What is this, the Succession show? Board fires CEO, CEO returns and fires half of the board?
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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
#532Who is driving the company (companies)? Certainly not the board, when it can be ousted on the whim of one person. Might as well just get rid of the board (all boards in this organization) as any decision made can be overthrown by a bit of publicity and ego. Perhaps it about getting rich at the expense of any ethics? Those who work for this company should bear this in mind, they are all expendable!
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Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Amoral literally means "lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something." Generally this is considered a problem if you are designing something that might influence the way people act.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 char…
That's pathetic. I cannot respect someone and will not work under someone who functions that way. A personality cultist.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean, there's a sense in which my mind is software that's being run by my brain, right? Yet that doesn't absolve me of moral responsibility. In any case, an F16 fighter jet is amoral in a certain sense, but it wouldn't be smart to make F16s available to the average Joe so he can conduct an airstrike whenever he wants.
Completely depends on your morality. I'm pretty sure there are some libertarians out there who think the most basic version of the second amendment includes owning F16 with live weapons.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#536Earlier 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
From everything I've read, safety still feels like a red herring. It just doesn't fit with everyone's behavior -- that's something that would have been talked about loudly. Altman lying to the board, especially in pursuit of board control, fits more cleanly with everyone's actions (and reluctance to talk about what exactly precipitated this). - Altman tries to effect board control - Confidant tells other board member…
But then that doesn't square with board refuses to tell employees or Microsoft or the public that altman committed malfeasance or provide examples. That would be pretty cut and dry and msft wouldn't be willing to acquihire the entire company we with altman as CEO if there was a valid reason like that.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#537Earlier 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.
Medical transcriptionists out of jobs? As far as I'm aware, medical transcription is still very much the domain of human experts, since getting doctors to cater their audio notes to the whims of software turned out to be impossible (at least in my corner of the EU).
My mom had to do this for her job and apparently some of the docs are so mumbly they have to infer a lot of the words from context and type of procedure but there is a lot of crossover everywhere so it depends a lot on which doc is mumbeling what. And yes you need special training for it (no medical degree though)
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#538Seems to me that the board made the right call in trying to get rid of Altman. Unfortunately it seems they weren't ready for the amount of backlash he and others could orchestrate, and the way the narrative would develop. I was personally kind of surprised too, I couldn't really understand the response from people, seemed like everybody settled on the take and stuck to it for some reason.
All they had to do was say why they fired him. A toddler could whip up the same amount of backlash against a board that bungled their communications so badly. The reason everyone settled on that take was that the take was pur forward that it was a coup, and then the board went nuh uh and that was it and like - what?
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#539i'm still not clear what the accusation against Altman was... something about being cavalier about safety? if that was the claim and it has merit, i don't understand why it wasn't right to oust him, and why the employees are clamoring for him back
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.
I dunno about this thought, are there other AI startups operating at this level and that have the amount of market share and headspace that OpenAI has? I see comments like this on hacker news a lot, and I get that yes, the man is human and fallible, but they are doing something that’s working well for their space. If there’s some compelling reason to doubt Altman’s leadership or character I haven’t heard it yet.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#540> I am sure books are going to be written about this time period, as egomaniac as ever
Yeah, who is he to think that people will bother writing a book when the film rights are already probably being fought over by every studio. This is very obviously gonna be a movie or two lol