Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 701 posts

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#381

Post by HissingMachine »

astrange wrote: post #238
HissingMachine wrote: post #67

So is this the way the government takes control of the AI, next OpenAI will have new but familiar owners from Raytheon and the other Pentagon crowd?

Governments don't need to "take control" of things, they get tax payments and can pass laws. The US has never spent less on its military than it does now, and the military industrial complex has never been less important, because the rest of the economy has grown so much larger. So it's funny to see people still using Cold War-era conspiracy theories from when it actually mattered.

Where is the conspiracy theory?

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#382

Post by solardev »

015a wrote: post #214
dragonwriter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has zero ownership of the entity the board controls (the OpenAI nonprofit), and a for-profit firm having seats on a nonprofit board especially if it was because they invested in a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit would raise serious issues of the “nonprofit” being run for purposes incompatible with its status.

Sure; but its still weird that Microsoft agreed to the deal with the board in the state that it was; not just no board seat, but three absolute outsiders, two of them extremely unqualified. We may look back on their decision to buy 49% of OpenAI as a big misstep.

Wasn't it a Hail Mary for Microsoft? They're not doing anything else particularly earth shattering, and if this came out without them, they'd be even less relevant. If OpenAI fought this and won without them, Microsoft would have nothing to compete against Google and everyone else with.

Did Microsoft have any other route to AI relevance?

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#383

Post by abra0 »

jumploops wrote: post #244

Sam and Ilya have recently made public statements about AGI that appear to highlight a fundamental disagreement between them. Sam claims LLMs aren't sufficient for AGI (rightfully so). Ilya claims the transformer architecture, with some modification for efficiency, is actually sufficient for AGI. Obviously transformers are the core component of LLMs today, and the devil is in the details (a future model may resemble…

>rightfully so

How the hell can people be so confident about this? You describe two smart people reasonably disagreeing about a complicated topic

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#384

Post by rootusrootus »

wavemode wrote: post #356
lenerdenator wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I'm not a lawyer (of the big city or simple country varieties, or any other variety) but if you talk to most HR people they'll tell you that if they ever get a phone call from a prospective employer to confirm details about someone having worked there previously, the three things they'll typically say are: 1) a confirmation of the dates of employment 2) a confirmation of the role/title during employment 3) whe…

Someone at OpenAI hates the man's guts. It's that simple. Even with very public cases of company leaders who did horrible things (much worse than lying), the companies that fired them said nothing officially. The person just "resigned". There's just no reason open up even the faintest possibility of an expensive lawsuit, even if they believe they can win. So yeah, someone definitely told the lawyers to go fuck themse…

I don't know that this is always the case. For example, when BK was forced to resign from Intel, the board's announcement was quite specific on why.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#385

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

Geee wrote: post #168

I think I see it now. Speculation following: They achieved AGI internally, but didn't want OpenAI to have it. All the important people will move to another company, following Sam, and OpenAI is left with nothing more than a rotting GPT. They planned all this from the start, which is why Sam didn't care about equity or long-term finances. They spent all the money in this one-shot gamble to achieve AGI, which can be re…

If you understand a bit of math you would know there is no AGI and there would be no AGI on the current path.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#387

Post by Michelangelo11 »

capableweb wrote: post #44
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there some weird chic thing where you intentionally don’t use capital letters? What is up with that ridiculous behaviour? I was wondering the same thing. Always, on purpose, avoiding starting sentences with capital letters. Both this guy and Sam Altman. What ... why ... ?

So you know that they are rule and norm breakers, no rule too tiny to be broken and skipped in the name of productivity/health/insert-hot-thing-of-the-day

That's it. Disruption as a way of life. True entrepreneur mindset. Yeahhhh.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#388

Post by jdminhbg »

cthalupa wrote: post #314
dougmwne wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the investors own the company and the board answers to them. Nonprofits are significantly disconnected from their own financial incentives. I have witnessed it at every nonprofit I have worked for.

> Sure, the investors own the company and the board answers to them. Huh? Plenty of startups in the stage being referenced are still majority owned by the founders.

Even if I only owned 1% of Google I’d be very motivated to vote in the best financial interests of the company. If I owned 0% not so much.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#389

Post by nostrademons »

cowl wrote: post #221
johnwheeler wrote: post #84

Edit: I called it https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857 nothing to do with dishonesty. That’s just the official reason. ———- I haven’t heard anyone commenting about this, but the two main figures here-consider: This MUST come down to a disagreement between Altman and Sutskever. Also interesting that Sutskever tweeted a month and a half ago https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907 Th…

Doesn't justify the hostile language and the urgent last minute timing. (partners were notified just minutes before press release). They didn't wait even 30 min for the market to close causing MSFT to drop billions in that time. A mere direction disagrement would have been handled with "Sam is retiring after 3 months to spend more time with his Family, We thank him for all his work". And surely would be taken months…

Yeah, this is more abrupt and more direct than any CEO firing I've ever seen. For comparison, when Travis Kalanick was ousted from Uber in 2017, he "resigned" and then was able to stay on the board until 2019. When Equifax had their data breach, it took 4 days for the CEO to resign and then the board retroactively changed it to "fired for cause". With the Volkswagon emissions scandal, it took 20 days for the CEO to resign (again, not fired) despite the threat of criminal proceedings.

You don't fire your CEO and call him a liar if you have any choice about it. That just invites a lawsuit, bad blood, and a poor reputation in the very small circles of corporate executives and board members.

That makes me think that Sam did something on OpenAI's behalf that could be construed as criminal, and the board had to fire him immediately and disavow all knowledge ("not completely candid") so that they don't bear any legal liability. It also fits with the new CEO being the person previously in charge of safety, governance, ethics, etc.

That Greg Brockman, Eric Schmidt, et al are defending Altman makes me think that this is in a legal grey area, something new, and it was on behalf of training better models. Something that an ends-justifies-the-means technologist could look at and think "Of course, why aren't we doing that?" while a layperson would be like "I can't believe you did that." It's probably not something mundane like copyright infringement or webscraping or even GDPR/CalOppa violations though - those are civil penalties, and wouldn't make the board panic as strongly as they did.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#390

Post by capableweb »

matwood wrote: post #306
cowl wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't justify the hostile language and the urgent last minute timing. (partners were notified just minutes before press release). They didn't wait even 30 min for the market to close causing MSFT to drop billions in that time. A mere direction disagrement would have been handled with "Sam is retiring after 3 months to spend more time with his Family, We thank him for all his work". And surely would be taken months…

> last minute timing Only feels last minute to those outside. I've seen some of these go down in smaller companies and it's a lot like bankruptcy - slowly, then all at once.

Everything points towards this being last minute both for people outside and people inside. Microsoft caught with their pants down, announcement before markets closed rather than just waiting a bit, and so on.
Post reply on HN