"To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."
I also thought this was interesting, not sure if this detail had been reported before this article, but seems like there were maybe more incidents than initially thought.
This list of 20 examples is new, albeit unsurprising given that there was no reason to think that there were only 2 incidents, and I highlight it in my longer commentary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-fac...
"Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” "
If he followed the norms, he'd be a mid-level manager at FAANG company.
There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation.
Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming their successors for messing up a good thing. Also very good at cultivating a certain subset of journalists who will keep burnishing the legend, never stepping outside the bubble.
Loosely related: does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? Because it seems as if Sam & Co. are quite determined to ignore it, deny it or minimize it, while continuing to push for breakneck growth of products with a very troubling design flaw.
I think this is akin to asking if anyone in the software engineering community has the patience and humility to try to solve the software bugs problem.
No it never eliminated all bugs, but if we're conflating the two problems you don't need to eliminate all hallucinations either, you just need to make them very unlikely, or a consequence of your bad specifications.
Both have been characterized as being manipulative liars though.
It was also downweighted as a follow-up [1] because there had been a similar profile article / megathread the day before:
"King of the Cannibals": How Sam Altman Took over Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38744021 - Dec 2023 (162 comments)
In the absence of significant new information [2] people mostly just repeat what has already been said, and the more reptition there is in a thread, the dumber and nastier it gets.
(Edit: I double checked that by skimming through the comments in this thread and I think it was the right call—they're generic, i.e. could just as easily have appeared in any similar thread, and range from ok-but-repetitive to outright-bad.)
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Who among us ...
This is where I stopped reading.
At the risk of sounding defensive of Sam Altman. If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support? He's just one man, say that what this article alleges is true, how many tricks does he have up his sleeve to fool the entirety of Silicon Valley?
I mean, we can beat around the bush all day but he managed to get his old/new?? job back at OpenAI. This means to me that his ouster was either unwarranted or the board was acting blindly and should have stepped aside just on account of being clearly incapable of making sound decisions.
This article does not ask the right questions. Doesn't answer any questions either like the many articles written before it riddled with speculation about Sam's much belabored firing.
As for what the benefit is, the ongoing report is one benefit. If the law firm (named here for the first time, I believe) didn't know about, say, Sutskever's list of 20 incidents, well, they do now.
Up until recently, the press about OpenAI has been mostly "look at the shiny lights" and now it's going to get the Elon Musk treatment.
You could shine a light into most people's lives and find in most cases broken egg shells here & there. Fixating on them at the expense of the bigger picture is a mistake.
Regarding the openai board, the problem imo is that too much weight was given to a nebulous & subjective mission, allowing those sitting to make up ridiculous positions and find them tenable (ie the company going kaput being in line with the mission, like srsly??)
However, there won't be a monopoly or anything of the sort that will form, our society's institutions wouldn't be able to properly enforce it and it's too easy for weights to leak, too much alpha for people to not fight back against it. Not worried.
The ai safety crowd's problem is that they're focused on a hypothetical entity that will take over humanity, imagining all sorts of scenarios in lalaland which are ridiculous (some of their "thought leaders" even advocating for strikes on datacenters to save humanity???), where the real risk is criminals/terros being empowered by the ai's cognitive ability. For that, we'll need the gov involved one way or another.
OpenAI going kaput might indeed be the best for humanity as a whole, only time will tell.
The article talks about his "luck" in "surviving." Which is about all he has, apparently. No consideration for the future of the product, the company, or the industry. The triumphant conclusion of this article is "a bunch of CEOs pulled weight and Altman got his old job back, again."
The more of these I read, the more convinced I am that his company is going nowhere, as they seem more skilled at producing "internal drama" than "new product."
My take on it is that they have an exceptionally skilled marketing department that's good at creating the impression that they've actually created an AGI, with stories trickling out to the press about ChatGPT 'getting lazy' or 'taking a break for the holidays' and other stuff that serves to humanise what is, at least for me, a product which routinely fails to accurately answer basic questions, the answers to which are contained in hundreds of blogs and forum postings.
If others are experiencing something different that's interesting. Personally I note that the 'I got this weird answer' posts are never accompanied by screenshots or any other evidence, they're just claims which all subsequent repliers appear to take as the unvarnished truth.
I congratulate their marketing team; I suspect that Mistral will ultimately present a far superior product.
Don't you think most entrepreneurs would call Sam if they have a chance?
What business has he aced?
Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever? In the words of Urkel, "Did I do that?"
There are some leaders in the tech world who have clearly done something. John Carmack did something. Steve Wozniak did something. There are some questionable cases as well. As far as Altman goes, I put him firmly in the same camp as Musk. They haven't done jack shit. I give them no respect, recognition, or credit. They were just wealthy people spending money. I seriously question the people who look at them positively in any way whatsoever.
You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.
You should try hiring a group of really smart people and getting them to work together to create something great before you dismiss the skills of the person doing that.
There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic.
Money can only get you so far.
Each one will end up pulling in their own direction, fighting with others over minor things, and nothing will ever get done.
Managing smart people, resolving conflicts, and making sure stuff gets done is a rare and underappreciated skill.
>claimed to have funded the invention of the piano and opera, financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore, and were patrons of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Francesco Redi, among many others in the arts and sciences.
Sure they didn't do the paintings but a lot of that stuff probably wouldn't have happened without them.
This example doesn't work, at least, since the industrial revolution. If an average person wins the lottery they would need to solve a lot (really a lot) of issues to move a business forward and most probably go bankrupt except if he/she puts the money in low risk financial instruments.
There is no "I do that" in the complex world of business. It is a nice Disney story with a few examples. Organization does the work and that includes anonymous engineers, not only CEOs and founders. The great ignition could start at a garage (e.g. Apple) but the road is long.
What Musk did with SpaceX is in no way comparable to just paying an architect to build a building. Unless the entire biography from Isaacson was fabricated, he was extremely hands on in design decisions, company direction, and hiring.
If you think none of those were relevant to the success of spacex, you’re completely delusional.
Why are you surprised by folks reaction? What did he successfully build before OpenAI? Nothing as far as I can tell? His main skill seems to be networking, not building product. Also, doing it fast, does not require lying, as seems his habit.
A lot can be accomplished by skirting pesky rules and regulations. It isn't something commendable.
I'm not saying Sam has never done anything illegal, but most of the outrage seems to be that he doesn't follow social/business norms (not that he doesn't follow rules/regulations/laws).
Well that depends.
Is the thing that is being accomplished very good and are the regulations bad?
For example, what if there is a law that was passed for the sole purpose of protecting a well connected monopoly, so that consumers have to pay more money, only so that this one monopoly could profit.
I'd say that such a law would be bad and should be under minded.
It feels like he just wants to do 10 things at the same time.
Hey, if you don't like Sam, that's fine. But that doesn't make him a sociopath.
If we followed the norms, he's be in prison. If you think fraud and self-dealing are justified if it moves a lot of value to shareholders, write to your senator. Until then the laws should be enforced against the rich as well as the poor.
Of course, I can't much bring myself to care in this case, because all that's at stake is a chatbot.
Like all human beings, he wasn't a one-dimensional character from a crappy sitcom. He had negative and positive traits. Whatever one feels about him personally, it is absolutely a mistake to dismiss him. What he achieved -- multiple times -- puts him in extremely rarified air in the business world.
Billionaires need on the ground types like him to actually do stuff.
It’s hard to find people who are young and ambitious and effective, and yet fundamentally and ruthlessly aligned with corporate hegemony.
And I suspect he must be spectacularly good at flattery.
We share this thought.
My pet theory regarding the recruitment efforts of this class: two broad fronts, one to drive the herd and the other to pick candidates.
The first front permeates our head space in form of content in the full spectrum of the bandwidth of this class: entertainment, news, organizations. Here the message is insistently that “Only suckers play straight”, “crime pays”, “winners and losers”. This is a consistent message.
The second front is more selective and here I am speculating (unlike the former which one gets to experience first hand, whether one likes it or not.) Here I suspect a more ‘direct’ sales pitch is used, and likely references the former.
Imagine you are a bright young thing from ‘not money’ raised in that “cultural” environment just mentioned. Now you open your favorite “journal of record”. You read barely disguised lies, note how these lies lead designated demographics by the NOSE with them not even aware of this fact, and finally your mentor has a conversation with you:
“Do you really think that the general population, these same people we were discussing being led by the nose with lies, are actually capable of self-governance and should have a say in “important” matters?”
He makes people money. Plenty of terrible people commanded great loyalty. All the loyalty tells you is he’s a good leader. Not where he’s leading us.
(Not saying anything about Sam. Just pointing out that loyalty is orthogonal.)
Aside from that, who cares about loyalty to the CEO of a tech company. He's a replaceable employee and OpenAI should be able to continue without him.
What were his actual crimes. It's not clear from the previous board nor anyone who's spoken about the matter what those were.
See I had already watched this documentary in full, and knew that this was just a cliffhanger for the second part that explained the car was modified, making the seemingly impossible shot very possible. Yet, my friend said "See? That's enough evidence." and walked away.
I asked, "don't you want to hear the rest?" the response: "nope."
Your comment reminds me of this experience
Stock options and a carefully built cult of personality, my friend
75 million people voted for Trump.
As an aside, I think these are both roughly equivalent to detecting code for which P(halts) is high!
I cant picture a case where charges need to be brought under a novel framework that couldnt be captured by existing laws. If you deploy a computer virus, thats a crime, if you hack someones bank account, thats a crime, if you slander someone, thats a crime.
Im personally not convinced that any of the public efforts made around AI safety have been honest. If these people were serious then like you say, they wouldnt be chasing evil scifi ai overlords. I can think of some wonderful use cases to counter things like AI generated fakes; I am actually uncomfortably suprised that every social media company hasnt added a banner below every picture that says whether scans indicate a picture was deepfaked, twitter could scan a picture when you post it and show what a variety of algorithms think. That would have a real shot at improving information asymmetry at the social level.
Elon Musk's involvement in design decisions was limited to the typical executive level involvement in hardware design, in the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.
Indeed, with SpaceX it's usually immediately obvious when Musk was involved: does something fail spectacularly in a way it wasn't supposed to? That was Musk, getting involved in something he didn't understand and overriding the engineers and other professionals. (Contrast the first Starship launch this year, which Musk micromanaged, vs the second launch in November in which he had minimal involvement due to being distracted by X and Tesla.)
>Per dozens of engineers at SpaceX...the biography from Isaacson contains numerous exaggerations and outright fabrications.
Which ones, specifically?
>the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.
Even if this were the only level of involvement, do you realize how important these are? Do you know how it would have worked out for the company if they focused on payload instead of reusability?
I tried to a Google search for a source. I cannot find anything. Do you have a good source, or insider information?
"Oh you think that going ahead before a decision is made and just publish a post will get us to decide in your favor because we're afraid of looking like we're backtracking? How about we don't decide in your favor and delete your post? What you gonna do now?"
This response, the one YC went with, is milquetoast. It’s rational. But the true fuck you is to counter-programme and publicly call out the lie.
It amplifies you. Speeds up big moves, acquisition of resources, hiring key people, etc. These are not loner (atom), team (list), or even top-down (tree), type activities.
A network of powerful people is like a collection of other threads, each with their own resources, that you can call. Literally. And put any number of those threads and resources to work on your problems (your coroutines) concurrently.
Only if it’s a network fit for use and purpose though.
Most companies (are not, won’t be, shouldn’t be, can’t be, don’t want to be) [pick one] an SV behemoth. I once worked at a small organization that had direct connections with a certain former CEO that remains one of the planet’s wealthiest people, but it didn’t really do much either way for the organization.
Put another way focused on OpenAI: I would argue that despite Microsoft’s moves in support of Altman with OpenAI, it’s not like Satya Nadella needs Sam Altman because Sam Altman has something Nadella/MS doesn’t. Quite the opposite. In situations like that, the stability of the stock price and market perception are much more compelling drivers. Microsoft is only transactionally served by him. If he was more expensive to keep than the value derived from his ability to razzle-dazzle, they’d have simply kept quiet.
Edit: typo
I agree with your first sentence, but I am confused by your second sentence. Are you referring to this part? "Carmack and Woz are legends for a reason."
There is nothing fallacious about my comment. Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous.
As another commenter said: he isn't unique.
You can compare him to other CEO but you have to justify why the comparison is valid.
You didn't do that.
If you want to directly claim that Sam did something illegal you need to show or say that.
Instead, what you did, is just point to someone else who did something illegal, and then criticize that other person, while vaguely implying that the criticism applies to Sam.
But the criticism doesn't apply to Sam, because you didn't demonstrate that Sam did anything illegal.
The more ability you have to be kind of waterproof so to speak - like a duck - because of a mixture of positioning, ruthlessness, access, intelligence, perseverance, etc the better you are. Most importantly you have to regularly show allegiance to specifically investors over all other considerations, and boom you’re perfectly crafted.
Altman has brilliantly positioned himself as that perfect fulcrum between venture and technical skills such that he is (in his own mind and to a tiny subset of incredibly powerful people in SV) indispensable to the silicon valley crowd who doesn’t really know how to navigate the intersection between venture and technical skills.
They believe in his focus to get things done, not in his ethics. And with ChatGPT, he got things done. Which means, he connected the right people and raised money so they can work on the important things.
Emphasis mine. I mean, that's just backs up my original question. These people will say anything to garner favor, perceived or otherwise. I've seen Altman speak. At what point should I expect to see a representative example of this focus and insight?
Probably never. He says nothing of substance in public.
He has VC catnip, and he sprinkles it on his clothes, most notably between the 6 polo shirts he wears at once.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9mJuUkhUzk
His pacing, clarity, and proficiency with the product are impressive; regardless of how one might feel about him.
"We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman."
This sort of misattribution seems to show up when you have individuals with sociopathic tendencies running firms that do cool things: Elon Musk is the king of this. The man has not, on his own, had any sort of good results on the world - Tesla and SpaceX seem to do a lot better when he steps away from them - but he has found ways to get himself into a position to take credit from the engineers who do. Hyperloops and Twitter are the results of Elon Musk's original work. That's not to say that the management is necessarily negative: someone needs to fund the work of the good engineers.
SpaceX and Tesla have the equivalent of the principals of each section of the orchestra feeding their conductor his cues and making sure he gets them right. Google has someone standing on the podium and bowing, but nobody waving the baton at all.
OpenAI is more of a research organization than a product company, and so it's hard to see where someone like Altman can contribute meaningfully to the direction.
The more polarising the figure, the more polarising the assessment of anything concerning them. Disconnecting different facets of a figure is not our strong suite.
There's an obsession with trying to discredit people like Jobs (and their contributions), particularly among the hacker news crowd. Fundamentally it's because most hackers don't understand leadership, marketing, sales, etc.
In this thread you'll see people claim Elon Musk is non-technical. That's bordering on belligerent. A person would have to have avoided the dozens of YouTube interviews where he demonstrates his technical understanding to an elaborate degree. Musk is as technical as Bill Gates was in his post coding days at Microsoft (which spanned the bulk of his time at Microsoft) and I've never seen anyone on HN claim Gates as being non-technical. How it works is simple: I dislike this person, therefore I shall tear them down; I'm unable to be objective about the subject, so I shall be emotional and irrational instead.
He comes across as a guy who really wants to seem deep and cerebral, but his takes are pretty surface level compared to other tech CEOs. He couldn’t even give a high level explanation of Twitter’s “crazy” tech stack without having a meltdown.
And that's a really common case.
It is absolutely true that you need both technical and non-technical people to make a business work. There are lots of jobs to be done, hats to be worn, and they are all valuable - many are necessary.
The issue is that our society and economy massively overvalues two roles in particular: those who bring the capital and those who carry the title executive. It's not that those roles don't contribute, they do. But they currently get the vast majority of the generated wealth, credit, and recognition (which then translates into more opportunities to access more capital and thus into an exponential feedback loop).
Woz was critical to early Apple. He was not involved in its modern iteration. Also, plenty of important and influential people are unknown in the popular imagination.
The point is that this is a general problem that falls out of the structure of our economy and business enterprises. And it's one that's fixable with a little societal refactoring (changing the laws around business structures and how they're formed).
If everybody could do it, they would be doing it. Altman's abilities are every bit as rare as that of a 10x software developer. The same was true of Jobs, and the same is true of Musk (regardless of whether someone likes him or not; who cares if he's likable, it's an infantile emotional derangement to obsess so much over likability).
What specifically backs that up? Didn't others create the technology? Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with? By many accounts, he was just using OpenAI to further other businesses and investments.
We know it's possible for someone with no technical ability to look like genius just by having lots of money. I knew people who believed Musk was going to bring about an AI revolution all on his own because of his very special brain, but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101. What makes you convinced all the rich "geniuses" who haven't revealed themselves to be idiots are actually smart for real this time?
Honest question: why? Just because your bubble denounces him and he's doing things differently than other big tech, in a way that upset developers / managers that doesn't mean he's automatically wrong.
Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great). Probably if we didn't have a board of do-nothing for years twitter could have turned into the Line of the west. Maybe it could have captured all the profits which ended up on patreon and onlyfans.
If it wasn't for his anti remote stance and general disregard for life-work balance I'd love to work for him. Finally, an organisation when things get done with few hard working people, and not hundreds of drones collecting a paycheck and slowing me down and complaining all the time.
I'm generally a fan of Musk, I'm glad he bought Twitter, I drive a Tesla etc. but this looks like delusion to think this.
Twitter is not doing well. Musk cut too fast and too deep, and it shows with the number of outages and problems Twitter has had. It wasn't a few months ago that they had to rate limit everyone from scolling their feed for a day, they had hours of downtime this last month alone.
This is not good for a company that makes its money by serving ads, which it also has seemed to be bad at. Running a blogging site isn't that hard, but runnign your own adnetwork is, and Twitter is doing a pretty bad job.
They are losing quite a lot of moeny according to Musk(!!!).
That was not is #1 job as per the charter, that why all this controversy started.
Boards don’t judge crimes. And unlike courts, they have no disclosure obligation. Particularly for a private company.
If true, that board deserved to be dissolved privately without being given the courtesy of raising any voices against Sam or OpenAI's future.
CEO of Reddit, how'd that go? Project Covalence, how'd that go? Andrew Yang? Our next president, right? 2018, The year Sam Altman became the governor of California, no? And of course: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to." - that aged well.
But he's now in a position where all his failures will be forgotten and his successes amplified forevermore (unless he buys a social media company, but he seems too smart for that so far). It is clear he has reached Jeff Dean levels of ridiculous hagiography though, but I guess worshipping CEOs is a step up from worshipping invisible friends or stinky geriatric ex-presidents so there's that.
Just by probabilities alone it's happened hundreds of times. Probably the source for original prophet claims.
Let one man make one (50/50) prediction once a year from the time he is 20 until 50. One in a billion by chance, but by numbers its had to occured. Attach some mythology and tada.
Hire a top researcher? Ok, you could get lucky with a few. But keep? Good luck if you are an incompetent manager. If Sam Altman was the "know-nothing" that so many on HN claim him to be, then the top researchers would leave and go to Meta, Google Brain, etc. It makes no sense that this core research team has been so stable. Is this not evidence enough for you?
OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei and a bunch of others left three years ago and started Anthropic.
Ilya Sutskever reportedly told the board before the coup that he’s so unhappy with Sam he was thinking about leaving. He might be out now.
I don’t know if Sam is the right leader for OpenAI - he might be. But it’s good that he’s being watched closely right now.
This is another one of those recent buzzwords that mean nothing. Like oil conglomerates making "green energy" donations and calling themselves low carbon emitters.
Calling Twitter a “crazy stack” is hilariously laughable, serious junior dev energy, that at the very least he should be able to describe to another dev a) whats crazy about it b) what it looks like from top to bottom without insulting people for asking.
He sold a game he programed at age 12, and wrote at least the initial code for zip2 which Compaq acquired for $307 million.
Most code critics of Musk today criticize his poor coding skills due to him unable to migrate his skills from that era to today. But as CEO, he doesn't need to do that. I'm sure he understands the code on a shallow level, which is fine for his role.
We are talking about a guy who didn’t understand how to run a python script that the doge guy sent him.
Who among us WASNT writing crappy little programs in BASIC back then, a language aimed at children and microcomputing amateurs? If he had written a 2.5d raycasting game at 12 in C++, i would be impressed.
I knew guys in the 90s in high school who were writing exploits and cracking major software. For a layperson who isn’t a dev and didn’t run in those circles, it might seem impressive for a kid, but not for any of the kids I knew. Any kid with a basic understanding of programming could copy the code from a computer magazine line by line and edit it slightly . And just because he wrote it at 12 doesn’t mean he has actual coding skills as an adult, he has even said so himself he is not a “hardcore coder”. Considering there are kids like Mike Wimmer who were taking uni level robotics courses at 12, Elon is incredibly mediocre in comparison and only a simp would believe he was some kind of prodigy.
After all, we are talking about a guy who asked his engineers to print out code to show him to prove how productive they were, and who could not explain Twitter’s craaaaazy stack without telling off an actual dev. Who the F thinks the more lines of code you write the more productive you are? How deeply embarrassing.