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95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

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Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#51

Post by tempsy »

tomohelix wrote: post #41

One thing is at some point, you are peer pressured into signing a petition. When your boss, your coworkers, and your reports are already in it, you got to be in it too. That said, it would still take a significant number of people before it gets to the snowballing phase and it is obvious OAI won't come out of this unscathed.

I’m more convinced this whole thing was Adam D’Angelo feeling blindsided by the GPT store which is effectively what his Poe platform does, and then convincing Ilya and the two other board members to agree with some hand wavy explanation to fire him.

Would explain why Ilya has now reversed course.

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#52

Post by colinsane »

tomohelix wrote: post #41

One thing is at some point, you are peer pressured into signing a petition. When your boss, your coworkers, and your reports are already in it, you got to be in it too. That said, it would still take a significant number of people before it gets to the snowballing phase and it is obvious OAI won't come out of this unscathed.

as a low-level employee, what happens when you don't sign? i've been on the minority side for stuff like that a couple times in my career, and so far there's never been much fallout. i don't deny it could go south sometimes, rather i'd like to understand more so i can predict when/how it would go south next time i'm in the minority again.

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#53

Post by LZ_Khan »

letmevoteplease wrote: post #48
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's apples and oranges. Employees are expressing a preference for making a profit versus the nonprofit board. I'm sort of impressed 5% of the crowd might elevate conscience over cash. No other business has been so insane as to pursue a naked profit objective under the guise of a nonprofit operation. The fact that Altman did so is not a virtue, in my opinion.

You're accepting the board's good vs. evil framing without any evidence that Altman sacrificed safety for profit, or that the board (the Quora guy, really?) is any better. OpenAI needs money to achieve its mission. Training GPT-4 alone cost over $100 million. Commercializing the product is not bad in itself.

The quora guy is the last person I can think of that's not profit motivated.

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#54

Post by pyrophane »

I've been part of a development team meltdown, where an entire engineering org left a company within a few months (we didn't all have a standing offer from a single company, so people trickled out as we found new jobs).

In retrospect, it was not a good company and good for us all for leaving, but the internal drama hit such a fever pitch at one point that we were nearing open rebellion and it was perhaps a bit over the top. I did, however, make quite a few close friends that I still have to this day.

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#55

Post by gitfan86 »

tomohelix wrote: post #41

One thing is at some point, you are peer pressured into signing a petition. When your boss, your coworkers, and your reports are already in it, you got to be in it too. That said, it would still take a significant number of people before it gets to the snowballing phase and it is obvious OAI won't come out of this unscathed.

It isn't peer pressure, it is just reality. 60 people are not going to be able to run OpenAI especially since those 60 people will have not had a 2 week knowledge transfer window with the missing 700 people.

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#56

Post by vaxman »

prirun wrote: post #34

Assuming these employees follow Altman to Microsoft, it seems like Microsoft got a pretty good deal on their $10B investment in OpenAI, most of which they haven't paid yet.

How quickly can DJ Elon de Don get organized and swoop in to take them Home, where they belong? Spending their remaining productive mortal lives in an MS bus terminal isn’t as bad as it sounds though. (Younger Me just projectile vomited.)

https://fortune.com/2023/11/18/elon-musk-ilya-sutskever-open...

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#57

Post by gitfan86 »

tempsy wrote: post #51
tomohelix wrote: post #41

One thing is at some point, you are peer pressured into signing a petition. When your boss, your coworkers, and your reports are already in it, you got to be in it too. That said, it would still take a significant number of people before it gets to the snowballing phase and it is obvious OAI won't come out of this unscathed.

I’m more convinced this whole thing was Adam D’Angelo feeling blindsided by the GPT store which is effectively what his Poe platform does, and then convincing Ilya and the two other board members to agree with some hand wavy explanation to fire him. Would explain why Ilya has now reversed course.

And this is why 99% of AI safety is a waste of time.

Skynet and paperclips are clearly not the risk. The risk is a person deciding that they need to use their power to do what they want and that person having access to powerful AI. What if Adam had a backdoor to GPT-5. He could have got sam arrested by generating proof that he was using company funds on prostitutes and drugs?

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#58

Post by jay-barronville »

goobergoo wrote: post #17

This is how we know that mankind cannot be trusted to develop harness and maintain an all-powerful AGI : absolutely everybody who is working on the project is more interested in the value of their own stock options than what happens in the future when this thing gets loose.

> absolutely everybody who is working on the project is more interested in the value of their own stock options than what happens in the future when this thing gets loose.

Seriously, that’s what you got from this?

Re: 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door

#59

Post by jmyeet »

polio wrote: post #32
jmyeet wrote: post #4

Just your daily reminder that there is no value without labor. The board has come off looking awful here regardless of the merits of their actions. That alone is reason why they should be replaced.

The AI industry seems to exist in order to make it possible for there to be value without labor.

And labor makes those AIs, even if it's a separate company. Until AI digs up the resources, builds the machines to do that, makes the computers they run on and writes the software there'll always be a labor factor.

Plus, once AI does all those things, it now pretty much falls into the labor bucket.

There is no value without labor.

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