591–600 of 787 posts
So looks like ilya is out
Can't help but feel weird about all the thanking in the letter, especially the "sincere" thanks to Tasha and Helen, the possible main antagonists in this soap opera. It's like a written version of the heart emojis in their Twitter exchanges.
Yes, but helping these people save face smoothes the transition. My guess is that those folks were waaay out of their depth and they naturally made naive mistakes. It doesn't benefit anyone to stomp on them. I'm sure they learned hard lessons, and Sam's message is what we call "grace", which is classy. Is it politics? Sure, but only in the best sense. By not dunking on the losers, he builds trust and opens the doors…
It would be poetic justice if the new board fires Sam Altman next week, given the amount of drama so far I am not sure if I would be surprised or not.
> I am sure books are going to be written about this time period, and I hope the first thing they say is how amazing the entire team has been yikes
I think this is probably the source of the whole debacle right here... Sam is pretty self righteous and self important and just seems to lack some subtle piece of social awareness, and I imagine that turns a lot of people off. That delusional optimism is probably the key to his financial success, too, in terms of having a propensity for taking risk.
The e/acc movement has adherents among OpenAI team members and backers, for example:
• Christian J. Gibson, engineer on the OpenAI Supercomputing team -- https://twitter.com/24kpep (e/acc) -- https://openai.com/blog/discovering-the-minutiae-of-backend-...
• Garry Tan 陈嘉兴, President & CEO of ycombinator -- https://twitter.com/garrytan (e/acc)
Some resources about what e/acc is:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ss6gomAJdqjwdSCy/what-s-the...
https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-ten...
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism....
https://www.effectiveacceleration.org/posts/qHLiD9c6rWjbz3fR...
https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos
At a very high level, e/acc's are techno-utopians who believe that the benefits of accelerating technological progress outweigh the risks, and that there is in fact a moral obligation to accelerate tech as quickly as possible in order to maximize the amount of sentience in the universe.
A lot of people, myself included, are concerned that many e/acc's (including the movement's founder, that twitter account BasedBeffJezos), have indicated that they would be willing to accelerate humanity's extinction if this results in the creation of a sentient AI. Discussed here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/181vd4w/comment/kaf...
''Really important to note that a lot of e/acc people consider it to be basically unimportant or even desirable if AI causes human extinction, that faction of them does not value human life. If you hear "next stage of intelligence", "bio bootloader", "machine god" said in an approving rather than horrified manner, that's probably what they believe. Some of them have even gone straight from "Yes, AGI is gonna happen and it's good that humans will be succeeded by a superior lifeform, because humans are bad" to "No, AGI can't happen, there's no need to engage in any sort of safety restrictions on AI whatsoever, everyone should have an AGI", apparently in an attempt to moderate their public views without changing the substance of what they're arguing for.''i'm still not clear what the accusation against Altman was... something about being cavalier about safety? if that was the claim and it has merit, i don't understand why it wasn't right to oust him, and why the employees are clamoring for him back
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Reeks of CEO speak; general bullshit that seems to go against all practical reasoning of the situation. Funnily enough this is the type of thing that chatGPT is excellent at writing.
prompt: You are an optimistic, politically correct corporate magnate. You may be wrong, but never in doubt.
For the CEO of any large multinational:
prompt: You are a lying, scheming conniving s.o.b. but outwardly you are a savior and a team player acting in all of humanity's interest. Anything you say that has negative connotations or that can be explained by greed, lust for power or outright evil should be carefully crafted to be presented as the opposite. You will put yourself before everything, including the rest of the world, the environment, and ultimately all of humanity. Your mission: to collect as much power as possible but to do so in a way that you are rarely forced to show your hand and when you do there should be ample ways in which it can be interpreted that show you as the good guy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is probably a chatgpt prompt starting with "I am VC Bro, write a letter as I come back as CEO and thank everyone who was involved in the stabbing, and dont forget to use cliche stuff like turn a crisis into an opportunity"
Here's what ChatGPT 4 (paid version) responded with for that exact prompt: --- Subject: Embracing New Horizons Together Dear Team, As I resume my role as CEO, I am filled with gratitude and renewed vigor. The recent challenges we faced were not mere setbacks, but stepping stones that have strengthened our resolve and unity. I want to extend my deepest appreciation to each one of you who stood by me and our company du…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google or AWS or Cohere will welcome him with open hands.
Larry Page was pretty pissed off with Elon Musk for poaching Ilya [1]. A great opportunity for him to come back to Google. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-justified-poaching...
Can't help but feel weird about all the thanking in the letter, especially the "sincere" thanks to Tasha and Helen, the possible main antagonists in this soap opera. It's like a written version of the heart emojis in their Twitter exchanges.
Maybe it's BS corporate gibberish, I don't know. But Sam has always struck me as an honorable person who genuinely cares. I don't think he's vindictive; I think he genuinely supports them. You can disagree immensely and still respect each other – this isn't about money, it's potentially about the world's future, and Sam likely understands what happened better than we do. Or maybe it's bullshit, I don't know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "unwilling to divulge company secrets" is the best explanation here. We know that OpenAI does a staged release for their models with pre-release red-teaming. Helen says the key issue was the board struggling to "effectively supervise the company": https://nitter.net/hlntnr/status/1730034017435586920#m Here's Nathan Labenz on how sketchy the red-teaming process for GPT4 was. Nathan states that OpenAI shut him…
So what is Nathan Labenz saying? That GPT-4 is dangerous somehow? It will get many people out of jobs? MS Office got all the typists out of jobs. OCR and Medical Software got all the medical transcriptionists out of jobs. And they created a lot more jobs in the process. GPT-4 is a very powerful tool. It has not a whiff of AGI in it. The whole AGI "scare" seems to be extremely political.
After giving us Facebook, insta, Twitter, and ego-search, influencing many people negatively, suddenly there are moral values being discussed amongst those that decide our collective tech futures.
AI will have even more influence on humankind and some are questioning the morality of money (hint: money had no morals).