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Ilya booted him https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294
by johnwheeler 3y ago
Ilya booted him https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294
- hitradostava 3y agoThis video dropped 2 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c Ilya clearly has a different approach to Sam
- dannykwells 3y agoThis should be higher voted. Seems like an internal power struggle between the more academic types and the commercial minded sides of OpenAI. I bet Sam goes and founds a company to take on OpenAI…and wins.
- thomassmith65 3y agoYes, and wins with an inferior product. Hooray /s If the company's 'Chief Scientist' is this unhappy about the direction the CEO is taking the company, maybe there's something to it.
- dmix 3y agoYou're putting a lot of trust in the power of one man, who easily could have the power to influence the three other board members. It's hard to know if this amounts more than a personal feud that escalated and then got wrapped in a pretty bow of "AI safety" and "non-profit vs profits".
- paulddraper 3y agoMaybe. But Altman has a great track record as CEO. Hard to imagine he suddenly became a bad CEO. Possible. But unlikely.
- csomar 3y agoWhere is this coming from? Sam does not have a "great" record as a CEO. In fact, he barely has any records. His fame came from working in YC and then the sky-rocketing of open AI. He is great at fundraising though.
- paulddraper 3y agowat the guy founded and was CEO of a company at 19 that sold for $43m
- csomar 3y ago> As CEO, Altman raised more than $30 million in venture capital for the company; however, Loopt failed to gain traction with enough users. It is easy to sell a company for $43 if you raised at least $43. Granted, we don't know the total amount raised but it certainly it's not the big success you are describing. That and I already mentioned that he is good in corporate sales.
- paulddraper 3y ago> he is good in corporate sales Which is a big part of being a great CEO
- plingamp 3y agoAccording to Crunchbase, Loopt raised $39.1M.
- lll-o-lll 3y agoBecause the Chief Scientist let ideology overrule pragmatism. There is always a tension between technical and commercial. That’s a battle that should be fought daily, but never completely won. This looks like a terrible decision, but I suppose we must wait and see.
- satvikpendem 3y agoAs long as truly "open" AI wins, as in fully open-source AI, then I'm fine with such a "leadership transition."
- ytoawwhra92 3y agoOpenAI is a non-profit research organisation. It's for-profit (capped-profit) subsidiary exists solely to be able to enable competitive compensation to its researchers to ensure they don't have to worry about the opportunity costs of working at a non-profit. They have a mutually beneficial relationship with a deep-pocketed partner who can perpetually fund their research in exchange for exclusive rights to commercialize any ground-breaking technology they develop and choose to allow to be commercialized. Aggressive commercialization is at odds with their raison d'être and they have no need for it to fund their research. For as long as they continue to push forward the state of the art in AI and build ground-breaking technology they can let Microsoft worry about commercialization and product development. If a CEO is not just distracting but actively hampering an organisation's ability to fulfill its mission then their dismissal is entirely warranted.
- adrr 3y agoInferior product is better than an unreleased product.
- hk__2 3y agoDoes ChatGPT look unreleased to you?
- quickthrower2 3y agoYou can’t win with an inferior product here. Not yet anyway. The utility is in the usefulness of the AI, and we’ve only just got to useful enough to start really being useful for daily workflows. This isn’t a ERP type thing where you outsell your rivals on sales prowess alone. This is more like the iPhone3 just got released.
- adharmad 3y agoFrom all accounts, Altman is a smart operator. So the whole story doesn’t make sense. Altman being the prime mover, doesn’t have sufficient traction with the board to protect his own position and allows a few non-techies to boot him out ?
- biddit 3y agoWell connected fundraiser - obviously. But…smart operator? Based on what? What trials has he navigated through that displayed great operational skills? When did he steer a company through a rocky time?
- RyanShook 3y agoThe abrupt nature and accusatory tone of the letter makes it sound like more was going on than disagreement. Why not just say, “the board has made the difficult decision to part ways with Altman”?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- krick 3y ago> Why not just say, “the board has made the difficult decision to part ways with Altman”? That's hardly any different. Nobody makes a difficult decision without any reason, and it's not like they really explained the reason.
- blablablerg 3y agoIt is a very big difference to publicly blame your now ex-CEO for basically lying ("not consistently candid") versus just a polite parting message based on personal differences or whatever. To attribute direct blame to Sam like this, something severe must have happened. You only do it like this to your ex-CEO when you are very pissed.
- csomar 3y agoI don't see it. Altman does not seem hacker-minded and likely will end up with an inferior product. This might be what led to this struggle. Sam is more about fundraising and getting the word out there but he should keep out of product decisions.
- deepGem 3y agoBrockman is with Sam, which makes them a formidable duo. Should they choose to, they will offer stiff competition to OpenAI but they may not even want to compete.
- kazamaloo 3y agoFor a company to be as successful as OpenAI, two people won't cut it. OpenAI arguably has the best ML talent at the moment. Talent attracts talent. People come for Sutskever, Karpathy, and alike -- not for Altman or Brockman.
- ignoramous 3y agoPachocki, Director of Research, just quit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38316378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38316378 Real chance of an exodus, which will be an utter shame.
- aidaman 3y agoaccording to one of the researchers who left, Simon, the engineering piece is more important. and many of their best engineers leading GPT5 and ChatGPT left (Brockman, Pachocki, and Simon)
- quickthrower2 3y agoI bet not (we could bet with play money on manifold.markets I would bet to 10% probability). Because you need the talent, the chips, the IP development, the billions. He could get the money but the talent is going to be hard unless he has a great narrative.
- maneesh 3y agoIsn't his narrative that he is basically the only person in the world who has already done this?
- erhaetherth 3y agoI'll sell my soul for about $600K/yr. Can't say I'm at the top of the AI game but I did graduate with a "concentration in AI" if that counts for anything.
- xvector 3y agoThat is "normal"/low-end IC6 pay at a tech company, the ML researchers involved here are pulling well into the millions.
- fyokdrigd 3y agoyour comment is close to dead, when you talk public open facts. shows that the demographic here is alienated when it came to their own compensation market value.
- bitcharmer 3y agoI have no problem with getting rid of people obsessed with profits and shareholder gains. Those MBA types never deliver any value except for the investors.
- croes 3y ago>I bet Sam goes and founds a company to take on OpenAI…and wins. How? Training sources are much more restricted know.
- moogly 3y agoDefine "wins".
- yieldcrv 3y agoToday’s lesson, keep multiple board seats None of the tech giants would be where they are today if they didn't ram through unique versions of control Their boards or shareholders would have ousted every FAANG CEO at less palatable parts of the journey
- cedws 3y agoThis is a surprising advantage Zuckerberg has in manoeuvring Meta. At least, to my knowledge, he is still effectively dictator.
- 100ideas 3y agoDear god, how is that an advantage? Are we all here just rooting for techno-dictator supremacy?
- yieldcrv 3y agoits objectively an advantage in control. if thats a goal, then its effective at doing that the only one inserting bias and emotion into objectivity here is you
- manvillej 3y agosince most public companies are owned by multi billion dollar hedgefunds, they're not exactly pillars of democracy. and since privately owned businesses are a thing; its really not that big of a deal
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 100ideas 3y agoThis comment is tone-deaf to the unique (and effective? TBD) arrangement of the board OpenAI 501(c)3 without compensation and the company they regulate. Your comment strikes me as not appreciating the unusually civic-minded arrangement, at least superficially, that is enabling the current power play. Maybe read the boards letter more carefully and provide your reaction. You castigate them as “non-techies” - meaning… what?
- dwd 3y agoJeremy Howard called ngmi on OpenAI during the Vanishing Gradients podcast yesterday, and Ilya has probably been thinking the same: LLM is a dead-end and not the path to AGI. https://twitter.com/HamelHusain/status/1725655686913392933 https://twitter.com/HamelHusain/status/1725655686913392933
- Sebguer 3y agoThis is the reverse of their apparent differences, at least as stated elsewhere in the comments.
- erhaetherth 3y agoDid we ever think LLMs were a path to AGI...? AGI is friggin hard, I don't know why folks keep getting fooled whenever a bot writes a coherent sentence.
- RuggedPineapple 3y agoIt's mostly a thing among the youngs I feel. Anybody old enough to remember the same 'OMG its going to change the world' cycles around AI every two or three decades knows better. The field is not actually advancing. It still wrestles with the same fundamental problems they were doing in the early 60s. The only change is external, where computer power gains and data set size increases allow brute forcing problems.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Eji1700 3y agoI'd say the biggest change is the quantity of available CATEGORIZED data. Tagged images and what not has done a ton to help the field. Further there are some hybrid chips which might help increase computing power specifically for the matrix math that all these systems work on. But yeah, none of this is making what people talk about when they say AGI. Just like how some tech cult people felt that Level 5 self driving was around the corner, even with all the evidence to the contrary. The self driving we have (or really, assisted cruise control) IS impressive, and leagues ahead of what we could do even a decade or two ago, but the gulf between that, and the goal, is similar to GPT and AGI in my eyes. There are a lot of fundamental problems we still don't have answers to. We've just gotten a lot better at doing what we already did, and getting more conformity on how.
- painted-now 3y agoElon Musk was talking about his view on OpenAI and especially the role of Ilya just 8 days ago on Lex Friedman Podcast. Listening to it again now, it feels like he might have know what is going on: https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?si=WnCdW45ccDOb3jgb&t=5100 https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?si=WnCdW45ccDOb3jgb&t=5100 Edit: Especially this part: "It was created as a non-profit open source and now it is a closed-source for maximum profit... Which I think is not good carma... ..." https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?si=WnCdW45ccDOb3jgb&t=5255 https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?si=WnCdW45ccDOb3jgb&t=5255
- Lacerda69 3y agoMusk is just salty he is out of the game
- painted-now 3y agoYeah, but I find his expression and pause after "bad karma" sentence quite interesting with this new context
- thoman23 3y agolol, he's so reminiscent of Trump. He can't help but make it all about himself. "I was the prime mover behind OpenAI". Everything is always all thanks to him.