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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

#621

Post by wordpad25 »

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…

>People keep speculating

Your take isn't uncommon, only are missing the main point of your interpretation - that the board is fully incompetent if it was truly that petty of a reason to ruin the company.

It's not even that it's not a justifiable reason, but they did it without getting legal advice or consulting with partners and didn't even wait for markets to close.

Board destroyed billions in brand and talent value for OpenAI and Microsoft in a mid day decision like that.

This is also on Sam Altman himself for building and then entertaining such an incompetent board.

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

#622

Post by austhrow743 »

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…

Straight forward disagreement over direction of the company doesn't generally lead to claiming wrongdoing on the part of the ousted. Even low level to medium wrongdoing on the part of the ousted rarely does.

So even if it's just "why did they insult Sam while kicking him out?" there is definitely a bigger, more interesting story here than standard board disagreement over direction of the company.

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

#623

Post by kmlevitt »

sangnoir wrote: post #463
insanitybit wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

HN has been radiating a lot of "We did it Reddit!" energy these past 4 days. Lots of confident conjecture based on very little. I have been guilty of it myself, but as an exercise in humility, I will come back to these threads in 6 months to see how wrong I and many others were.

I agree it's all just speculation. But the board aren't doing themselves any favors by not talking. As long as there is no specific reason for firing him given, it's only natural people are going to fill the void with their own theories. They have a problem with that, they or their attorneys need to speak up.

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

#624

Post by lordnacho »

tsimionescu wrote: post #612
arrosenberg wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think GP deals with that in his parenthesis.

It would be nice if we held organizations to their stated missions. We don't.

Perhaps there simply shouldn't be a tax break. After all if your org spends all its income on charity, it won't pay any tax anyway. If it sells cookies for more than what it costs to make and distribute them, why does it matter whether it was for a charity?

Plus, we already believe that for-profit orgs can benefit society, in fact part of the reason for creating them as legal entities is that we think there's some sort of benefit, whether it be feeding us or creating toys. So why have a special charity sector?

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

#625

Post by rightbyte »

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…

> a decision that destroyed billions of dollars worth of brand value and good will

I mean, there seem to be this cult following around Sam Altman on HN and Twitter. But do the common user care like at all?

What sane user would want a shitcoin CEO in charge of a product they depend on?

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

#626

Post by auggierose »

What? They told Ilya these two things, and he said, alright then, I volunteer to fire Sam for you?

That either makes Ilya pretty dumb (sorry, neural networks are not that complicated, it is mostly compute), or there is much much more to this story.

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

#627

Post by saiya-jin »

xinayder wrote: post #607
LMYahooTFY wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I like to read that, besides the problems others have listed, OpenAI seems like it was built on top of the work of others, who were researching AI, and suddenly took all this "free work" from the contributors and sold it for a profit where the original contributors didn't even see a single dime from their work. To me it seems like it's the usual case of a company exploiting open source and profiting off others' contr…

Or any other say pharma company using massively and constantly basic research done by universities worldwide from our tax money. And then you go to pharmacy and buy medicine that costed 50 cents to manufacture and distribute for 50 bucks.

I don't like the whole idea neither, but various communism-style alternatives just don't work very well.

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

#628

Post by arthur_sav »

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…

> Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told.

You mean to tell me that the 3-member board told Sutskever that Sama was being bad and he was like "ok, I believe you".

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

#629

Post by dr_dshiv »

austhrow743 wrote: post #622
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…

Straight forward disagreement over direction of the company doesn't generally lead to claiming wrongdoing on the part of the ousted. Even low level to medium wrongdoing on the part of the ousted rarely does. So even if it's just "why did they insult Sam while kicking him out?" there is definitely a bigger, more interesting story here than standard board disagreement over direction of the company.

From what I know, Sam supported the nonprofit structure. But let’s just say he hypothetically wanted to change the structure, e.g. to make the company a normal for-profit.

The question is, how would you get rid of the nonprofit board? It’s simply impossible. The only way I can imagine it, in retrospect, is to completely discredit them so you could take all employees with you… but no way anyone could orchestrate this, right? It’s too crazy and would require some superintelligence.

Still. The events will effectively “for-profitize” the assets of OpenAI completely — and some people definitely wanted that. Am I missing something?

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

#630

Post by lazystar »

upupupandaway wrote: post #381
lazystar wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats not very frugal; please provide a source or citation for your claim.

I am a former L7 SDM at Amazon. Just last year I had to contend with not one, but three teams doing the same thing. The faster one won with a half-baked solution that caused multiple Sev-1s. My original comment was half in jest; the actual way this works is that multiple teams discover the same issues at the same time and then compete for completing a solution first. This is usually across VPs so it’s difficult to cu…

> that caused multiple Sev-1s

...did folks run out of tables?

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