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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

#611

Post by WalterBright »

bawolff wrote: post #462
adastra22 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you merge changes between the source trees? Keep in mind this predates basically ANY kind of source control. It would have been nearly 3x the work.

3x the work may still fall under reasonable cost. If architectured properly (big if) you can split up the project appropriately so there is a common core and individual parts for specific OS. Is it extra effort? Sure. Impossible? Definitely not.

I've also successfully converted some rather large x86 assembler programs into C, so they could be ported to other platforms. It's quite doable by one person.

(Nobody else wanted the job, but I thought it was fun.)

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

#612

Post by tsimionescu »

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)

Ostensibly, all three of your examples do exist to improve society. The NFL exists to support a widely popular sport, the Heritage Foundation is there to propose changes that they theoretically believe are better for society, and Scientology is a religion that will save us all from our bad thetans or whatever cockamamie story they sell.

A non-profit has to have the intention of improving society. Whether their chosen means is (1) effective and (2) truthful are separate discussions. But an entity can actually lose non-profit status if it is found to be operated for the sole benefit of its higher ups, and is untruthful in its mission. It is typically very hard to prove though, just like it's very hard to successfully sue a for-profit CEO/president for breach of fiduciary duty.

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

#613

Post by krisoft »

mvdtnz wrote: post #430
dwaltrip wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs predict language, and language is a representation of human concepts about the world. Thus, these models are constructing, piece by piece, conceptual chains about the world. As they learn to construct better and more coherent conceptual chains, something interesting must be happening internally.

No they are not.

Your carefully constructed argument is less than convincing.

Could you at least elaborate what they are “not”? Surelly you are not having a problem with “LLMs predict language”?

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

#614

Post by Zolde »

trhway wrote: post #552
hooande wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. the article below basically says the same. Kind of reminds Friendster and the likes - striking a gold vein and just failing to scale efficient mining of that gold, i.e. the failure is at the execution/operationalization : https://w…

ChatGPT was too polished and product-ready to have been a runaway low-key research preview, like Meta's Galactica was. That is the legacy you build around it after the fact of getting 1 million users in 5 days ("it was build in my garage with a modest investment from my father").

I had heard (but now have trouble sourcing) that ChatGPT was commissioned after OpenAI learned that other big players were working on a chatbot for the public (Google, Meta, Elon, Apple?) and OpenAI wanted to get ahead of that for competitive reasons.

This was not a fluke of striking gold, but a carefully planned business move, generating SV hype, much like how Quora (basically an expertsexchange clone) got to be its hype-darling for a while, helped by powerfully networked investors.

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

#615

Post by johncampbelljr »

hluska wrote: post #580
aurareturn wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it does but my point is to prevent others from thinking that a giant money making entity like the NFL does not pay any taxes.

[flagged]

Would you not object if someone characterized google as a non-profit because part of the org (the Google foundation) is non-profit? (Not a perfect analogy (nothing ever is, really).)

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

#616

Post by rjtavares »

kevinventullo wrote: post #436
dclowd9901 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I’ve always assumed (known) there is no actual difference between high level execs and you: they just think higher of themselves.

In fact, I think the chaos we’ve seen over the last few days shows precisely the difference between competent and incompetent leadership. I think if anyone from, say, the board of directors of Coca-Cola was on the OAI board, this either wouldn’t have happened or would have played out very differently.

If Reed Hoffman was still there, I can't see this happening. People here talk about "glorified salespeople" as an insult without realizing that having people skills is a really important trait for Boards/C level people, and not everyone has them

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

#617

Post by Wronnay »

kmlevitt wrote: post #609
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…

People keep speculating sensational, justifiable reasons to fire Altman. But if these were actual factors in their decision, why doesn't the board just say so? Until they say otherwise, I am going to take them at their word that it was because he a) hired two people to do the same project, and b) gave two board members different accounts of the same employee. It's not my job nor the internet's to try to think up bett…

The Issue with these two explanations from the board is that this is normally nothing which would result into firing the CEO.

In my eyes these two explanations are simple errors which can occur to everybody and in a normal situation you would talk about these Issues and you could resolve them in 5min without firing anybody.

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

#618

Post by diffeomorphism »

cjbprime wrote: post #481
mvdtnz wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they are not.

(You're probably going to have to get better at answering objections than merely asserting your contradiction of them.)

Nah, calling out completely baseless assertions as just that is fine and a positive contribution to the discussion.

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

#619

Post by kmlevitt »

parl_match wrote: post #492
kmlevitt wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This gossip is going to continue for as long as they stay silent. Their lawyers are all screaming at them to shut up. This is going to be a highly visible and contested set of decisions that will play out in courtrooms, possibly for years.

I agree with you. But I suspect the reason they need to shut up is because their actual reason for firing him is not justifiable enough to protect them, and stating it now would just give more ammunition to plaintiffs. If they had him caught red-handed in an actual crime, or even a clear ethical violation, a good lawyer would be communicating that to the press on their behalf.

High-ranking employees that have communicated with them have already said they have admitted it wasn't due to any security, safety, privacy or financial concerns. So there aren't a lot of valid reasons left. They're not talking because they've got nothing.

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

#620

Post by ps256 »

tw1984 wrote: post #472
upupupandaway wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it absolutely fascinating that Emmett accepted this position. He can game all scenarios and there is no way that he can come out ahead on any of them. One would expect an experienced Silicon Valley CEO to make this calculus and realize it's a lost cause. The fact he accepted to me shows he's not a particularly good leader.

He made it pretty clear that he consider it as a once in a life time chance. I think he is correct, being the CEO twitch is a position known by no one in many places, e.g. how many developers/users in China even heard of Twitch? Being the CEO of OpenAI is a completely different story, it is a whole new level he can leverage in the years to come.

It seems kind of naive to think that he'll be CEO for long, or if it is for long, that there will be much company left to be a CEO of.
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