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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

#581

Post by rtpg »

hooande wrote: post #530
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…

Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. They voted on it and one side won. There isn't a bigger, more interesting story here. This is in fact a very common story that plays out at many software companies. The board of openai ended up making a decision that destroyed billi…

The "lying" line in the original announcement feels like where the good gossip is. The general idea of "Altman was signing a bunch of business deals without board approval, was told to stop by the board, he said he would, then proceeded to not stop and continue the behavior"... that feels like the juicy bit (if that is in fact what was happening, I know nothing).

This is all court intrigue of course, but why else are we in the comments section of an article talking about the internals of this thing? We love the drama, don't we.

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

#582

Post by kaoD »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #446
nemo44x wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t hold Sam bringing him over in too high a regard. Fucking each other over is a sport in Silicon Valley. You’re subservient exactly until the moment you sense an opportunity to dominate. It’s just business.

Why did Altman bring him onboard in the first place? What value does he provide? If there is a conflict of interest why didn’t Altman see it? If this Quora guy is the cause of all this, Altman only has himself to blame since he is the reason the Quora guy is on the board.

That Quora guy was CTO and VPEng of Facebook so plenty of connections I guess.

Also Quora seems like a good source of question-and-answer data which has probably been key in gpt-instruct training.

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

#583

Post by 0xDEADFED5 »

curiousgal wrote: post #575
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…

> 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 is absolutely peak irony! US pouring trillions into its army and close to nothing into its society (infrastructure, healthcare, education...) : crickets Some cou…

it's okay to give an example of something bad without being required to list all the other things in the universe that are also bad.

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

#584

Post by aylmao »

robertlagrant wrote: post #550
adrianN wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> New rich people come along and some rich people get poor

This is an overly simplistic look, and disregards a lot of history where, unsurprisingly, the reason there was wealth redistribution wasn't "innovation" but government policy

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

#585

Post by Emma_Goldman »

kmlevitt wrote: post #370
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.

Right now I think that’s the most plausible explanation simply because none of the other explanations that have been floating around make any sense when you consider all the facts. We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up. And if it’s wrong, D’Angelo and the rest of the board could help themselves out by explaining the real reason in…

> "We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up."

Why do you think that? It still strikes me as the most plausible explanation.

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

#586

Post by rtpg »

adastra22 wrote: post #342
insanitybit wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems extremely short sighted for the rest of the board to go along with that.

Well obviously that wouldn't be the explanation given to other board members. But it would be the reason he instigated this after dev day, and the reason he won't back down (OpenAI imploding? All the better).

But you would need to convince the rest of the board with _something_, right? Like to not only fire this guy, but to do it very publicly, quickly, with the declaration of lying in the announcement.

There are 3 other people on the board, right? Maybe they're all buddies of some big masterminding, but I dunno..

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

#587

Post by gardenhedge »

arrosenberg wrote: post #556
jelling wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. That's your belief . The NFL, Heritage Foundation and Scientology are all non-profits and none of them improve society; they all profit from it. (For what its' worth, I wish the law was more aligned with your worldview)

An argument could be made that sports - and a sports organization - helps society

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

#588

Post by fastball »

dwd wrote: post #539
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…

I don't understand how you only need 4 people for quorum on a 6-person board.

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

#589

Post by saagarjha »

VectorLock wrote: post #571
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…

It feels like Altman started the whole non-profit thing so he could attract top researchers with altruistic sentiment for sub-FANAAG wages. So the whole "Altman wasn't candid" thing seems to track.

Ok, but the wages were excellent (assuming that the equity panned out, which it seemed very likely it would until last week).

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

#590

Post by cdogl »

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?

> Was Marx wrong?

pt. 1: Whether he was right or wrong was pertinent. You can find plenty of eminent contemporaries of Marx who claimed the opposite. My point was that this is an argument made about technological change throughout history which has become a cliché, and in my opinion it remains a cliche regardless of how eminent (in a narrow field) the person making that claim is. Part of GP was from authority, and I question whether it is even a relevant authority given the scope of the claims.

> Was Marx Wrong?

pt. 2: I was once a Marxist and still consider much Marxist thought and writing to be valuable, but yes: he was wrong about a great many things. He made specific predictions about the _inevitable_ development of global capital that have not played out. Over a century later, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few has not changed, but the quality of life of the average person on the planet has increased immensely - in a world where capitalism is hegemonic.

He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class. As it turns out, the working class in many countries tend to be either centre right or centre left, like most people, with the proportion varying over time.

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