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Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

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Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#271

Post by alienbeast »

beachy wrote: post #174
swatcoder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory. But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's…

> I think they want to be shepherding responsible AGI before someone else does so irresponsibly. Is this a thing? This would be like Switzerland in WWII doing nuclear weapons research to try and get there before the Nazis. Would that make any difference whatsoever to the Nazis timeframe? No. I fail to see how the presence of "ethical" AI researchers would slow down in the slightest the bad actors who are certainly ou…

Having nukes protects you from other nuclear powers through mutually-assured destruction. I'm not sure whether that principle applies to AGI, though.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#272

Post by torstenvl »

It isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like describing voting out a politician as a coup.

Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman.

If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own it. It's the wresting of control from the actual owners in favor of a public facing executive.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#273

Post by threeseed »

belugacat wrote: post #239
eightysixfour wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - I think this is the schism. Sam is clearly a product person, these are AI people. Dev day didn’t meaningfully move the needle on AI, but for people building products it sure did.

Thinking you can develop AGI - if such a thing actually can exist - in an academic vacuum, and not by having your AI rubber meet the road through a plethora of real world business use cases strikes me as extreme hubris. … I guess that makes me a product person?

Or the obvious point that if you're not interested in business use cases then where are you going to get the money for the increasingly exorbitant training costs.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#274

Post by fullshark »

peter422 wrote: post #59

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…

It doesn't matter in the short term (usually). Then you look in 2-4 years and you see the collective impact of countless decisions and realize how important they are.

In this case, tons of people already have resigned from OpenAI. Sam Altman seems very likely to start a rival company. This is a huge decision and will have massive consequences for the company and their product area.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#275

Post by cratermoon »

Chamix wrote: post #202
cratermoon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look closer at the Ilya Sutskever vs Sam Altman tensions, and think of the product/profit as a cover. Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI, in that respect aligned with Geoff Hinton, his academic advisor at University of Toronto. Hinton has said "So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’…

You are conflating Illya's belief in the transformer architecture (with tweaks/compute optimizations) being sufficient for AGI with that of LLMs being sufficient to express human-like intelligence. Multi-modality (and the swath of new training data it unlocks) is clearly a key component of creating AGI if we watch Sutskever's interviews from the past year.

Yes, I read "Attention Is All You Need", and I understand that the multi-head generative pre-trained model talks about "tokens" rather than language specifically. So in this case, I'm using "LLM" as shorthand for what OpenAI is doing with GPTs. I'll try to be more precise in the future.

That still leaves disagreement between Altman and Sutskever over whether or not the current technology will lead to AGI or "superintelligence", with Altman clearly turning towards skepticism.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#276

Post by LightMachine »

campbel wrote: post #213
rafaelero wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a bad take. Developers (me included) loved Dev Day.

Pretty insightful I thought. The people who joined to create AGI are going to be underwhelmed by the products made available on dev day.

I was underwhelmed, but I got -20 upvotes on Reddit for pointing it out. Yes products are cool, but I'm not following OpenAI for another App Store, I'm following it for AGI. They should be directing all resources to that. As Sam said himself: once it is there, it will pay for itself. Settling to products around GPT-4 just passes the message that the curve has stagnated and we aren't getting more impressive capabilities. Which is saddening.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#277

Post by kbenson »

vanrysss wrote: post #222
FormerBandmate wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America did nuclear weapons research to get there before the Nazis and Japan and we were able to use them to stop Japan

So the first AGI is going to be used to kill other AGIs in the cradle ?

Or contain, or counter, or be used as a deterrent. At least, I think that's the idea being espoused here (in general, if not in the GP comment).

I think U. S. VS Japan is not.necessarily the right model to be thinking here, but U.S. VS U.S.S.R., where we'd like to believe that neither nation would actually launch against the other, but both having the weapon meant they couldn't without risking severe damage in response making it a losing proposition.

That said, I'm sure anyone with an AGI in their pocket/on their side will attempt to use it as a big stick against those that don't, in the Teddy Roosevelt meaning.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#278

Post by etempleton »

naasking wrote: post #94
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's actually what Jobs turned out to be? Woz and others were the engineering genius at Apple, and Jobs turned out to be really good at finding and identifying really good sales and branding hooks. See-through colourful boxes, "lickable" UIs, neat-o minimalistic portable music players, flick-flick-flick touch screens, and "One More Thing" presentations. Jobs didn't invent the Lisa and Macintosh. Bill Atkinson,…

I do think Jobs' engineering skill is oversold, but he was also more than just marketing. He had a vision for how technology should integrate with people's lives that drove great ergonomic and UX choices with a kind of polish that was lacking everywhere else. Those alone revolutionized personal computing in many ways. It's hard for younger people to even imagine how difficult it was to get connected to the internet a…

Yes, people love to be dismissive of Jobs and call him just a marketing guy, but that is incredibly reductive for a guy who was able to cofound Apple and then come back and bring it back from near death to become the biggest company in the world. Marketing alone can’t do that.

Jobs had great instincts for products and a willingness to create new products that would eat established products and revenue streams. He was second to none at seeing what technology could be used for and putting teams in place that could create consumer products with those technologies and understanding when the technologies weren’t ready yet.

Look at what Apple achieved under his leadership and what it didn’t achieve without his leadership. Being dismissive of Jobs contributions is either a bad faith argument or one out of ignorance.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#279

Post by deeviant »

mise_en_place wrote: post #236
threeseed wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

Keep in mind that the rest of the board members have ties to US intelligence. Something isn't right here.

I'm pretty sure Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife isn't a CIA plant.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#280

Post by dragonwriter »

noonething wrote: post #23

I hope they go back to being Open now that Altman is gone. It seems Ilya wants it to 'benefit all of humanity' again.

From what I've seen, Ilya seems to be even more concerned than Altman about safety risks and, like Altman, seems to see restricting access and information as a key part of managing that, so I'd expect less openness, not more.

Though he may be less inclined to see closed-but-commercial access as okay as much as Altman, so while it might involve less total access, it might involve more actual open/public information about what is also made commercially available.

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