401–410 of 754 posts
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> treating it like someone with intrinsic value Do you think if chickens treated us better with intrinsic value we won't kill them? For AGI superhuman x risk folks that's the bigger argument.
I think od I was raised by chickens that treated me kindly and fairly, yes, I would not harm chickens.
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 d…
I'm not sure this is actually the case, even ignoring the non-profit charter and the for-profit being beholden to it.
We know that OpenAI has been the talk of the town, we know that there is quite a bit of revenue, and that Microsoft invested heavily. What we don't know is if the strategy being pursued ever had any chance of being profitable.
Decades-long runways with hope that there is a point where profitability will come and at a level where all the investment was worth it is a pretty common operating strategy for the type of company Altman has worked with and invested in, but it is less clear to me that this is viable for this sort of setup, or perhaps at all - money isn't nearly as cheap as it was a decade ago.
What makes a for-profit startup successful isn't necessarily what makes a for-profit LLC with an operating agreement that makes it beholden to the charter of a non-profit parent organization successful.
I've seen some discussion on HN in which people claimed that even really important engineers aren't -too- important and that Ilya is actually replaceable, using Apple's growth after Woz' departure as an example. But I don't think that's the best situation to compare this to. I think a much better one is John Carmack firing Romero from id Software after the release of Quake. Some background: During a period of about 1…
1. I don't think Ilya is equivalent to Carmack in this case — he's been focused on safety and alignment research, not building GPT-[n]. By most accounts Greg Brockman, who quit in disgust over the move, was more impactful than Ilya in recent years, as well as the senior researchers who quit yesterday.
2. I think you are underselling what happened with id: while they didn't blow up as fantastically as Ion Storm (Romero's subsequent company), they slowly faded in prominence, and while graphically advanced, their games no longer represented the pinnacles of innovation that early Carmack+Romero id games represented. They eventually got bought out by Zenimax. Carmack alone was much better than Romero alone, but seemingly not as good as the two combined.
3. I don't think Sam Altman is equivalent to John Romero; Romero's biggest issue at Ion Storm was struggling to ship anything instead of endlessly spinning his wheels chasing perfection — for example, the endless Daikatana delays and rewrites. Ilya's primary issue with Altman was he was shipping too fast, not that he was unable to motivate and push his teams to ship impressive products quickly.
I hope Sam and Greg start a new foundational AI company, and if they do, I am extremely excited to see what they ship. TBH, much more excited than I am currently by OpenAI under a more alignment-and-regulation regime that Ilya and Helen seems to want.
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…
> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…
>The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. When mangement lays off 10,000 employees, the investors congratulate management. Thats why Sam & Greg wasn't all they complained about. They lead with the fact that it was shocking and irresponsible. Ron seems to think that the board is not making the right move for OpenAI.
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This is where I've ended up as well for now. I'm as distant from it all as anyone else, but I can easily believe the narrative that Ilya (et al.) didn't sign up there just to run through a tired page from the tech playbook where they make a better Amazon Alexa with an app store and gift cards and probably Black Friday sales.
And that is fine.. but why the immediate firing, why the controversy?
> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…
> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…
I've seen some discussion on HN in which people claimed that even really important engineers aren't -too- important and that Ilya is actually replaceable, using Apple's growth after Woz' departure as an example. But I don't think that's the best situation to compare this to. I think a much better one is John Carmack firing Romero from id Software after the release of Quake. Some background: During a period of about 1…
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Investors are not gonna like when the business guy who was pushing for productizing, profitability and growth get ousted. We don’t know all the details about what exactly caused the board to fire Sam. The part about lying to the board is notable. It’s possible Sam betrayed their trust and actually committed a fireable offense. But even if the rest of the board was right, the way they’ve handled it so far doesn’t insp…
Again, they didn't state that he lied. They stated that he wasn't candid. A lot of people here have been reading specifics into a generalized term. It is even possible to not be candid without even using lies of omission. For a CEO this could be as simple as just moving fast and not taking the time to report on major initiatives to the board.
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It often comes down to auteur theory. Unless someone is truly well versed in the production of something, they latch on to the most public facing aspect of that production and the person at the highest level of authority (to them, even though directors and CEOs often have to answer to others as well) That’s not to say they don’t have an outsized individual effect, but it’s rare their greatness is solo
When you say director, do you mean film director or a director in a company? Film directors are insane with the amount of technical, artistic, and people knowledge that they need to have and be able to utilize. The amount of stuff that a film director needs to manage, all on the ground, is insane. I wouldn't say that for CEOs, not by a long shot. CEOs mainly sit in meetings with people reporting things to them and th…