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Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

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Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#611

Post by [deleted] »

torstenvl wrote: post #500
crazygringo wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring the rest of the definition I provided. I did not say it was "any takeover of power". Please read the definition I gave in full. And I am not referring to the CEO status of Altman at all. That's not the coup part. What I'm referring to is the fact that beyond his firing as CEO, he and the chairman were removed from their board seats, as a surprise planned and executed in secret . That's the coup. This…

> You're ignoring the rest of the definition I provided. That isn't how definitions work. Removals from power that are by surprise and planned in secret are a strict subset of removals from power.

[deleted]

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#612

Post by rand846633 »

emptysongglass wrote: post #517
HAL3000 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has orchestrated two coups in different organizations, where the leadership did not align with the organization's interests and missions, I can assure you that the final stage of such a coup is not something that can be executed after just an hour of preparation or thought. It requires months of planning. The trigger is only pulled when there is sufficient evidence or justification for such action. Bui…

How are you still hireable? If I knew you orchestrated two coups at previous companies and I was responsible for hiring, you would be radioactive to me. Especially knowing that all that effort went into putting together a successful coup over other work. Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder,…

> If you're not happy with the way a company is doing business, your best action is to walk away.

This makes no sense at all!

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#613

Post by chaostheory »

user_named wrote: post #577
chaostheory wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going off on a big tangent, but Jiang Zemin had made several failed assassination attempts on Xi Jinping, but he was still able to die of old age.

Never heard about this before. Sources?

Google is just really terrible these days.

http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/xi-jinpings-fi...

http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/the-impossib...

I will try to find better sources. There are more not so great articles in my other comment

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#614

Post by chaostheory »

ls612 wrote: post #478
chaostheory wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going off on a big tangent, but Jiang Zemin had made several failed assassination attempts on Xi Jinping, but he was still able to die of old age.

By assassination I assume you mean metaphorical? As in to derail his rise before becoming party leader?

No, literal attempts.

One attempt involved a battleship “accidentally” firing onto another battleship where both Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping were visiting.

https://jamestown.org/program/president-xi-suspects-politica...

Biased source, but she’s able to get a lot of unreported news from the mainland.

https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2021/9/20/deleted-repo...

I will try to find more sources but Google is just shit these days. See my other comment for more.

A big problem is that mainland China is like the hermit kingdom. It’s a black hole for any news the CCP doesn’t want to get out

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#615

Post by bmitc »

dagmx wrote: post #603
bmitc wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A producer, yes, but not the film's director.

Out of genuine curiosity , and I mean no disrespect , have you worked in film production? Because directors sit in many meetings directing the people on the project. It kind of feels to me like you’re describing the way the industry works from an outsiders view since it doesn’t match the actual workings of any of the productions I’ve worked on. the shoots are only a portion of production. You have significant pre pro…

I suppose that I had and have in mind a certain type of feature film director (usually the good ones) that are involved in all things: pre- and post-production, writing the script, directing, the editing process, etc.

Your original comment mentioned auteurs, which is what influenced the type of film director I was thinking of, which often are also producers and even writers and editors on their own films. To my knowledge, I am not aware of any famous CEOs that fit the style and breadth of these directors, as the CEO is almost never actually doing anything nor even knowledgeable in the things they're tasking others to do.

So to summarize, I feel there are auteur directors but not CEOs, despite many thinking there are auteur CEOs. If there are, they are certainly none of the famous ones and are likely running smaller companies. I generally think of CEOs as completely replaceable, and usually the only reason one stands out is that they don't run the business into the ground or have a cult of personality surrounding them. If you take away an auteur director from their project, it will never materialize into anything remotely close to what was to be.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#616

Post by SoftTalker »

adastra22 wrote: post #593
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Max Levchin was an organizer of two coups while at PayPal. Both times, he believed it was necessary for the success of the company. Whether that was correct or not, they eventually succeeded and I don’t think the coups really hurt his later career.

PayPal had an exit, but it absolutely did not succeed in the financial revolution it was attempting. People forget now that OG PayPal was attempting the digital financial revolution that later would be bitcoin’s raison d'être.

Yep. PayPal was originally a lot like venmo (conceptually -- of course we didn't have phone apps then). It was a way for people to send each other money online.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#617

Post by goldinfra »

glitchc wrote: post #587
goldinfra wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders. Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He d…

> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.

If you want to get really basic: there's no OpenAI at all without Sam Altman, which means there's no ChatGPT either.

There are much larger armies of highly qualified scientists and engineers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies and none of them created ChatGPT. They wrote papers and did experiments but created nothing even remotely as useful.

And they still haven't been able to even fully clone it with years of effort, unlimited budgets, and the advantage of knowing exactly what they're trying to build. It should really give you pause to consider why it happened at OpenAI and not elsewhere. Your understanding of the dynamics of organizations may need a major rethink.

The answer is that the CEO of OpenAI created the incentives, hiring, funding, vision, support, and direction that made ChatGPT happen. Because leadership makes all the difference in the world.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#618

Post by fakedang »

adastra22 wrote: post #600
GCA10 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only appropriate target for Microsoft's anger would be its own deal negotiators. OpenAI's dual identity as a nonprofit/for-profit business was very well known. And the concentration of power in the nonprofit side was also very well known. From the media coverage of Microsoft's investments, it sounds as if MSFT prioritized getting lots of business for its Azure cloud service -- and didn't prioritize getting a boar…

Sure, but Microsoft could also walk away today and leave OpenAI high and dry. They hold ALL the power here.

If Open AI were to be in true crisis, I'm sure Amazon will step in to invest, for exclusive access to GPT4 (in spite of their Anthropic investment). That would put Azure in a bad place. So not exactly "All" the power.

Not to mention, after that, MSFT might be left bagholding onto a bunch of unused compute.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#619

Post by blast »

>A month ago, Sutskever’s responsibilities at the company were reduced, reflecting friction between him and Altman and Brockman. Sutskever later appealed to the board

Does anybody know how his responsibilities or what led to that? Seems pretty relevant.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#620

Post by pdonis »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #254
38321003thrw wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a political economy as well as a technical aspect to this that present inherent issues. Even if we can address the former by say regime change, the latter issue remains: the domain is technical and cognitively demanding. Thus the practitioners will generally sound sane and rational (they are smart people but that is no guarantee of anything other than technical abilities) and non-technical policy types (like…

In the end my concern comes down to that those who rise to power in our society are those who are best at playing the capitalist game. That's mostly, I guess, fine if what they're doing is being most efficient making cars or phones or grocery store chains or whatever. Making intelligent machines? Colour me disturbed. Let me ask you this re: "the domain is technical and cognitively demanding" -- do you think Sam Altma…

> What we need is accountability and legitimacy and the only way we've found to produce on a mass society level is through democratic institutions.

The problem is that our democratic institutions are not doing a good job of producing accountability and legitimacy. Our politics and government bureaucracies are just as corrupted as our private corporations. Sure, in theory we can vote the politicians out of power, but in practice that never happens: Congress has incumbent reelection rates in the 90s.

The unfortunate truth is that nobody is really qualified to be making governance-of-humanity decisions. The real problem is that we have centralized power so much in governments and megacorporations that the few elites at the top end up making decisions that impact everyone even though they aren't qualified to do it. Historically, the only fix for that has been to decentralize power: to give no one the power to make decisions that impact large numbers of people.

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