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OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

theverge.com

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

#911

Post by jacquesm »

latexr wrote: post #909
tim333 wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/wor…

Yes, that's exactly the one I was thinking about when unethical came up in this context. And I've been saying that from day #1, the way that is structured is just not ok.

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

#912

Post by jacquesm »

xivzgrev wrote: post #727
meetpateltech wrote: post #568

Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return. The deadline has passed and mass resignations expected if a deal isn’t reached ASAP https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1726055095341875545

I am just baffled for so many reasons. Why is the board reversing course? They said they lost confidence in Altman - that’s true whether lots of people quit or not. So it was bullshit Why did the board not foresee people quitting en masse? I’m sure some of it is loyalty to Sam and Greg but it’s also revolting at how they were suddenly fired Why did the interim CEO not warn Ilya about the above? Sure it’s a promotion…

Some of those board picks make zero sense to me.

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

#913

Post by rvba »

rurban wrote: post #806
adam_arthur wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty incredible incompetence all around if true. From the board for not anticipating a backlash and caving immediately... from Microsoft for investing into an endeavor that is purportedly chartered as non-profit and governed by nobodies who can sink it on a whim. And having 0 hard influence on the direction despite a large ownership stake Why bother with a non-profit model that is surreptitiously for profit? The wh…

> It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO. This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results. Ilja can follow Google's Bard by holding it back until they have countermodels trained to remove conflict…

When google came out it had the best algothitm backed by good hardware (as far as I understand often off the shelf hardware - anyway the page simply "just worked"). Difference between google and competitors was like night and day when it came out. It gained marker share very quickly because once you started using it - you didnt have any incentive to go back.

Now google search has a lot of problems, much better competition. But seriously you probably dont understand how it was years ago.

Also I thought that in ML still the best algorhitms win, since all the big companies have money. If someone came and developed a "pagerank-equivalent" for AI that is better than the current algs, customerd would switch quickly since there is no loyalty.

On a side note: Microsoft is playing the game very smart by adding AI to their products what makes you stick to them.

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

#914

Post by jacquesm »

x86x87 wrote: post #701
salad-tycoon wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been reading up on the insight offered up on this site. Seems like a lot of these board members have deep ties around various organizations, governmental bodies, etc. and that seems entirely normal and probable. However, prior to chatgpt and dalle we, the public , had only been allowed brief glimpses into the current state of AI (eg Look this robot can sound like a human and book a reservation for you at the restaura…

I don't buy the whole the board is for safety and Sam is pushing too fast argument. This is just classic politics and backstabbing unless there is some serious wrongdoing in the middle that left the board with no option to fire the CEO.

Agreed. 'Who benefits' is a good question to ask in situations like these and it looks like a palace coup to me rather than anything with a solid set of reasons behind it. But I'll keep my reservations until it is all transparent (assuming it ever will be).

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

#915

Post by alfonsodev »

andy_ppp wrote: post #833
mitrevf wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The codebase of an LLM is the size of a high school exam project. There is little to no coding in machine learning. That is the sole reason why they are overvalued - any company can write its own in a flash. You only require hardware to train and inference.

If it's so simple why does Chat GPT 4 perform better than almost everything else...

I think it's about having massive data pipelines and process to clean huge amounts of data, increasing signal noise ratio, and then scale as other are saying having enough gpu power to serve millions of users. When Stanford researchers trained Alpaca[1][2] the hack was to use GPT itself to generate the training data, if I'm not mistaken.

But with compromises, as it was like applying loose compression on an already compressed data set.

If any other organisation could invest the money in a high quality data pipeline then the results should be as good, at least that my understanding.

[1] https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html [2] https://newatlas.com/technology/stanford-alpaca-cheap-gpt/

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

#916

Post by rvba »

medler wrote: post #590
meetpateltech wrote: post #568

Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return. The deadline has passed and mass resignations expected if a deal isn’t reached ASAP https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1726055095341875545

Really weird phrasing in this tweet. The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.” Edit: an update to the verge article sheds some more light, but I still consider it very sus since it’s coming from the…

Maybe they used the old Soviet Russia trick / good old KGB methods to seek out those who supported Altman. Now the board has a list of his backers - and they will slowly fire them one by one later. "Give me the man and I will give you the case against him".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_g...

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

#917

Post by MrMan »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #151
skygazer wrote: post #26

Man, the board already looked reckless and incompetent, but this solidifies the appearance. You can do crazy ill-advised things, but if you unwaveringly commit, we’ll always wonder if you’re secretly a genius. But when you immediately backtrack, we’ll know you were a fool all along.

Dude, everyone already thinks the board did a crazy ill-advised thing. They're about to be the board of like a 5 person or so company if they double down and commit. To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness. A bigger sign of weakness in my opinion is people who commit to a shitty idea just because they said it first, despite all…

[dead]

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

#918

Post by Davidzheng »

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.

It's not even necessary that he is unethical. The fact is that the structure of openai is designed so that the board has unilateral power to do extreme shit for their cause. And if they can't successfully do extreme shit without the company falling apart and the money/charisma swaying all the people there's no hope for this nonprofit ai benefiting humanity to have ever worked--which you might say is obvious but this was their mission

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

#919

Post by matthewsinclair »

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…

I see a lot of work done by data scientists and a lot of work done by what I would call “data science flavoured software engineers”. I’ll take the SWE kind any day of the week. Most (not all, of course!) data scientists have an old school “it works on my machine” mentality that just doesn’t cut it when it comes to modern multi-disciplinary teaming. DVCS is the exception rather than the rule. They rarely want to use PMs or UI/UX, and the quality of the software is not (typically) up to production grade. They’re often blinding smart, there’s no doubt about that. But smart and wise are not the same thing.

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

#920

Post by hcks »

mise_en_place wrote: post #896
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.

Pathetic gatekeeping. Sorry but software engineer are not the same as real engineers.
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