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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

#401

Post by nickpp »

specialist wrote: post #362
WalterBright wrote: post #346

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…

With extreme inequity, who's gonna make all the smaller bets? Lost in the food fight over today's robberbarons is recognition that small and medium new business formation continues to decline. IMHO, those are the job creators and wealth creation (vs mere wealth transfer) I prefer we boosted. I trust billionaires will somehow muddle along with or without our help.

> With extreme inequity, who's gonna make all the smaller bets?

The more large, visible winners you have in a society the more us little people are incentivized to buy those lottery tickets. Crowd funding, angel investing and small funds do exist. Or even Robinhood.

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

#402

Post by nickpp »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #383
WalterBright wrote: post #346

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…

every society is based on a set of morals, the rights societies are ones that have rights in that set, it seems somewhat to be skipping a wide inductive gap to blithely say that free markets need be a part of rights based societies (assuming that by "free market" something like the modern American conception of that term is meant)

Whose morals though?

In my life time I've seen being gay or smoking weed (for example) turn from immoral to widely accepted. Kind of hard to consider these shifting sentiments as a solid foundation for anything.

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

#403

Post by bergen »

WalterBright wrote: post #346
thaumaturgy wrote: post #277

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…

> 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…

Mesopothemia was based on morals as far as we know, and they lay the foundation for many technical and scientific advances. And your rights are based on religious and ideological morals. Why do you believe the debate about Roe v. Wade exists? Why do we consider infidelity so bad it can break a contract of marriage? What is marriage? Those are not laws of nature.

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

#404

Post by int_19h »

nickpp wrote: post #394
stonogo wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

If this is meant to be a reference to Soviet-style communism, then all that shows is that centrally planned economies run by dictators end up poorly for everyone.

They don't end up without wealth disparity, though. In fact, USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin, when well-off party bureaucrats and high-ranking professionals hired housemaids - openly and legally - to clean their large apartments and dachas, while attending high school required paying money.

Another way to think about it is that USSR was a society in which capital was still controlled by a small elite, but collectively as a corporation (the Party). A particular apparatchik would be living much better than the average worker for ultimately the same reasons - because his lifestyle was financed by wealth produced by other people who did not have the claim to the wealth they produced under the law. But he didn't own his cars and his dachas personally; he merely used them so long as he retained his rank within the Party (which for many people could be a lifetime thing in practice, purges aside).

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

#406

Post by stale2002 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #364
stale2002 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look if you think the whole company should be shutdown, then say that. But don't pretend like any of the employees are going to go along with that. Just admit that the goal is to actively sabotage the company and shut it all down. Then, all those employees can understand what you want, and they can go work for Microsoft instead, doing the exact same job that they were doing before, but now without the board sabotagin…

First, my statement was a hypothetical that shows its fairly obvious in the abstract that just because a group's activity is beneficial to themselves doesn't mean humanity needs to tolerate it, if it's at the expense of everyone else. Hello cartels, carbon emissions, etc. When it comes to this specific case, the board did not think the mission of "AGI benefiting humanity" warranted shutting the company down. (they be…

Welcome to living in a society.

If OpenAI didn't offer high compensation, then it wouldn't have been able to attract the talent that it did.

Feel free to run your company off of Doge coin donations from EA orgs if you like.

But personally, I don't think anyone would have been able to make the frontier models that OpenAI did even if SBF himself funded the whole thing.

To actually succeed in the space you need money, top talent, and GPUs. And you can't get that if your plan is to shutdown the company.

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

#407

Post by bergen »

nickpp wrote: post #394
stonogo wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent. But it is hoarding wealth.

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

#408

Post by alvah »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #70
sho_hn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ends don't always justify means.

The parent comment didn’t say ends always justify means. In this case all Sam did was step on a few toes and hurt the egos of a few board members. Meanwhile they also launched some revolutionary products that also didn’t hurt anyone. So what’s the big deal?

"that also didn’t hurt anyone"

Can I have some of what you're on? It sounds like fun. Seriously, nobody in the entire world has been adversely affected by the widespread adoption of LLMs?

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

#409

Post by voltaireodactyl »

elefanten wrote: post #330
komali2 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think I've found the limit of people's ability to blame communism for every problem on earth, and I'm always surprised. Was the current genocide in Palestine the fault of Communism also? Was 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, communism?

That's a strawman caricature of the argument. States that are driven by free market allocation rather than central planning (because there's no _pure_ model of either/or) are much less likely to initiate major wars of conquest, such as the ongoing Ukraine war or a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan. That's just empirical fact at this point. There are counterexamples, but the propensity goes strongly in one direction. Al…

(Edited: reconsidered exposing my own ignorance of history as soon as I pressed send)

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

#410

Post by bergen »

thelastgallon wrote: post #380
thaumaturgy wrote: post #277

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 more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system. One of them doesn't belong on the list. Fossil fuel and legacy automobile companies killed EVs[1][2], bought all the battery patents and made sure there were no…

Musk profited of what he saw benefited him, yes he pushed forward EV technology and put other carmakers under pressure which is good. But he is an completely unhinged egomanic who has no respect for working people, even those working for him and often lies for his benefit, to workers, shareholders and reporters, this is documented hundreds of times
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