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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

#301

Post by creer »

dmix wrote: post #207
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/dr…

Another "thing" is, he has been named by a board which... [etc]. Being a bit cautious would be a minimum.

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

#302

Post by lokar »

maxlamb wrote: post #294
lokar wrote: post #271

I don’t understand people calling this a coup. The board is setup with very few legal constraints and answers only to itself. If this was a coup (seizing power from the rightful holder), who was it against?

Sam

That’s not how he structured the governance of the company.

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

#303

Post by jeremyjh »

primax wrote: post #234
jeremyjh wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would have just forked the code and maybe merged some changes back and forth, no real need for cross-platform code.

This was pre-1983. Forking wasn't a thing at the time. Any kind of code management was cutting edge, and cross-platform shared code wasn't even dreamed of yet.

You make a copy of the files and work on them and that is a fork.

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

#304

Post by 1024core »

kmlevitt wrote: post #81

Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…

> But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features.

Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that.

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

#305

Post by jtriangle »

satvikpendem wrote: post #64
voisin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the final season of Silicon Valley. Is this Pied Piper at Tres Comma Fest?

Seems to me more analogous to the final episode of the final season, where they must publicly destroy what they built.

Yes, except what they think they've built is far far less capable than what they've actually built.

This is a ten year old who set off their first fire cracker turning to their parents's iphone and saying 'I have become death, destroyer of worlds', because they don't really understand how any of this works but they've somehow ended up in control of it and are now terrified of doing their jobs.

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

#306

Post by insanitybit »

1024core wrote: post #304
kmlevitt wrote: post #81

Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…

> But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features. Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that.

It seems extremely short sighted for the rest of the board to go along with that.

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

#307

Post by kridsdale1 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #239
valine wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another element of that was the team that tried to adapt iPodOS for iPhone vs Forstall's team that adapted OSX.

I think it was also a contest between all web ui (like WebOS) bs Cocoa.

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

#308

Post by insanitybit »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #215
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…

Yes these people should all be doing more to feed internet drama! If they don't act soon, HN will have all sorts of wild opinions about what's going on and we can't have that! Even worse, if we don't have near constant updates, we might realize this is not all that important in the end and move on to other news items! I know, I know, I shouldn't jest when this could have grave consequences like changing which uri you…

> HN will have all sorts of wild opinions about what's going on and we can't have that!

Uh, or investors and customers will? Yes, people are going to speculate, as you point out, which is not good.

> we might realize this is not all that important in the end and move on to other news items!

It's important to some of us.

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

#309

Post by jrflowers »

jeremyjh wrote: post #216
quickthrower2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They would have just forked the code and maybe merged some changes back and forth, no real need for cross-platform code.

Should’ve just made it an Electron app

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

#310

Post by kridsdale1 »

lupire wrote: post #236
spoonjim wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, they haven’t. One is some policy analyst and the other is an actor’s wife.

Tasha Macauley is an electrical engineer who founder of two tech companies, besides having a cute husband. And the other guy is the founder of Quora and Poe.

Ok. I can Found a tech company by filling out LLC papers on LegalZoom for $40.

What have her companies done?

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