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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

#291

At 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…

It is a little amusing that we've crowned OpenAI as the destined mother of AGI long before the little sentient chickens have hatched.

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

#292
post #214
post #111

"A source with direct knowledge of the negotiations says that the sole job of this initial board is to vet and appoint a new formal board of up to 9 people that will reset the governance of OpenAl. Microsoft will likely have a seat on that expanded board, as will Altman himself." https://twitter.com/teddyschleifer/status/172721237871736880...

So basically, the outcome of this drama is that Microsoft gets more power without having to invest anything?

MSFT invested over $10B. And currently has no seat on the board.

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

#293

At 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…

I don't care about AI Safety, but:

https://openai.com/charter

above that in the charter is "Broadly distributed benefits", with details like:

"""

Broadly distributed benefits

We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.

Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.

"""

In that sense, I definitely hate to see rapid commercialization and Microsoft's hands in it. I feel like the only person on HN that actually wanted to see Team Sam lose, although it's pretty clear Team Helen/Ilya didn't have a chance, the org just looks hijacked by SV tech bros to me, but I feel like HN has a blindspot to seeing that at all and considering it anything other than a good thing if they do see it.

Although GPT barely looks like the language module of AGI to me and I don't see any way there from here (part of the reason I don't see any safety concern). The big breakthrough here relative to earlier AI research is massive amounts more compute power and a giant pile of data, but it's not doing some kind of truly novel information synthesis at all. It can describe quantum mechanics from a giant pile of data, but I don't think it has a chance of discovering quantum mechanics, and I don't think that's just because it can't see, hear, etc., but a limitation of the kind of information manipulation it's doing. It looks impressive because it's reflecting our own intelligence back at us.

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

#294

Larry Summers???? What he has to do with AI??

Easy. AI discourse has gone insane, on both sides, and is sorely in need of perspective from grounded, normal adults with a track record of moderation and shooting down BS. Summers is a grounded, normal adult with a track record of moderation and shooting down BS. Ergo, he's immanently relevant to AI. He's also financially literate enough to know that it's poor form release market-moving news right before the exchang…

Larry Summers is not financially literate.

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

#295

The media and the VCs are treating Sam like some hero and savior of AI. I’m not getting it. What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration? Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support? It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist.

Unsurprisingly VCs view VCs as the highest form of life, and product managers are temporary positions taken on the way to ascending to VC status.

I have said recently elsewhere SV now devalues builders but it is not just VCs/sales/product, a huge amount is devops and sre departments. They make a huge amount of noise about how all development should be free and the value is in deploying and operating the developed artifacts. Anyone outside this watching would reasonably conclude developers have no self respect, hardly aspirational positions.

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

#296

At 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…

This is a coherent narrative, but it doesn't explain the bizarre and aggressively worded initial press release. Things perhaps could've been different if they'd pointed to the founding principles / charter and said the board had an intractable difference of opinion with Sam over their interpretation, but then proceeded to thank him profusely for all the work he'd done. Although a suitable replacement CEO out the gate…

Apparently the FBI thought he'd done something wrong too, because they called up the board to start an investigation but they didn't have anything.

https://x.com/nivi/status/1727152963695808865?s=46

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

#297

At 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…

> If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit? No, if OpenAI is reaching singularity, so are Google, Meta, and Baidu etc. so proper course of action would be to loop in NSA/White House. You'll loop in Google, Meta, MSFT and will start mitigation steps. Slowing down OpenAI will hurt the company if assumption is wrong and won't help if it is t…

>Slowing down OpenAI will hurt the company if assumption is wrong and won't help if it is true.

Personally as I watched the nukes be lobbed I'd rather not be the person who helped lob them. And hope to god others look at the same problem (a misaligned AI that is making insane decisions) with the exact same lens. It seems to have worked for nuclear weapons since WW2, one can that we learned a lesson there as a species.

The Russian Stanislav Petrov who saved the world comes to mind."Well the Americans have done it anyways" was the motivation and he didn't launch. The cost of error was simply too great.

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

#298
post #135
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 think it's just this particular drama - OpenAI people are of the same tribe as Elon, and surely they prefer Twitter/X, not Mastodon or Bluesky.

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

#299
post #283
post #111

"A source with direct knowledge of the negotiations says that the sole job of this initial board is to vet and appoint a new formal board of up to 9 people that will reset the governance of OpenAl. Microsoft will likely have a seat on that expanded board, as will Altman himself." https://twitter.com/teddyschleifer/status/172721237871736880...

[flagged]

lol, or maybe they don’t care about woke virtue signaling

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

#300
post #215

Disappointing outcome. The process has conclusively confirmed that OpenAI is in fact not open and that it is effectively controlled by Microsoft. Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either. It might not seem like the case right now, but I think the real disruption is just about to begin. OpenAI does not have in its DNA to win, they're too…

A lot of this comes down to processing power though. That's why Microsoft had so much leverage with both factions in this fight. It actually gives them a pretty good moat above and beyond their head start. There aren't too many companies with the hardware to compete, let alone talent.
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