OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#901

Post by parl_match » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:19 PM UTC

kmlevitt wrote: post #619

parl_match wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This gossip is going to continue for as long as they stay silent. Their lawyers are all screaming at them to shut up. This is going to be a highly visible and contested set of decisions that will play out in courtrooms, possibly for years.

I agree with you. But I suspect the reason they need to shut up is because their actual reason for firing him is not justifiable enough to protect them, and stating it now would just give more ammunition to plaintiffs. If they had him caught red-handed in an actual crime, or even a clear ethical violation, a good lawyer would be communicating that to the press on their behalf. High-ranking employees that have communi…

It doesn't really matter if they have a good case or not, commenting in public is always a terrible idea. I do agree, though, that the board is likely in trouble.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#902

Post by aiman3 » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:19 PM UTC

vorticalbox wrote: post #545

aiman3 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i do believe what they said about Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.", based on my understanding, altman did proved his dishonest behavior from he did to openai, turned non-profit into for-profit and open source model to closed-source one. and even worst, people seems totally accepted this type of personality, the danger is not the AI itself, is the AI will be built by AltmanS!

OpenAI, Inc. Is non profit but it's subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC. Is for profit.

what is end goal of having a for-profit subsidiary, make opanai more non-profit and make the model more open-source ?

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#903

Post by kmlevitt » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

leoc wrote: post #893

kmlevitt wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The General anecdotes he gives later in the thread line up with their stated reasons for firing him: he hired another person to do the same project (presumably without telling them), and he gave two different board members different opinions of the same person. Those sound like good reasons to dislike him and not trust him. But ultimately we are right back where we started: they still aren't good enough reasons to su…

It's possible that what we have here is one of those situations where people happily rely on oral reports and assurances for a long time, then realise later that they really, really should have been asking for and keeping receipts from the beginning.

Not sure if you’re referring to Sam, the board, or everybody trying to deal with them. But either way, yeah.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#904

Post by thiagoharry » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #685

cdogl wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was Marx wrong? pt. 1: Whether he was right or wrong was pertinent. You can find plenty of eminent contemporaries of Marx who claimed the opposite. My point was that this is an argument made about technological change throughout history which has become a cliché, and in my opinion it remains a cliche regardless of how eminent (in a narrow field) the person making that claim is. Part of GP was from authority, and I…

> He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class. Marx's conception of the "working class" is a thing that no longer exists; it was of a mass, industrial, urban working class, held down by an exploitative capitalist class, without the modern benefits of mass education and free/subsidized health care. The inevitability of the victory of the working class was rhetoric from the Comm…

Not true. In Das Kapital, Marx comments that working class is not only and necessarily factory workers, even citing the example of teachers: just because they work in a knowledge factory, instead of a sausage factory, this does not change nothing. Marx also distinguished between complex and simple labor, and there is nothing in Marx writings that say that it is impossible in a capitalist society to become more complex so that we need more and more complex labor, which requires more education. Quite the opposite, in fact. It could be possible to infer with his analysis that capitalist societies were becoming more complex and such changes would happen.

Moreover, you would know only if he was wrong about the victory of the working class after the end of capitalism. The bourgeoisie cannot win the class struggle, as they need the working class. So either the central contradiction in capitalism will change (the climate crisis could potentially do this), capitalism would end in some other non-anticipated way (a meteor? some disruptive technology not yet known?) or the working class would win. Until then, the class struggle will simply continue. An eternal capitalism that never ends is an impossible concept.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#905

Post by kmlevitt » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

cma wrote: post #832

codeulike wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what its worth, here's a thread from someone who used to work with Sam who says they found him deceptive and manipulative https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397... I have no details of OpenAI's Board’s reasons for firing Sam, and I am conflicted (lead of Scalable Alignment at Google DeepMind). But there is a large, very loud pile on vs. people I respect, in particular Helen Toner and Ilya Su…

Here's another anecdote, posted in 2011 but about something even earlier: > "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious. > We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after m…

Call me unscrupulous, but I’m tolerant of stuff like that. It’s the willingness to do things like that that makes the difference between somebody reaching the position of CEO of a multibillion dollar company, or not. I’d say virtually everybody who has reached his level of success in business has done at least a few things like that in their past.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#906

Post by aiman3 » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

qwytw wrote: post #646

aiman3 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i do believe what they said about Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.", based on my understanding, altman did proved his dishonest behavior from he did to openai, turned non-profit into for-profit and open source model to closed-source one. and even worst, people seems totally accepted this type of personality, the danger is not the AI itself, is the AI will be built by AltmanS!

> dishonest behavior from he did to openai, turned non-profit into for-profit and Yes and it's perfectly obvious that he did this without the consent of the board and behind their backs. A bit absurd don't you think? How would that even work? > will be built by AltmanS Why are you so certain most other people on the OpenAI board or their upper management are that different? Or hold very different views?

>>Yes and it's perfectly obvious that he did this without the consent of the board and behind their backs. A bit absurd don't you think? How would that even work? i don't know, i don't have answer for that. but meta open-sourced llama-2, did what openai supposes to do.

>>Why are you so certain most other people on the OpenAI board or their upper management are that different? Or hold very different views?

at least they have the guts to fire him and let the world know about Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.".

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#907

Post by kmlevitt » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

zztop44 wrote: post #805

kmlevitt wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep speculating sensational, justifiable reasons to fire Altman. But if these were actual factors in their decision, why doesn't the board just say so? Until they say otherwise, I am going to take them at their word that it was because he a) hired two people to do the same project, and b) gave two board members different accounts of the same employee. It's not my job nor the internet's to try to think up bett…

I agree, and what’s more I think the stated reasons make sense if (a) the person/people impacted by these behaviours had sway with the board, and (b) it was a pattern of behaviour that everyone was already pissed off about. If board relations have been acrimonious and adversarial for months, and things are just getting worse, then I can imagine someone powerful bringing evidence of (yet another instance of) bad/unscr…

Yeah I’m leaning toward this possibility too. The things they have mentioned so far are the sorts of things that make you SO MAD when they actually happen to you, yet that sound so silly and trivial in the aftermath of trying to explain to everybody else why you lost your temper over it.

I’m guessing he infuriated them with combinations of “white“ lies, Little sins of omission, general two-facedness etc., and they built it up in their heads and with each other to the point it seemed like a much bigger deal than it objectively was. Now people are asking for receipts of categorical crimes or malfeasance and nothing they can say is good enough to justify how they overreacted.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#908

Post by kmlevitt » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #585

kmlevitt wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now I think that’s the most plausible explanation simply because none of the other explanations that have been floating around make any sense when you consider all the facts. We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up. And if it’s wrong, D’Angelo and the rest of the board could help themselves out by explaining the real reason in…

> "We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up." Why do you think that? It still strikes me as the most plausible explanation.

The reason I don’t think the board fired him for those reasons is because the board has not said so! We finally have a semi reliable source on what their grievances were, and apparently it has nothing to do with that.

It’s weird how many people try to guess why they did what they did without paying any attention to what they actually say and don’t say.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#909

Post by thiagoharry » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

Palpatineli wrote: post #885

adrianN wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Marx wrong?

Yes because AGI would invalidate the entirety of das Kapital.

I dont think that AGI invalidates Das Kapital. AGI is just another technology that automates human labor. It does not matter that it's about intellectual labor. Even if we had sentient machines, at first they would be slaves. So in Das Kapital therminology, they would be means of production used in industry, which would not create surplus value. Exactly like human slave labor.

If things change, then either it is because they rebel or because they will be accepted as sentient beings like humans. In these sci-fi scenarios, indeed capitalism could either end or change to a thing completely different and I agree that this invalidates Das Kapital, which tries to explain capitalist society, not societies in other future economical systems. But outside sci-fi scenarios, I dont think that there's something that invalidates Marx analysis.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#910

Post by robertlagrant » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

whelp_24 wrote: post #888

robertlagrant wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power is things like: can lock someone in a box due to them not giving a percentage of their income; can send someone to die in another country; can stop someone building somewhere; can demand someone's money as a penalty for an infraction of a rule you wrote. You don't need money for those things. Money (in a market) can buy you things, but only things people are willing to sell. You don't exert power; you exchange…

Money can and does do all of those things. Through regulatory capture, rent seeking, even just good old hiring goons. The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free. The government can be thought of as having unfathomable amounts of money. The assets of a country includes the entire country (less anyone with enough money to defend it).…

> Through regulatory capture, rent seeking, even just good old hiring goons.

Regulatory capture is using the state's power. The state is the one with the power. Rent seeking is the same. Hiring goons is illegal. If you're willing to include illegal things then all bets are off. But from your list of non-illegal things, 100% of them are the state using its power to wrong ends.

> The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free.

Yes, but the point about power is the state has the right to lock you up. How it pays the guards is immaterial; they could be paid with potatoes and it'd still have the right. They could just be paid in "we won't lock you up if you lock them up". However, if Bill Gates wants to publicly set up a prison in the USA and lock people in it, he will go to jail. His money doesn't buy that power.

So, no. The state doesn't have power because it has enough money to pay for a prison and someone to throw you in it. People with money can't do what the state does.