541–550 of 1001 posts
Dang. I owe Mr. Altman an apology. I didn't think a startup board would be so mindexplodingly stupid and figured some toxic skeleton fell out of his closet. Well, I'm sorry. Its a lesson to not speculate in public.
It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours the board has come crawling back, I- er Sam Altman might deign to return if they grovel hard enough and I'm given complete control." This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. Sam is the darlin of tech media and h…
the point of a non-profit is that they are allowed to make investors unhappy in pursuit of the greater mission A non-profit isn’t supposed to have investors. This structure should never have been allowed in the first place (nor IKEA.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders. No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor av…
So they are trying to backtrack which makes them look pretty foolish for no apparent reason ?
I am not sure it really makes sense for the investors to continue with OpenAI. It seems like this incident proved that the constitution of the company wasn't really compatible with a profit focus. It was a split from the beginning, and obviously a questionable arrangement. It just came to a head to make it obvious. The business and investment people want to make money. Many of the researchers want to take their time…
Maybe. Or maybe they can profit differently going forward. Sam is not the reason OpenAI is gangbusters, its tech is. What I’m not hearing in any of this reporting is how Sam Altman is somehow the secret sauce. And it’s because he isn’t. This is “rules for thee but not for me”. He as a bad fit, 2/3 the board outed him, and investors are mad because they didn’t feel included. You know, like how they include employees i…
I’ve seen more compelling boards at Home Depot
It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours the board has come crawling back, I- er Sam Altman might deign to return if they grovel hard enough and I'm given complete control." This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. Sam is the darlin of tech media and h…
> This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. There’s no evidence of that, only your assumptions. Lots of comments from knowledgeable folks outside the media and who couldn’t care less about a “pressure campaign”, even if it did exist, think the board was clueless and got duped into making a huge mistake with the coup.
> There’s no evidence of that
The leaks themselves whether or not based in fact are evidence of that. The only reason for someone in a position to be taken credibly reporting the information contained in either this Verge article or the Bloomberg article with a similarly sourced but slightly different narrative, to take that information to the media, whether or not it is true, is to use public pressure to attempt to shape the direction of events.
EDIT: To be clear, its evidence of the "pressure campaign" part; to the extent that the "incestuous tech media" part has any substantive meaning, I'm not sure its evidence of that.
It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours the board has come crawling back, I- er Sam Altman might deign to return if they grovel hard enough and I'm given complete control." This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. Sam is the darlin of tech media and h…
the point of a non-profit is that they are allowed to make investors unhappy in pursuit of the greater mission A non-profit isn’t supposed to have investors. This structure should never have been allowed in the first place (nor IKEA.)
The non-profit doesn't have investors. OpenAI Global, LLC isn't the non-profit, its a for-profit over which the non-profit has complete governance control.
It now seems to me that it was inevitable that something like GPT would take off - but it didn't necessarily have to come from OpenAI. Someone else would have filled their place. The collective ML knowledge and research were rapidly evolving, computing was getting faster and cheaper. The pressure was building and at some point, something somewhere had to pop off. They were a great but not a singular team. And it look…
The reason something like GPT didn't come out of e.g. Google is that they had/have stuff similar but were very reticent about making it public -- because of the ethical aspects as well as the sheer resource cost of hosting it to the public -- and also I suspect have naturally internal conflicts about whether it's the right direction to take, etc. And so something like OpenAI came along where Ilya S etc. got bags of m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are already the dumbest board in history (even dumber than Apple’s board firing Steve Jobs). So it’s not out of keeping with anything. Besides, those 2 independent board members (who couldn’t do fizz-buzz if their lives depended on it) won’t be staying long if Sam returns— nor are they likely to ever serve on any board ever again after their shenanigans.
Some of the board member choices are baffling. Like why is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s wife on the board? Her startup has under 10 employees and has a personal email address as the contact address on the homepage.
I have seen these types of people pop up in Silicon Valley over the years. Often, it is the sibling of a movie star, but it's the same idea. They typically do not know anything about technology and also are amusingly out of touch with the culture of the tech industry. They get hired because they are related to a famous person. They do not contribute much. I think they should just stay in LA.
EDIT: I just want to add that I don't know anything about this woman in particular (I'd never heard of her before yesterday), and it's entirely possible that she is the lone exception to the generalization I'm describing above. All I can say is that when I have seen these Hollywood people turn up in SF tech circles in the past (which has been several times, actually), it's always been the same story.
It now seems to me that it was inevitable that something like GPT would take off - but it didn't necessarily have to come from OpenAI. Someone else would have filled their place. The collective ML knowledge and research were rapidly evolving, computing was getting faster and cheaper. The pressure was building and at some point, something somewhere had to pop off. They were a great but not a singular team. And it look…
The reason something like GPT didn't come out of e.g. Google is that they had/have stuff similar but were very reticent about making it public -- because of the ethical aspects as well as the sheer resource cost of hosting it to the public -- and also I suspect have naturally internal conflicts about whether it's the right direction to take, etc. And so something like OpenAI came along where Ilya S etc. got bags of m…