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Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

openai.com

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Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically no, but when 90% of their employees threatened to quit, they would just be the board of nothing.

The board was a non profit board serving the mission. Mission was foremost. Employees are not. One of the comments a member made was, if the company was destroyed, it would still be consistent with serving the mission. Which is right. The fallout showed non-profit missions can't co-exist with for-profit incentives. And the power that investors were exerting, and employees (who would also benefit from the recent 70B r…

> The board was a non profit board serving the mission. Mission was foremost. Employees are not.

They need employees to advance their stated mission.

> One of the comments a member made was, if the company was destroyed, it would still be consistent with serving the mission. Which is right.

I mean, that's a nice sound bite and everything, but the only scenario where blowing up the company seems to be consistent with their mission is the scenario where Open AI itself achieves a breakthrough in AGI and where the board thinks that system cannot be made safe. Otherwise, to be relevant in guiding research towards AGI, they need to stay a going concern, and that means not running off 90% of the employee base.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#82

I try hard to stay away from conspiracy theories as they are almost always counterproductive, but D'Angelo still being on the board seems insane to me. Does this guy have some mega dirt on someone or something? Does he have some incredible talent or skill that is rare and valuable?

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#83
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line is really interesting: > The best interests of the company and the mission always come first. That is absolutely not true for the nonprofit inc. The mission comes first. Full stop. The company (LLC) is a means to that end. Very interested to see how this governance situation continues to change.

There's absolutely no sense in talking about OpenAI as a nonprofit at this point. The new board and Altman talk about the governance structure changing, and I strongly believe they will maximize their ability to run it as a for-profit company. 100x profit cap is a very large number on an $80 billion valuation.

Change the name while you are at it; the company is not any more "open" than the next shop.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if i was him id leave, do my own thing.

Google or AWS or Cohere will welcome him with open hands.

Google possibly.

But I guess he will stay low key for a longer time now ...

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#88
post #5

So even if you maintain strict board control, the money people can still kick you out. Incredible!

Not sure that’s the exact case. Once the employees threatened en masse to quit, all the power shifted to Sam and Greg’s hands - which I’m not sure they had up to that point. I still think the board did what they thought was right (and maybe even was?), but not having the pulse of the company and their lack of operational experience was fatal.

It looked like this was all decided in a hurry rather than that stakeholder buy-in was achieved. And maybe that's because if they had tried to get that buy-in the cat would be out of the bag and they would find even more opposition. It also partially explains why they didn't have a plan post-firing Sam but tried a whole bunch of weird (and weirder) moves.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#89

Ilya is the one irreplaceable employee there, not Sam

The “500 employees” who signed a letter to leave are not worth half as much as Ilya. Good luck to ClosedAI!

To be fair, most of those 500 have less than 8 months of tenure…

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a tweet that from an engineer at OpenAI that they're working on the problem that ChatGPT has become too "lazy" - generating text that contains a lot of placeholders and expecting people to fill in much more themselves. As for the general brain damage from RLHF and the political bias, no word still.

Using the api, I've been seeing this a lot with the gpt-4-turbo preview model, but no problems with the non-turbo gpt-4 model. So I'll assume ChatGPT is now using 4-turbo. It seems the new model has some kinks to work out--I've also personally seen noticeably reduced reasoning ability for coding tasks, increased context-forgetting, and much worse instruction-following. So far it feels more like a gpt-3.75-turbo rathe…

Yeah, I usually use gpt-4-turbo (I exclusively use the API via a local web frontend (https://github.com/hillis/gpt-4-chat-ui) rather than ChatGPT Plus). Good reminder to use gpt-4 if I need to work around it - it hasn't bothered me too much in practice, since ChatGPT is honestly good enough most of the time for my purposes.
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