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Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

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Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#521

Post by bear141 »

emptysongglass wrote: post #517
HAL3000 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has orchestrated two coups in different organizations, where the leadership did not align with the organization's interests and missions, I can assure you that the final stage of such a coup is not something that can be executed after just an hour of preparation or thought. It requires months of planning. The trigger is only pulled when there is sufficient evidence or justification for such action. Bui…

How are you still hireable? If I knew you orchestrated two coups at previous companies and I was responsible for hiring, you would be radioactive to me. Especially knowing that all that effort went into putting together a successful coup over other work. Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder,…

I agree completely. People should oppose openly or leave.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#522

Post by slenk »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #420
threeseed wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

> OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. This wasn't a change of strategy, it was a restoration of it. OpenAI was structured with a 501c3 in oversight from the beginning exactly because they wanted to prioritize using AI for the…

This isn't going to make me think in any way that OpenAI will return to its more open beginning. If anything it shows me they don't know what they want

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#523

Post by eganist »

tim333 wrote: post #514
eganist wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immediate firing is from our perspective. Who's to say everything else wasn't already tried in private?

Altman, Brockman and Nadella all say they didn't know in advance.

Not sure why Satya would be privy to this disagreement let alone admit it if he is, and I'd assume Altman and Brockman would be incentivized to provide their own perspective (just as Ilya would) to represent events in the best possible light for themselves.

At this level of execution, words are another tool in their toolbox.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#524

Post by Chamix »

cratermoon wrote: post #275
Chamix wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating Illya's belief in the transformer architecture (with tweaks/compute optimizations) being sufficient for AGI with that of LLMs being sufficient to express human-like intelligence. Multi-modality (and the swath of new training data it unlocks) is clearly a key component of creating AGI if we watch Sutskever's interviews from the past year.

Yes, I read "Attention Is All You Need", and I understand that the multi-head generative pre-trained model talks about "tokens" rather than language specifically. So in this case, I'm using "LLM" as shorthand for what OpenAI is doing with GPTs. I'll try to be more precise in the future. That still leaves disagreement between Altman and Sutskever over whether or not the current technology will lead to AGI or "superint…

Fair enough, shame "Large Tokenized Models" etc never entered the nomenclature.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#525

Post by Vegenoid »

threeseed wrote: post #216
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…

> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

> a blight on corporate governance > They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious) > the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market

It's seeming like corporate governance and market domination are exactly the kind of thing the board are trying to separate from with this move. They can't achieve this by going to investors first and talking about it - you think Microsoft isn't going to do everything in their power to prevent it from happening if they knew about it? I think their mission is laudable, and they simply did it the way it had to be done.

You can't slowly untangle yourself from one of the biggest companies in the world while it is coiling around your extremely valuable technology.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#526

Post by AlchemistCamp »

emptysongglass wrote: post #517
HAL3000 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has orchestrated two coups in different organizations, where the leadership did not align with the organization's interests and missions, I can assure you that the final stage of such a coup is not something that can be executed after just an hour of preparation or thought. It requires months of planning. The trigger is only pulled when there is sufficient evidence or justification for such action. Bui…

How are you still hireable? If I knew you orchestrated two coups at previous companies and I was responsible for hiring, you would be radioactive to me. Especially knowing that all that effort went into putting together a successful coup over other work. Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder,…

Max Levchin was an organizer of two coups while at PayPal. Both times, he believed it was necessary for the success of the company. Whether that was correct or not, they eventually succeeded and I don’t think the coups really hurt his later career.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#527

Post by s1artibartfast »

himaraya wrote: post #488
s1artibartfast wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't dispute that they say that at all. Therein lies the tension -having multiple goals. The goal is to uphold the mission, and also to make a profit, and the mission comes first. Im not saying one party is right or wrong, just pointing out that there is bound to be conflict when you give employees a bunch of profit based stock rewards, Bring in in 11B in VC investment looking for returns, and then have external o…

100x first-round investment and lower multiples for subsequent rounds, so much less than $1T.

what do you mean? Are you saying that is part of the article of incorporation for for-profit Open AI?

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#528

Post by pokepim »

underlipton wrote: post #407
threeseed wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

I'm sure my coworkers at [retailer] were not happy to be even shorter staffed than usual when I was ambush fired, but no one who mattered cared, just as no one who matters cares when it happens to thousands of workers every single day in this country. Sorry to say, my schadenfreude levels are quite high. Maybe if the practice were TRULY verboten in our society... but I guess "professional" treatment is only for the s…

I have noticed you decided to use several German words in your reply, trying not to be petty but at least you should attempt to write them correctly. It’s either Wunderkind (German word for child prodigy) or english translation: wonder kid.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#529

Post by intexpress »

Michelangelo11 wrote: post #240

I've seen some discussion on HN in which people claimed that even really important engineers aren't -too- important and that Ilya is actually replaceable, using Apple's growth after Woz' departure as an example. But I don't think that's the best situation to compare this to. I think a much better one is John Carmack firing Romero from id Software after the release of Quake. Some background: During a period of about 1…

> Meanwhile, id under Carmack kept cranking out hit after hit for years, essentially shrugging off Romero's firing like nothing happened.

I don't think that is accurate...

The output of id Software after Romero left (post Quake 1) was a clear step down. The technology was fantastic but the games were boring and uninspired, at best "good" but never "great". It took a full 20 years for them to make something interesting again (Doom in 2016).

After Romero left, id Software's biggest success was really as a technology licensing house, but not as a games developer. Powering games like Half Life, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, ...

Meanwhile Romero's new company (Ion Storm) eventually failed, but at least the creative freedom there led to some interesting games, like Deus Ex and Anachronox. And even Daikatana is a more interesting game than something like Quake 2 or Quake III.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#530

Post by spadufed »

dragonwriter wrote: post #258
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…

> The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. The board's job is specifically to do right by the charitable mission of the nonprofit of which they are the board. Investors in the downstream for-profit entity (OpenAI Global LLC) are warned explicitly that such investments should be treated as if they were donations and that returning profits to them is not the objective of the firm,…

> charitable mission of the nonprofit of which they are the board

This exactly. Folks have completely forgotten that Altman and Co have largely bastardized the vision of OpenAI for sport and profit. It's very possible that this is part of a larger attempt to return to the stated mission of the organization. An outcome that is undoubtedly better for humanity.

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