Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 946 posts

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#431

Post by gnaritas99 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #374
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite hypothesis: Ilya et al suspected emergent AGI ( e.g. saw the software doing things unprompted or dangerous and unexpected) and realized the Worldcoin shill is probably not the one you want calling the shots on it. For the record, I don't think it's true. I think it was a power play, and a failed coup at that. But it's about as substantiated as the "serious" hypotheses being mooted in the media. And it's m…

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.

[dead]

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#432

Post by seanhunter »

1024core wrote: post #304
kmlevitt wrote: post #81

Neither 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…

> But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features. Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that.

What’s interesting to me is that someone looked at Quora and thought “I want the guy behind that on my board”.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#433

Post by spullara »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #172

1) Where is Emmett? He's the CEO now. It's his job to be the public face of the company. The company is in an existential crisis and there have been no public statements after his 1AM tweet. 2) Where is the board? At a bare minimum, issue a public statement that you have full faith in the new CEO and the leadership team, are taking decisive action to stabilize the situation, and have a plan to move the company forwar…

He is trying to determine if they have already made an Alien God.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#434

Post by tock »

maxlamb wrote: post #352
tock wrote: post #345

So both Mira and Ilya voted to kick Sam out. And are now on team Sam. This makes absolutely no sense. Why did they vote yes in the first place then?

My understanding now is that Mira was not on the board so she did not vote.

Ah my bad. I just checked the OpenAI site and you're right Mira wasn't a board member.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#435

Post by gnaritas99 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #430
dwaltrip wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#436

Post by kevinventullo »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #322
sackfield wrote: post #233

Earlier 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.

Really? I’ve always assumed (known) there is no actual difference between high level execs and you: they just think higher of themselves.

In fact, I think the chaos we’ve seen over the last few days shows precisely the difference between competent and incompetent leadership. I think if anyone from, say, the board of directors of Coca-Cola was on the OAI board, this either wouldn’t have happened or would have played out very differently.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#437

Post by rjbwork »

bezier-curve wrote: post #415
nemo44x wrote: post #356

Earlier 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.

Yes. That is what is valued in the economic system we have. Absolute cut throat dominance to take as big a chunk of any pie you can get your grubby little fingers into yields the greatest amount of capital.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#438

Post by VirusNewbie »

upupupandaway wrote: post #381
lazystar wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats not very frugal; please provide a source or citation for your claim.

I am a former L7 SDM at Amazon. Just last year I had to contend with not one, but three teams doing the same thing. The faster one won with a half-baked solution that caused multiple Sev-1s. My original comment was half in jest; the actual way this works is that multiple teams discover the same issues at the same time and then compete for completing a solution first. This is usually across VPs so it’s difficult to cu…

Oh man, i’m glad I read this because right now at Google I am immensely frustrated by Google trying to fit their various shaped pegs into the round hole of their one true converged “solution” for any given problem.

My friends and I say “see, Amazon doesn’t have to deal with this crap, each team can go build their own whatever”. Buut, I guess that’s how you get 12 CMSs for one org.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#439

Post by quickthrower2 »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #215
DebtDeflation wrote: post #172

1) Where is Emmett? He's the CEO now. It's his job to be the public face of the company. The company is in an existential crisis and there have been no public statements after his 1AM tweet. 2) Where is the board? At a bare minimum, issue a public statement that you have full faith in the new CEO and the leadership team, are taking decisive action to stabilize the situation, and have a plan to move the company forwar…

Yes these people should all be doing more to feed internet drama! If they don't act soon, HN will have all sorts of wild opinions about what's going on and we can't have that! Even worse, if we don't have near constant updates, we might realize this is not all that important in the end and move on to other news items! I know, I know, I shouldn't jest when this could have grave consequences like changing which uri you…

They have customers and people deciding if they want to be customers.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#440

Post by karmasimida »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #383
kmlevitt wrote: post #81

Neither 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…

Wouldn't it make sense that Ilya Sutskever presented the reasons the board had for firing Sam Altman, which were not his reasons. My feeling is Ilya was upset about how Sam Altman was the face of OpenAI, and went along with the rest of the board for his own reasons. That's often how this stuff works out. He wasn't particularly compelled by their reasons, but had his own which justified his decision in his mind.

He lets the emotion gets the better part of him for sure.
Post reply on HN