Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 754 posts

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

#651

Post by laserlight »

dragonwriter wrote: post #265
laserlight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don’t have investors OpenAI has investors [0]. [0] https://openai.com/our-structure

OpenAI (the nonprofit whose board makes decisions) has no investors. the subordinate holding company and even more subordinate OpenAI Global LLC have investors, but those investors are explicitly warned that the charitable purpose of the nonprofit and not returning profits to investors is the paramount function of the organization, over which the nonprofit has full governance control.

Thanks for clarifying.

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

#652

Post by matisseverduyn »

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.

You were approached to participate in a coup and therefore had it squashed? Or a CEO was almost removed during their vacation?

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

#653

Post by devbent »

true_religion wrote: post #575
T-A wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario usually bandied about is AGI self-improving at an accelerating rate: once you cross the threshold to self-improvement, you quickly get superintelligence with God-like powers beyond human comprehension (a.k.a. the Singularity) as AGI v1 creates a faster AGI v2 which creates a faster AGI v3 etc. Any AI researchers still plodding along at mere human speed are then doomed: they won't be able to catch up even…

What if AI self improvement is not exponential? We assume a self improving AI will lead to some runaway intelligence improvement but if it grows at 1% per year or even per month that’s something we can adapt to.

Assume the AGI has access to a credit card and it goes ahead and reserves itself every GPU cycle in existence so it's 1 month is turned into a day, and now we're back to being fucked.

Maybe an ongoing GPU shortage is the only thing that'll save us!

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

#654

Post by g42gregory »

adastra22 wrote: post #597
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.

I’ve hired people that were involved in palace coups at unicorn startups, twice. Justified or not, those coups set the company on a downward spiral it never recovered from. I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route. Startups die from suicide, not homicide.

"Startups die from suicide, not homicide." - That's a great way to put it. 100% true.

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

#655

Post by g42gregory »

_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.

What is Falun Gong exactly? I never understood what they are.

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

#656

Post by cteiosanu »

adastra22 wrote: post #641
dragonwriter wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amateurs ?

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

#657

Post by fakedang »

adastra22 wrote: post #644
fakedang wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but Sutskever and Co still have the head start. On the models, the training data, the GPT4 licenses, etc. Their Achilles heel is the compute which Microsoft will pull out. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia may sell their Open AI stakes at a discount, but I'm sure either Google or Amazon will snap it up.

All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Microsoft and Softbank, while OpenAI is the orphan child with the huge estate. Microsoft isn't exactly the kingmaker here.

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

#658

Post by gnulinux »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #185
noonething wrote: post #23

I hope they go back to being Open now that Altman is gone. It seems Ilya wants it to 'benefit all of humanity' again.

Won't a truly open model conflict with the AI executive order?

What do you mean by AI executive order?

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

#659

Post by peyton »

fakedang wrote: post #657
adastra22 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but Sutskever and Co still have the head start. On the models, the training data, the GPT4 licenses, etc. Their Achilles heel is the compute which Microsoft will pull out. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia may sell their Open AI stakes at a discount, but I'm sure either Google or Amazon will snap it up. All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Mic…

It doesn’t sound like Sutskever is running anything. OpenAI reportedly put out a memo saying they’re trying to get Sam and Greg back: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-optimistic-it...

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

#660

Post by jatins »

peter422 wrote: post #59

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…

You are missing the emotional aspect of it, a connection towards building something great _together_. In some ways it is selfish, it make you feel important.

If Susan Fowler's book is accurate, Uber under TK was riddled with toxic management and incompetent HR. Yet you will hear people on Twitter reminisce of TK era Uber as the golden period and many would love him back

Post reply on HN