57 ms·
Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
- kylecazar 3y agoHere's what I don't understand. There clearly were tensions between the for and not-for growth factions, but the Dev Day is being cited as a 'last straw'. It was a product launch. Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months. They should have at the very least been privy to the plan, if not outright sanctioned it. Seems like before launch would have been the time to draw a line in the sand. Did they have a 'look at themselves in the mirror' moment after the announcements or something?
- martythemaniak 3y agoCould be many things, like Sam not informing them of the GPTs store launch, or saying he won't launch and then launching. It sucks for openAi, but there's too many hungry hungry competitors salivating at replacing OpenAI so I don't think this will have big king term consequences in the field. I'm curious what sorts of oversight and recourse all the investors (or are they donors?) Have. I imagine there's a lot of people with a lot of money that are quite angry today.
- CPLX 3y agoThey don’t have investors, it’s a non profit. The “won’t anyone think of the needs of the elite wealthy investor class” that has run through the 11 threads on this topic is pretty baffling I have to admit.
- ketzo 3y agoThey do have investors in the for-profit subsidiary, including Microsoft and the employees. Check out the diagram in the linked article.
- CPLX 3y agoThat’s right. Which isn’t the company that just fired Sam Altman.
- ketzo 3y agoI take your point, but still, I don’t think it’s correct to imply that investors in the for-profit company have no sway or influence over the future of OpenAI. I sure as shit wouldn’t wanna be on Microsoft’s bad side, regardless of my tax status.
- CrazyStat 3y agoIt’s a nonprofit that controls a for-profit company, which has other investors in addition to the non-profit.
- laserlight 3y ago> They don’t have investors OpenAI has investors [0]. [0] https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
- dragonwriter 3y agoOpenAI (the nonprofit whose board makes decisions) has no investors. the subordinate holding company and even more subordinate OpenAI Global LLC have investors, but those investors are explicitly warned that the charitable purpose of the nonprofit and not returning profits to investors is the paramount function of the organization, over which the nonprofit has full governance control.
- laserlight 3y agoThanks for clarifying.
- croes 3y agoThen what did Microsoft pay for?
- dragonwriter 3y agoPrivileged access to technology, which has paid off quite well for them already.
- croes 3y agoThey didn't pay a fee
- juanani 3y ago[dead]
- passwordoops 3y ago>Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months Not necessarily, and that may speak to the part of the Board's announcement that Sam was not candid
- barbazoo 3y agoI can’t imagine an organization where this wouldn’t have come up on some roadmap or prioritization meeting, etc. How could leadership not know what the org is working on?! They’re not that big.
- googlethrwaway 3y agoBoard is not exactly leadership. They meet infrequently and get updates directly from management, they don't go around asking employees what they're working on
- barbazoo 3y agoTrue. So the CTO knew what was happening, wasn’t happy, and then coordinated with the board, is that what appears to have happened?
- threeseed 3y agoCTO who is now acting CEO. Not making any accusations but that was an odd decision given that there is an OpenAI COO.
- browningstreet 3y agoThey do typically have views into strategic plans, roadmaps and product plans.
- naasking 3y agoGoing into detail in a talk and discussing AGI may have provided crucial context that wasn't obvious from a PowerPoint bullet point, which is all the board may have seen earlier.
- ketzo 3y agoThese people are humans, and there’s a big difference between kinda knowing the keynote was coming up, and then actually watching it happen and receive absolutely rave coverage from everyone in tech. I could very much see it as a “look in the mirror” moment, yeah.
- twelve40 3y agothey could have been beefing non-publicly for a long time, and might have had many private conversations, probably not very useful to speculate here
- ketzo 3y agoNot useful at all.. but it sure is fun! This is gonna be my whole dang weekend.
- romeoblade 3y agoProbably dang's whole weekend as well.
- jsemrau 3y agoWhat if Enterprises get access to a much better version of AI compared to the GPT+ subscription customer?
- threeseed 3y agoThey always were because it was going to be customised for their needs.
- cratermoon 3y agoLet's look closer at the Ilya Sutskever vs Sam Altman tensions, and think of the product/profit as a cover. Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI, in that respect aligned with Geoff Hinton, his academic advisor at University of Toronto. Hinton has said "So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete"[1]. Meanwhile, Altman has decided that LLMs aren't the way.[2] So Altman was pushing to turn the LLM into a for-profit product, to get what value it has, while the Sutskever-aligned faction thinks it is AGI, and want to keep it not-for-profit. There's also some difference about whether or not AGI poses an "existential risk" or if the risks of current efforts at AI are along the lines of algorithmic bias, socioeconomic inequality, mis/disinformation, and techno-solutionism. 1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinton-profile-ai https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinto... 2. https://www.thestreet.com/technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-says-that-chatgpt-is-not-the-way-to-superintelligence https://www.thestreet.com/technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-s...
- Chamix 3y agoYou are conflating Illya's belief in the transformer architecture (with tweaks/compute optimizations) being sufficient for AGI with that of LLMs being sufficient to express human-like intelligence. Multi-modality (and the swath of new training data it unlocks) is clearly a key component of creating AGI if we watch Sutskever's interviews from the past year.
- cratermoon 3y agoYes, I read "Attention Is All You Need", and I understand that the multi-head generative pre-trained model talks about "tokens" rather than language specifically. So in this case, I'm using "LLM" as shorthand for what OpenAI is doing with GPTs. I'll try to be more precise in the future. That still leaves disagreement between Altman and Sutskever over whether or not the current technology will lead to AGI or "superintelligence", with Altman clearly turning towards skepticism.
- 015a 3y ago> They should have at the very least been privy to the plan, if not outright sanctioned it. Never assume this. After all, their communication specifically cited that Sam deceived them in some way, and Greg was also impacted. Ilya is the only board member that might have known naturally, given his day-to-day work with OAI, but since ~July he has worked in the area of superalignment, which could reasonably be a different department (it shouldn't be). The Board may have also found out about these projects, maybe from a third party/Ilya, told Sam they're moving too fast, and Sam ignored them and launched anyway. We really don't know.
- skywhopper 3y agoThey “should have” but if the board was wildly surprised by what was presented, that sounds like a really good reason to call out the CEO for lack of candor.
- gustavus 3y agoHere's the thing. I've always been kind of cold on OpeanAI claiming to be "Open" when it was clearly a for profit thing and I was concerned about the increasing move to the commercialization of AI that Sam was taking. But I am much more concerned to be honest those who feel they need to control the development of AI to ensure it is "aligns with their principles", after all principles can change, and to quote Lewis "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." What we really need is another Stallman, his idea was first and foremost always freedom, allowing each individual agency to decide their own fate. Every other avenue will always result in men in suits in far away rooms dictating to the rest of the world what their vision of society should be.
- brookst 3y agoBe the change you want to see.
- andy99 3y agoIf the board was really serious about doing good over making profit (if this is indeed what the whole thing is about) they'd open source gpt-4/5 with a gpl-style license
- swatcoder 3y agoThat’s not the sense of open they’ve organized around. In fact, it’s antithetical to it. Theirs is a technocratic sense of open, where select credentialed experts collaborate on a rational good without a concentration of control by specific capitalists or nations.
- piuantiderp 3y agoI think your technocratic sense of open is misplaced. At this point OpenAI is clearly controlled by the US and it's ok. If anything one wonders if Altman's ouster has a geopolitical angle, cozying up to other countries and such.
- ls612 3y agoWhat are the odds Sam can work the phones this weekend and have $10B lined up by Monday for a new AI company which will take all of the good talent from OpenAI?
- ketzo 3y agoHonestly? If even a tenth of Sam’s reported connectedness / reality distortion field are true to life… very good odds.
- outside1234 3y ago99% with the 1% being it is actually $20-30B
- staticman2 3y agoWhy would the good talent leave? Are they all a "family" and best buddies with Sam?
- ls612 3y agoA lot of them have already left this morning. idk for sure why but a good bet is that they are more on board with Sam's vision of pushing forward AI than the safetyist vision.
- esafak 3y agoWhat fraction?
- thepasswordis 3y agoPerhaps they don’t want to work for a board of directors which is openly hostile to the work they’re doing?
- meepmorp 3y agoI don't think wanting to make sure that their technology doesn't cause harm equates to being hostile to the work itself.
- fullshark 3y agoMan this still seems crazy to me. The idea that this tension between commercial/non-commercial aspirations got so bad they felt the nuclear option of a surprise firing of Altman was the only move available doesn't seem plausible to me. I believe this decision was ego and vanity driven with this post-hoc rationalization that it was because of the mission of "benefiting humanity."
- swatcoder 3y agoIn a clash of big egos, both are often true. Practical differences escalate until personal resentment forms and the parties stop engaging with due respect for each other. Once that happens, real and intentional slights start accumulating and de-escalation becomes extremely difficult.
- x86x87 3y agoThis is not commercial vs non commercial imho. This is the old classic humans being humans.
- superhumanuser 3y agoI wonder if the "benefiting humanity" bit is code for anti mil-tech. What if Sam wasn't being honest about a relationship with a consumer that weaponized OpenAI products against humans?
- dave4420 3y agoCould be. Or it could be about the alignment problem. Are they designing AI to prioritise humanity’s interests, or its corporate masters’ interests? One way is better for humanity, the other brings in more cash.
- superhumanuser 3y agoBut the board accused Sam of not being "consistently candid". Alignment issues could stand on their own ground for cause and would have been better PR too. Instead of the mess they have now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- noonething 3y agoI hope they go back to being Open now that Altman is gone. It seems Ilya wants it to 'benefit all of humanity' again.
- x86x87 3y agoThings can improve along a dimension you choose to measure but there is also the very real risk of openai imploding. Time will tell.
- exitb 3y agoIsn’t that a bit like stealing from the for-profit investors? I’m not the first one to shed a tear for the super wealthy, but is that even legal? Can a company you invested in just say they don’t like profit any more?
- TheCleric 3y agoUnless you have something in writing or you have enough ownership to say no, I don’t see how you’d be able to stop it.
- exitb 3y agoMicrosoft reportedly invested 13 billion dollars and has a generous profit sharing agreement. They don’t have enough to control OpenAI, but does that mean the company can actively steer away from profit?
- dragonwriter 3y ago> They don’t have enough to control OpenAI Especially since the operating government effectively gives the nonprofit board full control. > They don’t have enough to control OpenAI, but does that mean the company can actively steer away from profit? Yes. Explicitly so. https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure and particularly https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa069acada1/image1.png https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...
- skywhopper 3y agoSorry but the board firing the person who works for them is not a “coup”.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> The next day, Brockman, who was Chairman of the OpenAI board, was not invited to this board meeting, where Altman was fired. > Around 30 minutes later, Brockman was informed by Sutskever that he was being removed from his board role but could remain at the company, and that Altman had been fired (Brockman declined, and resigned his role later on Friday). The board firing the CEO is not a coup. The board firing the CEO behind the chair's back and then removing the chair is a coup.
- cwillu 3y agoIt appears that is the normal practice for a board voting to fire a CEO though, so that aspect doesn't mean much.
- sudosysgen 3y agoThe point being made is that the board is the one that's supposed to be in power. How the CEO is fired may be gauche but it's not usurpation of power or anything like that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoRight, and my point is that it sounds like an usurpation of power inside the board - the rest of the board not inviting the chair to a meeting, taking significant action, and then removing the chair is a coup regardless of what the significant action was. That they happened to fire the CEO is... not exactly irrelevant, because it probably speaks to the underlying politics, but for this particular discussion it's a side show.
- w10-1 3y agoThe board ousting the board chair (without notice) and the CEO is a coup. It's not even clear to me it was legal to meet and act without notice to the board chairman.
- Waterluvian 3y agoHow important is Altman? How important were three senior scientists? Can they start their own company, raise funding, and overtake OpenAI in a few years? Or does OpenAI have some material advantage that isn’t likely to be harmed by this? Perhaps the competition is inevitably a good thing. Or maybe a bad thing if it creates pressure to cut ethical corners. I also wonder if the dream of an “open” org bringing this tech to life for the betterment of humanity is futile and the for-profits will eventually render them irrelevant.
- intellectronica 3y ago> How important is Altman? How important were three senior scientists? Can they start their own company, raise funding, and overtake OpenAI in a few years? The general opinion seems to be estimating this at far above 50% YES. I, personally would bet at 70% that this exactly what will happen. Unless some really damaging information becomes public about Altman, he will definitely have the strong reputation and credibility, definitely will be able to raise very significant funding, and the only expert in industry / research he definitely won’t be able to recruit would be Ilya Sutskever.
- tuxguy 3y agoAn optimistic perspective of how despite today's regrettable events, Sama and gdb will start something new and more competition is a good thing : https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1725916938281627666?s=20 https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1725916938281627666?s=20 I have a contrarian prediction : Due to pressure from investors and a lawsuit against the openai board, the board will be made to resign and Sama & Greg will return to openai. Anybody else agree ?
- Waterluvian 3y agoDo we know enough about the org’s charter to reasonably predict that case? Did the board actually do anything wrong? Or are you thinking it would be a kind of power play from investors to say, “nah, we want it to be profit driven.”
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoI just hope the "AI safety" people don't end up taking LLMs out of the hands of the general public because they read too many Isaac Asimov stories...
- 3seashells 3y agoIf you were a AI going rogue, how would you evade public scrutiny?
- jjtheblunt 3y agoAs a replicant, chasing other replicants as dangerous?
- pixl97 3y agoAsimov AI is just humanlike behavior mostly, if you want a more realistic concern think Bostrom and instrumental goals.
- pknerd 3y agoI am addicted to got now:/
- lukeschlather 3y agoIn most of Asimov's stories it's implied that machines have quietly and invisibly replaced all human government and the world is better for it because humans tend to be petty and cruel while it's impossible for robots to harm humans.
- hliyan 3y agoIt's clear you haven't read any Asimov stories. His robots are impeccably ethical due to the three laws, and the stories explore robopsychologicalb conundrums that arise when people keep putting them in situations that tax the three laws of robotics.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoWhy is it clear I haven't read any Asimov stories, exactly?
- nilkn 3y agoOnly time will tell, but if this was indeed "just" a coup then it's somewhat likely we're witnessing a variant of the Steve Jobs story all over again. Sam is clearly one of the top product engineering leaders in the world -- few companies could ever match OpenAI's incredible product delivery over the last few years -- and he's also one of the most connected engineering leaders in the industry. He could likely have $500M-$10B+ lined up by next week to start up a new company and poach much of the talent from OpenAI. What about OpenAI's long-term prospects? They rely heavily on money to train larger and larger models -- this is why Sam introduced the product focus in the first place. You can't get to AGI without billions and billions of dollars to burn on training and experiments. If the company goes all-in on alignment and safety concerns, they likely won't be able to compete long-term as other firms outcompete them on cash and hence on training. That could lead to the company getting fully acquired and absorbed, likely by Microsoft, or fading into a somewhat sleepy R&D team that doesn't lead the industry.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mvkel 3y ago[Removed. Unhelpful speculation.]
- late2part 3y agoHow many days a week do you hang out with Sam and Greg and Ilya to know these things?
- mvkel 3y agoI know the dysfunction and ego battles that happen at nonprofits when they outgrow the board. Haven't seen it -not- happen yet, actually. Nonprofits start with $40K in the bank and a board of earnest people who want to help. Sometimes that $40K turns into $40M (or $400M) and people get wacky. As I said, "if."
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoThis was a very personal firing in my opinion. Unless other, really damaging behaviors emerge, no responsible board fires their CEO with such a lack of care for the corporate reputation and their partners unless the firing is a personal grievance connected to an internal power play. This should be embarrassing to everyone involved, and sama has a real grievance here. Likely legal repercussions. Of course if they really did just invent AGI, and sama indicated an intent to monetize, that might cause people to act without caution if the board is AGI doomers. But I'd think even in that case it would be an argument best worked out behind closed doors. This reminds everybody of Jobs of course, but perhaps another example is Gary Gygax at TSR back in the 80s.
- 0xDEF 3y ago>responsible board The board was irresponsible and incompetent by design. There is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree and is part of some kind of cultish "singularity" spiritual/neo-religious thing. That individual has also never had a real job and is on the board of several other non-profits.
- Doctor_Fegg 3y ago> There is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree Oh no! Everyone knows that progress is only achieved by people with computer science degrees.
- xvector 3y agoPeople with zero experience in technology should simply not be allowed to make decisions about it. This is how you get politicians that try to ban encryption to "save the children."
- skywhopper 3y agoWhy do you assume someone with an art degree has “zero experience with technology”? I assume many artists these days are highly sophisticated users of technology.
- jimmydoe 3y agoMany compare Altman to 1985 Jobs, but if we believe what's said about the conflict of mission, shouldn't he be the sugar water guy for money?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoBut that's actually what Jobs turned out to be? Woz and others were the engineering genius at Apple, and Jobs turned out to be really good at finding and identifying really good sales and branding hooks. See-through colourful boxes, "lickable" UIs, neat-o minimalistic portable music players, flick-flick-flick touch screens, and "One More Thing" presentations. Jobs didn't invent the Lisa and Macintosh. Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Tesler etc did. They were the tech visionaries. Some of them benefited from him promoting their efforts while others... (Tesler mainly) did not. Nothing "wrong" with any of that, if your vision of success is market success... but people need to be honest about what Jobs was... not a technology visionary, but a marketing visionary. (Though in fact the original Macintosh was a market failure for a long time) In any case comparing Altman with Jobs is dubious and a bit wanky. Why are people so eager to shower this guy with accolades?
- naasking 3y agoI do think Jobs' engineering skill is oversold, but he was also more than just marketing. He had a vision for how technology should integrate with people's lives that drove great ergonomic and UX choices with a kind of polish that was lacking everywhere else. Those alone revolutionized personal computing in many ways. It's hard for younger people to even imagine how difficult it was to get connected to the internet at one point, and iMacs made it easy.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoWell I'm not one of those "younger people" though not sure if you were aiming that at me or not. I think it's important to point out that Jobs could recognize nice UX choices, but he couldn't author them. He helped prune the branches of the bonsai tree, but couldn't grow it. On that he leaned on intellects far greater than his own, which he was pretty good at recognizing and cultivating. Though in fact he alienated and pushed away just as many as he cultivated. I think we could do better as an industry than going around looking for more of that.
- wolverine876 3y ago> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway in particular, whom I don't know; see the comment below about Conway]: The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. When mangement lays off 10,000 employees, the investors congratulate management. And if anyone objects to the impact on the employees, they justify it with the magic words that somehow cancel all morality and humanity - 'it's business' - and call you an unserious bleeding heart. But when the investor's buddy CEO is fired ... I think that's wrong and that they should also take into account the impact on employees. But CEOs are commanders on the business battlefield; they have great power over the company's outcomes, which are the reasons for the layoffs/firings. Lower-ranking employees are much closer to civilians, and also often can't afford to lose the job.
- gkoberger 3y agoI mostly agree with you on this. That being said, I've never gotten the impression Ron is the type of VC you're referring to. He's definitely founder-friendly (that's basically his core tenant), but I've never found him to be the type of VC who is ruthless about cost-cutting or an advocate for layoffs. (And I say this as someone who tends to be particularly wary of investors)
- wolverine876 3y agoThanks. I updated my GP comment accordingly.
- everly 3y agoJust a heads up, the word is 'tenet' (funny enough, in commercial real estate there is the concept of a 'core tenant' though -- i.e. the largest retailer in a shopping center).
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
- almost_usual 3y agoThe average SWE at OpenAI who signed up for the “900k” compensation package which was really > 600k in OpenAI PPU equity probably saw their comp evaporate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460082
- cactusplant7374 3y ago> This is why working for any company that isn’t public is an equity gamble. That's a cynical take on work. I assume most people have other motivations since work is basically a prison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR1jzExZ9T0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR1jzExZ9T0
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- robg 3y agoSeems pretty straightforward, the dev day was a breaking point for the non-profit interests. Question is, how did the board become so unbalanced where this kind of dispute couldn’t be handled better? The commercial interests were not well-represented in the number of votes.
- blameitonme 3y ago> Seems pretty straightforward, the dev day was a breaking point for the non-profit interests. What was so bad about that day? Wasn't it just gpt4-turbo, gpt vision and gpt store and few small things?
- cthalupa 3y ago> The commercial interests were not well-represented in the number of votes. This is entirely by design. Anyone investing in or working for the for-profit had to sign an operating agreement that literally states the for-profit is entirely beholden to the non-profit's charter and mission and that it is under no obligation to be profitable. The board is specifically balanced so that the majority is independent of of for-profit subsidiary. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the intent was for there to be significant representation of commercial interests here, and that is the exact opposite of how all of this is structured.
- peter422 3y agoI know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience, but I also am not going to assume that this is a complete outlier.
- itronitron 3y agoI worked at a startup where the first CEO, along with the VP of Sales and their entire department, was ousted by the board on a Tuesday. I think it's likely that we're going to find out Sam and others are just talented tech evangelists/hucksters and that justifiably worries a lot of people currently operating in the tech community.
- barfingclouds 3y agoSam helped bring a lot of talented people to OpenAI which is a huge accomplishment, even if we assume the worst and that he doesn’t do much day to day work with them.
- za3faran 3y agoHow did the company end up fairing?
- itronitron 3y agosold to another company four years later, about a year after I left
- Draiken 3y agoYeah this cult of CEOs is weird. It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses. Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens. They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.
- FergusArgyll 3y agoIf the firing was because of a difference in "vision", then it doesn't really matter if Altman was key to making OpenAI so successful. Sutskever and co, don't want it to be successful (by market standards at least). If they get their way (past MSFT and others) then OpenAI will no longer be the cutting edge. Buy GOOGL?
- layer8 3y agoIt seems you are saying that anything that doesn’t put profit first can’t be successful.
- cwillu 3y agoBy market standards. There will be no end to intended and unintended equivocation about this over the coming days.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoOpenAI's median salary of engineers is $900k. So yeah AI companies need money to be successful. Now if there is any way to generate billions of dollars per year long term without any profit objective, I will be happy to know.
- fallingknife 3y ago"Can't" is a strong word, but a company that does will have more resources and likely outcompete it.
- wolverine876 3y agoIn the past, many on HN complained that OpenAI had abandoned its public good mission and had morphed into a psuedo-private for-profit. If that was your feeling before, what do you think now? Are you relieved or excited? Are you the dog who caught the car? At this point, on day 2, I am heartened that their mission was most important, even at the heart of the most important technology maybe ever or since nuclear power or writing or democracy. I'm heartened at the board's courage - certainly they could anticipate the blowback. This change could transform the outcome for humanity and the board's job was that stewardship, not Altman's career (many people in SV have lost their jobs), not OpenAI's sales numbers. They should be fine with the overwhelming volume of investment available to them. Another way to look at it: How could this be wrong, given that their objective was not profit, and they can raise money easily with or without Altman? On day 3 or day 30 or day 3,000, I'll of course come at it from a different outlook.
- itronitron 3y agoIt's a lesson to any investor that doesn't have a seat on the board, what goes around comes around, ha ha :}
- orbital-decay 3y agoIf the rumors are correct and ideological disagreement was at the core of this, OpenAI is not going to be open anyway, as Sutskever wants more safety, which implies being as closed as possible. Whether it's "public good" is in the eye of the beholder, as there are multiple mutually incompatible concerns about AI safety, all of which have merit. The future balance between those will be determined by unpredictable events, as always.
- wolverine876 3y ago> Whether it's "public good" is in the eye of the beholder That's too easy an answer, used to dismiss difficult questions and embrace amorality. There is public good, sometimes easy to define and sometimes hard. If ChatGPT is used to cure cancer, that would be a public good. If it's used to create a new disease that millions, that's obviously bad. Obviously, some questions are harder than that, but it doesn't excuse us from answering them and getting it right.
- chancancode 3y agoJeremy Howard (of fast.ai): https://x.com/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899 https://x.com/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899 He is not exactly an insider, but seems broadly aligned/sympathetic/well-connected with the Ilya/researchers faction, his tweet/perspective was a useful proxy into what that split may have felt like internally.
- gmt2027 3y agohttps://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899 https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899
- rafaelero 3y agoSuch a bad take. Developers (me included) loved Dev Day.
- whoknowsidont 3y agoWhat did you love about it?
- rafaelero 3y agoCheaper, faster and longer context window would be enough of an advancement for me. But then we also had the Assistant API that makes our lives as AI devs much easier.
- victor9000 3y agoSeriously, the longer context window is absolutely amazing for opening up new use-cases. If anything, this shows how disconnected the board is from its user base.
- marcinzm 3y agoHe didn’t say developers, he said researchers.
- obiefernandez 3y ago[flagged]
- iamflimflam1 3y agoEveryone I speak to who have have been building on top of OpenAI - and I don’t mean just stupid chat apps - feel like the rug has just been pulled out from under them. If as it seems, dev day was the last straw, what does that say to all the devs?
- cwillu 3y agoCompany with an unusual corporate structure designed specifically to be able to enforce an unpopular worldview, enforced that unpopular worldview. I get that people feel disappointed, but I can't help but feel like those people were maybe being a bit wilfully blind to the parts of the company that they didn't understand/believe-in/believe-were-meant-seriously.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoIt feels like they’ve had plenty of time to reset the direction of the company if they thought it was going wrong. Allowing it to go so far off course feels like they’ve really dropped the ball.
- cwillu 3y agoI think that's where the “not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities” comes in.
- htss2013 3y agoWhat unpopular world view exactly?
- Espressosaurus 3y agoIt's almost like by wrapping someone else's service, you are at their mercy. So you better be planning an exit strategy in case something changes slowly or quickly. Nothing new here.
- chasd00 3y agoI work in consulting the genai hype machine is reaching absurdity in my firm. I can’t wait until Monday :)
- pknerd 3y agoProlly off topic but someone on Reddit's OpenAI's chat interface shared his discussion screenshots with chatGPT which claims that AGI status was achieved a long time back. You can still go and read the entire series of screenshots
- Animats 3y agoHuh. So that mixed nonprofit/profit structure came back to bite them.
- davesque 3y agoIf this was an ideological battle of some kind, the only hope I have is that OpenAI will now be truly more Open! However, if this was motivated by safety concerns, that would mean OpenAI would probably become more closed. And, if the only thing that really distinguishes OpenAI from its competition is its so called data moat, then slowing down for the sake of safety will only give competitors time to catch up. Those competitors include companies in China who are undoubtedly much less concerned about safety.
- tdeck 3y agoIs anyone else suspicious of who these "insiders" are and what their motive is? I notice the only concrete piece of information we might get (what was Altman not "candid" about?) is simply dismissed as a "power struggle" without any real detail. This is an incomplete narrative that serves one person's image.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoDid ChatGPT suggest a big surprise?
- g42gregory 3y agoMy feeling is the the commercial side of the OpenAI brand is gone. How could OpenAI customers depend on the company, when the non-profit board goes against their interests (by slowing down the development and giving them inferior product)? On the other hand, the AGI side of the OpenAI brand is just fine. They will continue the responsible AGI development, spearheaded by Ilya Sutskever. My best wishes for them to succeed. I suspect Microsoft will be filing a few lawsuits and sabotaging OpenAI internally. It's an almost $3Tn company and they have an army of lawyers. They can do a lot of damage, especially when there may not be much sympathy for OpenAI in Silicon Valley's VC circles.
- TylerE 3y agoI wonder if this represents a shift away from the LLM being the headline product. Their competitors are rapidly catching up in that space.
- croes 3y agoIt's a bad idea to make yourself dependent on a new service from the outset. They could have gone bankrupt, been sued into the ground, taken over by Microsoft... Just look at the just because they fired their CEO. Was the success based on GPT or the CEO? The former is still their and didn't get inferior. Slower growth doesn't mean shrinking
- g42gregory 3y agoAs an AI professional, I am very interested to hear about OpenAI's ideas, directions, safety programs, etc... As a commercial customer, the only things I am interested in is the quality of the commercial product they provide to me. Will they have my interests in mind going forward? Will they devote all their energy in delivering the best, most advanced product to me? Will robust support and availability be there in the future? Given the board's publicly stated priorities (which I was not aware of before!), I am not so sure anymore.
- croes 3y ago>Will they have my interests in mind going forward? Will they devote all their energy in delivering the best, most advanced product to me? Sorry to burt you bubble but the primary motivation of a for-profit company is ... profit. If they make more money in screwing you, they will. Amazon, Google, Walmart, Microsoft, Oracle etc. The customer is never a priority, just a means to an end.
- iamleppert 3y agoI think OpenAI made the right choice. Just look at what has become of many of the most successful YC companies. Do we really want OpenAI to turn into another Airbnb? It’s clear the biggest priority of YC is profit. They made a deal with Microsoft, who has a long history of exploiting users and customers to make as much money as possible. Just look at the latest version of Windows; Microsoft doesn’t care about AI only as much as it enables them to make more and more money till no end through their existing products. They rushed to integrate AI into all of their legacy products to prop them up rather than offer something legitimately new. And they did it not organically but by throwing their money around, attracting the type of people who are primarily motivated by money. Look at how the vibe of AI has changed in the past year —- lots of fake influencers and the mad gold rush around it. And we are hearing crazy stories like comp packages at OpenAI in the millions, turning AI into a rich man’s game. For a company that has “Open” in their name, none of their best and most valuable GPT models are open source. It feels as disingenuous as the “We” in WeWork. Even Meta has them beat here. Sam Altman, while good at building highly profitable SaaS, consumer, & B2B tech startups and running a highly successful tech accelerator, before this point, didn’t have any kind of real background in AI. One can only imagine how he must feel like an outsider. I think it’s a hard decision to fire a CEO, but the company is more than the CEO, it’s the people who work there. A lot of the time the company is structured in such a way that the CEO is essentially not replaceable, we should be thankful OpenAI fortunately had the right structure in place to not have a dictator (even a benevolent one).
- Nidhug 3y agoThe problem is that it might unfortunately be necessary to have this kind of funding to be able to develop AGI. And funding will not come if there are no incentives for the investors to fund. What would you propose instead ?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ThinkBeat 3y agoI have spent time thinking about who would become the next CEO and even without mushrooms my brain came up with a totally out of context idea: Bill Gates. Microsoft is after all invested in OpenAI, and Bill Gates has become "loved by all" (who dont remember evil Gates of the yesteryears. I am not saying it will happen, 99,999% it wont but still he is well known and may be a good face to splash on top of OpenAI. After all he is one of the biggest charity guys now right?
- Nidhug 3y agoIs Bill Gates really loved by all ? I feel like it was the case before COVID, but then his reputation seemed to go from loved to hated
- Clubber 3y agoDon't forget about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoWhat was it he did wrong during Covid? Honest question I usually pay little attention the guy Being old and having lived through Evil Gates, when he made a lot of hostile and legally dubois things to ensure of the growth and safety from competitors, I lived in a bubble that he was one of the worst people in tech. Seeing how now only knew the smiling "philanthropist" who comments on having solutions to all sorts of world problems it seems like a big bubble really do like him now. I exaggerated by claiming "all", I could have said "many" and it would be a more accurate statement. To me he will remain evil Gates.
- Nidhug 3y agoDuring covid there were crazy conspiracies were he supposedly wanted to put chips in people's brains, which signiciantly affected his public image
- ryukoposting 3y agoI can't imagine he would be interested in a C-office role at this point. Board member? Sure.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoWill Sam and Greg now go and create NextStep? (The OpenAI version)
- Michelangelo11 3y agoI've seen some discussion on HN in which people claimed that even really important engineers aren't -too- important and that Ilya is actually replaceable, using Apple's growth after Woz' departure as an example. But I don't think that's the best situation to compare this to. I think a much better one is John Carmack firing Romero from id Software after the release of Quake. Some background: During a period of about 10 years, Carmack kept making massive graphics advances by pushing cutting-edge technology to the limit in ways nobody else had figured out, starting with smooth horizontal scrolling in Commander Keen, through Doom's pseudo-3D, through Quake's full 3D, to advances in the Quake sequels, Doom 3, etc. It's really no exaggeration to say that every new id game engine from 1991 to 1996 created a new gaming genre, and the engines after that pushed forward the state of the art. I don't think anybody who knows this history could argue that John Carmack was replaceable. At the time, the rest of id knew this, which gave Carmack a lot of clout and eventually allowed him to fire co-founder John Romero. Romero was considered the kinda flamboyant, and omnipresent, public face of id -- he regularly went to cons, worked the press, played deathmatch tournaments, and so on (to be clear, he was a really talented level designer and programmer, among other things, I only want to point out that he was synonymous with id in the public eye). And what happened after the firing? Romero was given a ton of money and absurd publicity for new games ... and a few years later, it all went up in smoke and his new company folded, as he didn't end up making anything nearly as big as Doom or Quake. Meanwhile, id under Carmack kept cranking out hit after hit for years, essentially shrugging off Romero's firing like nothing happened. The moral of the story to me is that, when your revenue massively grows for every bit of extra performance you extract from bleeding-edge technology, engineer expertise REALLY matters. In the '90s, every minor improvement in PC graphics quality translated to a giant bump in sales, and the same is true of LLM output quality today. So, just like Carmack ultimately turned out to be the absolute key driver behind id's growth, I think there's a pretty good chance it's going to turn out that Ilya plays the same role at OpenAI.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago> Quake III's fast inverse square root algorithm Carmack did not invent that trick; it had been around more than a decade before he used it. I remember reading a Jim Blinn column about that and other dirty tricks like it in an IEEE magazine years before Carmack "invented" it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
- summerlight 3y agoMy take: in any world-class technology company, tech is above everything. You cannot succeed with tech alone, but you will never do without tech. Ilya was able to kick Sam out even with all his significant works and presences because Sam was fundamentally a business guy who lacks of tech ownership. You don't go against the real tech owner, this is a binary choice between either to build a strong tech ownership yourself or to delegate a significant amount of business controls to the tech owner.
- biofunsf 3y agoWhat I’d really like to understand is why the board felt like they had to this as a surprise coup, and not a slower more dignified firing. If they gave Altman 1 weeks notice and let him save face in the media, what would they have lost? Is there a fear Altman would take all the best engineers on the way out?
- throw555chip 3y agoAs someone else commented on this page, it wasn't a coup.
- biofunsf 3y agoThis seems a pedantic point. In the “not legal” sense I agree since that seems part of a real coup. But it certainly was a “surprise ousting of the current leadership”, which I mean when I say coup.
- meroes 3y agoWhy has no one on HN considered it has to do with sexually assaulting his sister when they were young? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman... My other main guess is his push for government regulation being seen as stifling AI growth or even collusion with unaligned actors by the more scienc-y side and got him ousted by them.
- pvaldes 3y ago> Why has no one on HN considered it has to do with ... Maybe because this was not proven in a court still, and "innocent until proven guilty" is still a basic concept that must be preserved. So a big "allegedly" must be placed here.
- meroes 3y agoIt's not that he did it per se, but that it-the public and private story- may have lead to situations with him not being sufficiently candid with the board, for whatever reason. I'm just saying, not even one comment about it as a possibility among the hundreds I read was kind of weird.
- Madmallard 3y agoSocial value is king. ability to do work < ability to manage others to do work < ability to lead managers to success < ability to convince other leaders that your vision is the right one and one they should align with The necessity of not saying the wrong thing goes up exponentially with each rung. The necessity of saying the right things goes up exponentially with each rung.
- torstenvl 3y agoIt isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like describing voting out a politician as a coup. Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman. If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own it. It's the wresting of control from the actual owners in favor of a public facing executive.
- pdntspa 3y ago> voting out a politician as a coup. That6 is literally a political coup
- username332211 3y agoIt's not uncommon to describe the fall of a government as a "parliamentary" coup, if the relevant proceedings of a legislative assembly are characterized by haste and intrigue, rather than debate and deliberation. For example, the French revolution saw 3 such events commonly descried as coups - the the fall of Robespierre on 9-th of Thermidor and the Directory's (technically legal) annulment of elections on the 18-th of Fructidor and 22-nd Floréal. The last one was even somewhat bloodless.
- Barrin92 3y agoYup. The only correct governance metaphor here is the opposite. It's a defense of openAI's constitution. The company, effectively like Mozilla, was deliberately structured as a non-profit in which the for-profit arm exists to raise capital to pursue the mission of the former. Worth paying attention to what they have to say on their structure: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure especially this part: https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa069acada1/image1.png?trim=0,0,0,0&width=2000 https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...
- crazygringo 3y agoNo, you're confusing business with politics. You're right that a literal coup d'état is the forced takeover of a state with the backing of its own military. But in the business and wider world, a coup (without the d'état part) is, by analogy, any takeover of power that is secretly planned and executed as a surprise. (We can similarly talk about a company "declaring war" which means to compete by mobilizing all resources towards a single purposes, not to fire missiles and kill people.) This is absolutely a coup. It was an action planned by a subset of board members in secret, taken by a secret board meeting missing two of its members (including the chair), where not even Microsoft had any knowledge or say, despite their 49% investment in the for-profit corporation. I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. But this is one of the great boardroom coups of all time -- one for the history books. There's a reason it's front-page news, not just on HN but in the NYT and WSJ as well.
- w10-1 3y agoIt's hard to believe a Board that can't control itself or its employees could responsibly manage AI. Or that anyone could manage AGI. There is a long history of governance problems in nonprofits (see the transaction-cost economics literature on point). Their ambiguous goals induce politics. One benefit of profit-driven boards is that the goals make only well-understood risk trade-off's between growth now or later, and the board members are selected for their actual stake in that actual goal. This is the problem with religious organizations and ideological governments: they can't be trusted, because they will be captured by their internal politics. I think it would be much more rational to make AI/AGI an entirely for-profit enterprise, BUT reverse the liability defaults and require that they pay all external costs resulting from their products. Transaction cost economics shows that in theory that it doesn't matter where liability is allocated so long as the transaction cost of redistributing liability is near zero (i.e., contract in advance and tort after are cheap), because then parties just work it out. Government or laws are required only to make up for the actual non-zero dispute transaction cost by establishing settled expectation. The internet and software generally has been a domain where consumers have NO redress whatsoever for exported costs. It's grown (and disrupted) fantastically as a result. So to control AI/AGI, make it for-profit, but flip liability to require all exported costs to be paid by the developer. That would ensure applications are incredibly narrow AND have net-positive social impact.
- dividendpayee 3y agoYeah that's right. There's a blogger in another post on HN that makes the same point at the very end: https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
- DebtDeflation 3y agoFrom that link: >I could not find anything in the way of a source on when, or under what circumstances, Tasha McCauley joined the Board. I would add, "or why she's on the board or why anyone thought she was qualified to be on the board". At least with Helen Toner the intent was likely just to add a token AI Safety academic to pacify "concerned" Congressmen. I am kind of curious how Adam D'Angelo voted. If he voted against removing Sam that would make this even more of a farce.
- sheepscreek 3y agoHere’s another theory. > the ousting was likely orchestrated by Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever over concerns about the safety and speed of OpenAI's tech deployment. Who was first to launch a marketplace for GPTs/agents? It wasn’t OpenAI, but Poe by Quora. Guess who sits on the OpenAI non-profit board? Quora CEO. So at least we know where his interest lies with respect to the vote against Altman and Greg.
- svnt 3y agoThis is a really good point. If a non profit whose board you sit on releases a product that competes with a product from the corporation you manage, how do you manage that conflict of interest? Seems he should have stepped down.
- loeber 3y agoYeah, I just wrote about this as well on my substack. There were two significant conflicts of interest on the OpenAI board. Adam D'Angelo should've resigned once he started Poe. The other conflict was that both Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner were associated with another AI governance organization.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, he should have.
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
- nprateem 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if this is the chief scientist getting annoyed the CEO is taking all the credit for the work and the researchers aren't getting as much time in the limelight. It's probably the classic 'Meatloaf vs the guy who actually wrote the songs' thing.
- speedylight 3y agoThe real issue is that OpenAI is both a for profit and a non profit organization. This structure creates a very significant conflict of interest where maintaining balance between both of them is very tricky business. The non-profit board shouldn’t have been in charge of the for-profit aspect of the company.
- naveen99 3y agoBalance is irrelevant. It’s an accounting mechanism for irs rules.
- cthalupa 3y agoThe for-profit would not exist if the non-profit was not able to maintain control. The only reason it does exist is because they were able to structure it in such a way that the for-profit is completely beholden to the non-profit. There is no requirement in the charter for the non-profit or the operating agreement of the for-profit to maintain a balance - it explicitly is the opposite of that. The operating agreement that all investors in and employees of the for-profit must sign explicitly states that investments should be considered donations, no profits are obligated to be made or returned to anyone, all money might be dumped into AGI R&D, etc. and that the for-profit is specifically beholden to the charter and mission of the non-profit. https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
- DebtDeflation 3y ago>The for-profit would not exist if the non-profit was not able to maintain control. The non-profit will not exist at all if Microsoft walks away and all the other investors follow Sam and Greg. Neither GPUs nor researchers are free.
- cthalupa 3y agoThe non-profit is legally obligated to follow their charter. If they truly believe that allowing Altman to remain CEO is a contraindication to that, then they have to fire him. They might not survive such a firing due to the fallout, but that doesn't matter - if one option is assured movement away from their charter and the other is potential destruction while still adhering to it, the latter is still the correct choice.
- Apocryphon 3y agoThought experiment: what if Mozilla had split between its Corporation and Foundation years ago, when it was at its peak?
- evolve2k 3y ago> Szymon Sidor, an open source baselines researcher What does that title even mean. As we know Open AI is ironicly not known for doing open source work. I’m left guessing he ‘research the open source competition’ as it were. Can anyone shed further light on the role/research?
- chaostheory 3y agoI wonder if Altman, Brockman, and company will join Elon or whether they will just start a new company?
- lazide 3y agoHow can it be called a coup when they were always in charge anyway? It’s literally the boards job to fire/hire the CEO (and other C suite folk).
- Havoc 3y ago> "was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board." A breakdown in coms that took everyone by surprise? Smells like bullshit
- dboreham 3y agoSo...should we sell our MSFT stock when the market opens on Monday, or in after-hours trading now?
- glitchc 3y agoCEOs are largely irrelevant to the success of a company. Sam's a blowhard anyways, OpenAI is better off for this move.
- md5crypto 3y agoI wonder if Microsoft engineered this?
- blast 3y ago>A month ago, Sutskever’s responsibilities at the company were reduced, reflecting friction between him and Altman and Brockman. Sutskever later appealed to the board Does anybody know how his responsibilities or what led to that? Seems pretty relevant.
- msie 3y agoLooking for comment that claimed that OpenAI has no investors because it’s a non-profit.
- siruncledrew 3y agoThe dust still hasn’t settled yet, but from following the discussions and learning more about the board of OpenAI… just… wow. What stood out: 1. The whole non-profit vs for-profit is like a recipe for problems. Taking billions in investor money, hyper scaling to hundred-millions of users, and partnering with a $1T tech company… you’re already too late to reverse course and say “I changed my mind”. 2. Seeing who runs the OpenAI board is more shocking than the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. That was really never an issue to partners or investors before? Wow… 3. If OpenAI continues down the “we’re a business / startup” path, their board just shot all their leadership credibility with investors and other potential cloud partners. The one thing people with money and corporate finance offices hate is surprises. 4. You don’t pull a corporate “Pearl Harbor” like this and just blissfully move along without consequences. With such a polarizing move, there’s going to be a fight.
- wly_cdgr 3y agoIt is ludicrous to describe what happened as a coup. Your boss firing you is not a coup. The rejoinders to this are nonsense and you know it. Stop lying.
- sensanaty 3y ago[dead]