If people are at each other's throats like this, it could be an indication of how close AGI is.
OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
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Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#422Without all the fluff: One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project. The other was that Altman allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel
Ilya himself was a member of the board that voted to fire Altman. I don't know if he's lying to his teeth in these comments, making up an alibi, or is genuinely trying to convince people was acting as a rubber stamp and doesn't know anything.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t hold Sam bringing him over in too high a regard. Fucking each other over is a sport in Silicon Valley. You’re subservient exactly until the moment you sense an opportunity to dominate. It’s just business.
"Business" sucks then. This is sociopathic behavior.
What has been seen can not be unseen. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems extremely short sighted for the rest of the board to go along with that.
Well obviously that wouldn't be the explanation given to other board members. But it would be the reason he instigated this after dev day, and the reason he won't back down (OpenAI imploding? All the better).
But it’s still surprising the other three then haven’t sacked D’Angelo, then. You’d think with the shitstorm raging and the underlying reasoning seemingly so…inadequate, they would start seeing that D’Angelo was just playing them.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep! I've done eng "bake-offs" as well, where a few folks / teams work on a problem in isolation then we compare and contrast after. Good fun!
Not good fun when it's done in secret. That happened to me, and I was gaslit when I discovered the competing git repo. Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.
Yeah, doing it in secrecy is a recipe for Bad Things. I worked at a startup that completely died because of it.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
More evidence the layoffs are 100% BS. Suddenly there's surplus headcount and magical budgets out of nothing, all to accommodate several hundreds of people with way-above-market-average TCs. It's almost like they were never in danger of hurting profit margins in the first place.
It is entirely reasonable for there to be dire financial straits that require layoffs, yet when a $10 billion investment suddenly blows up and has to be saved the money can be spent to fix it. In the first case it wasn't that there was no cash in the bank and no bank willing to make loans, but that the company needed to spend less than it earned in order to make a profit. In the second case it wasn't that the money h…
These tech giants' finances are public, because they are publicly listed companies. All of them are sitting on fat stacks of cash and positive YoY revenue growth. They have absolutely zero chance of running out of money even if each one hires 10000 front desk clerks who do nothing but watch TikTok all day and collect $100k/yr comps. Zero, Zilch, Nada.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#427Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…
It could be a more primal explanation. I think OpenAi doesn’t want to effectively be a R&D arm of Microsoft. The ChatGPT mobile app is an unpolished and unrefined. There’s little to no product design there, so I totally see how it’s fair criticism to call out premature feature milling (especially when it’s clear it’s for Microsoft).
I’m imagining Sam being Microsoft’s Trojan horse, and that’s just not gonna fly.
If anyone tells me Sam is a master politician, I’d agree without knowing much about him. He’s a Microsoft plant that has support of 90% of the OpenAi team. The two things are conflicts of interest. Masterful.
It’s a pretty fair question to ask a CEO. Do you still believe in OpenAi vision or do you know believe in Microsoft’s vision?
The girl she said not to worry about.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can either act like a professional and control the messaging or let others fill the vacuum with idle speculation. I'm quite frankly in shock as to the level of responsibility displayed by people whose position should demand high function.
It seems evident that the board was filled at least in part by people whose understanding of the business world and leadership skills is a tier or three below what a position of this level requires. One wonders how they got the job in the first place.
This is America. Practically anyone can start a nonprofit or a company. More importantly, good marketing may attract substantial investment, but it doesn't necessarily imply good leadership.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely wild to me that people are drawing a straight line between a text completion algorithm and AGI. The term "AI" has truly lost all meaning.
If the text completion algorithm is sufficiently advanced enough then we wouldn't be able to tell it's not AGI, especially if it has access to state-of-the-art research and can modify its own code/weights. I don't think we are there yet but it's plausible to an extent.
No. This is modern day mysticism. You're just waving your hands and making fuzzy claims about "but what if it was an even better algorithm".
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely wild to me that people are drawing a straight line between a text completion algorithm and AGI. The term "AI" has truly lost all meaning.
LLMs predict language, and language is a representation of human concepts about the world. Thus, these models are constructing, piece by piece, conceptual chains about the world. As they learn to construct better and more coherent conceptual chains, something interesting must be happening internally.
No they are not.