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Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

businessinsider.com

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Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#531

Post by davidguetta »

benreesman wrote: post #318
thaumaturgy wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general reaction was "...who?" 2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without the…

I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a…

Isnt altman the architect of chatgpt as a product. He seems on par on that genius at the others on tech

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#533

Post by admissionsguy »

MrSkelter wrote: post #528
Aunche wrote: post #75

I think there is a very good chance this is true, but it also paints the picture of the board being incompetent and incapable of confrontation. They could have filed formal complaints, mandated increased scrutiny, handed off Sam's responsibilities to other people, or threatened legal action. Instead, they attempted a secret coup, which of course makes Sam look like the underdog

The board is working with the assumption the CEO isn’t a liar. Altman is a classic sociopath, a T-1000 to Musk’s clunky T-800. OpenAI is fated to implode in scandal. His 7 trillion dollar funding round ambition is a blaring siren to anyone with a working brain that he’s out of control and capable of doing real damage. He wants a sum of money that could crash the world economy. He thinks he should have the power of th…

Just to be clear - Musk’s crimes are single-handedly turning the US into the leader in EV and space industries, calling one guy a „pedo” and standing trial for it, and supporting the political side that you don’t like?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#534

Post by doktrin »

jfoster wrote: post #504
sage76 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are not even technical Sama is also not technical.

I've seen this mentioned a few times, but is this true? I could swear I've heard him mention that he uses ChatGPT for programming stuff. He might not be a super technical software engineer, but is he "non-technical" in that he can't even write some simple python or something equivalent?

> He might not be a super technical software engineer, but is he "non-technical" in that he can't even write some simple python or something equivalent?

1. that's a very low bar, almost to the point of making any distinction meaningless

2. imho, "technical" and "non-technical" are context dependent, and not intrinsic human qualities. Speaking for myself : I'm a technical individual contributor on my current team, but there are plenty of domains (bleeding edge AI research likely being one of them) where my technical acumen would fall short of expectations for an IC, and hence where my most logical role would be non-technical in nature.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#535

Post by sillysaurusx »

n2d4 wrote: post #518
LoKSET wrote: post #476

Board found out about ChatGPT on Twitter? Maybe she did but I kinda doubt Ilya was in the dark.

It's likely that Ilya didn't think the launch was anything notable: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-was-inaccurate-borin...

One of my most valuable memories is when I dismissed ChatGPT the day it came out. I didn't bother trying it; GPTs were just autocomplete, and OpenAI had already stretched the limits of what autocomplete could do, so this ChatGPT would just be slightly better autocomplete.

Much like pg dismissing Facebook as lame when it first launched, I was exponentially mistaken: https://paulgraham.com/swan.html

> History tends to get rewritten by big successes, so that in retrospect it seems obvious they were going to make it big. For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter.

> One could have described Microsoft and Apple in exactly the same terms.

It's worth remembering that even the big successes often don't realize they're onto something -- you'll be less likely to dismiss the next big wave when you see it forming.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#536

Post by bitcharmer »

tibbar wrote: post #128
bmitc wrote: post #86

What is still bizarre is how the board brought him back. I just don't understand that from any angle. It is very clear that he lied and schemed. So why was there any issue? He had no power once fired. If another company wants to hire him, fine. If he wants to make platitudes on Twitter, who cares? Employees threatened to leave? Let them. I imagine many of them wouldn't, and if they did, you could just rehire and find…

You had the answer there before you dismissed it -- the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft (which has OpenAI's IP rights) offering to hire them all immediately. This included the company's key leadership. The organization was unraveling overnight. This was far past the tipping point of "a few…

Yeah, sadly it looks like it was employees' greed that brought Altman back.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#537

Post by amelius »

ttyyzz wrote: post #499
amelius wrote: post #494

Question: has he now been definitely fired? I lost track.

In November 2023, he was surprisingly dismissed, but confirmed in office a few days later. He has been in office ever since! The story refers to this "surprising dismissal".

Okay, that's good to know, thanks.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#538

Post by ZiiS »

dantyti wrote: post #521
ZiiS wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone with his amount of power; if you are only 'a bit of an asshole' you may as well be a saint.

I have to say that your comment reads like you are justifying unethical behavior from a major business figure. I mean, saying that a CEO who acts with no qualms re accountability "a saint" really begs the question: how does the boot taste like?

Not at all. I am saying that centralising the amount of power OpenAI has is inherently antisocial. If you have done it so the average person uses the qualifier "a bit of" you are extraordinarily gifted.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#539

Post by _giorgio_ »

Aunche wrote: post #75

I think there is a very good chance this is true, but it also paints the picture of the board being incompetent and incapable of confrontation. They could have filed formal complaints, mandated increased scrutiny, handed off Sam's responsibilities to other people, or threatened legal action. Instead, they attempted a secret coup, which of course makes Sam look like the underdog

Obviously. They were just waiting for an excuse to fire him, and by chance they accused him of the same "errors" the had him fired before.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#540

Post by int_19h »

WalterBright wrote: post #441
int_19h wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time it does feel like the only rights that actually matter in a capitalist society are property rights of capital owners. The rest is more like "eh I suppose we could also do that if we're not too busy". You're correct that for a large and prosperous society you need some large organizations , but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs.

> but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs. I suspect you've defined a tautology by assuming that anyone running a large organization is a sociopathic megalomaniac. But let's take an example. Which do you think is better run - NASA or SpaceX?

SpaceX, naturally.

But being run better than NASA is not exactly a high bar. I would actually amend it to most US federal agencies, even. It's just that Americans, for some reason, assume that the way their government works is exemplar of governments in general. That is not true, to put it mildly - US is just particularly dysfunctional in that regard.

I should also note that my original point was not about a public/private dichotomy, but specifically about the "capitalist hero" cult of personality and the associated management style. You can have private companies that aren't run in this manner, where decisions are collegial or otherwise checked. You can even have private co-ops. And, of course, in many - indeed, most - cases you don't actually need megacorps to do things that need to be done, and a bunch of much smaller competing entities will do just fine without all the undesired political and economical effects.

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