721–730 of 854 posts
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I saw a claim at the time that a handful of employees rallied everyone else to sign the letter and post support on Twitter. Between that and Altman reportedly having a vindictive streak, I'm thinking the actual employee support was paper-thin.
Prisoner's dilemma and/or social pressure when million in profit share units hang in the balance. Joining MS was a way to stop their compensation being at risk by being stuck on a sinking ship
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It is a very fancy autocomplete indeed, but it's not like you missed anything on day 1. The engineering they put around GPT to make it work as a smart translator and eloquent "brainstormer" and whatnot is impressive, but so far there's no killer app in sight. (The biggest bang for the buck seems to be Copilot.)
It definitely is a killer app and light years ahead any competing product. Github copilot is good but different use case to me. If you meant MSFT Copilot, well that I am not sure what benefit if any exists.
I mean the thing you can use in IDEs, some people seem to love it. (And it's great for writing Terraform code for example.)
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It is a very fancy autocomplete indeed, but it's not like you missed anything on day 1. The engineering they put around GPT to make it work as a smart translator and eloquent "brainstormer" and whatnot is impressive, but so far there's no killer app in sight. (The biggest bang for the buck seems to be Copilot.)
It is the killer app in itself. You might be underestimating it's impact and how much usage it's getting (not always for good things, not always for bad). It's totally permeated many areas of life for people.
>100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history
I've used it for some non trivial stuff. Legal advice and advice on launching a crypto project.
I see signs of Toner trying to spin things to save face.
“for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board … [Altman gave] inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place … For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever … But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board”
Thoughts:
- The claim that this had been going on for years is presented as support for the decision to oust Sam. This is a spin, because an easy criticism is that, if this had been going on for so long, why didn’t Toner do anything about it years sooner? As she says herself, all along she had been responsible as a board member for “providing independent oversight over the company,” so there was a years-long lapse in effectiveness in her oversight duties if her claims are true.
- The emphasis on “all four of us who fired him” is an attempt to provide social proof that she did the reasonable thing. It doesn’t help answer the question of “why” — the purpose of the article — so it’s rhetoric serving some other purpose.
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> We did not evolve with private property rights Yeah, we did. The concept of "mine" appears very early in children. Attempts to raise children from birth as good communists have never worked. Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior. Even the die hard communists in the USSR still participated in the black market - this was tolerated because even the elites used it. It turns out that huma…
> Yeah, we did. No we did not. > The concept of "mine" appears very early in children. The concept of "mine" also exists in socialism. How have you come to the conclusion that when a child says "mine" that it is referring to the capitalist notion of private property? > Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior. Are you denying the existence of families now? Humans evolved and spread in sma…
Nope, even your shoes officially belong to the collective. I was told this by a former subject of the USSR.
> family
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, children are not fully formed humans, and have only a subset of adult rights. Families have evolved to deal with this issue. Extending the family to society does not work.
> why don't you tell us what human nature is
Two excellent books on the topic:
"The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...
"Noble Savages" by Napoleon Chagnon https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Savages-Dangerous-Yanomamo-Anth...
I can sum it up with human nature is our evolved behavior, rather than learned behavior.
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> On paper the board has the power and it’s their job to monitor and hire/fire the execs. But they’re dependent on the execs for info. It's way worse for the OpenAI board position in this case, because the company is basically just an assemblage of researchers, engineers, and Microsoft Azure credits. They can replace the CEO if they want, but all the value of the company can walk away if they don't like it.
> the company is basically just an assemblage of and . They can replace the CEO if they want, but all the value of the company can walk away if they don't like it. This is generally true of any company
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At this point I assume this is a troll comment, as nobody could hold views THAT extreme and be THAT snidey in real life (I assume/hope :O )
But, if you think in first principles, humans need to stop because we have only two eyes that can look at only one direction and can never simultaneously compute what speed the other cars are traveling. Of course we have to stop and give enough buffer for 0% accident probability.
A FSD vehicle will have 8+ cameras looking around and already have computed where all the vehicles will be and has faster reaction time. So, it can be afforded higher buffer and lenient rules that was designed for humans.
But, people like yourself are hell bent on following rules for rules-following-sake instead of thinking in first principles. So, an FSD builder would have to lie to you to say "It'll follow traffic rules" because you have that framework.
If another first-principle-thinker asks the FSD builder, then they won't lie and will correctly say "Hey it will stop only when it is required and will break some traffic rules which doesn't make sense for a machine".
But you think it's just a Billionaire club. But it is really about having same principles.
Hope that clarifies.
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They just folded. They were not the right people for the task. They would have prevailed with a bit more persistence and better PR.
Exactly. If the board had the reasons in this article ready to go when they fired Altman, things may have gone much differently.
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Then how do you explain the universal fact that the communist notion of rights always fails? There are clearly some system of rights that are better than others, for humans. BTW, we kill wolves that attack us.
I don't need to, there simply isn't a universally true notion of rights, it has to be socially defined, whether you're a communist or a capitalist. > There are clearly some system of rights that are better than others, for humans. I certainly agree with you : but "better for humans" is a morally grounded position. > BTW, we kill wolves that attack us. Sure. How is that a problem?
Yet there is. People can temporarily override human nature, but it always reasserts itself. Universal rights are based on human nature.
You can socially declare that what's yours is mine, but be both know how that will end up.
You can also pay people to be poor, but then you'll wonder why poverty increases.
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And yet Shotwell didn't create SpaceX, define its mission, establish its products, create Starlink or recruit the core team. Musk did all of that and tons more as well. It's fascinating how nobody was making this claim of a non-technical Musk up until the moment he stopped being loyal to one particular wing of US politics. Now we see a concerted effort to diminish his achievements. Do you people really think this wil…
He is diminishing his achievements all by myself on Twitter. Like before there was doubts he was technical. Now it's clear he is not and was acting (at least regarding software). If Steve Jobs was claiming he also did the iPhone engineering don't you think people would challenge that? He lies, he gets caught up, that's it. Look at his recent exchange with LeCun, is it really politics or has he simply too much ego and…
Says you, random HN poster. Here's the assessment of a NASA astronaut who spent time on the ISS and who has a PhD in mechanical engineering and a degree in applied mechanics:
"[Musk is] able to have conversations with our top engineers about software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy"
But sure, him and the software engineers at NASA are all dumbasses who are fooled by an actor. Happens all the time.
Again - do you guys really think this will work? You are saying what you want to be true, not what actually is true. It's really not necessary. You can loathe the guy for political reasons and still accept that he is in fact an engineer, and does in fact know how to write software. These things are not mutually exclusive.
As for "he lies, he gets caught up". Really. Nobody making this claim is in in any position to attack someone else for getting caught up in a lie, given how brazen this claim is, how many people with direct experience have lined up to say the exact opposite, and how obvious it is that it can't be true given his achievements.
Please, stop claiming Musk isn't technical or that Gwynne Shotwell is the real leader of SpaceX. It doesn't work and makes all criticism of Musk look like ideologically motivated reasoning. There are plenty of genuine ways to criticize Musk! Attack him for being way too over-optimistic about FSD in Tesla cars if you want. Attack him for requiring logins to Twitter. But don't spread obvious lies about him - it lowers the credibility of all criticism.