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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

#901

Post by jkaplowitz »

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.

Which news stories mentioned that virtually the whole staff was leaving? I saw a bunch of departures announced and others rumored to be upcoming, but no discussion of what percentage of the company was leaving.

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

#902

Post by mise_en_place »

rcbdev wrote: post #893
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…

For me, anecdotally, it was moreso the arrogance that was a major putoff. When I was a junior SWE I knew I sucked, and tried as hard as I could to learn from much more experienced developers. Many senior developers mentored me, I was never arrogant. Many data scientists on the other hand are extremely arrogant. They often treat SWE and DevOps as beneath them, like servants.

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

#903

Post by YetAnotherNick »

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

Hearing Altman's talks I don't think it's that black and white. He genuinely cares about safety from X risk but he doesn't believe that scaling transformers would bring us to AGI or any of its risk. And there in lies the core disagreement with Ilya who wants to stop the current progress unless they solve alignment.

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

#904

Post by qwytw »

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…

> The usability of iOS is so horrible that I just can't understand how people decide to use iPhones and eat glass for the sake of the brand

You do understand that other people might different preferences and opinions which are not somehow inherently inferior to those you hold.

> comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts

Current MacBooks are extremely competitive and in certain aspects they were fairly competitive for the last 15+ years.

> but neither did squat for the technical part of the business.

Right... MacOS being an Unix based OS is whose achievement exactly? I guess it was just random chance this this happened?

> That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore

Focusing on the business side might be more vital than ever now with all the competition you mentioned they just might be left behind in a few years if the money taps are turned off.

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

#905

Post by Cyberfit »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #155
airstrike wrote: post #57

This makes sense. The board thinks they're calling the shots, but the reality is the people with the money are the ones calling the shots, always. Boards are just appointed by shareholders aka investors aka capital holders to do their bidding. The capped-profit / non-profit structure muddles that a little bit, but the reality is that entity can't survive without the funding that goes into the for-profit piece And if…

A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders. No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor av…

A company is just legalese + people. And people are notoriously for-profit, especially in this day and age.

The board can maintain control of the legal aspects (such as the org itself), but in the end, people are much more important.

Organizations are easy to duplicate. Persons, less so.

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

#906

Post by krater23 »

0x142857 wrote: post #814
slowhadoken wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else notice how many techies are on Twitter but still badmouth Twitter?

you can't critisize the government if you live in the country?

It's easier to leave twitter than your county

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

#907

Post by avital »

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…

Greg had been writing deep systems code every day for many many house for the past few years.

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

#908

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

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…

The WSJ take is this second-guessing is investor-driven. But, investors didn't-- and legally couldn't(?)-- buy the nonprofit, and until now were adamant that the nonprofit controlled the for-profit vehicle. Events are calling those assurances into doubt, and this hybrid governance structure doesn't work. So now investors are going to circumvent governance controls that were necessary for investors to even be involved in the first place? Amateur hour all the way around.

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

#909

Post by latexr »

tim333 wrote: post #897
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.

That “experimenting with UBI” is indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam. It took from people, and he described it with the words that define a Ponzi scheme. That project isn’t “mitigating AI risk”, it pivoted to distinguish between AI and human generated content, a problem created by his other company, by continuing to collect your biometric data.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

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

#910

Post by jacquesm »

tim333 wrote: post #897
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.

I think the UBI experiment was quite unethical in many ways and I believe it was Altman's brainchild.

https://www.businessinsider.nl/y-combinator-basic-income-tes...

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