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Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

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Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#421

Post by jacquesm »

eganist wrote: post #416
jacquesm wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For all we know, the dev day announcements were the final straw and trigger for the decision that was probably months in the making. He was already the brand, and there likely wouldn't have been a convenient time to remove him from their perspective.

That may well be true. But that would prove that the board was out of touch with what the company was doing. If the board sees anything new on 'dev day' that means they haven't been doing their job in the first place.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#422

Post by rafaelero »

sseagull wrote: post #356
rafaelero wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this is a schism is already weird. Why do they care how the company transforms the technology coming from the lab into products? It's what pay their salaries in the end of the day and, as long as they can keep doing their research work, it doesn't affect them. Being resented about a thing like this to the point of calling it a "absolute embarrassment" when it clearly wasn't is childish to say the least.

> as long as they can keep doing their research work, it doesn't affect them That’s a big question. Once stuff starts going “commercial” incentives can change fairly quickly. If you want to do interesting research, but the money wants you to figure out how AI can help sell shoes, well guess which is going to win in the end - the one signing your paycheck.

> Once stuff starts going “commercial” incentives can change fairly quickly.

Not in this field. In AI, whoever has the most intelligent model is the one that is going to dominate the market. No company can afford not investing heavily in research.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#423

Post by DebtDeflation »

threeseed wrote: post #216
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> 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…

>They have blind-sided partners

This is the biggest takeaway for me. People are building businesses around OpenAI APIs and now they want to suddenly swing the pendulum back to being a fantasy AGI foundation and de-emphasize the commercial aspect? Customers are baking OpenAI's APIs into their enterprise applications. Without funding from Microsoft their current model is unsustainable. They'll be split into two separate companies within 6 months in my opinion.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#424

Post by evolve2k »

> Szymon Sidor, an open source baselines researcher

What does that title even mean. As we know Open AI is ironicly not known for doing open source work. I’m left guessing he ‘research the open source competition’ as it were.

Can anyone shed further light on the role/research?

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#425

Post by patcon »

w10-1 wrote: post #299

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…

> Their ambiguous goals induce politics. [...] This is the problem with religious organizations and ideological governments: they can't be trusted, because they will be captured by their internal politics.

Yes, of course. But that's because "doing good" is by definition much more ambiguous than "making money". It's way higher dimension, and it has uncountable definitions.

So nonprofits will by definition involve more politics at the human level. I'd say we must accept that if we want to live amongst the actions of nonprofits rather than just for-profits.

To claim that "politics" are a reason something "can't be trusted" is akin to saying involvement of human affairs means something can't be trusted (over computers). We must imagine effective politics, or else we cannot imagine effective human affairs -- only mechanistic affairs of simple optimization systems (like capitalist markets)

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#426

Post by photochemsyn »

ethanbond wrote: post #391
photochemsyn wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to replace the board members with AGI entities, isn't it? Just have to figure out how to do the real-time incorporation of current data into the model. I bet that's an active thing at OpenAI. Seems to have been a hot discussion topic lately: https://www.workbyjacob.com/thoughts/from-llm-to-rqm-real-ti... The real risk is that some government will put the result in charge of their national defense syst…

> The real risk is that some government will put the result in charge of their national defense system, aka Skynet, not that kids will ask it how to make illegal drugs. These cannot possibly be the most realistic failure cases you can imagine, are they? Who cares if "kids" "make illegal drugs?" But yeah, if kids can make illegal drugs with this tech, then actual bad actors can make actual dangerous substances with th…

Every bad actor who wants to make dangerous substances can find that information in the scientific literature with little difficulty. An LLM, however, is probably not going to tell you that the mostly likely outcome of a wannabe chemist trying to cook up something or other from an LLM recipe is that they'll poison themselves.

This generally fits a notion I've heard expressed repeatedly: today's LLMs are most useful to people who already have some domain expertise, it just makes things faster and easier. Tomorrow's LLMs, that's another question, as you imply.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#427

Post by g42gregory »

croes wrote: post #339
g42gregory wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an AI professional, I am very interested to hear about OpenAI's ideas, directions, safety programs, etc... As a commercial customer, the only things I am interested in is the quality of the commercial product they provide to me. Will they have my interests in mind going forward? Will they devote all their energy in delivering the best, most advanced product to me? Will robust support and availability be there in t…

>Will they have my interests in mind going forward? Will they devote all their energy in delivering the best, most advanced product to me? Sorry to burt you bubble but the primary motivation of a for-profit company is ... profit. If they make more money in screwing you, they will. Amazon, Google, Walmart, Microsoft, Oracle etc. The customer is never a priority, just a means to an end.

Absolutely. I totally agree with the sentiment. But, at least make an effort to pretend that you care! Give me something... OpenAI does not even pretend anymore. :-) The board was pretty clear. That's not a good sign for the customers.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#428

Post by cthalupa »

reissbaker wrote: post #403
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #240

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…

Three points: 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 Io…

Sutskever has shifted to safety and alignment research this year. Previously he was directly in charge of the development of GPT, from GPT-1 on.

Brockman did an entirely different type of work than Sutskever. Brockman's primary focus was on the infrastructure side of things - by all accounts the software he wrote to manage the pre-training, training, etc., is all world-class and a large part of why they were able to be as efficient as they are, but that is not the same thing as being the brains behind the ML portion.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#429

Post by DebtDeflation »

galangalalgol wrote: post #332
dragonwriter wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> split the company into two camps The split existed long prior to the board action, and extended up into the board itself. If anything, the board action is a turning point toward decisively ending the split and achieving unity of purpose.

Can someone explain the sides? Ilya seems to think transformers could make AGI and they need to be careful? Sam said what? "We need to make better LLMs to make more money."? My general thought is that whatever architecture gets you to AGI, you don't prevent it from killing everyone by chaining it better, you prevent that by training it better, and then treating it like someone with intrinsic value. As opposed to lock…

I don't think the issue was a technical difference of opinion regarding whether transformers alone were needed or other architectures required. It seems the split was over speed of commercialization and Sam's recent decision to launch custom GPTs and a ChatGPT Store. IMO, the board miscalculated. OpenAI won't be able to pursue their "betterment of humanity" mission without funding and they seemingly just pissed off their biggest funding source with a move that will also make other would be investors very skittish now.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#430

Post by fuzztester »

threeseed wrote: post #311
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have … split the company into two camps By all accounts, this split happened a while ago and led to this firing, not the other way around.

The split happened at the management/board level. And instead of resolving this and presenting a unified strategy to the company they have instead allowed for this split to be replicated everywhere. Everyone who was committed to a pro-profit company has to ask if they are next to be treated like Sam. It's incredibly destabilising and unnecessary.

The possibility of getting fired is an occupational hazard for anyone working in any company, unless something in your employment contract says otherwise. And even then, you can still be fired.

Biz 101.

I don't know why people even need to be explained this, except for ignorance of basic facts of business life.

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