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Greg Brockman quits OpenAI
- woeirua 3y agoThis is turning into a situation that OpenAI may not be able to recover from. Typically if the CEO and Chair of the board depart under these circumstances there was something illegal happening.
- indymike 3y ago> typically if the CEO and Chair of the board depart under these circumstances there was something illegal When they are fired by the board, it sends a very different signal.
- ashu1461 3y ago[dead]
- robswc 3y agoJesus. I saw he was "demoted" but he's totally out now, right?
- ryanSrich 3y agoWell "out" as in he explicitly quit. He wasn't fired.
- robswc 3y agoFor sure. Wasn't he essentially demoted before quitting though? I guess this means he wasn't even aware he was demoted.
- dragonwriter 3y agoHe was removed as Chairman of the Board but was allowed to remain in his other role as President reporting to the new acting CEO, but apparently wasn't interested. OTOH, I don't think it would surprise anyone that he would quit, and that may well have been the intent.
- robswc 3y agoThat's what I thought. OpenAI's statement implies he was aware of the demotion... but his statement seems to imply he wasn't. I guess the most likely situation is that they put out the press release, told him (or vice versa) and it took him a bit to decide to quit.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> OpenAI's statement implies he was aware of the demotion. Maybe my experience with corporate communications is different, but all it implies to me is that he was not removed as President and was being permitted to stay on under the new CEO.
- robswc 3y ago>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. Its totally fair (your interpretation) to think that. He was removed as chairman though, which IMO is a demotion. I think its disingenuous on the part of OpenAI _unless_ originally Greg said he was ok with the new terms. If a company says "Person X will remain as President and report to the CEO" you would think they have worked it out with person X _before_ announcing it.
- DavidSJ 3y agoThis suggests that Greg Brockman wasn't in the board meeting that made the decision, and only "learned the news" that he was off the board the same way the rest of us did.
- w10-1 3y agoBoards cannot meet or act without notice to board members and the opportunity for them to participate.
- cl42 3y agoThey can if the meeting is about the problematic board member(s).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway4aday 3y agoStill have to give notice
- adastra22 3y agoI'm not sure those rules apply to non-profits.
- Eliezer 3y agoThey're usually in the Bylaws. MIRI's Bylaws, iirc 23 years after I wrote them, contain a provision like that.
- dragonwriter 3y agoWell, yeah, he wouldn't be allowed to participate in deliberation about his own removal.
- DavidSJ 3y ago
- detolly 3y agowhat a day
- blibble 3y agothis keeps getting better and better
- heurist 3y agoYeah, this is not a good sign for OpenAI. Or at least not for those who appreciate what OpenAI was working to become.
- ibejoeb 3y agoI'm glad OpenAI happened, but I'd be happier if it stumbles a little and does not full-on capture the entirety of AI. I think a shake-up is good for the world.
- bloopernova 3y agoI guess we'll see much faster enshittification now? Buy 100 prompts now with AIBucks! Loot box prompts! Get 10 AI ultramax level prompts with your purchase of 5 new PromptSkin themes to customize your AI buddy! Pre-order the NEW UltraThink AI and get an exclusive UltraPrompt skin and 25 AIBucks!
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoAltman was the one who stood to benefit financially from OpenAI selling out. The rest of the board do not have equity in the company. If anything we'll see a reversal of the whole "Open"(to paying customers)AI
- astrange 3y agoHe didn't have equity in OpenAI either, he seemed to be running it for fun. Of course, he can get cash payments.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thornewolf 3y agomany things are happening
- gumballindie 3y agoThe screw is tightening. Britains largest newspaper has just called out ai companies on their intellectual property and content theft. The game is over boys. The only question is how to make these types of companies pay for the crimes committed.
- mrmuagi 3y agoI don’t think you can conclude that the ship is sinking per say, rather those at the helm are being changed.
- stainablesteel 3y agocompanies will just go to japan where its legal
- anon291 3y agoThere is no crime. observing something is not a crime.
- paul7986 3y agoThe cat's out of the box for profit or not ... those who make living off of copyright will just have to deal with it as they dealt with Napster and all other innovations.
- mardifoufs 3y agoOh no not Britain's largest newspaper! A nation known for the quality of its media. It's over for openai, I'm sure they'll fold rather than just not doing business with a comparatively small market if anything came out of that lol.
- gumballindie 3y agoYou’re missing the point. Raising awareness of the scale of this theft is aimed at swaying public opinion. That way, legitimate machine learning companies can thrive and research for ai can continue without the nuisance. Incidentally forums are filling up with horror stories from people working at or interviewing with openai, in spite of their paid trolls spamming forums left and right and reporting reddit posts to suppress people. Perhaps the bubble has burst. Openai has done more harm to ai than any other company. The cat’s out of the bag.
- jumploops 3y agoGreg is the one who announced GPT-4. Sam enabled Greg and vice-versa. The next AI winter may have just begun...
- fatherzine 3y ago"the next AI winter may have just begun" -- good! time to stop playing with existential fire. humans suffice. every flaw you see in humans will be magnified X times by an intelligence X times stronger than humans. whether it is autonomous or human lead.
- bananapub 3y agowhat a fucking ridiculous statement - sam altman is just a YC VC machine man, and I'm sure openai can find another CTO in the hottest ML market in history.
- woeirua 3y agoWe just don’t know enough yet. Sam could’ve been let go over a disagreement about direction. Or he could’ve been cooking the books. Or he could’ve been concealing the true operating costs. Or subscriber numbers. Some of those things just require a change in leadership. Others are existential risks to OpenAI.
- jodrellblank 3y agoOr their first real AGI could have ousted him.
- dougmwne 3y agoThermonuclear winter is more likely at this point. 4 AI safety believers that formed a board majority just got spooked.
- __loam 3y agoIf the AI ecosystem is so fragile that the ouster of two men from one start up is enough to destroy it then it wasn't ever a solid bet. I don't think this will mean much for the broad viability of these systems. Gpt is clearly valuable, but I guess we need to figure out if these systems can be run profitably. I'm not sure people have given much thought to how insanely expensive running massive gpu clusters is. It might just fundamentally not scale well.
- babl-yc 3y agoSo given that there are 6 board members, Ilya had to have voted to oust Sam?
- dnissley 3y agoPresumably Sam recused himself so not necessarily
- babl-yc 3y agoWhy would he recuse himself? Sam seemed happy to work at OpenAI. FWIW, radio silence from Ilya on twitter https://twitter.com/ilyasut https://twitter.com/ilyasut
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Why would he recuse himself? Usually mandatory for decisions about a board member for them to be recused. That there is an overwhelming potential for conflict between personal interest and the firm’s is pretty clear in that case.
- favorited 3y agoBecause it's a conflict of interest - a CEO should absolutely recuse themselves from a vote on whether they should be removed. If a CEO refused to do so, the board should adjourn and reconvene without the CEO present.
- hnarayanan 3y agoDo you mean X?
- SkyPuncher 3y agoGiven he was the subject of the vote, he likely wouldn’t even be able to participate.
- yieldcrv 3y agonice, hope there are openings in high level positions and they switch to remote I’m never going back to Noe Valley for less than $500,000/yr and a netjets membership
- hilux 3y agoYou willing to slum it in a shared seat that has supported other billionaires' behinds? I wouldn't ... but you do you!
- yieldcrv 3y agoI’d otherwise be slumming it in a shared seat that supported middle class behinds I wouldn't move back to San Francisco anywhere and hybrid would be a midweek affair
- georgehill 3y agoBuilding something on top of GPT, I am now worried.
- bananapub 3y agowhy? you should always assume that your dependencies might go down, or shut up shop, or become your competitor.
- selfhoster11 3y agoGPT-4 has effectively no competition for what your can extract out of it without any fine-tuning.
- lexandstuff 3y agoClaude is a drop in replacement for most use cases. You'll be fine.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoclaude sucks
- solardev 3y agoWho is Claude?
- grpt 3y agoHope they fire the person that forced verified phone numbers on new accounts.
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoAnd the person who decided that the settings (disable usage for training data) and (save prompts) can't be individually controlled. Also that the default is that your data is used for training purposes. Both are clear indications that privacy was no importance to them.
- brianjking 3y agoYou can opt out of training and keep your history turned on in the privacy center. You fill out a form and indicate your country of residence.
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoWhich privacy center? I only have settings. And in settings there is the sub-category Data controls where I disable "Chat history & training".
- brianjking 3y agoIt was previously a Google form without any confirmation. As of late October, they moved it to this privacy center that they keep conveniently well hidden. This page provides confirmation that your request is processed: https://privacy.openai.com/policies https://privacy.openai.com/policies
- malinens 3y agoVerifying phone number is one of the last things which is still effective when fighting against bot registrations. Alternative is to ask money for registration. Here is idea for hacker news crowd: make service which is a proxy for phone number validation: user needs to validate his phone number once in that app and any other 3rd-party service can ask this app for security code which confirms phone number ownership. We use something similar by offloading phone number confirmation via Telegram bot. Also this proxy service could optionally offload management of "bad" phone numbers used by spammers and add other protections
- Waterluvian 3y agoIs there some weird chic thing where you intentionally don’t use capital letters? What is up with that behaviour? Is it some cute attempt at saying “an AI didn’t write this”?
- tom_ 3y agoSome people just don't like to press shift. I moaned at one of my friends about this, years ago, and I got a 1-word reply that really stuck in my mind: > thomas. And there is indeed no law against not pressing shift.
- Michelangelo11 3y ago> Is there some weird chic thing where you intentionally don’t use capital letters? What is up with that ridiculous behaviour? I was wondering the same thing. Always, on purpose, avoiding starting sentences with capital letters. Both this guy and Sam Altman. What ... why ... ?
- capableweb 3y agoSo you know that they are rule and norm breakers, no rule too tiny to be broken and skipped in the name of productivity/health/insert-hot-thing-of-the-day
- Michelangelo11 3y agoThat's it. Disruption as a way of life. True entrepreneur mindset. Yeahhhh.
- ryandrake 3y agoI've seen this from a couple of VP/SVP level execs at companies I've worked. My pet theory is it's some kind of weird "My time is too important to even use the shift key" signal. They probably add up the cumulative amount of time they would spend using the shift key and multiply by their compensation and realize they could buy another car if they just optimized that useless key out of their lives.
- crop_rotation 3y agoThis all seems so weird, and the list of Board members doesn't make this any easier to understand. Apart from the 3 insiders, there are 3 other board members. 2 of them seem complete no names and might not qualify for any important corporate board. In a for profit shareholders in theory control the board, in a non profit I am not even sure of who really has control over things.
- nikcub 3y agoThree other people have left the board this year: Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd and the person from Neuralink.
- dougmwne 3y agoThe board does and they are not supposed to have a financial stake in the non-profit. Usually they just vote their friends on. Welcome to the loony tunes that is nonprofit management. Clearly Microsoft staked its whole product roadmap on 4 random people with no financial skin in the game.
- crop_rotation 3y agoThat does sound like loony tunes. If the board elects itself then I think it is a very very bad arrangement for something as important as OpenAI.
- 0xDEF 3y agoThat is one problem with non-profits. They end up with completely unprofessional leadership because they hire their friends who are crazies just like themselves. When things cool down in a few months we will learn Altman and Brockman were some of the few sane people on the board.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago> Usually they just vote their friends on You actually think that for-profit corporate boards are significantly different, especially in the startup/early IPO phase?
- famouswaffles 3y agoOh man. https://twitter.com/apples_jimmy/status/1725615804631392637?s=46&t=yQ_4zkmWd6ncIZAnXlXUbg https://twitter.com/apples_jimmy/status/1725615804631392637?... Really wonder what this is all about. Edit: My bad for not expanding. Noone knows the identity of this "Jimmy Apples" but this is the latest in a series of correct leaks he's made for Open AI for months now. Suffice to say he's in the know somehow.
- refulgentis 3y ago...that's a random post, Jimmy's not some OpenAI insider lmao. Hope he sees this
- telotortium 3y agoPretty sure he works at OpenAI. Beyond that, hard to say how important he is.
- next_xibalba 3y agoLolwut? Who is Jimmy Apples?
- FridgeSeal 3y agoDon’t you know? Random twitter guy has thoughts on $Current_Event and a witty quip about the “vibes”. It’s crucial we post this without context to the discussion
- famouswaffles 3y agoNobody knows who he is but this is the latest in a series of correct leaks he's made at Open AI for months now. Fair enough I didn't expand but "Jimmy Apples" of all people being unphased by this revelation that supposedly even Microsoft was unaware of is the funniest timeline.
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
- maxdoop 3y agoAnd satya seems to have been caught off guard as well. What is happening?
- modernpink 3y agoMr President, the second tower has been hit
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tmsh 3y agoHis last sentence is the main hint. Disagreement over dangers of AGI discoveries and how to handle I’d guess.
- kromem 3y agoGiven the way the board announcement ended on the commitment to the original charter of AI for everyone and the way this mention of safety is being thrown in, I suspect it may have been strong disagreements over continuing to be closed with research in the name of safety or open with the research community in the sake of advancement for all.
- crop_rotation 3y agoGPT4 has been closed for a long long time, nothing technical was ever released. The board can't suddenly one day wake up from a long sleep and decide that things have to become open right this minute.
- refulgentis 3y agoMaybe it didn't. Maybe it's been pushing on this for a bit and Altman kept paying lip service to it or made commitments in their eyes, and those weren't being followed through on
- Sai_ 3y ago> pushing..for a bit They could have waited another 30 mins for the markets to close before making the move. This isn’t the culmination of a long-standing problem.
- manquer 3y agoA non profit board is not as professional as a public company board. Looking at the people on the current board, it doesn't seem they have a lot of experience being independent board members in large public corporations. No non-profit has this level of public scrutiny, It could just be that they were sloppy because they are not professional board members.
- friendlynokill 3y agoHoly shit
- bangalore 3y agoHow do I profit from this news. Should I buy or sell MSFT?
- devin 3y agoI did both. ;)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dougmwne 3y agoOoof, I would sell personally unless they manage to seize control of OpenAI by Monday.
- kristjansson 3y agoBoth, you can't lose!
- voisin 3y agoWell, if you are doing put and call options betting on increased volatility, I think you’re right!
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago> > How do I profit from this news Ignore and focus on your life, the grapevine in your neighborhood about who is selling their car or their house is not as exciting but will net you way more money than this happening thousands of miles away from you. And most importantly without having to fuck with leverage.
- bangalore 3y agoThanks. I'm doing reasonably well in life.
- 3y ago
- Zaheer 3y agoGiven Greg seems to not have known about the board meeting there's a good chance Mira didn't either. Is she next?
- dragonwriter 3y agoMira wasn't on the board, but if they were concerned about her they wouldn't have made her interim CEO.
- RivieraKid 3y agoFinally some non-Elon-related drama in tech happening.
- voisin 3y agonon-Elon-related so far
- ronsor 3y agoSoon: "New CEO of xAI revealed to be Sam Altman"
- lexandstuff 3y agoWhat an unbelievable turn of events! To the outside observer, OpenAI is one of the most successful, well-oiled machines, shipping nearly weekly and doing an unbelievably good job marketing itself. Clearly, there's a lot of turmoil going on behind the scenes.
- __loam 3y agoWe don't really know anything about the internal finances at this point. The product is solid but who knows how fucked up things are. Maybe they were on track to run out of money. GPU compute ain't cheap.
- crop_rotation 3y agoNone of that can be a reason for a step like this. OpenAI can easily charge much more for their products, and there is a market for even extremely high prices (even if not as big) and given this is a non profit, it doesn't even need to make billions of dollars in money.
- CrazyStat 3y agoOpenAI exists both as a nonprofit and, for several years now, as a for-profit company [1] that has taken billions of dollars in investment. It needs to make billions of dollars to return to investors just as much as any other for-profit company does. [1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
- crop_rotation 3y agoThe non profit is the majority owner of the for profit, and there is no investor pressure here to make billions.
- j45 3y agoCould that not change as the board changes?
- HissingMachine 3y agoSo is this the way the government takes control of the AI, next OpenAI will have new but familiar owners from Raytheon and the other Pentagon crowd?
- andrewstuart 3y agoIt’ll be far more mundane than a spy novel plot.
- malfist 3y agoPostulating crazy conspiracy theories is no way to go through life
- HissingMachine 3y agoWhere is the conspiracy theory?
- johnghanks 3y ago[dead]
- astrange 3y agoGovernments don't need to "take control" of things, they get tax payments and can pass laws. The US has never spent less on its military than it does now, and the military industrial complex has never been less important, because the rest of the economy has grown so much larger. So it's funny to see people still using Cold War-era conspiracy theories from when it actually mattered.
- HissingMachine 3y agoWhere is the conspiracy theory?
- astrange 3y agoRaytheon and the Pentagon are secretly controlling OpenAI by changing its CEO?
- minimaxir 3y agoThere's no job quitting note like an all lower-case job quitting note.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- muzani 3y agoit's a way to soften your tone so it doesn't sound angry. but then it sounds like soft anger.
- j45 3y agoSlightly easier to read in many cases in all lower case.
- Mistletoe 3y agoI just read it as illiterate and am amazed someone that deliberately writes like that was chairman of the board.
- Spivak 3y agoThis is honestly par for the course for anyone who didn't grow up a digital native and is a career businessman who didn't spend it hand-composing messages. I wouldn't read too much into it. Direct emails from executives that aren't filtered by their assistants all look like this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- solardev 3y agoThey're working so hard they don't have time to use the shift key.
- blackguardx 3y agoYou don't think Greg is a "digital native?"
- ldargin 3y agoThis suggests that a real schism is occurring at OpenAI. I anticipate hearing of two different philosophies at play.
- gumballindie 3y agoSam and those that want to continue stealing ip and destroying entire industries in the process will leave, while ethical machine learning scientists will remain.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoIt would be interesting if Altman and Brockman, assuming that they want accelerated development, ended up in some high level roles at Microsoft. That seems like a win-win-win all the way around since OpenAI could follow their new path, Microsoft and Google could build new things fast, and the open model proponents can keep up their good work. Except for a clumsy fast press release, this doesn’t really have to end badly for anyone. Even though I have been an OpenAI fan every since I used their earliest public APIs, I am also very happpy that there is such a rich ecosystem, other commercial players like Anthropic, open model support from Meta and Hugging Face, and the increasingly wonderful small models like Mistral that can be easily run at home.
- adastra22 3y agoSam Altman is not the kind of person that goes into a bigco management job. He'll be doing another startup come Monday.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoYes. I changed my perspective - Altman would not fit in and be happy at Microsoft.
- ldargin 3y agoIt seems like your first opinion was correct.
- zzzeek 3y agoWow look at that garbage Twitter thread following it, with shitty ads and .eth jackasses. Twitter has really turned into 4-chan lite
- johnwheeler 3y agoEdit: I called it https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857 nothing to do with dishonesty. That’s just the official reason. ———- I haven’t heard anyone commenting about this, but the two main figures here-consider: This MUST come down to a disagreement between Altman and Sutskever. Also interesting that Sutskever tweeted a month and a half ago https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907 The press release about candid talk with the board… It’s probably just cover up for some deep seated philosophical disagreement. They found a reason to fire him that not necessarily reflects why they are firing him. He and Ilya no longer saw eye to eye and it reached its fever pitch with gpt 4 turbo. Ultimately, it’s been surmised that Sutskever had all the leverage because of his technical ability. Sam being the consummate businessperson, they probably got in some final disagreement and Sutskever reached his tipping point and decided to use said leverage. I’ve been in tech too long and have seen this play out. Don’t piss off an irreplaceable engineer or they’ll fire you. not taking any sides here. PS most engineers, like myself, are replaceable. Ilya is probably not.
- jeron 3y agothe theory that Altman did something in bad faith means that it might not be a disagreement but it's something that forced Sutskever to vote against Sam
- duringmath 3y agoThe theory is Altman gave his eye scanning crypto company early access to openAI tech without telling anyone and what ensued is just FAFO in action.
- woeirua 3y agoThat’s not big enough to immediately terminate him.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- layer8 3y agoWhat is this thing of people not using their shift key anymore? Sam Altman does the same. I don’t trust these people. ;)
- MarkusQ 3y agoWhy? Do they seem shiftless?
- durandal1 3y agoall lower case has a longer hacker culture history.
- TriangleEdge 3y agoContext please.
- rewtraw 3y agoa callback to the old IRC days
- Manouchehri 3y agoI still maintain that IRC is better than Discord. It was so nice to have "real" servers.
- OJFord 3y agoI'll take lazily not using Shift over pecking at Caps Lock!
- meepmorp 3y agoIt amazes me there are people who don't remap their capslock to something useful.
- metaltyphoon 3y ago
- andrewstuart 3y agoEither the board will resign and Altman will return. Or Altman will start a competitor.
- crop_rotation 3y agoIf non profit boards elect themselves, I see no reason for the board to resign, for half the board it is their biggest life accomplishment, and there is no shareholder to vote them out.
- naiv 3y agoso I guess non-profits do not have non-competes? I have no idea
- wnc3141 3y agoNon competes are illegal in California (if there is no sale of equity in excess of assets involved).
- dlandis 3y agoExactly...new competitor forming as we speak
- thrillgore 3y agoHe's probably on Atlas right now starting the company.
- runjake 3y agoWhat’s the likelihood this is over a Microsoft acquisition? Purely speculative here, but Sam might have been a roadblock. Edit: Maybe this is a reasonable explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312868 . The only other thing not considered is that Microsoft really enjoys having its brand on things.
- w10-1 3y agoAxios claims MS had no prior knowledge.
- kats 3y agoMeta should do a ChatGPT clone just like they did a Twitter clone.
- malfist 3y agoLlama?
- astrange 3y agoThey sort of did one before ChatGPT (and after InstructGPT) with Galactica, but didn't have the nerve to keep it up.
- computerex 3y agoGalactica was focused on academic use cases and got a lot of hate due to hallucinations.
- Alupis 3y agoBecause their Twitter clone went so well for them?
- veec_cas_tant 3y ago100 million monthly active users at the end of October, and still growing, according to Zuck. Is that not considered successful anymore?
- blackoil 3y agodisappointing @veec, with this mindset you'll never be in three comma club. /s
- mcenedella 3y agoThis Board has to go.
- lucubratory 3y agoSam Altman is much more replaceable than Ilya Sutskever
- rrsp 3y agoHas the same lack of capitalisation as Sam Altman's message, wonder why
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- duxup 3y agoSome conflict over using toUpperCase() ?
- tazu 3y agosnake_case debate got out of control
- johannes1234321 3y agoShowing it wasn't written by ChatGPT? (While one can easily ask ChatGPT to use lower case only ...)
- thornewolf 3y agoi predict because it's hip to talk that (this) way nowadays
- durandal1 3y agoNot sure if that's why they're doing it, but all lower case writing has strong hacker culture roots.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago1 qu17.
- otikik 3y ago> After learning today’s news, Which news is that?
- welpo 3y agoOpenAI firing Sam Altman. The announcement: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti... The discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611
- Geee 3y agoI think I see it now. Speculation following: They achieved AGI internally, but didn't want OpenAI to have it. All the important people will move to another company, following Sam, and OpenAI is left with nothing more than a rotting GPT. They planned all this from the start, which is why Sam didn't care about equity or long-term finances. They spent all the money in this one-shot gamble to achieve AGI, which can be reimplemented at another company. Legally it's not IP theft, because it's just code which can be memorized and rewritten. Sam got himself fired intentionally, which gives him and his followers a plausible cover story for moving to another company and continuing the work there. I'm expecting that all researchers from OpenAI will follow Sam.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoIf you understand a bit of math you would know there is no AGI and there would be no AGI on the current path.
- LatticeAnimal 3y agoWhat "bit of math" are you referring to? Similarly, would you have said the same things one year ago about the capabilities that ChatGPT currently possesses?
- woeirua 3y agoThis is certainly a take, but MSFT would probably sue the hell out of them if they tried to do this.
- 3y ago
- m101 3y agoMaybe something to do with this? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
- crop_rotation 3y agoThat is very old for it to cause a reaction like this now.
- cyanydeez 3y agosubstantive evidence might have cropped up.
- not2b 3y agoLet's suppose all that stuff is absolutely true, that when Sam Altman was a 13 year old kid he assaulted his 4 year old sister, that she's troubled because of it, and he made some attempts to buy her off, perhaps money in exchange for silence. Why would the board decide to suddenly fire him because of that, after all this time? He was a minor who would not understand the consequences. No, I'm confident that it has nothing to do with that. It must have to do with the current business. Maybe there's a financial conflict of interest. Maybe he's been hiding the severity of losses from the board. Maybe something else. But you don't fire a CEO because you discover that he committed a crime at age 13.
- brianjking 3y agoIf this is true, which it very well could be, it's clearly not ok/right. However, this was known for some time. She was tweeting about this in 2021, and this was discussed again in October of this year. None of that makes sense as to why the board would randomly fire him. I don't think it's this.
- markus_zhang 3y agoI found the lack of information of the CTO and certain board members disturbing. Like, who is Mira Murati? We only now that she came from Albania (one of the poorest countries) and somehow got into some pretty good private schools, and then to pretty good companies. Who are her parents? What kind of connections does she pull?
- crop_rotation 3y agoYou should look at the list of board members to get even bigger questions.
- markus_zhang 3y agoYes. Actually that was my motivation to check things up.
- voat 3y agoWhy is the fact that she is unknown disturbing?
- markus_zhang 3y agoIt is more like someone from one of the poorest countries in EU going straight to pretty good private schools and pretty good companies weird. Not going to say it's impossible, but she is doing so good but left so few footprints on the Internet. Again just my personal early night conspiracy drink. Don't take it seriously.
- zarzavat 3y agoHopefully not too pedantic but Albania is not in the EU.
- foobarian 3y agoIf I had a dollar for every Ivy school student whose parents were government functionaries in poor second and third world countries I could probably get a few years of Amazon Prime. But so what? I think it's good for the talent, and good for this country.
- duxup 3y agoQuitting like that makes it seem like Greg already knew what was brewing, whatever the conflict was and it came to a head and he made his call. So not a total surprise to him, at least as far as the backstory goes.
- crop_rotation 3y agoOn the contrary this makes it seem like he was surprised.
- duxup 3y agoI think if he didn't know why, he would wait to find out what the story was. Instead he knew enough to make is call immediately, knew what he was going to do.
- bongripper 3y agoNo, he does not seem surprised as he had his mind made up about an important life decision and a carefully crafted resignation letter ready in a matter of hours.
- flashback2199 3y ago> carefully crafted resignation letter Are you trolling, the letter is short and all lowercase lol
- Paul-Craft 3y agoMaybe he used ChatGPT to write the letter.
- stolsvik 3y agoI agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38313501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38313501
- bubmiw 3y agoI don't like the direction this is heading in at all...
- robswc 3y agoCan a super smart business-y person educate this engineer on how this even happens. So, if there's 6 board members and they're looking to "take down" 2... that means those 2 can't really participate, right? Or at the very least, they have to "recuse" themselves on votes regarding them? Do the 4 members have to organize and communicate "in secret"? Is there any reason 3 members can't hold a vote to oust 1, making it a 3/5 to reach majority, and then from there, just start voting _everyone_ out? Probably stupid questions but I'm curious enough to ask, lol.
- crop_rotation 3y agoI had the same questions, and have learnt now that non profit governance is like this and that is why is a bad idea for something like OpenAI. In a for profit the shareholders can just replace the board.
- robswc 3y agoAsking ChatGPT (until someone else answers) says that to remove a board member usually takes a super majority, which makes much more sense... but still seems to imply they need at least 4/6.
- 0xDEF 3y ago>Can a super smart business-y person educate this engineer on how this even happens. There is nothing business-y about this. As a non-profit OpenAI can do whatever they want.
- mexicanandre 3y agoOk what’s with the weird punctuation and lack of capital letters in their tweets? Both seem like they are horribly rushed and no auto complete?
- internetter 3y agoYes it likely is very likely he had absolutely no idea and rushed something out
- symlinkk 3y agoit’s a causal writing style that has become popular online in the last decade or so. don’t overthink it
- Sebb767 3y agoIt's usual in chats, not for formal writing like officially announcing your resignation. At least that's my impression.
- TheRoque 3y agoMaybe that's why it's used ? Twitter is just addressed to the public, so it's not official in any way, it's just communication. The lowercase casual style is only used to drive empathy probably.
- dkryptr 3y agoTo be fair, that's not a very formal resignation. He just... quit.
- vikramkr 3y agoThis is the sector of the economy that ipos in cargo shorts I don't think formal writing would be expected or appreciated
- brap 3y agoReminds me of how rich YouTubers make apology videos. No makeup (but yes makeup), no script (but yes script)... make an effort to seem effortless
- jumploops 3y agoSam and Ilya have recently made public statements about AGI that appear to highlight a fundamental disagreement between them. Sam claims LLMs aren't sufficient for AGI (rightfully so). Ilya claims the transformer architecture, with some modification for efficiency, is actually sufficient for AGI. Obviously transformers are the core component of LLMs today, and the devil is in the details (a future model may resemble the transformers of today, while also being dynamic in terms of training data/experience), but the jury is still out. In either case, publicly disagreeing on the future direction of OpenAI may be indicative of deeper problems internally.
- anvuong 3y agoThat is just disagreement in technological aspects, which any well-functioning company should always have a healthy amount of within its leadership. The press release literally said he was fired because he was lying. I haven't seen anything like that from a board of a big company for a very long time.
- kolja005 3y agoAdditionally, OpenAI can just put resources towards both approaches in order to settle this dispute. The whole point of research is that you don't know the conclusions ahead of time.
- capableweb 3y agoSeemingly, OpenAIs priorities shifted after the public ChatGPT release, and seems to be more and more geared towards selling to consumers, rather than a research lab that it seemed they initially were aiming for. I'm sure this was part of the disagreement as Sam is "capitalism incarnated" while Ilya gives of much different feelings.
- thelittleone 3y agoMaybe some promise was made by Sam to MS for the funding that the board didn't approve. He may have expected the board to accept the terms he agreed to but they fired him instead.
- stolsvik 3y agoWhether Greg knew of the decision beforehand? I don’t think so. This totally business-as-usual post from Greg Brockman happened 1 hour before the one from OpenAI: https://x.com/gdb/status/1725595967045398920 https://x.com/gdb/status/1725595967045398920 https://x.com/openai/status/1725611900262588813 https://x.com/openai/status/1725611900262588813 How crazy is that?!
- speedylight 3y agoI wonder if OpenAI employees will start resigning en masse because of this as a form of protest. The board better have a very good reason to back up their decision, if they decide to elaborate at all anyway.
- lucubratory 3y agoThere will definitely be people in Sam's camp that want to leave (I would guess a lot of product people?), but a lot of other people in Ilya's camp who want to stay. Notably, Ilya is the actual scientific and technical asset, and his team are much more likely to be loyal to him than Sam because they work with him. Even if Sam takes away a lot of admin and product roles, the core of the tech capabilities is likely to stay under OpenAI controls. That said, Microsoft doesn't have to keep giving them compute (well, they've got signed agreements Microsoft will honour, but MSoft doesn't have to go further than that), so the new OpenAI will still have to make concessions to their commercial investors for the same reason the company got a for profit subsidiary in the first place: because compute costs money, a lot of it.
- smlacy 3y agohttps://nitter.net/gdb/status/1725667410387378559 https://nitter.net/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
- intellectronica 3y agoNeither @sama nor @gdb are known to communicate in all lowercase. That fact that both did today must mean something.
- intellectronica 3y agoThe coordinated and disciplined communication from both suggests this wasn’t a surprise. Is this a planned move in a grander scheme?
- mil22 3y agoIt means there was no shifty business.
- paulcole 3y agoHopefully somebody who makes crosswords for the NYT uses this as inspiration. No shifty business? LOWERCASEWRITING is one too long for a M-S but could work on a Sunday I guess.
- exikyut 3y agoFacepalm It took a minute (and reading other comments) before that clicked :) SHIFT key...
- EFreethought 3y agoThere is no reason for Altman or Brockman to use the shift key, since as far as OpenAI is concerned they have already lost control.
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- ArcaneMoose 3y agoThere is one set of capitalized letters - in Greg's post: "AGI"
- aboodman 3y ago
- _ink_ 3y agoTwist: The AGI is not only already there, it is running rampant already.
- next_xibalba 3y agoHere is Helen Toner's resumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/details/education/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/details/edu... I am genuinely flabbergasted as to how she ended up on the board. How does this happen? I can't even find anything about fellow board member Tasha McCauley...
- andrewedstrom 3y agoJust linking to the education tab of her profile is misleading. Many people in AI safety are young. She has more professional experience than many leaders in the field. https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/
- exikyut 3y agoGetting "page not found". I don't think I have an account....
- codys 3y agoMcCauley's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-m-25475a54/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-m-25475a54/ . From some digging, full name appears to be Aimee Nastassia 'Tasha' McCauley, and is married to Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the actor).
- dauertewigkeit 3y agoPeople are forgetting that OpenAI started as a legit non-profit. It was not meant to be a big money making startup. So presumably getting a cushy board member position was not as hard because this was just some weird philanthropy thing that some SV people were funding...
- newsclues 3y agohttps://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/tasha-mccauley-35629.php https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/tasha-mccauley-3562...
- upwardbound 3y agoHelen Toner is famous among the AI safety community for being one of the most important people working to halt and reverse any sort of "AI arms race" between the US & China. The recent successes in this regard at the UK AI Safety Summit and the Biden/Xi talks are due in large part to her advocacy. She is well-connected with Pentagon leaders, who trust her input. She also is one of the hardest-working people among the West's analysts in her efforts to understand and connect with the Chinese side, as she uprooted her life to literally live in Beijing at one point in order to meet with people in the budding Chinese AI Safety community. Here's an example of her work: AI safeguards: Views inside and outside China (Book chapter) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003212980-19/ai-safeguards-helen-toner https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97810032... She's also co-authored several of the most famous "survey" papers which give an overview of AI safety methods: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22helen+toner%22+georgetown&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22h... She's at roughly the same level of eminence as Dr. Eric Horvitz (Microsoft's Chief Scientific Officer), who has similar goals as her, and who is an advisor to Biden. Comparing the two, Horvitz is more well-connected but Toner is more prolific, and overall they have roughly equal impact. (Copy-pasting this comment from another thread where I posted it in response to a similar question.)
- SXX 3y agoJust hope this will bring more "Open" into "AI.com"
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- wly_cdgr 3y agoHonestly it could be something as simple and sordid as a credible sexual assault allegation that he lied to the board about, or just some plain old fashioned embezzlement.
- acyou 3y agoDespite what the charter says, why is OpenAI called OpenAI and not OpenAGI? Is that at the core of this issue?
- convexstrictly 3y ago"Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI." https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman/ https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...
- Kye 3y agoIs this like Star Trek where the mission automatically ends if you lose enough of the bridge crew?
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoThe AI safety people may be one of the most destructive forces in tech history.
- zbentley 3y agoCould you elaborate on what you mean by that/why you think so?
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoBecause there is nothing even approaching the claimed risk of "AI", and they're stifling the growth and potential that LLMs have at vastly improving our lives.
- adastra22 3y agoAI x-risk is a load of hogwash based on extremely faulty reasoning ill-adapted to real ML architectures and political/economic reality. There is absolutely no reason to worry about the deceptive turn of a paperclip maximizer. Yet because of these sci-fi trope fears, real human progress is being held back.
- satvikpendem 3y agoIt is much ado about nothing, to quote our laudet poet in the English canon. Who gives a shit about AI, really?
- satvikpendem 3y agoI agree, let me query what I wish from the AI; it is literally no different from current search engines.
- momofuku 3y agohttps://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594 Update from Greg
- SamAltmanRapist 3y ago[dead]
- Mentlo 3y agoAs a sanity check - when Hinton left google we celebrated it as the faceless business corpo shouldn’t be leading the velocity of the dev, it should be AI pioneers who understand the risks. If indeed a similar disagreement happened in OpenAI but this time Hinton (Ilya) came on top- it’s a reason to celebrate.
- singluere 3y agoUpdate from Sam: https://nitter.net/sama/status/1725748751367852439 https://nitter.net/sama/status/1725748751367852439
- satvikpendem 3y agoIn my opinion, these people were not fit to run an enterprise originally labeled as "Open"AI, especially when Musk donated 100 million dollars to making sure it remained open while others in the company deemed it better to be closed. At this point, I must wonder if I support XAI instead over these companies.
- thekoma 3y agoIrrelevant but it struck me how both him and Sam Altman write in all lowercase.
- fredgrott 3y agoRemember folks, the trigger point that makes MS's investment worthless is reaching AGI point as that then triggers the charter rules to take the IP back out of commercial products....that is the crux of the firing...one board faction felt they had reached AGI and the people that were forced our or left felt they had not yet reached AGI. From my brief dealings with SA at Loopt in 2005, SA just does not have a dishonest bone in his body.(I got a brief look at the Loopt pitch deck due to interviewing for a mobile dev position at Loopt just after Sprint invested). If you want an angel invest play, find out the new VCfund firm Sam is setting up for hard research.
- mrangle 3y agoIf the primary issue is was safety vs performance, then in the near-future-end performance is going to win. As is the nature of AI that has been written about for decades. But right now, the board undoubtedly feels the most pressure in the realm of safety. This is where the political and big-money financial (Microsoft) support will be. If all true, Altman's departure was likely inevitable as well as fortunate for his future.
- ispyi 3y agoOne should consider the fact that in this case the ex CEO is independently wealthy so clearly wasn’t doing it for the money. In addition he started it with partners as originally as a non profit. Finally he didn’t own any equity in the company despite being one of its core team and founding members, in addition to its very public face. How many of us in the same position as him could be controlled given that the only thing one has to lose is their ability to have influence over the other board members and he seems to have lost that anyway.
- suggala 3y agoThe current deal with MSFT is cut by Sam is in such a way that Microsoft has huge leverage. Exclusive access, exclusive profit. And after all the profit limit is reached OpenAI sill need to be sold to msft to survive. This is like a worst deal for OpenAI whose goal is to do stuff open source way and it can’t do so due to this deal. If it is not for the MSFt deal, OpenAI could have open sourced and might have resorted to crowdsourcing which might have helped humanity. Also, quickly reaching profit goals is only for good for MSFT. There is no need to actually send money to OpenAI team, just provide operating expenses with 25% profit and take 75% profit. OpenAI has built a great software due to years of work and is being simply being milked by MSFt when the time comes for taking profit. And SAM allowed all this under his nose. Making sure OpenAI is ripe for MSFT takeover. This is a back channel deal for takeover. What about the early donors who donated with humanity goal whose funding made it all possible? I am not sure Sam has any contribution to the OpenAI Software but he gives the world an impression that he owns that and built the entire thing by himself and not giving any attribution to fellow founders.