To all who say 'handled so poorly'. Nobody know the exact reason OpenAi fired Sam. But go ahead and jump to conclusions that whatever it was didn't warrant being fired. And that surely the board did the wrong thing. Or maybe they should have released the exact reason and then asked hacker news what they thought should happen.
OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#872There can exist an inherent delusion within elements of a company, that if left unchallenged, can persist. An agreement for instance, can seem airtight because it's never challenged, but falls apart in court. The OpenAI fallacy was that non-profit principals were guiding the success of the firm, and when the board decided to test that theory, it broke the whole delusion. Had it not fully challenged Altman, the board…
> Now the cat is out of the bag, and people no longer believe that a non-profit who can act at will is a trusted vehicle for the future. And maybe it’s not. The big mistake people make is hearing non-profit and think it means there’s a greater amount of morality. It’s the same mistake as assuming everyone who is religious is therefore more moral (worth pointing out that religions are nonprofits as well). Most hospita…
> removing a motive that has the most direct connection to quantifiable results (profit) can actually make things worse
I totally agree. I don't think this is universally true of non-profits, but people are going to look for value in other ways if direct cash isn't an option.
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#873Silicon 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…
You can like D'Angelo or not but he was the CTO of Facebook.
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#874Earlier 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.
"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.
Basically the current situation you have with AI compute now on the hyperscalers
Good luck trying to find H100 80s on the 3 big clouds.
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#875Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watch Satya also save the research arm by making Karpathy or Ilya the head of Microsoft Research
0% chance of Ilya failing upwards from this. He dunked himself hard and has blasted a huge hole in his organizational-game-theory quotient.
The same could have been said for Adam Neumann, and yet...
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#876Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#877If I weren't so adverse to conspiracy theories, I would think that this is all a big "coup" by Microsoft: Ilya conspired with Microsoft and Altman to get him fired by the board, just to make it easy for Microsoft to hire him back without fear of retaliation, along with all the engineers that would join him in the process. Then, Ilya would apologize publicly for "making a huge mistake" and, after some period, would jo…
No, I don’t think there’s any grand conspiracy, but certainly MS was interested in leapfrogging Google by capturing the value from OpenAI from day one. As things began to fall apart there MS had vast amounts of money to throw at people to bring them into alignment. The idea of a buyout was probably on the table from day one, but not possible till now. If there’s a warning, it’s to be very careful when choosing your p…
Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. I think in this case MS is winning.
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#878Earlier 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.
Sure, the point is that MS giving $13B of its services away is less expensive than $13B in cash.
Azure has ~60% profit margin. So it's more like MS gave $5.2B in Azure Credits in return for 75% of OpenAI profits upto $13B * 100 = $1.3 trillion.
Which is a phenomenal deal for MSFT.
Time will tell whether they ever reach more than $1.3 in profits.
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#879If 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]…
> Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT.
If Microsoft does this, the non-profit OpenAI may find the action closest to their original charter ("safe AGI") is a full release of all weights, research, and training data.
Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
#880Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait I’m completely confused. Why is Ilya signing this? Is he voting for his own resignation? He’s part of the board. In fact, he was the ringleader of this coup.
No, it was just widely speculated that he was the ringleader. This seems to indicate he wasn't. We don't know. Maybe to Quora guy, Maybe the RAND Corp lady? All speculation.
It sounds like he’s just trying to save face bro. The truth will come out eventually. But he definitely wasn’t against it and I’m sure the no-names on the board wouldn’t have moved if they didn’t get certain reassurances from Ilya.