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

businessinsider.com

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

#531

Post by zombiwoof »

karmasimida wrote: post #440
AndyNemmity wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So glad the man baby AI scientist is in charge of AGI alignment

Feel the AI

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

#532

Post by Kwpolska »

losteric wrote: post #485
47494ureieurr wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing admirable about jumping off a sinking ship that you put the holes in. At this stage it's on him to clear his name.

Has Ilya left OpenAI? Not to my knowledge. This is more like a guy apologizing for the holes and actively trying to fix the ship. Which is absolutely worth something, even if no holes would still be better.

Ilya signed the "reinstate Altman or we're leaving" letter.

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

#533

Post by motoxpro »

seanhunter wrote: post #432
1024core wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

I was thinking the same thing. This whole thing is surprising and then I look at Quora and think "Eh, makes sense that the CEO is completely incompetent and money hungry"

Even as I type that, when people talk about the board being altruistic and holding to the Open AI charter, how in the world can you be that user hostile, profit focused, and incompetent at your day job (Quora CEO) and then say "Oh no, but on this board I am an absolute saint and will do everything to benefit humanity"

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

#534

Post by cdogl »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #487

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…

> Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society.

This prediction predated any of the technology to create even a rudimentary LLM and could be said of more-or-less any transformative technological development in human history. Famously, Marxism makes this very argument about the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of capital.

Geoffrey Hinton appears to be an eminent cognitive psychologist and computer scientist (edit: nor economist). I'm sure he has a level of expertise I can't begin to grasp in his field, but he's no sociologist or historian. Very few of us are in a position to make predictions about the future - least of all in an area where we don't even fully understand how the _current_ technology works.

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

#535

Post by LMYahooTFY »

losteric wrote: post #485
47494ureieurr wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing admirable about jumping off a sinking ship that you put the holes in. At this stage it's on him to clear his name.

Has Ilya left OpenAI? Not to my knowledge. This is more like a guy apologizing for the holes and actively trying to fix the ship. Which is absolutely worth something, even if no holes would still be better.

After seemingly being the front man in the firing of Altman he supposedly has put his name on the internal letter to reverse course, fire the board, and reinstate Altman.

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

#536

Post by rvba »

prepend wrote: post #34

So Surdkever fires Altman, then signs a letter saying they’ll quit unless he’s reinstated. There’s only 4 board members, right? Who wanted him fired. Is this a situation where they all thought the others wanted him fired and were just stupid? Have they been feeding motions into chatgpt and asking “should add I do this?”

Can the 3 board members also kick out Sustkever from the board?

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

#537

Post by 23B1 »

pavlov wrote: post #521
23B1 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.

OpenAI is a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary. The controlling board is at the non-profit and immune to shareholder concerns. Investors in OpenAI-the-business were literally told they should think of it as a donation. There’s not much grounds for a shareholder lawsuit when you signed away everything to a non-profit.

Corporate structure is not immunity from getting sued. Evidently HN doesn't understand that lawsuits are a tactic, not a conclusion.

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

#538

Post by adrianN »

cdogl wrote: post #534
LarsDu88 wrote: post #487

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…

> Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This prediction predated any of the technology to create even a rudimentary LLM and could be said of more-or-less any transforma…

Was Marx wrong?

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

#539

Post by dwd »

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…

Do we even have an idea of how the vote went?

Greg was not invited (losing Sam one vote), and Sam may have been asked to sit out the vote, so the 3 had a majority. Ilya who is at least on "Team Sam" now; may have voted no. Or simply went along thinking he could be next out the door at that point; we just don't know.

It's probably fair to say not letting Greg know the board was getting together (and letting it proceed without him there) was unprofessional and where Ilya screwed up. It is also the point when Sam should have said hang-on - I want Greg here before this proceeds any further.

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

#540

Post by motoxpro »

dmix wrote: post #207
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…

Technically he's the interim CEO in a chaotic company just assigned in the last 24hrs. I'd probably wait to get my bearings before walking in acting like I've got everything under control on the first day after a major upheaval. The only thing I've read about Shear is he is pro-slowing AI development and pro-Yudkowsky's doomer worldview on AI. That might not be a pill the company is ready to swallow. https://x.com/dr…

The more I read into this story the more I can't help but to be a conspiracy theorist and say that it feels like the boards intent was to kill the company.

No explanation beyond "he tried to give two people the same project

the "Killing the company would be consistent with the companies mission" line in the boards statement

Adam having a huge conflict of interest

Emmet wanting to go from a "10" to a "1-2"

I'm either way off, or I've had too much internet for the weekend.

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