Live data from Hacker News

Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

theverge.com

351–360 of 979 posts

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emmett's just a placeholder after Murati turned. I suspect he won't stay in his position for long.

Recursive Interim CEOs. Will there be a Mandelbrot set of Interim CEOs?

This particular board won’t even let ChatGPT help the CEO because they’re afraid there’s a Basilisk hiding in every response.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#352

This saga highlights something that I found challenging when I was on the board of a startup, and which the board has completely misplayed. The difference between authority and autonomy . If you're on the board of OpenAI which is doing fantastically well etc you're a big deal. You have a great deal of authority . You may well think that the structure of the company and how the votes on the board work etc means that a…

This would normally be true, but this is the board of a non-profit that has no investors. If the board actually lacked autonomy, then the article we're commenting on would have been about Altman being re-hired today.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#353

For a change, maybe it'd be a good idea to get a CEO who at least has faint idea about how ML works on a technical level? Would you like a company that builds rockets to be led by some salesman who doesn't understand basic Physics? Probably not. You don't need to be Hinton or Schmidhuber, but come on, who thinks it's a good idea to have these typical "Silicon Valley VC CEOs" lead an AI company?

What special credentials do you think Sam Altman had in AI?

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message. I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of t…

Also, serious investors won't touch OpenAI with a ten foot pole after these events. There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya). Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single large…

[deleted]

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#355

"We fired the CEO for being too profit-driven" is a terrible message to send to your employees when you've lured them in with $1m comp packages that mostly consist of "Profit Participation Units" that are only worth anything when you actually make money.

...unless those engineers are happy with fat salaries and understand that startup equity should be valued at zero.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#356

Contrarian prediction: OpenAI will be just fine. The board will bring in an adult CEO who can balance the nonprofit charter with Microsoft and the commercial business, and who doesn't have a million side projects taking his or her focus away. Some employees will leave but the vast majority will stay for the usual reasons (i.e. inertia), the business will keep growing because ChatGPT is already a worldwide brand at th…

Where is OpenAI going to get money? They just said, loudly, that they don’t care about money.

Money is exchanged for goods and services, like GPUs, hiring researchers and coders, and acquiring data.

No one is going to trust them. They will be able to use their whole 120M they got as donations to operate the company for a full week or two.

Good luck, twats.

(Maybe they have AGI/ASI in the basement. If so, kudos, they will be fine and it was classless to fire Sam)

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has hundreds more employees, all of whom are incredibly smart. While they will definitely lose the leadership and talent of those two, it’s not as if a nuclear bomb dropped on their HQ and wiped out all their engineers! So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me

I am guessing they are super reliant on Microsoft to keep running ChatGPT... If Microsoft decides to get out and finds a way they would be in deep trouble.

I'm sure Google will throw a couple of billions their way, given the chance

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#358
I’m genuinely surprised that they stuck to their guns. The PR push behind Altman’s return was convincing enough that I had my doubts.

Altman will be more than fine, he’ll get a bucket of money and the chance to prove he is the golden boy he’s been sold to the world. He will get to recruit a team that believes in his vision of accelerating AI for commercial use. This will lead to a more diverse market.

I hope for the best for those who remain at OpenAI. I hope for the best for Altman and Brockman.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, serious investors won't touch OpenAI with a ten foot pole after these events. There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya). Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single large…

200k MS employees can't do what 500 from OAI can, the more you pile on the problem, the worse the outcome. The problem with Microsoft is that, like Google, Amazon and IBM, they are not a good medium for radical innovation, are old, ossified companies. Apple used to be nimble when Steve was alive, but went to coasting mode since then. Having large revenue from old business is an obstacle in the new world, maybe Apple…

MS isn't starting from scratch, it already has the weights of the worlds most powerful LM, and it's all running on their datacenters. Even without Sam, they just need to keep the current momentum going. Maybe axe ChatGPT and focus solely on Bing/Copilot going forward. It would give me great satisfaction to see the laughing stock search engine of the past decade being the undisputed face of AI over the next.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#360

I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this? Will be super inter…

The big question in my mind is the reported threat from MSFT to withhold cloud credits (i.e. the actual currency of their $10B investment). Is this true? And are they going to follow through? I don't buy for a second that enough employees will walk to sink the company (though it could be very be disruptive). But for OpenAI, losing a big chunk of their compute could mean they are unable to support their userbase and t…

The report was that investors were talking to microsoft about the threat to withhold credits.

Which does not say whether microsoft was open to the idea or ultimately chose to pursue that path.

Post reply on HN