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

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

#361

Post by quickthrower2 »

jes5199 wrote: post #316
swatcoder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Various camelid inspired models and open source code.

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

#362

Post by cthalupa »

fulladder wrote: post #262
fullshark wrote: post #17

Man this still seems crazy to me. The idea that this tension between commercial/non-commercial aspirations got so bad they felt the nuclear option of a surprise firing of Altman was the only move available doesn't seem plausible to me. I believe this decision was ego and vanity driven with this post-hoc rationalization that it was because of the mission of "benefiting humanity."

Yeah, the surprise firing part really doesn't make much sense. My best guess is that if you look at the composition of this board (minus Altman and Brockman), it seems to be mostly academics and the wife of a Hollywood actor. They may not be very experienced in the area of tech company boards, and might not have been aware that there are smoother ways to force a CEO out that are less damaging to your organization. No…

>it seems to be mostly academics and the wife of a Hollywood actor

This argument would require you ignore both Sutskever himself as well as D'Angelo, who was CTO/VP of Engineering at Facebook and then founding CEO of Quora.

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

#363

Post by hef19898 »

fallingknife wrote: post #203
hef19898 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last gig was with one of those wannabe Elon Musks (what wouldnI give to get wannabe Steve Jobs back). Horrible, ultimately he was ousted as CEO, only to be allowed to stay on as some head of innovation, because he and his founder buddies retained enough voting power to first get him a life time position as head of the board fir his "acievements" and then prevent his firing. They also vetoed, from ehat people told,…

> Besides getting said company to 800 people burning a sweet billion, he didn't do anything else in his life Getting a company to that size is a lot.

All you need is HR... I'm a cynic. He got the funding so, which is a lot (as an achievement and in terms of mones raised). He just started to believe to be the genius not justbin raising money, but also is building product and organisation. He isn't and never was. What struck me so, even the adults hired to replace him, didn't have the courage to call him out. Hence his comeback in function if not title.

Well, I'm happy to work with adults again, in a sane environment with people that known their job. It was a very, very useful experience so, and I wouldn't miss it.

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

#364

Post by Nidhug »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #229

I have spent time thinking about who would become the next CEO and even without mushrooms my brain came up with a totally out of context idea: Bill Gates. Microsoft is after all invested in OpenAI, and Bill Gates has become "loved by all" (who dont remember evil Gates of the yesteryears. I am not saying it will happen, 99,999% it wont but still he is well known and may be a good face to splash on top of OpenAI. After…

Is Bill Gates really loved by all ? I feel like it was the case before COVID, but then his reputation seemed to go from loved to hated

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

#365

Post by dividendpayee »

w10-1 wrote: post #299

It's hard to believe a Board that can't control itself or its employees could responsibly manage AI. Or that anyone could manage AGI. There is a long history of governance problems in nonprofits (see the transaction-cost economics literature on point). Their ambiguous goals induce politics. One benefit of profit-driven boards is that the goals make only well-understood risk trade-off's between growth now or later, an…

Yeah that's right. There's a blogger in another post on HN that makes the same point at the very end: https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

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

#366

Post by s1artibartfast »

cthalupa wrote: post #308
s1artibartfast wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didnt give money to a non-profit. They created a for profit company, and microsoft gave that company 11B, and Open AI gave it the technology. OpenAI shares ownership of that for-profit company with Microsoft and Early investors like Sam, Greg, Musk, Theil, Bezos, the employees of that company.

While technically true, in practicality, they did give money to the non-profit. The even signed an agreement stating that any investments should be considered more as donations, because the for-profit subsidiary's operating agreement is such that the charter and mission of the non-profit are the primary duty of the for-profit, not making money. This is explicitly called out in the agreement that all investors in and…

I don't dispute that they say that at all. Therein lies the tension -having multiple goals. The goal is to uphold the mission, and also to make a profit, and the mission comes first.

Im not saying one party is right or wrong, just pointing out that there is bound to be conflict when you give employees a bunch of profit based stock rewards, Bring in in 11B in VC investment looking for returns, and then have external oversight with all the control setting the balance between profit and mission.

The disclaimer says "It would be wise to see the the investment in OpenAI Global in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"

That doesnt mean investors and employees wont want money, and few will be scared off by owning a company so wildly successful that it ushers in a post scarcity world.

You have partners and employees that want to make profit, and that is fundamental to why some of them are there, especially Microsoft. The expectation of possible profits are clear, because that is why the company exists, and why microsoft has a deal where they get 75% of profit until they recoup their 11 Billion investment. I read the returns are capped at 100X investment, so if holds true, Microsoft returns are capped at 1.1 Trillion dollars.

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

#367

Post by quickthrower2 »

beachy wrote: post #174
swatcoder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think they want to be shepherding responsible AGI before someone else does so irresponsibly. Is this a thing? This would be like Switzerland in WWII doing nuclear weapons research to try and get there before the Nazis. Would that make any difference whatsoever to the Nazis timeframe? No. I fail to see how the presence of "ethical" AI researchers would slow down in the slightest the bad actors who are certainly ou…

They can’t stop another country developing AI they are not fond of.

They can use their position to lobby their own government and maybe other governments to introduce laws to govern AI.

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

#368

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

username332211 wrote: post #297
vanrysss wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the first AGI is going to be used to kill other AGIs in the cradle ?

I think that was part of the LessWrong eschatology. It doesn't make sense with modern AI, where improvement (be it learning or model expansion) is separated from it's normal operation, but I guess some beliefs can persevere very well.

Modern AI also isn't AGI. We seem to get a revolution at the frontier every 5 years or so; it's unlikely the current LLM transformer architecture will remain the state of the art for even a decade. Eventually something more capable will become the new modern.

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

#369

Post by goldinfra »

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,…

It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders.

Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.

Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today.

Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.

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

#370

Post by photochemsyn »

w10-1 wrote: post #299

It's hard to believe a Board that can't control itself or its employees could responsibly manage AI. Or that anyone could manage AGI. There is a long history of governance problems in nonprofits (see the transaction-cost economics literature on point). Their ambiguous goals induce politics. One benefit of profit-driven boards is that the goals make only well-understood risk trade-off's between growth now or later, an…

The solution is to replace the board members with AGI entities, isn't it? Just have to figure out how to do the real-time incorporation of current data into the model. I bet that's an active thing at OpenAI. Seems to have been a hot discussion topic lately:

https://www.workbyjacob.com/thoughts/from-llm-to-rqm-real-ti...

The real risk is that some government will put the result in charge of their national defense system, aka Skynet, not that kids will ask it how to make illegal drugs. The curious silence on military-industrial applications of LLMs makes me suspect this is part of the OpenAI story... Good plot for a novel, at least.

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