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OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

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Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#541

Post by tyrfing »

bananapub wrote: post #361
tyrfing wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 board members (joined by Ilya Sutskever, who is publicly defecting now) found themselves in a position to take over what used to be a 9-member board, and took full control of OpenAI and the subsidiary previously worth $90 billion. Speculation is just on motivation, the facts are easy to establish.

> 3 board members (joined with Ilya Sutskever, who is publicly defecting now) found themselves in a position to take over what used to be a 9-member board, and took full control of OpenAI and the subsidiary previously worth $90 billion. er...what does that even mean? how can a board "take full control" of the thing they are the board for? they already have full control. the actual facts are that the board, by majorit…

The board had 3 positions empty, people who left this year, leaving it as a 6-member board. Both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were on the board; Ilya Sutskever's vote (which he now states he regrets) gave them the votes to remove both, and bring it down to a 4 member board controlled by 3 members that started the year as a small minority.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#542

Post by joshstrange »

If Microsoft emerges as the "winner" from all of them then I think we are all the "losers". Not that I think OpenAI was perfect or "good" just that MS taking the cake is not good for the rest of us. It already feels crazy that people are just fine with them owning what they do and how important it is to our development ecosystem (talking about things like GitHub/VSCode), I don't like the idea of them also owning the biggest AI initiative.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#544

Post by zer00eyz »

jacquesm wrote: post #341
boh wrote: post #312

There can exist an inherent delusion within elements of a company, that if left unchallenged, can persist. An agreement for instance, can seem airtight because it's never challenged, but falls apart in court. The OpenAI fallacy was that non-profit principals were guiding the success of the firm, and when the board decided to test that theory, it broke the whole delusion. Had it not fully challenged Altman, the board…

Yes, indeed and that's the real loss here: any chance of governing this properly got blown up by incompetence.

> any chance of governing this properly got blown up by incompetence

No one knows why the board did this. No one is talking about that part. Yet every one is on twitter talking shit about the situation.

I have worked with a lot of PhD's and some of them can be, "disconnected" from anything that isn't their research.

This looks a lot like that, disconnected from what average people would do, almost childlike (not ish, like).

Maybe this isn't the group of people who should be responsible for "alignment".

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#545

Post by brigadier132 »

autaut wrote: post #405

Years from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the profits of very few ppl. The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.

Amazing how you don't see this as a complete win for workers because the workers chose profit over non-profit. This is the ultimate collective bargaining win. Labor chose Microsoft over the bullshit unaccountable ethics major and the movie star's girlfriend.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#547

Post by airstrike »

gtirloni wrote: post #522
airstrike wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think everyone is a "loser" in the current situation. On the margin, I think the only real possible win here is for a competitor to poach some of the OpenAI talent that may be somewhat reluctant to join Microsoft. Even if Sam'sAI operates with "full freedom" as a subsidiary, I think, given a choice, some of the talent would prefer to join some alternative tech megacorp. I don't know that Google is as attractive a…

This is pure speculation but I've said in another comment that Anthropic shouldn't be feeling safe. They could face similar challenges coming from Amazon.

If they get 20% of key OpenAI employees and then get acquired by Amazon, I don't think that's necessarily a bad scenario for them given the current lay of the land

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#548

Post by Terretta »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #221
falleng0d wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he even posted a apology: https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20 what the actual fuck =O

I'm going to take a leap of intuition and say all roads lead back Adam d'Angelo for the coup attempt.

> all roads lead back Adam d'Angelo

Maybe someone thinks Sam was “not consistently candid” about mentioning one of the feature bullets in latest release was dropping d'Angelo's Poe directly into the ChatGPT app for no additional charge.

Given dev day timing and the update releasing these "GPTs" this is an entirely plausible timeline.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/poes-ai-chatbot-app-now-le...

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#549

Post by himaraya »

breadwinner wrote: post #51

If they join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft they will not need to start from scratch because Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT. Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits. So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts. [1]…

This is wrong. Microsoft has no such rights and its license comes with restrictions, per the cited primary source, meaning a fork would require a very careful approach.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-awkw...

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#550

Post by ergocoder »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #266
abraxas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I seriously doubt this will work out for him. He has to be the smartest stupid person that the world has seen.

He seriously underestimated how much rank and file employees want $$$ over an idealistic vision (and sam altman is $$$) but if he backs down now, he will pretty much lose all credibility as a decision maker for the company.

If your compensation goes from 600k to 200k, you would care as well.

No idealistic vision can compensate for that.

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