171–180 of 1001 posts
> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
I think it was Mark Zuckerberg that described (pre-Elon) Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Reminds me a bit of the Open AI board. Most of them I'd never heard of either.
For OpenAI... Altman (and formerly Musk) were not that adult supervision. Nor is the board they ended up with. They needed some people on that board and in the company to keep things sane while cherishing the (supposed) original vision.
(Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable as Sundar and Ruth have completely eviscerated what was left of it, but whatever)
> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
If I may paraphrase Churchill: This has become a bit of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
This was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone, especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of it (staff that already function well as a team). > In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we…
> Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone Exactly. I'm curious about how much of this was planned vs emergent. I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists. Equally, it's not entirely unpredictable. MS is the easiest to read: their moves to date have been really clear in wanting to be the primary commercial beneficiary of OAI's work. OAI itself i…
From our outsider, uninformed perspective, yes. But if you know more sometimes these things become completely plannable.
I'm not saying this is the actual explanation because it probably isn't. But suppose OpenAI was facing bankruptcy, but they weren't telling anyone and nobody external knew. This allows more complicated planning for various contingencies by the people that know because they know they can exclude a lot of possibilities from their planning, meaning it's a simpler situation for them than meets the (external) eye.
Perhaps ironically, the more complicated these gyrations become, the more convinced I become there's probably a simple explanation. But it's one that is being hidden, and people don't generally hide things for no reason. I don't know what it is. I don't even know what category of thing it is. I haven't even been closely following the HN coverage, honestly. But it's probably unflattering to somebody.
(Included in that relatively simple explanation would be some sort of coup attempt that has subsequently failed. Those things happen. I'm not saying whatever plan is being enacted is going off without a hitch. I'm just saying there may well be an internal explanation that is still much simpler than the external gyrations would suggest.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen though? Microsoft gobbles up all talent from OpenAI as they just gave everyone a position. So we went from "Faux NGO" to, "For profit", to "100% Closed".
> Doesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen though? Going from OpenAI to Microsoft means ceding the upside: nobody besides maybe Altman will make fuck-you money there. I’m also not sure as some in Silicon Valley that this is antitrust proof. So moving to Microsoft not only means less upside, but also fun in depositions for a few years.
What might have been tens or hundreds of millions in common stakeholder equity gains will likely be single digit millions, but at least much more likely to materialize (as Microsoft RSUs).
This was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone, especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of it (staff that already function well as a team). > In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we…
In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board. Initially it seemed Sam may have committed some inexcusable financial crime but doesn't look so anymore. Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.
> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
I still think 'Altman's Basilisk' is a thing: I think somewhere in this mess there's actions taken to wrest control of an AI from somebody, probably Altman.
Altman's Basilisk also represents the idea that if a charismatic and flawed person (and everything I've seen, including the adulation, suggests Altman is that type of person from that type of background) trains an AI in their image, they can induce their own characteristics in the AI. Therefore, if you're a paranoid with a persecution complex and a zero-sum perspective on things, you can through training induce an AI to also have those characteristics, which may well persist as the AI 'takes off' and reaches superhuman intelligence.
This is not unlike humans (perhaps including Altman) experiencing and perpetuating trauma as children, and then growing to adulthood and gaining greatly expanded intelligence that is heavily, even overwhelmingly, conditioned by those formative axioms that were unquestioned in childhood.
> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. What in the world is happening at OpenAI?