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OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

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Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#841

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#843

Post by LuvThisBoard »

Based on what has come out so far, seems to me:

The board wanted to keep the company true to its mission - non profit, ai safety, etc. Nadella/MSFT left OpenAI alone as they worked out a solution, so it looks like even Nadella/MSFT understood that.

The board could explain their position and move on. Let whoever of the 600 that actually want to leave, leave. Especially the employees that want a company that will make them lots of money, should leave and find a company that has that objective too. OpenAI can rebuild their teams - it might take a bit of time but since they are a non profit that is fine. Most CS grads across USA would be happy to join OpenAI and work with Ilya and team.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#844

Post by miyuru »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #282
falleng0d wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he even posted a apology: https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20 what the actual fuck =O

I knew it was Joseph Gordon-Levitt's plot all along!

I don't know if you are joking or not, but one of the board members is Joseph Gordon-Levitt Wife.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#845

Post by mullen »

no_wizard wrote: post #828

Well, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file, and this was a blunder by OpenAI. I don't feel sorry for Sam or any other executive, but it does hurt the rank and file more than anyone and I hope they land on their fit if this continues to go sideways. Turns out they acted incompetently in this case as a board, and put the company in a bad position, and so far everyone who resigned has landed fine.

> Well, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file, and this was a blunder by OpenAI.

Not just the Rank and File, but he was really was the face of AI in general. My wife, who is not in the tech field at all, knows who Sam Altman is and has seen interviews of him on YouTube (Which I was playing and she found interesting).

I have not heavily followed the Altman Dismissal Drama but this strikes me as a Board Power Play gone wrong. Some group wanted control, thought Altman was not reporting to them enough and took it as an opportunity to dismiss him and take over. However, somewhere in their calculation, they did not figure out Sam is the face of modern AI.

My prediction is that he will be back and everything will go back to what it was before. The board can't be dismissed and neither can Sam Altman. Status quo is the goal at this point.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#846

Post by svnt »

himaraya wrote: post #816
svnt wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I think there's more to the Poe story. Sam forced out Reid Hoffman over Inflection AI, [1] so he clearly gave Adam a pass for whatever reason. Maybe Sam credited Adam for inspiring OpenAI's agents? [1] https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...

I think it’s more likely that D’Angelo was there for his link to Meta, while Hoffman was rendered redundant after the big Microsoft deal (which occurred a month or two before he was asked to leave), but that’s just a guess.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#847

Post by golergka »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #659
mcny wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman. I have no inside information. I don't know anyone at Open AI. This is all purely speculation. Now that that's out out the way, here is my guess: money. These people never joined OpenAI to "advance sciences and arts" or to "change the world". They joined OpenAI to earn money. They think they can make more money with Sam Altman in…

Really? If they work at OpenAI they are already among the highest lifetime earners on the planet. Favouring moving oneself from the top 0.5% of global lifetime earners to the top 0.1% (or whatever the percentile shift is) over the safe development of a potentially humanity-changing technology would be depraved. EDIT: I don't know why this is being downvoted. My speculation as to the average OpenAI employee's place in…

> over the safe development of a potentially humanity-changing technology

May be people who are actually working on it and are also world best researchers have a better understanding of safety concerns?

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#848

Post by Aurornis »

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…

The board previously had people like Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman. Greg Brockman was part of the board until he was ousted as well.

The attrition of industry business leaders, the ouster of Greg Brockman, and the (temporary, apparently) flipping of Ilya combined to give the short list of remaining board members outsized influence. They took this opportunity to drop a nuclear bomb on the company's leadership, which so far has backfired spectacularly. Even their first interim CEO had to be replaced already.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#849

Post by Applejinx »

tedivm wrote: post #363
soderfoo wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like a ChatGPT hallucination. Where will this all go next? It seems like HN is melting down.

> It seems like HN is melting down. Almost literally- this is the slowest I've seen this site, and the number of errors are pretty high. I imagine the entire tech industry is here right now. You can almost smell the melting servers.

Understandable: so much of this is so HN-adjacent that clearly this is the space to watch, for some kind of developments. I've repeatedly gone to Twitter to see if AI-related drama was trending, and Twitter is clearly out of the loop and busy acting like 4chan, but without the accompanying interest in Stable Diffusion.

I'm going to chalk that up as another metric of Twitter's slide to irrelevance: this should be registering there if it's melting the HN servers, but nada. AI? Isn't that a Spielberg movie? ;)

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#850

Post by mikeryan »

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.

I dunno how you see it but I don’t see anything that Microsoft is doing wrong here. They’ve obviously been aligned with Sam all along and they’re not “poaching” employees - which isn’t illegal anyway.

They bought their IP rights from OpenAI.

I’m not a fan of MS being the big “winner” here but OpenAI shit their own bed on this one. The employees are 100% correct in one thing - that this board isn’t competent.

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