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

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541–550 of 787 posts

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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I'm sure they have competent people

But compared to FB, MS, Google etc they are probably still behind (both in infrastructure and maturity)

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

#542
post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also an unvalidated claim, predicated upon assumptions.

I've hired people I "don't like" on a personal level. I care more about their ability to work positively with oters, and their professionalism and skill.

Yet you and the parent poster have assumed he is hiring a cult, because he spends time evaluating?

A weird assumption to make.

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

#543

Earlier 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

That non-profit did give out ridiculously high salaries tho.

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

#544
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you assume that Ilya is straight out lying, here is his public reaction on Sam being reinstated: There exists no sentence in any language that conveys how happy I am[1] [1]: https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1727434066411286557

Unless you read it literally, that there is really no sentence in any language to convey how happy he is. ;) He was part of the firing board, so in that sense he did lose. Either way we’ll find out in the upcoming days/weeks/months.

He has basically guaranteed himself loosing by saying he don't know why Sam was fired and regretful of board action. He was in a lose lose situation.

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

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you only impressed if the power of employees comes with high cost to their career? When employers exercise their power capriciously, they often do so without any material consequences. I'm more impressed with employees doing the same, i.e., exercising power with impunity.

A decision with a cost is always more meaningful than one without.

That's only a measure of the strength of one's conviction, and is unrelated to whether they chose the right thing, or for the right reasons.

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

#546

This 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.

Pricing higher is funny because OpenAI fully runs on Azure.

Why? The Azure API comes with an SLA and support.

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

#547

Earlier 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.

The cost of planning an assassination is not the same thing as the cost (and risk) of carrying out an assassination, what a stupid take.

I can think of several ways that AI assistance might radically alters both attack and bodyguard methods. I say "might" because I don't want to move in circles that can give evidenced results for novel approaches in this. And I'm not going to list them for the same reasons I don't want an AI to be capable of listing them: while most of the ideas are probably just Hollywood plot lines, there's a chance some of them might actually work.

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

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "unwilling to divulge company secrets" is the best explanation here. We know that OpenAI does a staged release for their models with pre-release red-teaming. Helen says the key issue was the board struggling to "effectively supervise the company": https://nitter.net/hlntnr/status/1730034017435586920#m Here's Nathan Labenz on how sketchy the red-teaming process for GPT4 was. Nathan states that OpenAI shut him…

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.

Did they really create a ton more jobs? The past few rounds of industrialization and automation have coinved with plagues/the black death that massively reduced the population, mass agitation, increasing inequality, and recently a major opioid epidemic in regions devastated by the economic changes of globalization and industrialization. I think these tools are very good and we should develop, I also think it's delusional to think it'll just balance out magically and dangerous to expect our already failed systems to protect people left behind. Doesnt exactly look like they worked any of the previous times!

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

#549
post #222

> The fact that we did not lose a single customer will drive us to work even harder for you, and we are all excited to get back to work. I'm not a big customer, but I am starting the process of moving away from OpenAI in response to these events

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.

They might mean net? Have the same number of customers at the end as the start? Instead of a steep cliff?

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

#550

Earlier 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.

We don't want immoral output even for immoral input.

(We do disagree about what constitutes "immoral", which makes this much harder).

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