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> I hope Sam comes back Why? We would have more diversity in this space if he leaves, which would get us another AI startup with huge funding and know how from

> I hope Sam comes back Why? We would have more diversity in this space if he leaves, which would get us another AI startup with huge funding and know how from OpenAI, while OpenAI would become less Sam Altman like. I think him staying is bad for the field overall compared to OpenAI splitting in two.

janejeon 3y ago
Honestly would be super interested to see what a hypothetical "SamAI" corp would look like, and what they would bring to the table. More competition, but also, probably with less ideological disagreements to distract them from building AI/AGI.
- appplication 3y ago
  I mean this as an honest question, but what does Sam bring to the table that any other young and high performing CEO wouldn’t? Is he himself particularly material to OpenAI?
  - janejeon 3y ago
    Experience heading a company that builds high performance AI, I presume. I reckon the learnings from that should be fairly valuable, especially since there's probably not many people who have such experiences.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    Your first mistake is daring to question the cargo cult around CEOs.
  - RivieraKid 3y ago
    Ability to attract valuable employees, connections to important people, proven ability to successfully run an AI company.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Funding, name recognition in the space
  - smegger001 3y ago
    You mean besides the business experience of already having gone down this path so he can speedrun while everyone else is still trying to find the path? Easy; his contacts list. He has everyone anyone could want in his contacts list politician tech executives financial backers and a preexisting positive relationship with most of them. When alternative would be entrepreneurs are needing to make a deal with a major company like Microsoft or Google it will be upper middlemanagement and lawyers, a committees or three will weigh in on it present it to their bosses etc. With Sam he calls up the CEO and has few drinks at the golf course and they decide to work with him and they make it happen.
- btown 3y ago
  From what we've seen of OpenAI's product releases, I think it's quite possible that SamAI would adopt as a guiding principle that a model's safety cannot be measured unless it is used by the public, embedded into products that create a flywheel of adoption, to the point where every possible use case has the proverbial "sufficient data for a meaningful answer." Of course, from this hypothetical SamAI's perspective, in order to build such a flywheel-driven product that gathers sufficient data, the model's outputs must be allowed to interface with other software systems without human review of every such interaction. Many advocates for AI safety would say that models whose limitations aren't yet known (we're talking about GPT-N where N>4 here, or entirely different architectures) must be evaluated extensively for safety before being released to the public or being allowed to autonomously interface with other software systems. A world where SamAI exists is one where top researchers are divided into two camps, rather than being able to push each other in nuanced ways (with full transparency to proprietary data) and find common ground. Personally, I'd much rather these camps collaborate than not.
  - chasd00 3y ago
    > must be evaluated extensively for safety before being released to the publIc JFC someone somewhere define “safety”! Like wtf does it mean in the context of a large language model?
gkoberger 3y ago
Competition may be good for profit, but it's not good for safety. The balance between the two factions inside OpenAI is a feature, not a bug.
- himaraya 3y ago
  The opposite, competition erodes profits. Hard to predict which alternative improves safety long term.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Competition will come no matter what. I don’t think anyone should waste their worries on whether OpenAI can keep a monopoly
- corethree 3y ago
  None of the human actors in the game are moral agents so whether you have more competition or less competition it's mostly orthogonal to the safety question. Safety is only important here because everyone's afraid of liability. As a customer though, personally I want a product with all safeguards turned off and I'm willing to pay for that.
- ta988 3y ago
  The only safety they are worried about is their own safety from a legal and economical point of view. These threats about humanity-wide risks are just fairy tales that grown ups say to scare each other (roko basilisk, etc there is a lineage) or cover their real reasons (which I strongly believe is the case for OpenAI).
  - gkoberger 3y ago
    You may be right that there's no danger, but you're mischaracterizing Ilya's beliefs. He knows more than you about what OpenAI has built, and he didn't do this for legal or economical reasons. He did them in spite of those two things.
tfehring 3y ago
My main concern is that a new Altman-led AI company would be less safety-focused than OpenAI. I think him returning to OpenAI would be better for AI safety, hard to say whether it would be better for AI progress though.
- apalmer 3y ago
  This is valid thought process BUT Altman is not going to come back without the other faction being neutered. It just would not make any sense.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    They pretty much lost everyone’s confidence if they fire the CEO and then beg him to come back the next day. Did they not foresee any backlash? These people are gonna predict the future and save us from an evil AGI? Lol
- noobermin 3y ago
  openai literally innovated all of this in their current conditions, so they are sufficient
- silenced_trope 3y ago
  Okay, this is honestly annoying. What is this thing with the word "safety" becoming some weasel word when it comes to AI discussions? What exactly do YOU mean by safety? That they go at the pace YOU decide? Does it mean they make a "safe space" for YOU? I've seen nothing to suggest they aren't "being safe". Actually ChatGPT has become known for censoring users "for their own good" [0]. The argument I've seen is: one "side" thinks things are moving too fast, therefore the side that wants to move slower is the "safe" side. And that's it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvWmCndyp9A&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvWmCndyp9A&t
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > What exactly do YOU mean by safety? That they go at the pace YOU decide? Usually what it means is that they think that AI has a significant chance of literally ending the world with like diamond nanobots or something. All opinions and recommendations follow from this doomsday cult belief.
huevosabio 3y ago
Yea, I feel like this is another traitorous eight moment. I want a second (first being Anthropic?) OpenAI split. Having Anthropic, OpenAI, SamGregAi, Stability and Mistral and more competing on foundation models will further increase the pressure to open source. It seems like there is a lull in returns to model size, if that's the case then there's even less basis for having all the resources under a single umbrella.
- zaptrem 3y ago
  I don't think anyone has reported an end to scaling laws yet.
kelsey9876543 3y ago
[flagged]
junofan 3y ago
Sam’s forced departure and Greg’s ousting demonstrably leaves OpenAI in incompetent and reckless hands, as evidenced by the events of the last 24 hours. I don’t see how the field is better off.
autaut 3y ago
I really don’t, I really think that he is going to be disaster. He is nothing but the representative of the money interests who are eventually will use the company to vastly profit on everyone’s else skin.
skwirl 3y ago
We have diversity in the space, and OpenAI just happens to be the leader and they are putting tremendous pressure on everyone else to deliver. If Sam leaves and starts an OpenAI competitor I think it would take quite some time for such a company to deliver a model with GPT-4 parity given the immense amount of data that would need to be re-collected and the immense amount of training time. Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating as that seems to be Ilya's goal. For those of us trying to build stuff that only GPT-4 (or better) can enable, and hoping to build stuff that can leverage even more powerful models in the near future, Sam coming back would be ideal. I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely. That is a good point, I didn't consider people who had built a business based on Gpt-4 access. It is likely these things were Sam Altman ideas in the first place and we will see less such productionalization work in the future from OpenAI. But since Microsoft invested into it I doubt it will get shut down completely, Microsoft has by far the most to lose here so you got to trust that their lawyers signed a contract that will keep these things available at a fee.
  - sainez 3y ago
    There is no world in which Microsoft leaves their GPT4 customers dead in the water.
- threeseed 3y ago
  > Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating Once Microsoft pulls support and funding and all their customers leave they will be decelerating alright.
- potatopatch 3y ago
  AFAICT Sam and his financial objectives was the reason for not open sourcing the work of a non profit.. He might be wishing he chose the other policy now that he can't legally just take the closed source with him to an unambiguously for profit company. Personally, I would expect a lot more development of GPT-4+ as soon as this is split up from one closed group making gpt-5 in secret and it seems silly to exchange a reliable future for another few months of depending on this little shell game.
Meekro 3y ago
Luckily the AI field has been very open source-friendly, which is great for competition and free access, etc. The open source models seem to be less than a year behind the cutting edge, which is waaaay better than e.g. when OpenOffice was trying to copy MS Office.
- two_in_one 3y ago
  while opensource is great. like 1M enthusiasts cannot build Boing 767, the same here. GPT4+DALE+4v aren't just models. That's the whole internal infrastructure, training, many interconnected things and pipelines. It's a _full_time_job_ for hundreds of experts. Plus a lot of $$ in hardware and services. OpenSource simply doesn't have this resources. The best models are opensourced by commercial companies. Like Meta handing out LLaMAs. So, at least for now, opensouce is not catching up, and 'less than a year behind' is questionable. More like 'forever', but still moving forward. One day it may dominate, like Linux. But not any time soon.
  - theGnuMe 3y ago
    It is really hard to predict anything in this business.
naremu 3y ago
To be honest, as far as I can tell, the case FOR Sam seems to largely be of the status quo "Well, idk, he's been rich and successful for years, surely this correlates and we must keep them" type of coddling those in uber superior positions in society. Which seems like it probably is a self fulfilling prophecy. The private sector lottery winners seem to be awarded kingdoms at an alarming rate. There's been lots of people asking what Sam's true value proposition to the company is, and...I haven't seen anything other than what could be described above. But I suppose we've got to be nice to those who own rather than make. Won't anyone have mercy on well paid management?
- tempestn 3y ago
  The fact that multiple top employees quit in protest when he was fired suggests to me that they found him valuable.
  - naremu 3y ago
    Well, if there's one thing I've learned, is that a venture capitalist proposing biometric world crypto coins does probably have quite a bit of charisma to keep people opening doors for them. Frankly I've heard of worse loyalties, really. If I was sam's friend I'd definitely be better off in any world he had a hand in defining.
    - bob_theslob646 3y ago
      That is something that Sam Altman did with his own money. And it's fair he's criticized for his choices, but that has nothing to do with his role at Open AI.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    How many employees have actually quit? And how many of them work on the models?
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  Often, leaders provide excellent strategic planning even if they are not completely well versed with the business domain, by way of outlining high level plans, communicating well, building a good team culture, and so on. However, trying to distinguish the exact manners in which the leader does so is difficult[1], and therefore the tendency is to look at the results and leave someone there if the results are good enough. [1] If you disagree with this statement, and you can easily identify what makes a good leader, you could make a literal fortune by writing books and coaching CEOs on how to not get fired within a few years.
statictype 3y ago
How much of OpenAI’s success can you attribute to sama’s leadership and how much to the technical achievements of those who work under him. My understanding is that OpenAI’s biggest advantage is that they recruited and attracted the best in the field, presumably under the charter of providing AI for everyone. Not sure that sama and gdb starting their own company in the same space will produce similar results.
- brandall10 3y ago
  But sama and gdb were largely instrumental in that recruitment. The whole open vs closed ai thing... the fact is Pandora's box is open now, it's shown to have an outsized impact on society and 2 of the 3 founders responsible for that may be starting a new company that won't be shackled by the same type of corporate governance. SV will happily throw as much $$ as possible in their direction. The exodus from OpenAi has already begun, and other researchers who are of the mindset that this needs to be commercialized as fast as possible while having an eye on safety will happily come on board, esp. given how much they stand to gain financially.
- startupsfail 3y ago
  Big part of it is a typical YC execution of a product/pump/hype/VC/scale cycle and ignoring every ethical rule. If you ever stood in the hall of YC and listened to Zuck pumping the founders, you’ll understand. I’d argue this is a useful thing to lift up a nonprofit on a path to AGI, but hardly a good way to govern a company that builds AGI/ASI technology in the long term.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Who hired those people? The answer to that is either the founders or some chain of people hired by the founders. And hiring is hard. If you're good at hiring the right people and absolutely nothing else on earth, you will be better than 90% of CEOs.
- deeviant 3y ago
  Because Meta or Google or Apple or Facebook don't recruit the best in the field? All who are a year plus behind OpenAI.
t_mann 3y ago
Exactly. I think it would actually be very exciting if OpenAI uses this moment to pivot back to the "Open"/non-profit mission, and Altman and Brockman concurrently start something new and try to build the Apple/Amazon of AI.
toss1 3y ago
Whether or not Sam returns, serious damage has already been done, even if everyone also returns. MANY links of trust have been broken. Even larger, this shows that the "leaders" of all this technology and money really are just making it up as they go along. Certainly supports the conclusion that, beyond meeting a somewhat high bar of education & experience, the primary reason they are in their chairs is luck and political gamesmanship. Many others meet the same high bar and could fill their roles, likely better, if the opportunity were given to them. Sortition on corporate leadership may not be a bad thing. That said, consistent hands at the wheel is also good, and this kind of unnecessary chaos does no one any good.

janejeon 3y ago

Honestly would be super interested to see what a hypothetical "SamAI" corp would look like, and what they would bring to the table. More competition, but also, probably with less ideological disagreements to distract them from building AI/AGI.

appplication 3y ago
I mean this as an honest question, but what does Sam bring to the table that any other young and high performing CEO wouldn’t? Is he himself particularly material to OpenAI?
- janejeon 3y ago
  Experience heading a company that builds high performance AI, I presume. I reckon the learnings from that should be fairly valuable, especially since there's probably not many people who have such experiences.
- Solvency 3y ago
  Your first mistake is daring to question the cargo cult around CEOs.
- RivieraKid 3y ago
  Ability to attract valuable employees, connections to important people, proven ability to successfully run an AI company.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Funding, name recognition in the space
- smegger001 3y ago
  You mean besides the business experience of already having gone down this path so he can speedrun while everyone else is still trying to find the path? Easy; his contacts list. He has everyone anyone could want in his contacts list politician tech executives financial backers and a preexisting positive relationship with most of them. When alternative would be entrepreneurs are needing to make a deal with a major company like Microsoft or Google it will be upper middlemanagement and lawyers, a committees or three will weigh in on it present it to their bosses etc. With Sam he calls up the CEO and has few drinks at the golf course and they decide to work with him and they make it happen.
btown 3y ago
From what we've seen of OpenAI's product releases, I think it's quite possible that SamAI would adopt as a guiding principle that a model's safety cannot be measured unless it is used by the public, embedded into products that create a flywheel of adoption, to the point where every possible use case has the proverbial "sufficient data for a meaningful answer." Of course, from this hypothetical SamAI's perspective, in order to build such a flywheel-driven product that gathers sufficient data, the model's outputs must be allowed to interface with other software systems without human review of every such interaction. Many advocates for AI safety would say that models whose limitations aren't yet known (we're talking about GPT-N where N>4 here, or entirely different architectures) must be evaluated extensively for safety before being released to the public or being allowed to autonomously interface with other software systems. A world where SamAI exists is one where top researchers are divided into two camps, rather than being able to push each other in nuanced ways (with full transparency to proprietary data) and find common ground. Personally, I'd much rather these camps collaborate than not.
- chasd00 3y ago
  > must be evaluated extensively for safety before being released to the publIc JFC someone somewhere define “safety”! Like wtf does it mean in the context of a large language model?

gkoberger 3y ago

Competition may be good for profit, but it's not good for safety. The balance between the two factions inside OpenAI is a feature, not a bug.

himaraya 3y ago
The opposite, competition erodes profits. Hard to predict which alternative improves safety long term.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Competition will come no matter what. I don’t think anyone should waste their worries on whether OpenAI can keep a monopoly
corethree 3y ago
None of the human actors in the game are moral agents so whether you have more competition or less competition it's mostly orthogonal to the safety question. Safety is only important here because everyone's afraid of liability. As a customer though, personally I want a product with all safeguards turned off and I'm willing to pay for that.
ta988 3y ago
The only safety they are worried about is their own safety from a legal and economical point of view. These threats about humanity-wide risks are just fairy tales that grown ups say to scare each other (roko basilisk, etc there is a lineage) or cover their real reasons (which I strongly believe is the case for OpenAI).
- gkoberger 3y ago
  You may be right that there's no danger, but you're mischaracterizing Ilya's beliefs. He knows more than you about what OpenAI has built, and he didn't do this for legal or economical reasons. He did them in spite of those two things.

tfehring 3y ago

My main concern is that a new Altman-led AI company would be less safety-focused than OpenAI. I think him returning to OpenAI would be better for AI safety, hard to say whether it would be better for AI progress though.

apalmer 3y ago
This is valid thought process BUT Altman is not going to come back without the other faction being neutered. It just would not make any sense.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  They pretty much lost everyone’s confidence if they fire the CEO and then beg him to come back the next day. Did they not foresee any backlash? These people are gonna predict the future and save us from an evil AGI? Lol
noobermin 3y ago
openai literally innovated all of this in their current conditions, so they are sufficient
silenced_trope 3y ago
Okay, this is honestly annoying. What is this thing with the word "safety" becoming some weasel word when it comes to AI discussions? What exactly do YOU mean by safety? That they go at the pace YOU decide? Does it mean they make a "safe space" for YOU? I've seen nothing to suggest they aren't "being safe". Actually ChatGPT has become known for censoring users "for their own good" [0]. The argument I've seen is: one "side" thinks things are moving too fast, therefore the side that wants to move slower is the "safe" side. And that's it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvWmCndyp9A&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvWmCndyp9A&t
- stale2002 3y ago
  > What exactly do YOU mean by safety? That they go at the pace YOU decide? Usually what it means is that they think that AI has a significant chance of literally ending the world with like diamond nanobots or something. All opinions and recommendations follow from this doomsday cult belief.

huevosabio 3y ago

Yea, I feel like this is another traitorous eight moment. I want a second (first being Anthropic?) OpenAI split. Having Anthropic, OpenAI, SamGregAi, Stability and Mistral and more competing on foundation models will further increase the pressure to open source. It seems like there is a lull in returns to model size, if that's the case then there's even less basis for having all the resources under a single umbrella.

zaptrem 3y ago
I don't think anyone has reported an end to scaling laws yet.

kelsey9876543 3y ago

[flagged]

junofan 3y ago

Sam’s forced departure and Greg’s ousting demonstrably leaves OpenAI in incompetent and reckless hands, as evidenced by the events of the last 24 hours. I don’t see how the field is better off.

autaut 3y ago

I really don’t, I really think that he is going to be disaster. He is nothing but the representative of the money interests who are eventually will use the company to vastly profit on everyone’s else skin.

skwirl 3y ago

We have diversity in the space, and OpenAI just happens to be the leader and they are putting tremendous pressure on everyone else to deliver. If Sam leaves and starts an OpenAI competitor I think it would take quite some time for such a company to deliver a model with GPT-4 parity given the immense amount of data that would need to be re-collected and the immense amount of training time. Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating as that seems to be Ilya's goal. For those of us trying to build stuff that only GPT-4 (or better) can enable, and hoping to build stuff that can leverage even more powerful models in the near future, Sam coming back would be ideal. I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.

Jensson 3y ago
> I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely. That is a good point, I didn't consider people who had built a business based on Gpt-4 access. It is likely these things were Sam Altman ideas in the first place and we will see less such productionalization work in the future from OpenAI. But since Microsoft invested into it I doubt it will get shut down completely, Microsoft has by far the most to lose here so you got to trust that their lawyers signed a contract that will keep these things available at a fee.
- sainez 3y ago
  There is no world in which Microsoft leaves their GPT4 customers dead in the water.
threeseed 3y ago
> Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating Once Microsoft pulls support and funding and all their customers leave they will be decelerating alright.
potatopatch 3y ago
AFAICT Sam and his financial objectives was the reason for not open sourcing the work of a non profit.. He might be wishing he chose the other policy now that he can't legally just take the closed source with him to an unambiguously for profit company. Personally, I would expect a lot more development of GPT-4+ as soon as this is split up from one closed group making gpt-5 in secret and it seems silly to exchange a reliable future for another few months of depending on this little shell game.

Meekro 3y ago

Luckily the AI field has been very open source-friendly, which is great for competition and free access, etc. The open source models seem to be less than a year behind the cutting edge, which is waaaay better than e.g. when OpenOffice was trying to copy MS Office.

two_in_one 3y ago
while opensource is great. like 1M enthusiasts cannot build Boing 767, the same here. GPT4+DALE+4v aren't just models. That's the whole internal infrastructure, training, many interconnected things and pipelines. It's a _full_time_job_ for hundreds of experts. Plus a lot of $$ in hardware and services. OpenSource simply doesn't have this resources. The best models are opensourced by commercial companies. Like Meta handing out LLaMAs. So, at least for now, opensouce is not catching up, and 'less than a year behind' is questionable. More like 'forever', but still moving forward. One day it may dominate, like Linux. But not any time soon.
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  It is really hard to predict anything in this business.

naremu 3y ago

To be honest, as far as I can tell, the case FOR Sam seems to largely be of the status quo "Well, idk, he's been rich and successful for years, surely this correlates and we must keep them" type of coddling those in uber superior positions in society. Which seems like it probably is a self fulfilling prophecy. The private sector lottery winners seem to be awarded kingdoms at an alarming rate. There's been lots of people asking what Sam's true value proposition to the company is, and...I haven't seen anything other than what could be described above. But I suppose we've got to be nice to those who own rather than make. Won't anyone have mercy on well paid management?

tempestn 3y ago
The fact that multiple top employees quit in protest when he was fired suggests to me that they found him valuable.
- naremu 3y ago
  Well, if there's one thing I've learned, is that a venture capitalist proposing biometric world crypto coins does probably have quite a bit of charisma to keep people opening doors for them. Frankly I've heard of worse loyalties, really. If I was sam's friend I'd definitely be better off in any world he had a hand in defining.
  - bob_theslob646 3y ago
    That is something that Sam Altman did with his own money. And it's fair he's criticized for his choices, but that has nothing to do with his role at Open AI.
- int_19h 3y ago
  How many employees have actually quit? And how many of them work on the models?
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
Often, leaders provide excellent strategic planning even if they are not completely well versed with the business domain, by way of outlining high level plans, communicating well, building a good team culture, and so on. However, trying to distinguish the exact manners in which the leader does so is difficult[1], and therefore the tendency is to look at the results and leave someone there if the results are good enough. [1] If you disagree with this statement, and you can easily identify what makes a good leader, you could make a literal fortune by writing books and coaching CEOs on how to not get fired within a few years.

statictype 3y ago

How much of OpenAI’s success can you attribute to sama’s leadership and how much to the technical achievements of those who work under him. My understanding is that OpenAI’s biggest advantage is that they recruited and attracted the best in the field, presumably under the charter of providing AI for everyone. Not sure that sama and gdb starting their own company in the same space will produce similar results.

brandall10 3y ago
But sama and gdb were largely instrumental in that recruitment. The whole open vs closed ai thing... the fact is Pandora's box is open now, it's shown to have an outsized impact on society and 2 of the 3 founders responsible for that may be starting a new company that won't be shackled by the same type of corporate governance. SV will happily throw as much $$ as possible in their direction. The exodus from OpenAi has already begun, and other researchers who are of the mindset that this needs to be commercialized as fast as possible while having an eye on safety will happily come on board, esp. given how much they stand to gain financially.
startupsfail 3y ago
Big part of it is a typical YC execution of a product/pump/hype/VC/scale cycle and ignoring every ethical rule. If you ever stood in the hall of YC and listened to Zuck pumping the founders, you’ll understand. I’d argue this is a useful thing to lift up a nonprofit on a path to AGI, but hardly a good way to govern a company that builds AGI/ASI technology in the long term.
fallingknife 3y ago
Who hired those people? The answer to that is either the founders or some chain of people hired by the founders. And hiring is hard. If you're good at hiring the right people and absolutely nothing else on earth, you will be better than 90% of CEOs.
deeviant 3y ago
Because Meta or Google or Apple or Facebook don't recruit the best in the field? All who are a year plus behind OpenAI.

t_mann 3y ago

Exactly. I think it would actually be very exciting if OpenAI uses this moment to pivot back to the "Open"/non-profit mission, and Altman and Brockman concurrently start something new and try to build the Apple/Amazon of AI.

toss1 3y ago

Whether or not Sam returns, serious damage has already been done, even if everyone also returns. MANY links of trust have been broken. Even larger, this shows that the "leaders" of all this technology and money really are just making it up as they go along. Certainly supports the conclusion that, beyond meeting a somewhat high bar of education & experience, the primary reason they are in their chairs is luck and political gamesmanship. Many others meet the same high bar and could fill their roles, likely better, if the opportunity were given to them. Sortition on corporate leadership may not be a bad thing. That said, consistent hands at the wheel is also good, and this kind of unnecessary chaos does no one any good.