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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors. He always does that to give himself cover, but he has clearly shown that his words mean very little in this regard. He always dodges criticism. He used to talk about the importance of him being accountable to the OpenAI board and them bei…

Wasn't he fired for questionable reasons? I thought everyone wanted him back, and that's why he was able to return. It was, as I remember, just the board that wanted him out. I imagine if he was doing something truly nefarious, opinions might have been different, but I have no idea what kind of cult of personality he has at that company, so I might be wrong here.

At the time, was it possible for people working at OpenAI to, er, "cash out"?

I don't actually know the answer to that, but I'm suggesting that perhaps people had additional motives for the organization to preserve its current hype/investment growth strategies.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#402

A few weeks ago my OpenAI credits expired and I was billed to replace them. I had no idea this was the business model, fine you got me with your auto-renew scam because you decided my tokens were spoiled. At some point, OpenAI became who they said they werent. You can't even get chatgpt to do anything fun anymore as the lawyers have hobbled its creative expression. And now they want to fight with Elon over what they…

And now they want to fight with Elon

Elon sued OpenAI, not the other way around

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#403

It's amusing how Sutskever kept musking Musk over the years (overpromising with crazy deadlines and underdelivering): In 2017 he wrote "Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots (though no one should pass the Turing test)." "We will completely s…

That’s embarrassing and should be noted when he’s treated as a guru (as in today when I guess he gave a talk at Neurips conference) Of course, he should be listened to and treated as a true expert. But, it’s becoming more clear in viewing public people that extreme success can warp people’s perspective.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#405
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measured another way, just a bit under 2 Twitters.

When he bought it, sure? Probably more like 20 X's

Offset by the value of toppling a hostile administration that had him in its crosshairs. Is that worth $XXB? Maybe not, but it's worth something.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#406
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri a…

Did you really just compare the thing that makes me able to code and ship 5x faster to... NFTs?

> code and ship

I notice that doesn't say what happened to the throughput of "diagnose, fix, and reduce technical debt." :p

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#407

From Musk's email: "Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach." Genuine question I've always had is, are these charlatans conscious of how full of shit they are, or are they really high on their own stuff? Also…

I think people kissing your ass all day and viewing wealth as a sign of intelligence (which would make Musk the smartest man in history by a lot), it’s more understandable.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter. Its fairly easy. In almost every western country the incumbent administration has been punished by voters due to inflation, this has been the case in the uk, germany, romania, france, mexico... list goes on. So Trump could have won without Elon buying twitter. Similarly he could have donated to Trump without buying Twitter, and been on stage and been all day o…

Twitter famously deplatformed Trump, as a sitting president. They were a captured institution and it was shown that corrupt intelligence agencies were directly influencing Twitter's censorship. There was no other distribution channel available. Messaging is important. Counter narratives are important.

> In a June 2023 court filing, Twitter attorneys strongly denied that the Files showed the government had coerced the company to censor content, as Musk and many Republicans claimed.[8] Former Twitter employees asserted that Republican officials also made takedown requests so often that Twitter had to keep a database tracking them.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#409
post #128
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> I overheard a daughter talking to her mother about ChatGPT and KI (Künstliche Intelligenz, the German for AI).

Given the fact that how much ALL of our media beating that drum since GPT-3, I am hoping that my cat will start talking about it without understanding what it is. Even Draghi’s report has immense hidden lobbying dedicated to KI.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors. He always does that to give himself cover, but he has clearly shown that his words mean very little in this regard. He always dodges criticism. He used to talk about the importance of him being accountable to the OpenAI board and them bei…

Wasn't he fired for questionable reasons? I thought everyone wanted him back, and that's why he was able to return. It was, as I remember, just the board that wanted him out. I imagine if he was doing something truly nefarious, opinions might have been different, but I have no idea what kind of cult of personality he has at that company, so I might be wrong here.

> Wasn't he fired for questionable reasons?

There were a number of concerns, including for-profit projects he was pursuing despite his public insistence on OpenAI being non-profit as well as generally deceptive behaviour on his part. The last part at least is consistent with what others have said about Altman previously, including what allegedly led to his exit from YC, although they have kept those stories pretty quiet. But it seems like PG himself no longer has a lot of trust in Altman after he basically made him his heir apparent, and he has known him for a while now.

What's more, the driving force behind the board's move to remove him from OpenAI was reportedly Ilya Sutskever who was one of their key people and one of the handful of original founders. So it wasn't just a bunch of external people who wanted Altman gone, but at least one high level insider who has been around for the entire thing.

Altman himself was even once asked by journalists whether we could trust him to which he outright answered "no". But then he pointed to the fact that the board could remove him for any reason. Clearly, he was suggesting that there were strong safe guards in place to keep him in check, but it is now apparent that those safe guards never really existed while his answer still stands.

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