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

arstechnica.com

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

#311

Post by threeseed »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #294
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…

> They have … split the company into two camps By all accounts, this split happened a while ago and led to this firing, not the other way around.

The split happened at the management/board level.

And instead of resolving this and presenting a unified strategy to the company they have instead allowed for this split to be replicated everywhere. Everyone who was committed to a pro-profit company has to ask if they are next to be treated like Sam.

It's incredibly destabilising and unnecessary.

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

#312

Post by Danjoe4 »

nyssos wrote: post #257
stavros wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do feel free to give some examples of a less constrained imagination.

The biggest near-term threat is probably bioterrorism. You can get arbitrary DNA sequences synthesized and delivered by mail, right now, for about $1 per base pair. You'll be stopped if you try to order some known dangerous viral genome, but it's much harder to tell the difference between a novel synthetic virus that kills people and one with legitimate research applications. This is already an uncomfortably risky si…

The threat of bioterrorism is in no way enabled or increased by LLMs. There are hundreds of guides on how to make fully synthetic pathogens, freely available online, for the last 20 years. Information is not the constraint.

The way we've always curbed manufacture of drugs, bombs, and bioweapons is by restricting access to the source materials. The "LLMs will help people make bioweapons" argument is a complete lie used as justification by the government and big corps for seizing control of the models. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12114528/

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

#313

Post by huytersd »

stavros wrote: post #193
huytersd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very constrained imagination. You could wreak havoc with a truly unconstrained, good enough LLM.

Do feel free to give some examples of a less constrained imagination.

Selectively generate highly likely images of politicians in compromising sexual encounters based on the people that are attractive and they work with a lot in their lives.

Use to power of LLMs to mass denigrate politicians and regular folks at scale in online spaces with reasonable, human like responses.

Use LLMs to mass generate racist caricatures, memes, comics and music.

Use LLMs to generate nude imagery of someone you don’t like and have it mass emailed to the school/workplace etc.

Use LLMs to generate evidence for infertility in a marriage and mass mail it to everyone on the victims social media.

All you need is plausibility in many of these cases. It doesn’t matter if they are eventually debunked as false, lives are already ruined.

You can say a lot of these things can be done with existing software bits it’s not trivial and requires skills. Making generation of these trivial would make these way more accessible and ubiquitous.

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

#314

Post by s1artibartfast »

marcinzm wrote: post #234
s1artibartfast wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have something in writing. OpenAI created a for-profit joint venture company with microsoft, and gave it license to its technology.

Exclusive license?

No clue, but I guess not.

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

#315

Post by dragonwriter »

whatshisface wrote: post #270
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…

I thought the for-profit AI startup with no higher purpose was OpenAI itself.

OpenAI is a nonprofit charity with a defined charitable purpose that has a for-profit subsidiary that is explicitly subordinated to the purpose of the nonprofit, to the extent investors in the subsidiary are advised in the operating agreement to treat investments as if they were more like donations, and that the firm will prioritize the charitable function of the nonprofit which retains full governance power over the subsidiary over returning profits, which it may never do.

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

#316

Post by jes5199 »

swatcoder wrote: post #101
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,…

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…

okay but I personally do want new LLM toys. who is going to provide them, now?

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

#317

Post by Michelangelo11 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #296
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #240

I've seen some discussion on HN in which people claimed that even really important engineers aren't -too- important and that Ilya is actually replaceable, using Apple's growth after Woz' departure as an example. But I don't think that's the best situation to compare this to. I think a much better one is John Carmack firing Romero from id Software after the release of Quake. Some background: During a period of about 1…

> Quake III's fast inverse square root algorithm Carmack did not invent that trick; it had been around more than a decade before he used it. I remember reading a Jim Blinn column about that and other dirty tricks like it in an IEEE magazine years before Carmack "invented" it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

Yes, you're right -- I dug around in the Wikipedia article, and it turns out he even confirmed in an email it definitely wasn't him: https://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

Thanks for the correction, edited the post.

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

#318

Post by w10-1 »

skywhopper wrote: post #25

Sorry but the board firing the person who works for them is not a “coup”.

The board ousting the board chair (without notice) and the CEO is a coup. It's not even clear to me it was legal to meet and act without notice to the board chairman.

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

#319

Post by throw555chip »

biofunsf wrote: post #247

What I’d really like to understand is why the board felt like they had to this as a surprise coup, and not a slower more dignified firing. If they gave Altman 1 weeks notice and let him save face in the media, what would they have lost? Is there a fear Altman would take all the best engineers on the way out?

As someone else commented on this page, it wasn't a coup.

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

#320

Post by stavros »

huytersd wrote: post #313
stavros wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do feel free to give some examples of a less constrained imagination.

Selectively generate highly likely images of politicians in compromising sexual encounters based on the people that are attractive and they work with a lot in their lives. Use to power of LLMs to mass denigrate politicians and regular folks at scale in online spaces with reasonable, human like responses. Use LLMs to mass generate racist caricatures, memes, comics and music. Use LLMs to generate nude imagery of someon…

Lives are ruined because it's relatively rare right now. If it becomes more frequent, people will become desensitized to it, like with everything else.

These arguments generally miss the fact that we can do this right now, and the world hasn't ended. Is it really going to be such a huge issue if we can suddenly do it at half the cost? I don't think so.

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