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Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

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Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#461

Post by js8 »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #133
telotortium wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a tweet that from an engineer at OpenAI that they're working on the problem that ChatGPT has become too "lazy" - generating text that contains a lot of placeholders and expecting people to fill in much more themselves. As for the general brain damage from RLHF and the political bias, no word still.

Gonna be hilarious when AGI turns out to be analagous to like a sassy 8 year old or something? Like "AGI, do all this random shit for me!" AGI: No! i don't wanna!

That's a premise of sci-fi "novel" Golem XIV from Stanislaw Lem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#462

Post by cpeterso »

Jensson wrote: post #232
gopher_space wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does political correctness and bias mean in this context? edit: I'm asking because to my eye most of these conversations revolve around jargon mismatch more than anything else.

Whatever the people who buys ads decides, losing your ad revenue is the main fear of most social media and media companies. See twitter for example, ad buyers decided it is no longer politically correct so twitter lost a lot of ad revenue. Avoiding that is one of the most important things if you want to sell a model to companies.

The only AI safety that companies care about is their brand safety.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#463

Post by statictype »

asicsarecool wrote: post #453
doubtfuluser wrote: post #443

How do I have to understand the fact that Ilya is not on the board anymore AND why did the statement not include Ilya in the “Leadership group” that’s called out?

As Sam said they are still trying to work out how they are going to work together. He may be in the leadership team once those discussions have concluded

Or equally likely he's on his way out? If there is doubt about whether a person of his stature belongs on the leadership team or not, it seems to signal that he won't be on the leadership team.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#464

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

fastball wrote: post #255
7e wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were either scared of being sued for defamation or unwilling to divulge existential company secrets. Or both.

Doesn't really make sense to be unwilling to divulge company secrets if you're willing to gut the company for this hill.

It's remarkable that the old board is the side characterized as willing to blow up the company, since it was Altman's side who threatened to blow it up. All the old board really did was fire Altman and remove Brockman from the board.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#465

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

jxi wrote: post #412
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't willing to gut the company. That's why Sam is back as CEO.

It sounded like they would if they could (for instance trying to sell to Anthropic or instating a "slow it way down" CEO), but they even failed at that. Not an effective board at all.

>for instance trying to sell to Anthropic or instating a "slow it way down" CEO

I wouldn't put these in the same category as "90% of staff leaves for Microsoft".

In any case, let's not confuse unsuccessful with incompetent. (Or incompetent with immoral, for that matter.)

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#466

Post by cedilla »

moralestapia wrote: post #192
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the CEO could oust the board like that was that after the board fired the CEO, 720 of the 770 employees of the company got together and signed a pledge that they will all leave unless the CEO is reinstated and the board fired. This was the purest example of labor democracy and self-organization in action in the United States I have ever seen, my takeaway is rather the opposite of "they are all expendable".…

Yeah, and that just means that the board is useless de facto . Nice story on a company, maybe, but really bad thing on a "non-profit".

"Being useless" and "wielding absolute, unilateral, unquestionable authority like Sun King Louis XIV" are not the only two options here.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#467

Post by rezonant »

jacquesm wrote: post #265
Denzel wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a strange statement because I definitely canceled my subscription as a result of the happenings. This very public battle confirmed for me how misaligned OpenAI is with the originating charter and mission of its nonprofit. And I didn’t want to financially contribute towards that future anymore. I guess my subscription didn’t count as a customer.

This happens to me frequently. When I report an obvious problem in some service it is always the very first time that they've heard of it and no other customers seem to have the issue.

This is a universal truth of feedback and customer service. Every user report is an iceberg: for every 1 person there's a much more significant number of people who experienced the problem but never reported it.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#468

Post by contrarian1234 »

mikeg8 wrote: post #307
bmitc wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also isn't clear why Altman couldn't have been replaced by someone else with literally no change in operations and progress. It is just really confusing why people acted as if they fired Michael Jordan from the Bulls.

He is obviously a great leader and those that work there wanted to work with him. It’s very clear in this thread how undervalued exceptional leadership actually is, as evidence by comments thinking the top role in the most innovative company could be just plug-and-play.

I'm going to guess it's not about leadership. From the Lex Fridman interview he claims to be personally involved in all hires - and spend a good fraction of his time evaluating candidates.

- He's not going to hire someone he doesn't like

- Someone that doesn't like him is unlikely to join his team

So it's very likely the whole staff ends up being people that "like" him or get along with him. He did come off as a charming smooth talking - and I'm sure he has lot of incredibly powerful friends/connections. But at least from that little window into his world I didn't feel he showed any particularly brilliance or "leadership". He did seem pretty deferential to ML experts (which i guess he's not) - but it's hard to know if it's a false humility or not

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#469

Post by Xenoamorphous »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #449
Waterluvian wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Microsoft offered them all jobs.

As if they couldn't easily get a job almost anywhere? Also don't they all have equity in OpenAI? Seems like a pretty shallow take.

> Also don't they all have equity in OpenAI?

Call me a cynic but this must be the reason behind those 700 employees threatening to walk away, especially if as it seems the board wanted to “slow down”.

I don’t think it’s so much of a “we love Altman” as “we love any CEO that will increase the value of our equity”.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#470

Post by g42gregory »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #441
g42gregory wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is Nathan Labenz saying? That GPT-4 is dangerous somehow? It will get many people out of jobs? MS Office got all the typists out of jobs. OCR and Medical Software got all the medical transcriptionists out of jobs. And they created a lot more jobs in the process. GPT-4 is a very powerful tool. It has not a whiff of AGI in it. The whole AGI "scare" seems to be extremely political.

Nathan says the initial version of GPT-4 he red-teamed was "totally amoral" and it was happy to plan assassinations for him: https://nitter.net/labenz/status/1727327464328954121#m Reducing the cost of medical transcription to ~$0 is one thing. Reducing the cost of assassination to ~$0 is quite another.

This is a piece of software. What would "totally amoral" even mean here? It's an inanimate object, it has no morals, feelings, conscience, etc... He gives it an amoral input, he gets an amoral output.
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