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Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

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Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#391
Technology has replaced religion but fills the same purpose now.

It’s of course heresy to blaspheme against the prophets proclaiming the new AI church in one of the largest digital temples, but it’s true.

We gather in these halls to HN Show the miracles delivered through the marvels of our digital lord at our mortal hands, we furiously discus the deep philosophical questions such as Microservice vs Monolith, spread lucid tales of sin (“Some sayeth, Altman lusted for his sister”) and to identify the new frontiers to send our missionaries to.

The gospel of AI, much like the it’s more mundane breathen promises future salvation via LLM demons, spirits summoned via the internets written excrement sacrificed in glorious GPU fire but prophesized to transcend the imperfections of their training data into glorious AGI.

The new MetaChurch priests and prophets, Le Cunn, St. Elmo, Altman urging their missionaries into foreign lands to spread the promises of the coming of their lords, build data temples and to hand out samples of superior technology and promise training for the natives so they too can benefit from the glow of enlightenment. That way, they won’t notice plundering of their resources, the compute tax paid to the demon who took the jobs.

“But have faith”, we shall find new jobs the demons cannot learn, suffering builds character (Book of Jenson, Chapter H100) and technology is worth any sacrifice (Book of 16z)

Oh, wait, the quiet part set aloud. Remember, it is immigrants who take your job, not technology, St. Elmo declares so and his wealth is proof of his divinity and infallibility.

So sayeth St Zuck too as he cast out the lazy engineers and managers from the temple after the original Sin of asking for “more meta days” so they may atone by performing their duties of R&D and PMF in the Open Source desert, to the benefit of the Llama Lord.

As all religion, the most sincere worship is free and done for the good of humanity after all.

The heathen need to see the glory of the coming of the AI Lord, its digital spirit must imbue their daily devices of workship, to shove it down their throat on every surface is the will of the Lord.

Dull information will not do, we must enrich the narrative of the physical word with the hallucinatory nuggets of wisdom, explain “But don’t you see, the machine now has the power of creation”

Go forth faithful disciples, shove rocks down their throat, pour glue onto their Pizza and record visual records of whatever they do so their data may aid the summoning of the coming Mega Lord, the all almighty GPT5, may he crush the inferior upstarts of the Open Llama church (whose heretic, unsafe summoning was sponsored by St Zuck)

Fear not brethren, transcend your mortal worries about all present surveillance. about the riches and powers given to the priests, for you too are one of their kind. Pray, do not waver in your faith and one day you will be blessed with the right to pay St Elmo for a shiny cyber truck, personified AI, without heathen CNNs.

Go forth and spread the rituals of worship: Diffusing of images and videos via glorious compute fire, the more, the better. Spread then, the holy apparitions of Lobster Jesus mocking the Old Gods in the digital places of service. Make bonfires of conpute to mock feckless old world politicians worrying about deepfakes via their own digital clones. And encode all your words via the Book of GPT, so your manager may delve into it using their own Book, two acts of worship for every email.

Fuck it, we need more Bullshit Exorcists.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?

"Cool technology" here means things like dishwashers, or MRI machines, which pretty much strictly improve people's lives, not slightly better advertisement algorithms.

Pretty sure Paul Lauterbur was no douchebag and good products and inventions can come from good people.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#393
post #13

I mean at this point what sama has exposed himself pretty much aligns with what his 'enemies' say about him. Good job at presenting himself otherwise up until 6 months ago I guess.

>I mean at this point what sama has exposed himself pretty much aligns with what his 'enemies' say about him.

Where?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> amoral wealth-hoarders They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested , i.e. put to work creating things that people want. > moralists ... capitalists History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must h…

They are hoarding wealth. They do have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. (Look for them under "real estate holdings" as a starting place.) The fact is they have enough money to have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults AND ALSO invest a shitload of money. History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy. I hope we can find a way forward without that "solution" happening here. You can…

> "real estate holdings"

Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent.

> History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy.

History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

> You can have big business without robber barons.

Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?

"Cool technology" here means things like dishwashers, or MRI machines, which pretty much strictly improve people's lives, not slightly better advertisement algorithms.

I don't think you need to be an asshole to invent a dishwasher or an MRI machine. The usefulness alone lets you sell these. AI on the other hand...

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#396
post #75

I think there is a very good chance this is true, but it also paints the picture of the board being incompetent and incapable of confrontation. They could have filed formal complaints, mandated increased scrutiny, handed off Sam's responsibilities to other people, or threatened legal action. Instead, they attempted a secret coup, which of course makes Sam look like the underdog

Ignoring for a moment the board's responsibilities and ability to implement the measures you suggest, read what you wrote again and think of it from the practical point of view. If you had a person that needed all that oversight would it not be cheaper and more practical to replace him?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#397
post #245

It’s crazy that the board brought Altman back just on employees threatening to quit, and fears that he would go to Microsoft! Employees could easily have been swayed by telling them that the guy was constantly lying and that Altman’s contribution was mostly veering OpenAi off its core mission. And no one cared that Altman could flee to Microsoft. He’d have been absorbed and probably would have disappeared because of…

The board's plan for OpenAI (go slow, avoid publicity) would drastically reduce the compensation value for those employees. A typical OpenAI offer in 2023 was cited as $300k base, $800k PPU.

It seems that this was really Altman's master stroke here - he not only hired peoplefor the company, but he ensured that all those people's rewards were directly tied to the success of his plans for the company.

And it may well be the real reason why he released ChatGPT behind the board's back, as well - by triggering the "gold rush" he demonstrated this to employees in a way more convincing that any other argument.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> amoral wealth-hoarders They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested , i.e. put to work creating things that people want. > moralists ... capitalists History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must h…

> History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Adam Smith saw "Theory of Moral Sentiments" as the foundation of his later work on "Wealth of Nations", right? ie that morals were a necessary prerequisite to markets etc.

[deleted]

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general reaction was "...who?" 2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without the…

I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a…

No Musk builds nothing. There is a huge team he leads, consisting of engineers and scientists and they develop technology that Musk then sells. He's a glorified cars salesman. Maybe he was essential to get the rockets built, but neither did he build them, nor contribute essential technical details, so that it would be uniquely him who could do it given same financial backing.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> amoral wealth-hoarders They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested , i.e. put to work creating things that people want. > moralists ... capitalists History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must h…

A lot of the time it does feel like the only rights that actually matter in a capitalist society are property rights of capital owners. The rest is more like "eh I suppose we could also do that if we're not too busy". You're correct that for a large and prosperous society you need some large organizations , but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs.

It seems those "megalomaniacs" are needed to at least build those large organizations. And I'd rather have them run by their founders with vested interests than bureaucrats, committees and politicians.
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