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

Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 711 posts

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#691

Post by lannisterstark »

aidaman wrote: post #156
lannisterstark wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doomerism when it comes to technology has always been such a weird mindset to me. "oh no, they're gonna take the horses/horse buggies/telegram/landlines away!" "Goddamn, how dare they invent the bigger cannons!?" - Romans, 1453, in Constantinople probably. (One incident where I can use my exempt powers).

Most of the time the technology is not building an artificial intelligent computer that is capable of superhuman reasoning. Have you used gpt4? it's reasoning capabilities match human ability. The more you think about it, the more scary the reality becomes. GPT 4 can reason through any mental exercise as well as a human. The rest of the work to make it autonomous is simple in comparison.

>Have you used gpt4? it's reasoning capabilities match human ability.

I use it every day, and I have to often guide it like a 5 year old to come to the conclusion to help me the way I want it to.

>GPT 4 can reason through any mental exercise as well as a human.

So can my alcoholic neighbor. That should not be a benchmark of anything.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#692

Post by andrewstuart »

andrewstuart wrote: post #284
chasd00 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who fires the board at a 501.3c?

I absolutely guarantee you when Microsoft owns 50% that they paid $50,000,000,000 for, that Microsoft is really in charge. The board and Ilya will all be gone within a month.

To all the commenters in this thread, here we are a few days later.....

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-19/openai-ne...

OpenAI Negotiations to Reinstate Altman Hit Snag Over Board Role

    OpenAI’s leaders want board removed, but directors resisting
    Microsoft’s Nadella leading high-stakes talks on Altman return
Sam Altman

Photographer: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images Have a confidential tip for our reporters? Get in Touch Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal LEARN MORE By Emily Chang, Edward Ludlow, Rachel Metz, and Dina Bass November 20, 2023 at 7:17 AM GMT+11 Updated on November 20, 2023 at 7:47 AM GMT+11

A group of OpenAI executives and investors racing to get Sam Altman reinstated to his role as chief executive officer have reached an impasse over the makeup and role of the board, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The decision to restore Altman’s role as CEO could come quickly, though talks are fluid and still ongoing.

At midday Sunday, Altman and former President Greg Brockman were in the startup’s headquarters, according to people familiar with the matter.

OpenAI leaders pushing for the board to resign and to reinstate Altman include Interim CEO Mira Murati, Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. foundering_tout

Altman, who was fired Friday, is open to returning but wants to see governance changes — including the removal of existing board members, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private. After facing intense pressure following their decision to fire Altman Friday, the board agreed in principle to step down, but have so far refused to officially do so. The directors have been vetting candidates for new directors.

At the center of the high-stakes negotiations between the executives, investors and the board is Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella has been leading the charge on talks between the different factions, some of the people said. Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest investor, with $13 billion invested in the company.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#693

Post by urbandw311er »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #385
urbandw311er wrote: post #158

Just seen their departure tweets (link below) What’s with this annoying trend of omitting capital letters from comms? https://x.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559?s=20

>comms Ironically some of us haven't gotten used to this yet either. But it does look very weird. the full stop at the end of a capitalless sentence followed by an ellipsis is what sticks out to me, seems very tryhard.

Apologies! Irony not lost.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#694

Post by datameta »

chucke1992 wrote: post #687
datameta wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience I have encountered two 10x engineers: 1) Moves fast, flexes their authority to sweep small stuff under the rug until it is out of scope and can be "fixed real quick" later. Often leverages many subject matter experts through effective and persistent communication and learns quick enough to get PRs through the door (that sometimes need "quick" fixes later). Enjoys selecting items that benefit their ca…

Sorry, but what is SMI?

I just engaged in the kind of acronym abuse I don't enjoy receiving! It stands for Subject Matter Expert.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#695

Post by fuzztester »

collingreen wrote: post #678
angoragoats wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems less of a lift I’ve seen this expression a lot recently and it baffles me. The word you are looking for is “effort,” or if you prefer adjectives, maybe something like “difficult.”

Idioms exist and probably always will. I personally think they add a pleasant amount of variety and depth to communication, and sometimes even add deep nuance/context (even if I don't like every set of jargon or slang). Even your "looking for" is a metaphor since you technically can't "look" for words (except as a metaphor for literally reading in a dictionary?) but we all know exactly what you mean. Moreover, if we…

yeah!

and also:

let's all jump on a call, set kras so we stay on the ball, up our team work to get that perk, get our messaging right, so the kpi chart goes up and to the right.

go team! play ball!

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#696

Post by fuzztester »

jimmydddd wrote: post #653
angoragoats wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m aware, but this phrase seems to be more meaningless corporate-speak than regional dialect or variation. The only purpose of phrases like this is to make the speaker sound smart at the cost of obfuscating what they mean.

Obfuscating? What's the purpose of using this fancy word? Why not just say "make hard to understand?"

Obfuscating is an easy word to understand. Only 11 letters. You, sir, are phantasmagorical. (16)

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#697

Post by dang »

benkarst wrote: post #467
nickisnoble wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure is a color, pretty common.

Oh, ok. Thanks for the education sir. I'm sure it's referring the color and not the second biggest cloud computing platform grossing over 50 billion per year.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#698

Post by vineyardmike »

nirav72 wrote: post #343
vineyardmike wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had internal efforts, and Anthropic already. They definitely don’t have the compute to spare to split with another organization. Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants. Oracle and AWS are really the only cloud left, and oracle is already renting to Microsoft for GPU compute.

>Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants. Apple has a lot of cash to throw at it. Question would be if Apple is even interested in it.

The problem is that a significant amount of the already-made GPUs are in use. Even if they can afford to throw money at it, where is that money going to go?

The best they can do is out-bid their competitors, for the competitors hardware. I'm sure apple doesn't want to pay Google for GCP resource to train an AI. Again, there may not be enough companies renting out GPUs at all.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#699

Post by seanmcdirmid »

voisin wrote: post #546
toomuchtodo wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could Microsoft not hire Sam (reporting directly to Satya) and those who departed and equip them with compute access and ancillary resources? It seems less of a lift than salvaging the OpenAI situation internally due to the emotions and politics involved, non competes not existing in California (broadly speaking), and the logistics of attempting to apply pressure to a 501c3 board with very little leverage. The value…

> The pr wire writes itself. Technically speaking, only because PR has been replaced by ChatGPT :-)

> Technically speaking, only because PR has been replaced by ChatGPT :-)

It only appears like that because PR writing has become careful and systematic, which is the kind of writing ChatGPT does very well.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#700

Post by visarga »

Davidzheng wrote: post #617
visarga wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of the reporting so far indicates that Ilya and the board fired Sam to prioritize safety and non profit objectives Maybe Ilya discovered something as head of AI safety research, something bad, and they had to act on it. From the outside it looks as if they are desperately trying to gain control. Maybe he got confirmation that LLMs are a little bit conscious, LOL. No, I am not making this up: https://twitter.co…

lol sorry if this is clearly a joke but who cares if it's a little bit conscious. So are fucking pigeons.

it would be funny if Ilya followed the ranks of Blake Lemoine and went off for AI consciousness
Post reply on HN