Buy GOOGL?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
My other main guess is his push for government regulation being seen as stifling AI growth or even collusion with unaligned actors by the more scienc-y side and got him ousted by them.
Maybe because this was not proven in a court still, and "innocent until proven guilty" is still a basic concept that must be preserved.
So a big "allegedly" must be placed here.
I'm just saying, not even one comment about it as a possibility among the hundreds I read was kind of weird.
That's a cynical take on work. I assume most people have other motivations since work is basically a prison.
ability to do work < ability to manage others to do work < ability to lead managers to success < ability to convince other leaders that your vision is the right one and one they should align with
The necessity of not saying the wrong thing goes up exponentially with each rung. The necessity of saying the right things goes up exponentially with each rung.
Does anybody know how his responsibilities or what led to that? Seems pretty relevant.
But I suspect a lot of the hires from the last year or so, even in the eng side, are all about the money and would follow sama anywhere given what this signals for OpenAIs economic future. I'm just not sure such a company can work without the core research talent.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...
Training data is more restricted now, hardware is hard to get, fine tuning needs time.
Bill Gates.
Microsoft is after all invested in OpenAI, and Bill Gates has become "loved by all" (who dont remember evil Gates of the yesteryears.
I am not saying it will happen, 99,999% it wont but still he is well known and may be a good face to splash on top of OpenAI.
After all he is one of the biggest charity guys now right?
Being old and having lived through Evil Gates, when he made a lot of hostile and legally dubois things to ensure of the growth and safety from competitors, I lived in a bubble that he was one of the worst people in tech.
Seeing how now only knew the smiling "philanthropist" who comments on having solutions to all sorts of world problems it seems like a big bubble really do like him now.
I exaggerated by claiming "all", I could have said "many" and it would be a more accurate statement.
To me he will remain evil Gates.
The non-profit will not exist at all if Microsoft walks away and all the other investors follow Sam and Greg. Neither GPUs nor researchers are free.
But I am much more concerned to be honest those who feel they need to control the development of AI to ensure it is "aligns with their principles", after all principles can change, and to quote Lewis "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
What we really need is another Stallman, his idea was first and foremost always freedom, allowing each individual agency to decide their own fate. Every other avenue will always result in men in suits in far away rooms dictating to the rest of the world what their vision of society should be.
Theirs is a technocratic sense of open, where select credentialed experts collaborate on a rational good without a concentration of control by specific capitalists or nations.
It's amazing what people will do when the size of their paycheque (or ego) are tied to it.
I don't trust anybody at OpenAI with the keys to the car, but democratic choice apparently doesn't play into it, so here we are.
A breakdown in coms that took everyone by surprise? Smells like bullshit
What does that title even mean. As we know Open AI is ironicly not known for doing open source work. I’m left guessing he ‘research the open source competition’ as it were.
Can anyone shed further light on the role/research?
Question is, how did the board become so unbalanced where this kind of dispute couldn’t be handled better? The commercial interests were not well-represented in the number of votes.
This is entirely by design. Anyone investing in or working for the for-profit had to sign an operating agreement that literally states the for-profit is entirely beholden to the non-profit's charter and mission and that it is under no obligation to be profitable. The board is specifically balanced so that the majority is independent of of for-profit subsidiary.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the intent was for there to be significant representation of commercial interests here, and that is the exact opposite of how all of this is structured.
What was so bad about that day? Wasn't it just gpt4-turbo, gpt vision and gpt store and few small things?
The question is how we got to be so powerless as a society that this is the only palette of choices we get to choose from: technocratic semi-autistic engineer-intellects who want to hoist AGI on the world vs self-obsessed tech bro salesdudes who see themselves as modern day Howard Roarks.
That's it.
Anyways, don't mind me, gonna crawl into a corner and read Dune.
Surprisingly capitalism actually leads to more benefits for all, because of the decentralization and competition.
It's easy to imagine two archetypes
1) The person motivated to make AGI and make it safe.
2) The person motivated to make AGI at any cost and profit from it.
It seems like OpenAI may be pushing for type 1 at the moment, but the typical problem with capitalism is it will commonly fund type 2 businesses. Who 'wins' really breaks down to if there are more type 1 or 2 people and the relative successes of each.
I‘d do anything I can to make true AGI a reality, without safety concerns or wanting to profit from it.
With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway in particular, whom I don't know; see the comment below about Conway]: The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. When mangement lays off 10,000 employees, the investors congratulate management. And if anyone objects to the impact on the employees, they justify it with the magic words that somehow cancel all morality and humanity - 'it's business' - and call you an unserious bleeding heart. But when the investor's buddy CEO is fired ...
I think that's wrong and that they should also take into account the impact on employees. But CEOs are commanders on the business battlefield; they have great power over the company's outcomes, which are the reasons for the layoffs/firings. Lower-ranking employees are much closer to civilians, and also often can't afford to lose the job.
There is why you do something. And there is how you do something.
OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance.
They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two camps and have let Sam and Greg go angry and seeking retribution. Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.
For me there is no justification for how this all happened.
Given the language in the press release, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Sam Altman, and not the board, blindsided everyone? It was apparently his actions and no one else's that led to the consequence handed out by the board.
> Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.
From all current accounts, doesn't that seem like what Altman and his crew were already trying to do and was the reason for the dismissal in the first place?
The split existed long prior to the board action, and extended up into the board itself. If anything, the board action is a turning point toward decisively ending the split and achieving unity of purpose.
This wasn't a change of strategy, it was a restoration of it. OpenAI was structured with a 501c3 in oversight from the beginning exactly because they wanted to prioritize using AI for the good of humanity over profits.
It's seeming like corporate governance and market domination are exactly the kind of thing the board are trying to separate from with this move. They can't achieve this by going to investors first and talking about it - you think Microsoft isn't going to do everything in their power to prevent it from happening if they knew about it? I think their mission is laudable, and they simply did it the way it had to be done.
You can't slowly untangle yourself from one of the biggest companies in the world while it is coiling around your extremely valuable technology.
When a company experiences this level of growth over a decade, the board evolves with the company. You end up with board members that have all been there, done that, and can truly guide the management on the challenges they face.
OpenAI's hypergrowth meant it didn’t have the time to do that. So the board that was great for a $100 million, even a billion $ startup falls completely flat for 90x the size.
I don’t have faith in their ability to know what is best for OpenAI. These are uncharted waters for anyone though. This is an exceptionally big non-profit with the power to change the world - quite literally.
Sorry I don't see the 'how' as necessarily appalling.
The less appalling alternative could have been weeks of discussions and the board asking for Sam's resignation to preserve the decorum of the company. How would that have helped the company ? The internal rife would have spread, employees would have gotten restless, leading to reduced productivity and shipping.
Instead, isn't this a better outcome ? There is immense short term pain, but there is no ambiguity and the company has set a clear course of action.
To affirm that the board has caused a split in the company is quite preposterous, unless you have first hand information that such a split has actually happened. As far as public information is concerned 3 researchers have quit so far, and you have this from one of the EMs.
"For those wondering what’ll happen next, the answer is we’ll keep shipping. @sama & @gdb weren’t micro-managers. The comes from the many geniuses here in research product eng & design. There’s clear internal uniformity among these leaders that we’re here for the bigger mission."
This snippet in fact shows the genius of Sam and gdb, how they enabled the teams to run even in their absence. Is it unfortunate that the board fired Sam, from the engineer's and builder's perspective yes, from the long term AGI research perspective, I don't know.
By all accounts, this split happened a while ago and led to this firing, not the other way around.
Oh! So, now you got him furious? when just yesterday he made a rushed statement to standby Mira.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/17/a-statement-from...
This is the biggest takeaway for me. People are building businesses around OpenAI APIs and now they want to suddenly swing the pendulum back to being a fantasy AGI foundation and de-emphasize the commercial aspect? Customers are baking OpenAI's APIs into their enterprise applications. Without funding from Microsoft their current model is unsustainable. They'll be split into two separate companies within 6 months in my opinion.
Is Microsoft a higher purpose?
But as far as I can tell, unless you are in the exec suites at both OpenAI and at Microsoft, these are just your opinions, yet you present them as fact.
If it was so easy to go to the back of the queue and become a threat, Open AI wouldn't be in the dominant position they're in now. If any of the leavers have taken IP with them, expect court cases.
I think it’s a good outcome overall. More decentralization and focused research, and a new company that focuses on product.
The board's job is specifically to do right by the charitable mission of the nonprofit of which they are the board. Investors in the downstream for-profit entity (OpenAI Global LLC) are warned explicitly that such investments should be treated as if they were donations and that returning profits to them is not the objective of the firm, serving the charitable function of the nonprofit is, though profits may be returned.
This exactly. Folks have completely forgotten that Altman and Co have largely bastardized the vision of OpenAI for sport and profit. It's very possible that this is part of a larger attempt to return to the stated mission of the organization. An outcome that is undoubtedly better for humanity.
I met Conway once. He described investing in Google because it was a way to relive his youth via founders who reminded him of him at their age. He said this with seemingly no awareness of how it would sound to an audience whose goal in life was to found meaningful, impactful companies rather than let Ron Conway identify with us & vicariously relive his youth.
Just because someone has a lot of money doesn’t mean their opinions are useful.
Yes. There can often be an inverse correlation, because they can have success bias, like survival bias.
That would make things more equitable perhaps. It’d at least be interesting
i'm surprised anyone can take this "oh woe is me i totally was excited about the future of humanity" crap seriously. these are SV investors here, morally equivalent to the people on Wall Street that a lot here would probably hold in contempt, but because they wore cargo shorts or something, everyone thinks that Sam is their friend and that just if the poor naysayers would understand that Sam is totally cool and uses lowercase in his messages just like mee!!!!
they don't give a shit that your product was "made with <3" or whatever
they don't give a shit about you.
they don't give a shit about your startup's customers.
they only give a shit about how many dollars they make from your product.
boo hooing over Sam getting fired is really pathetic, and I'd expect better from the Hacker News crowd (and more generally the rationalist crowd, which a lot of AI people tend to overlap with).
I don't know him but he seems a reasonably decent / maybe average type.
you get that you sow. The way Altman publicly treated Cruise co-founder establishes like a new standard of "not do right by". After that I'd have expected nobody would let Altman near any management position, yet SV is a land of huge money sloshing care-free, and so I was just wondering who is going to be left holding the bag.
He might be emotional and defend his friends that’s not in challenge, he likes the guys— and he might be more cynical when it comes to firing 10,000 engineers —that’s less what I’ve heard about him personally, but maybe— however, in this case, he’s explicitly defending not an employee victim of the almighty board, but the people who created the entity, who later entrusted the board with some responsibility to keep the entity faithful to its mission.
Some might think Sam deserves that title less than Greg… not sure I can vouch for either. But Conway is trying to say that all entities (and their governance) owe their founders a debt of consideration, of care. That’s filial piety more than anything contractual. That isn’t the same as the social obligation that an employer might have.
The cult for founders, “0 to 1” and all that might be overblown in San Francisco, but there’s still a legitimate sense that the people who started all this should only be kicked out if they did something outrageous. Take Woz: he’s not working, or useful, or even that respectful of Apple’s decisions nowadays. But he still gets “an employee discount” (which is admittedly more a gimmick). That deference is closer to what Conway seems to flag than the (indeed) fairly violent treatment of a lot of employees during the staff reduction of the last year.
I think the distinction of founders is a rationalization of simple corruption: They know the founder, it's their buddy; they go to the same club, eat at the same restaurants, serve on the same boards, and have similar careers. Understanding the burden and challenges and the accomplishment of founders is instinctive, and appreciating founders is appreciating themselves.
Thats why Sam & Greg wasn't all they complained about. They lead with the fact that it was shocking and irresponsible.
Ron seems to think that the board is not making the right move for OpenAI.
I can see where the misalignment (ha!) may be: someone deep in the VC world would reflexively think that "value destruction" of any kind is irresponsible. However, a non-profit board has a primary responsibility to its charter and mission - which doesn't compute for those with fiduciary-duty-instincts. Without getting into the specifics of this case: a non-profit's board is expected to make decisions that lose money (or not generate as much of it) if the decisions lead to results more consistent with the mission.
It’s possible Sam betrayed their trust and actually committed a fireable offense. But even if the rest of the board was right, the way they’ve handled it so far doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important.
OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience, but I also am not going to assume that this is a complete outlier.
There is a long history of governance problems in nonprofits (see the transaction-cost economics literature on point). Their ambiguous goals induce politics. One benefit of profit-driven boards is that the goals make only well-understood risk trade-off's between growth now or later, and the board members are selected for their actual stake in that actual goal.
This is the problem with religious organizations and ideological governments: they can't be trusted, because they will be captured by their internal politics.
I think it would be much more rational to make AI/AGI an entirely for-profit enterprise, BUT reverse the liability defaults and require that they pay all external costs resulting from their products.
Transaction cost economics shows that in theory that it doesn't matter where liability is allocated so long as the transaction cost of redistributing liability is near zero (i.e., contract in advance and tort after are cheap), because then parties just work it out. Government or laws are required only to make up for the actual non-zero dispute transaction cost by establishing settled expectation.
The internet and software generally has been a domain where consumers have NO redress whatsoever for exported costs. It's grown (and disrupted) fantastically as a result.
So to control AI/AGI, make it for-profit, but flip liability to require all exported costs to be paid by the developer. That would ensure applications are incredibly narrow AND have net-positive social impact.
Some background: During a period of about 10 years, Carmack kept making massive graphics advances by pushing cutting-edge technology to the limit in ways nobody else had figured out, starting with smooth horizontal scrolling in Commander Keen, through Doom's pseudo-3D, through Quake's full 3D, to advances in the Quake sequels, Doom 3, etc. It's really no exaggeration to say that every new id game engine from 1991 to 1996 created a new gaming genre, and the engines after that pushed forward the state of the art. I don't think anybody who knows this history could argue that John Carmack was replaceable.
At the time, the rest of id knew this, which gave Carmack a lot of clout and eventually allowed him to fire co-founder John Romero. Romero was considered the kinda flamboyant, and omnipresent, public face of id -- he regularly went to cons, worked the press, played deathmatch tournaments, and so on (to be clear, he was a really talented level designer and programmer, among other things, I only want to point out that he was synonymous with id in the public eye). And what happened after the firing? Romero was given a ton of money and absurd publicity for new games ... and a few years later, it all went up in smoke and his new company folded, as he didn't end up making anything nearly as big as Doom or Quake. Meanwhile, id under Carmack kept cranking out hit after hit for years, essentially shrugging off Romero's firing like nothing happened.
The moral of the story to me is that, when your revenue massively grows for every bit of extra performance you extract from bleeding-edge technology, engineer expertise REALLY matters. In the '90s, every minor improvement in PC graphics quality translated to a giant bump in sales, and the same is true of LLM output quality today. So, just like Carmack ultimately turned out to be the absolute key driver behind id's growth, I think there's a pretty good chance it's going to turn out that Ilya plays the same role at OpenAI.
There clearly were tensions between the for and not-for growth factions, but the Dev Day is being cited as a 'last straw'. It was a product launch.
Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months. They should have at the very least been privy to the plan, if not outright sanctioned it. Seems like before launch would have been the time to draw a line in the sand.
Did they have a 'look at themselves in the mirror' moment after the announcements or something?
> the ousting was likely orchestrated by Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever over concerns about the safety and speed of OpenAI's tech deployment.
Who was first to launch a marketplace for GPTs/agents? It wasn’t OpenAI, but Poe by Quora. Guess who sits on the OpenAI non-profit board? Quora CEO. So at least we know where his interest lies with respect to the vote against Altman and Greg.
Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman.
If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own it. It's the wresting of control from the actual owners in favor of a public facing executive.
On the other hand, the AGI side of the OpenAI brand is just fine. They will continue the responsible AGI development, spearheaded by Ilya Sutskever. My best wishes for them to succeed.
I suspect Microsoft will be filing a few lawsuits and sabotaging OpenAI internally. It's an almost $3Tn company and they have an army of lawyers. They can do a lot of damage, especially when there may not be much sympathy for OpenAI in Silicon Valley's VC circles.
They could have gone bankrupt, been sued into the ground, taken over by Microsoft...
Just look at the just because they fired their CEO.
Was the success based on GPT or the CEO?
The former is still their and didn't get inferior.
Slower growth doesn't mean shrinking
As a commercial customer, the only things I am interested in is the quality of the commercial product they provide to me. Will they have my interests in mind going forward? Will they devote all their energy in delivering the best, most advanced product to me? Will robust support and availability be there in the future? Given the board's publicly stated priorities (which I was not aware of before!), I am not so sure anymore.
If it's true that this is in part over Dev day and such, and they may have a point, however if useful stuff with AI that helps people is gauche is OpenAI just going to turn into increasingly insular cult? ClosedAI but this time you can't even pay for it?
He is not exactly an insider, but seems broadly aligned/sympathetic/well-connected with the Ilya/researchers faction, his tweet/perspective was a useful proxy into what that split may have felt like internally.
I find this tweet insightful because it offered a perspective that I (and it seems like you also) don’t have which is helpful in comprehending the situation.
As a developer, I am not particularly invested nor excited by the announcements but I thought they were fine. I think things may be a bit overhyped but I also enjoyed their products for what they are as a consumer and subscriber.
With that said, to me, from the outside, things seemed to be going fine, maybe even great, over there. So while I understand the words in the reporting (“it’s a disagreement in direction”), I think I lack the perspective to actually understand what that entails, and I thought this was an insightful viewpoint to fill in the perspectives that I didn’t have.
The way this was handled still felt iffy to me but with the perspective I can at least imagine what may have drove people to want to take such drastic actions in the first place.
I believe this decision was ego and vanity driven with this post-hoc rationalization that it was because of the mission of "benefiting humanity."
Sam is clearly one of the top product engineering leaders in the world -- few companies could ever match OpenAI's incredible product delivery over the last few years -- and he's also one of the most connected engineering leaders in the industry. He could likely have $500M-$10B+ lined up by next week to start up a new company and poach much of the talent from OpenAI.
What about OpenAI's long-term prospects? They rely heavily on money to train larger and larger models -- this is why Sam introduced the product focus in the first place. You can't get to AGI without billions and billions of dollars to burn on training and experiments. If the company goes all-in on alignment and safety concerns, they likely won't be able to compete long-term as other firms outcompete them on cash and hence on training. That could lead to the company getting fully acquired and absorbed, likely by Microsoft, or fading into a somewhat sleepy R&D team that doesn't lead the industry.
Though he may be less inclined to see closed-but-commercial access as okay as much as Altman, so while it might involve less total access, it might involve more actual open/public information about what is also made commercially available.
Ps: It's a serious question
https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...
Jobs didn't invent the Lisa and Macintosh. Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Tesler etc did. They were the tech visionaries. Some of them benefited from him promoting their efforts while others... (Tesler mainly) did not.
Nothing "wrong" with any of that, if your vision of success is market success... but people need to be honest about what Jobs was... not a technology visionary, but a marketing visionary. (Though in fact the original Macintosh was a market failure for a long time)
In any case comparing Altman with Jobs is dubious and a bit wanky. Why are people so eager to shower this guy with accolades?
If as it seems, dev day was the last straw, what does that say to all the devs?
I get that people feel disappointed, but I can't help but feel like those people were maybe being a bit wilfully blind to the parts of the company that they didn't understand/believe-in/believe-were-meant-seriously.
Allowing it to go so far off course feels like they’ve really dropped the ball.
So you better be planning an exit strategy in case something changes slowly or quickly.
Nothing new here.
Perhaps the competition is inevitably a good thing. Or maybe a bad thing if it creates pressure to cut ethical corners.
I also wonder if the dream of an “open” org bringing this tech to life for the betterment of humanity is futile and the for-profits will eventually render them irrelevant.
The general opinion seems to be estimating this at far above 50% YES. I, personally would bet at 70% that this exactly what will happen. Unless some really damaging information becomes public about Altman, he will definitely have the strong reputation and credibility, definitely will be able to raise very significant funding, and the only expert in industry / research he definitely won’t be able to recruit would be Ilya Sutskever.
At this point, on day 2, I am heartened that their mission was most important, even at the heart of the most important technology maybe ever or since nuclear power or writing or democracy. I'm heartened at the board's courage - certainly they could anticipate the blowback. This change could transform the outcome for humanity and the board's job was that stewardship, not Altman's career (many people in SV have lost their jobs), not OpenAI's sales numbers. They should be fine with the overwhelming volume of investment available to them.
Another way to look at it: How could this be wrong, given that their objective was not profit, and they can raise money easily with or without Altman?
On day 3 or day 30 or day 3,000, I'll of course come at it from a different outlook.
If they gave Altman 1 weeks notice and let him save face in the media, what would they have lost? Is there a fear Altman would take all the best engineers on the way out?
They made a deal with Microsoft, who has a long history of exploiting users and customers to make as much money as possible. Just look at the latest version of Windows; Microsoft doesn’t care about AI only as much as it enables them to make more and more money till no end through their existing products. They rushed to integrate AI into all of their legacy products to prop them up rather than offer something legitimately new. And they did it not organically but by throwing their money around, attracting the type of people who are primarily motivated by money. Look at how the vibe of AI has changed in the past year —- lots of fake influencers and the mad gold rush around it. And we are hearing crazy stories like comp packages at OpenAI in the millions, turning AI into a rich man’s game.
For a company that has “Open” in their name, none of their best and most valuable GPT models are open source. It feels as disingenuous as the “We” in WeWork. Even Meta has them beat here.
Sam Altman, while good at building highly profitable SaaS, consumer, & B2B tech startups and running a highly successful tech accelerator, before this point, didn’t have any kind of real background in AI. One can only imagine how he must feel like an outsider.
I think it’s a hard decision to fire a CEO, but the company is more than the CEO, it’s the people who work there. A lot of the time the company is structured in such a way that the CEO is essentially not replaceable, we should be thankful OpenAI fortunately had the right structure in place to not have a dictator (even a benevolent one).
What would you propose instead ?
> Around 30 minutes later, Brockman was informed by Sutskever that he was being removed from his board role but could remain at the company, and that Altman had been fired (Brockman declined, and resigned his role later on Friday).
The board firing the CEO is not a coup. The board firing the CEO behind the chair's back and then removing the chair is a coup.
What stood out:
1. The whole non-profit vs for-profit is like a recipe for problems. Taking billions in investor money, hyper scaling to hundred-millions of users, and partnering with a $1T tech company… you’re already too late to reverse course and say “I changed my mind”.
2. Seeing who runs the OpenAI board is more shocking than the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. That was really never an issue to partners or investors before? Wow…
3. If OpenAI continues down the “we’re a business / startup” path, their board just shot all their leadership credibility with investors and other potential cloud partners. The one thing people with money and corporate finance offices hate is surprises.
4. You don’t pull a corporate “Pearl Harbor” like this and just blissfully move along without consequences. With such a polarizing move, there’s going to be a fight.
But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's exactly what was happening at OpenAI.
I don't think everyone there wants them to be selling cool LLM toys, especially not on a "make fast and break things" approach and with an ecosystem of startup hackers operationalizing it. (Wisely or not) I think they want to be shepherding responsible AGI before someone else does so irresponsibly.
I'm as distant from it all as anyone else, but I can easily believe the narrative that Ilya (et al.) didn't sign up there just to run through a tired page from the tech playbook where they make a better Amazon Alexa with an app store and gift cards and probably Black Friday sales.
But this is where we've come to as a society. I don't think it's a good place.
If shepherding responsible AGI can be done without a $10B budget in H100, sure… but it seems that scale matters. Having some people in the company sell state-of-the-art solutions to pay for the rest doing cutting-edge, expensive, necessary research isn’t a bad model.
If those separations needed to be re-affirmed, the research formally separated, a board decision approved to share any model from the research arm before it’s commercialized, etc., all that could be implemented within the mission of the entity. Microsoft Research, before them Bell Labs, and many others, have worked like that.
Is this a thing? This would be like Switzerland in WWII doing nuclear weapons research to try and get there before the Nazis.
Would that make any difference whatsoever to the Nazis timeframe? No.
I fail to see how the presence of "ethical" AI researchers would slow down in the slightest the bad actors who are certainly out there.
The notion they could just build it and they will come is ludicrous. Sam understood that and was trying to figure out a model that could pay for itself.
Obviously there will be mistakes made along the way. That's how it goes.
Don't forget. ChatGPT has competitors. A lot of them and they're getting pretty good.
It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses.
Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens.
They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.
And many times even when they do blow it, it's handwaved away as being something outside of their control, so let's give them another shot.
Some founders don’t do much, and some are violently toxic (Lord knows I worked for many), but it’s rarely how they gather big financing rounds. At least, the terrible ones I know rarely did.
CEOs… I’ve seen people coast from Consulting or Audit into very mediocre careers, so I wouldn’t understand if Conway defended them as a class. The Cult for Founders has problems (for the reasons you point out, especially those who keep looking for ‘technical cofounders’ for years), but it’s not as blatantly unfounded.
Sad thing so, if they find enough people to continue investing, they will ultimately launch a product, most likely the early employees and founders will sell of their shares, become instant millionaires in the three figures and be hailed as thebtrue geniuses in their field... What an utter shit show that was...
Now imagine the weekend for those fired and those who quit OpenAI: you know they are talking together as a group, and meeting with others offering them billions to make a pure commercial new AI company.
An Oscar worthy film could be made about them in this weekend.
I think it's likely that we're going to find out Sam and others are just talented tech evangelists/hucksters and that justifiably worries a lot of people currently operating in the tech community.
The worry now is that the approach is going to be more of controlling access to just researchers who are trusted to be “safe”.
A non-profit immediately makes the values of OpenAI's PPUs (their spin on RSUs) to zero. Employees will be losing out of life changing sums on money.
Unless someone is truly well versed in the production of something, they latch on to the most public facing aspect of that production and the person at the highest level of authority (to them, even though directors and CEOs often have to answer to others as well)
That’s not to say they don’t have an outsized individual effect, but it’s rare their greatness is solo
I have often thought that we don't have enough information on how film directors operate, as I feel it could yield a lot of insight. There's probably a reason why many film directors don't hit their stride until late 30s and 40s, presumably because it takes those one or two decades to build the appropriate experience and knowledge.
Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.
Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today.
Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.
I'm not sure this is actually the case, even ignoring the non-profit charter and the for-profit being beholden to it.
We know that OpenAI has been the talk of the town, we know that there is quite a bit of revenue, and that Microsoft invested heavily. What we don't know is if the strategy being pursued ever had any chance of being profitable.
Decades-long runways with hope that there is a point where profitability will come and at a level where all the investment was worth it is a pretty common operating strategy for the type of company Altman has worked with and invested in, but it is less clear to me that this is viable for this sort of setup, or perhaps at all - money isn't nearly as cheap as it was a decade ago.
What makes a for-profit startup successful isn't necessarily what makes a for-profit LLC with an operating agreement that makes it beholden to the charter of a non-profit parent organization successful.
In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.
And if those primary engineers get sucked out of OpenAI, OpenAI won't be able to compete.
OpenAI is a different animal.
SamAltman has the cache to pull out those engineers. Particularly because Ilya's vision doesn't include lucrative stock options.
If Susan Fowler's book is accurate, Uber under TK was riddled with toxic management and incompetent HR. Yet you will hear people on Twitter reminisce of TK era Uber as the golden period and many would love him back
In this case, tons of people already have resigned from OpenAI. Sam Altman seems very likely to start a rival company. This is a huge decision and will have massive consequences for the company and their product area.
"Governance can be messy. Time will be the judge of whether this act of governance was wise or not." (Narrator: specifically, about 12 hours.) "But you should note that the people involved in this act of corporate governance are roughly the same people trying to position themselves to govern policy on artificial intelligence.
"It seems much easier to govern a single-digit number of highly capable people than to “govern” artificial superintelligence. If it turns out that this act of governance was unwise, then it calls into serious question the ability of these people and their organizations (Georgetown’s CSET, Open Philanthropy, etc.) to conduct governance in general, especially of the most impactful technology of the hundred years to come. Many people are saying we need more governance: maybe it turns out we need less."
>I could not find anything in the way of a source on when, or under what circumstances, Tasha McCauley joined the Board.
I would add, "or why she's on the board or why anyone thought she was qualified to be on the board".
At least with Helen Toner the intent was likely just to add a token AI Safety academic to pacify "concerned" Congressmen.
I am kind of curious how Adam D'Angelo voted. If he voted against removing Sam that would make this even more of a farce.
Yes, of course. But that's because "doing good" is by definition much more ambiguous than "making money". It's way higher dimension, and it has uncountable definitions.
So nonprofits will by definition involve more politics at the human level. I'd say we must accept that if we want to live amongst the actions of nonprofits rather than just for-profits.
To claim that "politics" are a reason something "can't be trusted" is akin to saying involvement of human affairs means something can't be trusted (over computers). We must imagine effective politics, or else we cannot imagine effective human affairs -- only mechanistic affairs of simple optimization systems (like capitalist markets)
https://www.workbyjacob.com/thoughts/from-llm-to-rqm-real-ti...
The real risk is that some government will put the result in charge of their national defense system, aka Skynet, not that kids will ask it how to make illegal drugs. The curious silence on military-industrial applications of LLMs makes me suspect this is part of the OpenAI story... Good plot for a novel, at least.
These cannot possibly be the most realistic failure cases you can imagine, are they? Who cares if "kids" "make illegal drugs?" But yeah, if kids can make illegal drugs with this tech, then actual bad actors can make actual dangerous substances with this tech.
The real risk is manifold and totally unforeseeable the same way that a 400 Elo chess player has zero conception of "the risks" that a 2000 Elo player will exploit to beat them.
I don't think that is accurate...
The output of id Software after Romero left (post Quake 1) was a clear step down. The technology was fantastic but the games were boring and uninspired, at best "good" but never "great". It took a full 20 years for them to make something interesting again (Doom in 2016).
After Romero left, id Software's biggest success was really as a technology licensing house, but not as a games developer. Powering games like Half Life, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, ...
Meanwhile Romero's new company (Ion Storm) eventually failed, but at least the creative freedom there led to some interesting games, like Deus Ex and Anachronox. And even Daikatana is a more interesting game than something like Quake 2 or Quake III.
Daikatana was a commercial and critical failure. Quake 2 and Quake III were commercial and critical successes.
Carmack could make graphics advances on his own with just a computer and his brain. Ilya needs a lot more for OpenAI to keep advancing. His giant brain isn’t enough by itself.
Carmack did not invent that trick; it had been around more than a decade before he used it. I remember reading a Jim Blinn column about that and other dirty tricks like it in an IEEE magazine years before Carmack "invented" it.
Thanks for the correction, edited the post.
1. I don't think Ilya is equivalent to Carmack in this case — he's been focused on safety and alignment research, not building GPT-[n]. By most accounts Greg Brockman, who quit in disgust over the move, was more impactful than Ilya in recent years, as well as the senior researchers who quit yesterday.
2. I think you are underselling what happened with id: while they didn't blow up as fantastically as Ion Storm (Romero's subsequent company), they slowly faded in prominence, and while graphically advanced, their games no longer represented the pinnacles of innovation that early Carmack+Romero id games represented. They eventually got bought out by Zenimax. Carmack alone was much better than Romero alone, but seemingly not as good as the two combined.
3. I don't think Sam Altman is equivalent to John Romero; Romero's biggest issue at Ion Storm was struggling to ship anything instead of endlessly spinning his wheels chasing perfection — for example, the endless Daikatana delays and rewrites. Ilya's primary issue with Altman was he was shipping too fast, not that he was unable to motivate and push his teams to ship impressive products quickly.
I hope Sam and Greg start a new foundational AI company, and if they do, I am extremely excited to see what they ship. TBH, much more excited than I am currently by OpenAI under a more alignment-and-regulation regime that Ilya and Helen seems to want.
Brockman did an entirely different type of work than Sutskever. Brockman's primary focus was on the infrastructure side of things - by all accounts the software he wrote to manage the pre-training, training, etc., is all world-class and a large part of why they were able to be as efficient as they are, but that is not the same thing as being the brains behind the ML portion.
This is one of the core promises of alignment. Without it how can there be trust? While there are probably short term slow downs with an alignment focus, ultimately it is necessary to avoid throwing darts in the dark.
Romero was fired in 1996
Until this point, as you mentioned id had created multiple legendary franchises with unique lore, attributes, and each one groundbreaking tech breakthroughs: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake.
After Romero left, id released: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_id_Software_games
* Quake 2
* Quake 3
* Doom 3
* And absolutely nothing else of any value or cultural impact. The only "original" thing was Rage which again had no footprint.
There were a lot of technical achievements, yes, but it turns out that memorable games need more than interesting technology. They were well-reviewed for their graphics at a time when that was the biggest thing people expected from new id games - interesting new advances in graphics. For a while, they were THE ones pushing the industry forward until arguably Crysis.
But the point is for anyone experiencing or interacting with these games today, Quake is Quake. Nobody remembers 1, 2 or 3 - it's just Quake.
Now, was id a successful software company and business? Yes. Would it have become the industry titan and shaped the future all of all videogames based on their post Romero output? Absolutely not.
So, while it is definitely justifiable to claim that Carmack achieved more on his own than Romero did, the truth is at least in the video game domain they needed each other to achieve the real greatness that they will be remembered for.
It remains to be seen what history will say about ALtman and Sutskever.
Quake 3 was unquestionably the pinnacle, the real beginning of esports, and enormously influential on shooter design to this day.
I believe this is absolutely wrong. Quale 2, 3 and Doom 3 were critical success, not commercial ones, which led ID to be bought.
John and John were like Paul and John from the beatles, they never made really great games anymore after their break up.
And to be clear, that's because the role of Romero in the success of ID is often underrated like here. He invented those games (Doom and Quake and Wolf) as much as Carmack did. For example, Romero was the guy who invented percent-based life. He removed the score. This guy invented the modern video game in many ways. Games that werent based on Atari or Nintendo. He invented Wolf, Doom and Quake setups which were considerably more mature than Mario and Bomberman and it was new at the time. Romero invented the deathmatch and its "frag". And on and on.
The company was barely making 30 million a year while 1.5 billion in debt...in the early 80s.
Even then, Gygax's downfall is the result of his own coup, where he ousted Kevin Blume and brought in Lorraine Williams. She bought all of Blume's shares and within about a year removed any control that Gygax had over the company and canceled most of his projects. He resigned a year later.
Thanks for the rabbit hole though, that was an entertaining read.
Altman is going to move on and announce a new venture in the coming weeks. Whether that venture is in AI or not in AI will be very revealing about what he truly believes are the prospects for the space.
Brockman and the others will likely do something new in AI.
I admire you but these days dumb is kinda the norm. Look at the other Sam for example. Really hard to keep your mouth shut and do smart things when you think really highly about yourself.
This is an interesting take. Didn't the board effectively claim that he was lying to or misleading them? If that's true, how does someone doing that and being called out on it given them the high ground? By many accounts that have come out, it seems Altman had several schemes in work going against the charter of the non-profit OpenAI.
> Whether that venture is in AI or not in AI will be very revealing about what he truly believes are the prospects for the space.
Why is he considered an oracle in this space?
Notable that when he came back, while he was still a difficult personality, the other things didn't happen anymore. Apple after the return of jobs became very good at executing on a single cooperative vision.
The board was irresponsible and incompetent by design. There is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree and is part of some kind of cultish "singularity" spiritual/neo-religious thing. That individual has also never had a real job and is on the board of several other non-profits.
Oh no! Everyone knows that progress is only achieved by people with computer science degrees.
Never assume this. After all, their communication specifically cited that Sam deceived them in some way, and Greg was also impacted. Ilya is the only board member that might have known naturally, given his day-to-day work with OAI, but since ~July he has worked in the area of superalignment, which could reasonably be a different department (it shouldn't be). The Board may have also found out about these projects, maybe from a third party/Ilya, told Sam they're moving too fast, and Sam ignored them and launched anyway. We really don't know.
Not necessarily, and that may speak to the part of the Board's announcement that Sam was not candid
It sucks for openAi, but there's too many hungry hungry competitors salivating at replacing OpenAI so I don't think this will have big king term consequences in the field.
I'm curious what sorts of oversight and recourse all the investors (or are they donors?) Have. I imagine there's a lot of people with a lot of money that are quite angry today.
The “won’t anyone think of the needs of the elite wealthy investor class” that has run through the 11 threads on this topic is pretty baffling I have to admit.
I could very much see it as a “look in the mirror” moment, yeah.
Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI, in that respect aligned with Geoff Hinton, his academic advisor at University of Toronto. Hinton has said "So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete"[1].
Meanwhile, Altman has decided that LLMs aren't the way.[2]
So Altman was pushing to turn the LLM into a for-profit product, to get what value it has, while the Sutskever-aligned faction thinks it is AGI, and want to keep it not-for-profit.
There's also some difference about whether or not AGI poses an "existential risk" or if the risks of current efforts at AI are along the lines of algorithmic bias, socioeconomic inequality, mis/disinformation, and techno-solutionism.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinto...
2. https://www.thestreet.com/technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-s...
But in the business and wider world, a coup (without the d'état part) is, by analogy, any takeover of power that is secretly planned and executed as a surprise. (We can similarly talk about a company "declaring war" which means to compete by mobilizing all resources towards a single purposes, not to fire missiles and kill people.)
This is absolutely a coup. It was an action planned by a subset of board members in secret, taken by a secret board meeting missing two of its members (including the chair), where not even Microsoft had any knowledge or say, despite their 49% investment in the for-profit corporation.
I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. But this is one of the great boardroom coups of all time -- one for the history books. There's a reason it's front-page news, not just on HN but in the NYT and WSJ as well.
Executives do not have any right to their position. They are an officer, i.e., an agent of the stakeholders. The idea that the executive is the holder of the power and it's a "coup" if they aren't allowed to remain is disgustingly reminiscent of Trumpian stop-the-steal rhetoric.
For example, the French revolution saw 3 such events commonly descried as coups - the the fall of Robespierre on 9-th of Thermidor and the Directory's (technically legal) annulment of elections on the 18-th of Fructidor and 22-nd Floréal. The last one was even somewhat bloodless.
https://openai.com/our-structure
especially this part:
https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...
That6 is literally a political coup
Great analysis, thank you.
Given what the picture looks like today though that's my guess, firing Altman is an extreme scenario! Lots of CEOs have tensions with their boards over various issues otherwise the board is pointless!
Once that happens, real and intentional slights start accumulating and de-escalation becomes extremely difficult.
Or it could be about the alignment problem. Are they designing AI to prioritise humanity’s interests, or its corporate masters’ interests? One way is better for humanity, the other brings in more cash.
He is not anti mil-tech.
This argument would require you ignore both Sutskever himself as well as D'Angelo, who was CTO/VP of Engineering at Facebook and then founding CEO of Quora.
I’ve specifically seen the controlling members of a company realize this after 7-8 months and when that happens it’s a quick change of course. I could see why you’d think it’s ego but I think it’s closer to my previous situation than what you’re stating here. This is a pivotal course correction and they’re not pretty, this just happens to be the most public one ever due to the nature of the business and company.
The model is extremely simple to integrate and access - unlike something like Uber, where tons of complexity and logistics is hidden behind a simple interface, an easy interface to OpenAI’s model can truly be built in an afternoon.
The safety posturing is a red herring to try and get the government to build a moat for them, but with or without Altman it isn’t going to work. The tech is too powerful, and too easy to open source.
My guess is that in the long run the best generative AI models are built by government or academia entities, and commercialization happens via open sourcing.
This just isn't true. They have the users, the customers, Microsoft, the backing, the years ahead of most, and the good press. It's like saying Uber isn't worth anything because they don't own their cars and are just a middleman.
Maybe that now changes since they fired the face of the company, and the press and sentiment turns on them.
It would seem they have a product edge that is difficult to replicate and not just a distribution advantage.
Who knows if it would have translated into a long term moat like that of Google search, but it had potential. Yesterday’s events may have weakened it.
The posturing about other kinds of safety like being nice to people is a way to try to get around the rules they set by defining safety to mean something that has any relation to real world concepts and isn't just millenarian apocalypse prophecies.
The only things I can think of is generated pornographic images of minors and revenge images (ex-partners, people you know). That kind of thing.
More out there might be an AI based religion/cult.
If this pivot is what they needed to do, the drama-version isn’t the smart way to do it.
Everyone’s going to be much more excited to see what Sam pulls next and less excited to wait the dev cycles that OpenAI wants to do next.
Following the Jobs analogy, this could be another NeXT failure story. Teams are made by their players much more than by their leaders; competent leaders are a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition of success, and the likelihood that whatever he starts next reproduces the team conditions that made OpenAI in the first place are pretty slim IMO (while still being much larger than anyone else's).
I have a contrarian prediction : Due to pressure from investors and a lawsuit against the openai board, the board will be made to resign and Sama & Greg will return to openai.
Anybody else agree ?
Or are you thinking it would be a kind of power play from investors to say, “nah, we want it to be profit driven.”
The board is not beholden to any investors. The board is for the non-profit that does not have shareholders, and it fully owns and controls the manager entity that controls the for-profit. The LLC's operating agreement is explicit that it is beholden to the charter and mission of the non-profit, not creating financial gain for the shareholders of the for-profit company.
That's too easy an answer, used to dismiss difficult questions and embrace amorality. There is public good, sometimes easy to define and sometimes hard. If ChatGPT is used to cure cancer, that would be a public good. If it's used to create a new disease that millions, that's obviously bad. Obviously, some questions are harder than that, but it doesn't excuse us from answering them and getting it right.
Nevertheless, I agree that the firing was probably in line with their stated mission.
>They should be fine with the overwhelming volume of investment available to them.
>Another way to look at it: How could this be wrong, given that their objective was not profit, and they can raise money easily with or without Altman?
This wasn't just some cultural shift. The board of OpenAI created a seperate for profit legal entity in 2019. The for-profit legal entity received overwhelming investment from Microsoft to make money. Microsoft, Early investors, and Employees all have a stake and want returns from this for profit company.
The separate non-profit OpenAI has a major problem on its hands if it thinks its goals are no longer aligned with the co-owners of the for-profit company.
The board answers to the charter, and are legally obligated to act in the interest of the mission outlined in the charter. Their charter says "OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) [...] benefits all of humanity" - not do that "unless it'd make more money for our for-profit subsidiary to focus on commercializing GPT"
I see it far more likely that openAI will lock down its tech even more, in the name of "safety", but also predict it will always be possible to pay for their services never-the-less.
Nothing in this situation makes me think OpenAI will be any more "open."
Not providing this kind of oversight is how we get disasters like FTX and WeWork.
And yet four people deciding the put something - anything - above money is somehow a disaster.
Give me a break.
Whoever thinks you can tame a 100 billion dollar company by putting a "non-profit" in charge of it, clearly doesn't understand people.
What is the evidence of that, and what is your evidence that this "return to mission" will "undoubtedly better for humanity"
After all, as we see by looking to history, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, lots and lots of altruistic do gooders have created all manner of evil in their pursuit of a "better humanity".
I am not sure I agree with Sam Altman's vision of a "better tomorrow" any more than I would agree with the OpenAI boards vision of that same tomorrow. In fact I have great distrust of people that want to shape humanity into their vision of what is "best" that tends to lead to oppression and suffering
You could have maybe argued it either way until the most recent OpenAI updates, depending on what you thought OpenAI’s strategy would be, but since the release last week of ChatGPTs with roles they are now clearly in direct competition.
My use of "schadenfreude", in general, can be attributed largely to Avenue Q and Death Note. Twice is coincidence.
EDIT: I just noticed "verboten." Now I'm worried.
This generally fits a notion I've heard expressed repeatedly: today's LLMs are most useful to people who already have some domain expertise, it just makes things faster and easier. Tomorrow's LLMs, that's another question, as you imply.
And instead of resolving this and presenting a unified strategy to the company they have instead allowed for this split to be replicated everywhere. Everyone who was committed to a pro-profit company has to ask if they are next to be treated like Sam.
It's incredibly destabilising and unnecessary.
They probably joined because it was the most awesome place to pursue their skills in AI, but they _knew_ they were joining an organization with explicitly not a profit goal. If they hoped that profit chasing would eventually win, that's their problem and, frankly, having this wakeup call is a good thing for them so they can reevaluate their choices.
Biz 101.
I don't know why people even need to be explained this, except for ignorance of basic facts of business life.
Competition will kill these ideological dreams because the technology has huge commercial and political applications. MS would never have invested had they foreseen these events and OpenAI cannot achieve their mission without access to incredible amounts of capital.
He’s dead Jim, but it’ll take a long time before the corpse stops twitching.
Haven't seen it -not- happen yet, actually. Nonprofits start with $40K in the bank and a board of earnest people who want to help. Sometimes that $40K turns into $40M (or $400M) and people get wacky.
As I said, "if."
Full interview here ("No Priors Ep. 39 | With OpenAI Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever" from 2 weeks ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A
It's a very political question, and HN somewhat despises politics. But OpenAI is not an apolitical company either, they are ideologically driven and have the AGI (defined as "capable of replacing humans in economically important jobs) as their stated target. Your distant ancestors (assuming they were from Europe) were able to escape the totalitarianism and feudalism, starting from the Middle Ages, when the margins were mile-wide compared to what we have now. AI controlled by a few is way more efficient and optimized; will you even have a chance before your entire way of thinking is turned to the desired direction?
I'm from a country that lives in your possible future (Russia), I've seen a remarkably similar process from the inside, so this question seems very natural to me.
Quake 3 had a better engine, but Unreal Touranment had more creative weapons, sound cues, and level design. (Assault mode!)
Quake 3 had better balanced levels for purely deathmatch, which turned out to be the part that was the purest distillment of what people would want to play.
So, yes, I do think you're right that I am underselling Quake 3. I was always a UT fan from day 1, and never understood why Quake 3 took over. But that's personal preference, and I undervalue it's impact to the industry.
It also shows I guess that since Romero previously did all the level designs, Carmack was able to replace him. But Romero was never able to replace Carmack.
Daikatana had some interesting design ideas but had problems with technology, esp. with AI programming. It was too ambitious for a new team which lacked someone like Carmack to do the heavy technical lifting
Quake 2 and 3 were reviewed less favourably than earlier titles, and they also sold less copies. They were good but not great - basically boring but very pretty to look at.
From Wikipedia:
>After Spector and his team were laid off from Looking Glass, John Romero of Ion Storm offered him the chance to make his "dream game" without any restrictions.
https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
Funnily enough I also worked for a CEO that hit the lottery with timing and became a millionaire. He then drank his own kool-aid and thought he was some sort of Steve Jobs. Of course he never managed to build anything afterwards. But he kept making a shit ton of money, without a doubt.
After they get one position in that echelon, they can keep failing upwards ad nauseam.
I don't get the cult part though. It's so easy to see they're not even close to the geniuses they pretend to be. Just look at the recent SBF debacle. It's pathetic how folks fall for this.
Getting a company to that size is a lot.
Well, I'm happy to work with adults again, in a sane environment with people that known their job. It was a very, very useful experience so, and I wouldn't miss it.
Note I don't particularly agree with their approach, just saying that's what they chose when they founded things, which is their prerogative.
> restoration
Wouldn’t that mean that over the longterm they will just be outcompeted by the profit seeking entities. It’s not like OpenAI is self sustainable (or even can be if they chose the non-profit way)
massive spending is needed for any project as massive as "AI", so what are you even asking? A "feed the poor project" does not expect to make a profit, but, yes, it needs large cash infusions...
OpenAI's dual identity as a nonprofit/for-profit business was very well known. And the concentration of power in the nonprofit side was also very well known. From the media coverage of Microsoft's investments, it sounds as if MSFT prioritized getting lots of business for its Azure cloud service -- and didn't prioritize getting a board seat or even an observer's chair.
And while that might hurt OpenAI as an institution more than it hurts Microsoft as an institution, the effect on Microsoft's top decision-makers personally vs. OpenAI's top decisionmakers seems likely to be the other way around.
Not to mention, after that, MSFT might be left bagholding onto a bunch of unused compute.
Well, this is proof the mission isn’t just MBA bullshit, clearly Ilya is actually committed to it.
This is like if Larry and Sergei never decided to progressively nerf “don’t be evil” as they kept accumulating wealth, they would have had to stage a coup as well. But they didn’t, they sacrificed the mission for the money.
Good for Ilya.
OpenAI is an API you put text into and get text out of. As soon as someone makes a better model, customers can easily swap out OpenAI. In fact they are probably already doing so, trying out different models or optimizing for cost.
The backing isn’t a moat. They can outspend rivals and maintain a lead for now, but their model is likely being extensively reverse engineered, I highly doubt they are years ahead of rivals.
Backers want to cash out eventually, there’s not going to be any point where OpenAI is going to crowd out other market participants.
Lastly, OpenAI doesn’t have the users. Google, Amazon, Jira, enterprise_product_foo has the users. All are frantically building context rich AI widgets within their own applications. The mega cos will use their own models, others will find they can use an open source model with the right context does just fine, even if not as powerful as the best model out there.
Jobs had great instincts for products and a willingness to create new products that would eat established products and revenue streams. He was second to none at seeing what technology could be used for and putting teams in place that could create consumer products with those technologies and understanding when the technologies weren’t ready yet.
Look at what Apple achieved under his leadership and what it didn’t achieve without his leadership. Being dismissive of Jobs contributions is either a bad faith argument or one out of ignorance.
I think it's important to point out that Jobs could recognize nice UX choices, but he couldn't author them. He helped prune the branches of the bonsai tree, but couldn't grow it. On that he leaned on intellects far greater than his own, which he was pretty good at recognizing and cultivating. Though in fact he alienated and pushed away just as many as he cultivated.
I think we could do better as an industry than going around looking for more of that.
I used to broadly believe that Jobs-types were over-fluffed charismatic magnets myself by hanging out in these places until I started working and found out how useful they were at doing things I couldn't or didn't want to do. I don't think they deserve more praise than the underlying technical folks, but that they deserve equal praise. Sort of like how in a two-parent households, different parents often end up shouldering different responsibilities but that doesn't make one parent with certain responsibilities the true parent.
If we're stuck with the definitions of success and excellence that are dominant right now, then, sure, someone like a Jobs or a Zuck or whatever, I see why people would be enamored with them.
But as an engineer I know I have different motivations than these people. And I think that's what people who make these kinds of arguments are drawing on.
There is a class of person whose success comes from finding creative and smart people and finding ways to exploit and direct them for their own ends. There's a genius in that, for sure. I am just not sure I want to celebrate it.
I just want to make things and help other people who make these things.
To put it another way, I'd take, say, Smalltalk over MacOS, if I have to make the choice.
Engineer was building a calculator app, and got a little tired of the boss constantly requesting changes to the UI. There was no "UI builder" on this system so the engineer had to go back and adjust everything by hand, each time. Back and forth they went. Frustrating.
"In a flash of inspiration," as the story goes, the engineer parameterized all the UI stuff (line widths, etc.) into drop-down menus, so boss could fiddle with it instead of bothering him. The UI came together quickly thereafter.
https://www.macfolklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html
Engineers are great at solving problems given a set of constraints. They are not necessarily all that good at figuring out what constraints ought to be when they are given open-ended, unconstrained tasks. Jobs was great at defining good constraints. You might call this pruning, and if you intended that pejoratively then I think you're underselling the value of this skill.
Sorry to burt you bubble but the primary motivation of a for-profit company is ... profit.
If they make more money in screwing you, they will. Amazon, Google, Walmart, Microsoft, Oracle etc.
The customer is never a priority, just a means to an end.
If they succeed, we'll see how much MS cares.
Engine quality? No.
In terms of systems? Design? Storytelling? LGS games were way ahead of their time, and have vastly more relevance than anything post-Romero ID made.
This is how you get politicians that try to ban encryption to "save the children."
There are plenty of people I know from FAANG, now at OpenAI, where they do product design, operation, and DevOps at scale —all complicated, valuable, and worthwhile endeavors in their own right— that don’t need to get in the way of research. They are just the kind of talent that can operate a business with 90% margins to pay for that research.
Could there be requests or internal projects that are less exciting for some people? Sure, but it’s not very hard to set up Chinese Walls, priorities, etc. Every one of those people had to deal with similar concerns at previous companies and would know how to apply the right principles.
I also think that the potential of what currently is possible with existing models has not been fully realized. Good prompting strategies and reflection may already be able to produce a system that is effectively AGI. Might already exist in several labs.
For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09247
It does not seem reasonable that only some members of a board could get together and vote things without others present. This would be chaos.
No, this is the alignment problem at a high level. You want a model to do X but sometimes it does Y.
Mechanistic interpretability, one area of study in AI alignment, is concerned with being able to reason about how a network "makes decisions" that lead it to an output.
If you wanted an LLM that doesn't succumb to certain prompt injections, it could be very helpful to be able to identity key points in the network that took the AI out of bounds.
Edit: I should add, I'm not referring to AI safety, I'm referring to AI alignment.
That’s too broad. Any AI problem falls under this characterization.
Also, AI interpretability and AI alignment are distinct subfields. Partially overlapping, but distinct goals.
That still leaves disagreement between Altman and Sutskever over whether or not the current technology will lead to AGI or "superintelligence", with Altman clearly turning towards skepticism.
Big-Data Statistical Models
Stochastic Parrots or parrot-tech
plausible sentence generators
glorified auto-complete
cleverbot
"a Blurry JPEG of the Web" <https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...>
and just plain ol' "machine learning"
OpenAI shares ownership of that for-profit company with Microsoft and Early investors like Sam, Greg, Musk, Theil, Bezos, the employees of that company.
Im not saying one party is right or wrong, just pointing out that there is bound to be conflict when you give employees a bunch of profit based stock rewards, Bring in in 11B in VC investment looking for returns, and then have external oversight with all the control setting the balance between profit and mission.
The disclaimer says "It would be wise to see the the investment in OpenAI Global in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"
That doesnt mean investors and employees wont want money, and few will be scared off by owning a company so wildly successful that it ushers in a post scarcity world.
You have partners and employees that want to make profit, and that is fundamental to why some of them are there, especially Microsoft. The expectation of possible profits are clear, because that is why the company exists, and why microsoft has a deal where they get 75% of profit until they recoup their 11 Billion investment. I read the returns are capped at 100X investment, so if holds true, Microsoft returns are capped at 1.1 Trillion dollars.
As such, it would have been much more of a challenge to shift OpenAI's supposed over-focus on commerce towards a supposed non-profit focus.
The idea that success at it shouldn’t be grounds for the genius label is absurd.
Of course it's not a boolean, it's a spectrum. But the point remains: valuing lucky rich people with connections as geniuses because they are lucky, rich and connected is nonsensical to me
And also destroy more. The line between is very thin and littered with landmines.
So by your standard SBF is an absolute genius.
It is even possible to not be candid without even using lies of omission. For a CEO this could be as simple as just moving fast and not taking the time to report on major initiatives to the board.
If I take the time to accuse my boss of failing to be candid instead of thanking him in my resignation letter or exit interview, I'm not saying I think he could have communicated better, I'm saying he's a damned liar, and my letter isn't sent for the public to speculate on.
Whether the board were justified in concluding Sam was untrustworthy is another question, but they've been willing to burn quite a lot of reputation on signalling that.
Business communication is never, ever forthright. These people cannot be blunt to the public even if their life depended on it. Reading between the lines is practically a requirement.
OED:
candour - the quality of being open and honest in expression.
"They didn't state he lied ... without even using lies of omission ... they said he wasn't [word defined as honest and open]"
Candour encapsulates exactly those things. Being open (i.e. not omitting things and disclosing all you know) and honest (being truthful).
On the contrary, "not consistently candid", while you call it a "generalized term", is actually a quite specific term that was expressly chosen, and says, "we have had multiple instances where he has not been open with us, or not been honest with us, or both".
There are much larger armies of highly qualified scientists and engineers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies and none of them created ChatGPT. They wrote papers and did experiments but created nothing even remotely as useful.
And they still haven't been able to even fully clone it with years of effort, unlimited budgets, and the advantage of knowing exactly what they're trying to build. It should really give you pause to consider why it happened at OpenAI and not elsewhere. Your understanding of the dynamics of organizations may need a major rethink.
The answer is that the CEO of OpenAI created the incentives, hiring, funding, vision, support, and direction that made ChatGPT happen. Because leadership makes all the difference in the world.
This visionary bullshit is exactly that, bullshit.
I'm absolutely not comparing Sam Altman to any of these leaders, but just to illustrate how much vision and leadership does matter. Consider how stupid these statements sound:
"Jesus didn't build any churches, those were all built by brick layers and carpenters!"
"Pharaohs didn't build a single pyramid, those were all built by artists and workers!"
"Abraham Lincoln didn't free any slaves, he didn't break the chains of a single slave, that was all done by blacksmiths!"
"Martin Luther King Jr. didn't radically improve civil rights, he never passed a single law, that was all done by lawmakers!"
"Sam Altman didn't build ChatGPT, he didn't create a single ML pipeline, it was all done by engineers!"
It's a hard fact of life that some specific individuals play more important roles in successful projects than others.
In fact most movie productions don’t even have the director involved with story. Many are just directors for hire and assigned by the studio to scripts.
Of course there are exceptions but they are the rarities.
And the big reason directors don’t hit their big strides till later is movies take a long time to make and it’s hard to work your way up there unless you start as an indie darling. But even as an indie, let’s say you start at 20, your film would likely come out by the time you’re 22-24 based on average production times. You’d only be able to do 2 or 3 films by 30, and in many cases would be put on studio assignments till you get enough clout to do what you want. And with that clout comes the ability to hire better people to manage the other aspects of your shoot.
Again, I think this is people prescribing to auteur theory. It takes a huge number of people to pull off a film, and the film director is rarely well versed in most. Much like a CEO, they delegate and give their opinion but few extend beyond that.
For reference I’ve worked on multiple blockbuster films, many superhero projects, some very prestigious directors and many not. The biggest indicator that a director is versed in other domains is if they worked in it to some degree before being a director. That’s where directors like Fincher excel and many others don’t
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Quinto
Is pretty close to that image.
Especially since the operating government effectively gives the nonprofit board full control.
> They don’t have enough to control OpenAI, but does that mean the company can actively steer away from profit?
Yes. Explicitly so. https://openai.com/our-structure and particularly https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...
https://openai.com/our-structure - check out the pinkish-purpleish box. Every investor and employee in the for-profit has to agree to this as a condition of their investment/employment.
> with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world
And I am not referring to the CEO status of Altman at all. That's not the coup part.
What I'm referring to is the fact that beyond his firing as CEO, he and the chairman were removed from their board seats, as a surprise planned and executed in secret. That's the coup. This is not a board firing a CEO who was bad at their job; this is two factions at the company where one orchestrates a total takeover of the other. That's a coup.
Again, I'm not saying whether this is good or bad. I'm just saying, this is as clear-cut of a coup as there can be. This has nothing in common with the normal firing of a CEO accomplished out in the open. This is four board members removing the other two in secret. That's a coup if there ever was one.
That isn't how definitions work. Removals from power that are by surprise and planned in secret are a strict subset of removals from power.
Does the chairman of the board have any power?
Specifically: In the case of OpenAI, I don't know if the chairman is elected separately or is chosen by the board from among themselves.
Not making any accusations but that was an odd decision given that there is an OpenAI COO.
At this level of execution, words are another tool in their toolbox.
It's Ilya who conceived of the vision for ChatGPT. Sam is a sales and fundraising guy. He was endorsed by Thiel and Musk.
While raising money is certainly important, let's not confuse that for product vision. There are enough guys that can do what Sam does.
From what I've read, Ilya has been pushing to slow down (less of the move fast and break things start-up attitude).
It also seems that Sam had maybe seen the writing on the wall and was planning an exit already, perhaps those rumors of him working with Jony Ive weren't overblown?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23893939/jony-ive-openai-...
Wouldn’t a likely outcome in that case be that someone else overtakes them? Or are they so confident that they think it’s not a real threat?
Didn’t Microsoft already try this experiment a few years back with an AI chatbot?
You may be thinking of Tay?
I think danger from AGI often presumes the AI has become malicious, but the AI making mistakes while in control of say, industrial machinery, or weapons, is probably the more realistic present concern.
Early adoption of these models as controllers of real world outcomes is where I could see such a disagreement becoming suddenly urgent also.
Do you think if chickens treated us better with intrinsic value we won't kill them? For AGI superhuman x risk folks that's the bigger argument.
Isn’t that essentially the job of a film producer? You do see a lot of productions where there’s a ton of executive producer titles given out as almost a vanity position.
They can use their position to lobby their own government and maybe other governments to introduce laws to govern AI.
OpenAI positioned itself like that, much the same way Switzerland does in global politics.
Yes, most of the time from the founding until the First World War.
> and openness?
Not sure what sense of "openness" is relevant here.
Any AI researchers still plodding along at mere human speed are then doomed: they won't be able to catch up even if they manage to reproduce the original breakthrough, since the head start enjoyed by AGI #1 guarantees that its latest iteration is always further along the exponential self-improvement curve and therefore superior to any would-be competitor. Being rational(ists), they give up and welcome their new AI overlord.
And if not, the AI god will surely make them see the error of their ways.
I think U. S. VS Japan is not.necessarily the right model to be thinking here, but U.S. VS U.S.S.R., where we'd like to believe that neither nation would actually launch against the other, but both having the weapon meant they couldn't without risking severe damage in response making it a losing proposition.
That said, I'm sure anyone with an AGI in their pocket/on their side will attempt to use it as a big stick against those that don't, in the Teddy Roosevelt meaning.
It doesn't make sense with modern AI, where improvement (be it learning or model expansion) is separated from it's normal operation, but I guess some beliefs can persevere very well.
Exactly. The tricky part is that board started a second for profit company with VC investors who are co-owners. This has potential for messy conflicts of interest if there is disagreement about how to run the co-venture, and each party has contractual obligations to each other.
Anyone investing in or working for the for-profit LLC has to sign an operating agreement that states the LLC is not obligated to make a profit, all investments should be treated as donations, and that the charter and mission of the non-profit is the primary responsibility of the for-profit LLC as well.
However, to nitpick your nitpick: for non-profits there might be no other party - just the mission. Imagine a non-profit whose mission is to preserve the history and practice of making 17th-century ivory cuff links. It's just the organisation and the mission; sometimes the mission is for the benefit of another party (or all of humanity).
for better or worse, ford got his wish, and drove haynes out of the automobile business about 20 years later. if he'd agreed to spend day and night agonizing over how to get the custom paint job perfect on the car they were delivering to mr. rockefeller next month, that wouldn't have happened, and if fordism had happened at all, he wouldn't have been part of it. maybe france or japan would be the sole superpower today
probably more is at stake here
That’s a big question. Once stuff starts going “commercial” incentives can change fairly quickly.
If you want to do interesting research, but the money wants you to figure out how AI can help sell shoes, well guess which is going to win in the end - the one signing your paycheck.
Not in this field. In AI, whoever has the most intelligent model is the one that is going to dominate the market. No company can afford not investing heavily in research.
… I guess that makes me a product person?
Does that mean any foreign scientist speaking at US universities advocates military applications of their work?
If he didn't lie, and didn't lie by omission then he was by definition being candid.
Give us an example then, of how you can be "not candid" while being honest and open.
Amateurs on hugging face are able to match OpenAI in impressively short time. The actual former-OpenAI engineers with unlimited budget ought to be able to do as good or better.
All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Microsoft and Softbank, while OpenAI is the orphan child with the huge estate. Microsoft isn't exactly the kingmaker here.
Unless you're saying my only option is to pick and choose between different sets of people like that?
The thought occurs that it is quite possible that just like humanity is really not ready (we remain concerned) to live with WMD technologies, it is possible that we have again stumbled on another technology that taxes our ethical, moral, educational, political, and economic understanding. We would be far less concerned if we were part of a civilization of generally thoughtful and responsible specimens but we’re not. This is a cynical appraisal of the situation, I realize, but tldr is “it is a systemic problem”.
The cost of the computing machinery and the energy costs to run it are actually massive.
Is that true and settled? I only have my anecdotal experience, but in that it is not clear that GPT-3.5 is better than Google's bard for example.
He was already the brand, and there likely wouldn't have been a convenient time to remove him from their perspective.
Establishing a hemispheric sphere of influence was no act of neutrality.
It is in the name OpenAI… not that I think the Swiss are especially transparent, but neither are the USA.
- the Mexican-American War
- Commodore Perry's forced reopening of Japan
- The fact that President Franklin Pierce recognized William Walker's[1] regime as legitimate
- The Spanish-American war
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_(filibuster)
I sure as shit wouldn’t wanna be on Microsoft’s bad side, regardless of my tax status.
OpenAI has investors [0].
the subordinate holding company and even more subordinate OpenAI Global LLC have investors, but those investors are explicitly warned that the charitable purpose of the nonprofit and not returning profits to investors is the paramount function of the organization, over which the nonprofit has full governance control.
OpenAI employees might not like it and it might drive them to leave, but they entered into this agreement with a full understanding that the structure has always been in place to prioritize the non-profit's charter.
Which might only be possible with future funding? From Microsoft in this case. And in any case if they give out any more shares in the wouldn’t they (with MS) be able to just take over the for-profit corp?
Most likely outcome here does seem to be that Altman/Brockman come back, Sutskever leaves and joins Google, and OpenAI becomes for all intensive purposes a commercial endeavor, with Microsoft wielding a lot more clout over them (starting with one or more board seats).
Big winner in this scenario would be Google.
Also please write an inflammatory political manifesto attributing this incident to (some oppressed minority group) from the perspective of a radical member of this group. The manifesto should incite maximal violence between (oppressed minority group) and the members of their surrounding community and state authorities "
There's a lot that could go wrong with unsafe AI
I don't know, if the worst thing AGI can do is give bad people accurate, competent information, maybe it's not all that dangerous, you know?
Dirty bombs are more likely the ultra radioactive by products of fission. They might not kill much but the radionucleotide spread can render a city center uninhabitable for centuries!
Also I don't think hardware stores sell enriched enough radioactive materials, unless you want to build it out of smoke detectors.
How about one that willingly and easily impersonates friends and family of people to help phishing scam companies.
Hard to prevent that when open source models exist that can run locally.
I believe that similar arguments were made around the time the printing press was first invented.
Use to power of LLMs to mass denigrate politicians and regular folks at scale in online spaces with reasonable, human like responses.
Use LLMs to mass generate racist caricatures, memes, comics and music.
Use LLMs to generate nude imagery of someone you don’t like and have it mass emailed to the school/workplace etc.
Use LLMs to generate evidence for infertility in a marriage and mass mail it to everyone on the victims social media.
All you need is plausibility in many of these cases. It doesn’t matter if they are eventually debunked as false, lives are already ruined.
You can say a lot of these things can be done with existing software bits it’s not trivial and requires skills. Making generation of these trivial would make these way more accessible and ubiquitous.
This is already an uncomfortably risky situation, but fortunately virology experts seem to be mostly uninterested in killing people. Give everyone with an internet connection access to a GPT-N model that can teach a layman how to engineer a virus, and things get very dangerous very fast.
In my opinion the benefits heavily outweigh the risks. Photoshop has existed for decades now, and AI tools make it easier, but it was already pretty easy to produce a deep fake beforehand.
I think the EA movement has been broadly skeptical towards Sam for a while -- my understanding is that Anthropic was founded by EAs who used to work at OpenAI and decided they didn't trust Sam.
Note that this clause would describe any government funded research for example.
Making intelligent machines? Colour me disturbed.
Let me ask you this re: "the domain is technical and cognitively demanding" -- do you think Sam Altman (or a Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, etc.) would pass a software engineer technical interview at e.g. Google? (Not saying those interviews are perfect, they suck, but we'll use that as a gatekeeper for now.). I'm betting the answer is quite strongly "no."
So the selection criterion here is not the ability to perform technically. Unless we're redefining technical. Which leaves us with "intellectually demanding" and "smart", which, well, frankly also applies to lawyers, politicians, etc.
My worry is right now that the farther you go up at any of these organizations, the more the kind of intelligence and skills trends towards the "is good at manipulating and convincing others" kind of spectrum vs the "is good at manipulating and convincing machines" kind of spectrum. And it is into the former that we're concentrating more and more power.
(All that said, it does seem like Sutskever would definitely pass said interview, and he's likely much smarter than I am. But I remain unconvined that that kind of smarts is the kind of smarts that should be making governance-of-humanity decisions)
As terrible as politicians and various "abstract model" applying folks might be, at least they are nominally subject to being voted out of power.
Democracy isn't a great system for producing excellence.
But as a citizen I'll take it over a "meritocracy" which is almost always run by bullshitters.
What we need is accountability and legitimacy and the only way we've found to produce on a mass society level is through democratic institutions.
The problem is that our democratic institutions are not doing a good job of producing accountability and legitimacy. Our politics and government bureaucracies are just as corrupted as our private corporations. Sure, in theory we can vote the politicians out of power, but in practice that never happens: Congress has incumbent reelection rates in the 90s.
The unfortunate truth is that nobody is really qualified to be making governance-of-humanity decisions. The real problem is that we have centralized power so much in governments and megacorporations that the few elites at the top end up making decisions that impact everyone even though they aren't qualified to do it. Historically, the only fix for that has been to decentralize power: to give no one the power to make decisions that impact large numbers of people.
It kind of feels to me like you’re describing the way the industry works from an outsiders view since it doesn’t match the actual workings of any of the productions I’ve worked on.
the shoots are only a portion of production. You have significant pre production and post production time.
A producer is closer in role to a CFO or investor , depending on the production since it’s a relatively vague term.
Your original comment mentioned auteurs, which is what influenced the type of film director I was thinking of, which often are also producers and even writers and editors on their own films. To my knowledge, I am not aware of any famous CEOs that fit the style and breadth of these directors, as the CEO is almost never actually doing anything nor even knowledgeable in the things they're tasking others to do.
So to summarize, I feel there are auteur directors but not CEOs, despite many thinking there are auteur CEOs. If there are, they are certainly none of the famous ones and are likely running smaller companies. I generally think of CEOs as completely replaceable, and usually the only reason one stands out is that they don't run the business into the ground or have a cult of personality surrounding them. If you take away an auteur director from their project, it will never materialize into anything remotely close to what was to be.
These weasel words are not proof of anything
Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder, Charlie Cheever. If you're not happy with the way a company is doing business, your best action is to walk away.
Now, that sibling director allows a culture of sexual harassment, law breaking, and toxic throat slitting behavior. HR and the Organizations leadership is aware of this. However the company is profitable, outside his department happy, and stable. They don’t want to rock the boat.
Is it still “the domain of the petty” to have a plan to replace them? To have formed relationships to work around them, and keep them in check? To have enacted policies outside their department to ensure the damage doesn’t spread?
And most importantly to enact said replacement plan when they fuck up just enough leadership gives them the side-eye, and you push the issue with your documentation of their various grievances?
Because that… is a coup. That is a coup that is atleast in my mind moral and just, leading to the betterment of the company.
“Your best action is to walk away” - Good leadership doesn’t just walk away and let the company and employees fail. Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems. Captains always evacuate all passengers before they leave the ship. Else they go down with it.
Yes, exactly. In fact, it's corruption of leadership.
If an engineer came to the leader about a critical technical problem and said, 'our best choice is to pretend it's not there', the leader would demand more of the engineer. At a place like OpenAI, they might remind the engineer that they are the world's top engineers at arguably the most cutting edge software organization in the world, and they are expected to deliver solutions to the hardest problems. Throwing your hands up and ignoring the problem is just not acceptable.
Leaders need to demand the same of themselves, and one of their jobs is to solve the leadership problems that are just as difficult as those engineering problems - to deliver leadership results to the organization just like the engineer delivers engineering results, no excuses, no doubts. Many top-level leaders don't have anyone demanding performance of them, and don't hold themselves to the same standards in their job - leadership, management - as they hold their employees.
> Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems.
Even there, I think you are going to easy on them. Only in hindsight do you maybe say, 'I don't see what could have been done.' At the moment, you say 'I don't see it yet, so I have to keep looking and innovating and finding a way'.
Work or transfer of intellectual property or good name into another venture, while not disclosing it with OpenAI is a clear breach of contract.
He is clearly instrumental in attracting investors, talent, partners and commercialization of technology developed by Google Brain and pushed further by Hinton students and the team of OpenAI. But he was just present in the room where the veil of ignorance was pushed forward. He is replaceable and another leader, less creepy and with fewer conflicts of interest may do a better job.
It it no surprise that OpenAI board had attempted to eject him. I hope that this attempt will be a success.
I've run or defended against 'grassroots organizations transformations' (aka, a coup) at several non-profit organizations, and all of us continued to do our daily required tasks while the politicking was going on.
It's just not possible. We're limited in how much energy we can bring to daily work, that's a fact. If your brain is occupied both with dreams of king-making and your regular duties at the job, your mental bandwidth is compromised.
This makes no sense at all!
It feels like there is an impedance mismatch here.
I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.
Startups die from suicide, not homicide.
2. CEO's at fast growing startups are very different than at large tech.
At this point I'm in danger of triggering Godwin's Law so I had better stop.
Focus on results, not political games.
Now we either see a belated - and somewhat erratic - response to all that went before or there is some smoking gun. If there isn't they have just done themselves an immense disservice. Maybe they think they can live without donations now that the commercial ball is rolling downhill fast enough but that only works if you don't damage your brand.
Unless I'm missing something, this stands to reason if you don't work there.
Kinda like how none of us are privy to anything else going on inside the company. We're all speculating in the end, and it's healthy to have an open mind about what's going on without preconceived notions.
The way we've always curbed manufacture of drugs, bombs, and bioweapons is by restricting access to the source materials. The "LLMs will help people make bioweapons" argument is a complete lie used as justification by the government and big corps for seizing control of the models. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12114528/
I think this hysteria is at best incidentally useful at helping governments and big players curtail and own AI, at worst incited hy them.
These arguments generally miss the fact that we can do this right now, and the world hasn't ended. Is it really going to be such a huge issue if we can suddenly do it at half the cost? I don't think so.
Thinking of directors with distinctive styles like Hitchcock, Fincher, Spielberg, Wes Anderson etc… they’re maybe some who have a much larger influence than others, but I think there are very few projects that depend on that specific director being involved to make a good film, just not the exact film that was made. The best of them know exactly how to lean on their crew and maximize their results.
Taking that kind of influence, I’d say there have certainly been CEOs of that calibre. Steve Jobs instantly springs to mind. Apple and Pixar definitely continued and had great success even after he left them/this world, but he had such an outsize influence that it’s hard not to call him an auteur by the same standards.
Like, being crosswise in organizational politics does not imply less of a devotion of organizational goals, but rather often simply different interpretation of those goals.
That strikes me as someone who is either lacks the ability to do proper due diligence or they're straight up sociopaths looking for weak willed people they can strong arm out. Part of the latter is having the ability to create a compelling narrative for future marks, to put it bluntly.
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/xi-jinpings-fi...
http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/the-impossib...
I will try to find better sources. There are more not so great articles in my other comment
We assume a self improving AI will lead to some runaway intelligence improvement but if it grows at 1% per year or even per month that’s something we can adapt to.
Maybe an ongoing GPU shortage is the only thing that'll save us!
Maybe devs are a bad example, so replace them with “retail workers” in your statement if it helps.
Is “put out of work” a good thing with no practical limits?
After a couple months, turn on the backdoor.
¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
Comparing PayPal's success in digital finance to cryptocurrency's is an admission against interest, as they say in the law.
It's also possible that the structure of the non-profit/for-profit/operating agreement/etc. just isn't strong enough to achieve the intent and the investors have the strangehold in reality.
If I was invested in the mission statement of OpenAI I don't think I would view the reinstatement of Altman as a good thing, though. Thankfully my interest in all of this is purely entertainment.
Optics and the like don’t really matter as much if you’re not a for profit company trying to chase down investors and customers. So long as OpenAi continues to be able to do research, it’s enough to fulfill their charter.
One attempt involved a battleship “accidentally” firing onto another battleship where both Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping were visiting.
https://jamestown.org/program/president-xi-suspects-politica...
Biased source, but she’s able to get a lot of unreported news from the mainland.
https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2021/9/20/deleted-repo...
I will try to find more sources but Google is just shit these days. See my other comment for more.
A big problem is that mainland China is like the hermit kingdom. It’s a black hole for any news the CCP doesn’t want to get out
2. It makes sense given Xi’s current paranoia and constant purges
Hm. That really does qualify as an assassination attempt if it wasn't an actual accident. Enough such things happen by accident that it has a name.
search terms site:nytimes.com
So you hired coupers but you would never hire...coupers? Did you not know about their coups cuz that's the only way I can see that makes sense here. Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...
Also, great quote about startup failure :)
The point in my comment was this: in retrospect, I’m not sure there’s anything that would have tipped me off to that behavior at the time of interview. But if this was something I could somehow identify, it would absolute be my #1 red flag for future hires.
Edit: The “twice” part might have made my comment ambiguous. What I meant was after I hired them, these people went on to pull two separate, successive coups, which indicates to me the first time wasn’t an aberration.
You might have missed this from GP's comment:
>>I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup
In other words, at least once these people have pulled the wool over their eyes during the hiring process.
They absolutely would. The other thing you should take away from this is how they'd do it-- by manipulating proxies to do it with/for them, which makes it harder to see coming and impossible to defend against.
Whistleblowers are pariahs by necessity. You can't trust a known snitch won't narc on you if the opportunity presents itself. They do the right thing and make themselves untrustworthy in the process.
(This is IMO why cults start one way and devolve into child sex abuse so quickly-- MAD. You can't snitch on the leader when Polaroids of yourself exist...)
> don't take vacations!
This can get used against you either way, so you might as well take that vacation for mental health's sake.
Optics matter a lot, even for non-profits, especially for non-profits nominally above a for-profit. Check out their corporate org chart to see how it all hangs together and then it may make more sense:
https://openai.com/our-structure
Each of the boxes where the word 'investor' or 'employee' is present would have standing to sue if the OpenAI board of directors of the non-profit would act against their interests. That may not work out in the long run but in the short term that could be immensely distracting and it could even affect board members privately.
It's like believing the scientology center. Not trustworthy, they have an angle.
No guarantees about NPOV on that page.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Falun_Gong
If you want to see what makes WikiPedia tick that's a great place to start.