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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

#541

Post by LMYahooTFY »

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…

Well, the appointment of a CEO who believes AGI is a threat to the universe is potentially one point in favor of AI safety philosophical differences.

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

#542

Post by calf »

mvdtnz wrote: post #429
ssnistfajen wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the text completion algorithm is sufficiently advanced enough then we wouldn't be able to tell it's not AGI, especially if it has access to state-of-the-art research and can modify its own code/weights. I don't think we are there yet but it's plausible to an extent.

No. This is modern day mysticism. You're just waving your hands and making fuzzy claims about "but what if it was an even better algorithm".

You're correct about their error; however, Hinton views that a sufficiently scaled up autocompletion would be forced, in a loose mathematical sense, to understand things logically and analytically, because the only way approach 0 error rate on the output is to actually learn the problem and not imitate the answer. It's an interesting issue and there are different views on this.

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

#543

Post by 23B1 »

lolinder wrote: post #518
23B1 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.

Right, but my understanding is that the nonprofit structure eliminates most (if not all) possible shareholder suits.

No corporate structure – except for maybe incorporating in the DPRK – can eliminate lawsuits.

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

#544

Post by tasuki »

aravindgp wrote: post #331
jacquesm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately no conflict of interest there. Ignore the guy behind the curtain.

In the case of a board member of OpenAI running a separate chatbot company, it would be important to consider these factors. The specifics of the situation, including the nature of both companies, the level of competition between them, and the actions taken by the board member and OpenAI to manage potential conflicts, would all play a role in determining if there is a conflict of interest. Definitely conflict of inte…

jacquesm was being sarcastic

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

#545

Post by vorticalbox »

aiman3 wrote: post #366
rossdavidh wrote: post #300

So, none of this sounds like it could be the real reason Altman was fired. This leaves people saying it was a "coup", which still doesn't really answer the question. Why did Altman get fired, really? Obviously, it's for a reason they can't say. Which means, there is something bad going on at the company, like perhaps they are short of cash or something, that was dire enough to convince them to fire the CEO, but which…

i do believe what they said about Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.", based on my understanding, altman did proved his dishonest behavior from he did to openai, turned non-profit into for-profit and open source model to closed-source one. and even worst, people seems totally accepted this type of personality, the danger is not the AI itself, is the AI will be built by AltmanS!

OpenAI, Inc. Is non profit but it's subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC. Is for profit.

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

#546

Post by Simon_ORourke »

There's a singular obvious reason for Sam Altman's sacking by his board - plain old jealousy of the kind that had been gnawing away for months. There's more than likely a few sociopathic types inhabiting that (if not most) boards, and they just couldn't stand to see the limelight directed at Sam and not them. Any old excuse then to oust him was used to try and 1) get back at him, 2) do something to massage their poor damaged egos.

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

#547

Post by jelling »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #525
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…

>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. What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? What type of politicking and decepti…

> What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something?

Yes. Yes and more yes.

That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. Because they are supposed to be improving society, not profiting from it.

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

#548

Post by PeterStuer »

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…

What is interesting is the total absence of 3 letter agency mentions from all of the talk and speculation about this.

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

#549

Post by robocat »

cjbprime wrote: post #471
mvdtnz wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely wild to me that people are drawing a straight line between a text completion algorithm and AGI. The term "AI" has truly lost all meaning.

It's not wild. "Predict the next word" does not imply a bar on intelligence; a more intelligent prediction that incorporates more detail from the descriptions of the world that were in the training data will be a better prediction. People are drawing a straight line because the main advance to get to GPT-4 was throwing more compute at "predict the next word", and they conclude that adding another order of magnitude o…

> Predict the next word

Are there any papers testing how good humans are at predicting the next word?

I presume us humans fail badly:

1. as the variance in input gets higher?

2. Poor at regurgitating common texts (e.g. I couldn't complete a known poem).

3. When context starts to get more specific (majority of people couldn't complete JSON)?

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

#550

Post by robertlagrant »

adrianN wrote: post #538
cdogl wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Probably. Or at least that turned out to not matter so much. The alternative, keeping both control of resources and direct power in the state, seems to keep causing millions of deaths. Separating them into markets for resources and power for a more limited state seems to work much better.

This idea also ignores innovation. New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.

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