Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

921–930 of 946 posts

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

#921

Post by robocat »

robocat wrote: post #592
dang wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've merged quite a few! but not all, because (1) to some extent there are distinct ongoing subplots, and (2) it's too big a mess to control. If you or anyone want to know how we handle this, here you go... Once or twice a year, a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) hits HN that isn't just one big story, but an entire sequence of big stories. A saga, even! This is one. With these we can't do what we usually do, which is have…

> avalanched by sneelessness sp.: senselessness (I guess since it appears to be a Googlewhack). But I'll be honest I think the word sneelessness covers this whole FUBAR better!

Update - I'm wrong. In the comment dang says

  each twist with Significant New Information (SNI)—but to downweight the ones that are sneeless
So it definitely isn't a typo for senselessness. I should have known dang types what they mean!

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

#922

Post by aiman3 »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #911
aiman3 wrote: post #902

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ideally it is to have greater access to resources by taking investment money and paying for top talent with profit sharing agreements, in order to ultimately further the goals of the nonprofit.

the outcome of this for-profit subsidiary is already showing in real-time, they just want to take everything from openai into for-profit for their own benefit, that is a fraud by definition, which means taking something is not theirs. one good example is Flash mob in LA, yours belongs to me, same culture, same behavior. to your "Ideally world", its very simple, Microsoft could simply just donate $10b to openai, they can share the open-sourced model.

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

#923

Post by bmitc »

jxi wrote: post #329
lupire wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tasha Macauley is an electrical engineer who founder of two tech companies, besides having a cute husband. And the other guy is the founder of Quora and Poe.

She only founded one, Fellow Robots, and that "company" went nowhere. There's no product info and the company page shut down. She was CEO of GeoSim for a short 3 years, and this "company" also looks like it's going nowhere. She has quite a track record of short tenures and failures.

What's up with Loopt and Worldcoin?

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

#924

Post by ummonk »

bnralt wrote: post #828
rightbyte wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a decision that destroyed billions of dollars worth of brand value and good will I mean, there seem to be this cult following around Sam Altman on HN and Twitter. But do the common user care like at all? What sane user would want a shitcoin CEO in charge of a product they depend on?

I’ve said this before, but it’s quite possible to think that Altman isn’t great, and that he’s better than the board and his replacement. The new CEO of OpenAI said he’d rather Nazi’s take over the world forever than risk AI alignment failure, and said he couldn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise[1]. I don’t think people appreciate how far some of these people have gone off the deep end. [1] https://twitte…

"End of all value" is pretty clearly referring to the extinction of the human species, not mere "AI alignment failure". The context is talking about x-risk.

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

#925

Post by danans »

robertlagrant wrote: post #749
danans wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after. > That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power. Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it…

> Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after. The rule of thumb is it lasts up to three generations, and only for very very few people. They are also, for everything they buy, and everyone they employ, paying tax. Redistribution isn't the goal; h…

>> Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.

> I think this is a non sequitur.

I mean after someone can afford all the needs, wants, and luxuries of life, the utility of any money they spend is primarily power.

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

#926

Post by cma »

kmlevitt wrote: post #905
cma wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you do that kind of thing internally though or against the org with an outside interest it isn't surprising that it wouldn't go over well. Though that isn't confirmed yet as they never made a concrete allegation.

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

#927

Post by sumedh »

nmfisher wrote: post #782
sumedh wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which line specifically says they will keep AGI out of the hands of “big tech companies”.

“Big tech companies” was in quotation marks because it’s a journalistic term, not a direct quotation from their charter. But the intention was precisely that - just read the charter. Or if you want it directly from the founders, read this interview and count how many times they refer to Google https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinato...

Look at the date of that article, those ideas look good on paper but then reality kicks in and you have to spend lot of money on computing, who funds that, its the "Big tech companies".

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

#928

Post by freejazz »

rightbyte wrote: post #920
freejazz wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's trying to say that AI-non-alignment would be a greater threat to humanity than having Nazis take over the world. It's perfectly clear.

Which means self-hosted AIs is worse than Nazis kicking in your door, since any self-hosted AI can be modified by a non big-tech aligned user. He is dehumanizing programmers that can stop their sole reign on the AI throne, by labeling them as Nazis. Especially FOSS AI which by definition can't be "aligned" to his interests.

I'm not reading that at all

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

#929

Post by k12sosse »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #487

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…

MBS? Seriously? How badly do you need the money.. good luck not getting hacked to pieces when your AI insults his holiness

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

#930

Post by campbel »

cyrnel wrote: post #410
campbel wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! I've done eng "bake-offs" as well, where a few folks / teams work on a problem in isolation then we compare and contrast after. Good fun!

Not good fun when it's done in secret. That happened to me, and I was gaslit when I discovered the competing git repo. Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.

Yeah that sounds toxic, this was done with everyones knowledge
Post reply on HN