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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

#441

Post by kmlevitt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #394
kmlevitt wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but there was no effort to actually oust him either. Which you would expect them to do if they had to fire guilty parties for a massive wrongdoing that couldn’t be ignored Either he had no part in this hypothetical transgression and thinks the accusation is nonsense, or he was part of it and for some inexplicable reason wasn’t asked to leave Open AI despite that. But you have to choose.

> Right, but there was no effort to actually oust him either. Reducing someone's responsibility significantly is well known to often be a mmechanism to oust them without explicitly firing, so I don't know that that is the case.

Well, they still haven’t accused him of anything yet despite repeatedly being asked to explain their reasoning, so it seems fair to give him the benefit of the doubt until they do.

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

#442

Post by 47494ureieurr »

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…

[flagged]

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

#443

Post by cosmojg »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #420
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…

But why would Ilya publicly say he regrets his decision and wants Sam to come back. You think his existential worries are less important than being liked by his coworkers??

> You think his existential worries are less important than being liked by his coworkers??

Yes, actually. This is overwhelmingly true for most people. At the end of the day, we all fear being alone. I imagine that fear is, at least in part, what drives these kinds of long-term "existential worries," the fear of a universe without other people in it, but now Ilya is facing the much more immediate threat of social ostracism with significantly higher certainty and decidedly within his own lifetime. Emotionally, that must take precedence.

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

#445

Post by upupupandaway »

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…

I find it absolutely fascinating that Emmett accepted this position. He can game all scenarios and there is no way that he can come out ahead on any of them. One would expect an experienced Silicon Valley CEO to make this calculus and realize it's a lost cause. The fact he accepted to me shows he's not a particularly good leader.

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

#446

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

nemo44x wrote: post #356
anupamchugh wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s lots of conflicts of interests beyond Adam and his Poe AI. Yes, he was building a commerical bot using OpenAI APIs, but Sam was apparently working on other side ventures too. And Sam was the person who invested in Quora during his YC tenure, and must have had a say in bringing him onboard. At this point, the spotlight is on most members of the nonprofit board

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.

Why did Altman bring him onboard in the first place? What value does he provide? If there is a conflict of interest why didn’t Altman see it?

If this Quora guy is the cause of all this, Altman only has himself to blame since he is the reason the Quora guy is on the board.

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

#447

Post by himaraya »

jacquesm wrote: post #256
himaraya wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows nonprofit boards wield outsize power and need strict governance, e.g., conflicts of interest, empty board seats.

All of which should have been covered in the paperwork.

Hence the need for strict governance. I can't think of another board with so many board seats empty, to say nothing about conflicts of interest.

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

#448

Post by squigz »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #120
samspenc wrote: post #23

> One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project. Have these people never worked at any other company before? Probably every company with more than 10 employees does something like this.

>Have these people never worked at any other company before? Half the board has not had a real job ever. I’m serious.

Could you please elaborate on what a 'real job' is in this context?

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

#449

Post by ajb »

dang wrote: post #76
ajb wrote: post #32

Should we start flagging these -what do people think? This is what, the 12th front page story today about the openAI drama? Also wondering why the mods don't consolidate them

We've merged quite a few! but not all, because (1) to some extent there are distinct ongoing subplots, and (2) it's too big a mess to control. If you or anyone want to know how we handle this, here you go... Once or twice a year, a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) hits HN that isn't just one big story, but an entire sequence of big stories. A saga, even! This is one. With these we can't do what we usually do, which is have…

Thanks for the response! It should have occurred to me that there must have been even more threads than were showing.

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

#450

Post by quickthrower2 »

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.

Hold up. Any AI that exists is an IO function (algorithm) perhaps with state. Including our brains. Being an “x completion” algorithm doesn’t say much about whether it is AI.

Your comment sounds like a rhetoric way to say that GPT is in the same class as autocomplete and that what autocomplete does sets some kind of ceiling to what IO functions that work a couple of bytes at a time can do.

It is not evident to me that that is true.

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