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OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

businessinsider.com

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Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#201

Post by quickthrower2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #194
kumarvvr wrote: post #65

Giving 2 people the same project? Isnt this like the thing to do to get differing approaches and then release the amalgamation of the two? I thought these sorts of things are common. Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO? This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.

Back in the late 80s, Lotus faced a crisis with their spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. Should they: 1. stick with DOS 2. go with OS/2 3. go with Windows Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.

Which would have had been a tradeoff too. More time to market, fewer people on each project, slowed down by cross platform code.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#202

Post by abnry »

bnralt wrote: post #110
bhouston wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this situation the most powerful people on the board should have been Altman, Brockman and Sutskever. The others were sort of nice to haves who were there just to fill it out. For them to run this coup is just insane. There has to be more to it. Someone has to be pulling the strings with a plan.

It's wouldn't be that surprising, I've seen these kind of group dynamics play out fairly often. If D'Angelo, McCauley, and Toner formed a clique, and Sustkever was easily influenced by clique politics, that's all it would take. A lot of people will buckle surprisingly fast to social pressure and clique politics. Its also something that can blindside hardworking individuals who assume that others are above this type o…

If this is the case, and Ilya is truly a non-political guy, I feel awful about how badly he was manipulated.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#203

Post by ssnistfajen »

cpncrunch wrote: post #144
colinsane wrote: post #134

> The people asked for anonymity because they are not authorized to share internal matters. Their identities are known to Business Insider. why would you say that second sentence? what's it supposed to signal, except "our sources asked for anonymity, and we're respecting that for now "?

No, it is standard journalism practice to verify sources and protect their identity. The comment is just clarifying that the sources are not completely anonymous.

Similar to " declined to comment" seen in many news articles. It signals that the reporter reached out to give them a chance to tell their side of the story, and the resulting article isn't an opinionated unilateral attack piece.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#204

Post by JoshTko »

throwawayapples wrote: post #167
riku_iki wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it is the board might be the dumbest people alive. it totally sounds like they outsourced company management to ChatGPT..

no way even ChatGPT is this nuts. Ok, well, maybe it is. but a magic 8-ball would have been better than this.

Would be hilarious if the board members were actually consulting with chat GPT on what moves they should make but accidentally were using 3.5 instead of 4

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#205

Post by campbel »

stingraycharles wrote: post #128
kumarvvr wrote: post #65

Giving 2 people the same project? Isnt this like the thing to do to get differing approaches and then release the amalgamation of the two? I thought these sorts of things are common. Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO? This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.

I remember a few years ago when there was some research group that was able to take a picture of a black hole. It involved lots of complicated interpretation of data. As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct. So yes, it’s absolutely a valid strategy.

Yep! I've done eng "bake-offs" as well, where a few folks / teams work on a problem in isolation then we compare and contrast after. Good fun!

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#206

Post by quickthrower2 »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #190
stingraycharles wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, Microsoft realizes this and gives them the equivalent of their OAI stock options in MSFT stock options if they join them now. For some employees, this may mean $10MM+

More evidence the layoffs are 100% BS. Suddenly there's surplus headcount and magical budgets out of nothing, all to accommodate several hundreds of people with way-above-market-average TCs. It's almost like they were never in danger of hurting profit margins in the first place.

You can lay people off without being in dire straits.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#207

Post by dmix »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #172

1) Where is Emmett? He's the CEO now. It's his job to be the public face of the company. The company is in an existential crisis and there have been no public statements after his 1AM tweet. 2) Where is the board? At a bare minimum, issue a public statement that you have full faith in the new CEO and the leadership team, are taking decisive action to stabilize the situation, and have a plan to move the company forwar…

Technically he's the interim CEO in a chaotic company just assigned in the last 24hrs. I'd probably wait to get my bearings before walking in acting like I've got everything under control on the first day after a major upheaval.

The only thing I've read about Shear is he is pro-slowing AI development and pro-Yudkowsky's doomer worldview on AI. That might not be a pill the company is ready to swallow.

https://x.com/drtechlash/status/1726507930026139651

> I specifically say I’m in favor of slowing down, which is sort of like pausing except it’s slowing down.

> If we’re at a speed of 10 right now, a pause is reducing to 0. I think we should aim for a 1-2 instead.

> - Emmett Shear Sept 16, 2023

https://x.com/eshear/status/1703178063306203397

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#208

Post by qiqitori »

samspenc wrote: post #23

> One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project. Have these people never worked at any other company before? Probably every company with more than 10 employees does something like this.

To me at least that's an _extremely_ rude thing to do. (Unless one person is asked to do it this way, the other one that way, so people can compare the outcome.)

(Especially if they aren't made aware of each other until the end.)

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#209

Post by fakedang »

valine wrote: post #68
kumarvvr wrote: post #65

Giving 2 people the same project? Isnt this like the thing to do to get differing approaches and then release the amalgamation of the two? I thought these sorts of things are common. Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO? This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.

Steve Jobs famously had two iPhone teams working on concepts in parallel. It was click wheel vs multi-touch. Shockingly the click wheel iPhone lost.

Seriously? Click wheel iPhone lost shockingly? The click wheel on most laptops wears out so fast for me, and the chances of that happening on a smaller phone wheel is just so much higher.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#210

Post by threeseed »

t-writescode wrote: post #130
stingraycharles wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would MSFT buy the for-profit entity when they already have the employees and IP?

That's a whole lot of training and server infrastructure that would have to be rebuilt - and cloning the exact existing stuff would be one heck of a corporate espionage charge, which I expect Microsoft is very avoidant of.

Microsoft has a license to OpenAI's technologies.

And they could clone the entire OpenAI Azure stack in about 10 minutes.

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