What is this, the Succession show? Board fires CEO, CEO returns and fires half of the board?
Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
521–530 of 787 posts
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#522Earlier 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, unionizing so your boss doesn’t get fired really is the most SF/US “labor democracy” thing ever
I agree.
1. A group of highly skilled people voluntarily associating with each other
2. in an organization working on potentially world-changing moonshot technology,
3. born of and accelerated by the liquidity of the free market
4. with said workers having stake in the success of that organization
is very American. We should ponder the reasons why, time and time again, it has been the US "system" that has produced the overwhelming number of successes in such ventures across all industries, despite the attempts of many other nations to replicate these results in their own borders.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
People go to work to make money. If they’re lucky, they also like they’re work. It’s ok to want more out of work. Work certainly wants more out of you.
> People go to work to make money If that’s the overriding drive then perhaps they should not got to a non-profit and expect it to optimize for profit
Non-profit just means there are no stakeholders, meaning that revenue must be used for the organization's expenses, which includes the compensation of employees and growth. Many non-profits also benefit from tax-exemptions.
Assuming anything more than that about the nature of non-profits is just romantic BS that has nothing to do with reality.
Also, there's nothing wrong with wanting to make a profit.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#524Earlier 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".…
> This was the purest example of labor democracy and self-organization in action in the United States I have ever seen This was not an anonymised vote giving the chance to safely support what you believe free from interference... this was to declare for the King or the Revolution knowing that if don't choose who prevails, you will be executed. It becomes a measure of which direction the people believe the wind is blo…
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Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#525Earlier 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".…
The combined will of the employees is much less meaningful when they're saying "DO IT OR WE'LL TAKE AN ATTRACTIVE OFFER THAT'S ON THE TABLE." I'd have been more impressed by their unity if it would have meant actually losing their jobs.
I'm pretty sure they weren't thinking of how to impress fatbird on HN when they were deciding which boss they like best, the old one or an unknown new one.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#526Earlier 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.
See https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-86-billion-s... What if lots of employees stood to make "fuck you" money from that sale, and with Sam's departure, that money was in danger of evaporating?
If employees would have voted Sam out, you'd take that as a shiny example of the proletariat exercising the power for the good of human kind, hammer, sickle and all that.
I always find it funny when people understand democracy to mean "other people that should vote my way, otherwise they are imoral and should be re-educated".
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#527This pushed our small team to try Azure instance of GPT3.5 - wow 20 times faster. API does not fail to respond to server requests as we found oh so often on the OpenAI API. We now have something fast enough and stable enough to actually use. Pricing is higher, but my goodness, it actually works.
As much as I'm sure people on OpenAI are good, they're focused on the research and math of the thing, but lack in Ops experience (though to be honest I think Azure API was flaky yesterday)
Considering the complexities involved and the outrageous amount of MAUs OpenAI has on their platform and yet them north of 99.8% uptime (ok, November was worse with 99,20%), saying they lack Ops experience is ludicrous.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. But Helen Toner has been tweeting a little "To be clear: our decision was about the board's ability to effectively supervise the company, which was our role and responsibility. Though there has been speculation, we were not motivated by a desire to slow down OpenAI’s work." https://twitter.com/hlntnr/status/1730034020140912901
> Though there has been speculation, we were not motivated by a desire to slow down OpenAI’s work. Strange when their choice of interim-CEO was someone who explicitly stated he wants to see the pace of AI development go from a 10 to a 2 [1] and she regularly speaks at EA conferences where that's a major theme. This is probably double speak for she want's to not "slow down OpenAI's work" on AI safety but probably woul…
The way EA does donations is "I'll take a premise I believe in and will stretch the argument until it makes no sense". This is how they end up thinking that a massage for an AI researcher is money better spent than on hungry Yemeni children for example.
Once you view it like this, I wouldn't put it past them to blatantly lie. Looking at the facts as you say, they tried to replace a guy that is moving ahead with a guy that wants to slow it down to a crawl, that's pretty much all we need to know.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#529I used to correspond with Bret Taylor when he was still at Google. He wrote a windows application called Notable that I used every day for note-taking. Eventually, I started contributing to it. It’s been fascinating to witness his career progression from Product Manager at Google, to the co-CEO of Salesforce, and now the chair of OpenAI board (he was also the chair of Twitter board pre-Elon)!
I think he is also the creator of the “Like” concept. It was introduced in FriendFeed and then Facebook started using it.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were about to quit... how much more should they lose their jobs to impress you?
He meant if they were to lose their jobs and then have to put actual effort in to get a new one, like most people.
I do not think it is hard for any of them to get a new job and they would be flooooooded with offers if the opened their linkedin