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Put the pieces together: Nov 6 - OpenAI devday, with new features of build-your-own ChatGPT and more Nov 9 - Microsoft cuts employees off from ChatGPT due to

• iLoveOncall 3y ago
  I'm not saying that you're not right, but this definitely wouldn't warrant an instant firing of your CEO.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • jonny_eh 3y ago
    Security lapses is still sadly not a fireable offense. It has to be either money related, criminal, or something deeply embarrassing. More embarrassing that being a public anti-semite (like another tech CEO not yet fired by their board).
    • iwillremember 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • belter 3y ago
        "White House condemns Elon Musk’s ‘abhorrent’ antisemitic tweets" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/17/white-house-biden-elon-musk-antisemitic-tweet-hate https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/17/white-hou...
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • carrja99 3y ago
        Pretty sure the parent is referring to the Twitter CEO. paulg's concern about Palestinians is not anti-Semitic despite how much people try to spin it that way.
      • ak_111 3y ago
        Context for this: Paul Graham tweeted one tweet highlighting the disproportionate assault by Israel on Gaza by citing the enormous number of children killed by the bombings, and then got mobbed on twitter by extreme Israel supporters for being an anti-semite. Not one of them could provide a single evidence for this serious accusation beyond the tweet I mentioned above.If anything the story highlights how anti-semitism has been disgracefully weaponised by extreme supporters of Israel to shutdown any criticism of Israel's military.
        • Paul-Craft 3y ago
          Yep, and the "Twitter mob" is much more right wing now with Elon as CEO, so they're far more likely to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
  • kristjansson 3y ago
    If the CEO attempted to hide it though…
    • 0x142857 3y ago
      IDK if it's possible to hide incidents like that
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        Its always possible to try and fail. If he actually hid it, he wouldn't be in trouble.
• csjh 3y ago
  Hard to imagine it was so major that it lead to him being fired while still being so quiet that it hasn't hit any news outlets
• gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Well, the problem with that is the CTO is now the interim CEO. Not saying she might still not be fired; but it would seem a little strange to make the arsonist the temporary executive.
  • smrtinsert 3y ago
    That's a good point. It suggests to me the issue is then safety. People might have been using chatgpt for something awful and Sam knew about it from her but didn't care. That would mean the technical execution might still be great, but the board lost confidence in him due to lie by omission.
• kristjansson 3y ago
  Don’t forgot the major outage incidents attributed to DDoS and auth failures between the 6th and 15th
  • bmurphy1976 3y ago
    Why would that be cause for firing the CEO? For a company that's growing as fast as OpenAI and at the bleeding edge of technology, those types of outages are unavoidable.
    • kristjansson 3y ago
      No direct connection that I see, just adding to OP's timeline of weird, security-ish stuff that's happened around OpenAI in the last two weeks.
      • Solvency 3y ago
        By this metric Musk would've been sacked long before X or even the horrible panel gaps on his cars.
        • kristjansson 3y ago
          > one theory: the new release had a serious security issue, leaked a bunch of data, and it wasn't disclosed The Auth/DDoS event adds a bit of weight to OP's original theory. It's not a justification on its own.
• Zetobal 3y ago
  He got replaced by the CTO though.
  • nikcub 3y ago
    Theory: possibly because Mira disagreed with Sam on launching so much so quickly (she reports to him), he overrode, it went wrong, and then she took it to the board. Hence, they trust her to take on the interim role. Again, all speculative.
    • Dr_Birdbrain 3y ago
      I don’t buy it. “Move fast and break things” is the mantra of Silicon Valley. A buggy rollout is classic, and IMHO no big deal.
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      This would be an enormous overreaction to a buggy but seemingly successful rollout.
    • ssnistfajen 3y ago
      If you are referring to the knowledge file leak with GPTs, it didn't seem that devastating and wouldn't have warranted such a dramatic exit.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• alright2565 3y ago
  > "We were testing endpoint control systems for LLMs and inadvertently turned them on for all employees," a spokesperson said. "We restored service shortly after we identified our error. As we have said previously, we encourage employees and customers to use services like Bing Chat Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise that come with greater levels of privacy and security protections."
• nopinsight 3y ago
  OpenAI’s board previously consisted of 6 people, incl Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Two of them are more involved in technical matters at OpenAI than Sam. Now there are only four members on the board. At least one of them must jointly make this decision with the three outside board members. I’d say it’s more likely to be business related. (In addition, the CTO is appointed as the interim CEO.) (Edit: But obviously we currently don’t really know. I think the whistleblower theory below is possible too.) The announcement: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti... “OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner. ….. As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.“ Previous members: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure “Our board OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.”
  • ENGNR 3y ago
    In the scenario where a security incident is the cause, the CTO might have been the one blowing the whistle
    • nikcub 3y ago
      Exactly. Which is why they trust her in the interim CEO role.
    • naim08 3y ago
      While there is no evidence to back this, I wouldnt be surprised if the CTO made a for the CEO role. I mean shes a great fit for the role
  • rsrsrs86 3y ago
    The tone used by OpenAI (their distrust of Sam Altman) tells me that they did not simply decide they need different leadership. The statement by the board seriously damages his career. Why else would they burn bridges and oppose themselves on ethical grounds? Or they are trying to blame and sac Altman.
• jstummbillig 3y ago
  I don't think this checks out, as most of the ideas around here involving him hiding OpenAI internals from the board don't, for this reason: How could he, given who is on the board? There is no way that sama is the only person in this set of people to have unique information on critical privacy incidents or financials or costs of server operations, because these issues don't originate with him. If some version of this turned out to be true, I would be seriously confused about ground truth transparency in the company and how the fuck they set the whole thing up, that this was an option. But again, this is why I'd say: Implausible.
  • ehsankia 3y ago
    Hmm, I don't see which part of the theory requires the board to not have known. It just may have taken them a week to decide who's head to cut for the mess
    • adastra22 3y ago
      The part where the board said that as justification for firing Sam.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • otteromkram 3y ago
    Executive boards aren't involved in day-to-day management like CEOs and other executives. They meet periodically and review updated information. So, yes, Altman would have access to more information than the board.
    • adastra22 3y ago
      This board includes some C-level officers of the company.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
• thanhhaimai 3y ago
  My bet is actually not on the recent security concern, but more about OpenAI "was not consistenly candid" on how it trained data. Facing the recent lawsuits, that would explain the hasty firing. The security concern is huge, but doesn't warrant an immediate firing.
  • Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Pending lawsuits aren't a thing that warrants taking action before the market closes.
    • kaliqt 3y ago
      Imagine Satya wasn't informed about this. The heart attack he must have gotten seeing the stock prices.
      • sumedh 3y ago
        > The heart attack he must have gotten seeing the stock prices. Why would a 2% drop bother him?
• northern-lights 3y ago
  From: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure "Second, because the board is still the board of a Nonprofit, each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to make and distribute profit, it is subject to this mission. The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors." So, if I were to speculate, it was because they were at odds over profit/non-profit nature of the future of OpenAI.
  • baidifnaoxi 3y ago
    Bingo. The for profit stuff was probably ok with the board to raise capital. But the closeness with Microsoft probably went too far for the board.
  • jasonmperry 3y ago
    Maybe, but the board fired him without notifying OpenAI’s employees on a Friday before Thanksgiving week. Thats has to be more than a disagreement for such a forceful move.
    • rsrsrs86 3y ago
      Yep.
    • chatmasta 3y ago
      I get this logic, but it seems contradictory with "it was last minute." If they timed it for the Friday before Thanksgiving, then they must have been sitting on it, right? Whereas if it's sudden, it must be unplanned. So which was it, sudden or planned? The fact they timed the announcement actually implies some planning, which means the reason couldn't be so damaging that they had to fire him immediately after discovering it. (Of course, it's possible that only by coincidence, an unplanned revelation happened at a convenient time to fire him.)
• baxtr 3y ago
  This could be true. Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
  • AmericanOP 3y ago
    It is an odd statement since Ilya and Mira are CTOs. How does a CEO obfuscate technical issues from your CTOs?
    • JacobThreeThree 3y ago
      I don't think technical issues are the problem. See the other speculation in this thread regarding the certain allegations against him. Maybe Sam lied about his personal life to the board, and now it's impacting business?
• schleck8 3y ago
  Don't forget: Nov 12 - Sam posts tweets saying that the new GPT 4 Turbo model has been "improved a lot", after which people on the Reddit notice a significant change (to the positive) of responses.
  • PokemonNoGo 3y ago
    This sounds interesting but I'm not sure I understand. The responses ChatGPT gives or the responds to his tweet?
    • schleck8 3y ago
      The GPT 4 Turbo responses changed noticeably in quality, to the better. After launch they weren't up to expectations initially
  • ShamelessC 3y ago
    > people on the Reddit notice a significant change Okay... > (to the positive) what? > of responses. what? This comment doesn't make any sense. Can you clarify? Please reword it rather than defending the original phrasing - there are so many ambiguities.
    • schleck8 3y ago
      Take it to the high council of grammar dictators. I'm not a native speaker and have never lived in an Anglo-country, I think you'll survive reading the comment
      • ShamelessC 3y ago
        Sorry
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  It would have to be extremely serious, obviously. "review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board" OK, so they tell us he was lying, which is precisely what "not consistently candid in his communications" means. Possible topics for lying: * copyright issues to do with ingestion of training data * some sort of technical failure of the OpenAI systems * financial impropriety * some sort of human resources issue - affair with employee * other - some sort of political power play? Word from Satya Nadella - "get rid of him"? Possibly the reason is something that the board members felt exposed them personally to some sort of legal liability, thus if they did not act then they would have to pay a legal price later. It has to be pretty serious to not make it public.
  • baidifnaoxi 3y ago
    Occams razor. He probably pursued a sale to Microsoft without the boards approval. Hes buddy buddy with Satya. Board basically said no, thats not our mission. Firedd
    • matmatmatmat 3y ago
      Makes sense, but would this be so egregious that they had to fire him on the spot?
    • atleastoptimal 3y ago
      Why would he want to sell to Microsoft. All that would do is put his leadership in jeopardy, and he wouldn't profit as he owns no equity.
    • resource0x 3y ago
      Occam's razor: duped the investors about the technical and financial prospects of the company. No AGI next year (or ever).
      • sebzim4500 3y ago
        It has to be something time sensitive or they would never fire him in this way. Also Sutskever is on the board, who has as much understanding of how far away AGI is as anyone on Earth.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  OpenAI not only has stolen intellectual property from millions of people it’s also stealing it from users. Those “leaks” are openai training against data people upload - sensitive customer data, private information, proprietary source code, and so on. Ai doesnt “learn”, it depends on data. The more the better. This guy wanted to get as much as possible to make their chat bot appear more intelligent at all cost. I have the strong suspicion we will see a bunch of revelations soon some covering what i stated above.
  • pk-protect-ai 3y ago
    Why are you even able to write this lie, "Ai doesnt “learn”"? I mean, you can literally read extensively in books, papers, and code all about how neural networks function.
    • layer8 3y ago
      Arguably once the AI has been created by training, it doesn’t learn any more in the form of an LLM. The LLM is the result of the learning/training, but then in actual operation it doesn’t do any learning.
      • marshray 3y ago
        Adding "learn" to my list of key words indicating that a discussion is 100% guaranteed to degrade into quibbling over semantics. Others are "think" and "conscious".
      • pk-protect-ai 3y ago
        So what's your point? How does the fact that an LLM learns only during training make it any less "learning"?
        • layer8 3y ago
          My point is that the LLM is the result of the training. It is not what is doing the training. Like a program is the result of coding. A program doesn’t itself perform the coding. An LLM being created by a training process is a different mode of operation than using the resulting LLM to generate content.
• ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  I'm trying to find the episode, but on the All in Podcast ~6 months ago, they made comments about how the corporate structure of OpenAI may have been a secret way for Sam Altman to hold a large stake in the company. I don't think this is privacy related, but that there was a shell game with the equity and the non profit status. If they were training on data like that, the board/people at the company would have known. EDIT: episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ, "somebody has to own the residual value of the company, sam controls the non profit, and so the non profit after all equity gets paid out at lower valuations, owns the whole company. Sam altman controls all of open ai if its a trillion dollar valuation. Which if true would be a huge scandal"
  • humbleharbinger 3y ago
    This was my first thoguht, I think it was a more recent episode. The one where they discussed the open ai phone. Probably in the last 2 months
  • sebastiennight 3y ago
    Parent comment is referring to Sept. 29th's Episode 147 [0], at 1 hour and 4 minutes in. [0]: https://piped.video/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ&t=3866 https://piped.video/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ&t=3866
• zombiwoof 3y ago
  Gtfo you mean LLMs aren’t safe with my data?
• mardifoufs 3y ago
  What could be worse than that issue they had back in March, for chatgpt? Except for a model leak? I would be surprised if the firing was related to any operational issue openai has, it has to be something a bit less mundane to justify firing him when openai is at its peak imo.
• majesticglue 3y ago
  oh thank god. I distrusted Sam Altman with a passion. Granted who knows if the new CEO is much better though.
  • bl0rg 3y ago
    Why?
    • vvndomaazzz662 3y ago
      Delusions of grandeur and God complex, weird cult-y associations, sketchy past and a lot of things that don't fully add up, and the general feeling that this is a person that is in way over his head and that he is an enormous danger to both himself and others so long as he is allowed to behave as he has been behaving. I should see the timing of all of this and the surrounding inflation has already severely damaged the public perception of the tech industry to such an extent that I do not think there is any hope any more of not being completely and totally destroyed and neutered by the government. The HackerNews demographic is so fundamentally out of touch with the actual political winds in the world, and these stunts Altman is doing by going around to Congress and saying provocative things needs to stop immediately.
• doctorpangloss 3y ago
  It's so much simpler: there was a priced offer of some kind to the board. Some board members disagreed and tried to fundraise. The total valuation was not a sufficient premium over the other offer. The other priced offer was withdrawn. Consequently those "some board members" were taken off the board, by hook or by crook. All these other conspiracies are ridiculous and do not at all reflect much simpler, economics-driven realities that the board's backers - investors - are interested in. It's like that Altman and Brockman wanted to take an economically positive offer now, say a complete buyout from Microsoft, and the rest of the board wanted to do an additional fundraising round that would be far less cash but a far higher valuation. Now that the private fundraising is probably signed, those guys are out.
  • miohtama 3y ago
    It feels that in the case of fundraising disagreement, the language of the announcement would be different. It says Sam lied to the board. There is no need to lie if you have a disagreement about take it or leave it offer.
    • doctorpangloss 3y ago
      Okay well, an even simpler explanation is that the new lead shareholder wanted him fired. This is also why Greg is no longer chairman. Who knows what reason it will be.
• trunnell 3y ago
  Wait, no, Microsoft said the action was a temporary mistake. From the article you linked: In a statement to CNBC, Microsoft said the ChatGPT temporary blockage was a mistake resulting from a test of systems for large language models. “We were testing endpoint control systems for LLMs and inadvertently turned them on for all employees,” a spokesperson said. “We restored service shortly after we identified our error. As we have said previously, we encourage employees and customers to use services like Bing Chat Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise that come with greater levels of privacy and security protections.”
  • nikcub 3y ago
    That is Microsoft's PR statement to the press in response to a leaked story. They're major investors in OpenAI - it's in their interest to downplay and respond this way.
    • egeozcan 3y ago
      Downplaying is one thing, but attributing a policy decision to a fabricated technical error would be outright lying to the public. In a large company like Microsoft, with numerous potential sources of information leaks, this approach is likely unfeasible.
• skottenborg 3y ago
  I think the reason Microsoft was concerned about the new chatGPT release was due to the fact that you could prompt the model to a download link of the training files. Thus, if an employee trained a custom GPT on sensitive material you could quite easily retrieve the data.
• smsm42 3y ago
  > leaked a bunch of data, and it wasn't disclosed, but Microsoft knew about it Didn't we just have a topic here on HN how not disclosing the breach within 4 days is a securities fraud? Since Nov 9 there has been more than 4 days, so either there was no (material) breach, or Microsoft committed securities fraud and somehow expects to get away with it.
  • FateOfNations 3y ago
    That timeline would only be in play if it was data held by Microsoft that was compromised.
    • smsm42 3y ago
      Why? Whoever is responsible for the data, we could assume if MS knew it, the owner of the data knew it too - if it's not MS, MS would notify them immediately. Of course, there's an option that the owner is privately held, has no investors and no interested third parties and no clients - then there's nobody to notify and nobody to defraud. But who would that owner be then?
  • lucubratory 3y ago
    That law isn't in effect until the end of November. It's a new regulation.
• j45 3y ago
  I love that HN can help contextualize things like this and leave it open to consideration and not presenting it as fact.
• hfjjbf 3y ago
  [dead]
• gemstones 3y ago
  My bet - security issue involving data loss, but the data loss was the GPT model itself.
• elfly 3y ago
  If there is an incident where people can see other's people chats there are two possibilities: -It's a server issue, meaning someone fucked up their javascript and cached a session key or something. It's a minor thing; could get the specific dev fired in the worst case, and it is embarrassing, but it is solvable. -it's inherent to how the AI works, and thus it is impossible to share a ChatGPT server with someone else without sooner or later leaking knowledge. It would mean the company cannot scale at all cause they'd need to provide each client their own separate server instance. If this was something Sam knew and kept it from the board, that'd be fireable. And it'd be catastrophic, cause it'd mean no useable product until a solution is found. I'd somehow doubt it is something like this, but if we see security issues and private chats that keep leaking, it is a possibility.
  • vvndomaazzz662 3y ago
    It's inherent to how it works, it is known and had always been known that nothing you type into these chats is private and there is nothing whatsoever fundamentally to stop the AI from just handing your chats to somebody else or dumping them out to the internet. They aren't even able to theoretically describe a mechanism by which you could provide a kind of memory protection for these models. And of course we have seen real examples of this already. Only a matter of time before the completely and totally insurmountable problems or scaling AI become clear. Sam is and has always been a conman in my view.
  • evan_ 3y ago
    It was absolutely, incontrovertibly the former. The go misstates the issue- users saw other people’s chat titles, not chats. It was just a web server thing.
• nikcub 3y ago
  further edit: found this comment on reddit [0][1] which also seems to line up: > I feel compelled as someone close to the situation to share additional context about Sam and company. > Engineers raised concerns about rushing tech to market without adequate safety reviews in the race to capitalize on ChatGPT hype. But Sam charged ahead. That's just who he is. Wouldn't listen to us. > His focus increasingly seemed to be fame and fortune, not upholding our principles as a responsible nonprofit. He made unilateral business decisions aimed at profits that diverged from our mission. > When he proposed the GPT store and revenue sharing, it crossed a line. This signaled our core values were at risk, so the board made the tough decision to remove him as CEO. > Greg also faced some accountability and stepped down from his role. He enabled much of Sam's troubling direction. > Now our former CTO, Mira Murati, is stepping in as CEO. There is hope we can return to our engineering-driven mission of developing AI safely to benefit the world, and not shareholders. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/sam_altman_is_leaving_openai/k9p7mpv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/sam_altman_... [1] take it with a grain of salt
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    I could buy that if the announcement was "Altman is leaving in x months to spend more time with his family. He will be assisting with the transition to Murati stepping in as CEO." But that's not what the board said.
• ryzvonusef 3y ago
  screenshots of your comment are now being spread on twitter, thought you should know.
• csomar 3y ago
  This is a pretty good orchestration of events. Given the high profile nature of the organization here, it would be prudent for the board to have defended (legally speaking) their side. Sam might be complicit in something and they used that to boot him. Only time will tell now.