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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

#351

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.

Sam Altman has done in four days what it took Steve Jobs 11 years to do! I'm impressed.

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

#352

So, the only two women were removed from the board, and two ultra-alpha males were brought on. And everybody is cheering it on as the right thing to do! Not judging, just observing.

And Larry Summers believes that women are genetically inferior to men at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. A lot of the techbro hate that was directed specifically at Helen is openly misogynistic, which is actually pretty funny because Larry Summers was probably who Helen was eventually happy with because of their shared natsec connections.

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

#353
post #351

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.

Sam Altman has done in four days what it took Steve Jobs 11 years to do! I'm impressed.

I'm sorry, impressed by what?

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

#354

With Sam coming back as CEO, hasn't OpenAI board proven that it has lost its function? Regardless of who is in the board, they won't be able to exercise one of the most fundamental of their rights, firing the CEO, because Sam has proven that he is unfireable. Now, Sam can do however he pleases, whether it is lying, not reporting, etc. To be clear, I don't claim that Sam did, or will, lie, or misbehave.

This is a better deal for the board and a worse one for Sam than people realize. Sam and Greg and even Ilya are both off the board, D'Angelo gets to stay on despite his outrageous actions, and he gets veto power over who the new board members will be and a big say in who gets voted on to the board next.

Everybody's guard is going to be up around Sam from now on. He'll have much less leverage over this board than he did over the previous one (before the other three of nine quit). I think eventually he will prevail because he has the charm and social skills to win over the other independent members. But he will have to reign in his own behavior a lot in order to keep them on his side versus D'Angelo

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

#355

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…

> Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before.

I very much recommend reading the book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” from Nick Bostrom.

It is a seminal work which provides a great introduction into these ideas and concepts.

I found myself in the same boat as you do. I was seeing otherwise inteligent and rational people worry about this “fairy tale” of some AI uprising. Reading that book give me an appreciation of the idea as a serious intelectual excercise.

I still don’t agree with everything contained in the book. And definietly don’t agree with everything the AI doomsayers write, but i believe if more people would read it that would elevate the discourse. Instead of rehashing the basics again and again we could build on them.

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

#356

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'm convinced there is a certain class of people who gravitate to positions of power, like "moderators", (partisan) journalists, etc. Now, the ultimate moderator role has now been created, more powerful than moderating 1000 subreddits - the AI safety job who will control what AI "thinks"/says for "safety" reasons. Pretty soon AI will be an expert at subtly steering you toward thinking/voting for whatever the "safety"…

If you believe the other side in this rift is not also striving to put themselves in positions of power, I think you are wrong. They are just going to use that power to manipulate the public in a different way. The real alternative are truly open models, not Models controlled by slightly different elite interests.

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

#357

I really don't care who the CEO/CTO/CFO of any company is. Why is this whole thing blowing up that much on ycombinator?

It wouldn't be interesting if one CEO got fired and replaced, but the fact that there's a different CEO every couple of days and no one knows what will happen next. The uncertainty is addictive, not to mention the scale of self-destruction. See also: trainwrecks.

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

#358
post #71

Excellent news. I’ve been worried that Sam moving to Microsoft would stall out possible future engineering efforts like GPT-5 in IP court. As an example of how much faster GPT-4 has made my workflow was the outage this evening — I tried Anthropic, openchat, Bard, and a few others and they were between not useful and worse than just looking at forums and discord it’s 2022.

GPT-5 is kinda pointless until they make some type of improvement on the data and research side. From what I’ve read it’s not really what OpenAI has been pursuing it

The next improvement will be more modalities (images, sound, etc.)

GPT4 in image viewing mode doesn't seem to be nearly as smart as text mode, and image generation IME barely works.

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

#359

Larry Summers? He has no technical experience, torpedoed the stimulus plan in 2008, and had to resign the Harvard presidency following a messy set of statements about ‘differences’ between the sexes and their mental abilities. Kind of a shocking choice.

If Larry correctly said that men and women are different, i see nothing wrong here.

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

#360

I really did not think that would happen. I guess the obvious next question is what happens to Ilya? From this announcement it appears he is off the board. Is he still the chief scientist? I find it hard to believe he and Sam would be able to patch their relationship up well enough to work together so closely. Interesting that Adam stayed on the board, that seems to disprove many of the theories floating around here…

I would be slightly more optimistic. They know each other quite well as well as how to work together to get big things done. Sometimes shit happens or someone makes a mistake. A simple apology can go a long way when it’s meant sincerely.

Sam triple-hearted Ilya's apology tweet.
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