Who is Sam?
It was Microsoft's voice generation tool from the 90s. You can play with it here: https://www.tetyys.com/SAPI4/
no really who is Sam, and how did he get here? Do u know?
We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
981–990 of 1001 posts
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#982If OpenAI remains a 501(c)(3) charity, then any employee of Microsoft on the board will have a fiduciary duty to advance the mission of the charity, rather than the business needs of Microsoft. There are obvious conflicts of interest here. I don't expect the IRS to be a fan of this arrangement.
I don't get the drama with "conflict of interests"... Aren't board members generally (always?) in representation of major shareholders? Isn't it obvious that shareholders have interests that are likely to be in conflict with each other or even the own organization? Thats why board members are supposed to check each other, right?
OpenAI is a non profit and the board members are not allowed to own shares in the for profit.
That means the remaining conflicts are when the board has to make a decisions between growing the profit or furthering the mission statement. I wouldn't trust the new board appointed by investors to ever make the correct decision in these cases, and they already kicked out the "academic" board members with the power to stop them.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#983If OpenAI remains a 501(c)(3) charity, then any employee of Microsoft on the board will have a fiduciary duty to advance the mission of the charity, rather than the business needs of Microsoft. There are obvious conflicts of interest here. I don't expect the IRS to be a fan of this arrangement.
Whenever there's an obvious conflict, assume it's not enforced or difficult to litigate or has relatively irrelevant penalties. Experts/lawyers who have a material stake in getting this right have signed off on it. Many (if not most) people with enough status to be on the board of a fortune 500 company tend to also be on non-profit boards. We can go out on a limb and suppose the mission of the nonprofit is not their…
> Experts/lawyers who have a material stake in getting this right have signed off on it.
How does that work when we're talking about non-profit motives? The lawyers are paid by the companies benefitting from these conflicts, so how is it at all reassuring to hear that the people who benefit from the conflict signed off on it?
> We can go out on a limb and suppose the mission of the nonprofit is not their top priority, and yet they continue on unscathed.
That's the concern. They've just replaced people who "maybe" cared about the mission statement with people who you've correctly identified care more about profit growth than the nonprofit mission.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#984Some perspective ... One developer (Ilya) vs. One businessman (Sam) -> Sam wins Hundreds of developers threaten to quit vs. Board of Directors (biz) refuse to budge -> Developers win From the outside it looks like developers held the power all along ... which is how it should be.
seems like the union of developers is stronger than the company itself. hence why unions are so frowned upon by big tech corporate leadership
And yet, this union was threatening to move to a company without unions.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#985I was hopeful for a private-industry approach to AI safety, but it looks unlikely now, and due to the slow pace of state investment in public AI R&D, all approaches to AI safety look unlikely now. Safety research on toy models will continue to provide developments, but the industry expectation appears to be that emergent properties puts a low ceiling on what can be learned about safety without researching on cutting…
There are no emergent properties, just a linear increase in knowledge that can be retrieved. - It can't plan - It can't do arithmetic - It can't reason - It can approximately retrieve knowledge with a natural language query (there are some issues with this, but it's very good) - It can encode data into natural languages and other modalities I'm not worried about it, I am worried about how badly people have misunderst…
I don't think AI safetyists are worried about any model they have created so far. But if we are able to go from letter-soup "ooh look that almost seems like a sentence, SOTA!" to GPT4 in 20 years, where will go in the next 20? And what is the point they are becoming powerful. Let alone all the crazy ways people are trying to augment them with RAG, function calls, get them to run on less computer power and so on.
Also being better at humans at everything is not a prerequisite for danger. Probably a scary moment is when it could look at a C (or Rust, C++, whatever) codebase, find an exploit, and then use that exploit as a worm. If it can do that on everyday hardware not top end GPUs (either because the algorithms are made more efficient, or every iPhone has a tensor unit).
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#986If OpenAI remains a 501(c)(3) charity, then any employee of Microsoft on the board will have a fiduciary duty to advance the mission of the charity, rather than the business needs of Microsoft. There are obvious conflicts of interest here. I don't expect the IRS to be a fan of this arrangement.
The non-profit could sell off its interest in the for-profit company and use the money for AGI research.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#987Larry Summers? Microsoft? Alignment? Bye, bye humanity.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#988At the end of the day, we still don't know what exactly happened and probably, never will. However, it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya). I think the tensions were brewing for quite a while, as it's evident from an article written even before GPT-3 [1]. > Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressu…
One funny thing about this mess is that "Team Helen" has never mentioned anything about safety, and Emmett said "The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety". The reason everyone thinks it's about safety seems largely because a lot of e/acc people on Twitter keep bringing it up as a strawman. Of course, it might end up that it really was about safety in the end, but for now I still haven't s…
>The story about Sam trying to get board control and the board retaliating seems more plausible given what's actually happened.
What story? Any link?
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#989OpenAI's Future and Viability - OpenAI has damaged their brand and lost trust, but may still become a hugely successful company if they build great products - OpenAI looks stronger now with a more professional board, but has fundamentally transformed into a for-profit focused on commercializing LLMs - OpenAI still retains impressive talent and technology assets and could pivot into a leading AI provider if managed we…
Many are still going to use this; few will bother to ponder and break the event down like this.
Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
#990With Sam coming back as CEO, hasn't OpenAI board proven that it has lost its function? Regardless of who is in the board, they won't be able to exercise one of the most fundamental of their rights, firing the CEO, because Sam has proven that he is unfireable. Now, Sam can do however he pleases, whether it is lying, not reporting, etc. To be clear, I don't claim that Sam did, or will, lie, or misbehave.
OpenAI workers has shown their plain support to their CEO by threatening to follow him wherever he wants, I personaly think their collective judgement on him is worth more than any rumors
Money indeed is worth more, also the only thing that is easy to measure during crisis.