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Altman sought billions for AI chip venture before OpenAI ouster

338 points by ryzvonusef 3y ago

AndrewFleming 3y ago
[dead]
ryzvonusef 3y ago
> Altman had been traveling to the Middle East to fundraise for the project, which was code-named Tigris, the people said. The OpenAI chief executive officer planned to spin up an AI-focused chip company that could produce semiconductors that compete against those from Nvidia Corp., which currently dominates the market for artificial intelligence tasks. Altman’s chip venture is not yet formed and the talks with investors are in the early stages, said the people, who asked not to be named as the discussions were private.
- ryzvonusef 3y ago
  However apparently even this wasn't the reason for Sam's ouster... so the question remains, what was?
  - himaraya 3y ago
    Not exactly. Ilya allegedly disliked Sam fundraising side hustles off his profile at OpenAI. It sounds like a confluence of factors precipitated the ousting.
    - cactusplant7374 3y ago
      It seems more likely Illya is a less wrong type of person that saw Sam as a threat to his vision. He doesn't like the commercialization aspect where as Sam would prefer OpenAI didn't go broke.
      - himaraya 3y ago
        Well, Sam & Greg allegedly sidelined Ilya shortly before all this went down. It seems like Ilya felt he had to make a drastic move.
      - juliangoldsmith 3y ago
        "Not going broke" is a bit different from announcing an "open" venture, then, once it's successful, doing everything possible to make it closed and stifle competition (through regulatory capture).
        tyrfing 3y ago
        > once it's successful, doing everything possible to make it closed and stifle competition (through regulatory capture). Half of the current 4-member board is also involved with GovAI, which is dedicated to AI safety research and advocating regulation. Aren't they more likely to think that OpenAI has been extremely reckless in publicly releasing models and research like they have?
        juliangoldsmith 3y ago
        They weren't the ones who went before Congress, asking for regulations that would prevent new startups taking root. (Something like a minimum of 25 employees dedicated to moderation against bias, as I recall. That would be trivial for OpenAI, but impossible when on a budget.)
    - KennyFromIT 3y ago
      Can someone explain how it's ethical to be working on multiple things like this at the same time (e.g. OpenAI, AI chips, that eye orb crypto thing), but the benefits of each not accruing to the other investors, only to that individual? I've always had similar questions about folks like Musk and Dorsey. Is it simply lack of proper governance? Is it something written into their contacts? Is this just a Silicon Valley thing? I can only imagine that a lot of people would like to work on many side projects, but their employment agreements forbid it.
      - deleted 3y ago
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      - civilitty 3y ago
        > I've always had similar questions about folks like Musk and Dorsey. Is it simply lack of proper governance? Is it something written into their contacts? Is this just a Silicon Valley thing? I can only imagine that a lot of people would like to work on many side projects, but their employment agreements forbid it. Folks like Musk and Dorsey have a lot more leverage when they're negotiating their contracts but when it comes to public companies, they get sued all the time over their decisions. The lawsuits are just very drawn out, boring affairs that normally get settled during discovery, before any details actually become public so we don't often hear much about them from the media. Musk was sued by tons of people over self dealing when Tesla bought SolarCity, for example.
      - voxic11 3y ago
        How do you know the benefits are accruing to only altman? I thought he claims to have no stake in OpenAI.
        itronitron 3y ago
        >> I thought he claims to have no stake in OpenAI. That's good, then he probably won't mind not being there.
      - swatcoder 3y ago
        It’s “ethical” in that it’s broadly accepted, and it’s accepted because those CEO’s are usually talented dealmakers that deliver huge opportunities to the companies they lead. It’s not new or unique to Silicon Valley. You can see these personalities pop up in commercial and political dealmaking throughout pretty much all of history. You can get away with a lot when you’re effective.
- throwoutway 3y ago
  Using your celebrity status as CEO of a non-profit to raise money for multiple related for-profits does seem like you may be more dedicated to personal financial motivations than that of the non-profit's mission and charter. No indication this was the trigger event, but reasonable that the board took notice of all these things. Even viewing this in the best possible, most innocent light, it still looks bad and Sam should have known better.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    he wasn't CEO of a non-profit. He was CEO of the for-profit OpenAI company.
    - throwoutway 3y ago
      Do you know where that's documented? All reporting seems to indicate otherwise and all the digging i did confirmed he was CEO of the non-profit too. For example: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/sam-altman-is-out-as-openais-ceo/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/sam-altman-is-out-as-opena...
kvee 3y ago
https://archive.is/3LaJF https://archive.is/3LaJF
dontupvoteme 3y ago
This is pretty much directly in violation of OpenAI's charter, not to mention how concerning it is to have a CEO putting so much effort into side hustles. I'm not surprised the board had to act.
- ganzuul 3y ago
  > I'm not surprised the board had to act. A watchdog sounded an alert.
- RobertDeNiro 3y ago
  Why is it violation?
- NOWHERE_ 3y ago
  How is this violating OpenAI‘s charter? If they really want to ensure that ensure that AI benefits all of humanity they have to keep it affordable to everyone. Scaling out of expensive GPUs, and making the service cheap and therefore generally available to more humans sounds sensible.
  - theptip 3y ago
    The obvious argument is that since we have not solved alignment, accelerating AGI is unsafe. I’d wager that is the general line of reasoning from Sutskever and the board. “We are growing quickly enough and a GPU shortage gives everyone more time to catch up on safety research” seems like a logically consistent position to me.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Can you point to what's in violation? I don't see anything at all. And "side hustles" are not inherently concerning at all. There are quite a number of well-known tech CEO's running multiple companies at once. The only things that matter are a) that the board is aware and feel like they're paying the right amount for the proportion of the CEO's time that they're getting, and b) that they don't involve a conflict of interest. (And generally speaking, being a potential supplier for your company isn't a conflict -- to the contrary, it's a pattern that's been successfully followed before.)
siva7 3y ago
I have the feeling that hard times are coming for the kumbaya type of ai researcher at BigCo who prefers to openly share all research, doesn’t care about commercialisation and wants to slow down the ai train behind curtains for safety considerations after the openai fiasco.
- CalChris 3y ago
  ... while pulling down $500K/yr.
- voz_ 3y ago
  This is a stupid straw man. At its most generous face value, you’ve said nothing. At worst you insulted a large swath of people.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  It seems that startup money has poisoned this culture anyway. Every week, I see papers come out that are not necessarily fraudulent, but are contorting themselves to toot their own horn for yet another framework or GPT-4 beating finetune. You can't trust the ML papers anymore.
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    It's a failure mode for arxiv, I feel.
    - gryn 3y ago
      how ? I thinks it's doing what it seeking to do. a place for pre-publications to be shared. as far I know arxiv is not a journal. it doesn't reject papers and never intended to do so. you can find many almost crackpot (meta)physics theories in it. you only need to have someone already on the platform to invite to be able to publish. the only rejection criteria seems to be that your paper need to be related to the scientific/academic world (ex not your grandma's cookie recipe)
      - 3y ago
jpollock 3y ago
I thought I saw somewhere that OpenAI was looking at their own chip project? [1] If Altman had been working in parallel to form a startup, that would have raised conflict of interest problems. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-exploring-making-its-own-ai-chips-sources-2023-10-06/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-e...
himaraya 3y ago
> On Sunday, a person familiar with the board stood by the board’s explanation on Friday that cited candor. This person said there was no one precipitating incident but rather a mounting loss of trust over communications with Altman. The person declined to offer examples. https://www.wsj.com/tech/openai-trying-to-get-sam-altman-back-4b728049 https://www.wsj.com/tech/openai-trying-to-get-sam-altman-bac... > According to one person with knowledge of the situation, Altman had been attempting to raise as much as $100bn from investors in the Middle East and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to establish a new microchip development company which could compete with Nvidia and TSMC. Those efforts, in the weeks before his sacking, had caused concerns on the board, this person said. https://www.ft.com/content/466bf00a-1e76-4255-be2b-3c1d37508031 https://www.ft.com/content/466bf00a-1e76-4255-be2b-3c1d37508... > Two days after OpenAI’s board of directors fired him, Sam Altman is expected to join executives at the company’s San Francisco headquarters Sunday as they push the board to reinstate him, Interim CEO Mira Murati told staff on Sunday morning, according to people with knowledge of the situation. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-execs-invite-altman-brockman-to-headquarters-in-push-to-reinstate-them https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-execs-invite-...
- voisin 3y ago
  > This person said there was no one precipitating incident but rather a mounting loss of trust over communications with Altman. Yet it was apparently so time sensitive that there was no time for discussion with key stakeholders. This board appears to have been run by the keystone kops.
  - medler 3y ago
    There are no key stakeholders other than the board itself
    - bmitc 3y ago
      And the board members aren't financial stakeholders. There's really nothing they have to gain from this, which implies that their decision was based on facts rather than some power play.
23B1 3y ago
"...according to people familiar with the matter." "...said the people, who asked not to be named as the discussions were private." "...a representative [...] did not immediately respond to a request for comment. OpenAI, SoftBank and Mubadala declined to comment." sigh
- mistermann 3y ago
  Welcome to Planet Earth, Western Hemisphere, 2023. Please enjoy your stay!
shmatt 3y ago
And the funniest part is OpenAI has been refusing to hire remotely. That’s their right, but I wonder how many office days a week Sam was there with all of his other shenanigans OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the remote work ‘experiment’ was a mistake—and ‘it’s over’ https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-work-mistake-return-to-office/amp/ https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-... Tell me more, Person with 7 jobs, about how all work needs to be done from the office
- airstrike 3y ago
  I'm 100% in favor of remote work... but presumably their job postings weren't for the CEO role (or at least not then)
- teekert 3y ago
  Offices are for (human) resources, where they are neatly herded and monitored and managers can look at the office every now and then and enjoy the sight of toiling crowds. It's not for the elites.
- leosanchez 3y ago
  from: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/chatgpt-maker-sam-altman-says-era-of-remote-work-is-over-380090-2023-05-04 https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/chatgpt-m... > He further added that OpenAI’s some of the best talents are working remotely. He said, "some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don't let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don't like the open air fentanyl markets either.”
- gkoberger 3y ago
  I've been to the OpenAI office once, and saw Sam sitting on a couch working. This is obviously just a single data point, so who knows.
  - shmatt 3y ago
    Could have been on a WorldCoin zoom though
renegade-otter 3y ago
So, even if the board was justified in its actions (quite possible), the way in which they have gone about it will be studied for years as what not to do. This was bush league level of PR mistakes and miscommunication. And the fact that OpenAI is a total $90B juggernaut of a company made this amateur hour so much worse.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Alternatively, the board is up against someone who is very good at spinning any story in their favor. They could come off as amateurish when they're up against someone as charismatic as Sam Altman, but it's unlikely that very many boards could have done better given the circumstances.
  - vikramkr 3y ago
    I mean, waiting 30 minutes to not release it before market close and pissing off Microsoft is a very obvious thing that it's still staggering that they didn't handle correctly. Immediately pissing off your biggest financial supporter is pretty unforgiveably incompetent
    - himaraya 3y ago
      Not that different from releasing the news on a Friday after-hours, honestly. Microsoft would get pissed off by the shift from profit-seeking either way.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        Exactly. So much of the commentary surrounding this is assuming that the board is motivated to act like the board of a startup, and therefore what they've done is amateurish because it would kill a startup. But the remaining members of the board are all very clearly not invested in OpenAI becoming an insanely profitable company—they're on the board of a nonprofit, in charge of the mission and the charter, not in charge of maximizing profit. I'm sure that there are things they could have done better even with that context, but I think most of the confusion stems from people on here not understanding the motivations of these people.
bartwr 3y ago
This sounds like an insane conflict of interest. CEO of a company (or worse, non-profit!) and a member of its board creates another, for-profit company (in partial secrecy/lack of transparency) that the non-profit would eventually pay a lot of money. This is almost a fraudulent level of siphoning non-profit money. Btw, this is hilarious - regular employees have non-competes in their contracts (sometimes void/illegal, depending on the local jurisdiction) and breaching them is an immediately fireable offense (sometimes leading to more severe consequences). You work on a small thing on the side? Better be careful, ask your manager/HR, risk it getting taken over by the company (luckily, IIUC this part is mostly illegal now in all jurisdictions that "matter" for tech). But sitting on multiple boards where you have much more room and possibilites for creating conflicts of interest and damaging the company? All fine and common!
- philistine 3y ago
  AND a complete Moby Dick move. You're going to suddenly get up and compete with all the chip designers and beat them at their job? Computer chips are literally the most complex products in the world. It is an astonishing development that the most profitable company in the world was able to make chips, let alone chips that beat Intel and Nvidia in some key metrics. It took Apple more than a decade of shipping chips in phones to be able to move up to desktop-class. The board was right to get rid of a guy who would rather hunt a white whale than do his job.
- cma 3y ago
  I think Altman hails from a kind of hustle culture that may not go great with AI safety: >I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this: > "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious. > We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day. > We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract." > I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 The crypto WorldCoin thing is probably a bigger example.
TekMol 3y ago
The project is intended to rival Nvidia Are Nvidia chips also produced in Taiwan by TSMC? And would this new project be the same, using chips made by TSMC? Or would this be a diversification away from TSMC?
- pk-protect-ai 3y ago
  You can't use the same chips as Nvidia without licensing them. Creating a new type of GPU/TPU is a complex endeavor that involves much more than just a single chip.
- djbusby 3y ago
  All my reads of the rumors makes me think it's new fabs, chips and facilities and labs and all that.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    Perhaps that's what they are selling, but ASML lead times are many years-long. It sounds to me like a WeWork/Softbank-style heist: taking advantage of those who have more money than sense under cover of the current LLm/AI hype.
  - baal80spam 3y ago
    If that's so, then $100B won't be enough by a long shot.
yieldcrv 3y ago
btw, this is only controversial because the board chose to make it controversial there is nothing “worse” about it because OpenAI is a non-profit and would likely contract with this venture the regulations against this kind of thing simply require A) disclosure, for potential future donors B) low thresholds of ownership to avoid self dealing regulations, which all VC backed companies are compliant with due to share dilution the secret behind quick impressive fundraises that launder founder’s reputations into legendary status is that their non profits are investors as the “friends and family” or “lead investor”, and then outside investors follow suit and that reduces the non profit and the founder’s ownership percentages below noncompliant levels. (This isn’t really a game that people can organically play. You either have deep pools of capital you control, or you don’t.)
mikerg87 3y ago
When I see this. I am reminded of the quote from Alan Kay: People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Counterpoint: when has that advice ever led to anything but a slow-motion train wreck?
  - Hackbraten 3y ago
    Counterexample: https://oxide.computer https://oxide.computer
    - latchkey 3y ago
      Too early.
charlie0 3y ago
This is my take, Altman was fired because there was no other choice. OpenAIs charter is fundamentally incompatible with the hypercapitalist model and its believers. I'm sure the board tried to dissuade Sam from going certain path, but being an SV capitalist, there was no way to dissuade him. Given his own level of power and what I think was a superior hand, he ignored the board. At the point, the board really only had one move left, which was to fire him. I don't think it was the wrong move for the board, but they way it was done it really the big issue here.
- mikeg8 3y ago
  My counter: Altman is correctly aware that the the hyper capitalist path is the most probable path to creating an AGI, as the amount of capital/investment for the compute/architecture will be massive. Vertically integrating with hardware seems very logical to solve a technical problem as big as AGI. The entire charter becomes moot without AGI and the current path of relying on outside funding (Microsoft) and suppliers (nvidia) only makes their overall mission more difficult.
  - charlie0 3y ago
    Their current model allows for hypercapitalism with constraints and has been successful. They still raised billions. Remains to be confirmed what happened behind the scenes, but it possible Sam wasn't honest with these dealings. The correct way to have gone about this was to setup that hardware co under the the same umbrella as OpenAI co. Sam is playing 3d chess here and the board has to fold or make their play, even if their hand isn't great.
deleted 3y ago
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akamaka 3y ago
I’m surprised that nobody has brought up that Altman was busy this summer dumping his nuclear startup Oklo onto the public market via a SPAC. He seems to be a talented fundraiser and dealmaker and not so much of a singleminded visionary who wants to spend the next decade perfecting the details of AGI. Maybe the right place for him is focusing on his next few startups.
- Solvency 3y ago
  He literally founded a defunct social network and then hung out in YC world before falling into AI at the right time to raise money. There isn't a single element of magic or secret sauce to Sam Altman in the AI space. So yeah. Have him mess around in more startups and raise cash for them.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
    I think he's also talented at assembling great teams. He has a deep personal network of incredibly talented people to draw from. It's really hard to pull the right people together and sweet talk them into walking away from all the other incredible things they're working on, but it might be the single most important thing that an executive at a new, growing company has to do.
roschdal 3y ago
Imagine the General Artificial Intelligence system created by Sam Altman with billions of Saudi Arabian oil dollars. Allah Akbar and Jihad as core values. Truely an apocalyptic AI system. AI Technological singularity with Islamic petrodollars.
- ETHisso2017 3y ago
  Imagine Allah.ai gets to AGI, and the first thing it does is say "the House of Saud is haram"
warthog 3y ago
Don't know if it is a conflict or not but I think he should do it. The dude knows the problems blocking advancement more than anybody else. I am surprised everyone thought he would do another LLM company. Do the chips, drop the prices, make it cheaper to develop AI => then he can return to AI software if he wants though I highly doubt it
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  From what I understand Altman is a business person and not an engineer. Can someone explain to me why everyone is freaking out about his departure? A salesman is gone, who cares?
  - jorl17 3y ago
    I am first and foremost an engineer (I’m also the CTO of a very small startup studio and, so, also do a lot of business-y things). I traditionally despise “we are all a big family” work culture. Nonetheless, I think it’s foolish to not understand the power of people with the right charisma and driving force. The halo effect, the reality distortion field, whatever you wanna call it, is quite real. It makes people go above and beyond. Some people are just very good at this, it’s almost innate to them. I’m not saying we should glorify them or not hold them accountable, but to think that a business person leaving, as opposed to an engineer, is not grounds to “freak out” is, to me, a bit naive. I have had the pleasure of working with business people just like that. Very little engineering background, but they were born leaders and motivators. Just like on a smaller scale you can get the same vibe from certain engineers. Those guys and gals that make you feel like you’ll pull through no matter what. Seems to me like Sam Altman has that kind of vibe. For better or worse, he drives people! We often forget that it is people that build software. Not algorithms or robots. And who moves the people to build that software and to never give up? Other people, leaders — engineers or not.
    - Solvency 3y ago
      What am I missing here: Sam Altman has zero charisma or cool factor. Every talk I've seen him in, he comes off as lethargic and sluggish. I get zero sense of passion or rallying drive around the hype of AI from him. Maybe he's good at fudging numbers to a specific set of people in a private room, but as a "reality distorter" for the masses he seems like a joke.
davesque 3y ago
Maybe I'm crazy here, but why would this be a problem? Assuming Altman still had enough time to perform his duties as OpenAI's CEO, what's wrong with developing other businesses that might help OpenAI lower its costs and achieve its goal of broadening access? One concern I could see is the source of funding. But OpenAI's COO is on record saying that Altman's firing had nothing to do with "...anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices." So that seems to indicate they wouldn't have cared. Having a really hard time unpacking all this. This article is very speculative.
orik 3y ago
> Adam D’Angelo is working on ChatGPT competitor Poe. > Helen Toner & Tasha McCauley are working with OpenPhilanthropy/Anthropic on GovAI board (former board member Holden Karnofsky left when his wife started to get involved with Anthropic) These seem like much larger conflicts of interest (working with direct competitors) than working on a company that one day this company might want to purchase a product from. The board was anemic, lost people and didn’t replace them, and then was small enough that you could fire the chairman of the board and then remove the CEO in a friday night massacre. https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
- swatcoder 3y ago
  Those conflicts disappear when you look at the OpenAI nonprofit through its aspiration to steward safe AGI no matter where it arises. It’s meant to transcend specific interests and look more like a technocratic standards body, like an IEEE precursor for AI, than a corporation seeking a private edge. It should have representation of diverse interests. And that’s exactly why its ownership of an apparent VC rocketship in its profit-making entity was becoming so problematic. Suddenly, it’s critically important transcendence and independence was being threatened by its subsidiary’s outsized and rapid success. It’s really important to keep in mind that the OpenAI board represents fundamentally different interests than those of the subsidiary developing and selling ChatGPT products. That they may have murdered the latter is not necessarily an accident or mistake.
- tomComb 3y ago
  Yes, those are conflicts , but that’s with board members which is a very different thing that having conflicts with the CEO.
chucke1992 3y ago
I don't really buy into - though of course it could happen. But the way the board moved - extremely fast - tells me that there is more to it.
davidham 3y ago
This whole episode gives the lie to this concept of building the company for the good of humanity. The real players here care about humanity about as much as Elon Musk does. Altman has the power because he can make (or lead others to make) a thing that’s worth billions of dollars. All this nonprofit org chart craziness and good of humanity is horseshit and always was. Safety, justice, corporate governance, the law generally, effect on the environment, will always be second to AI’s capacity to generate money for those who make it.
neonate 3y ago
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/altman-sought-billions-ai-chip-173747741.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/altman-sought-billions-ai-chi...
sashank_1509 3y ago
This is honestly completely fine, and I don’t understand how people can think this is a conflict of interest? NVIDIA has the most ridiculous monopoly on GPU’s right now. Their RTX4090 is really fast and would be great for clusters but NVIDIA software driver locked it from sending data at high speed to other GPU’s that prevents it from being used in clusters. This is not a one off thing, NVIDIA regularly does stuff like this to piss off consumers but we are at the mercy of buying NVIDIA chips and making it a trillion dollar company. There were reports that the H100 (latest and fastest known AI chip from NVIDIA) costs only 3000$ to make, while it is sold for 30,000$. Everyone is desperate to add some competition to this industry. If I were CEO of OpenAI even I would be desperate to create another chip to compete with NVIDIA and end this resource reliance. It’s not obvious that this effort should be started within OpenAI. It may turn out to be a distraction for a startup doing really well, many large companies with much more money to spend have spent huge resources building their own chips (TPU’s, Tesla DOJO, Intel Arc) and still NVIDIA is Uber dominant. I think it makes complete sense to start it outside of OpenAI. It would be a conflict of interest, only if: 1. The chip is of poor quality and Sam Altman forces OpenAI to buy it anyways to enrich himself. I think the possibility of this happening is close to 0, everything I’ve seen and heard of Sam doesn’t make it seem like he’s someone who would do something like this. That said we are right now 2-3 years away optimistically from such a chip being developed, it’s too early to level any conflict of interest allegations! As am ML practitioner I for one strongly welcome Sam Altmans Chip startup, just as I welcome MS building their own chip, Teslas Dojo, Google TPUs and anyone else who wants to challenge NVIDIA
- latchkey 3y ago
  > There were reports that the H100 (latest and fastest known AI chip from NVIDIA) costs only 3000$ to make These sorts of comparisons are silly. If it was only $300, then everyone would have made them. It would be made and sold at the local BestBuy. The reality is that it costs a lot more than that. R&D, Fab, etc... plus the chassis it goes into...
happytiger 3y ago
I made a similar comment a few days ago which I’m expanding on here, but looking to be involved in the actual development of AIs is very risky. These are then organizations that will have incredible scrutiny from regulators and the public and grapple with the massive ethics issues of developing digital intelligences. They are the “face” companies. But to own a piece of the “second companies” — the industries that will pop up from the disruption — that’s where the real money will be made. And it’s primarily because the optics of making trillions inside of an AI creating business is essentially untenable investor risk. It’s also just common sense to spread your risk as an investor. In my mind OpenAI has always been the “profit limited” generator of the change. It’s the lamb not the wolf. Owning a stake in OpenAI itself isn’t important. Creating the change is. Owning stakes in the companies that will ultimately capture and harvest the profits of the disruption caused by OpenAI is where profits are made. And it’s such a massive disruption you don’t even have to be that close to the source, though it helps. OpenAI can’t become a profit center while it disrupts all intellectual work and digitizes humanities future: those optics are not something you want to be attached to. There is no flame retardant suite strong enough to survive politically or take profits ethically. Now the real issue is whether you should be developing the technology with such incredible disruption and be able to position to take profits at all. But ethics are a side concern and the system we are in clearly isn’t prepared to grapple with the impact properly, other than to catalog people for minimum survival incomes. Even now while corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming, most people on Earth are not sharing in the bounty. And personally, I don’t think we can rely on the architects of disruption to create a sustainable and ethical future that’s fair for everyone no matter how fair or ethical their declared intentions. Even if they are morally pristine they are mortal, and that kind of concentrated wealth and power is a recipe for incredible, unstoppable tyrants.
deleted 3y ago
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zoogeny 3y ago
For some reason this reminds me of the olden days of Railroad Tycoons. Like those old timey movies where a bunch of land from the common folks is bought out for super cheap prices because the guys building the railways know where the stations are going to be placed. This also helps make sense to me why so many SV types were jumping to the defense of Altman on X/Twitter. They are probably salivating at the potential investments that were in back-room discussions involving Altman and feel the need to prop those up. For example, there may have been literal billions agreed upon in principle but not yet signed amongst several ventures. The tarnishment of his reputation could scuttle much more than OpenAI if this report is correct. If I was a pure AI researcher and my entire goal in life was to build AGI - I would loathe to be in a company that was engaging in such shenanigans. I'm not for or against either side in this dispute but I can totally appreciate why each side would want to retain control of what has been built so far. It is just there is a fork in the road here and only one vehicle.
- manmal 3y ago
  This is still common practice in places where zoning is not fully developed. Politicians (or their friends) buy cheap ag land, and a few years down the road it’s rezoned and politician can sell it for massive profit. In my country there‘s a me-too like cascade happening right now around this very issue.
- MrMan 3y ago
  [dead]
programmarchy 3y ago
People have mentioned this as a conflict of interest with OpenAI, but worse is that it runs afoul of the CHIPS Act. Biden administration has made it clear that the semiconductor supply chain is a national security interest. Microsoft is also in big trouble with the US Gov with their looming $30B tax liability and their gross negligence regarding Azure [1] leading to the US getting hacked. OpenAI being hosted there could be seen as yet another liability to US security. My bet is that this OpenAI story originated much higher than the board of directors… [1] https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/microsoft-cloud-security-blasted-for-its-culture-of-toxic-obfuscation/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/microsoft-cloud-sec...
reilly3000 3y ago
Given the mass amounts of saber rattling about Taiwan and TSMC, I have to wonder how a deal with the Saudis would play out from a geopolitical perspective.
eigenvalue 3y ago
I really don’t see the issue if OpenAI makes rational buying decisions for its hardware. As long as they aren’t paying a premium in terms of model generations per dollar or per mwh versus Nvidia’s GPUs, it seems obviously a net good thing for OpenAI given how much of a gating factor hardware availability has gotten to be. Also, they know all their own special tricks that could be implemented directly in hardware to dramatically reduce energy consumption or performance per dollar, and might not want to tell Nvidia all that stuff. Sam is already so rich, and he really doesn’t strike me as being primarily motivated by personal financial gain at this point. I just can’t see this all being some ploy to extract money from OpenAI by forcing them to buy his own company’s hardware at unfavorable prices.
- jsnell 3y ago
  > Also, they know all their own special tricks that could be implemented directly in hardware to dramatically reduce energy consumption or performance per dollar, and might not want to tell Nvidia all that stuff. You seem to be saying that the good reading of the situation is that Altman will take OpenAI's internal secrets (so secret they don't even want to tell their existing chip suppliers) to his own side hustle. But that's not actually good; in fact it's exactly the kind of thing that a CEO should not be doing. If OpenAI wanted to influence non-Nvidia chip makers into building the perfect next-generation chip, not one of them that would turn down that call. > Sam is already so rich, and he really doesn’t strike me as being primarily motivated by personal financial gain at this point. The man started a fucking cryptocoin just a couple of years ago. That doesn't exactly scream "not motivated by personal financial gain". > I just can’t see this all being some ploy to extract money from OpenAI by forcing them to buy his own company’s hardware at unfavorable prices. Agreed on this. The company would never ship anything for OpenAI to buy. But what he appears to be doing is trading on the OpenAI name to hustle stupid money into the biggest money pit since WeWork.

338 points by ryzvonusef 3y ago

[dead]

> Altman had been traveling to the Middle East to fundraise for the project, which was code-named Tigris, the people said. The OpenAI chief executive officer planned to spin up an AI-focused chip company that could produce semiconductors that compete against those from Nvidia Corp., which currently dominates the market for artificial intelligence tasks. Altman’s chip venture is not yet formed and the talks with investors are in the early stages, said the people, who asked not to be named as the discussions were private.

ryzvonusef 3y ago
However apparently even this wasn't the reason for Sam's ouster... so the question remains, what was?
- himaraya 3y ago
  Not exactly. Ilya allegedly disliked Sam fundraising side hustles off his profile at OpenAI. It sounds like a confluence of factors precipitated the ousting.
  - cactusplant7374 3y ago
    It seems more likely Illya is a less wrong type of person that saw Sam as a threat to his vision. He doesn't like the commercialization aspect where as Sam would prefer OpenAI didn't go broke.
    - himaraya 3y ago
      Well, Sam & Greg allegedly sidelined Ilya shortly before all this went down. It seems like Ilya felt he had to make a drastic move.
    - juliangoldsmith 3y ago
      "Not going broke" is a bit different from announcing an "open" venture, then, once it's successful, doing everything possible to make it closed and stifle competition (through regulatory capture).
      - tyrfing 3y ago
        > once it's successful, doing everything possible to make it closed and stifle competition (through regulatory capture). Half of the current 4-member board is also involved with GovAI, which is dedicated to AI safety research and advocating regulation. Aren't they more likely to think that OpenAI has been extremely reckless in publicly releasing models and research like they have?
        juliangoldsmith 3y ago
        They weren't the ones who went before Congress, asking for regulations that would prevent new startups taking root. (Something like a minimum of 25 employees dedicated to moderation against bias, as I recall. That would be trivial for OpenAI, but impossible when on a budget.)
  - KennyFromIT 3y ago
    Can someone explain how it's ethical to be working on multiple things like this at the same time (e.g. OpenAI, AI chips, that eye orb crypto thing), but the benefits of each not accruing to the other investors, only to that individual? I've always had similar questions about folks like Musk and Dorsey. Is it simply lack of proper governance? Is it something written into their contacts? Is this just a Silicon Valley thing? I can only imagine that a lot of people would like to work on many side projects, but their employment agreements forbid it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - civilitty 3y ago
      > I've always had similar questions about folks like Musk and Dorsey. Is it simply lack of proper governance? Is it something written into their contacts? Is this just a Silicon Valley thing? I can only imagine that a lot of people would like to work on many side projects, but their employment agreements forbid it. Folks like Musk and Dorsey have a lot more leverage when they're negotiating their contracts but when it comes to public companies, they get sued all the time over their decisions. The lawsuits are just very drawn out, boring affairs that normally get settled during discovery, before any details actually become public so we don't often hear much about them from the media. Musk was sued by tons of people over self dealing when Tesla bought SolarCity, for example.
    - voxic11 3y ago
      How do you know the benefits are accruing to only altman? I thought he claims to have no stake in OpenAI.
      - itronitron 3y ago
        >> I thought he claims to have no stake in OpenAI. That's good, then he probably won't mind not being there.
    - swatcoder 3y ago
      It’s “ethical” in that it’s broadly accepted, and it’s accepted because those CEO’s are usually talented dealmakers that deliver huge opportunities to the companies they lead. It’s not new or unique to Silicon Valley. You can see these personalities pop up in commercial and political dealmaking throughout pretty much all of history. You can get away with a lot when you’re effective.
throwoutway 3y ago
Using your celebrity status as CEO of a non-profit to raise money for multiple related for-profits does seem like you may be more dedicated to personal financial motivations than that of the non-profit's mission and charter. No indication this was the trigger event, but reasonable that the board took notice of all these things. Even viewing this in the best possible, most innocent light, it still looks bad and Sam should have known better.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  he wasn't CEO of a non-profit. He was CEO of the for-profit OpenAI company.
  - throwoutway 3y ago
    Do you know where that's documented? All reporting seems to indicate otherwise and all the digging i did confirmed he was CEO of the non-profit too. For example: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/sam-altman-is-out-as-openais-ceo/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/sam-altman-is-out-as-opena...

kvee 3y ago

https://archive.is/3LaJF https://archive.is/3LaJF

dontupvoteme 3y ago

This is pretty much directly in violation of OpenAI's charter, not to mention how concerning it is to have a CEO putting so much effort into side hustles. I'm not surprised the board had to act.

ganzuul 3y ago
> I'm not surprised the board had to act. A watchdog sounded an alert.
RobertDeNiro 3y ago
Why is it violation?
NOWHERE_ 3y ago
How is this violating OpenAI‘s charter? If they really want to ensure that ensure that AI benefits all of humanity they have to keep it affordable to everyone. Scaling out of expensive GPUs, and making the service cheap and therefore generally available to more humans sounds sensible.
- theptip 3y ago
  The obvious argument is that since we have not solved alignment, accelerating AGI is unsafe. I’d wager that is the general line of reasoning from Sutskever and the board. “We are growing quickly enough and a GPU shortage gives everyone more time to catch up on safety research” seems like a logically consistent position to me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
crazygringo 3y ago
Can you point to what's in violation? I don't see anything at all. And "side hustles" are not inherently concerning at all. There are quite a number of well-known tech CEO's running multiple companies at once. The only things that matter are a) that the board is aware and feel like they're paying the right amount for the proportion of the CEO's time that they're getting, and b) that they don't involve a conflict of interest. (And generally speaking, being a potential supplier for your company isn't a conflict -- to the contrary, it's a pattern that's been successfully followed before.)

siva7 3y ago

I have the feeling that hard times are coming for the kumbaya type of ai researcher at BigCo who prefers to openly share all research, doesn’t care about commercialisation and wants to slow down the ai train behind curtains for safety considerations after the openai fiasco.

CalChris 3y ago
... while pulling down $500K/yr.
voz_ 3y ago
This is a stupid straw man. At its most generous face value, you’ve said nothing. At worst you insulted a large swath of people.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
It seems that startup money has poisoned this culture anyway. Every week, I see papers come out that are not necessarily fraudulent, but are contorting themselves to toot their own horn for yet another framework or GPT-4 beating finetune. You can't trust the ML papers anymore.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  It's a failure mode for arxiv, I feel.
  - gryn 3y ago
    how ? I thinks it's doing what it seeking to do. a place for pre-publications to be shared. as far I know arxiv is not a journal. it doesn't reject papers and never intended to do so. you can find many almost crackpot (meta)physics theories in it. you only need to have someone already on the platform to invite to be able to publish. the only rejection criteria seems to be that your paper need to be related to the scientific/academic world (ex not your grandma's cookie recipe)
    - 3y ago

jpollock 3y ago

I thought I saw somewhere that OpenAI was looking at their own chip project? [1] If Altman had been working in parallel to form a startup, that would have raised conflict of interest problems. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-exploring-making-its-own-ai-chips-sources-2023-10-06/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-e...

himaraya 3y ago

> On Sunday, a person familiar with the board stood by the board’s explanation on Friday that cited candor. This person said there was no one precipitating incident but rather a mounting loss of trust over communications with Altman. The person declined to offer examples. https://www.wsj.com/tech/openai-trying-to-get-sam-altman-back-4b728049 https://www.wsj.com/tech/openai-trying-to-get-sam-altman-bac... > According to one person with knowledge of the situation, Altman had been attempting to raise as much as $100bn from investors in the Middle East and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to establish a new microchip development company which could compete with Nvidia and TSMC. Those efforts, in the weeks before his sacking, had caused concerns on the board, this person said. https://www.ft.com/content/466bf00a-1e76-4255-be2b-3c1d37508031 https://www.ft.com/content/466bf00a-1e76-4255-be2b-3c1d37508... > Two days after OpenAI’s board of directors fired him, Sam Altman is expected to join executives at the company’s San Francisco headquarters Sunday as they push the board to reinstate him, Interim CEO Mira Murati told staff on Sunday morning, according to people with knowledge of the situation. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-execs-invite-altman-brockman-to-headquarters-in-push-to-reinstate-them https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-execs-invite-...

voisin 3y ago
> This person said there was no one precipitating incident but rather a mounting loss of trust over communications with Altman. Yet it was apparently so time sensitive that there was no time for discussion with key stakeholders. This board appears to have been run by the keystone kops.
- medler 3y ago
  There are no key stakeholders other than the board itself
  - bmitc 3y ago
    And the board members aren't financial stakeholders. There's really nothing they have to gain from this, which implies that their decision was based on facts rather than some power play.

23B1 3y ago

"...according to people familiar with the matter." "...said the people, who asked not to be named as the discussions were private." "...a representative [...] did not immediately respond to a request for comment. OpenAI, SoftBank and Mubadala declined to comment." sigh

mistermann 3y ago
Welcome to Planet Earth, Western Hemisphere, 2023. Please enjoy your stay!

shmatt 3y ago

And the funniest part is OpenAI has been refusing to hire remotely. That’s their right, but I wonder how many office days a week Sam was there with all of his other shenanigans OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the remote work ‘experiment’ was a mistake—and ‘it’s over’ https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-work-mistake-return-to-office/amp/ https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-... Tell me more, Person with 7 jobs, about how all work needs to be done from the office

airstrike 3y ago
I'm 100% in favor of remote work... but presumably their job postings weren't for the CEO role (or at least not then)
teekert 3y ago
Offices are for (human) resources, where they are neatly herded and monitored and managers can look at the office every now and then and enjoy the sight of toiling crowds. It's not for the elites.
leosanchez 3y ago
from: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/chatgpt-maker-sam-altman-says-era-of-remote-work-is-over-380090-2023-05-04 https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/chatgpt-m... > He further added that OpenAI’s some of the best talents are working remotely. He said, "some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don't let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don't like the open air fentanyl markets either.”
gkoberger 3y ago
I've been to the OpenAI office once, and saw Sam sitting on a couch working. This is obviously just a single data point, so who knows.
- shmatt 3y ago
  Could have been on a WorldCoin zoom though

renegade-otter 3y ago

So, even if the board was justified in its actions (quite possible), the way in which they have gone about it will be studied for years as what not to do. This was bush league level of PR mistakes and miscommunication. And the fact that OpenAI is a total $90B juggernaut of a company made this amateur hour so much worse.

lolinder 3y ago
Alternatively, the board is up against someone who is very good at spinning any story in their favor. They could come off as amateurish when they're up against someone as charismatic as Sam Altman, but it's unlikely that very many boards could have done better given the circumstances.
- vikramkr 3y ago
  I mean, waiting 30 minutes to not release it before market close and pissing off Microsoft is a very obvious thing that it's still staggering that they didn't handle correctly. Immediately pissing off your biggest financial supporter is pretty unforgiveably incompetent
  - himaraya 3y ago
    Not that different from releasing the news on a Friday after-hours, honestly. Microsoft would get pissed off by the shift from profit-seeking either way.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Exactly. So much of the commentary surrounding this is assuming that the board is motivated to act like the board of a startup, and therefore what they've done is amateurish because it would kill a startup. But the remaining members of the board are all very clearly not invested in OpenAI becoming an insanely profitable company—they're on the board of a nonprofit, in charge of the mission and the charter, not in charge of maximizing profit. I'm sure that there are things they could have done better even with that context, but I think most of the confusion stems from people on here not understanding the motivations of these people.

bartwr 3y ago

This sounds like an insane conflict of interest. CEO of a company (or worse, non-profit!) and a member of its board creates another, for-profit company (in partial secrecy/lack of transparency) that the non-profit would eventually pay a lot of money. This is almost a fraudulent level of siphoning non-profit money. Btw, this is hilarious - regular employees have non-competes in their contracts (sometimes void/illegal, depending on the local jurisdiction) and breaching them is an immediately fireable offense (sometimes leading to more severe consequences). You work on a small thing on the side? Better be careful, ask your manager/HR, risk it getting taken over by the company (luckily, IIUC this part is mostly illegal now in all jurisdictions that "matter" for tech). But sitting on multiple boards where you have much more room and possibilites for creating conflicts of interest and damaging the company? All fine and common!

philistine 3y ago
AND a complete Moby Dick move. You're going to suddenly get up and compete with all the chip designers and beat them at their job? Computer chips are literally the most complex products in the world. It is an astonishing development that the most profitable company in the world was able to make chips, let alone chips that beat Intel and Nvidia in some key metrics. It took Apple more than a decade of shipping chips in phones to be able to move up to desktop-class. The board was right to get rid of a guy who would rather hunt a white whale than do his job.
cma 3y ago
I think Altman hails from a kind of hustle culture that may not go great with AI safety: >I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this: > "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious. > We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day. > We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract." > I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 The crypto WorldCoin thing is probably a bigger example.

TekMol 3y ago

The project is intended to rival Nvidia Are Nvidia chips also produced in Taiwan by TSMC? And would this new project be the same, using chips made by TSMC? Or would this be a diversification away from TSMC?

pk-protect-ai 3y ago
You can't use the same chips as Nvidia without licensing them. Creating a new type of GPU/TPU is a complex endeavor that involves much more than just a single chip.
djbusby 3y ago
All my reads of the rumors makes me think it's new fabs, chips and facilities and labs and all that.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  Perhaps that's what they are selling, but ASML lead times are many years-long. It sounds to me like a WeWork/Softbank-style heist: taking advantage of those who have more money than sense under cover of the current LLm/AI hype.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  If that's so, then $100B won't be enough by a long shot.

yieldcrv 3y ago

btw, this is only controversial because the board chose to make it controversial there is nothing “worse” about it because OpenAI is a non-profit and would likely contract with this venture the regulations against this kind of thing simply require A) disclosure, for potential future donors B) low thresholds of ownership to avoid self dealing regulations, which all VC backed companies are compliant with due to share dilution the secret behind quick impressive fundraises that launder founder’s reputations into legendary status is that their non profits are investors as the “friends and family” or “lead investor”, and then outside investors follow suit and that reduces the non profit and the founder’s ownership percentages below noncompliant levels. (This isn’t really a game that people can organically play. You either have deep pools of capital you control, or you don’t.)

mikerg87 3y ago

When I see this. I am reminded of the quote from Alan Kay: People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

CamperBob2 3y ago
Counterpoint: when has that advice ever led to anything but a slow-motion train wreck?
- Hackbraten 3y ago
  Counterexample: https://oxide.computer https://oxide.computer
  - latchkey 3y ago
    Too early.

charlie0 3y ago

This is my take, Altman was fired because there was no other choice. OpenAIs charter is fundamentally incompatible with the hypercapitalist model and its believers. I'm sure the board tried to dissuade Sam from going certain path, but being an SV capitalist, there was no way to dissuade him. Given his own level of power and what I think was a superior hand, he ignored the board. At the point, the board really only had one move left, which was to fire him. I don't think it was the wrong move for the board, but they way it was done it really the big issue here.

mikeg8 3y ago
My counter: Altman is correctly aware that the the hyper capitalist path is the most probable path to creating an AGI, as the amount of capital/investment for the compute/architecture will be massive. Vertically integrating with hardware seems very logical to solve a technical problem as big as AGI. The entire charter becomes moot without AGI and the current path of relying on outside funding (Microsoft) and suppliers (nvidia) only makes their overall mission more difficult.
- charlie0 3y ago
  Their current model allows for hypercapitalism with constraints and has been successful. They still raised billions. Remains to be confirmed what happened behind the scenes, but it possible Sam wasn't honest with these dealings. The correct way to have gone about this was to setup that hardware co under the the same umbrella as OpenAI co. Sam is playing 3d chess here and the board has to fold or make their play, even if their hand isn't great.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

akamaka 3y ago

I’m surprised that nobody has brought up that Altman was busy this summer dumping his nuclear startup Oklo onto the public market via a SPAC. He seems to be a talented fundraiser and dealmaker and not so much of a singleminded visionary who wants to spend the next decade perfecting the details of AGI. Maybe the right place for him is focusing on his next few startups.

Solvency 3y ago
He literally founded a defunct social network and then hung out in YC world before falling into AI at the right time to raise money. There isn't a single element of magic or secret sauce to Sam Altman in the AI space. So yeah. Have him mess around in more startups and raise cash for them.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  I think he's also talented at assembling great teams. He has a deep personal network of incredibly talented people to draw from. It's really hard to pull the right people together and sweet talk them into walking away from all the other incredible things they're working on, but it might be the single most important thing that an executive at a new, growing company has to do.

roschdal 3y ago

Imagine the General Artificial Intelligence system created by Sam Altman with billions of Saudi Arabian oil dollars. Allah Akbar and Jihad as core values. Truely an apocalyptic AI system. AI Technological singularity with Islamic petrodollars.

ETHisso2017 3y ago
Imagine Allah.ai gets to AGI, and the first thing it does is say "the House of Saud is haram"

warthog 3y ago

Don't know if it is a conflict or not but I think he should do it. The dude knows the problems blocking advancement more than anybody else. I am surprised everyone thought he would do another LLM company. Do the chips, drop the prices, make it cheaper to develop AI => then he can return to AI software if he wants though I highly doubt it

bitcharmer 3y ago
From what I understand Altman is a business person and not an engineer. Can someone explain to me why everyone is freaking out about his departure? A salesman is gone, who cares?
- jorl17 3y ago
  I am first and foremost an engineer (I’m also the CTO of a very small startup studio and, so, also do a lot of business-y things). I traditionally despise “we are all a big family” work culture. Nonetheless, I think it’s foolish to not understand the power of people with the right charisma and driving force. The halo effect, the reality distortion field, whatever you wanna call it, is quite real. It makes people go above and beyond. Some people are just very good at this, it’s almost innate to them. I’m not saying we should glorify them or not hold them accountable, but to think that a business person leaving, as opposed to an engineer, is not grounds to “freak out” is, to me, a bit naive. I have had the pleasure of working with business people just like that. Very little engineering background, but they were born leaders and motivators. Just like on a smaller scale you can get the same vibe from certain engineers. Those guys and gals that make you feel like you’ll pull through no matter what. Seems to me like Sam Altman has that kind of vibe. For better or worse, he drives people! We often forget that it is people that build software. Not algorithms or robots. And who moves the people to build that software and to never give up? Other people, leaders — engineers or not.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    What am I missing here: Sam Altman has zero charisma or cool factor. Every talk I've seen him in, he comes off as lethargic and sluggish. I get zero sense of passion or rallying drive around the hype of AI from him. Maybe he's good at fudging numbers to a specific set of people in a private room, but as a "reality distorter" for the masses he seems like a joke.

davesque 3y ago

Maybe I'm crazy here, but why would this be a problem? Assuming Altman still had enough time to perform his duties as OpenAI's CEO, what's wrong with developing other businesses that might help OpenAI lower its costs and achieve its goal of broadening access? One concern I could see is the source of funding. But OpenAI's COO is on record saying that Altman's firing had nothing to do with "...anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices." So that seems to indicate they wouldn't have cared. Having a really hard time unpacking all this. This article is very speculative.

orik 3y ago

> Adam D’Angelo is working on ChatGPT competitor Poe. > Helen Toner & Tasha McCauley are working with OpenPhilanthropy/Anthropic on GovAI board (former board member Holden Karnofsky left when his wife started to get involved with Anthropic) These seem like much larger conflicts of interest (working with direct competitors) than working on a company that one day this company might want to purchase a product from. The board was anemic, lost people and didn’t replace them, and then was small enough that you could fire the chairman of the board and then remove the CEO in a friday night massacre. https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

swatcoder 3y ago
Those conflicts disappear when you look at the OpenAI nonprofit through its aspiration to steward safe AGI no matter where it arises. It’s meant to transcend specific interests and look more like a technocratic standards body, like an IEEE precursor for AI, than a corporation seeking a private edge. It should have representation of diverse interests. And that’s exactly why its ownership of an apparent VC rocketship in its profit-making entity was becoming so problematic. Suddenly, it’s critically important transcendence and independence was being threatened by its subsidiary’s outsized and rapid success. It’s really important to keep in mind that the OpenAI board represents fundamentally different interests than those of the subsidiary developing and selling ChatGPT products. That they may have murdered the latter is not necessarily an accident or mistake.
tomComb 3y ago
Yes, those are conflicts , but that’s with board members which is a very different thing that having conflicts with the CEO.

chucke1992 3y ago

I don't really buy into - though of course it could happen. But the way the board moved - extremely fast - tells me that there is more to it.

davidham 3y ago

This whole episode gives the lie to this concept of building the company for the good of humanity. The real players here care about humanity about as much as Elon Musk does. Altman has the power because he can make (or lead others to make) a thing that’s worth billions of dollars. All this nonprofit org chart craziness and good of humanity is horseshit and always was. Safety, justice, corporate governance, the law generally, effect on the environment, will always be second to AI’s capacity to generate money for those who make it.

neonate 3y ago

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/altman-sought-billions-ai-chip-173747741.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/altman-sought-billions-ai-chi...

sashank_1509 3y ago

This is honestly completely fine, and I don’t understand how people can think this is a conflict of interest? NVIDIA has the most ridiculous monopoly on GPU’s right now. Their RTX4090 is really fast and would be great for clusters but NVIDIA software driver locked it from sending data at high speed to other GPU’s that prevents it from being used in clusters. This is not a one off thing, NVIDIA regularly does stuff like this to piss off consumers but we are at the mercy of buying NVIDIA chips and making it a trillion dollar company. There were reports that the H100 (latest and fastest known AI chip from NVIDIA) costs only 3000$ to make, while it is sold for 30,000$. Everyone is desperate to add some competition to this industry. If I were CEO of OpenAI even I would be desperate to create another chip to compete with NVIDIA and end this resource reliance. It’s not obvious that this effort should be started within OpenAI. It may turn out to be a distraction for a startup doing really well, many large companies with much more money to spend have spent huge resources building their own chips (TPU’s, Tesla DOJO, Intel Arc) and still NVIDIA is Uber dominant. I think it makes complete sense to start it outside of OpenAI. It would be a conflict of interest, only if: 1. The chip is of poor quality and Sam Altman forces OpenAI to buy it anyways to enrich himself. I think the possibility of this happening is close to 0, everything I’ve seen and heard of Sam doesn’t make it seem like he’s someone who would do something like this. That said we are right now 2-3 years away optimistically from such a chip being developed, it’s too early to level any conflict of interest allegations! As am ML practitioner I for one strongly welcome Sam Altmans Chip startup, just as I welcome MS building their own chip, Teslas Dojo, Google TPUs and anyone else who wants to challenge NVIDIA

latchkey 3y ago
> There were reports that the H100 (latest and fastest known AI chip from NVIDIA) costs only 3000$ to make These sorts of comparisons are silly. If it was only $300, then everyone would have made them. It would be made and sold at the local BestBuy. The reality is that it costs a lot more than that. R&D, Fab, etc... plus the chassis it goes into...

happytiger 3y ago

I made a similar comment a few days ago which I’m expanding on here, but looking to be involved in the actual development of AIs is very risky. These are then organizations that will have incredible scrutiny from regulators and the public and grapple with the massive ethics issues of developing digital intelligences. They are the “face” companies. But to own a piece of the “second companies” — the industries that will pop up from the disruption — that’s where the real money will be made. And it’s primarily because the optics of making trillions inside of an AI creating business is essentially untenable investor risk. It’s also just common sense to spread your risk as an investor. In my mind OpenAI has always been the “profit limited” generator of the change. It’s the lamb not the wolf. Owning a stake in OpenAI itself isn’t important. Creating the change is. Owning stakes in the companies that will ultimately capture and harvest the profits of the disruption caused by OpenAI is where profits are made. And it’s such a massive disruption you don’t even have to be that close to the source, though it helps. OpenAI can’t become a profit center while it disrupts all intellectual work and digitizes humanities future: those optics are not something you want to be attached to. There is no flame retardant suite strong enough to survive politically or take profits ethically. Now the real issue is whether you should be developing the technology with such incredible disruption and be able to position to take profits at all. But ethics are a side concern and the system we are in clearly isn’t prepared to grapple with the impact properly, other than to catalog people for minimum survival incomes. Even now while corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming, most people on Earth are not sharing in the bounty. And personally, I don’t think we can rely on the architects of disruption to create a sustainable and ethical future that’s fair for everyone no matter how fair or ethical their declared intentions. Even if they are morally pristine they are mortal, and that kind of concentrated wealth and power is a recipe for incredible, unstoppable tyrants.

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zoogeny 3y ago

For some reason this reminds me of the olden days of Railroad Tycoons. Like those old timey movies where a bunch of land from the common folks is bought out for super cheap prices because the guys building the railways know where the stations are going to be placed. This also helps make sense to me why so many SV types were jumping to the defense of Altman on X/Twitter. They are probably salivating at the potential investments that were in back-room discussions involving Altman and feel the need to prop those up. For example, there may have been literal billions agreed upon in principle but not yet signed amongst several ventures. The tarnishment of his reputation could scuttle much more than OpenAI if this report is correct. If I was a pure AI researcher and my entire goal in life was to build AGI - I would loathe to be in a company that was engaging in such shenanigans. I'm not for or against either side in this dispute but I can totally appreciate why each side would want to retain control of what has been built so far. It is just there is a fork in the road here and only one vehicle.

manmal 3y ago
This is still common practice in places where zoning is not fully developed. Politicians (or their friends) buy cheap ag land, and a few years down the road it’s rezoned and politician can sell it for massive profit. In my country there‘s a me-too like cascade happening right now around this very issue.
MrMan 3y ago
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programmarchy 3y ago

People have mentioned this as a conflict of interest with OpenAI, but worse is that it runs afoul of the CHIPS Act. Biden administration has made it clear that the semiconductor supply chain is a national security interest. Microsoft is also in big trouble with the US Gov with their looming $30B tax liability and their gross negligence regarding Azure [1] leading to the US getting hacked. OpenAI being hosted there could be seen as yet another liability to US security. My bet is that this OpenAI story originated much higher than the board of directors… [1] https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/microsoft-cloud-security-blasted-for-its-culture-of-toxic-obfuscation/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/microsoft-cloud-sec...

reilly3000 3y ago

Given the mass amounts of saber rattling about Taiwan and TSMC, I have to wonder how a deal with the Saudis would play out from a geopolitical perspective.

eigenvalue 3y ago

I really don’t see the issue if OpenAI makes rational buying decisions for its hardware. As long as they aren’t paying a premium in terms of model generations per dollar or per mwh versus Nvidia’s GPUs, it seems obviously a net good thing for OpenAI given how much of a gating factor hardware availability has gotten to be. Also, they know all their own special tricks that could be implemented directly in hardware to dramatically reduce energy consumption or performance per dollar, and might not want to tell Nvidia all that stuff. Sam is already so rich, and he really doesn’t strike me as being primarily motivated by personal financial gain at this point. I just can’t see this all being some ploy to extract money from OpenAI by forcing them to buy his own company’s hardware at unfavorable prices.

jsnell 3y ago
> Also, they know all their own special tricks that could be implemented directly in hardware to dramatically reduce energy consumption or performance per dollar, and might not want to tell Nvidia all that stuff. You seem to be saying that the good reading of the situation is that Altman will take OpenAI's internal secrets (so secret they don't even want to tell their existing chip suppliers) to his own side hustle. But that's not actually good; in fact it's exactly the kind of thing that a CEO should not be doing. If OpenAI wanted to influence non-Nvidia chip makers into building the perfect next-generation chip, not one of them that would turn down that call. > Sam is already so rich, and he really doesn’t strike me as being primarily motivated by personal financial gain at this point. The man started a fucking cryptocoin just a couple of years ago. That doesn't exactly scream "not motivated by personal financial gain". > I just can’t see this all being some ploy to extract money from OpenAI by forcing them to buy his own company’s hardware at unfavorable prices. Agreed on this. The company would never ship anything for OpenAI to buy. But what he appears to be doing is trading on the OpenAI name to hustle stupid money into the biggest money pit since WeWork.