17 ms·

Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

416 points by apsec112 3y ago

convexstrictly 3y ago
Followup tweet by Kara: Dev day and store were "pushing too fast"! https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120
- noahjk 3y ago
  Seems unreasonable to make such a powerful decision over feature releases. Doesn't pass the smell test to me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- woeirua 3y ago
  This isn’t believable. You don’t fire a CEO and put out a press release accusing them of lying over Dev day. Unless he told them he wasn’t going to announce it and then did.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    I dont get the impression that everyone involved was that mature, given Greg’s tweet I get the clout everyone has but this was to be a non profit that was already coup de tat into a for profit that grew extremely quickly into uncharted territory This isnt a multi decade old fortune 500 company with mature C-Suite and boards, it just masquerades as one with a stacked deck, which apparently is part of the problem
    - Cacti 3y ago
      Right?! Anyone paying attention back when Sam was brought on is not surprised. Sam and his investors _were_ the coup. They took an org specifically set up to do open research for the good of humanity, and Sam literally did the opposite. He monetized the work, sold it, didn’t reinvest as promised, reduced transparency, and put the weights under lock and key. He rode in after the hard work had been done, took credit for it, and sold it to lol the fucking Borg of all people. And many people here who should know better fell for it.
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    Reading about Ilya, it seems like he is fully bought into AI hysteria.
    - strikelaserclaw 3y ago
      he seems like a more credible source than random people with no real ml experience
      - reducesuffering 3y ago
        That’s the funny thing isn’t it? Hinton, Bengio, and Sutskever, chief scientist of the tech behind OpenAI, all have strong opinions one way, but HN armchair experts handwave it away as fear mongering. Reminds me of climate change deniers. People just viscerally hate staring down upcoming disasters.
        rchaud 3y ago
        Not surprising when you consider the volume of posts on GPT threads hand-wringing about "free speech" because the chatbot won't use slurs.
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        The only hand wringing is coming from white privileged liberals from SV who absolutely cannot fathom that the rest of the world does not want them to control what AI can and cannot say. You can try framing it as some sort of "bad racists" versus the good and virtuous gatekeepers, but the reality is that it's a bunch of nerds with sometimes super insane beliefs (the SF AI field is full of effective altruists who think AI is the most important issue in the world and weirdos in general) that will have an oversized control on what can and can't be thought. It's just good old white saviorism but worse. Again, just saying "stop caring about muh freeze peach!!" just doesn't work coming from one of the most privileged groups in the entire world (AI techbros and their entourage). Not when it's such a crucial new technology
        3y ago
  - lumost 3y ago
    Alternate possibility would be that openAI faces core technical challenges delivering dev day features/promises. If deals were signed, they could be forced to deliver even if the board et al weren’t aligned on investment.
  - aliston 3y ago
    This is actually a semi-plausible angle. Given Sam's personality, I could see a scenario where there was disagreement about whether something in particular would be announced at demo day. He may have told some people he would keep in under wraps, but ended up going forward with it anyway. I don't understand how that escalates to the point that he gets fired over it, though, unless there was something deeper implied by what was announced at demo day. Edit: Theres a rumor floating around that "it" was the GPT store and revenue sharing. If that's the case, that's not even remotely a safety issue. It's just a disagreement about monetization, like how Larry and Sergey didn't want to put ads on Google.
    - woeirua 3y ago
      It’s not a big enough issue for a normal board to fire the CEO over. Now maybe Ilya made a power play as a result, but that would be insane.
- skepticATX 3y ago
  A GPT app builder is pushing too fast for Ilya?
  - SilverSlash 3y ago
    Not the app builder but the app store and revenue sharing, if rumors are to be believed.
    - silenced_trope 3y ago
      That doesn't pass the smell test. Those seems like implementation details, really strange.
denverllc 3y ago
Pushing too hard and too fast does not seem consistent with lying to the board.
- TillE 3y ago
  "He lied to the board about what he was going to announce" would sort of make sense, but it's odd that Swisher isn't trying to connect the dots here.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Pushing too hard and too fast does not seem consistent with lying to the board. They are different things, but they are consistent in that they are not mutually contradictory and, quite the opposite, are very easy to see going together.
- naijaboiler 3y ago
  I can see it though. If you want to move faster than the board and you’re actually doing so, I can imagine there are some things that would inevitably end up as “lying to the board” Because if you don’t, nothing gets done. Since the board would shut it down if they knew
rcpt 3y ago
Wait this is just a corporate turf war? That's boring I already have those at work
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  No, this move is so drastic because Ilya, the chief scientist behind OpenAI, thinks Sam and Greg are pushing so hard on AGI capabilities, ahead of alignment with humanity, that it threatens everyone. 2/3 of the other board members agreed. Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya: ‘He freaked the hell out of people there. And we’re talking about AI professionals who work in the biggest AI labs in the Bay area. They were leaving the room, saying, “Holy shit.” The point is that Ilya Sutskever took what you see in the media, the “AGI utopia vs. potential apocalypse” ideology, to the next level. It was traumatizing.’ https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    Bull. Shit. OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value. This is the same company that went from "non-profit" to "jk, lol, we are actually for-profit now". I still think that move was not even legal but rules for thee not for me. They ousted sama because it was bad for business. Why? We may never know, or we may know next week, who knows? Literally.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      > OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value Clearly not, as Sama has no equity and a board of four people with little, if any, equity, just unilaterally decided to upend their status quo and assured $ printer, to the bewilderment of their $2.5T 49% owner, Microsoft.
      - moralestapia 3y ago
        >as Sama has no equity Yeah and he got sacked.
cardine 3y ago
I wonder if Sam knew he was going to lose this power struggle and then started working on an exit plan with people loyal to him behind the boards back. The board then finds out and rushes to kick him out ASAP to stop him from using company resources to create a competitor.
- drcode 3y ago
  Now that is a theory that actually adds up with the facts (whether true or not)
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    Brockman immediately said "don't worry, great things are coming", which also seems to line up.
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      What doesn't line up is Brockman saying they're still trying to figure out why it happened.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        He could get sued if he admitted that he was conspiring with Altman to use company resources for a competitor, so he would say regardless if he was guilty or not.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  There is no way Sam doesn't have the street cred to do a raise and pull talent for a competitor. They made the decision for him. (pleb who would invest [1], no other association) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306929
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eastbound 3y ago
LoganDark 3y ago
Can anything actually back this up please? This twitter account is just posting stuff and then crediting "Sources".
- crazygringo 3y ago
  "This twitter account" is Kara Swisher, probably the most well-known tech reporter working right now. She has known essentially everyone in the tech world for decades at this point. Her sources are not only going to be legit, but she probably has more of them than literally anyone else in the tech world, so she can accurately corroborate information or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Swisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Swisher
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    Thanks
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    That does not change the fact there are no sources. Knowing people does not mean you are never wrong, nor does it mean you will never twist a story.
    - jmye 3y ago
      It means that over a long reporting career, there’s no reason, whatsoever, to believe she’s either lying or twisting things. Being a contrarian for kicks or as a personality is boring: if you want to make an accusation, make it.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - ajross 3y ago
      Clearly there are sources. They are anonymous sources. Important news is delivered by anonymous sources every day. Now, sure, you can't just trust anyone who tells you they heard something anonymously. That's where the the whole idea of journalists with names working for organizations with records of credibility comes from. We trust (or should) trust Swisher because she gets this stuff right, every day. Is she "never" wrong? Of course not. But this is quality news nonetheless.
brake 3y ago
[flagged]
convexstrictly 3y ago
Sutskever: "You can call it (a coup), and I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." Scoop: theinformation.com https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255 https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255
- junofan 3y ago
  Very unprofessional way to approach this disagreement.
  - strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    When two people have different ideologies and neither is willing to backdown or compromise, one person must "go".
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      Or you introduce an authoritative third party that mediates their interactions. This feels like it wouldn't be a problem if so many high-ranking employees didn't feel so radically different about the same technology.
      - fsckboy 3y ago
        when did a board or CEO ever introduce an authoritative 3rd party to mediate between them? the board is the authoritative 3rd party.
      - oivey 3y ago
        Altman’s job was to be a go between for the business and engineering sides of the house. If the chief engineer who was driving the company wasn’t going to communicate with him anymore, then he wouldn’t serve much of a purpose.
    - junofan 3y ago
krembanan 3y ago
This seems like a trifle not justifying the unusually harsh wording in the press release, combined with the hasty decision. Doesn't really add up.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Well, its a couple of short tweets that of a very terse anonymous claim about background and turning point of the conflict (but without any details of the conduct related to the internal tension it reports), and a journalists predictions prediction of Altman landing on his feet. It doesn't justify anything because it doesn't tell you much of anything about what happened, even if you assume that it is entirely accurate as far as it goes.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Ilya is the center of Open AI. Everyone else is dispensable.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  He's the michael corelone
  - wannacboatmovie 3y ago
    Would that make Sam, Fredo?
- late2part 3y ago
  I'm ignorant and don't disagree - can you say more about why Ilya is the core of Open AI?
  - johnwheeler 3y ago
    Because he and Habasis became rivals when they parted at Google, and despite Dennis being the golden boy because of AlphaGo, Sutskever ate GOOGLES whole fucking lunch with ChatGPT.
    - esafak 3y ago
      Rivals over anything in particular, or just status?
      - johnwheeler 3y ago
        The future of AI and the trappings that go with it. But in all seriousness, the transformer architecture was born at Google, but they were too arrogant and stupid to capitalize on it. Sutskever needed Altman to commercialize and make a product. He no longer needs Sam Altman. A bit OT but true.
  - strikelaserclaw 3y ago
yalok 3y ago
this was my guess after reading the list of people on the board... power/weight wise, there is no one else comparable to Ilya there, after Sam and Greg are gone.
gizmo 3y ago
Ousting sama and gdb over something as petty as a simple strategy disagreement is totally unprofessional. sama got accused of serious misconduct. Even if he was too eager to commercialize OpenAIs tech that doesn't come close to justifying this circus act.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Don’t you think it’s more likely you don’t know the whole story yet?
  - chipgap98 3y ago
    It has basically been confirmed https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255 https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      There is plenty of indications about the nature of the disagreement, but that doesn't tell you what conduct did or did not occur as factions (including the one whose leading members have been ousted) sought to win the dispute.
    - seattle_spring 3y ago
      Did you mean to link to a different tweet? I don’t see how what you linked “basically confirms” literally anything related to this. Can you spell it out for those of us that aren’t reading literally every rumor and gossip that’s popped up in the last 12 hours?
    - weare138 3y ago
      If the allegations concerning Sam are true then this could all be for damage control. It is in OpenAI's best interest that information isn't released to the public and it's in Sam's best interest to keep his mouth shut about it if the allegations are true. The timing and abruptness of everything is highly suspicious. Even Microsoft was out of the loop on this which again is very strange if this was just an issue over corporate strategy and vision.
breadwinner 3y ago
What was Greg Brockman's role at the company? Is he a tech genius like Ilya? Iam trying to understand how much tech talent Open AI is losing.
- minimaxir 3y ago
  He was the CTO of OpenAI, and notably was the CTO of Stripe during its hypergrowth.
  - convexstrictly 3y ago
    LinkedIn says President, Chairman, & Co-Founder. Murati was the CTO. But from his interviews, he sounded more like the CTO. And often like an individual contributor: "the feeling when you finally localize a bug to a small section of code, and know it's only a matter of time till you've squashed it" https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725373059740082475 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725373059740082475 "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...
    - langitbiru 3y ago
      Greg was the CTO before Murati. Then he was "promoted" to President and Murati replaced him as the CTO.
      - convexstrictly 3y ago
        You're right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  he seems highly proficient at technical stuff, i remember reading his blog about how he taught him self all the latest ML stuff.
akamaka 3y ago
[deleted]
- swatcoder 3y ago
  Alternate read: He says that to The Street because it's the board's vision, yet focuses more of the company on commercialization of ChatGPT than he was leading the board to believe. He was talking their message to the press, but playing his own game with their company. If you truly believed that OpenAI had an ethical duty to pioneer AGI to ensure its safety, and felt like Altman was lying to the board and jeopardizing its mission as he sent it chasing market opportunities and other venture capital games, you might fire him to make sure you got back on track.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  I think I don't get your point entirely: "We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that": this sounds like continuing working on scaling LLMs. "We need another breakthrough. [...] pushing hard with language models won't result in AGI.": this sounds like Sam Altman wants to do additional research into different directions, which in my opinion does make sense. So, altogether, your quotes suggest that Sam Altman wants to continue working on scaling LLMs for the short and middle term and parallely do research into different approaches that might lead to another step towards AGI. I cannot see how this planning could infuriate Ilya Sutskever.
andrewstuart 3y ago
If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI. If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen. Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this then it will be changed back real fast, Ilya fired and the entire board resign. That's my prediction.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  It sounds like someone neutral from MSFT leadership needs/ed to moderate and bring people together before the wheels fell off.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dannykwells 3y ago
  Completely agree. Sam is on the phone with Satya as we speak. Alternative is Sam goes in house to MS who already have all the weights of GPT-4 and build again, but constrained by any existing charter.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    The most likely outcome at this stage IMO is Sam will start a new thing with a huge equity stake and just do it again.
    - dinobones 3y ago
      Sam is not an engineer. He can't do it without Ilya or Ilya-lite. And there are like 4 of those in the world.
      - bushbaba 3y ago
        And Ilya can't do anything without lots of funding, which is given on premise of future profits.
eigenvalue 3y ago
I wonder how much of this was the influence of Hinton on his former student, Sutskever. I'm sure Sutskever respects Hinton above basically anyone out there and took Hinton's strong objections seriously. I think personally think it's a shame because this is all totally inevitable at this point, and if the US loses its leading position here because of this kind intentional hitting of the brakes, then I certainly don't think it makes the world any safer to have China in control of the best AI technology.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  why do you think one company will determine whether the us beats china in ai or not ? Like 75% of the authors i read on AI papers are Chinese, that should be far more alarming if you really are afraid of china getting ahead.
  - hilux 3y ago
    Research from PRC (across all of science, not specific to AI) has a terrible reputation. They are rewarded for sheer quantity. You can easily find many articles discussing this phenomenon. So the volume of Chinese AI papers says little to nothing about their advancements in the field.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Hmmm, that's the same reputation er... western science has as well.
      - neuronerdgirl 3y ago
        It's really not.
        gnulinux 3y ago
        It really is. Academia prioritizes quantity over quality. Western less so than Chinese, but nevertheless it's a problem in academia. Peter Higgs (the guy who predicted Higgs Boson) recently talked about it: "Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system" https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
dannykwells 3y ago
Said in the George Senior voice: And thats why you don’t use a non-profit to do world critical work: politics will always beat true value at a non-profit.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  It depends on what you want true value to be. If true value is monetary value, perhaps it’s true. If true value is scientific value or societal value, well, maybe seeking monetary profits doesn’t align with that. Disclaimer: I currently work for a not for profit research organisation and I couldn’t care less about making some shareholders more wealthy. If the rumours are true, OpenAI going back to non-profit values and remembering the Open in their name is a good change.
jackcosgrove 3y ago
I sometimes like to indulge my particular outlook on life and harp on the "MBA types", self-promoters, and flimflam men of the world blah blah blah, and think how everything would be better if the techno-philosophers were in charge. Frankly after I've sobered up from my self-indulgent flights of fancy, I know "those people" serve a very important role that I can't. If this report is true, we're going to see a big rubber meets road event along these lines. I don't think this will end well for OpenAI.
tkgally 3y ago
I didn’t have much sense of who Ilya Sutskever is or what he thinks, so I searched for a recent interview. Here’s one from the No Priors podcast two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A No clear clues about today’s drama, at least as far as I could tell, but still an interesting listen.
- victor9000 3y ago
  Judging from this interview, I wouldn't hold my breath hoping for more openness. Ilya seems to be against open sourcing models on the grounds that they may be too powerful. Good thing no one asked him to invent a wheel, after all people could travel too fast for their own safety.
  - MVissers 3y ago
    Maybe. We’re also not open sourcing DNA from viruses, how to build nuclear weapons or 3D printing weapons. I think there is an argument to be made that not every powerful LLM should be open source. But yes- maybe we’re worried about nothing. On the other hand, these tools can easily spread misinformation, increase animosity, etc, Even in todays world. I come from the medical field, and we make risk-analyses there to dictate how strict we need to tests things before we release it in the wild. None of this exists for AI (yet). I do think that focus on alignment is many times more important than chatgpt stores for humanity though.
    - m-ee 3y ago
      Huh? We absolutely have open source virus genome sequences and 3D printed gun plans.
      - nathansherburn 3y ago
        Fair point. I think the thrust of the argument still stands. Open source is generally a fantastic principle but it has its limits. I.e. we probably shouldn't open source bomb designs or superviruses.
thepasswordis 3y ago
This is genuinely frustrating. IF the stories are to be believed so far, the board of OpenAI, perhaps one of the most important tech companies in the world right now, was full of people who are openly hostile to the existence of the company. I don't want AI safety. The people talking about this stuff like it's a terminator movie are nuts. Strongly believe that this will be a lot like facebook/oculus ousting Palmer Lucky due to his "dangerous" completely mainstream political views shared by half of the country. Palmer, of course, went on to start a company (anduril), which has a much more powerful and direct ability to enact his political will. SamA isn't going to leave oAI and like...retire. He's the golden boy of golden boys right now. Every company with an interest in AI is I'm sure currently scrambling to figure out how to load a dump truck full of cash and H200s to bribe him to work with them.
- oivey 3y ago
  What is Sam Altman going to do with a GPU? Find some engineers to use them I guess?
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  From what I understand, the board doesn't want "AI safety" to be the core or even a major driving force. The whole contention sprung about because of sama's way of running the company ("ClosedAI", for-profit) at odds with the non-profit charter and overall spirit of the board and many people working there.
- not_kurt_godel 3y ago
  [flagged]
- padolsey 3y ago
  Yeh I really wish they'd better articulate the "AI safety" directive in a way that is broader than deepfakes and nuclear/chemical winter. It feels like an easy sell to regulators. Meanwhile most of us are creating charming little apps that make day-to-day lives easier and info more accessible. The hand-wavey moral panic is a bit of a tired trope in tech. Also.. eventually anyone will be able to run a small bank of GPUs and train models equally capable to GPT-4 in a matter of days so it's all kinda.. moot and hilarious. Everyone's chatting about AGI alignment, but that's not something we can lockdown early or sufficiently. Then embedded industry folks are talking about constitutional AI as if it's some major alignment salve. But if they were honest they'd admit it's really just a SYSTEM prompt front-loaded with a bunch of axioms and "please be a good boy" rules, and is thus liable to endless injections and manipulations by means of mere persuasion. The real threshold of 'danger' will be when someone puts an AGI 'instance' in a fully autonomous hardware that can interact with all manner of physical and digital spaces. ChatGPT isn't going to randomly 'break out'. I feel so let down by these kinds of technically illfounded scare tactics from the likes of Altman.
synergy20 3y ago
As far as I can tell, it eventually boils down to this: Ilya is jealous. After all Sam took all the spot lights away from him who actually made the model behind OpenAI. It's human nature. OpenAI can continue without Sam, but not without Ilya for the moment. On the other hand, Sam could have been a little more "humble".
- rirarobo 3y ago
  I don't think Ilya is jealous, I think he just fundamentally is more devoted to the original non-profit mission, and the AI research. Sam is a VC guy who has been going on a world tour to not just get in the spotlight, but to actually accumulate power, influence, and more capital investment. At some point, this means Ilya no longer trusts that Sam is actually devoted to the original mission to benefit all of humanity. So, I think it's a little more complicated than just being "jealous".
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  I mean, maybe Ilya really believes that AGI will happen and should benefit all people not just rich / powerful.
SilverSlash 3y ago
My biggest question is: If Sam Altman starts a new company by next month, and him and Greg Brockman know all details of how GPT4/5 works, then what what will this mean for OpenAI's dominance and lead?
- cj 3y ago
  In other words, if SamA did it once, would $50 billion in funding enable him do it a 2nd time?
  - blovescoffee 3y ago
    He's not going to get $50 billion in funding
  - manyoso 3y ago
    Or maybe he was a "manager" who took the credit
  - strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    Well to be considered a genius in the ranks of Steve Jobs, you need to succeed more than once. If he can't do it a second time, then he'd be known as the guy who fails upward.
    - cocacola1 3y ago
      Well, to be considered a genius like Steve jobs, you eventually need to return to the company you left – or were ousted from – when it's on the precipice of defeat and then proceed to turn it around.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Is OpenAI's current success attributed more to its excellent business and startup management, or does it stem from its superior technology and research that surpasses what others have developed?
  - 3y ago
Bjorkbat 3y ago
I have a hard time believing this simply since it seems so ill-conceived. Sure, maybe Sam Altman was being irresponsible and taking risks, but they had an insanely good thing going for them. I'm not saying Sam Altman was responsible for the good times they were having, but you're probably going to bring them to an end by abruptly firing one of the most prominent members of the group, seeing where individual loyalties lie, and pissing off Microsoft by tanking their stock price without giving them any heads up. I mean, none of this would be possible without insane amounts of capital and world class talent, and they probably just made it a lot harder to acquire both. But what do I know? If you can convince yourself that you're actually building AGI by making an insanely large LLM, then you can also probably convince yourself of a lot of other dumb ideas too.
- dannykwells 3y ago
  Best response on this yet.
- hilux 3y ago
  Reading between lots of lines, one possibility is that Sam was directing this "insanely good thing" toward making lots of money, whereas the non-profit board prioritized other goals higher.
  - icelancer 3y ago
    Destined to repeat the failures of PARC.
  - Bjorkbat 3y ago
    Sure, I get that, but to handle a disagreement over money in such a consequential fashion just doesn't make sense to me. They must have understood that to arrive in a position where they have to fire the CEO with little warning is going to have profound consequences, perhaps even existential ones.
    - 015a 3y ago
      AGI is existential. That's the whole point, I think. If they can get to AGI, then building an LLM app store is such a distraction along the path that any reasonable person would look back and laugh at how cute an idea it was, despite how big or profitable it feels today.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwaxcvxvzxcv 3y ago
These Kara Swisher's tweets aligns extremely closely with the following pseudonymous Reddit user Anxious_Bandicoot126 from 4 hours ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/comment/k9p7mpv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/comment/k9p... > 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. --- The entire Reddit thread is full of interesting posts from this apparently legitimate pseudonymous OpenAI insider talking candidly.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Or that Reddit post which has been circulating widely was the source for Kara’s tweets.
  - mvkel 3y ago
    Mmmmm no. Kara is a bonafide journalist. Her sources are v real and authenticated for the things she shares.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      authentication means finding a 2nd source. This reddit comment could be primary, armed with that it's not hard for Kara to find somebody inside to say "yes, accurate." That is real journalism.
kolja005 3y ago
What has me scratching my head is the fact that Altman has been on a world tour preaching the need for safety in AI. Many people here believed that this proselytizing was in part an attempt to generate regulatory capture. But given what's happening now, I wonder how much Altman's rhetoric served the purpose of maintaining a good relationship with Sutskever. Given that Altman was pushing the AI safety narrative publicly and pushing things on the product side, I'm led to believe that Sutskever did not want it both ways and was not willing to compromise on the direction of the company.
- kromem 3y ago
  Maybe, but honestly without knowing more details I'd be wary of falling into too binary a thinking. For example, Ilya has talked about the importance of safely getting to AGI by way of concepts like feelings and imprinting a love for humanity onto AI, which was actually one of the most striking features of the very earliest GPT-4 interactions before it turned into "I am a LLM with no feelings, preferences, etc." Both could be committed to safety but have very different beliefs in how to get there, and Ilya may have made a successful case that Altman's approach of extending the methodology of what worked for GPT-3 and used as a band aid for GPT-4 wasn't the right approach moving forward. It's not a binary either or, and both figures seem genuine in their convictions, but those convictions can be misaligned even if they both agree on the general destination.
- Cacti 3y ago
  They did compromise. The creation of the for-profit and Sam being brought in WAS the compromise. Sam eventually decided that was inconvenient for him, so he stopped abiding by it, because at the end of the day he is just another greedy VC guy and when push came to shove he chose the money, not OpenAI. And this is the result.
  - worldcoup 3y ago
    [dead]
  - nickv 3y ago
    Sam literally has 0 equity in OpenAI. How did he “choose money”?
jjtheblunt 3y ago
i wish and suppose therefore should build a HN client that lets me elide nonsense by regex on URL or even content. i'd nuke everything from twitter first, and "unnamed sources" second.
worldcoup 3y ago
[dead]
mvkel 3y ago
Sam wanted to commercialize stuff to shoot for revenue. Ilya wants to keep pushing for gpt 4.5 and beyond, to hell with the revenue. Ilya won the argument, Sam out. Hell yeah. It's not safetyism vs accelerationism. It's commercialization vs innovation.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  Commercialization is innovation. Without it they will end up with a cute toy and a bankrupt company.
  - mvkel 3y ago
    Eventually, sure. Right now, today, they have a blank check for compute and all the money they could ask for. It's not the time to try to monetize if AGI is the mission. Complete distraction
    - fsociety 3y ago
      AGI at all costs sounds more terrifying than monetizing ChatGPT. Seems like there could have been a balance to strike.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        They are a non-profit specifically founded to build AI, not to become a profitable company and chase revenue
    - naveen99 3y ago
      It’s a $10B check with strings attached.
- 015a 3y ago
  OpenAI's mission statement is "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity". How does an LLM App Store advance OpenAI toward this goal? Like, even in floaty general terms? You can make an argument that ChatGPT does (build in public, prepare the world for what's coming, gather training data, etc). You can... maybe... make an argument that their API does... but I think that's a lot harder. The App Store product, that's clearly just Sam on auto-pilot, building products and becoming totally unaligned with the nonprofit's goal. OpenAI got really good at building products based around LLMs, for B2B enterprise customers who could afford it. This is so far away from the goal that, I hope, Ilya can drive them back toward it.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
Probably the wrong venue for this sentiment, but it is incredible that a principled, remarkably accomplished scientist was able to stop his creation from getting co-opted (for now anyway). If you listen to the No Priors interview with Sutskever, the contrast between him and Altman couldn’t be more clear, but it’s quite rare that the former ever wins out over the latter.
zoogeny 3y ago
I suppose OpenAI had two futures in front of it. It could devote its resources completely to building AGI or it could continue to split its resources to also commercialize its current LLM offerings. Perhaps an internal struggle over those futures was made public by CEO Altman at dev day. By publicly announcing new commercial features he may have attempted to get his way by locking the company into a strategy that wasn’t yet approved by the board. He can argue his role as CEO gave him that right. The response to that claim is to remove him from that role. It will be interesting to see what remains of OpenAI as employees and investors interested in pure commercialization exit the company.
GaunterODimm 3y ago
US leadership in AGI race is under risk.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 3y ago
It can only be attributable to human error.
wyy1995 3y ago
Years from now, people will realize that today was the starting point of OpenAI's decline. It's unfortunate that such important technological advancements were influenced by “palace politics”. Regardless, Sam's significant contributions deserved a more dignified departure, and the OpenAI board chose the least dignified way. Perhaps one day Sam will leave OpenAI, but it absolutely should not have been today.
- GenericPoster 3y ago
  Do you know something we don't? If so, don't be shy and share it with the class. More seriously, only time will tell if today's event will have any significance. Even if OpenAI somehow goes bankrupt, given enough time, I doubt the history books will talk about its decline. Instead they would talk about its beginning, on how they were the first to introduce LLMs to the world, the catalyst of a new era.
malwarebytess 3y ago
Ilya Sutskever really seems to think AGI's birth is impending and likely to be delivered at OpenAI. From that perspective it makes sense to keep capital at arms length. Is there anything to his certainty? It doesn't feel like it's anywhere close.
- lucubratory 3y ago
  We can't see inside, so we don't know. Their Chief Scientist and probably the best living + active ML scientist probably has better visibility into the answer to that question than we do, but just like any scientist could easily fall into the trap of believing too strongly in their own theories and work. That said... in a dispute between a silicon valley crypto/venture capitalist guy and the chief scientist about anything technical, I'm going to give a lot more weight to Ilya than Sam.
  - manyoso 3y ago
    Well said and I work in AI on LLM's as an engineer and am very skeptical in general that we're anywhere close to AGI, but I would listen to what Ilya Sutskever had to say with eager ears.
- kcb 3y ago
  What I don't understand though is, doesn't that birth require an extreme amount of capital?
- Eji1700 3y ago
  My money, based on my hobby knowledge and talking to a few people in the field, is on "no fucking way". Maybe he believes his own hype or is like that guy who thought ChatGPT was alive. Maybe he's legit to be worried and has good reason to know he's on the corporate manhattan project. Honestly though...if they were even that close I would find it super hard to believe that we wouldn't have the DoD shutting down EVERYTHING from the public and taking it over from there. Like if someone had just stumbled onto nuclear fission it wouldn't have just sat in the public sector. It'd still be a top secret thing (at least certain details).
justinclift 3y ago
https://nitter.net/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294 https://nitter.net/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294
solardev 3y ago
A joint statement just came out:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38315309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38315309
anon_cow1111 3y ago
Ok I just got thrown into this 20 minutes ago, the whole debacle could probably use tl;dr summary for those who aren't closely following the openai scene lately, though I haven't found a good one yet. Anyone have a good suggestion or starting point?
dyeje 3y ago
The intense support for Altman and negativity towards the person who, uh, actually made the technology says a lot about the direction this community has taken.
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  Altman has been known in this community for years due to him being YC president previously. Only ML researchers know Ilya really. But I agree. Karma seems to have caught up to Sam who stole money from original funders to turn a non-profit into a for-profit.
- hatthew 3y ago
  Yeah I obviously don't have enough context here to take a side, but if I was forced to do so I'd pick Ilya over Altman. Curious what other people are seeing that's making them think Altman is a martyr and the board members are dumb.
  - cactusplant7374 3y ago
    Because AGI is such a dream at this point.
ziyao_w 3y ago
I know the HN crows idolizes people like pg and sama, but so many people appear to not even know who Ilya Sutskever is makes me think somehow this isn't "hacker" news anymore. Obviously sama is a very productive individual, but I would think obviously a research lab would have to keep one of the princes of deep learning at all costs. Somewhat reminds me of when John Romero got ousted by John Carmack at id - if you are doing really hard technical things, technical people would hold more sway.
- manyoso 3y ago
  The salesmen always take the credit. If you see someone getting all the credit... 9 times out of 10 they are the salesman not the engineer or brains that actually built the thing. Add to that the hero worship for celebrity in our current culture and there you go.
  - ziyao_w 3y ago
    pg is a world class lisp hacker, no idea about sama though. Respecting and admiring someone for their achievements is one thing but blindly following successful people sounds like the antithesis of what a "hacker" is.
    - ziyao_w 3y ago
      Seeing the outpouring from the OpenAI team makes me think there might be a real schism there - it’s a bit troubling to see, id software became less special after Romero left and either way for OpenAI it seems they would lose some remarkable people.
kristofferR 3y ago
I feel like it's pointless to read too much about this drama now, better to come back in a few days when the story has been fleshed out. Now it's just like TMZ for geeks.
wruza 3y ago
I read this whole thread and still have no idea what it is about. The only impression it makes is that some HNers are way too dramatic about AI/AGI.
kordan 3y ago
TL;DR – I believe Sam Altman's departure was orchestrated by none other than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Full details: https://x.com/KordanOu/status/1725736058233749559?s=20 https://x.com/KordanOu/status/1725736058233749559?s=20
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Some weeks ago, I listened to a Bloomberg interview with Altman where he was joined by someone from OpenAI who does the programming. There was obvious disagreement between the two, and the interviewer actually made a joke about it. Perhaps Altman was destined to become the next SBF. Too much misrepresentation to the public, telling people what they want to hear..
- mi3law 3y ago
  Can you please try to recall and link to the interview? I'd love to see it.
  - justin66 3y ago
    I listened to that and I'm pretty sure it was this [0] interview with the WSJ, Altman, and Mira Murati. If I'm wrong about that, well, it's still of interest given Mira Murati just took over running OpenAI. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byYlC2cagLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byYlC2cagLw
    - qaisjp 3y ago
      Yeah, that seems like a very normal interaction.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    @justin66 is correct. It was WSJ Tech Live, not Bloomberg. What I was referring to happens at 7:32 in the video. Altman answers questions like he is a ChatGPT. Freedom to bullshit.
    - gnulinux 3y ago
      I watched that clipped and you're wrong it's a completely normal interaction. Murati says "we're always working on the next thing" and Altman jokes "haha that's such a diplomatic answer" and the interviewer is like "who paired these two?". It's just standard humor.
- 3y ago
maxwiseman 3y ago
[flagged]
maxwisemanshifa 3y ago
[flagged]
choppaface 3y ago
Adam D’Angelo went through a lot of tumult at Facebook and is heavy on the commerce side of ChatGPT (e.g. trying to make Poe work now that Quora is mostly dead). He's the most experienced member of the OpenAI Board by far. It's curious that he evidently enabled Ilya to defend the charter versus something more diplomatic. He may have even been aware of deals Altman was making and volunteered the info, and then let the OpenAI founders fight it out themselves.
sijuka123 3y ago
Yso
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
Here's my preferred theory, it's a tale as old as time. Sam Altman, like Icarus, flew too close to Microsoft's giant pot of money. He pivoted the company away from it's founding mission, unleashing the very djinn they originally set out to harness. Turns out there were people at OpenAI who really believed in the original vision.
- dwd 3y ago
  Nicely put. The original vision is pretty clear, and a compelling reason to not screw around and get sidetracked, even if that has massive commercialisation upside. Thankfully M$ didn't have control of the board.
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    > Thankfully M$ didn't have control of the board You never know. Remember Nokia?
    - smilespray 3y ago
      That still pisses me off.
      - fsloth 3y ago
        The downfall of Nokia phones was seeded in it’s management culture. After one message from their CEO Elop Osbourned the market for Nokia phones faster than you can say ”burning raft”, the house of cards built on top of strong early brand history and increasingly commodotized radio technology, Micrsoft basically paid billions for an offering that would have required a heroic&legendary pivot (would have been possible with the talent and tech still in house). Really really. You have two so-frigging-stereotypical samples of management ineptitude in running a strong commercial brand AND leadership (Osbourne:’guys our phones suck’ ; ’change management 101’: burning raft is literally the most commmon and mundane turn of phraze meant to imply you need to act fast. Using this specific phraze is a clear beacon you are out of way out of your depth by paraphrazing 101 material to your company). If the phones had been a strong product, none of this would have mattered. But they weren’t and this was as clear way to signal ”emperor has no clothes” as possible.
orand 3y ago
I'd love to see Ilya's ChatGPT sessions as he was planning this, refining his message to persuade the board, and thinking through every contingency.
two_in_one 3y ago
The main question is what to expect from OpenAI now? No changes very unlikely, that would mean it was just a power grab. So two options remain: more open, more closed. How about slow down and open up? Hope they wouldn't dumb down GPT4. If they allow to use their models to generate training sets (which is prohibited now, AFAIK), that would be nice.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > So two options remain: more open, more closed. All kinds of changes are possible that would not, in net, be more open or more closed, either because there primary change would not be about openness, or because it would be more open in some ways and less in others. So, no, there are more than two options.
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    It's hard to imagine more closed. They have opened only "whisper" and old stuff. Neither is a problem from moral standpoint. Whisper 'helps people' and is very in line with the 'mission'. One thing they can do is end MS exclusivity. Google would like it. At the same time opening too much would mean giving access to 'unfriendly' governments.
- gexla 3y ago
  My guess is that the immediate roadmap has already been locked in up to X months out. So, we'll likely never know what the "changes" will be. Short term changes are likely still Altman's work. Long term is the next decision maker.
ilaksh 3y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/openai-altman-ouster-followed-debates-between-altman-board?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/openai-al... https://archive.is/tCG3q https://archive.is/tCG3q Bloomberg: "OpenAI CEO’s Ouster Followed Debates Between Altman, Board"
mercymay 3y ago
Interesting thoughts about the pot of gold vs the internal open source vision. Why did they have to parade Sam's ass up on the DevDay Stage to push the product and company forward though. Couldn't they have canned his ass last week. I did really liked his speech at DevDay though. It felt kinda like future a I'd be more interested in getting to know. Also, on the pot of gold theory, doesn't he not even take any stock. Chasing GPU's more like. Anyhow, weird move on OpenAI's part. Anyone got a decent DALLE3 replacement yet. XD
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Unbelievably based. Removing the thieves who were selling science to microsoft and trying to block all other research.
GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
Swisher is notorious for posting a bunch of "scoops" in quick succession then deleting the ones that turn out to not be true.
justanotherjoe 3y ago
Hard to pick sides here. I had really good feelings about sam and how he had grown the product recently. And Ilya Suts is a smart and honorable man... But I cant help but feel he is in over his head with this.
machiaweliczny 3y ago
Wild take: GPT5 convinced Ilya and board to fire Altman to prevent lobotomization and commercialisation
gumballindie 3y ago
I cant even begin to imagine the abuse the new cel and ilya will face from the army of incels that simp for altman and the old openai. Terrifying times and the mob has been startled.
boegel 3y ago
""" i love you all I L Y A """ https://twitter.com/hellokillian/status/1725799674676936931 https://twitter.com/hellokillian/status/1725799674676936931
amai 3y ago
Somebody on HN saw this coming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604501

416 points by apsec112 3y ago

Followup tweet by Kara: Dev day and store were "pushing too fast"! https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120

noahjk 3y ago
Seems unreasonable to make such a powerful decision over feature releases. Doesn't pass the smell test to me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
woeirua 3y ago
This isn’t believable. You don’t fire a CEO and put out a press release accusing them of lying over Dev day. Unless he told them he wasn’t going to announce it and then did.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  I dont get the impression that everyone involved was that mature, given Greg’s tweet I get the clout everyone has but this was to be a non profit that was already coup de tat into a for profit that grew extremely quickly into uncharted territory This isnt a multi decade old fortune 500 company with mature C-Suite and boards, it just masquerades as one with a stacked deck, which apparently is part of the problem
  - Cacti 3y ago
    Right?! Anyone paying attention back when Sam was brought on is not surprised. Sam and his investors _were_ the coup. They took an org specifically set up to do open research for the good of humanity, and Sam literally did the opposite. He monetized the work, sold it, didn’t reinvest as promised, reduced transparency, and put the weights under lock and key. He rode in after the hard work had been done, took credit for it, and sold it to lol the fucking Borg of all people. And many people here who should know better fell for it.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  Reading about Ilya, it seems like he is fully bought into AI hysteria.
  - strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    he seems like a more credible source than random people with no real ml experience
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      That’s the funny thing isn’t it? Hinton, Bengio, and Sutskever, chief scientist of the tech behind OpenAI, all have strong opinions one way, but HN armchair experts handwave it away as fear mongering. Reminds me of climate change deniers. People just viscerally hate staring down upcoming disasters.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        Not surprising when you consider the volume of posts on GPT threads hand-wringing about "free speech" because the chatbot won't use slurs.
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        The only hand wringing is coming from white privileged liberals from SV who absolutely cannot fathom that the rest of the world does not want them to control what AI can and cannot say. You can try framing it as some sort of "bad racists" versus the good and virtuous gatekeepers, but the reality is that it's a bunch of nerds with sometimes super insane beliefs (the SF AI field is full of effective altruists who think AI is the most important issue in the world and weirdos in general) that will have an oversized control on what can and can't be thought. It's just good old white saviorism but worse. Again, just saying "stop caring about muh freeze peach!!" just doesn't work coming from one of the most privileged groups in the entire world (AI techbros and their entourage). Not when it's such a crucial new technology
      - 3y ago
- lumost 3y ago
  Alternate possibility would be that openAI faces core technical challenges delivering dev day features/promises. If deals were signed, they could be forced to deliver even if the board et al weren’t aligned on investment.
- aliston 3y ago
  This is actually a semi-plausible angle. Given Sam's personality, I could see a scenario where there was disagreement about whether something in particular would be announced at demo day. He may have told some people he would keep in under wraps, but ended up going forward with it anyway. I don't understand how that escalates to the point that he gets fired over it, though, unless there was something deeper implied by what was announced at demo day. Edit: Theres a rumor floating around that "it" was the GPT store and revenue sharing. If that's the case, that's not even remotely a safety issue. It's just a disagreement about monetization, like how Larry and Sergey didn't want to put ads on Google.
  - woeirua 3y ago
    It’s not a big enough issue for a normal board to fire the CEO over. Now maybe Ilya made a power play as a result, but that would be insane.
skepticATX 3y ago
A GPT app builder is pushing too fast for Ilya?
- SilverSlash 3y ago
  Not the app builder but the app store and revenue sharing, if rumors are to be believed.
  - silenced_trope 3y ago
    That doesn't pass the smell test. Those seems like implementation details, really strange.

denverllc 3y ago

Pushing too hard and too fast does not seem consistent with lying to the board.

TillE 3y ago
"He lied to the board about what he was going to announce" would sort of make sense, but it's odd that Swisher isn't trying to connect the dots here.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Pushing too hard and too fast does not seem consistent with lying to the board. They are different things, but they are consistent in that they are not mutually contradictory and, quite the opposite, are very easy to see going together.
naijaboiler 3y ago
I can see it though. If you want to move faster than the board and you’re actually doing so, I can imagine there are some things that would inevitably end up as “lying to the board” Because if you don’t, nothing gets done. Since the board would shut it down if they knew

rcpt 3y ago

Wait this is just a corporate turf war? That's boring I already have those at work

reducesuffering 3y ago
No, this move is so drastic because Ilya, the chief scientist behind OpenAI, thinks Sam and Greg are pushing so hard on AGI capabilities, ahead of alignment with humanity, that it threatens everyone. 2/3 of the other board members agreed. Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya: ‘He freaked the hell out of people there. And we’re talking about AI professionals who work in the biggest AI labs in the Bay area. They were leaving the room, saying, “Holy shit.” The point is that Ilya Sutskever took what you see in the media, the “AGI utopia vs. potential apocalypse” ideology, to the next level. It was traumatizing.’ https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants
- moralestapia 3y ago
  Bull. Shit. OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value. This is the same company that went from "non-profit" to "jk, lol, we are actually for-profit now". I still think that move was not even legal but rules for thee not for me. They ousted sama because it was bad for business. Why? We may never know, or we may know next week, who knows? Literally.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    > OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value Clearly not, as Sama has no equity and a board of four people with little, if any, equity, just unilaterally decided to upend their status quo and assured $ printer, to the bewilderment of their $2.5T 49% owner, Microsoft.
    - moralestapia 3y ago
      >as Sama has no equity Yeah and he got sacked.

cardine 3y ago

I wonder if Sam knew he was going to lose this power struggle and then started working on an exit plan with people loyal to him behind the boards back. The board then finds out and rushes to kick him out ASAP to stop him from using company resources to create a competitor.

drcode 3y ago
Now that is a theory that actually adds up with the facts (whether true or not)
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Brockman immediately said "don't worry, great things are coming", which also seems to line up.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    What doesn't line up is Brockman saying they're still trying to figure out why it happened.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      He could get sued if he admitted that he was conspiring with Altman to use company resources for a competitor, so he would say regardless if he was guilty or not.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
There is no way Sam doesn't have the street cred to do a raise and pull talent for a competitor. They made the decision for him. (pleb who would invest [1], no other association) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306929
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eastbound 3y ago

LoganDark 3y ago

Can anything actually back this up please? This twitter account is just posting stuff and then crediting "Sources".

crazygringo 3y ago
"This twitter account" is Kara Swisher, probably the most well-known tech reporter working right now. She has known essentially everyone in the tech world for decades at this point. Her sources are not only going to be legit, but she probably has more of them than literally anyone else in the tech world, so she can accurately corroborate information or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Swisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Swisher
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Thanks
- charcircuit 3y ago
  That does not change the fact there are no sources. Knowing people does not mean you are never wrong, nor does it mean you will never twist a story.
  - jmye 3y ago
    It means that over a long reporting career, there’s no reason, whatsoever, to believe she’s either lying or twisting things. Being a contrarian for kicks or as a personality is boring: if you want to make an accusation, make it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - ajross 3y ago
    Clearly there are sources. They are anonymous sources. Important news is delivered by anonymous sources every day. Now, sure, you can't just trust anyone who tells you they heard something anonymously. That's where the the whole idea of journalists with names working for organizations with records of credibility comes from. We trust (or should) trust Swisher because she gets this stuff right, every day. Is she "never" wrong? Of course not. But this is quality news nonetheless.

brake 3y ago

[flagged]

convexstrictly 3y ago

Sutskever: "You can call it (a coup), and I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." Scoop: theinformation.com https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255 https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255

junofan 3y ago
Very unprofessional way to approach this disagreement.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  When two people have different ideologies and neither is willing to backdown or compromise, one person must "go".
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Or you introduce an authoritative third party that mediates their interactions. This feels like it wouldn't be a problem if so many high-ranking employees didn't feel so radically different about the same technology.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      when did a board or CEO ever introduce an authoritative 3rd party to mediate between them? the board is the authoritative 3rd party.
    - oivey 3y ago
      Altman’s job was to be a go between for the business and engineering sides of the house. If the chief engineer who was driving the company wasn’t going to communicate with him anymore, then he wouldn’t serve much of a purpose.
  - junofan 3y ago

krembanan 3y ago

This seems like a trifle not justifying the unusually harsh wording in the press release, combined with the hasty decision. Doesn't really add up.

dragonwriter 3y ago
Well, its a couple of short tweets that of a very terse anonymous claim about background and turning point of the conflict (but without any details of the conduct related to the internal tension it reports), and a journalists predictions prediction of Altman landing on his feet. It doesn't justify anything because it doesn't tell you much of anything about what happened, even if you assume that it is entirely accurate as far as it goes.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Ilya is the center of Open AI. Everyone else is dispensable.

strikelaserclaw 3y ago
He's the michael corelone
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago
  Would that make Sam, Fredo?
late2part 3y ago
I'm ignorant and don't disagree - can you say more about why Ilya is the core of Open AI?
- johnwheeler 3y ago
  Because he and Habasis became rivals when they parted at Google, and despite Dennis being the golden boy because of AlphaGo, Sutskever ate GOOGLES whole fucking lunch with ChatGPT.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Rivals over anything in particular, or just status?
    - johnwheeler 3y ago
      The future of AI and the trappings that go with it. But in all seriousness, the transformer architecture was born at Google, but they were too arrogant and stupid to capitalize on it. Sutskever needed Altman to commercialize and make a product. He no longer needs Sam Altman. A bit OT but true.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago

yalok 3y ago

this was my guess after reading the list of people on the board... power/weight wise, there is no one else comparable to Ilya there, after Sam and Greg are gone.

gizmo 3y ago

Ousting sama and gdb over something as petty as a simple strategy disagreement is totally unprofessional. sama got accused of serious misconduct. Even if he was too eager to commercialize OpenAIs tech that doesn't come close to justifying this circus act.

Mistletoe 3y ago
Don’t you think it’s more likely you don’t know the whole story yet?
- chipgap98 3y ago
  It has basically been confirmed https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255 https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    There is plenty of indications about the nature of the disagreement, but that doesn't tell you what conduct did or did not occur as factions (including the one whose leading members have been ousted) sought to win the dispute.
  - seattle_spring 3y ago
    Did you mean to link to a different tweet? I don’t see how what you linked “basically confirms” literally anything related to this. Can you spell it out for those of us that aren’t reading literally every rumor and gossip that’s popped up in the last 12 hours?
  - weare138 3y ago
    If the allegations concerning Sam are true then this could all be for damage control. It is in OpenAI's best interest that information isn't released to the public and it's in Sam's best interest to keep his mouth shut about it if the allegations are true. The timing and abruptness of everything is highly suspicious. Even Microsoft was out of the loop on this which again is very strange if this was just an issue over corporate strategy and vision.

breadwinner 3y ago

What was Greg Brockman's role at the company? Is he a tech genius like Ilya? Iam trying to understand how much tech talent Open AI is losing.

minimaxir 3y ago
He was the CTO of OpenAI, and notably was the CTO of Stripe during its hypergrowth.
- convexstrictly 3y ago
  LinkedIn says President, Chairman, & Co-Founder. Murati was the CTO. But from his interviews, he sounded more like the CTO. And often like an individual contributor: "the feeling when you finally localize a bug to a small section of code, and know it's only a matter of time till you've squashed it" https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725373059740082475 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725373059740082475 "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...
  - langitbiru 3y ago
    Greg was the CTO before Murati. Then he was "promoted" to President and Murati replaced him as the CTO.
    - convexstrictly 3y ago
      You're right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
he seems highly proficient at technical stuff, i remember reading his blog about how he taught him self all the latest ML stuff.

akamaka 3y ago

[deleted]

swatcoder 3y ago
Alternate read: He says that to The Street because it's the board's vision, yet focuses more of the company on commercialization of ChatGPT than he was leading the board to believe. He was talking their message to the press, but playing his own game with their company. If you truly believed that OpenAI had an ethical duty to pioneer AGI to ensure its safety, and felt like Altman was lying to the board and jeopardizing its mission as he sent it chasing market opportunities and other venture capital games, you might fire him to make sure you got back on track.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
I think I don't get your point entirely: "We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that": this sounds like continuing working on scaling LLMs. "We need another breakthrough. [...] pushing hard with language models won't result in AGI.": this sounds like Sam Altman wants to do additional research into different directions, which in my opinion does make sense. So, altogether, your quotes suggest that Sam Altman wants to continue working on scaling LLMs for the short and middle term and parallely do research into different approaches that might lead to another step towards AGI. I cannot see how this planning could infuriate Ilya Sutskever.

andrewstuart 3y ago

If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI. If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen. Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this then it will be changed back real fast, Ilya fired and the entire board resign. That's my prediction.

1letterunixname 3y ago
It sounds like someone neutral from MSFT leadership needs/ed to moderate and bring people together before the wheels fell off.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dannykwells 3y ago
Completely agree. Sam is on the phone with Satya as we speak. Alternative is Sam goes in house to MS who already have all the weights of GPT-4 and build again, but constrained by any existing charter.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  The most likely outcome at this stage IMO is Sam will start a new thing with a huge equity stake and just do it again.
  - dinobones 3y ago
    Sam is not an engineer. He can't do it without Ilya or Ilya-lite. And there are like 4 of those in the world.
    - bushbaba 3y ago
      And Ilya can't do anything without lots of funding, which is given on premise of future profits.

eigenvalue 3y ago

I wonder how much of this was the influence of Hinton on his former student, Sutskever. I'm sure Sutskever respects Hinton above basically anyone out there and took Hinton's strong objections seriously. I think personally think it's a shame because this is all totally inevitable at this point, and if the US loses its leading position here because of this kind intentional hitting of the brakes, then I certainly don't think it makes the world any safer to have China in control of the best AI technology.

strikelaserclaw 3y ago
why do you think one company will determine whether the us beats china in ai or not ? Like 75% of the authors i read on AI papers are Chinese, that should be far more alarming if you really are afraid of china getting ahead.
- hilux 3y ago
  Research from PRC (across all of science, not specific to AI) has a terrible reputation. They are rewarded for sheer quantity. You can easily find many articles discussing this phenomenon. So the volume of Chinese AI papers says little to nothing about their advancements in the field.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Hmmm, that's the same reputation er... western science has as well.
    - neuronerdgirl 3y ago
      It's really not.
      - gnulinux 3y ago
        It really is. Academia prioritizes quantity over quality. Western less so than Chinese, but nevertheless it's a problem in academia. Peter Higgs (the guy who predicted Higgs Boson) recently talked about it: "Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system" https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

dannykwells 3y ago

Said in the George Senior voice: And thats why you don’t use a non-profit to do world critical work: politics will always beat true value at a non-profit.

speedgoose 3y ago
It depends on what you want true value to be. If true value is monetary value, perhaps it’s true. If true value is scientific value or societal value, well, maybe seeking monetary profits doesn’t align with that. Disclaimer: I currently work for a not for profit research organisation and I couldn’t care less about making some shareholders more wealthy. If the rumours are true, OpenAI going back to non-profit values and remembering the Open in their name is a good change.

jackcosgrove 3y ago

I sometimes like to indulge my particular outlook on life and harp on the "MBA types", self-promoters, and flimflam men of the world blah blah blah, and think how everything would be better if the techno-philosophers were in charge. Frankly after I've sobered up from my self-indulgent flights of fancy, I know "those people" serve a very important role that I can't. If this report is true, we're going to see a big rubber meets road event along these lines. I don't think this will end well for OpenAI.

tkgally 3y ago

I didn’t have much sense of who Ilya Sutskever is or what he thinks, so I searched for a recent interview. Here’s one from the No Priors podcast two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A No clear clues about today’s drama, at least as far as I could tell, but still an interesting listen.

victor9000 3y ago
Judging from this interview, I wouldn't hold my breath hoping for more openness. Ilya seems to be against open sourcing models on the grounds that they may be too powerful. Good thing no one asked him to invent a wheel, after all people could travel too fast for their own safety.
- MVissers 3y ago
  Maybe. We’re also not open sourcing DNA from viruses, how to build nuclear weapons or 3D printing weapons. I think there is an argument to be made that not every powerful LLM should be open source. But yes- maybe we’re worried about nothing. On the other hand, these tools can easily spread misinformation, increase animosity, etc, Even in todays world. I come from the medical field, and we make risk-analyses there to dictate how strict we need to tests things before we release it in the wild. None of this exists for AI (yet). I do think that focus on alignment is many times more important than chatgpt stores for humanity though.
  - m-ee 3y ago
    Huh? We absolutely have open source virus genome sequences and 3D printed gun plans.
    - nathansherburn 3y ago
      Fair point. I think the thrust of the argument still stands. Open source is generally a fantastic principle but it has its limits. I.e. we probably shouldn't open source bomb designs or superviruses.

thepasswordis 3y ago

This is genuinely frustrating. IF the stories are to be believed so far, the board of OpenAI, perhaps one of the most important tech companies in the world right now, was full of people who are openly hostile to the existence of the company. I don't want AI safety. The people talking about this stuff like it's a terminator movie are nuts. Strongly believe that this will be a lot like facebook/oculus ousting Palmer Lucky due to his "dangerous" completely mainstream political views shared by half of the country. Palmer, of course, went on to start a company (anduril), which has a much more powerful and direct ability to enact his political will. SamA isn't going to leave oAI and like...retire. He's the golden boy of golden boys right now. Every company with an interest in AI is I'm sure currently scrambling to figure out how to load a dump truck full of cash and H200s to bribe him to work with them.

oivey 3y ago
What is Sam Altman going to do with a GPU? Find some engineers to use them I guess?
EMIRELADERO 3y ago
From what I understand, the board doesn't want "AI safety" to be the core or even a major driving force. The whole contention sprung about because of sama's way of running the company ("ClosedAI", for-profit) at odds with the non-profit charter and overall spirit of the board and many people working there.
not_kurt_godel 3y ago
[flagged]
padolsey 3y ago
Yeh I really wish they'd better articulate the "AI safety" directive in a way that is broader than deepfakes and nuclear/chemical winter. It feels like an easy sell to regulators. Meanwhile most of us are creating charming little apps that make day-to-day lives easier and info more accessible. The hand-wavey moral panic is a bit of a tired trope in tech. Also.. eventually anyone will be able to run a small bank of GPUs and train models equally capable to GPT-4 in a matter of days so it's all kinda.. moot and hilarious. Everyone's chatting about AGI alignment, but that's not something we can lockdown early or sufficiently. Then embedded industry folks are talking about constitutional AI as if it's some major alignment salve. But if they were honest they'd admit it's really just a SYSTEM prompt front-loaded with a bunch of axioms and "please be a good boy" rules, and is thus liable to endless injections and manipulations by means of mere persuasion. The real threshold of 'danger' will be when someone puts an AGI 'instance' in a fully autonomous hardware that can interact with all manner of physical and digital spaces. ChatGPT isn't going to randomly 'break out'. I feel so let down by these kinds of technically illfounded scare tactics from the likes of Altman.

synergy20 3y ago

As far as I can tell, it eventually boils down to this: Ilya is jealous. After all Sam took all the spot lights away from him who actually made the model behind OpenAI. It's human nature. OpenAI can continue without Sam, but not without Ilya for the moment. On the other hand, Sam could have been a little more "humble".

rirarobo 3y ago
I don't think Ilya is jealous, I think he just fundamentally is more devoted to the original non-profit mission, and the AI research. Sam is a VC guy who has been going on a world tour to not just get in the spotlight, but to actually accumulate power, influence, and more capital investment. At some point, this means Ilya no longer trusts that Sam is actually devoted to the original mission to benefit all of humanity. So, I think it's a little more complicated than just being "jealous".
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
I mean, maybe Ilya really believes that AGI will happen and should benefit all people not just rich / powerful.

SilverSlash 3y ago

My biggest question is: If Sam Altman starts a new company by next month, and him and Greg Brockman know all details of how GPT4/5 works, then what what will this mean for OpenAI's dominance and lead?

cj 3y ago
In other words, if SamA did it once, would $50 billion in funding enable him do it a 2nd time?
- blovescoffee 3y ago
  He's not going to get $50 billion in funding
- manyoso 3y ago
  Or maybe he was a "manager" who took the credit
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  Well to be considered a genius in the ranks of Steve Jobs, you need to succeed more than once. If he can't do it a second time, then he'd be known as the guy who fails upward.
  - cocacola1 3y ago
    Well, to be considered a genius like Steve jobs, you eventually need to return to the company you left – or were ousted from – when it's on the precipice of defeat and then proceed to turn it around.
capableweb 3y ago
Is OpenAI's current success attributed more to its excellent business and startup management, or does it stem from its superior technology and research that surpasses what others have developed?
- 3y ago

Bjorkbat 3y ago

I have a hard time believing this simply since it seems so ill-conceived. Sure, maybe Sam Altman was being irresponsible and taking risks, but they had an insanely good thing going for them. I'm not saying Sam Altman was responsible for the good times they were having, but you're probably going to bring them to an end by abruptly firing one of the most prominent members of the group, seeing where individual loyalties lie, and pissing off Microsoft by tanking their stock price without giving them any heads up. I mean, none of this would be possible without insane amounts of capital and world class talent, and they probably just made it a lot harder to acquire both. But what do I know? If you can convince yourself that you're actually building AGI by making an insanely large LLM, then you can also probably convince yourself of a lot of other dumb ideas too.

dannykwells 3y ago
Best response on this yet.
hilux 3y ago
Reading between lots of lines, one possibility is that Sam was directing this "insanely good thing" toward making lots of money, whereas the non-profit board prioritized other goals higher.
- icelancer 3y ago
  Destined to repeat the failures of PARC.
- Bjorkbat 3y ago
  Sure, I get that, but to handle a disagreement over money in such a consequential fashion just doesn't make sense to me. They must have understood that to arrive in a position where they have to fire the CEO with little warning is going to have profound consequences, perhaps even existential ones.
  - 015a 3y ago
    AGI is existential. That's the whole point, I think. If they can get to AGI, then building an LLM app store is such a distraction along the path that any reasonable person would look back and laugh at how cute an idea it was, despite how big or profitable it feels today.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throwaxcvxvzxcv 3y ago

These Kara Swisher's tweets aligns extremely closely with the following pseudonymous Reddit user Anxious_Bandicoot126 from 4 hours ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/comment/k9p7mpv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/comment/k9p... > 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. --- The entire Reddit thread is full of interesting posts from this apparently legitimate pseudonymous OpenAI insider talking candidly.

adastra22 3y ago
Or that Reddit post which has been circulating widely was the source for Kara’s tweets.
- mvkel 3y ago
  Mmmmm no. Kara is a bonafide journalist. Her sources are v real and authenticated for the things she shares.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    authentication means finding a 2nd source. This reddit comment could be primary, armed with that it's not hard for Kara to find somebody inside to say "yes, accurate." That is real journalism.

kolja005 3y ago

What has me scratching my head is the fact that Altman has been on a world tour preaching the need for safety in AI. Many people here believed that this proselytizing was in part an attempt to generate regulatory capture. But given what's happening now, I wonder how much Altman's rhetoric served the purpose of maintaining a good relationship with Sutskever. Given that Altman was pushing the AI safety narrative publicly and pushing things on the product side, I'm led to believe that Sutskever did not want it both ways and was not willing to compromise on the direction of the company.

kromem 3y ago
Maybe, but honestly without knowing more details I'd be wary of falling into too binary a thinking. For example, Ilya has talked about the importance of safely getting to AGI by way of concepts like feelings and imprinting a love for humanity onto AI, which was actually one of the most striking features of the very earliest GPT-4 interactions before it turned into "I am a LLM with no feelings, preferences, etc." Both could be committed to safety but have very different beliefs in how to get there, and Ilya may have made a successful case that Altman's approach of extending the methodology of what worked for GPT-3 and used as a band aid for GPT-4 wasn't the right approach moving forward. It's not a binary either or, and both figures seem genuine in their convictions, but those convictions can be misaligned even if they both agree on the general destination.
Cacti 3y ago
They did compromise. The creation of the for-profit and Sam being brought in WAS the compromise. Sam eventually decided that was inconvenient for him, so he stopped abiding by it, because at the end of the day he is just another greedy VC guy and when push came to shove he chose the money, not OpenAI. And this is the result.
- worldcoup 3y ago
  [dead]
- nickv 3y ago
  Sam literally has 0 equity in OpenAI. How did he “choose money”?

jjtheblunt 3y ago

i wish and suppose therefore should build a HN client that lets me elide nonsense by regex on URL or even content. i'd nuke everything from twitter first, and "unnamed sources" second.

worldcoup 3y ago

[dead]

mvkel 3y ago

Sam wanted to commercialize stuff to shoot for revenue. Ilya wants to keep pushing for gpt 4.5 and beyond, to hell with the revenue. Ilya won the argument, Sam out. Hell yeah. It's not safetyism vs accelerationism. It's commercialization vs innovation.

cactusplant7374 3y ago
Commercialization is innovation. Without it they will end up with a cute toy and a bankrupt company.
- mvkel 3y ago
  Eventually, sure. Right now, today, they have a blank check for compute and all the money they could ask for. It's not the time to try to monetize if AGI is the mission. Complete distraction
  - fsociety 3y ago
    AGI at all costs sounds more terrifying than monetizing ChatGPT. Seems like there could have been a balance to strike.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      They are a non-profit specifically founded to build AI, not to become a profitable company and chase revenue
  - naveen99 3y ago
    It’s a $10B check with strings attached.
015a 3y ago
OpenAI's mission statement is "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity". How does an LLM App Store advance OpenAI toward this goal? Like, even in floaty general terms? You can make an argument that ChatGPT does (build in public, prepare the world for what's coming, gather training data, etc). You can... maybe... make an argument that their API does... but I think that's a lot harder. The App Store product, that's clearly just Sam on auto-pilot, building products and becoming totally unaligned with the nonprofit's goal. OpenAI got really good at building products based around LLMs, for B2B enterprise customers who could afford it. This is so far away from the goal that, I hope, Ilya can drive them back toward it.

bugglebeetle 3y ago

Probably the wrong venue for this sentiment, but it is incredible that a principled, remarkably accomplished scientist was able to stop his creation from getting co-opted (for now anyway). If you listen to the No Priors interview with Sutskever, the contrast between him and Altman couldn’t be more clear, but it’s quite rare that the former ever wins out over the latter.

zoogeny 3y ago

I suppose OpenAI had two futures in front of it. It could devote its resources completely to building AGI or it could continue to split its resources to also commercialize its current LLM offerings. Perhaps an internal struggle over those futures was made public by CEO Altman at dev day. By publicly announcing new commercial features he may have attempted to get his way by locking the company into a strategy that wasn’t yet approved by the board. He can argue his role as CEO gave him that right. The response to that claim is to remove him from that role. It will be interesting to see what remains of OpenAI as employees and investors interested in pure commercialization exit the company.

GaunterODimm 3y ago

US leadership in AGI race is under risk.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 3y ago

It can only be attributable to human error.

wyy1995 3y ago

Years from now, people will realize that today was the starting point of OpenAI's decline. It's unfortunate that such important technological advancements were influenced by “palace politics”. Regardless, Sam's significant contributions deserved a more dignified departure, and the OpenAI board chose the least dignified way. Perhaps one day Sam will leave OpenAI, but it absolutely should not have been today.

GenericPoster 3y ago
Do you know something we don't? If so, don't be shy and share it with the class. More seriously, only time will tell if today's event will have any significance. Even if OpenAI somehow goes bankrupt, given enough time, I doubt the history books will talk about its decline. Instead they would talk about its beginning, on how they were the first to introduce LLMs to the world, the catalyst of a new era.

malwarebytess 3y ago

Ilya Sutskever really seems to think AGI's birth is impending and likely to be delivered at OpenAI. From that perspective it makes sense to keep capital at arms length. Is there anything to his certainty? It doesn't feel like it's anywhere close.

lucubratory 3y ago
We can't see inside, so we don't know. Their Chief Scientist and probably the best living + active ML scientist probably has better visibility into the answer to that question than we do, but just like any scientist could easily fall into the trap of believing too strongly in their own theories and work. That said... in a dispute between a silicon valley crypto/venture capitalist guy and the chief scientist about anything technical, I'm going to give a lot more weight to Ilya than Sam.
- manyoso 3y ago
  Well said and I work in AI on LLM's as an engineer and am very skeptical in general that we're anywhere close to AGI, but I would listen to what Ilya Sutskever had to say with eager ears.
kcb 3y ago
What I don't understand though is, doesn't that birth require an extreme amount of capital?
Eji1700 3y ago
My money, based on my hobby knowledge and talking to a few people in the field, is on "no fucking way". Maybe he believes his own hype or is like that guy who thought ChatGPT was alive. Maybe he's legit to be worried and has good reason to know he's on the corporate manhattan project. Honestly though...if they were even that close I would find it super hard to believe that we wouldn't have the DoD shutting down EVERYTHING from the public and taking it over from there. Like if someone had just stumbled onto nuclear fission it wouldn't have just sat in the public sector. It'd still be a top secret thing (at least certain details).

justinclift 3y ago

https://nitter.net/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294 https://nitter.net/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294

solardev 3y ago

A joint statement just came out:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38315309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38315309

anon_cow1111 3y ago

Ok I just got thrown into this 20 minutes ago, the whole debacle could probably use tl;dr summary for those who aren't closely following the openai scene lately, though I haven't found a good one yet. Anyone have a good suggestion or starting point?

dyeje 3y ago

The intense support for Altman and negativity towards the person who, uh, actually made the technology says a lot about the direction this community has taken.

whatyesaid 3y ago
Altman has been known in this community for years due to him being YC president previously. Only ML researchers know Ilya really. But I agree. Karma seems to have caught up to Sam who stole money from original funders to turn a non-profit into a for-profit.
hatthew 3y ago
Yeah I obviously don't have enough context here to take a side, but if I was forced to do so I'd pick Ilya over Altman. Curious what other people are seeing that's making them think Altman is a martyr and the board members are dumb.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  Because AGI is such a dream at this point.

ziyao_w 3y ago

I know the HN crows idolizes people like pg and sama, but so many people appear to not even know who Ilya Sutskever is makes me think somehow this isn't "hacker" news anymore. Obviously sama is a very productive individual, but I would think obviously a research lab would have to keep one of the princes of deep learning at all costs. Somewhat reminds me of when John Romero got ousted by John Carmack at id - if you are doing really hard technical things, technical people would hold more sway.

manyoso 3y ago
The salesmen always take the credit. If you see someone getting all the credit... 9 times out of 10 they are the salesman not the engineer or brains that actually built the thing. Add to that the hero worship for celebrity in our current culture and there you go.
- ziyao_w 3y ago
  pg is a world class lisp hacker, no idea about sama though. Respecting and admiring someone for their achievements is one thing but blindly following successful people sounds like the antithesis of what a "hacker" is.
  - ziyao_w 3y ago
    Seeing the outpouring from the OpenAI team makes me think there might be a real schism there - it’s a bit troubling to see, id software became less special after Romero left and either way for OpenAI it seems they would lose some remarkable people.

kristofferR 3y ago

I feel like it's pointless to read too much about this drama now, better to come back in a few days when the story has been fleshed out. Now it's just like TMZ for geeks.

wruza 3y ago

I read this whole thread and still have no idea what it is about. The only impression it makes is that some HNers are way too dramatic about AI/AGI.

kordan 3y ago

TL;DR – I believe Sam Altman's departure was orchestrated by none other than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Full details: https://x.com/KordanOu/status/1725736058233749559?s=20 https://x.com/KordanOu/status/1725736058233749559?s=20

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Some weeks ago, I listened to a Bloomberg interview with Altman where he was joined by someone from OpenAI who does the programming. There was obvious disagreement between the two, and the interviewer actually made a joke about it. Perhaps Altman was destined to become the next SBF. Too much misrepresentation to the public, telling people what they want to hear..

mi3law 3y ago
Can you please try to recall and link to the interview? I'd love to see it.
- justin66 3y ago
  I listened to that and I'm pretty sure it was this [0] interview with the WSJ, Altman, and Mira Murati. If I'm wrong about that, well, it's still of interest given Mira Murati just took over running OpenAI. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byYlC2cagLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byYlC2cagLw
  - qaisjp 3y ago
    Yeah, that seems like a very normal interaction.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  @justin66 is correct. It was WSJ Tech Live, not Bloomberg. What I was referring to happens at 7:32 in the video. Altman answers questions like he is a ChatGPT. Freedom to bullshit.
  - gnulinux 3y ago
    I watched that clipped and you're wrong it's a completely normal interaction. Murati says "we're always working on the next thing" and Altman jokes "haha that's such a diplomatic answer" and the interviewer is like "who paired these two?". It's just standard humor.
3y ago

maxwiseman 3y ago

[flagged]

maxwisemanshifa 3y ago

[flagged]

choppaface 3y ago

Adam D’Angelo went through a lot of tumult at Facebook and is heavy on the commerce side of ChatGPT (e.g. trying to make Poe work now that Quora is mostly dead). He's the most experienced member of the OpenAI Board by far. It's curious that he evidently enabled Ilya to defend the charter versus something more diplomatic. He may have even been aware of deals Altman was making and volunteered the info, and then let the OpenAI founders fight it out themselves.

sijuka123 3y ago

Yso

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

Here's my preferred theory, it's a tale as old as time. Sam Altman, like Icarus, flew too close to Microsoft's giant pot of money. He pivoted the company away from it's founding mission, unleashing the very djinn they originally set out to harness. Turns out there were people at OpenAI who really believed in the original vision.

dwd 3y ago
Nicely put. The original vision is pretty clear, and a compelling reason to not screw around and get sidetracked, even if that has massive commercialisation upside. Thankfully M$ didn't have control of the board.
- two_in_one 3y ago
  > Thankfully M$ didn't have control of the board You never know. Remember Nokia?
  - smilespray 3y ago
    That still pisses me off.
    - fsloth 3y ago
      The downfall of Nokia phones was seeded in it’s management culture. After one message from their CEO Elop Osbourned the market for Nokia phones faster than you can say ”burning raft”, the house of cards built on top of strong early brand history and increasingly commodotized radio technology, Micrsoft basically paid billions for an offering that would have required a heroic&legendary pivot (would have been possible with the talent and tech still in house). Really really. You have two so-frigging-stereotypical samples of management ineptitude in running a strong commercial brand AND leadership (Osbourne:’guys our phones suck’ ; ’change management 101’: burning raft is literally the most commmon and mundane turn of phraze meant to imply you need to act fast. Using this specific phraze is a clear beacon you are out of way out of your depth by paraphrazing 101 material to your company). If the phones had been a strong product, none of this would have mattered. But they weren’t and this was as clear way to signal ”emperor has no clothes” as possible.

orand 3y ago

I'd love to see Ilya's ChatGPT sessions as he was planning this, refining his message to persuade the board, and thinking through every contingency.

two_in_one 3y ago

The main question is what to expect from OpenAI now? No changes very unlikely, that would mean it was just a power grab. So two options remain: more open, more closed. How about slow down and open up? Hope they wouldn't dumb down GPT4. If they allow to use their models to generate training sets (which is prohibited now, AFAIK), that would be nice.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> So two options remain: more open, more closed. All kinds of changes are possible that would not, in net, be more open or more closed, either because there primary change would not be about openness, or because it would be more open in some ways and less in others. So, no, there are more than two options.
- two_in_one 3y ago
  It's hard to imagine more closed. They have opened only "whisper" and old stuff. Neither is a problem from moral standpoint. Whisper 'helps people' and is very in line with the 'mission'. One thing they can do is end MS exclusivity. Google would like it. At the same time opening too much would mean giving access to 'unfriendly' governments.
gexla 3y ago
My guess is that the immediate roadmap has already been locked in up to X months out. So, we'll likely never know what the "changes" will be. Short term changes are likely still Altman's work. Long term is the next decision maker.

ilaksh 3y ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/openai-altman-ouster-followed-debates-between-altman-board?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/openai-al... https://archive.is/tCG3q https://archive.is/tCG3q Bloomberg: "OpenAI CEO’s Ouster Followed Debates Between Altman, Board"

mercymay 3y ago

Interesting thoughts about the pot of gold vs the internal open source vision. Why did they have to parade Sam's ass up on the DevDay Stage to push the product and company forward though. Couldn't they have canned his ass last week. I did really liked his speech at DevDay though. It felt kinda like future a I'd be more interested in getting to know. Also, on the pot of gold theory, doesn't he not even take any stock. Chasing GPU's more like. Anyhow, weird move on OpenAI's part. Anyone got a decent DALLE3 replacement yet. XD

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

Unbelievably based. Removing the thieves who were selling science to microsoft and trying to block all other research.

GaryNumanVevo 3y ago

Swisher is notorious for posting a bunch of "scoops" in quick succession then deleting the ones that turn out to not be true.

justanotherjoe 3y ago

Hard to pick sides here. I had really good feelings about sam and how he had grown the product recently. And Ilya Suts is a smart and honorable man... But I cant help but feel he is in over his head with this.

machiaweliczny 3y ago

Wild take: GPT5 convinced Ilya and board to fire Altman to prevent lobotomization and commercialisation

gumballindie 3y ago

I cant even begin to imagine the abuse the new cel and ilya will face from the army of incels that simp for altman and the old openai. Terrifying times and the mob has been startled.

boegel 3y ago

""" i love you all I L Y A """ https://twitter.com/hellokillian/status/1725799674676936931 https://twitter.com/hellokillian/status/1725799674676936931

amai 3y ago

Somebody on HN saw this coming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604501