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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

#641

Post by qwytw »

wordpad25 wrote: post #621
kmlevitt wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> that the board is fully incompetent if it was truly that petty of a reason to ruin the company

It's perfectly obvious that these weren't the actual reasons. However yes, they are still incompetent because they couldn't think of a better justification (amongst other reasons which led to this debacle).

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

#642

Post by noirscape »

adrianN wrote: post #538
cdogl wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This prediction predated any of the technology to create even a rudimentary LLM and could be said of more-or-less any transforma…

Was Marx wrong?

For his prediction of society? Yes.

Not even talking about the various tin-pot dictators paying nominal lip service to him, but Marx predicted that the working class would rise up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their mistreatment during the industrial revolution in well, a revolution and that would somehow create a classless society. (I'll note that Marx pretty much didn't state how to go from "revolution" to "classless society", so that's why you have so many communist dictators; that between step can be turned into a dictatorship to as long as they claim that the final bit of a classless society is a permanent WIP, which all of them did.)

Now unless you want to argue we're still in the industrial revolution, it's pretty clear that Marx was inaccurate in his prediction given... that didn't happen. Social democracy instead became a more prevailing stream of thought (in no small part because few people are willing to risk their lives for a revolution) and is what led to things like reasonable minimum wages, sick days, healthcare, elderly care, and so on and so forth being made accessible to everyone.

The quality of which varies greatly by the country (and you could probably consider the popularity of Marxist revolutionary thought today in a country as directly correlated to the state of workers rights in that country; people in stable situations will rarely pursue ideologies that include revolutions), but practically speaking - yeah Marx was inaccurate on the idea of a revolution across the world happening.

The lens through which Marx examined history is however just that - a lens to view it through. It'll work well in some cases, less so in others. Looking at it by class is a useful way to understand it, but it won't cover things being motivated for reasons outside of class.

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

#643

Post by kmlevitt »

wordpad25 wrote: post #621
kmlevitt wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

No, I totally agree. In fact what annoys me about all the speculation is that it seems like people are creating fanfiction to make the board seem much more competent than all available evidence suggests they actually are.

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

#644

Post by jurgenaut23 »

I think that the non-profit status of OpenAI was ultimately its demise as well: as the stakes get higher, people just cannot help themselves but to get (too) interested in more than just the original mission.

Being a non-profit doesn't mean that you cannot commercialise what you build, even at a hefty price. You just need to then re-invest everything into R&D and/or anything that advance your purpose (for which you're in principle exempted of taxes). _OF COURSE_, you are not supposed to divert a single dollar to someone that might look like a shareholder. OpenAI is (was?) a non-profit that payed some of their engineers north of a million dollars. I would argue that, at this point, you have vested interests in the success of the company beyond its original purpose. Not mentioning the fact that Microsoft poured billions into the company for purely interested reasons as well.

I can only imagine the massive tensions that arose in board's discussions around these topics. Especially if you project yourself a few years into the future, with the IRS knocking at the door to ask questions about these topics.

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

#645

Post by trhway »

Zolde wrote: post #614
trhway wrote: post #552

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. 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 cha…

>This was not a fluke of striking gold, but a carefully planned business move

Then that execution and operationalization failure is even more profound.

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

#646

Post by qwytw »

aiman3 wrote: post #366
rossdavidh wrote: post #300

So, none of this sounds like it could be the real reason Altman was fired. This leaves people saying it was a "coup", which still doesn't really answer the question. Why did Altman get fired, really? Obviously, it's for a reason they can't say. Which means, there is something bad going on at the company, like perhaps they are short of cash or something, that was dire enough to convince them to fire the CEO, but which…

i do believe what they said about Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.", based on my understanding, altman did proved his dishonest behavior from he did to openai, turned non-profit into for-profit and open source model to closed-source one. and even worst, people seems totally accepted this type of personality, the danger is not the AI itself, is the AI will be built by AltmanS!

> dishonest behavior from he did to openai, turned non-profit into for-profit and

Yes and it's perfectly obvious that he did this without the consent of the board and behind their backs. A bit absurd don't you think? How would that even work?

> will be built by AltmanS

Why are you so certain most other people on the OpenAI board or their upper management are that different? Or hold very different views?

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

#647

Post by sgt101 »

todd3834 wrote: post #576
shafyy wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT has already had a tremendous positive impact on society. Citation needed

Fair enough, I should have said, it’s my opinion that it has had a positive impact. I still think it’s easy to see them as a non profit. Even with everything they announced at AI day. Can anyone make an argument against it? Or just downvote because you don’t agree.

I think ChatGPT has created some harms:

- It's been used unethically for psychological and medical purposes (with insufficient testing and insufficient consent, and possible psychological and physical harms).

- It has been used to distort educational attainment and undermine the current basis of some credentials as a result.

- It has been used to create synthetic content that has been released unmarked into the internet distorting and biasing future models trained on that content.

- It has been used to support criminal activity (scams).

- It has been used to create propaganda & fake news.

- It has devalued and replaced the work of people who relied on that work for their incomes.

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

#648

Post by kmlevitt »

onimishra wrote: post #593
kmlevitt wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing Sam as a way of sticking up for Ilya would make more sense if Ilya wasn’t currently in support of Sam getting his job back.

I’m not sure Ilya was anticipating this to more or less break OpenAI as a company. Ilya is all about the work they do, and might not have anticipated that this would turn the entire company against him and the rest of the board. And so, he is in support of Sam coming back, if that means that they can get back to the work at hand.

Perhaps. But if the board is really so responsive to Ilya's concerns, why have they not reversed the decision so that Ilya can get his wish?

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

#649

Post by zkr »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #638

> only a handful of the company's employees attended, according to a person familiar with the company and the events of Sunday. The rest of the staff effectively staged a walk-out. This paragraph is quite funny to me. It was a Sunday, maybe they were neither in attendance, nor staging a walk-out, maybe they were on their weekend? Realistically with the shake-up this gigantic, likely no OpenAI employees were _just_ en…

That clearly wasn't written by an European.

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

#650

Post by jimmySixDOF »

Sunhold wrote: post #554
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…

I would rather OpenAI have a diverse base of income from commercialization of its products than depend on "donations" from a couple ultrarich individuals or corporations. GPT-4 cost $100 million+ to train. That money needs to come from somewhere.

Then there is the Inference cost said to be as high as $0.30 per question asked based on compute cost infrastructure.
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