Live data from Hacker News

Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

twitter.com

41–50 of 140 posts

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#41

This seems like BS that the Altman camp is feeding to the media. I very much doubt a single engineer or scientist would side with him and leave with him - most likely it's his cronies he put up in other executive positions. However, if you check their backgrounds, none of them have any meaningful experience pre-openAI - I am skeptical any would actually leave their opportunity of a lifetime.

Four top engineers already quit.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#42

This seems like BS that the Altman camp is feeding to the media. I very much doubt a single engineer or scientist would side with him and leave with him - most likely it's his cronies he put up in other executive positions. However, if you check their backgrounds, none of them have any meaningful experience pre-openAI - I am skeptical any would actually leave their opportunity of a lifetime.

Three people resigned yesterday: Jakub Pachocki, the company’s director of research; Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating potential risks from AI, and Szymon Sidor, a seven-year researcher.

I know a good number of OpenAI people, and every single person I know is supportive of Sam. (This may be selection bias, of course, but there are a large number of people who are on Sam's side in all of this)

Even if this wasn't the case, this debacle kneecapped the $80Bn tender offer from Thrive, meaning a large number of employees will not receive the money they believed they would be getting.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#43
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just focus on the enterprise chat bot business That’s clearly what they’re doing. The AGI thing is just fancy marketing.

No, these people are insane cultists who genuinely believe that they’re about to create a God. They’ve been very explicit about this. Not that they couldn’t be lying, but I’m not sure Occam’s razor would suggest that given their long history of public statements on the topic.

AGI is IMO the biggest pipe dream (scam may be too strong a term) in computing. It’s perpetually “10 years away.” I remember when a group working on “AGI” spoke at my university (oof, 21 years ago at this point) and all the talk then was “yep, we’ve totally cracked the code on this thing, it’s just that computers are too slow at the moment. But in 5-10 years, watch out.”

I’ve always felt fundamentally that if you don’t understand how human thought works to such a degree that you can distill it down into an algorithm, you certainly can’t make a computer do it. Which I know is pretty obvious, but apparently a lot of people haven’t gotten the memo. What ChatGPT can do is really cool, and incredibly useful, but it’s nowhere near a model of the human thought process.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#44
This whole thing is gross. The sycophantic worship of Sam is gross and the paranoid AI safety people are insane. The singularity cultists are also insane.

What happened? I remember when most of the people in this industry were at least okay. A little weird but okay.

Of course judging by social media it’s a microcosm of the rest of society. People are utterly losing their minds everywhere. It’s both scary and amusing.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#45

This seems like BS that the Altman camp is feeding to the media. I very much doubt a single engineer or scientist would side with him and leave with him - most likely it's his cronies he put up in other executive positions. However, if you check their backgrounds, none of them have any meaningful experience pre-openAI - I am skeptical any would actually leave their opportunity of a lifetime.

Are engineers compensated with cash? I wonder if the Sam Altman version of OpenAI is more lucrative for employees than the alternative OpenAI. So as a result of the recent changes, there is an employee exodus to places with greater compensation

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#47

This seems like BS that the Altman camp is feeding to the media. I very much doubt a single engineer or scientist would side with him and leave with him - most likely it's his cronies he put up in other executive positions. However, if you check their backgrounds, none of them have any meaningful experience pre-openAI - I am skeptical any would actually leave their opportunity of a lifetime.

Four top engineers already quit.

Out of how many?

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#50
post #10

> Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

There is no no compete agreement with Altman? How is that possible?
Post reply on HN