Who is Sam?
We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#182Larry 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.
To be honest, one reason I like Summers as a choice is I have the impression he is willing to be unpopular when necessary, e.g. I remember him getting dragged extremely heavily on Twitter a few years back, for some takes on inflation which turned out to be fairly accurate.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#183So, 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.
I feel like history has shown repeatedly that having a good product matters way more than trust, as evidenced by Facebook and Uber. People seem to talk big smack about lost trust and such in the immediate aftermath of a scandal, and then quitely renew the contracts when the time comes.
All of the big ad companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook) have, like, a scandal per month, yet the ad revenue keeps coming. Meltdown was a huge scandal, yet Intel keeps pumping out the chips.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#184Larry 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 ho…
A control group is kind of unimaginable right? And even if you could be sure of this conclusion, is it helpful or beneficial to promote it in public discourse?
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#185At the end of the day, we still don't know what exactly happened and probably, never will. However, it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya). I think the tensions were brewing for quite a while, as it's evident from an article written even before GPT-3 [1]. > Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressu…
> Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya)
If you open up openai.com, the navigation menu shows
Research, API, ChatGPT, Safety
I believe they belong to @ilyasut, @gbd, @sama and Helen Toner respectively?
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#186At the end of the day, we still don't know what exactly happened and probably, never will. However, it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya). I think the tensions were brewing for quite a while, as it's evident from an article written even before GPT-3 [1]. > Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressu…
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Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#187Emmett Shear on Twitter: I am deeply pleased by this result, after ~72 very intense hours of work. Coming into OpenAI, I wasn’t sure what the right path would be. This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I’m glad to have been a part of the solution. https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598
I wonder what he gets out of this. Ceo for a few days? Do they pay him for 3 days of work? Presumably you'd want some minimum signing bonus in your contract as a Ceo?
He 100% had a golden parachute in case this scenario came up and will be paid out. Executives have lawyers to make sure of this.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#188> We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. > We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this. 1- So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults? 2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of thi…
If there’s been one constant here, it’s been people who actually know Tonrer expressing deep support for her experience, intelligence, and ethics, so it’s interesting to me that she seems to be getting the boot.
Add delusions of grandeur to that list thinking she can pursue her ideological will by winning over 3 board members while losing 90% of the company staff.
She was fighting an idelogical battle that needs full industry buy in, legitimate or not that's not how you win people over.
If she's truely a rationalist as she claims then a rationalist would be realistic understanding that if your engineers can just leave and do it somewhere else tomorrow you aren't making progress. Taking on the full might of US capitalism via winning over the fringe half of a non profit board is not the best strategy. At best it was desperate and naive.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#189At the end of the day, we still don't know what exactly happened and probably, never will. However, it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya). I think the tensions were brewing for quite a while, as it's evident from an article written even before GPT-3 [1]. > Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressu…
well said, I would note that both sides recognize that "AGI" will require new uncertain R&D breakthroughs beyond merely scaling up another order of magnitude in compute. given this, i think it's crazy to blow the resources of azure on trying more scale. rapid commercialization at least buys more time for the needed R&D breakthrough to happen.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#190So basically somebody initiated a coup, then the key figure of the coup regretted it openly, and the fallout was that OpenAI will become a 100% commercial entity, fully open for Microsoft to taking over?
If that’s not a fertile soil for conspiracy theory, I don’t know what could ;)