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

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

#311

Post by hanniabu »

zebnyc wrote: post #227
discordance wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happens all the time. Teams of people at Google work on the same features, only to find out near launch that they lost to another team who had been working on the same thing without their knowledge.

How does that work? Do they have the same the same PM, requirements? Is it just different tech / achitectures adopted by different teams. Fascinating

Give a goal (ex. make it more intuitive/easier for the user to do X), have 2 teams independently work on it, A/B test them, winner gets merged.

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

#312

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

resource0x wrote: post #290
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…

The failure to create anything resembling AGI can be easily explained away by concerns about the safety of AGI. This can be done in perpetuity. Google explains its AI failures along the same lines.

> The failure to create anything resembling AGI can be easily explained away by concerns about the safety of AGI.

Isn't the solution to just pipe ChatGPT into a meta-reinforcement-learning framework that gradually learns how to prompt ChatGPT into writing the source-code for a true AGI? What do we even need AI ethicists for anyway? /s

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

#313

Post by kmlevitt »

hal009 wrote: post #265
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.

As mentioned by another person in this thread [0], it is likely that it was Ilya's work that was getting replicated by another "secret" team, and the "different opinions on the same person" was Sam's opinions of Ilya. Perhaps Sam saw him as an unstable element and a single point of failure in the company, and wanted to make sure that OpenAI would be able to continue without Ilya? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/repl…

Firing Sam as a way of sticking up for Ilya would make more sense if Ilya wasn’t currently in support of Sam getting his job back.

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

#314

Post by jtriangle »

nopromisessir wrote: post #174
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I can't understand is how Emmett Shear accepted the interim CEO position. I presume he must have known this reasoning (he tweeted that he did know the reasoning). Everything I've read online is that Shear is generally well respected and competent. Then how on Earth was he willing to get anywhere near this toxic dumpster fire? It's already been reported that the former GitHub CEO and the Scale AI CEO turned…

I'm sorry to say... But my analysis is either: he was poorly informed by the board Or He agrees that they are off the rails with respect to safety. See the Atlantic article, if you havn't read. Lots of context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399 The new guy believes that there is a 5-50 percent chance of full AI Armageddon. I get the impression that the two women on the board may agree. The quora guy I don…

Humans have been making and successfully containing things that can kill us all for the better part of a century now, probably more depending on where you draw the line.

There is a 100% chance that something kills all of us if we aren't mindful of it. I don't see a lack of mindfulness, I see an abundance of fear, and progress being offered up as a sacrifice to the idol of status-quo.

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

#315

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

Maybe they needed two teams to independently try to decode an old tape of random numbers from a radio space telescope that turned out to be an extraterrestrial transmission, like a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation or something. Happens all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

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

#317

Post by gexla »

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…

Thank you! I get the sense that none of this matters and it's all a massive distraction.

News

Company which does research and doesn't care about money makes a decision to do something which aligns with research and not caring about money.

From the OpenAI website...

"it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"

Big tech co makes a move which sends its stock to an all time high. Creates research team.

Seems like there could be a "The Martian" meme here... we're going to Twitter the sh* out of this.

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

#318

Post by resolutebat »

rossdavidh wrote: post #300

So, none of this sounds like it could be the real reason Altman was fired. This leaves people saying it was a "coup", which still doesn't really answer the question. Why did Altman get fired, really? Obviously, it's for a reason they can't say. Which means, there is something bad going on at the company, like perhaps they are short of cash or something, that was dire enough to convince them to fire the CEO, but which…

Banks have strict cash reserve requirements that are externally audited. OpenAI does not, and more to the point, they're both swimming in money and could easily get more if they wanted. (At least until last week, that is.)

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

#319

Post by lumost »

Rastonbury wrote: post #275
az226 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft would likely match their PPUs at the tender offer valuation.

Honestly MS don't have to, losing more than half the employees will destroy the value of the PPUs. The fact so many have signed the petition is a classic example of game theory. If everyone stays, the PPU keep most of their value, the more people threaten to leave, the more attractive it is to sign. They don't have to love Sam or support him Edit: actually thinking about it, the best outcome would to be go back on th…

MSFT may perceive a benefit in absorbing and locking down the openAI team. Doing so will require large golden handcuffs in excess of what competitors would offer those same folks.

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

#320

Post by c_s_guy »

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…

If Emmett will run this the same way he ran Twitch, I'm not expecting much action from him.
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