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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

#811

Post by throwaway4aday »

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…

The more likely explanation is that D'Angelo has a massive conflict of interest with him being CEO of Quora, a business rapidly being replaced by ChatGPT and which has a competing product "creator monetization with Poe" (catchy name, I know) that just got nuked by OpenAI's GPTs announcement at dev day.

https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization...

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/31/quoras-poe-introduces-an-a...

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

#812

Post by dgellow »

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…

If I understood correctly Altman was CEO of the for-profit OpenAI, not the non-profit. The structure is pretty complicated: https://openai.com/our-structure

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

#813

Post by detourdog »

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…

To me this is the ultimate Silicon Valley bike shedding incident.

Nobody can really explain the argument, there are "billions" or "trillions" of dollars involved, most likely the whole thing will not change the technical path of the world.

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

#814

Post by mcv »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #774
benterix wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 board can either step down and lose completely or try to continue and destroy whatever is left of OpenAI. From the board's perspective, destroying OpenAI might be the best possible outcome right now. If OpenAI can no longer fulfill its mission of doing AI work for the public good, it's better to stop pretending and let it all crumble.

Except that letting it all crumble leaves all the crumbs in Microsoft's hands. Although there may not be any way to prevent that anyway at it point.

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

#815

Post by OOPMan »

jacquesm wrote: post #767
edmundsauto wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling statement. The Elon split for me cements Altman as the Lionheart in the story.

There are other options besides 'Elon is a jerk' or 'Sam is a jerk'.

For example...they're both jerks!

:-)

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

#816

Post by mensetmanusman »

achenet wrote: post #722
passion__desire wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast fashion and fashion industry in general is useless to society. But rich jobless people need a place to hangout so they create an activity to justify.

useless to society... fashion allows people to optimize their appearance so as to get more positive attention from others. Or, put more crudely, it helps people look good so they can get laid. Not sure that it's net positive for society as a whole, but individual humans certainly benefit from the fashion industry. Ask anyone who has ever received a compliment on their outfit. This is true for rich people as well as n…

we can correlate now that the more fast fashion there is the less people are coupling though...

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

#817

Post by inDigiNeous »

adastra22 wrote: post #346
DonHopkins wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a Beowulf Cluster of Apple //e's to run an Electron app in 1983!

Been a long time since I heard "Beowulf Cluster"!

Had to log in just to upvote this comment, brought back nostalgia from the Slashdot days of yore.

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

#818

Post by sumitkumar »

hooande wrote: post #530
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…

Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. They voted on it and one side won. There isn't a bigger, more interesting story here. This is in fact a very common story that plays out at many software companies. The board of openai ended up making a decision that destroyed billi…

Usually what happens in fast growing companies is that the high energy founders/employees drive out the low energy counterparts when the pace needs to go up. In OpenAI Sam and team did not do that and surprisingly the reverse happened.

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

#819

Post by xwowsersx »

> Sustkever is said to have offered two explanations he purportedly received from the board, according to one of the people familiar. One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project.

> The other was that Altman allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

It must've been wildly infuriating to listen to these insultingly unsatisfactory explanations.

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

#820

Post by tomhallett »

dgellow wrote: post #812
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…

If I understood correctly Altman was CEO of the for-profit OpenAI, not the non-profit. The structure is pretty complicated: https://openai.com/our-structure

I’m curious: if one of the board members “knows” the only way for OpenAI to be truly successful is for it to be a non-profit and “don’t be evil” (Google’s mantra), that if they set expectations correctly and put caps on the for-profit side, it could be successful. But they didn’t fully appreciate how strong the market forces would be, where all of the focus/attention/press would go to the for-profit side. Sam’s side has such an intrinsic gravity, that’s it’s inevitable that it will break out of its cage.

Note: I’m not making a moral claim one way or the other, and I do agree that most tech companies will grow to a size/power/monopoly that their incentives will deviate from the “common good”. Are there examples of openai’s structure working correctly with other companies?

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