Earlier quoted context omitted.
In favour of the CEO who was about to make them fabulously wealthy. FTFY.
and there aint nothing wrong with wanting to be fabulously wealthy.
That is entirely dependent on how that wealth is obtained
Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
821–830 of 985 posts
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#822Am I the only one who thinks all this looks like fairly childish behavior by the board, the employees, microsoft, and Sam Altman?
It s a non-profit, it's for profit, Microsoft is investing, board is firing Sam, Ilya thinks Sam needs to be removed, Ilya thought about it more is sorry for firing Sam and wants him back, Sam's part of microsoft, now he's still trying to be CEO of OpenAI.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Starting from before the anthropic exodus, I suspect the timeline looks like: (2015) Founding: majority are concerned with safety (2019) For profit formed: mix of safety and profit motives (majority still safety oriented?) (2020) GPT3 released to much hype, leading to many ambition chasers joining: the profit seeking side grows. (2021) Anthropic exodus over safety: the safety side shrinks (2022) chatgpt relea…
This is why I never understood people resigning in protest such as was the case with Google’s military contracts. You simply assure that the culture change happens more swiftly.
There's always other companies. Plus sometimes you just gotta stick to your values. For the Google military contracts it makes even more sense: the protest resignation isn't just a virtue signal, it's also just refusing to contribute to the military.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#824Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn’t make sense. You mean companies like Microsoft and business types like Altman don’t want to release infra to the public. Microsoft and Altman may hide under the guise of “it’s not safe to share this stuff” but they’re intent is capital gain not safety. True safety believers understand that safety comes from a general understanding by everyone and audit-able infra otherwise you have no transparency about t…
The impression I get from what I read is that AI safety people want to have large cutting edge foundational models they control, can do testing and research on. They have no interest in open sourcing those cutting edge models. Whether this makes sense in the long run I don't know, but it is what I meant by AI safety types. Of course money makers want to keep it closed source to extract rent. In some ways that is an a…
I agree with the definition everyone seems to be eating up, but I think it’d be healthier if we all started calling bs on the double speak and hidden profit motive of the use of “safety” and make them be more upfront about the intent.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of those employees will be dissapointed. MS says they extend a contract to each one but how many of those 700 are really needed when MS already have a lot of researchers in that field. Myabe the top 20% will have an assured contract but th rest is doubtfull will pass the 6 month mark.
Microsoft gutting OpenAI's workforce would really make no sense. All it would do is slow down their work and slow down the value and return on investment for Microsoft. Even if every single OpenAI employee demands $1m/yr (which would be absurd, but let's assume), that would still be less than $1bn/yr total, which is significantly less than the $13bn that MSFT has already invested in OpenAI. It would probably be one o…
Microsoft has already done major layoffs over the last year of their own employees. Why wouldn’t they lay off OpenAI employees?
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#826As of 10am PT, 700 of 770 employees have signed the call for board resignation. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242
Apparently Sam isn't in the Microsoft employee directly yet, so he isn't technically hired at all. Seems like he loses a bit of leverage over the board if they think he & Microsoft are actually bluffing and the employment announcement was just a way to pressure the board into resigning.
Going to MS doesn’t seem like the best outcome for Sam. His role would probably get marginalized once everything is under Satya’s roof. Good outcome for MS, though.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably a hot take: we should let democratically elected leaders be the guardians of superintelligence. You don't need to be technical at all to grapple with the implications of AI on humanity. It's a humanity question, not a tech question.
Yeah Trump should be the guardian of the superintelligence.
Trump was never democratically elected.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#828If anything has become clear after all this is that humanity is not ready for being the guardian of superintelligence. These are supposed to be the top masterminds behind one of the most influential technologies of our lifetime, and perhaps history, and yet they're all behaving like petty children, with egos and personal interests pulling in all directions, and everyone doing their best to secure their piece of the p…
I'm not sure how people reach this sentiment.
Humans strike me as being awesome, especially compared to other species.
I feel like there is a general sentiment that nature has it figured out and that humans are disrupting nature.
But I haven't been convinced that is true. Nature seems to be one big gladiatorial ring where everything is in a death match. Nature finds equilibrium through death, often massive amounts of death. And that equilibrium isn't some grand design, it's luck organized around which species can discover and make effective use of an energy source.
Humans aren't the first species to disrupt their environment. I don't believe we are even the first species to create a mass extinction. IIUC the great oxygenation event was a species-driven mass extinction event.
While most species consume all their resources in a boom cycle and subsequently starve to death in their bust cycle, often taking a portion of their ecosystem with them, humans are metaphorically eating all the corn but looking up and going "Hey, folks, we are eating all the corn - that's probably not going to go well. Maybe we should do something about that."
I find that level of species-level awareness both hope-inspiring and really awesome.
I haven't seen any proposals for a better first-place species when it comes to being responsible stewards of life and improving the chances of life surviving past this rock's relatively short window for supporting life. I'd go as far as saying whatever species we try to put in second place, humans have them beaten by a pretty wide margin.
If we create a fictitious "perfect human utopia" and compare ourselves to that, we fall short. But that's a tautology. Most critiques of humans I see read to me as goals, not shortcomings compared to nature's baseline.
When it comes to protecting ourselves against inorganic superintelligence, I haven't seen any reasonable proposals for how we are going to fail here. We are self-interested in not dying. Unless we develop a superintelligence without realizing it and fail to identify it getting ready to wipe us out, it seems like we would pull the plug on any of its shenanigans pretty early? And given the interest in building and detecting superintelligence, I don't see how we would miss it?
Like if we notice our superintelligence is building an army, why wouldn't we stop that before the army is able to compete with an existing nation-state military?
Or if the superintelligence is starting to disrupt our economies or computer systems, why wouldn't we be able to detect that early and purge it?
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#829Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the "safe AI" people at OpenAI were in a unique position to help guide AI dev in as safe a direction as possible Is it also the case that the anti-war Germans who joined the Nazi regime were in a unique position to help guide Germany in as benign direction as possible? If not, what is the difference between the "safe AI" person who decides to join OpenAI and the anti-war, anti-racist German who decides to get a job…
That went quickly to Godwin's law .
Fair but in this case works well because it aptly demonstrates the futility of trying to change a system "from the inside" away from its core designation.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#830Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or what, they will quit and give up all their equity in a company valued at 86bn dollars? Is Microsoft even on record as willing to poach the entire OpenAI team? Can they?! What is even happening.
They don't have that valuation now. Secondly, yes, MSFT is on record of this. Third, Benioff (Salesforce) has said he'll match any salary and to submit resumes directly to his ceo@salesforce.com email as well as other labs like Cohere trying to poach leading minds too.
Sounds like quite a coup for Microsoft. They get the staff and the IP and they don’t even have to pay out the other 51% of investors.