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We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

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Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#151

Post by nonethewiser »

alex_young wrote: post #141

Larry Summers? He has no technical experience, torpedoed the stimulus plan in 2008, and had to resign the Harvard presidency following a messy set of statements about ‘differences’ between the sexes and their mental abilities. Kind of a shocking choice.

> “There is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and female population,” he said. Thus, even if the average abilities of men and women were the same, there would be more men than women at the elite levels of mathematical ability

Isn’t this true though? Says more about Harvard than Summers to be honest.

https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_...

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#152

Post by dragonwriter »

altpaddle wrote: post #42

I guess the main question is who else will be on the board and to what degree will this new board be committed to the Open AI charter vs being Sam/MSFT allies. I think having Sam return as CEO is a good outcome for OpenAI but hopefully he and Greg stay off the board. It's important that the board be relatively independent and able to fire the CEO if he attempts to deviate from the mission. I was a bit alarmed by the…

> I guess the main question is who else will be on the board

Who knows.

> and to what degree will this new board be committed to the Open AI charter vs being Sam/MSFT allies.

I'm guessing "zero". The faction that opposed OpenAI being a figleaf nonprofit covering a functional subsidiary of Microsoft lost when basically the entire workforce said they would go to Microsoft for real if OpenAI didn't surrender.

> I think having Sam return as CEO is a good outcome for OpenAI

Its a good result for investors in OpenAI Global LLC and the holding company that holds a majority stake in it.

The nonprofit will probably hang around because there are some complexities in unwinding it, and the pretext of an independent (of Microsoft) safety-oriented nonprofit is useful in covering lobbying for a regulatory regime that puts speedbumps in the way of any up-and-coming competitors as being safety-oriented public interest, but for no other reason.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#153

Post by travisgriggs »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #117

I haven't seen this many nerds in a froth since Apple walked back the butterfly keyboards in the MacBook.

I know we’re supposed to optimize for “content with a contribution” in HN, but this captured in parody form more of a contribution of how I too have felt.

I use these tools as one of many tools to amplify my development. And I’ve written some funny/clever satirical poems about office politics. But really? I needed to call Verizon to clear up an issue today, it desperately wanted me to use their assistant. I tried for the grins. A tool that predictively generates plausibility is going to have its limits. It went from cute/amusing to annoying as hell and give me a “love agent” pretty quickly.

That this little TechBro Drama has dominated a huge amount of headlines (we’ve been running at least 3 of the top 30 posts at a time on HN here related to this subject) at a time when there is so much bigger things going on in the world. The demise of Twitter generated less headlines. Either the news cycles are getting more and more desperate, or the software development ecosystem is struggling to generate fund raising enthusiasm more and more.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#154

Post by acl777 »

https://x.com/swyx/status/1727215534037774752?s=20

  Finally the OpenAI saga ends and everybody can go back to building!
  
  3 things that turned things around imo:
  
  1. 95% of employees signing the letter
  2. Ilya and Mira turning Team Sam
  3. Microsoft pulling credits
  
  Things AREN’T back to where they were. OpenAI has been through hell and back. This team is going to ship like we’ve never seen before.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#155

Post by altpaddle »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #136
altpaddle wrote: post #42

I guess the main question is who else will be on the board and to what degree will this new board be committed to the Open AI charter vs being Sam/MSFT allies. I think having Sam return as CEO is a good outcome for OpenAI but hopefully he and Greg stay off the board. It's important that the board be relatively independent and able to fire the CEO if he attempts to deviate from the mission. I was a bit alarmed by the…

> It's important that the board be relatively independent and able to fire the CEO if he attempts to deviate from the mission. They did fire him, and it didn't work. Sam effectively became "too big to fire." I'm sure it will be framed as a compromise, but how can this be anything but a collapse of the board's power over the commercial OpenAI arm? The threat of firing was the enforcement mechanism, and its been spent.

Well it depends on who's on the new board and what they believe. If Altman, Greg, and MSFT do not have direct representation on the new board there would still be a check against his decisions

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#156

Post by robbomacrae »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #68
tomohelix wrote: post #17

So, Ilya is out of the board, but Adam is still on it. I know this will raise some eyebrows but whatever. Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.

The OpenAI of the past, that dabbled in random AI stuff (remember their DotA 2 bot?), is gone. OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it. Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete. Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just becau…

I'm still waiting for an optimized version of that bot that can run locally...

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#157

Post by transcriptase »

mvdtnz wrote: post #112
transcriptase wrote: post #47

Assuming they weren’t LARPing, that Reddit account claiming to have been in the room when this was all going down must be nervous. They wrote all kinds of nasty things about Sam, and I’m assuming the signatures on the “bring him back” letter would narrow down potential suspects considerably. Edit: For those who may have missed it in previous threads, see https://old.reddit.com/user/Anxious_Bandicoot126

First of all nothing on Reddit is real (within margin of error). Secondly it's weird that you'd assume we know what you're talking about.

Links to the profile/comments were posted a few times in each of the major OpenAI HN submissions over the last 4 days. On the off-chance I would be breaking some kind of brigading/doxxing rule I didn't initially link it myself.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#158

Post by swyx »

nickpp wrote: post #135
r721 wrote: post #29

Quote tweets by main participants: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727206691262099616 (+ follow-up https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883 ) https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727206609477411261 https://twitter.com/miramurati/status/1727206862150672843 UPD https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727208843137179915 https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598 https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/17272076…

On a side tangent, absolutely amazing how all this drama unfolded on Twitter/X. No Threads, no Mastodon, no Truth Social or Blue whatever. Say what you want about Elon’s leadership but his instinct to buy Twitter was completely right. To me it seemed like any social network crap but he realized it was important .

i mean he also tried his hardest to back out of the deal until he realized he couldnt

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#159

Post by nonethewiser »

gzer0 wrote: post #128

One of the more interesting aspects from this entire saga was that Helen Toner recently wrote a paper critical of OpenAI and praising Anthropic. Yet where OpenAI’s attempt at signaling may have been drowned out by other, even more conspicuous actions taken by the company, Anthropic’s signal may have simply failed to cut through the noise. By burying the explanation of Claude’s delayed release in the middle of a long,…

And Anthropic doesnt get credit for stopping the robot apocalypse when it was never even possible. AI safety seems a lot like framing losing as winning.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#160

Post by metabagel »

rvz wrote: post #14

Once again the source is directly from Twitter / X and the news was announced from there. Dispelling the complete nonsense that the platform is 'dying'.

Twitter isn’t dying. It’s just finding its core audience of white supremacists.
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