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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

#641

Post by adastra22 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #630
adastra22 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they invested in Sam’s new startup, under agreeable profit-focused terms this time, and all the OpenAI talent (minus Ilya) followed.

At best, that might enable them to eventually come back, once new products are built from scratch, but that takes non-zero time.

Non-zero time, but not a lot either. Main hangup would be acquiring data for training, as their engineers would remember the parameters for GPT-4 and Microsoft would provide the GPUs. But Microsoft with access to Bing and all its other services ought to be able to help here too.

Amateurs on hugging face are able to match OpenAI in impressively short time. The actual former-OpenAI engineers with unlimited budget ought to be able to do as good or better.

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

#642

Post by gmassman »

rand846633 wrote: post #612
emptysongglass wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It makes the most sense if you value your own wellbeing over whatever “mission” a company is supposedly chasing.

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

#643

Post by replwoacause »

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.

If this wasn’t a coup, what would have made it one?

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

#644

Post by adastra22 »

fakedang wrote: post #618
adastra22 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sam and Greg have already said they’re starting an OpenAI competitor, and at least 3 senior engineers have jumped ship already. More are expected tonight. Microsoft would just back them as well, then take their time playing kingmaker in choosing the winner.

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

#645

Post by brandall10 »

cdogl wrote: post #584
throwaway35i2 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you the sort of person that hires someone that can successfully organize a coup against corporate leadership? It feels like there is an impedance mismatch here.

If I'm confident in my competence and the candidate has a trustworthy and compelling narrative about how they undermined incompetent leadership to achieve a higher goal - yep, for sure.

But being in a situation where this was called for twice?

That strikes me as someone who is either lacks the ability to do proper due diligence or they're straight up sociopaths looking for weak willed people they can strong arm out. Part of the latter is having the ability to create a compelling narrative for future marks, to put it bluntly.

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

#646

Post by adastra22 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #624
SoftTalker wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good thing for PayPal that it now owns Venmo :P

PayPal went down the embrace, extend, extinguish route. If it were possible for them to do the same with bitcoin, they would have.

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

#647

Post by chris_wot »

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,…

Are you responsible for hiring though?

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

#648

Post by chris_wot »

jacquesm wrote: post #634
matisseverduyn wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This example seems to be survivorship bias. Personally, if someone approached me to suggest backstabbing someone else, I wouldn't trust that they wouldn't eventually backstab me as well. @bear141 said "People should oppose openly or leave." [1] and I agree completely. That said, don't take vacations! (when Elon Musk was ousted from PayPal in the parent example, etc.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326443

I had this exact thing happen a few weeks ago in a company that I have invested in. That didn't quite pan out in the way the would-be coup party likely intended. To put it mildly.

Dear god that sounds interesting and yet terrifying.

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

#650

Post by chris_wot »

_tik_ wrote: post #640
chaostheory wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

These are FalungGong. I will not trust Falun Gong's news on China. They are known to create conspiracy stories.

Agreed. Whilst I don’t trust China’s CCP, I sure as heck don’t trust anything from Falun Gong. Those guys are running an asymmetric battle against the Chinese State and frankly they would be capable of saying anything if it helped their cause.
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