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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

#471

Post by cjbprime »

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.

It's not wild. "Predict the next word" does not imply a bar on intelligence; a more intelligent prediction that incorporates more detail from the descriptions of the world that were in the training data will be a better prediction. People are drawing a straight line because the main advance to get to GPT-4 was throwing more compute at "predict the next word", and they conclude that adding another order of magnitude of compute might be all it takes to get to superhuman level. It's not "but what if we had a better algorithm", because the algorithm didn't change in the first place. Only the size of the model did.

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

#472

Post by tw1984 »

upupupandaway wrote: post #445
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.

He made it pretty clear that he consider it as a once in a life time chance.

I think he is correct, being the CEO twitch is a position known by no one in many places, e.g. how many developers/users in China even heard of Twitch? Being the CEO of OpenAI is a completely different story, it is a whole new level he can leverage in the years to come.

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

#473

Post by halfjoking »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #299
fullshark wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems most likely Sustkever wanted him fired and then realized his mistake. Ultimately the board was probably quietly seething about the direction the company was headed, got mad enough to retake the reigns with that stunt and then realized what that actually meant. Now they are trying to unring the bell but cannot.

> Now they are trying to unring the bell but cannot. Well, they can unring the bell pretty easy. They were given an easy out. Reinstate Sam (he wants to come back) and resign. However, they CONTINUE to push back and refuse to step down.

I'm going to be the only one in this thread calling it this.

But why does no one think it's possible these women are CIA operatives?

They come from think tanks. You think the US Intelligence community wants AGI to be discovered at a startup? They want it created at big tech. AGI under MSFT would be perfect. All big tech is heavily compromised: https://twitter.com/NameRedacted247

EDIT: Since this heavy speculation, I'm going to make predictions. These women will now try to force Ilya out the board, put in a CEO not from Silicon Valley, and eventually get police to shut down OpenAI offices. That's a CIA coup

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

#474

Post by mvkel »

WalterBright wrote: post #194
kumarvvr wrote: post #65

Giving 2 people the same project? Isnt this like the thing to do to get differing approaches and then release the amalgamation of the two? I thought these sorts of things are common. Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO? This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.

Back in the late 80s, Lotus faced a crisis with their spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. Should they: 1. stick with DOS 2. go with OS/2 3. go with Windows Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.

IBM was bankrolling all the development. They only had one choice.

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

#475

Post by ilikehurdles »

adastra22 wrote: post #355
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And the one which does have a real job is a direct competitor with OpenAI.

And since none of them have equity in OpenAI, their external financial interest would influence decision making, especially when those interests lie with a competing company where a board member is currently the chief executive.

I've seen too much automatic praise given to this board under the unbacked assumption that this decision was some pure, mission-driven action, and not enough criticism of an org structure that allows a board to bet against the long term success of the underlying organization.

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

#476

Post by WalterBright »

bawolff wrote: post #456
WalterBright wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Successful 8086 projects were usually written in assembler - no way to get the speed and size down otherwise. I'm pretty sure Lotus 123 was all in assembler.

I'm not an assembly programmer and not very familiar with how that world works, but even then, if the two OSs were for the same architecture (x86), couldn't you still have a cross OS main part and then specific parts that deal with operating system things? I normally think of compiled languages like c being an abstraction over cpu architecture, not operating system api.

Yes, you can have common assembler code among platforms, provided they use the same CPU.

From what I've seen of code developed in the 80s, however, asm code was not written to be divided into general and os specific parts. Writing cross-platform code is a skill that gets learned over time, usually the hard way.

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

#477

Post by allday »

hooande wrote: post #378
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…

Why wouldn't Ilya come out and say this? Why wouldn't any of the other people who witnessed the software behave in an unexpected way say something? I get that this is a "just for fun" hypothesis, which is why I have just for fun questions like what incentive does anyone have to keep clearly observed ai risk a secret during such a public situation?

Because, if they announced it and it seemed plausible or even possible that they were correct, then every media outlet, regulatory body, intelligence agency, and Fortune 500 C-suite would blanket OpenAI in the thickest veil of scrutiny to have ever existed in the modern era. Progress would grind to a halt and eventually, through some combination of legal, corporate, and legislative maneuvers, all decision making around the future of AGI would be pried away from Ilya and OpenAI in general - for better or worse.

But if there's one thing that seems very easy to discern about Ilya, it's that he fully believes that when it comes to AI safety and alignment, the buck must stop with him. Giving that control over to government bureaucracy/gerontocracy would be unacceptable. And who knows, maybe he's right.

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

#478

Post by Keyframe »

msravi wrote: post #285
stingraycharles wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a few years ago when there was some research group that was able to take a picture of a black hole. It involved lots of complicated interpretation of data. As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct. So yes, it’s absolutely a valid strategy.

Did the teams know that there was another team working on the same thing? I wonder how that affects working of both teams... On the other hand, not telling the teams would erode the trust that the teams have in management.

There were four teams actually. They knew but couldn't talk to each other. There's a documentary about it. I highly suggest watching it, it also features late Stephen Hawking et al. working on black hole soft hair. Documentary is called Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, it's on pretty much all streaming platforms.

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

#480

Post by bmitc »

upupupandaway wrote: post #445
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.

That seems kind of silly to say. He's not a good leader because he's taking on a challenge?
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