6 ms·

Pretty incredible incompetence all around if true. From the board for not anticipating a backlash and caving immediately... from Microsoft for investing into a

Pretty incredible incompetence all around if true. From the board for not anticipating a backlash and caving immediately... from Microsoft for investing into an endeavor that is purportedly chartered as non-profit and governed by nobodies who can sink it on a whim. And having 0 hard influence on the direction despite a large ownership stake Why bother with a non-profit model that is surreptitiously for profit? The whole structure of OpenAI is largely a facade at this point. Just form a new for profit company and be done with it. Altman's direction for profit is fine, but shouldn't have been pursued under the loose premise of a non profit. While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama. Why keep the baggage? It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO. OpenAI has first mover advantage, and perhaps better talent, but not by an order of magnitude. There is no special sauce here. Altman may be charismatic and well connected, but the hero worship put forward on here is really sad and misplaced.

x86x87 3y ago
my question is: why not both? why not pursue the profit and use that to fuel the research into AGI. seems like a best of both worlds.
- cthalupa 3y ago
  That's the intent of the arrangement, but there's also limits - when that pursuit of profit begins to interfere with the charter of the non-profit, you end up in this situation. https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. My interpretation of events is the board believes that Altman's actions have worked against the interest of building an AGI that benefits all of humanity - concentrating access to the AI to businesses could be the issue, or the focus on commercialization of the existing LLMs and chatbot stuff causing conflict with assigning resources to AGI r&d, etc. Of course no one knows for sure except the people directly involved here.
  - dabockster 3y ago
    > Of course no one knows for sure except the people directly involved here. The IRS will know soon enough if they were indeed non-profit.
    - cthalupa 3y ago
      I was not implying they were not a non-profit. I am saying that we do not know the exact reason why the board fired Altman.
lazystar 3y ago
look at the backgrounds of those board members... cant find any evidence that any of them have experience with corporate politics. theyre in way over their heads.
- robswc 3y ago
  It is also crazy that the "winning move" was to just do nothing and look like a genius and coast off that for the rest of their lives. Who in their right mind would consider them for a board position now.
  - cthalupa 3y ago
    This is assuming motivations similar to a board for a for-profit company, which the OpenAI board is not. Insisting, no matter how painful, that the organization stays true to the charter could be considered a desirable trait for the board of a non-profit.
    - robswc 3y ago
      Fair. I don't know why they wouldn't just come out and say that though, if that were the case. It would be seen as admirable, instead of snake-ish. Instead of "Sam has been lying to us" it could have been "Sam had diverged too far from the original goal, when he did X."
      - cthalupa 3y ago
        It's hard to say. Lots of things don't really make sense based on the information we have. They could have meant that Sam had 'not been candid' about his alignment with commercial interests vs. the charter.
      - cowl 3y ago
        that is what the press release says. they didn't go into specifics but it is clear that the conflict is in Comercialisation vs original purpose
wwaaadomisaaz2 3y ago
[flagged]
rurban 3y ago
> It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO. This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results. Ilja can follow Google's Bard by holding it back until they have countermodels trained to remove conflicts ("safety"), but this will not win them any compute contracts, nor keep them the existing GPU hours. It's only mass, not smarts. Ilja lost this one.
- SeanLuke 3y ago
  > Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results. What in the world are you talking about? Internet search? I remember Inktomi. Basch's excuses otherwise, Google won because PageRank produced so much better results it wasn't even close.
  - philistine 3y ago
    The faster results came after they had already won the race for best search results. Initially, Google wasn't faster than the competition in returning a full page. I vividly remeber the joy of patiently waiting 2-3 seconds for an answer, and jolting up every time Google Search came back with exactly what I wanted.
- rvba 3y ago
  When google came out it had the best algothitm backed by good hardware (as far as I understand often off the shelf hardware - anyway the page simply "just worked"). Difference between google and competitors was like night and day when it came out. It gained marker share very quickly because once you started using it - you didnt have any incentive to go back. Now google search has a lot of problems, much better competition. But seriously you probably dont understand how it was years ago. Also I thought that in ML still the best algorhitms win, since all the big companies have money. If someone came and developed a "pagerank-equivalent" for AI that is better than the current algs, customerd would switch quickly since there is no loyalty. On a side note: Microsoft is playing the game very smart by adding AI to their products what makes you stick to them.
huytersd 3y ago
[flagged]
- az226 3y ago
  “Tech entrepreneur”
- dang 3y ago
  You've posted some version of this at least half a dozen times now. Please stop.
- talldatethrow 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - tjpnz 3y ago
    Working at Google doesn't mean you're intelligent, regardless of gender.
    - talldatethrow 3y ago
      It did 15 years ago. And I have a feeling it still does for the people not checking the right diversity hire boxes.
jstummbillig 3y ago
> While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama. It's hard to put into words, that do not seem contradictory: GPT-4 is barely good enough to provide tremendous value. For what I need, no other model is passing that bar, which makes them not slightly worse but entirely unusable. But again, it's not that GPT-4 is great, and I would most certainly go to whatever is better at the current price metrics in a heartbeat.
- skohan 3y ago
  What is your use-case? I have not worked with them extensively, but both PALM and LLAMA seem as good as GPT-4 for most tasks I have thrown at them
  - barfingclouds 3y ago
    I’ve used all 3 a lot. Gpt 4 is definitely better. That being said if I was to rank a close second it would be Claude 2, which I think is really good
    - skohan 3y ago
      But would you say the others besides GPT-4 are unsuitable? That's the claim I find surprising

x86x87 3y ago

my question is: why not both? why not pursue the profit and use that to fuel the research into AGI. seems like a best of both worlds.

cthalupa 3y ago
That's the intent of the arrangement, but there's also limits - when that pursuit of profit begins to interfere with the charter of the non-profit, you end up in this situation. https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. My interpretation of events is the board believes that Altman's actions have worked against the interest of building an AGI that benefits all of humanity - concentrating access to the AI to businesses could be the issue, or the focus on commercialization of the existing LLMs and chatbot stuff causing conflict with assigning resources to AGI r&d, etc. Of course no one knows for sure except the people directly involved here.
- dabockster 3y ago
  > Of course no one knows for sure except the people directly involved here. The IRS will know soon enough if they were indeed non-profit.
  - cthalupa 3y ago
    I was not implying they were not a non-profit. I am saying that we do not know the exact reason why the board fired Altman.

lazystar 3y ago

look at the backgrounds of those board members... cant find any evidence that any of them have experience with corporate politics. theyre in way over their heads.

robswc 3y ago
It is also crazy that the "winning move" was to just do nothing and look like a genius and coast off that for the rest of their lives. Who in their right mind would consider them for a board position now.
- cthalupa 3y ago
  This is assuming motivations similar to a board for a for-profit company, which the OpenAI board is not. Insisting, no matter how painful, that the organization stays true to the charter could be considered a desirable trait for the board of a non-profit.
  - robswc 3y ago
    Fair. I don't know why they wouldn't just come out and say that though, if that were the case. It would be seen as admirable, instead of snake-ish. Instead of "Sam has been lying to us" it could have been "Sam had diverged too far from the original goal, when he did X."
    - cthalupa 3y ago
      It's hard to say. Lots of things don't really make sense based on the information we have. They could have meant that Sam had 'not been candid' about his alignment with commercial interests vs. the charter.
    - cowl 3y ago
      that is what the press release says. they didn't go into specifics but it is clear that the conflict is in Comercialisation vs original purpose

wwaaadomisaaz2 3y ago

[flagged]

rurban 3y ago

> It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO. This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results. Ilja can follow Google's Bard by holding it back until they have countermodels trained to remove conflicts ("safety"), but this will not win them any compute contracts, nor keep them the existing GPU hours. It's only mass, not smarts. Ilja lost this one.

SeanLuke 3y ago
> Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results. What in the world are you talking about? Internet search? I remember Inktomi. Basch's excuses otherwise, Google won because PageRank produced so much better results it wasn't even close.
- philistine 3y ago
  The faster results came after they had already won the race for best search results. Initially, Google wasn't faster than the competition in returning a full page. I vividly remeber the joy of patiently waiting 2-3 seconds for an answer, and jolting up every time Google Search came back with exactly what I wanted.
rvba 3y ago
When google came out it had the best algothitm backed by good hardware (as far as I understand often off the shelf hardware - anyway the page simply "just worked"). Difference between google and competitors was like night and day when it came out. It gained marker share very quickly because once you started using it - you didnt have any incentive to go back. Now google search has a lot of problems, much better competition. But seriously you probably dont understand how it was years ago. Also I thought that in ML still the best algorhitms win, since all the big companies have money. If someone came and developed a "pagerank-equivalent" for AI that is better than the current algs, customerd would switch quickly since there is no loyalty. On a side note: Microsoft is playing the game very smart by adding AI to their products what makes you stick to them.

huytersd 3y ago

[flagged]

az226 3y ago
“Tech entrepreneur”
dang 3y ago
You've posted some version of this at least half a dozen times now. Please stop.
talldatethrow 3y ago
[flagged]
- tjpnz 3y ago
  Working at Google doesn't mean you're intelligent, regardless of gender.
  - talldatethrow 3y ago
    It did 15 years ago. And I have a feeling it still does for the people not checking the right diversity hire boxes.

jstummbillig 3y ago

> While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama. It's hard to put into words, that do not seem contradictory: GPT-4 is barely good enough to provide tremendous value. For what I need, no other model is passing that bar, which makes them not slightly worse but entirely unusable. But again, it's not that GPT-4 is great, and I would most certainly go to whatever is better at the current price metrics in a heartbeat.

skohan 3y ago
What is your use-case? I have not worked with them extensively, but both PALM and LLAMA seem as good as GPT-4 for most tasks I have thrown at them
- barfingclouds 3y ago
  I’ve used all 3 a lot. Gpt 4 is definitely better. That being said if I was to rank a close second it would be Claude 2, which I think is really good
  - skohan 3y ago
    But would you say the others besides GPT-4 are unsuitable? That's the claim I find surprising