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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

#701

Post by sebzim4500 »

shafyy wrote: post #676
todd3834 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you. Depends on what you define as positive impact. Helping programmers write boiler plate code faster? Summarize a document for lazy fuckers who can't get themselves to read two page? Ok, not sure if this is what I would consider "positive impact". For a list of negative impacts, see the sister comments. I'd also like to add that the energy usage of LLMs like ChatGPT is immense…

Your examples seem so obviously to me to be a "positive impact" that I can't really understand your comment.

Of course saving time for 100 million people is positive.

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

#702

Post by sigmoid10 »

benterix wrote: post #692
mcv wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This certainly feels like the most likely true reason to me. Altman fundraising for this new investment, and taking money from people the board does not approve of, and Altman possible promised not to do business with. Of course it's all speculation, but this sounds a lot more plausible for such a sudden and dramatic decision than any of the other explanations I've heard.

Moreover, if this is true, he could reasonably well continue knowing that he has more power than the board. I could almost imagine the board saying, "You can't do that" and him replying "Watch me!" because he understood he is more powerful than them. And he proved he was right, and the board can either step down and lose completely or try to continue and destroy whatever is left of OpenAI.

The thing is, they could have just come out with that fact and everyone in the alignment camp and people who memed the whole super-commercialized "Open" AI thing would be on their side. But the fact that they haven't means that either there was no greater-good mission related reason for ousting Sam or the board is just completely incompetent at communication. Either way, they need to go and make room for people who can actually deal with this stuff. OpenAI is doomed with their current board.

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

#703

Post by denton-scratch »

dwaltrip wrote: post #399
mvdtnz wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely wild to me that people are drawing a straight line between a text completion algorithm and AGI. The term "AI" has truly lost all meaning.

LLMs predict language, and language is a representation of human concepts about the world. Thus, these models are constructing, piece by piece, conceptual chains about the world. As they learn to construct better and more coherent conceptual chains, something interesting must be happening internally.

> LLMs predict language, and language is a representation of human concepts about the world. Thus, these models are constructing, piece by piece, conceptual chains about the world.

I smell a fallacy. Parent has moved from something you can parse as "LLMs predict a representation of concepts" to "LLMs construct concepts". Yuh, if LLMs "construct concepts", then we have conceptual thought in a machine, which certainly looks interesting. But it doesn't follow from the initial statement.

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

#704

Post by dariosalvi78 »

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…

> you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history

the second after Musk taking over Twitter

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

#705

Post by mcv »

mvdtnz wrote: post #374
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite hypothesis: Ilya et al suspected emergent AGI ( e.g. saw the software doing things unprompted or dangerous and unexpected) and realized the Worldcoin shill is probably not the one you want calling the shots on it. For the record, I don't think it's true. I think it was a power play, and a failed coup at that. But it's about as substantiated as the "serious" hypotheses being mooted in the media. And it's m…

Absolutely wild to me that people are drawing a straight line between a text completion algorithm and AGI. The term "AI" has truly lost all meaning.

ChatGPT is not AGI, but it is AI. The thing that makes AI lose all meaning is the constantly moving goal posts. There's been tons of very successful AI research over the past decades. None of it is AGI, but it's still very successful AI.

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

#706

Post by jacquesm »

pavlov wrote: post #521
23B1 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.

OpenAI is a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary. The controlling board is at the non-profit and immune to shareholder concerns. Investors in OpenAI-the-business were literally told they should think of it as a donation. There’s not much grounds for a shareholder lawsuit when you signed away everything to a non-profit.

Absolutely nobody on a board is immune from judicial oversight. That fiction really needs to go. Anybody affected by their decisions could have standing to sue. They are lucky that nobody has done it so far.

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

#707

Post by abkolan »

I find it strange that Satya says he has not been given an explanation yet.

Tweet from Bloomberg Tech Journalist, Emily Chang

>The more I watch this interview – the wilder this story seems. Satya insists he hasn’t been given any reason why Sam was fired. THE CEO OF MICROSOFT STILL DOES NOT KNOW WHY: “I’ve not been told about anything…” he tells me.

source: https://x.com/emilychangtv/status/1726835093325721684

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

#708

Post by jacquesm »

behnamoh wrote: post #469
1024core wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features. Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that.

> Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that. If that were the case, can't he get sued by the Alliance (Sam, Greg, rest)? If he has conflict of interest then his decisions as member of the board would be invalid, right?

The decisions will stand assuming they were arrived at according to the bylaws of the non-profit but he may end up being personally liable.

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

#709

Post by jacquesm »

Moto7451 wrote: post #524
behnamoh wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that. If that were the case, can't he get sued by the Alliance (Sam, Greg, rest)? If he has conflict of interest then his decisions as member of the board would be invalid, right?

I don’t think that’s how it would work out since his conflict was very public knowledge before this point. He plausibly disclosed this to the board at some point before Poe launched and they kept him on. Large private VC backed companies also don’t always fall under the same rules as public entities. Generally there are shareholder thresholds (where insider/private shareholders count towards) that in turn cause some…

That's not how it works. If you have a conflict of interest and you remain on a board you are supposed to recuse yourself from those decisions where that conflict of interest materializes. You can still vote on the ones that you do not stand to profit from if things go the way you vote.

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

#710

Post by mcv »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #419
mvdtnz wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely wild to me that people are drawing a straight line between a text completion algorithm and AGI. The term "AI" has truly lost all meaning.

If the text completion algorithm is sufficiently advanced enough then we wouldn't be able to tell it's not AGI, especially if it has access to state-of-the-art research and can modify its own code/weights. I don't think we are there yet but it's plausible to an extent.

Any self-learning system can change its own weights. That's the entire point. And a text-processing system like ChatGPT may well have access to state-of-the-art research. The combination of those two things does not imply that it can improve itself to become secretly AGI. Not even if the text-completion algorithm was even more advanced. For one thing, it still lacks independent thought. It's only responding to inputs. It doesn't reason about its own reasoning. It's questionable whether it's reasoning at all.

I personally think a far more fundamental change is necessary to reach AGI.

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