OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#791

Post by churchill » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

kashyapc wrote: post #689

Silicon Valley outsider here. Am I being harsh here? I just bothered to look at the full OpenAI board composition. Besides Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, why are these people eligible to be on the OpenAI board? Such young people, calling themselves "President of this", "Director of that". - Adam D'Angelo — Quora CEO (no clue what he's doing on OpenAI board) - Tasha McCauley — a "management scientist" (this is a ne…

Exactly this. I saw another commenter raise this point about Tasha (and Helen, if I remember correctly) noting that her LinkedIn profile is filled with SV-related jargon and indulge-the-wife thinktanks but without any real experience taking products to market or scaling up technology companies.

Given the pool of talent they could have chosen from their board makeup looks extremely poor.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#792

Post by voittvoidd » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #345

singularity2001 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Board will be ousted, new board will instruct interim CEO to hire back Sam at al, Nadella will let them go for a small favor, happy ending.

Board will be ousted, but the ship has sailed on Sam and Greg coming back.

I would think OpenAI is basically toast. They arent coming back, these people will quit and this will end up in court.

Everyone just assumes AGI is inevetible but it is a non-zero chance we just passed the ai peak this weekend.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#793

Post by vikramkr » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

LonelyWolfe wrote: post #626

breadwinner wrote: post #51

If they join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft they will not need to start from scratch because Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT. Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits. So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts. [1]…

Just a thought.... Wouldn't one of the board members be like "If you screw with us any further we're releasing gpt to the public" I'm wondering why that option hasn't been used yet.

theoretically their concern is around AI safety - whatever it is in practice doing something like that would instantly signal to everyone that they are the bad guys and confirm everyone's belief that this was just a power grab

Edit: since it's being brought up in thread they claimed they closed sourced it because of safety. It was a big controversial thing and they stood by it so it's not exactly easy to backtrack

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#794

Post by svnt » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

himaraya wrote: post #549

breadwinner wrote: post #51

If they join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft they will not need to start from scratch because Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT. Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits. So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts. [1]…

This is wrong. Microsoft has no such rights and its license comes with restrictions, per the cited primary source, meaning a fork would require a very careful approach. https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-awkw...

But it does suggest a possibility of the appearance of a sudden motive:

Open AI implements and releases ChatGPTs (Poe competitor) but fails to tell D’Angelo ahead of time. Microsoft will have access to code (with restrictions, sure) for essentially a duplicate of D’Angelo’s Poe project.

Poe’s ability to fundraise craters. D’Angelo works the less seasoned members of the board to try to scuttle OpenAI and Microsoft’s efforts, banking that among them all he and Poe are relatively immune with access to Claude, Llama, etc.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#795

Post by renegade-otter » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

ramesh31 wrote: post #449

dmix wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI's upper ceiling in for-profit hands is basically Microsoft-tier dominance of tech in the 1990s, creating the next uber billionaire like Gates. If they get this because of an OpenAI fumble it could be one of the most fortunate situations in business history. Vegas type odds. A good example of how just having your foot in the door creates serendipitous opportunity in life.

>A good example of how just having your foot in the door creates serendipitous opportunity in life. Sounds like Altman's biography.

Altman's bio is so typical. Got his first computer at 8. My parents finally opened the wallet for a cheap E-Machine when I went to college.

Altman - private school, Stanford, dropped out to f*ck around in tech. "Failed" startup acquired for $40M. The world is full of Sam Altmans who never won the birth lottery.

Could he have squandered his good fortune - absolutely, but his life is not exactly per ardua ad astra.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#796

Post by toss1 » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

qwebfdzsh wrote: post #77

toss1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the ironic part of the greed is that it seems there is far more (at least potential) earnings to be spread around and make everyone there wealthy enough to not have to think about it ever again. Yet they start this kind of nonsense. Not exactly focusing on building a great system or product.

I assumed that due how the whole company/non-profit was structured employees didn't really get any actual equity?

Um, equity isn't the only way to distribute profits...

edit: 'tho TBF, the other methods do require ethical management behavior down the road, which was just shown to be lacking in the last few days.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#797

Post by geodel » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #612

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits To be clear, these don't go away. They remain an asset of OpenAI's, and could help them continue their research for a few years.

A $13B lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation clearly in the wrong surely is an easy one.

Clear to you. But in courts of law it may take a while to be clear.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#798

Post by belter » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

Nobody seems to be considering the possibility, that ChatGPT will go offline soon. Because it's known to be losing money per query, and if the evil empire decides to stop those Azure credits...

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#799

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

p_j_w wrote: post #775

toomuchtodo wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cluster is at capacity. Workload will be scheduled as capacity permits." If the credits are considered an asset, totally possible to devalue them while staying within the bounds of the contractual agreement. Failing that, wait until OpenAI exhausts their cash reserves for them to challenge in court.

It’s amazing to me to see people on HN advocate a giant company bullying a smaller one with these kind of skeezy tactics.

Explaining how the gazelle is going to get eaten confidently jumping into the oasis isn't advocating for the crocodiles. See sibling comments.

Experience leads to pattern recognition, and this is the tech community equivalent of a David Attenborough production (with my profuse apologies to Sir Attenborough). Something about failing to learn history and repeating it should go here too.

If you can take away anything from observing this event unfold, learn from it. Consider how the sophisticated vs the unsophisticated act, how participants respond, and what success looks like. Also, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Do not rush when the consequences of a misstep are substantial. You learning from this is cheaper than the cost for everyone involved. It is a natural experiment you get to observe for free.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#800

Post by visarga » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

gardenhedge wrote: post #339

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will never discover AGI with this approach because 1) they are brute forcing the results and 2) none of this is actually science.

Can you explain for us not up to date with AI developments?

Imagine you are participating in car racing, and your car has a few tweak knobs. But you don't know what is what and can only make random perturbations and see what happens. Slowly you work out what is what, but you might still not be 100% sure.

That's how AI research and development works, I know, it is pretty weird. We don't really really understand, we know some basic stuff about how neurons and gradients work, and then we hand wave to "language model" "vision model" etc. It's all a black box, magic.

How we we make progress if we don't understand this beast? We prod and poke, and make little theories, and then test them on a few datasets. It's basically blind search.

Whenever someone finds anything useful, everyone copies it in like 2 weeks. So ML research is like a community thing, the main research happens in the community, not inside anyone's head. We stumble onto models like GPT4 then it takes us months to even have a vague understanding of what it is capable of.

Besides that there are issues with academic publishing, the volume, the quality, peer review, attribution, replicability... they all got out of hand. And we have another set of issues with benchmarks - what they mean, how much can we trust them, what metrics to use.

And yet somehow here we are with GPT-4V and others.