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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

#971

Post by foooorsyth »

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…

> 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.

This is an absurd retcon. Google won because they had the best search. Ask Jeeves and AltaVista and Yahoo had poor search results.

Now Google produces garbage, but not in 2004.

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

#972

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

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

This is just everyone swallowing the crap Sam Altman drops as truth.

I’d guess this sort of narcissist behavior is what got him canned to begin with. Good riddance.

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

#973

Post by s3p »

soufron wrote: post #937

But what about the legal responsability of Microsoft and investors there? To explain, it's the board of the non-profit that ousted @sama . Microsoft is not a member of the non-profit. Microsoft is "only" a shareholder of its for-profit subsidiary - even for 10B. Basically, what happened is a change of control in the non-profit majority shareholder of a company Microsoft invested in. But not a change of control in the…

I don't see any citations provided by you showing legal threats, though.

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

#974

Post by chucke1992 »

v3ss0n wrote: post #878
d-z-m wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Machine learning, data science, Deep learning= backend Plotting, Charting ,visualization, = frontend

Running matplotlib is not doing frontend...

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

#975

Post by Turing_Machine »

soufron wrote: post #962
bob_theslob646 wrote: post #942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out?" Please think about this. Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. If the relationships are what kept OpenAI from always being on top and they removed that from the company, corpora…

Well, once again, then it's Satya's mistake to have allowed the representative of an independant third party entity become the public face of a company he invested in. OpenAI might have wasted the 10B of Microsoft. But whose fault is it in the first place? It's Microsoft's fault to have invested it in the first place.

Regardless of whether or not it was a "mistake" (I don't think it was... OpenAI is so far ahead of the competition that it's not even funny), the fact remains that a) Microsoft has dumped in tons of money that they want to get back and b) Microsoft has a tremendous amount of clout, in that they're providing the compute power that runs the whole shebang.

While I'm not privy to the contracts that were signed, what happens if Nadella sends a note to the OpenAI board that reads, roughly, "Bring back Altman or I'm gonna turn the lights off"?

Nadella is probably fairly pissed off to begin with. I can't imagine he appreciates being blindsided like this.

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

#976

Post by skohan »

jstummbillig wrote: post #865
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…

> While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama. It's hard to put into words, that do not seem contradictory: GPT-4 is barely good enough to provide tremendous value. For what I need, no other model is passing that bar, which makes them not slightly worse but entirely unusable. But again, it's not that GPT-4 is great, and I would most certainly go to w…

What is your use-case? I have not worked with them extensively, but both PALM and LLAMA seem as good as GPT-4 for most tasks I have thrown at them

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

#977

Post by s3p »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #860
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Loyalty is not earned, it is more like 'snared' or 'captured'. Local guy had all the loyalty of his employees, almost a hero to them. Got bought out. He took all the money for himself, left the employees with nothing. Many got laid off. Result? Still loyal. Still talk of him as a hero. Even though he obviously screwed them, cared nothing for them, betrayed them. Loyalty is strange. Born of charisma and empty talk tha…

Loyalty is absolutely earned.

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

#978

Post by Turing_Machine »

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…

> Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business.

The history of technology is littered with the corpses of companies that concentrated solely on the "technical side of the business".

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

#979

Post by s3p »

brigadier132 wrote: post #62
gkoberger wrote: post #24

I'd bet money Satya was a driver of this reversal. I genuinely can't believe the board didn't see this coming. I think they could have won in the court of public opinion if their press release said they loved Sam but felt like his skills and ambitions diverged from their mission. But instead, they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely. I hope Sam comes back. He'll make a lot more money if he doesn't, but I…

I bet it was multifaceted. By firing Sam this way they nuked their ability to raise funds because anyone investing in the "for profit" subsidiary would have to do so with the understanding that the non-profit could undermine them at a whim. Also, all the employees are being paid with PPUs which is a share in future profits, and now they find out that actually, the company doesn't care about making profit! A lot of to…

>Also, all the employees are being paid with PPUs which is a share in future profits, and now they find out that actually, the company doesn't care about making profit!

Maybe. But on their investing page it literally says to consider an OpenAI investment as a "donation" as it is very high risk and will likely not pay off. Everyone knew this going into it.

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

#980

Post by croes »

bob_theslob646 wrote: post #942
soufron wrote: post #937

But what about the legal responsability of Microsoft and investors there? To explain, it's the board of the non-profit that ousted @sama . Microsoft is not a member of the non-profit. Microsoft is "only" a shareholder of its for-profit subsidiary - even for 10B. Basically, what happened is a change of control in the non-profit majority shareholder of a company Microsoft invested in. But not a change of control in the…

"Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out?" Please think about this. Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. If the relationships are what kept OpenAI from always being on top and they removed that from the company, corpora…

And I thought AI is about the brain and not the face.
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