411–420 of 754 posts
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And that is fine.. but why the immediate firing, why the controversy?
The immediate firing is from our perspective. Who's to say everything else wasn't already tried in private?
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> Exactly. The tricky part is that board started a second for profit company with VC investors who are co-owners. This has potential for messy conflicts of interest if there is disagreement about how to run the co-venture, and each party has contractual obligations to each other. Anyone investing in or working for the for-profit LLC has to sign an operating agreement that states the LLC is not obligated to make a pro…
See my other response. If you have people sign a contract that says the mission comes first, but also give them profit sharing stocks, and cap those profits at 1.1 Trillion, it is bound to cause some conflicts of interest in reality, even if it is clear who calls the shots when deciding how to balance the mission and profit
OpenAI employees might not like it and it might drive them to leave, but they entered into this agreement with a full understanding that the structure has always been in place to prioritize the non-profit's charter.
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America did nuclear weapons research to get there before the Nazis and Japan and we were able to use them to stop Japan
Has the US ever stated or followed a policy of neutrality and openness? OpenAI positioned itself like that, much the same way Switzerland does in global politics.
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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…
Would it be accurate to liken CEOs to film producers?
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What did you love about it?
Cheaper, faster and longer context window would be enough of an advancement for me. But then we also had the Assistant API that makes our lives as AI devs much easier.
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The immediate firing is from our perspective. Who's to say everything else wasn't already tried in private?
That may be so but then they should have done it well before Altman's last week at OpenAI where they allowed him to become that much more tied to their brand as the 'face' of the operation.
He was already the brand, and there likely wouldn't have been a convenient time to remove him from their perspective.
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…
It isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like describing voting out a politician as a coup. Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman. If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own i…
But in the business and wider world, a coup (without the d'état part) is, by analogy, any takeover of power that is secretly planned and executed as a surprise. (We can similarly talk about a company "declaring war" which means to compete by mobilizing all resources towards a single purposes, not to fire missiles and kill people.)
This is absolutely a coup. It was an action planned by a subset of board members in secret, taken by a secret board meeting missing two of its members (including the chair), where not even Microsoft had any knowledge or say, despite their 49% investment in the for-profit corporation.
I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. But this is one of the great boardroom coups of all time -- one for the history books. There's a reason it's front-page news, not just on HN but in the NYT and WSJ as well.
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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…
Would it be accurate to liken CEOs to film producers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Quinto
Is pretty close to that image.
> 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…
This wasn't a change of strategy, it was a restoration of it. OpenAI was structured with a 501c3 in oversight from the beginning exactly because they wanted to prioritize using AI for the good of humanity over profits.