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OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

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Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#891

Post by hmottestad »

d-z-m wrote: post #851
mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

> I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers. What do you mean by "full stack"? I'm sure there's a spectrum of ability, but frankly where I'm from, "Data Scientist" refers to someone who can use pandas and scikit-learn. Probably from inside a Jupyter notebook.

Maybe she just meant that "data scientists are engineers too", rather than saying that they work on both the ChatGPT web UI and the the machine learning code on the backend.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#892

Post by FartyMcFarter »

jessenaser wrote: post #803
localhost wrote: post #772

If you look at the quote tweets on Sam's latest tweet[1] that contain just a single heart and no words, those are all OpenAI employees voting for Sam's return. It's quite a sight to see. [1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1726099792600903681

Also Mira replied with a heart. https://x.com/miramurati/status/1726126391626985793 Also also she left her bio as “CTO @OpenAI”.

So she hadn't even agreed with the plan of becoming interim CEO? Either that or she changed her mind...

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#893

Post by rcbdev »

mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

I have to work with code written by Data Scientists very often and, coming from a classical SWE background, I would not call what the average Data Scientist does full stack software engineering. The code quality is almost always bad.

This is not to take away from the amazing things that they do - The code they produce often does highly quantitative things beyond my understanding. Nonetheless it falls to engineers to package it and fit it into a larger software architecture and the avg. Data Science career path just does not seem to confer the skills necessary for this.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#894

Post by klft »

mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

> Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers

It is about scientists as in "let's publish a paper" vs. engineers as in "let's ship a product".

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#895

Post by zztop44 »

pk-protect-ai wrote: post #844
nerbert wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not, some people compare him to Jobs http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

This is the problem with people: they build icons to worship and turn a blind eye to the crooked side of that icon. Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business. Right now, Altman is irrelevant for the further development of AI and GPT in particular because the vision for the AI future comes from the engineers and scienti…

I don’t understand this take. Do you really think CEOs don’t have any influence on their business? Alignment, morale, resource allocation, etc? And do you really think that those factors don’t have any influence on the productivity of the workers who make the product?

A bad CEO can make everyone unhappy and grind a business to a halt. Surely a good one can do the opposite, even if that just means facilitating an environment in which key workers can thrive and do their best work.

Edit: None of that is to say Sam Altman is a good or bad CEO. I have no idea. I also disagree with you about iOS, it’s not perfect but it does the job fine. I don’t feel like I’m eating glass when I use it.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#896

Post by mise_en_place »

mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

I'm sorry but data scientist is just not the same as a software engineer, or a real scientist. At best you are a tourist in our industry.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#897

Post by tim333 »

mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

>If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics

Any evidence he's unethical? Or just dislike him?

He actually seems to have done more practical stuff like experimenting with UBI, to mitigate AI risk than most people.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#898

Post by peterclary »

adharmad wrote: post #361
crop_rotation wrote: post #60

The board seems truly incompetent here and looking at the member list it doesn't seem very surprising. A competent board should have asked for legal and professional advice before taking a drastic step like this. Instead the board thought it was a boxing match and tried to deliver a knockout punch before the market closes with blunt language. This might be the most incompetent board for an organisation of this size.

It was complete amateur hour for the board. But that aside, how did so many clueless folks who understand neither the technology, or the legalese, nor have enough intelligence/acumen to forsee the immediate impact of their actions happen to be on the board of one of the most important tech companies?

Pretty sure that Sutskever understands the technology, and it looks like he persuaded the others.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#899

Post by croes »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #827
mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

On the other hand having virtually the whole staff being willing to follow him shows they clearly think very highly of him. That kind of loyalty is pretty wild when you think about how significant being a part of OPENAI means at this point.

Who knows if they follow him or just don't want to work for OpenAI anymore.

That are different things.

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