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Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

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Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#791

Post by tsimionescu »

lajawfe wrote: post #667
gzer0 wrote: post #576

@karpathy on Twitter: I just don’t have anything too remarkable to add right now. I like and respect Sam and I think so does the majority of OpenAI. The board had a chance to explain their drastic actions and they did not take it, so there is nothing to go on except exactly what it looks like. https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1726289070345855126

I for one thought Karpathy would side with the core researchers and not the corpos. To me, this whole ordeal is a clash between profit motives of Sam vs Non Profit and Safety motives of OpenAI's original charter. I mean didn't HN hate when OpenAI changed their open nature and become completely closed and profit oriented? This could be the healing of the cancer that OpenAI brought to this field to make it closed as a…

There are at least three competing perspectives.

One is Sutskever, who believes AI is very dangerous and must be slowed down and closed source (edit: clarified so that it doesn't sound like closed down). He believes this is in line with OpenAI's original charter.

Another is the HN open source crowd who believes AI should be developed quickly and be open to everyone. They believe this is in line with OpenAI's original charter.

Then there is Altman, who agrees that AI should be developed rapidly, but wants it to stay closed so he can directly profit by selling it. He probably believes this is in line with OpenAI's original charter, or at least the most realistic way to achieve it, effective altruism "earn to give" style.

Karpathy may be more amenable to the second perspective, which he may think Altman is closer to achieving.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#792

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

bmitc wrote: post #592

Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…

The new CEO, (Emmett, not Mura, who was CEO for two days I guess) has publicly stated on multiple occasions "we need to slow down from a 10 to a 1-2". Ilya is also in favor of dramatically "slowing down". That's who's left in this company, running it.

In the field of AI, right now, "slowing down" is like deciding to stop the car and walk the track by foot in the middle of a Formula 1 race. It's like going backwards.

Unless things change from the current status quo, OpenAI will be irrelevant in less than 2 years. And of course many will quit such a company and go work somewhere where the CEO wants to innovate, not slow down.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#793

Post by eightnoteight »

LrnByTeach wrote: post #784

This may be a fair workable solution to all the parties involved. Context: --------- 1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast progression to GPT-5 level 1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition. 1.3/ M…

@sama @gdb joined microsoft

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#794

Post by hef19898 »

Closi wrote: post #481
hef19898 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it with all this personality cult about founders, CEOs and CTOs nowadays? I thpught the cult around Steve Jobs was, bad it pales in comparison to today. As soon as one person becomes more important than the team, as in the team starts to be structured around said person instead of with the person, that person should be replaced. Because otherwise, the team will not be functioning properly without the "star pl…

While your post sounds like something that would be true, there are loads of examples of where companies have thrived under a clear vision from a specific person. The example of Steve Jobs used in the above post is probably a prime example - Apple just wouldn’t be the company it is today without that period of his singular vision and drive. Of course they struggled after losing him, but the current version of Apple t…

Steve Jobs is actually a great example: He was, sucessfully at each time, replaced twice, once aftwr he almost ran Apple into the ground and then after his death. In fact, he shoes how to build an org that explicitly does not depend on war star player.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#795

Post by pug_mode »

pug_mode wrote: post #719

Doesn't Microsoft own access to everything OpenAI is working on prior to AGI? Couldn't Sam and his team get hired by MSFT and continue their work?

4 minutes after that comment, Satya said Sam and some his people are joining Microsoft!

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#796

Post by mirzap »

sangnoir wrote: post #344
threeseed wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products. Which likely most of the company was working on.

OpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products under Sam Altman's leadership

And that could be a core problem. He wasn't really free to decide the speed of development. He wanted to change that and deliver faster. Obviously, they achieved something in the past weeks, so doomers pulled the plug to stop him.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#797

Post by eightnoteight »

LrnByTeach wrote: post #784

This may be a fair workable solution to all the parties involved. Context: --------- 1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast progression to GPT-5 level 1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition. 1.3/ M…

in hindsight, you got the context pretty accurate i.e importance of microsoft in all of this

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#798

Post by xcv123 »

bayindirh wrote: post #778
alsodumb wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What idea are you talking about? They are not your classic founders coming up with an idea to join Y combinator. They build OpenAI for many years, they know what to do. It won't be hard for them to hire researchers and engineers, from OpenAI or other places. Questions like this makes me wonder if you are a troll. I won't continue this thread.

Being able to hire researchers and, even the top talent doesn't guarantee that they'll be the top company or even succeed at what they're building. This is what I referred as "Cargo Cult AI". You can get the money, but money is not the only ingredient needed to make things happen. edit: Looks like they won't have a brand new company next week, but joining an existing one.

Nothing can guarantee that. Investors always accept risk.

He has a better chance than some other random guy who was not the CEO of OpenAI.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#799

Post by rreichman »

astrange wrote: post #410
loveparade wrote: post #290

For a change, maybe it'd be a good idea to get a CEO who at least has faint idea about how ML works on a technical level? Would you like a company that builds rockets to be led by some salesman who doesn't understand basic Physics? Probably not. You don't need to be Hinton or Schmidhuber, but come on, who thinks it's a good idea to have these typical "Silicon Valley VC CEOs" lead an AI company?

The trick is that execs do have unusually good insight into how their tech works, because they can ask their reports to explain it. Btw, I think it's funny how much credit Hinton gets for AI. His contribution is pretty much just keeping some grad students on the problem.

Hinton is overrated? That's quite a take.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#800

Post by xvector »

vintermann wrote: post #707
tempusalaria wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole situation should make it clear that SV media is beholden to VCs and will print anything they tell them to. Bloomberg, the verge and the information all went to bat for Altman in a big way on this.

I'm also pretty suspicious of people in forums like these who say nothing can compare to GPT4 and they're miles ahead of everyone else etc. How much of that is venture capital speaking? It's not quite where it is (or was) with Tesla, where it was hopeless to know what was sincere and what was just people talking up their investment/talking down their short, but it's getting there.

I mean, try and compare for yourself. It is quite obviously miles ahead of everything else.

I want OpenAI to be absolutely crushed in the free market after this move. But it will take years for anyone to catch up with GPT-4, if even Anthropic is nowhere close.

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