Meta should do a ChatGPT clone just like they did a Twitter clone.

Has the same lack of capitalisation as Sam Altman's message, wonder why

Yeah, this is not a good sign for OpenAI. Or at least not for those who appreciate what OpenAI was working to become.

Remember folks, the trigger point that makes MS's investment worthless is reaching AGI point as that then triggers the charter rules to take the IP back out of commercial products....that is the crux of the firing...one board faction felt they had reached AGI and the people that were forced our or left felt they had not yet reached AGI.

From my brief dealings with SA at Loopt in 2005, SA just does not have a dishonest bone in his body.(I got a brief look at the Loopt pitch deck due to interviewing for a mobile dev position at Loopt just after Sprint invested).

If you want an angel invest play, find out the new VCfund firm Sam is setting up for hard research.

What an unbelievable turn of events! To the outside observer, OpenAI is one of the most successful, well-oiled machines, shipping nearly weekly and doing an unbelievably good job marketing itself. Clearly, there's a lot of turmoil going on behind the scenes.

One should consider the fact that in this case the ex CEO is independently wealthy so clearly wasn’t doing it for the money. In addition he started it with partners as originally as a non profit. Finally he didn’t own any equity in the company despite being one of its core team and founding members, in addition to its very public face. How many of us in the same position as him could be controlled given that the only thing one has to lose is their ability to have influence over the other board members and he seems to have lost that anyway.

Given Greg seems to not have known about the board meeting there's a good chance Mira didn't either. Is she next?

Despite what the charter says, why is OpenAI called OpenAI and not OpenAGI? Is that at the core of this issue?

Is this like Star Trek where the mission automatically ends if you lose enough of the bridge crew?

Greg is the one who announced GPT-4. Sam enabled Greg and vice-versa.

The next AI winter may have just begun...

Irrelevant but it struck me how both him and Sam Altman write in all lowercase.

Quitting like that makes it seem like Greg already knew what was brewing, whatever the conflict was and it came to a head and he made his call. So not a total surprise to him, at least as far as the backstory goes.

Just hope this will bring more "Open" into "AI.com"

This Board has to go.

Finally some non-Elon-related drama in tech happening.

this keeps getting better and better

Maybe something to do with this?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

I don't like the direction this is heading in at all...

Jesus. I saw he was "demoted" but he's totally out now, right?

His last sentence is the main hint. Disagreement over dangers of AGI discoveries and how to handle I’d guess.

1 qu17.

disappointing @veec, with this mindset you'll never be in three comma club. /s

You still need it to check Silicon Valley references.

> carefully crafted resignation letter

Are you trolling, the letter is short and all lowercase lol

Maybe he used ChatGPT to write the letter.

I mean AGI

Our stupid monkey brains are evolved to work in a primitive, human centric way, we always need a "figure", a "leader" to look up to, we can't comprehend that many people can be involved in something, that doesn't satisfy our primate brains need to follow or worship someone.

Human motivations and effort are like Brownian motion completely stochastic and hard to direct in any one direction to make any significant impact .

A effective leader whether it is Musk, Jobs, Altman, Gandhi, Mandela (or Hitler for that matter) has the unique to skill to be able to direct everyone in a common direction efficiently like a superconducting material.

They are not individually contributing like say a Nobel laureate doing theoretical research. They get accolades they get is because they were able to direct many other people to achieve a very hard objective and keep them motivated and focused on the common vision, That is rare and difficult to do.

In the case of Altman, yes there were 1000s researchers, programmers who did the all the actual heavy lifting of getting OpenAI where it is today.

However without his ability and vision to get funding none of them would be doing what they are doing today at OpenAI.

All those people would not work a day more if there is no pay, would not be able train any model without resources. A CEO's first priotity is to make that happen by selling that vision to investors, Secondly he has to sell the vision to all these researchers to leave their cushy academic and large company jobs to work in small unproven startup and create an environment they can thrive in their roles. He has done both very well.

Or their first real AGI could have ousted him.

>what was strange about it?

There's 8 billion people on the planet nowadays, of those, about 7.9 billion would not lift a finger if there's no material benefit to them. Hence why it's strange.

Just look at how this news is doing on reddit (a service i conflate a little more with the general public than hacker news which learns towards silicon valley technology) and you can easily see the truth of your statement.

OpenAI exists both as a nonprofit and, for several years now, as a for-profit company [1] that has taken billions of dollars in investment. It needs to make billions of dollars to return to investors just as much as any other for-profit company does.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

That's what I thought.

OpenAI's statement implies he was aware of the demotion... but his statement seems to imply he wasn't.

I guess the most likely situation is that they put out the press release, told him (or vice versa) and it took him a bit to decide to quit.

Maybe it didn't. Maybe it's been pushing on this for a bit and Altman kept paying lip service to it or made commitments in their eyes, and those weren't being followed through on

Honestly it could be something as simple and sordid as a credible sexual assault allegation that he lied to the board about, or just some plain old fashioned embezzlement.

Hope they fire the person that forced verified phone numbers on new accounts.

> After learning today’s news,

Which news is that?

many things are happening

what a day

Holy shit

There's no job quitting note like an all lower-case job quitting note.

Here is Helen Toner's resumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/details/edu...

I am genuinely flabbergasted as to how she ended up on the board. How does this happen?

I can't even find anything about fellow board member Tasha McCauley...

Oh man. https://twitter.com/apples_jimmy/status/1725615804631392637?...

Really wonder what this is all about.

Edit: My bad for not expanding. Noone knows the identity of this "Jimmy Apples" but this is the latest in a series of correct leaks he's made for Open AI for months now. Suffice to say he's in the know somehow.

What is this thing of people not using their shift key anymore? Sam Altman does the same. I don’t trust these people. ;)

Ok what’s with the weird punctuation and lack of capital letters in their tweets?

Both seem like they are horribly rushed and no auto complete?

Neither @sama nor @gdb are known to communicate in all lowercase. That fact that both did today must mean something.

Wow look at that garbage Twitter thread following it, with shitty ads and .eth jackasses. Twitter has really turned into 4-chan lite

Is there some weird chic thing where you intentionally don’t use capital letters? What is up with that behaviour?

Is it some cute attempt at saying “an AI didn’t write this”?

The screw is tightening. Britains largest newspaper has just called out ai companies on their intellectual property and content theft.

The game is over boys. The only question is how to make these types of companies pay for the crimes committed.

nice, hope there are openings in high level positions and they switch to remote

I’m never going back to Noe Valley for less than $500,000/yr and a netjets membership

I found the lack of information of the CTO and certain board members disturbing.

Like, who is Mira Murati? We only now that she came from Albania (one of the poorest countries) and somehow got into some pretty good private schools, and then to pretty good companies. Who are her parents? What kind of connections does she pull?

This is turning into a situation that OpenAI may not be able to recover from. Typically if the CEO and Chair of the board depart under these circumstances there was something illegal happening.

So is this the way the government takes control of the AI, next OpenAI will have new but familiar owners from Raytheon and the other Pentagon crowd?

Unlikely. They are separate settings both on iOS and Android.

a habit of a certain era of internet kids.

Some people just don't like to press shift. I moaned at one of my friends about this, years ago, and I got a 1-word reply that really stuck in my mind:

> thomas.

And there is indeed no law against not pressing shift.

Yea, I'm not a fan. I'm not grammar nazi but it makes reading a bit unpleasant.

He didn't have equity in OpenAI either, he seemed to be running it for fun. Of course, he can get cash payments.

Never, Elon despised Sam's pivot from non-profit to for-profit. He invested 100M in the beginning.

I'm sure there's a non compete clause in his employment

That would be happening but Elon won't want to be overshadowed

Or Musk returns to the board of OpenAI after a hiatus.

> I have the choice of using a Visa/MC gift card I bought with cash.

Technically you can also pay for a burner service to get temporary phone numbers to receive SMSs for registering to services. Can’t attest if any of them are good or trustworthy. I recently looked into it but everything I found was a subscription and/or shady looking.

That's why we offloaded phone validation to Telegram - it is too costly to send SMS in other countries than our home market and spammers are finding ways to get phone numbers for free from different VoIP providers. We need to implement complicated SMS sending limit logic to avoid abuse

There is no reason for Altman or Brockman to use the shift key, since as far as OpenAI is concerned they have already lost control.

If I had a dollar for every Ivy school student whose parents were government functionaries in poor second and third world countries I could probably get a few years of Amazon Prime. But so what? I think it's good for the talent, and good for this country.

And Ilya Sutskever was born in the Soviet Union during its end stage crisis days. Your point being?

Hopefully not too pedantic but Albania is not in the EU.

Maybe that's why it's used ? Twitter is just addressed to the public, so it's not official in any way, it's just communication. The lowercase casual style is only used to drive empathy probably.

This is the sector of the economy that ipos in cargo shorts I don't think formal writing would be expected or appreciated

To be fair, that's not a very formal resignation. He just... quit.

That's it. Disruption as a way of life. True entrepreneur mindset. Yeahhhh.

Which privacy center? I only have settings. And in settings there is the sub-category Data controls where I disable "Chat history & training".

no, I live in a US urban environment and my experience is that most people enjoy doing good and helping others, especially when it is simple and low effort.

a callback to the old IRC days

No, that's BeffJezos https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7C...

I think the board is required to be a majority non-equity-holders precisely because an equity-holding board will not keep to their non-profit mission.

Raytheon and the Pentagon are secretly controlling OpenAI by changing its CEO?

Capslock -> Ctrl gang

Nobody knows who he is but this is the latest in a series of correct leaks he's made at Open AI for months now. Fair enough I didn't expand but "Jimmy Apples" of all people being unphased by this revelation that supposedly even Microsoft was unaware of is the funniest timeline.

This is honestly par for the course for anyone who didn't grow up a digital native and is a career businessman who didn't spend it hand-composing messages. I wouldn't read too much into it. Direct emails from executives that aren't filtered by their assistants all look like this.

Because the I’s weren’t capitalized? It just looks like he turned off auto-caps

at this point, it's work to keep autocorrect from fixing this.

Well, yeah, he wouldn't be allowed to participate in deliberation about his own removal.

He was chairman of the board, no? surely he was in the meeting? More likely it's some kind of schism and he was on Sam's side.

Since he was chair of the board... I'm curious how the rest of the board implemented this.

Apart from some piddly tech, silicon valley startups primarily sell stock. And a monday company will be free to capitalize on the hype and sell stock that won't have its shoelaces tied like a non profit.

OpenAI is no Apple.

Stock market is full of dumb suits falling for salesman

After market prices are just a potential trend as the volume traded is very small and easily manipulated.

Not as much tho right?

That is true for millionaires and billionaires alike, the best ROI opportunities investments are geographically close to you before they are sniffed out by other people.

Betting on the World Cup Final vs. betting on a local match where you know a team has been clubbing and drinking until late into the night at your bar.

Local advantage.

Who isn't? That does not mean you cannot do well on financial news. The best way forward is to buy VTI/VTSAX (they are eqiivalent, just based on whether you want to buy a mutual fund or ETF) and wait 20 to 50 years.

> Why would he recuse himself?

Usually mandatory for decisions about a board member for them to be recused. That there is an overwhelming potential for conflict between personal interest and the firm’s is pretty clear in that case.

Because it's a conflict of interest - a CEO should absolutely recuse themselves from a vote on whether they should be removed. If a CEO refused to do so, the board should adjourn and reconvene without the CEO present.

Do you mean X?

Generalizing is how we reason, and having been on boards and worked with them closely, I can straight up tell you that's not how it works.

In general, everyone is professional unless there's something really bad. This was quite unprofessionally handled, and so we draw the obvious conclusion.

Yes. I changed my perspective - Altman would not fit in and be happy at Microsoft.

Governments fall all the time in non-coup. They just lost majority.

> and it would have been in the official announcement.

It is:

> As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.

https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti...

Well, he tweeted that once he “goes off” the board won’t be able to do anything about it, because he never owned any equity. That’s how I read it.

It's very good, competition is all you need.

This. There were no investors on the board -- as Jason @ all-in said "that's just crazy".

Everything points towards this being last minute both for people outside and people inside. Microsoft caught with their pants down, announcement before markets closed rather than just waiting a bit, and so on.

Announcing something huge like this before market close is not something that can be interpreted as anything other than either a huge timing mistake or a massive feeling of urgency

Exactly. They call it: The shit hitting the fan.

My Open AI bill was (opens dashboard...), $43,xxx last month.

First thing tomorrow I'm kicking off another round of searching for alternatives.

> You don't need the LLM to do the logic, you just need the LLM to prepare the information so it can be fed into a logic engine.

This is my view!

Expert Systems went nowhere, because you have to sit a domain expert down with a knowledge engineer for months, encoding the expertise. And then you get a system that is expert in a specific domain. So if you can get an LLM to distil a corpus (library, or whatever) into a collection of "facts" attributed to specific authors, you could stream those facts into an expert system, that could make deductions, and explain its reasoning.

So I don't think these LLMs lead directly to AGI (or any kind of AI). They are text-retrieval systems, a bit like search engines but cleverer. But used as an input-filter for a reasoning engine such as an expert system, you could end up with a system that starts to approach what I'd call "intelligence".

If someone is trying to develop such a system, I'd like to know.

Interesting, is this how they're currently structured? It sounds a lot like Mozilla with the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation.

No, if you read this article it shows there were some issues with the way they tested.

> The claim that GPT-4 can’t make B to A generalizations is false. And not what the authors were claiming. They were talking about these kinds of generalizations from pre and post training.

> When you divide data into prompt and completion pairs and the completions never reference the prompts or even hint at it, you’ve successfully trained a prompt completion A is B model but not one that will readily go from B is A. LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A” when the training date is split into prompt and completion pairs

Simple fix - put prompt and completion together, don't do gradients just for the completion, but also for the prompt. Or just make sure the model trains on data going in both directions by augmenting it pre-training.

https://andrewmayne.com/2023/11/14/is-the-reversal-curse-rea...

Still have to give notice

They're usually in the Bylaws. MIRI's Bylaws, iirc 23 years after I wrote them, contain a provision like that.

which makes sense because it'd take 2/3 to implement something if they're unanimous.

just base logic.

I believe the comment was edited. The original comment made a mention of “seeing a lot of speculation” (paraphrasing) that piqued my curiosity.

The source of the speculation could further enhance or remove the probability of this being true. For instance, a journalist who covers OpenAI vs. a random tweeter (now X’er?) with no direct connection. It’s a loose application of Bayesian reasoning - where knowing the likelihood of one event (occupation of speculator and their connection to AI) can significantly increase the probability of the other event (the speculation).

Even if it is literal, it may not be infringement. See "rangeCheck" in the Oracle v. Google case.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...

It varies by jurisdiction and board rules, but this is a common setup and a very reasonable guess.

Right, so he’s going to flee the US for China?!? Come on.

That’s not big enough to immediately terminate him.

I'm also inclined to believe something like this happened.

No way, no Sam - crypto scandal again.

That is one problem with non-profits. They end up with completely unprofessional leadership because they hire their friends who are crazies just like themselves.

When things cool down in a few months we will learn Altman and Brockman were some of the few sane people on the board.

The latter is for Mazdas, the former is something we can't discuss in a SFW forum

Small scale social groups

Seemingly, OpenAIs priorities shifted after the public ChatGPT release, and seems to be more and more geared towards selling to consumers, rather than a research lab that it seemed they initially were aiming for.

I'm sure this was part of the disagreement as Sam is "capitalism incarnated" while Ilya gives of much different feelings.

That might be part of it. They announced that they were dedicating compute to researching superintelligence alignment. When they launched the new stuff on Dev Day, there was not enough compute and the service was disrupted. It may have also interfered with Ilya's team's allocation and stopped their research.

If that happened (speculation) then those resources weren't really dedicated to the research team.

> If he decided to quit immediately after the vote then why would the board issue a statement saying he was going to stay on?

Why would they issue a statement saying that he was going to stay on without some form of assurance from him?

I mean, you're writing a release stating that you're firing your CEO and accusing him of lack of candor. Not exactly the best news to give. You're chasing that with "oh by the way, the chairman of the board is stepping down too", so the news are going from bad to worse. The last thing you want is to claim that said chairman of the board is staying as an employee to have him quit hours later. I find it hard to believe that they'd make mistake as dumb as announcing Greg was staying without some sort of assurance from him, knowing that Greg was Sam's ally.

After looking into it they would have had to give notice in case they wanted to attend but from the sounds of it they may not have bothered to go which would make sense if they knew they were screwed.

I doubt that there will be any ASI in the near future, with or without regulation.

You'd have to read the company charter and by-laws.

There isn't really any rules specified in the law for this, unlike with corporate law which mandates companies to be structured a certain way. We'd have to see OpenAI's operating by-laws.

I understand the meaning of this statement but please reconsider the way you view your customer base - it's not a good grounding for the success of your business to think this way. Great work with what you've built so far!

Very true.

Though I would go further than that: if that is indeed the reason, the board has proven themselves very much incompetent. It would be quite incompetent to invite this type of shadow of scandal for something that was a fundamentally reasonable disagreement.

No, all native Californians are like this (this just replaces hippie Buddhism with hippie computer worship) and the singularity stuff is the reason OpenAI was founded in the first place. And the reason Elon is mad at them, because they pivoted from it.

What if government is also some frontend?

Man I'm drunk in conspiracy theories tonight. Between a huge lay off and the Open AI fiasco please allow me indulge myself...

Even smart, savvy, and self interested people can't always predict what individual humans are going to do. It's certainly an interesting wrinkle, but I don't think it's relevant to the limited scope of the analysis I've presented here.

Greg's removal was announced in the same press release as Altman's

He was renoved as Chairman at the same time (close enough that they were announced together, and presumably linked in cause, though possibly a separate vote) as Altman was removed as CEO.

GPT and transformer code has been open sourced many times over by different companies. The weights and the operational model is where the IP really is. This will include the architecture for distributing training and inference at this scale. That said m, any developer and scientist worth their salt will be able to replicate it from memory - without having to copy stuff over 1:1.

So unless any of the necessary bits are patented, I highly doubt an argument against them starting a new company will hold in the courts.

Sometimes the contracts can include a cool-down period before a person can seek employment in the same industry/niche, I don’t think that will apply in Sam’s case - as he was a founder.

Also - the wanting to get himself fired intentionally argument doesn’t have any substance. What will he gain from that? If anything, him leaving on his own terms sounds like a much stronger argument. I don’t buy the getting-fired-and-having-no-choice-but-to-start-an-AGI-company argument.

An interesting twist would be if he joins Elon in his pursuit. Pure speculation, sharing it just for amusement. I don’t think they’ll ever work together. Can’t have two people calling the shots at the top. Leaves employees confused and rarely ever works. Probably not very good for their own mental health either.

Probably depends on what the code is and how material it is to AT&T’s business and what agreements are in place. IANAL. Youre not gonna get sued for routine stuff.

It is not a copyright issue unless you typed out the exact code from memory. It could be a patent issue if it behaves the same way.

You are comparing a corporate scandals, but the alternative theory in this forum seems to be a power struggle and power struggles have completely different mechanics.

Think of it as the difference between a vote of no confidence and a coup. In the first case you let things simmer for a bit to allow you to wheel and deal and to arrange for the future. In the second case, even in the case of a parliamentary coup like the 9th of Thermidor, the most important thing is to act fast.

Yeah, but Uber is completely different organization. The boards you mention were likely complic in stuff they kicked their CEOs out about.

what examples are you considering here, bioweapons?

Human cloning

But the point is that Woz was replacable, because he was replaced. Jobs on the other hand was replaced and the company nearly died, he came back and turned it around. Of course it only because a trillion dollar company after Tim Apple took over, which I guess just shows that nobody is irreplacable.

vice versa ;)

Prediction: there isn't a difference. The apparent difference is a manifestation of human brain delusion about how human brains work. The Turing test is a beautiful proof of this phenomenon: so and so thing is impossibility hard only achievable via magic capabilities of human brains...oops no actually it's easily achievable now so we better re-define our test. This cycle Will continue until the singularly. Disclosure: I've been long term skeptical about AI but that writing is up on the wall now.

Not sure what you mean here. They tried to IPO in 2019 and all the dirty laundry came out, scuttled the IPO and Neumann got ousted.

There's a difference between self-dealing you sell the board on and self-dealing you conceal from the board (also, different where its a pure for-profit where the self-dealing happens and where there is a non-profit involved, because the latter not only raises issues of conflict of interest with the firm, but also potential violations of the rules governing non-profits.)

The board knew and agreed to it in that case.

IKEA is the world's largest nonprofit.

https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-acco...

Ikea has the wildest legal structure, but yes, a lot of IKEA is technically owned by a couple of "nonprofits" which happen to pay out a lot of money to the Kamprad family.

Yes. https://www.fastcompany.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-...

It's a foundation in Luxembourg, with a Dutch subsidiary that owns some offices in Sweden.

So is Rolex!

I agree with your premise.

You're right: I haven't seen evidence of LLM novel pattern output that is basically creative.

It can find and remix patterns where there are pre-existing rules and maps that detail where they are and how to use them (ie: grammar, phonics, or an index). But it can't, whatsoever, expose new patterns. At least public facing LLM's can't. They can't abstract.

I think that this is an important distinction when speaking of AI pattern finding, as the language tends to imply AGI behavior.

But abstraction (as perhaps the actual marker of AGI) is so different from what they can do now that it essentially seems to be futurism whose footpath hasn't yet been found let alone traversed.

When they can find novel patterns across prior seemingly unconnected concepts, then they will be onto something. When "AI" begins to see the hidden mirrors so to speak.

If LLMs can copy the symbolic behaviors that let humans generate new knowledge, it'll be there.

> , they just regurgitate it, remix it, and expose patterns

Who cares? Sometimes the remixation of such patterns is what leads to new insights in us humans. It is dumb to think that remixing has no material benefit, especially when it clearly does.

> They are very convincing, and show that the Turing test may be flawed

The only think flawed here is this statement. Are you even familiar with the premise of Turing test?

It only dropped 2% and it’s already half back in after hours. I don’t think the market thinks it’s Altman who’s the golden boy here.

Why is OpenAI responsible for protecting Microsoft’s stock price?

I've been wondering along similar lines, although I am for all intents and purposes here a layman so apologies if the following is nonsensical.

I feel there are potential parallels between RAG and how human memory works. When we humans are prompted, I suspect we engage in some sort of relevant memory retrieval process and the retrieved memories are packaged up and factored in to our mental processing triggered by the prompt. This seems similar to RAG, where my understanding is that some sort of semantic search is conducted over a database of embeddings (essentially, "relevant memories") and then shoved into the prompt as additional context. Bigger context window allows for more "memories" to contextualise/inform the model's answer.

I've been wondering three things: (1) are previous user prompts and model answers also converted to embeddings and stored in the embedding database, as new "memories", essentially making the model "smarter" as it accumulates more "experiences" (2) could these "memories" be stored alongside a salience score of some kind that increases the chance of retrieval (with the salience score probably some composite of recency and perhaps degree of positive feedback from the original user?) (3) could you take these new "memories" and use them to incrementally retrain the model for, say, 8 hours every night? :)

Edit: And if you did (3), would that mean even with a temperature set at 0 the model might output one response to a prompt today, and a different response to an identical prompt tomorrow, due to the additional "experience" it has accumulated?

> regurgitate facts or speak at all.

Most of that is encoded into weights during training, though external function call interfaces and RAG are broadening this.

People zooming in too far. If you look at the 1d chart, yeah, something happened at 3:30. If you look at the 1m chart, today is irrelevant.

Sure; but its still weird that Microsoft agreed to the deal with the board in the state that it was; not just no board seat, but three absolute outsiders, two of them extremely unqualified. We may look back on their decision to buy 49% of OpenAI as a big misstep.

That doesn't seem insane to me in this case. OpenAI is easily the most important non profit for any Government in the whole world.

yes. this is a very strange event and given the relationship to what we may call "cutting edge applied DL" technology, right after DevDay, with two key players dropping out. GDB leaving is pretty wild, IMO. indicates something maybe on the engineering level wasn't above board. Anyways, we shall see. I think some conspiratorial thinking is fine, especially if its backed up with some evidence. This comment isn't, but the fact remains this is pretty weird and people should let their minds wander and connect dots that maybe they half-remember. IMO

CIA has been destabilizing and puppeteering governments around the world. Why are you so steadfastly assured that they wouldn't meddle in the US?

Not saying there is proof, but we just found out Ukraine blew up the Russian pipeline so it seems weird to just squash debate at the 'that's too crazy to ever happen'. Way crazier things have happened/are constantly happening.

Knowing what some of those three letter agencies have gotten caught doing, I'm not so sure this particular one would be so insane.

I mean I'm not a lawyer (of the big city or simple country varieties, or any other variety) but if you talk to most HR people they'll tell you that if they ever get a phone call from a prospective employer to confirm details about someone having worked there previously, the three things they'll typically say are:

1) a confirmation of the dates of employment

2) a confirmation of the role/title during employment

3) whether or not they would rehire that person

... and that's it. The last one is a legally-sound way of saying that their time at the company left something to be desired, up to and including the point of them being terminated. It doesn't give them exposure under defamation because it's completely true, as the company is fully in-charge of that decision and can thus set the reality surrounding it.

That's for a regular employee who is having their information confirmed by some hiring manager in a phone or email conversation. This is a press release for a company connected to several very high-profile corporations in a very well-connected business community. Arguably it's the biggest tech exec news of the year. If there's ulterior or additional motive as you suggest, there's a possibility Sam goes and hires the biggest son-of-a-bitch attorney in California to convince a jury that the ulterior or additional motive was _the only_ motive, and that calling Sam a liar in a press release was defamation. As a result, OpenAI/the foundation, would probably be paying him _at least_ several million dollars (probably a lot more) for making him hard to hire on at other companies.

Either he simply lied to the board and that's it, or OpenAI's counsel didn't do their job and put their foot down over the language used in the press release.

John, I don't think you understand how corporate law departments work. It's not like a romantic or friend breakup where someone says a mean remark about the other to underline that it's over; there's a big legal risk to the corporate entity from carelessly damaging someone's reputation like that, so it's smarter to just keep the personality/vision disagreements private and limit public statements to platitudes.

I don’t believe the evidence backs this up. Woz is as much a one off as Jobs.

Woz did two magic things just in the Apple II which no one else was close to: the hack for the ntsc color, and the disk drive not needing a completely separate CPU. In the late 70s that ability is what enabled the Apple II to succeed.

The point is Woz is a hacker. Once you build a system more properly, with pieces used how their designers explicitly intended, you end up with the Mac (and things like Sun SPARCstafions) which does not have space for Woz to use his lateral thinking talents.

From Tom Perkins’s biography - after serving on boards both big private companies and non-profjts, he said that non profits were much worse. His theory was that with no money on the stake it’s all about egos, and they cause weird situations to happen.

Also, I worked in startups and my ex-gf in various nonprofits, and the amount of drama she saw was way higher than in the commercial world

Sure, the investors own the company and the board answers to them. Nonprofits are significantly disconnected from their own financial incentives. I have witnessed it at every nonprofit I have worked for.

But those are people who have some skin in the game right? And shareholders can change the board structure right?

No, not really. Calling something "science-fiction" at the present moment is generally an insult intended to say something along the lines of "You're an idiot for believing this made up children's story could be real, it's like believing in fairies", which is of course a really dumb thing to say because science fiction has a very long history of predicting technological advances (the internet, tanks, video calls, not just phones but flip phones, submarines, television, the lunar landing, credit cards, aircraft, robotics, drones, tablets, bionic limbs, antidepressants) so the idea that because something is in science fiction it is therefore a stupid idea to think it is a real possibility for separate reasons is really, really dumb. It would also be dumb to think something is possible only because it exists in science fiction, like how many people think about faster than light travel, but science fiction is not why people believe AGI is possible.

Basically, there's a huge difference between "I don't think this is a feasible explanation for X event that just happened for specific technical reasons" (good) and "I don't think this is a possible explanation of X event that just happened because it has happened in science fiction stories, so it cannot be true" (dumb).

About nanotechnology specifically, if Drexler from Drexler-Smalley is right then an AGI would probably be able to invent it by definition. If Drexler is right that means it's in principle possible and just a matter of engineering, and an AGI (or a narrow superhuman AI at this task) by definition can do that engineering, with enough time and copies of itself.

Already a good investment then, even if this fundamentally changes how impactful OpenAI is going forward.

If Steve Jobs didn't have Woz, or if the Apple 1 or 2 flopped, Steve Jobs would have gone on to sell something else - medical supplies, timeshares, or who knows what and maybe he'd be famous in another industry, but not necessarily attaining a reality distortion field. If Apple flopped early, maybe he would have stayed with selling computers, for another company but he wouldn't be elevated to the status he was, because he had Woz's contribution and had total marketing control over it. If he had to work for another company in sales, Steve Jobs would be reprimanded and fired for his toxic attitudes. There is probably an alternate universe where Steve Jobs is a nobody. The reality is that he got very, very lucky in this universe.

I can remember to do something tomorrow after doing many things in-between.

I can reason about something and then combine it with something I reasoned about at a different time.

I can learn new tasks.

I can pick a goal of my own choosing and then still be working towards it intermittently weeks later.

The examples we have now of GPT LLM cannot do these things. Doing those things may be a small change, or may not be tractable for these architectures to do at all... but it's probably in-between: hard but can be "tacked on."

The claim was that non-profits "just put their friends on the board". No difference.

The word you are looking for is "shareholder."

Military and intelligence technology is almost always ahead of the private sector. Governments have practically infinite money and resources to throw at the problem, including for recruiting and industrial espionage.

I can tell you right now that the government agencies are ahead of for-profit ones. Whether you choose to believe it is up to you.

> With a more advanced AI system, one that could build better physics simulation environments, write software that's near maximally efficient, design better atomic modelling and tools than currently exist, and put all of that into thinking through a plan to achieve the technology (effectively experimenting inside its own head), I could maybe see it being possible for it to make it without needing the physical lab work.

It couldn't do any of that because it would cost money. The AGI wouldn't have money to do that because it doesn't have a job. It would need to get one to live, just like humans do, and then it wouldn't have time to take over the world, just like humans don't.

An artificial human-like superintelligence is incapable of being superhuman because it is constrained in all the same ways humans are and that isn't "they can't think fast enough".

>John

>I'm not patronizing you

(A)ssuming (G)ood (F)aith, referring to someone online by their name, even in an edge case where their username is their name, is considered patronizing as it is difficult to convey a tone via text medium that isn't perceived as a mockery/veiled threat.

This may be a US-internet thing; analogous to getting within striking distance with a raised voice can be a capital offense in the US, juxtaposed to being completely normal in some parts of the Middle East.

It’s not defamation if it’s true

It happened to me recently on a list where I post under my real name, and yes, it's irritating, especially if it is someone you never met, and they are disagreeing with you.

Really? Referring to someone by first name is perfectly ordinary where I’m from, regardless of relationship. If someone doesn’t want me to do that, I’d expect them to introduce themselves as “Mr. so-and-so”, instead.

Is it the first name or the personal touch that would make you feel patronized? What if you read a reply “… a 24 year old, such as yourself, will know …”.

I don't know. The board statement, peeling away the pleasantries, says he lied to the board repeatedly. That's a very serious accusation. I don't know how US law works here, but in the UK you can sue and win over defamation for far milder infractions.