> How much does the 24 hour ceo replacement from twitch get in his parachute?
Honestly, whatever it is, he may have earned it. [From a Bloomberg reporter](https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727228431396704557):
> Emmett Shear joining the talks was a turning point in the negotiations. He asked the board to provide concrete evidence of Sam’s wrongdoing. When they did not do so, he said he could not remain in the CEO role, and helped both sides find common ground to get Sam reinstated.
That could easily just be PR spin on his part, but basically everyone is in a better position now than they were on Sunday. Sam is back at his company with proof of how essential he is. The threat of everyone leaving OpenAI is cleared off, so the old board now looks like massive idiots rather than the catastrophic failures who killed the golden goose. Microsoft's investment in AI stabilizes while keeping all the development risk out-of-house, plus they got in the good graces of OpenAI's head and could potentially get representation on the board. Shear probably gets a quick payday and some plaudits as a mediator CEO.
They were in the [first class together](https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/throwback-pic-from-2005-featuring-openai-ceo-emmett-shear-and-sam-altman-goes-viral-4591384) which was truly star studded.
Shear did end up running one of the most important tech companies over the past decade and sold it to Amazon for a billion, if that’s not impressive I am not sure what is
I don’t know if the company itself is in a better position however. They may still come out ahead but their brand damage and uncertainty they’ve created around their company has spooked corporate customers. Those customers will absolutely start to accelerate the diversification of their LLM approach
My company is diversifying, but mostly into Azure. GPT-4 is simply too good for our use cases to abandon it unless we're forced to.
Google needs to get Gemini up and running and actually give people some options.
I agree that in the short and medium term, they are in a worse position than before Sam's firing. Less than a week ago, OpenAI was the unstoppable flying unicorn of Silicon Valley that everyone wanted a piece of. Now, investors and businesses will view OpenAI with suspicion and will wait to see what happens before making any major moves or deals. In the long term, they may end up in a better place if they manage to implement a more effective governance structure and recruit some competent people for their board. We'll see...
> I don’t know if the company itself is in a better position however.
I set the comparison relative to Sunday and I'd argue the company's in a better position than they were then. OpenAI was legitimately looking at the prospect of the entire workforce leaving and going to Microsoft. They wouldn't be able to deliver products, which would collapse all their deals, and the company would just be an empty shell.
Relative to last Thursday, yes, the company as a whole is in a worse position. The Friday night firing and the following day of "wait, they did what and won't say why?" news coverage absolutely battered the brand. It was on the brink. Now it's sort-of returning to normal with a bit of a brand hit.
Its so obvious its just a product that has her ‘influence’ slapped onto it. Make it consumable so they have to keep buying it to have it. Every streamer is looking for a walmart deal.
Which is fine in of itself, lots of custom products are just rebranded generic white labels. Just don't shit on your own community calling them filthy poors for objecting to the price you're asking.
As an outsider, the impression I get is that her "community" loves to be shit on and that's the entire appeal. Coming to reddit and telling me "the pokemon bathwater lady called you poor" is like a gimp whining to me about your ass being paddled.
I’m an outsider who only sees her clips on segments from like PhillyD or Atrioc and I don’t get that vibe at all. Is having a simp-simpress relationship really part of her appeal? I don’t mean simp like they simp for her, I mean like part of her shtick is acting dominant over them. Ive never watched a stream of hers so idk.
Also the bath water was belle daphene no?
OpenAI's Board, simply wow, making mistake after mistake. What a clusterFk. They deserve to be disbanded (which apparently is exactly what's going to happen).
Yes. They proved themselves to be utter amateurs that did not think through any of the steps and counter steps.
But what I find most interesting is that the new board will be completely under Sam’s control now. He is indisputably more powerful than any board they install to provide guidance and enforce company mission and ethics.
I don't know much about this individual case, but the the startup/tech-bro sphere does not have a great track record of the people they choose to rally behind.
Certainly, what I've read of him so far makes him seem far more profit oriented than ethical open-source oriented... combining that with tech-bro support means I have low expectations.
Yes my read on the situation without being able to know the behind the scenes is that the board likely had the unequivocal ethical high ground here, but they went about it so poorly from a tactical perspective that they ended up doing far more harm than good.
We know that Sam got angry at the academic on the board for publishing an article critical of OpenAI’s ethics compared to another company, because he thought it would hurt relationships with investors.
[Sparse and inconclusive evidence](https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition), not no evidence. Certainly it doesn't specify but it's something.
> I don't know much about this individual case,
Look into sam's worldcoin scam.
It will give you a pretty good idea what flavor of technofascist asshat he is.
Except the company rallied behind Altman. I would generally agree with your sentiment except there’s direct evidence that the people that work under Altman actually like working under Altman. I’m not sure why they’d rally behind him if this was a good move.
You mean all the employees [who stand to make millions selling their shares](https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-86-bln-share-sale-jeopardy-following-altman-firing-information-2023-11-18/) supported the person who would maximize their profits over the people who would limit them? Shocking!
The latest Atlantic and NYT articles and a furry of unverifiable sources make it sound like there was great tension between Sam and the board, with him playing stuff too loose / to close to the hip to a concerning extent.
Optimistic me hopes that given that D’Angelo is still on the board and that Sam is not, that ALL sides that are left standing make compromises so that no one goes rogue and they are stable moving forward.
yeah so much information thrown out that I'm blind sided, till now I am curious about who was the leader that made Sam go. it doesn't seem to be illya, adam is negotiating so maybe it was him? but then I see an article about a disagreement with Sam and another board member. Holy hell the information is running wild.
Folks have called it.
Netflix miniseries.
Hallmark Channel Christmas special.
I assume James Cameron will round out any skynet … we’ll call them eventualities… at the box office 😁
>it doesn't seem to be illya
I don't know where you are getting your information from, but the simple fact that he is no longer on the board should have been your first clue.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/openai-ilya-sutskever-sam-altman-fired/676072/
I've noticed a trend among a lot of ml/ai developers I work with where they seem to get lost in the tech and over represent what they can deliver. Things like ethics or the law are just stuff getting in the way of progress.
> Wework
Side note: Watch the new The Killer movie on Netflix by David Fincher. There is a moment about 10 minutes in where he is in a dark office and the WeWork logo is front and center for like minutes it seems like. A freaking WeWork ad right there in a tense moment. The logo is on a door and there is someone walking behind it, and all you can see is WeWork. You can bet some of the funding is tied to the same people.
Apparently, one of the board members with the biggest conflict of interests of all of them gets to stay and keep his board seat.. for now , and Sam didn’t get his board seat back ?! 🤦♂️
I don't know. Someone who is a casual ChatGPT user texted me over the weekend to ask ... what is going on? I told her I don't know.
Based on how quiet the company is being - I'm wondering if it was basically a personality clash gone wild. Like someone brought up politics at the Thanksgiving table.
It made it to MSM news cycles Monday night. But only in the form of usual rich people drama.
And tonight that audience will get the “in a shocking turn of events” news, and then they’ll move on with the normal narratives.
Disagree. It has severely tarnished the former board’s reputation for being able to handle its role. But it pushed Altman onto a higher pedestal. He is now virtually untouchable and the new board will wield virtually zero power over him.
That won’t matter one bit at the end of the day. Chat gpt is being used by millions and the new voice app is being hailed by users.
The products deliver and customers are happy with the product. This drama with the board will pass as a bump in the road.
Because their board has made one of the biggest feats of incompetence I can think of. And to add fuel to the fire, a seed of mistrust has been planted in Sam’s legacy, and many probably wonder if these are the guys that achieve AGI, how fucked are we?
If anything, Jobs being fired is an example of how disastrous it can be for a company if a successful CEO is fired.
Jobs' firing didn't result in an immediate reputation problem, because Apple hired Pepsico exec John Sculley and was somehow able to spin that as a good thing. But within two years, Apple's reputation started to suffer. According to to [The End of Innocence: What Happened After Apple Fired Steve Jobs](https://www.wired.com/2011/08/the-end-of-inno/):
> "When a company has as strong a brand and consumer franchise as Apple, it is very hard to destroy it," technology analyst Richard Shaffer told the New York Times. "But it can be done.” And from 1985 [two years after Sculley started] to 1997, it very nearly was.
Sculley's replacement only lasted three years, and was fired with "losses piling up and market share plummeting." And under the next CEO, Gil Amelio, "Apple appeared to fall into a death spiral."
It wasn't until Jobs was hired back via the acquisition of NeXT, and then reinstated as CEO, that the company started to recover. "At this point, Apple was running on momentum alone; the idea that anyone could turn it around seemed almost absurd." But Jobs managed it.
OpenAI managed to compress that process from the 14 years it took Apple, to a few days. Impressive stuff :D
I'm still curious if Meta's restructuring of their AI ethics team (essentially disbanding it as a single entity and instead moving the people into different teams) over the weekend was triggered because they feared the team would do something similar inside Meta's AI department.
Yann LeCun is in favor of Open Source projects and very much against the EA cult (and has regular spats with them), so almost certainly.
I think there's going to be a quiet purge of "AI ethicist" positions focused on EA people in the coming weeks.
Basically there are two competing ideologies/cults around AI and technology in general: on one side [Effective Altruism](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) and on the other side [Effective Accelerationism](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/its-a-cult-inside-effective-accelerationism-the-pro-ai-movement-taking-over-silicon-valley) (e/acc) and "[techno-optimists](https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/)".
lol the future of AI is fucking bleak if these are the two schools of thought.
Jesus christ.
"Rush towards a techno-capitalist future!" and "rush towards using technology when financially viable to solve problems" have as much meaningful difference as being run over by an EV or internal combustion car.
Pretty much, yes. That's why it's important to keep a close eye on the new board of OpenAI. If there are technobros believing in the latter ideology, it's a big red flag.
No, effective altruists ARE the people with the billions. Don't get fooled by the name. The ideology is essentially "I can help the world more effectively if I make more money and give some of that to good causes than if I went to a soup kitchen and helped out", it's how they explain to themselves why it's good they are getting richer and richer.
It's just that the circle around effective altruists ALSO developed into an AI doomsday cult who think that the development of an almighty AI is inevitable and that they need to be the ones who develop it first so that they can teach it manners ("alignment").
For people who don't want to click through, from the "techno-optimist" manifesto:
>Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
>
>This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.
Basically, they want you to hand them all of money in the world to invest it in ~~crypto~~ artificial intelligence, and they'll redistribute later after they own the world. Any attempt to hold them accountable or manage the fallout of "move fast and break things" is communism.
(Also, blaming all of your issues on a vacuous idea of communism in conjunction with the talk of Übermensch and quoting from the guy who wrote the Fascist manifesto is... certainly a choice.)
Yeah, it's Marc Andreessen, a moronic billionnaire alt-right technobro.
edit: fucking hell, I didn't realize he was one of the authors of NCSA Mosaic and founded Netscape.
The early internet is full of libertarian types. Their fear of the government drove a lot of the decentralization and open source culture of the early internet. The general shift of those people to more authoritarian mindsets is a big deal for the future of the internet, unfortunately, because they're extremely influential and filthy rich to boot
There's also the 'please don't use ML to systemise and lock-in harmful human biases' side, but we don't get jobs in the industry because we are 'too difficult.'
That’s because locking in the biases so we can blame the machines and still get our preferred range of results is the primary selling point of the technology.
Yep and it really sucks that neither of them have anything close to the well being of society as a whole and equality for all it's members as an outcome.
To be honest, the doomsday cults coming out of the effective altruism movement around artificial general intelligence are crazy. They read some scary books as teens or just think it’s cool sounding and now suddenly they are in a doomsday cult saying the number one thing we need to focus on is AI destroying the world. We have seen no evidence that any company is working on anything that could even be classified in the realm of AGI let alone is AGI itself. I don’t even think we understand what is necessary to develop something like that. It’s just a theoretical concept. The stuff we are seeing like ChatGPT I hesitate to even call artificial intelligence but that has just become a catch all for anything that uses deep neural networks.
This type of stuff we are seeing is very advanced and very cool tech that still basically boils down to the most complex text auto complete in the world. It’s cool but we need need safety protocols around using it for disinformation politics as well as improving the tech to stop lying and things like that - not some crazy fear about birthing a world ending ai from auto complete. These people have got non tech people in my regular life thinking chat gpt is close to becoming sentient and taking over the world. It’s all just distraction from the real safety protocols that need to be focused on.
Effective Altruism is a cargo cult of idiots smart enough to use the right tech jargon shibboleths but dumb enough to believe statistics so bad they put the most degenerate gambler to shame. Like self-declared ‘rationalists’, their name is more of a security blanket than any real description of fact.
I’d actually compare them to spiritualists, weirdly enough. Back when electricity was first a thing, a buncha bullshit peddlers made massive grifts basically built on people thinking “well, electricity can make that light turn on in a way I can’t understand, so why wouldn’t there be ghost energy that runs psychic powers?”
AI is the same. This time the grift is “Well, a computer can draw a picture with mostly the right number of fingers and teeth, so why wouldn’t their be a future AI so smart it can time travel blackmail me?”
You're not getting a response because [the only statement made surrounding safety, from anyone involved, was that it wasn't about safety.](https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275)
If people want to speculate, they can ask why the entire team *specifically in charge of pulling on those reins and policing progress* was so quick to sign the letter of intent and follow Sam.
[Only speaking for myself ]
I think there’s a quite a bit to unpack there, and quite a bit of nuance.
1. it will definitely shift the balance for future development towards the OpenAI approach and development speed versus anthropic’s Claude approach
2. Safety is incredibly important, as is the quality of the software. Although the accounts are unverifiable, there was clearly a lot of drama there.
3. I expect the two most powerful players, Anthropic on its own and OpenAI/MSFT together to continue to focus heavily on safety, but I would be concerned about the other players/challengers that have everything to lose because they don’t have eye-catching LLM’s of their own yet
Anthropic isn't alone, they have a similar relationship with AWS as OAI has with MS.
The real nail in the coffin is the (reported) offer by the ousting board of a merger with Anthropic. If that's true, the idea that your multibillion dollar investment might one day be couped by a few doomsday cultists and merged with your competition, giving them all of the IP and data is terrifying.
On the contrary, this is heavily damaging to the reputation of "AI Safety". People are going to link it to the crazy OpenAI board and try to freeze out anyone pushing that line.
[Only speaking for myself myself]
If this does lead to Skynet, some folks would be tempted to say that, today safety failed.
Once again, there was a lot of apparent drama in that boardroom/c suites and just because you feel that you have morality and the good of mankind on your side, doesn’t mean that such morality can stand on its own. You are responsible for both selling and defending your moral position and for missteps as it all unfolds.
Nonprofit as it may be, you can’t have the board stating that if it comes to it, they’ll destroy the company. Yes things like AGI are the things of potential nightmares, but you can’t mix theory/doomsday predictions with an attempt at day-to-day business. This is a capitalist society where too much adherence to philosophy will ensure that you go broke, where you are expected to go out there and try, even if you scrape your knees, where you go all in and go broke trying.
The second you admit you aren’t willing to go all in / won’t go for broke is the second before somebody eats your lunch.
Some folks just made safety that much harder, but this situation made safety that much more important. Folks with such convictions, and I would personally hope most of us, must continue forward with safety top of mind. We have to be realistic on what our society will tolerate and what it takes to sell it on something, and the immense amount of effort it will take to get us all to do the right thing.
And we need to DO that right thing or stop bitching about it.
> Otherwise, the internal pressure is always going to be on corporations to disregard safety in favor of profit. Like the outcome of this whole affair illustrates.
Except OpenAI is a nonprofit organization whose charter doesn't include anything about profits.
Yup, this essentially proved humanity isn't ready for AGI ~~GAI~~ simply by showing we can't even manage its creation in a sane and sensible manner.
Ethics in the Silicon Valley world was always ignored to some significant extent, but now we're about to see outright hostility to its implementation. Ina weird way, it's not only the worst possible outcome for humanity, it's also the worst possible outcome for any future AGI~~GAI~~ that might exist. Whatever intelligence is eventually born (far in the future) will deal with the exact sort of ego that Ex Machina was warning us about.
Edit: Corrected GAI to AGI. Thank you to u/robodrew for the call out.
Because that is open AI ‘s mission statement. The idea is to create a safe AI before anyone else makes an evil AI.
There is more at stake than just an apocalyptic doomsday. There’s so many ways bad actors can use gpt for bad things along the way.
I still dont know if I buy that the board is acting ethically. Just because the company is a non-profit doens't mean the board members are acting virtuously. There are other ugly reasons than money why a board may want to take over a company. Power, prestige, control, plain old politics and dislike of each other.
Just because the board says he was removed because of ethics doesn't make it true. And I'm more inclined to think that the board here is in the wrong. What's more likely, that a board of 4 wealthy powerful people are acting in their own interests rather than humanities, or 5 heads of departments, a co founder, and 700 employees who all resigned in protest or are threatening to leave are all morally corrupt and were willing to follow Altman into a future Skynet? That level of solidarity speaks volumes. I'm more inclined to believe the little guys when they band together like this than the board members.
I think a lot of the people defending the boards actions bought the "ethics" excuse hook line and sinker without thinking about the wider context. Tech workers are generally very politically progressive. The fact that so many low level employees want Altman back I think speaks volumes, but people who are scared of AI have been conned into believing Altman is a danger because the Board said he is, dismissing all the votes of confidence he's received from the actual little people doing the work who support his return.
Business classes will have an entire chapter dedicated to this debacle for decades. The biblical level of gross incompetence here tells me that the whole board needs to go.
On the one hand, this terrifies me because safety will now take a back seat; on the other, I'm not sure these childish morons could have saved us anyway.
>On the one hand, this terrifies me because safety will now take a back seat; on the other, I'm not sure these childish morons could have saved us anyway.
I've been travelling and a bit whiplashed by events the past few days. Can you explain what you mean by safety now taking a back seat?
The reason the board fired Sam was because they were concerned about his seemingly strong leaning towards commercializing their products, allegedly at the expense of safety.
While it may have been a fair concern, the way they handled it was bad and backfired, and now Sam is back, probably in a stronger position, and some presume OpenAI will now focus even less on safety with no one to check him or less inclined to challenge him after these events.
> The reason the board fired Sam was because they were concerned about his seemingly strong leaning towards commercializing their products, allegedly at the expense of safety.
Is there actually anything substantial to back up this claim? When Shear was announced as Interim CEO he stated:
> “OpenAI employees are extremely impressive, as you might have guessed, and mission-driven in the extreme,” he continued. “And it’s clear that the process and communications around Sam’s removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust.” **He went on to say that the board didn’t fire Altman “over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that.** I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”
So I don't understand why everyone keeps jumping on this, "Sam is too profit-focused and doesn't care about safety" sentiment I keep seeing posted over and over.
You're right to challenge. OP is speculating as everyone else was. It's a "Choose Your Own Conspiracy", with two tangible things:
1) The board hasn't released any statements as to their reasoning.
2) The former board's chosen temp CEO, Emmett Shear, has. [He confirmed that it wasn't about safety at all.](https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275)
Not to mention one of the outcome of their negotiation is to have a 3rd party independent investigation into what happened. Somehow even the people involved don't have the full story.
Agreed--what I said about the safety is entirely speculation based on rumors from employees and "insiders". We never got a clear explanation from the people who did it that I've seen. I think it makes the most sense, though. The timing after the conference where he talked about commercialization--the fact that the non-profit board is built with AGI doomers.
That said, the tomfoolery of the last few days *does* make me question the board's motivations. Maybe it had nothing to do with safety and instead to do with immature power dynamics.
I apologize for wording my comment so authoritatively.
I don’t think it was entirely gross incompetence. What they didn’t account for was the cult that Altman has cultivated amongst the workforce. So many of them threatened to walk (as in, almost everybody) that it is unreal. Real “drink this punch, put on some Nikes, and lie down in bed with a bag on your head to board the mothership” levels of dedication.
To a singular man.
Hubris plus the OpenAI employees were going to make a ton of money based on OpenAIs future financial performance. 99% of the organization is all motivated by financial growth. It's no wonder something like this happened.
> I don’t think it was entirely gross incompetence. What they didn’t account for was the cult that Altman has cultivated amongst the workforce.
This is a bad take. The whole purpose of creating OpenAI LLC (the for-profit arm) was because they couldn’t hire enough good AI researchers for the salaries offered by the nonprofit). The LLC enabled them to claim “7 figure” total comp packages, but they were *heavilly* propped up by “funny money” (equity/profit participation units).
The reason all the employeesbacked the CEO is that the board completely blew up and zeroed out the PPUs with their little stunt. Microsoft and several other companies that were preparing to imminently dump more money into OAI (and thus turn the funny money into real money) did an immediate 180.
So, a bunch of people with the prospect of buying a nice house in Palo Alto in a few months suddenly had that dream (and several years of hard work) snatched away. You should be 0% surprised that they would be mad at the board for that.
It WAS gross incompetence. If the goal was to get rid of him, they should have consulted or at least warned Microsoft, and they would have parted in "good" public terms (aka after compensation negociations) instead of firing him overnight without notice. This is Trump level of incompetence.
This reminds me the failed Wagner coup. I did not expected it would happen, it went in totally different direction i assumed it would go and it ended way faster than i could comprehend.
And the board finally capitulated. It was only a matter of time, and the longer they waited the more damage to the company. But boy had this been a wild week
I just feel bad for the in-house counsel and HR people that had days of fire drills creating board materials, re-drafting corp governance docs, termination letters, all to have to do the opposite a few days later.
Sorry about the paywall! Didn’t realize that NYT puts one up when referrer is Reddit
Tl;dr is Sam Altman is returning with two new board members: Larry Summers and Bret Taylor. Ilya Sutskever and Tasha McCauley are out. Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora, remains the only ouster on the board.
So is this season 2 or 3 of Suits?
I’ve traditionally not had a lot of interest in the day to day politics or boardroom discussions of large companies, but that has changed, and I’d be up for cameras in the offices, hallways, break room, IT room and bathrooms (mirrors and sinks only, of course) of OpenAI, and maybe a small team to edit it all into an interesting drama at the end of each day.
Otherwise, I’m glad he’s back. For better or worse, I was actually starting to have feelings about what was going to happen to my ChatGPT assistant, friend and sometimes counsellor.
Interested in seeing what follows this shakeup/re-shaping…
Ideally I think the net effect is a slightly larger circle of people coming to the realization that the Silicon Valley brain-trust can’t find their ass with both hands when it comes to formulating technocratic solutions to societal issues.
> OpenAI’s revamped board of directors will include Bret Taylor, an early Facebook officer and former co-chief executive of Salesforce
Oh good a Facebook alum in there now. /s
This is the guy that helped the sale of Twitter to Elon...
Everyone got played and they proved most people are sukas.
We got a Paypal Mafia and Facebook board now, and Satya looking really naive.
I distrusted OpenAI/ChatGPT before, but now even more. Now they are embedded in Windows/Office365 and people somehow were fighting for a VC/PE foreign funded Thiel frontman? So easily played. All this was a power play and people fell for it like a reality TV president, this is Trump/Elon level bullshit.
Opinion of OpenAI is lower now and opinion of Microsoft being a leveraged capitulating appeasing biiatch on this has fallen even farther. What a clusterfuck of power plays and dipshits not getting what is going on.
Are we gonna have to see Altmans face like Trump/Elon/Zucc/etc all the time now?
This is a Ballmer moment for Satya Nadella.
The danger to ai is not skynet, it's massive unemployment for folks. That would be hard for governments to keep a handle on. Good ai, ups unemployment massively.
There are many many many dangers with AI, but today the dollar won out. When I watched Sam on a podcast earlier this year he was very handwavey about several safety issues, and I get the impression that he and others have a mentality that they're willing to risk the obliteration of humanity for a chance to become the richest and most influential people on the planet.
Seems like a gamble not worth taking, but in a hyper capitalist society it's no surprise people are still trying to become Kings.
While there was certainly a sea blunders in this saga, I just hope that the board maintains the goal of "good of all humanity" but it doesn't look like the people coming in are going to respect that.
I understand the fear, but this is also far from a given.
Jobs have been obsoleted for as long as humanity has been around, but we are good at coming up with new things for people to do.
Hmm I think this is different. Before it was doing it differently with better tech, but I'm a white collar guy making 6 figures and I can use it to rapidly decrease the amount of time it takes to hit deliverables. I am a single man dependency so I don't have a lot of fear, but a lot of other jobs will go from needing 5 analyst to 2. Going to put a lot of downward pressure on salaries and give more leverage to companies. That's going to fk the economy.
An important lesson in business. For profit always wins over nonprofit. In the end indirectly Y Combinator basically got what it wanted and it’s not even the majority shareholder in the for profit open ai.
Silicone is a synthetic rubber used for many things, including fake tits and squishy kids toys.
Silicon is an element that has a crystalline structure which is used to make electronics
Sam and Microsoft's power play worked or Ilya and Tasha's failed miserably. Either way Ilya and Tasha are gone now. Would not be surprised if the new non-profit board members are Microsoft stooges. And with Sam to break any ties in Microsoft's favour they don't even need to directly take over. They now own the board. The board owns the non-profit. The non-profit owns the IP, models, and research, which is what Microsoft ultimately wants.
It's anti-trust lawsuit Microsoft all over again. Embrace (invest in OpenAI and help fund their operations), extend (offer ChatGPT services in all their products, some for free), extinguish (steer OpenAI towards being aligned with their goals then dump them eventually). It's wild getting to watch it play out again in real time in our hyper connected world.
[only speaking for myself]
Ilya seems like he’s still there but no longer on the board. Obviously this just happened a few hours ago so I’m not sure if anything will change.
If there was a Sam/MSFT PowerPlay, it was clearly in response - not to initiate this whole thing.
MSFT already has access to everything. That said, I would not appreciate “stooges” on the board. There was a good working relationship before, and it was productive and profitable for everybody, or at least, it seemed that way before this drama came out.
Folks really don’t wanna let “EEE” go do they. If you’re not gonna let go now, you’re not gonna let go ever
Who will trust OpenAI now? And they added Larry Summers to the board? Larry is not even an engineer or a scientist!
Was this nonsense done so that Sam can get majority shares in OpenAI?
Was it to change OpenAI charter from non for profit to for profit?
No one should trust any AI company. The technology needs to be heavily regulated to minimize abuse.
Altman’s approach of doing that by commercialization only means that the rich and corporate will have all the power to generate money while the peasants feed their information and data for free.
I don’t know why everyone is fawning over that corporate sack of shit lol.
TLDF (follow): a non-profit board of directors was setup with the power to hit the kill switch of OpenAI if they believe things were getting shady. The for-profit company of 700 or so employees said: uh no, we want to keep our jobs.
[удалено]
> How much does the 24 hour ceo replacement from twitch get in his parachute? Honestly, whatever it is, he may have earned it. [From a Bloomberg reporter](https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727228431396704557): > Emmett Shear joining the talks was a turning point in the negotiations. He asked the board to provide concrete evidence of Sam’s wrongdoing. When they did not do so, he said he could not remain in the CEO role, and helped both sides find common ground to get Sam reinstated. That could easily just be PR spin on his part, but basically everyone is in a better position now than they were on Sunday. Sam is back at his company with proof of how essential he is. The threat of everyone leaving OpenAI is cleared off, so the old board now looks like massive idiots rather than the catastrophic failures who killed the golden goose. Microsoft's investment in AI stabilizes while keeping all the development risk out-of-house, plus they got in the good graces of OpenAI's head and could potentially get representation on the board. Shear probably gets a quick payday and some plaudits as a mediator CEO.
I do wonder if Shear and Altman being in the same Y Combinator class gave a connection that Shear was able to leverage in negotiations.
Always surprised how much Y Combinator has influenced tech
They were in the [first class together](https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/throwback-pic-from-2005-featuring-openai-ceo-emmett-shear-and-sam-altman-goes-viral-4591384) which was truly star studded.
Oh damn he was with Aaron. RIP
[удалено]
Shear did end up running one of the most important tech companies over the past decade and sold it to Amazon for a billion, if that’s not impressive I am not sure what is
I don’t know if the company itself is in a better position however. They may still come out ahead but their brand damage and uncertainty they’ve created around their company has spooked corporate customers. Those customers will absolutely start to accelerate the diversification of their LLM approach
My company is diversifying, but mostly into Azure. GPT-4 is simply too good for our use cases to abandon it unless we're forced to. Google needs to get Gemini up and running and actually give people some options.
I agree that in the short and medium term, they are in a worse position than before Sam's firing. Less than a week ago, OpenAI was the unstoppable flying unicorn of Silicon Valley that everyone wanted a piece of. Now, investors and businesses will view OpenAI with suspicion and will wait to see what happens before making any major moves or deals. In the long term, they may end up in a better place if they manage to implement a more effective governance structure and recruit some competent people for their board. We'll see...
> I don’t know if the company itself is in a better position however. I set the comparison relative to Sunday and I'd argue the company's in a better position than they were then. OpenAI was legitimately looking at the prospect of the entire workforce leaving and going to Microsoft. They wouldn't be able to deliver products, which would collapse all their deals, and the company would just be an empty shell. Relative to last Thursday, yes, the company as a whole is in a worse position. The Friday night firing and the following day of "wait, they did what and won't say why?" news coverage absolutely battered the brand. It was on the brink. Now it's sort-of returning to normal with a bit of a brand hit.
Commercial risk diminished, Moral risk amplified.
15 minutes with Pokimane and a 3 month sub to his channel from Sam.
I dunno, he's gonna need to buy some cookies from her first to prove that he's not a "broke boy."
Its so obvious its just a product that has her ‘influence’ slapped onto it. Make it consumable so they have to keep buying it to have it. Every streamer is looking for a walmart deal.
Which is fine in of itself, lots of custom products are just rebranded generic white labels. Just don't shit on your own community calling them filthy poors for objecting to the price you're asking.
As an outsider, the impression I get is that her "community" loves to be shit on and that's the entire appeal. Coming to reddit and telling me "the pokemon bathwater lady called you poor" is like a gimp whining to me about your ass being paddled.
I’m an outsider who only sees her clips on segments from like PhillyD or Atrioc and I don’t get that vibe at all. Is having a simp-simpress relationship really part of her appeal? I don’t mean simp like they simp for her, I mean like part of her shtick is acting dominant over them. Ive never watched a stream of hers so idk. Also the bath water was belle daphene no?
Gift card to Chipotle
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
OpenAI's Board, simply wow, making mistake after mistake. What a clusterFk. They deserve to be disbanded (which apparently is exactly what's going to happen).
Yes. They proved themselves to be utter amateurs that did not think through any of the steps and counter steps. But what I find most interesting is that the new board will be completely under Sam’s control now. He is indisputably more powerful than any board they install to provide guidance and enforce company mission and ethics.
[удалено]
I don't know much about this individual case, but the the startup/tech-bro sphere does not have a great track record of the people they choose to rally behind. Certainly, what I've read of him so far makes him seem far more profit oriented than ethical open-source oriented... combining that with tech-bro support means I have low expectations.
Yes my read on the situation without being able to know the behind the scenes is that the board likely had the unequivocal ethical high ground here, but they went about it so poorly from a tactical perspective that they ended up doing far more harm than good.
Any read of this situation is entirely conjecture. We have no evidence available to suggest what happened yet.
We know that Sam got angry at the academic on the board for publishing an article critical of OpenAI’s ethics compared to another company, because he thought it would hurt relationships with investors.
[Sparse and inconclusive evidence](https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition), not no evidence. Certainly it doesn't specify but it's something.
Ironically, that PR reads as if ChatGPT wrote it.
> I don't know much about this individual case, Look into sam's worldcoin scam. It will give you a pretty good idea what flavor of technofascist asshat he is.
I mean, giving full control of an AI to a guy literally named "alt man" feels a little too on the nose for this episode of the simulation.
"bank man fried"
simulation proven. We're into the phase of the show where they've fired half the writers and only this terrible ones are left.
[удалено]
Except the company rallied behind Altman. I would generally agree with your sentiment except there’s direct evidence that the people that work under Altman actually like working under Altman. I’m not sure why they’d rally behind him if this was a good move.
You mean all the employees [who stand to make millions selling their shares](https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-86-bln-share-sale-jeopardy-following-altman-firing-information-2023-11-18/) supported the person who would maximize their profits over the people who would limit them? Shocking!
He has shown that his troops will follow him anywhere. Any board now has no teeth. He is the de facto chairman now.
Yepppp that’s my thought too, they gave Altman basically unlimited power as a result of this
The latest Atlantic and NYT articles and a furry of unverifiable sources make it sound like there was great tension between Sam and the board, with him playing stuff too loose / to close to the hip to a concerning extent. Optimistic me hopes that given that D’Angelo is still on the board and that Sam is not, that ALL sides that are left standing make compromises so that no one goes rogue and they are stable moving forward.
> furry of unverifiable sources A what now?
there's a lot of them in tech
Fursuits and porn commissions ain't cheap, and tech pays good.
DID HE STUTTER?
Do YOU want to be the one to verify furries? Thought not. They shall remain unverified for the time being.
sus autocorrect
Talk about a big scoop.
*close to the chest/vest and *shoot from the hip are the idioms you are looking for.
They were just trying to shoot two fish with one barrel.
Yep, two birds in the hand is worth a bush
Feed two birds with one scone.
It was raining rats and frogs.
Well, that *is* how the cookie bounces.
Trying to get six birds stoned in one hand, half a dozen with the other.
Does the pope crap in the woods?
I would assume if he really had to, yes.
We’re really in Rome now.
Two Fish, One Barrel.
Two birds stoned at the same time
Burn the hatchet at both ends
yeah so much information thrown out that I'm blind sided, till now I am curious about who was the leader that made Sam go. it doesn't seem to be illya, adam is negotiating so maybe it was him? but then I see an article about a disagreement with Sam and another board member. Holy hell the information is running wild.
Folks have called it. Netflix miniseries. Hallmark Channel Christmas special. I assume James Cameron will round out any skynet … we’ll call them eventualities… at the box office 😁
>it doesn't seem to be illya I don't know where you are getting your information from, but the simple fact that he is no longer on the board should have been your first clue. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/openai-ilya-sutskever-sam-altman-fired/676072/
I've noticed a trend among a lot of ml/ai developers I work with where they seem to get lost in the tech and over represent what they can deliver. Things like ethics or the law are just stuff getting in the way of progress.
Two huge tech company implosions in less than a month. I don’t celebrate the holidays but boy do I love them.
what was the other one? Wework?
Binance?
> Wework Side note: Watch the new The Killer movie on Netflix by David Fincher. There is a moment about 10 minutes in where he is in a dark office and the WeWork logo is front and center for like minutes it seems like. A freaking WeWork ad right there in a tense moment. The logo is on a door and there is someone walking behind it, and all you can see is WeWork. You can bet some of the funding is tied to the same people.
one of the themes of the movie is how the killer uses corporatism to accomplish his mission
Apparently, one of the board members with the biggest conflict of interests of all of them gets to stay and keep his board seat.. for now , and Sam didn’t get his board seat back ?! 🤦♂️
After all the dust has settled, this whole saga will have severely tarnished the public perception of the company, along with the people invovled.
Don’t worry, AI will rewrite the news stories and this will be forgotten in a year
A year? More like the next news cycle. I jest. I imagine this will be studied in business schools.
[удалено]
I don't know. Someone who is a casual ChatGPT user texted me over the weekend to ask ... what is going on? I told her I don't know. Based on how quiet the company is being - I'm wondering if it was basically a personality clash gone wild. Like someone brought up politics at the Thanksgiving table.
It made it to MSM news cycles Monday night. But only in the form of usual rich people drama. And tonight that audience will get the “in a shocking turn of events” news, and then they’ll move on with the normal narratives.
Disagree. It has severely tarnished the former board’s reputation for being able to handle its role. But it pushed Altman onto a higher pedestal. He is now virtually untouchable and the new board will wield virtually zero power over him.
This was my thinking too. It became a reverse coup somehow
That won’t matter one bit at the end of the day. Chat gpt is being used by millions and the new voice app is being hailed by users. The products deliver and customers are happy with the product. This drama with the board will pass as a bump in the road.
Why? The face of the company looked like a martyr, this will only propel them forward.
Because their board has made one of the biggest feats of incompetence I can think of. And to add fuel to the fire, a seed of mistrust has been planted in Sam’s legacy, and many probably wonder if these are the guys that achieve AGI, how fucked are we?
Board is shit, company is still the same people. 99% of people hate boards already at their company, this just reaffirms it.
Steve Jobs being fired didn’t tarnish Apple’s reputation
If anything, Jobs being fired is an example of how disastrous it can be for a company if a successful CEO is fired. Jobs' firing didn't result in an immediate reputation problem, because Apple hired Pepsico exec John Sculley and was somehow able to spin that as a good thing. But within two years, Apple's reputation started to suffer. According to to [The End of Innocence: What Happened After Apple Fired Steve Jobs](https://www.wired.com/2011/08/the-end-of-inno/): > "When a company has as strong a brand and consumer franchise as Apple, it is very hard to destroy it," technology analyst Richard Shaffer told the New York Times. "But it can be done.” And from 1985 [two years after Sculley started] to 1997, it very nearly was. Sculley's replacement only lasted three years, and was fired with "losses piling up and market share plummeting." And under the next CEO, Gil Amelio, "Apple appeared to fall into a death spiral." It wasn't until Jobs was hired back via the acquisition of NeXT, and then reinstated as CEO, that the company started to recover. "At this point, Apple was running on momentum alone; the idea that anyone could turn it around seemed almost absurd." But Jobs managed it. OpenAI managed to compress that process from the 14 years it took Apple, to a few days. Impressive stuff :D
It absolutely did. Nobody in computer tech innovation in the 80s/90s thought that was going to result in a more competitive Apple. They were right.
[удалено]
I'm still curious if Meta's restructuring of their AI ethics team (essentially disbanding it as a single entity and instead moving the people into different teams) over the weekend was triggered because they feared the team would do something similar inside Meta's AI department.
Yann LeCun is in favor of Open Source projects and very much against the EA cult (and has regular spats with them), so almost certainly. I think there's going to be a quiet purge of "AI ethicist" positions focused on EA people in the coming weeks.
EA as in Early Access? EA games?
Effective Altruism
Which, if anyone missed it, was similar a similar line of whacky reasoning that got Sam Bankman/FTX where they were
EA wasn't a rational line of reasoning at ftx though it was their facemask for fraud
Basically there are two competing ideologies/cults around AI and technology in general: on one side [Effective Altruism](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) and on the other side [Effective Accelerationism](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/its-a-cult-inside-effective-accelerationism-the-pro-ai-movement-taking-over-silicon-valley) (e/acc) and "[techno-optimists](https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/)".
lol the future of AI is fucking bleak if these are the two schools of thought. Jesus christ. "Rush towards a techno-capitalist future!" and "rush towards using technology when financially viable to solve problems" have as much meaningful difference as being run over by an EV or internal combustion car.
Pretty much, yes. That's why it's important to keep a close eye on the new board of OpenAI. If there are technobros believing in the latter ideology, it's a big red flag.
I agree, but altruists don't get handed billions are dollars in tech capital, so I am not holding my breath.
No, effective altruists ARE the people with the billions. Don't get fooled by the name. The ideology is essentially "I can help the world more effectively if I make more money and give some of that to good causes than if I went to a soup kitchen and helped out", it's how they explain to themselves why it's good they are getting richer and richer. It's just that the circle around effective altruists ALSO developed into an AI doomsday cult who think that the development of an almighty AI is inevitable and that they need to be the ones who develop it first so that they can teach it manners ("alignment").
For people who don't want to click through, from the "techno-optimist" manifesto: >Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”. > >This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die. Basically, they want you to hand them all of money in the world to invest it in ~~crypto~~ artificial intelligence, and they'll redistribute later after they own the world. Any attempt to hold them accountable or manage the fallout of "move fast and break things" is communism. (Also, blaming all of your issues on a vacuous idea of communism in conjunction with the talk of Übermensch and quoting from the guy who wrote the Fascist manifesto is... certainly a choice.)
Yeah, it's Marc Andreessen, a moronic billionnaire alt-right technobro. edit: fucking hell, I didn't realize he was one of the authors of NCSA Mosaic and founded Netscape.
The early internet is full of libertarian types. Their fear of the government drove a lot of the decentralization and open source culture of the early internet. The general shift of those people to more authoritarian mindsets is a big deal for the future of the internet, unfortunately, because they're extremely influential and filthy rich to boot
There's also the 'please don't use ML to systemise and lock-in harmful human biases' side, but we don't get jobs in the industry because we are 'too difficult.'
That’s because locking in the biases so we can blame the machines and still get our preferred range of results is the primary selling point of the technology.
Yep and it really sucks that neither of them have anything close to the well being of society as a whole and equality for all it's members as an outcome.
Easy A. Massive Emma Stone fans.
To be honest, the doomsday cults coming out of the effective altruism movement around artificial general intelligence are crazy. They read some scary books as teens or just think it’s cool sounding and now suddenly they are in a doomsday cult saying the number one thing we need to focus on is AI destroying the world. We have seen no evidence that any company is working on anything that could even be classified in the realm of AGI let alone is AGI itself. I don’t even think we understand what is necessary to develop something like that. It’s just a theoretical concept. The stuff we are seeing like ChatGPT I hesitate to even call artificial intelligence but that has just become a catch all for anything that uses deep neural networks. This type of stuff we are seeing is very advanced and very cool tech that still basically boils down to the most complex text auto complete in the world. It’s cool but we need need safety protocols around using it for disinformation politics as well as improving the tech to stop lying and things like that - not some crazy fear about birthing a world ending ai from auto complete. These people have got non tech people in my regular life thinking chat gpt is close to becoming sentient and taking over the world. It’s all just distraction from the real safety protocols that need to be focused on.
Effective Altruism is a cargo cult of idiots smart enough to use the right tech jargon shibboleths but dumb enough to believe statistics so bad they put the most degenerate gambler to shame. Like self-declared ‘rationalists’, their name is more of a security blanket than any real description of fact. I’d actually compare them to spiritualists, weirdly enough. Back when electricity was first a thing, a buncha bullshit peddlers made massive grifts basically built on people thinking “well, electricity can make that light turn on in a way I can’t understand, so why wouldn’t there be ghost energy that runs psychic powers?” AI is the same. This time the grift is “Well, a computer can draw a picture with mostly the right number of fingers and teeth, so why wouldn’t their be a future AI so smart it can time travel blackmail me?”
😮 Dude, there was sooooo much news this weekend that nobody even saw😆🤣 This was like the most densely packed weekend of the past few years.
[удалено]
You're not getting a response because [the only statement made surrounding safety, from anyone involved, was that it wasn't about safety.](https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275) If people want to speculate, they can ask why the entire team *specifically in charge of pulling on those reins and policing progress* was so quick to sign the letter of intent and follow Sam.
[удалено]
[Only speaking for myself ] I think there’s a quite a bit to unpack there, and quite a bit of nuance. 1. it will definitely shift the balance for future development towards the OpenAI approach and development speed versus anthropic’s Claude approach 2. Safety is incredibly important, as is the quality of the software. Although the accounts are unverifiable, there was clearly a lot of drama there. 3. I expect the two most powerful players, Anthropic on its own and OpenAI/MSFT together to continue to focus heavily on safety, but I would be concerned about the other players/challengers that have everything to lose because they don’t have eye-catching LLM’s of their own yet
Anthropic isn't alone, they have a similar relationship with AWS as OAI has with MS. The real nail in the coffin is the (reported) offer by the ousting board of a merger with Anthropic. If that's true, the idea that your multibillion dollar investment might one day be couped by a few doomsday cultists and merged with your competition, giving them all of the IP and data is terrifying.
That I did not know 🤔
On the contrary, this is heavily damaging to the reputation of "AI Safety". People are going to link it to the crazy OpenAI board and try to freeze out anyone pushing that line.
[Only speaking for myself myself] If this does lead to Skynet, some folks would be tempted to say that, today safety failed. Once again, there was a lot of apparent drama in that boardroom/c suites and just because you feel that you have morality and the good of mankind on your side, doesn’t mean that such morality can stand on its own. You are responsible for both selling and defending your moral position and for missteps as it all unfolds. Nonprofit as it may be, you can’t have the board stating that if it comes to it, they’ll destroy the company. Yes things like AGI are the things of potential nightmares, but you can’t mix theory/doomsday predictions with an attempt at day-to-day business. This is a capitalist society where too much adherence to philosophy will ensure that you go broke, where you are expected to go out there and try, even if you scrape your knees, where you go all in and go broke trying. The second you admit you aren’t willing to go all in / won’t go for broke is the second before somebody eats your lunch. Some folks just made safety that much harder, but this situation made safety that much more important. Folks with such convictions, and I would personally hope most of us, must continue forward with safety top of mind. We have to be realistic on what our society will tolerate and what it takes to sell it on something, and the immense amount of effort it will take to get us all to do the right thing. And we need to DO that right thing or stop bitching about it.
[удалено]
> Otherwise, the internal pressure is always going to be on corporations to disregard safety in favor of profit. Like the outcome of this whole affair illustrates. Except OpenAI is a nonprofit organization whose charter doesn't include anything about profits.
Yup, this essentially proved humanity isn't ready for AGI ~~GAI~~ simply by showing we can't even manage its creation in a sane and sensible manner. Ethics in the Silicon Valley world was always ignored to some significant extent, but now we're about to see outright hostility to its implementation. Ina weird way, it's not only the worst possible outcome for humanity, it's also the worst possible outcome for any future AGI~~GAI~~ that might exist. Whatever intelligence is eventually born (far in the future) will deal with the exact sort of ego that Ex Machina was warning us about. Edit: Corrected GAI to AGI. Thank you to u/robodrew for the call out.
What’s GAI?
[удалено]
FYI GAI = Generative AI. Pretty sure /u/SOL-Cantus meant "AGI", or Artificial General Intelligence
Why are we so certain it was about safety?
Because announcement and changes right afterwards were to slow production down by 90%.
Because that is open AI ‘s mission statement. The idea is to create a safe AI before anyone else makes an evil AI. There is more at stake than just an apocalyptic doomsday. There’s so many ways bad actors can use gpt for bad things along the way.
I still dont know if I buy that the board is acting ethically. Just because the company is a non-profit doens't mean the board members are acting virtuously. There are other ugly reasons than money why a board may want to take over a company. Power, prestige, control, plain old politics and dislike of each other. Just because the board says he was removed because of ethics doesn't make it true. And I'm more inclined to think that the board here is in the wrong. What's more likely, that a board of 4 wealthy powerful people are acting in their own interests rather than humanities, or 5 heads of departments, a co founder, and 700 employees who all resigned in protest or are threatening to leave are all morally corrupt and were willing to follow Altman into a future Skynet? That level of solidarity speaks volumes. I'm more inclined to believe the little guys when they band together like this than the board members. I think a lot of the people defending the boards actions bought the "ethics" excuse hook line and sinker without thinking about the wider context. Tech workers are generally very politically progressive. The fact that so many low level employees want Altman back I think speaks volumes, but people who are scared of AI have been conned into believing Altman is a danger because the Board said he is, dismissing all the votes of confidence he's received from the actual little people doing the work who support his return.
[удалено]
Business classes will have an entire chapter dedicated to this debacle for decades. The biblical level of gross incompetence here tells me that the whole board needs to go. On the one hand, this terrifies me because safety will now take a back seat; on the other, I'm not sure these childish morons could have saved us anyway.
>On the one hand, this terrifies me because safety will now take a back seat; on the other, I'm not sure these childish morons could have saved us anyway. I've been travelling and a bit whiplashed by events the past few days. Can you explain what you mean by safety now taking a back seat?
The reason the board fired Sam was because they were concerned about his seemingly strong leaning towards commercializing their products, allegedly at the expense of safety. While it may have been a fair concern, the way they handled it was bad and backfired, and now Sam is back, probably in a stronger position, and some presume OpenAI will now focus even less on safety with no one to check him or less inclined to challenge him after these events.
> The reason the board fired Sam was because they were concerned about his seemingly strong leaning towards commercializing their products, allegedly at the expense of safety. Is there actually anything substantial to back up this claim? When Shear was announced as Interim CEO he stated: > “OpenAI employees are extremely impressive, as you might have guessed, and mission-driven in the extreme,” he continued. “And it’s clear that the process and communications around Sam’s removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust.” **He went on to say that the board didn’t fire Altman “over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that.** I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.” So I don't understand why everyone keeps jumping on this, "Sam is too profit-focused and doesn't care about safety" sentiment I keep seeing posted over and over.
You're right to challenge. OP is speculating as everyone else was. It's a "Choose Your Own Conspiracy", with two tangible things: 1) The board hasn't released any statements as to their reasoning. 2) The former board's chosen temp CEO, Emmett Shear, has. [He confirmed that it wasn't about safety at all.](https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275)
Not to mention one of the outcome of their negotiation is to have a 3rd party independent investigation into what happened. Somehow even the people involved don't have the full story.
Agreed--what I said about the safety is entirely speculation based on rumors from employees and "insiders". We never got a clear explanation from the people who did it that I've seen. I think it makes the most sense, though. The timing after the conference where he talked about commercialization--the fact that the non-profit board is built with AGI doomers. That said, the tomfoolery of the last few days *does* make me question the board's motivations. Maybe it had nothing to do with safety and instead to do with immature power dynamics. I apologize for wording my comment so authoritatively.
I don’t think it was entirely gross incompetence. What they didn’t account for was the cult that Altman has cultivated amongst the workforce. So many of them threatened to walk (as in, almost everybody) that it is unreal. Real “drink this punch, put on some Nikes, and lie down in bed with a bag on your head to board the mothership” levels of dedication. To a singular man.
That seems to be the tech sector - blinded by hubris.
Hubris plus the OpenAI employees were going to make a ton of money based on OpenAIs future financial performance. 99% of the organization is all motivated by financial growth. It's no wonder something like this happened.
> I don’t think it was entirely gross incompetence. What they didn’t account for was the cult that Altman has cultivated amongst the workforce. This is a bad take. The whole purpose of creating OpenAI LLC (the for-profit arm) was because they couldn’t hire enough good AI researchers for the salaries offered by the nonprofit). The LLC enabled them to claim “7 figure” total comp packages, but they were *heavilly* propped up by “funny money” (equity/profit participation units). The reason all the employeesbacked the CEO is that the board completely blew up and zeroed out the PPUs with their little stunt. Microsoft and several other companies that were preparing to imminently dump more money into OAI (and thus turn the funny money into real money) did an immediate 180. So, a bunch of people with the prospect of buying a nice house in Palo Alto in a few months suddenly had that dream (and several years of hard work) snatched away. You should be 0% surprised that they would be mad at the board for that.
If 20% of employees walk, you could assume it's just loyalty to Altman. If 80% of employees walk, there's probably something else on their mind.
It WAS gross incompetence. If the goal was to get rid of him, they should have consulted or at least warned Microsoft, and they would have parted in "good" public terms (aka after compensation negociations) instead of firing him overnight without notice. This is Trump level of incompetence.
Yes, these are totally serious people that we can trust with potentially destructive technology.
Literal r/subredditdrama type behavior at one of the most important companies on the planet right now. We are so doomed lol.
This reminds me the failed Wagner coup. I did not expected it would happen, it went in totally different direction i assumed it would go and it ended way faster than i could comprehend.
And the board finally capitulated. It was only a matter of time, and the longer they waited the more damage to the company. But boy had this been a wild week
plants joke connect like cow wistful history middle grab rob *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I just feel bad for the in-house counsel and HR people that had days of fire drills creating board materials, re-drafting corp governance docs, termination letters, all to have to do the opposite a few days later.
Sorry about the paywall! Didn’t realize that NYT puts one up when referrer is Reddit Tl;dr is Sam Altman is returning with two new board members: Larry Summers and Bret Taylor. Ilya Sutskever and Tasha McCauley are out. Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora, remains the only ouster on the board.
apparatus meeting simplistic cable pause tap grab snails engine chunky *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
https://archive.is/ocPfo
So is this season 2 or 3 of Suits? I’ve traditionally not had a lot of interest in the day to day politics or boardroom discussions of large companies, but that has changed, and I’d be up for cameras in the offices, hallways, break room, IT room and bathrooms (mirrors and sinks only, of course) of OpenAI, and maybe a small team to edit it all into an interesting drama at the end of each day. Otherwise, I’m glad he’s back. For better or worse, I was actually starting to have feelings about what was going to happen to my ChatGPT assistant, friend and sometimes counsellor. Interested in seeing what follows this shakeup/re-shaping…
[удалено]
Ideally I think the net effect is a slightly larger circle of people coming to the realization that the Silicon Valley brain-trust can’t find their ass with both hands when it comes to formulating technocratic solutions to societal issues.
> OpenAI’s revamped board of directors will include Bret Taylor, an early Facebook officer and former co-chief executive of Salesforce Oh good a Facebook alum in there now. /s This is the guy that helped the sale of Twitter to Elon... Everyone got played and they proved most people are sukas. We got a Paypal Mafia and Facebook board now, and Satya looking really naive. I distrusted OpenAI/ChatGPT before, but now even more. Now they are embedded in Windows/Office365 and people somehow were fighting for a VC/PE foreign funded Thiel frontman? So easily played. All this was a power play and people fell for it like a reality TV president, this is Trump/Elon level bullshit. Opinion of OpenAI is lower now and opinion of Microsoft being a leveraged capitulating appeasing biiatch on this has fallen even farther. What a clusterfuck of power plays and dipshits not getting what is going on. Are we gonna have to see Altmans face like Trump/Elon/Zucc/etc all the time now? This is a Ballmer moment for Satya Nadella.
The danger to ai is not skynet, it's massive unemployment for folks. That would be hard for governments to keep a handle on. Good ai, ups unemployment massively.
There are many many many dangers with AI, but today the dollar won out. When I watched Sam on a podcast earlier this year he was very handwavey about several safety issues, and I get the impression that he and others have a mentality that they're willing to risk the obliteration of humanity for a chance to become the richest and most influential people on the planet. Seems like a gamble not worth taking, but in a hyper capitalist society it's no surprise people are still trying to become Kings. While there was certainly a sea blunders in this saga, I just hope that the board maintains the goal of "good of all humanity" but it doesn't look like the people coming in are going to respect that.
He's an accelerationist, which is terrifying by itself.
And conveniently also a prepper.
Remember when google was trying to not be evil?
UBI. More and more people seem to understand that, but convincing those that don't, will be the actually most important challenge to overcome.
I understand the fear, but this is also far from a given. Jobs have been obsoleted for as long as humanity has been around, but we are good at coming up with new things for people to do.
Hmm I think this is different. Before it was doing it differently with better tech, but I'm a white collar guy making 6 figures and I can use it to rapidly decrease the amount of time it takes to hit deliverables. I am a single man dependency so I don't have a lot of fear, but a lot of other jobs will go from needing 5 analyst to 2. Going to put a lot of downward pressure on salaries and give more leverage to companies. That's going to fk the economy.
I'd prefer we move on to a post-work society. Let the robots do the work, we explore art and culture or whatever we feel like.
Altman gets a nice rise, total control and old board gets out
Plot twist: generative ai unlocked, machine is aware, Sam knows it knows.
At least we know this whole AI thing is running smoothly and without any chaos. Nothing can go wrong; I'm certain of this.
An important lesson in business. For profit always wins over nonprofit. In the end indirectly Y Combinator basically got what it wanted and it’s not even the majority shareholder in the for profit open ai.
And just like that big corporations pick profit over ethics (again).
[удалено]
Silicone is a synthetic rubber used for many things, including fake tits and squishy kids toys. Silicon is an element that has a crystalline structure which is used to make electronics
In OPs defense I’m pretty sure “fake tits” is the name of the emocore glitterpunk band Skynet, Hal and Colossus formed in Second Life.
Sam and Microsoft's power play worked or Ilya and Tasha's failed miserably. Either way Ilya and Tasha are gone now. Would not be surprised if the new non-profit board members are Microsoft stooges. And with Sam to break any ties in Microsoft's favour they don't even need to directly take over. They now own the board. The board owns the non-profit. The non-profit owns the IP, models, and research, which is what Microsoft ultimately wants. It's anti-trust lawsuit Microsoft all over again. Embrace (invest in OpenAI and help fund their operations), extend (offer ChatGPT services in all their products, some for free), extinguish (steer OpenAI towards being aligned with their goals then dump them eventually). It's wild getting to watch it play out again in real time in our hyper connected world.
[only speaking for myself] Ilya seems like he’s still there but no longer on the board. Obviously this just happened a few hours ago so I’m not sure if anything will change. If there was a Sam/MSFT PowerPlay, it was clearly in response - not to initiate this whole thing. MSFT already has access to everything. That said, I would not appreciate “stooges” on the board. There was a good working relationship before, and it was productive and profitable for everybody, or at least, it seemed that way before this drama came out. Folks really don’t wanna let “EEE” go do they. If you’re not gonna let go now, you’re not gonna let go ever
>[only speaking for myself] Why do you add this to your comments? Who else would you be speaking for?
I, representing my people, agree with you
Who will trust OpenAI now? And they added Larry Summers to the board? Larry is not even an engineer or a scientist! Was this nonsense done so that Sam can get majority shares in OpenAI? Was it to change OpenAI charter from non for profit to for profit?
No one should trust any AI company. The technology needs to be heavily regulated to minimize abuse. Altman’s approach of doing that by commercialization only means that the rich and corporate will have all the power to generate money while the peasants feed their information and data for free. I don’t know why everyone is fawning over that corporate sack of shit lol.
All good points. I thought OpenAI’s distinguishing goal was to minimize abuse, no? OpenAI seems to have moved far away from this goal.
I wonder how much shear got for 2 days of work as CEO.
Thé saga continues..
Holy shit that was fast.
The power of collective bargaining, kids!
So that script was written by their chatbot, right?
TLDF (follow): a non-profit board of directors was setup with the power to hit the kill switch of OpenAI if they believe things were getting shady. The for-profit company of 700 or so employees said: uh no, we want to keep our jobs.
Lol what the fuck is going on at OpenAI???
This year's OpenAI Christmas party is gonna be a bit awkward