4 ms·

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 h

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.
  - goosinmouse 3y ago
    I feel like once the for-profit "genie" is out of the bottle, it can't be put back in. How many employees have they hired since 2018 that are the absolute best of the best of the industry? How influential was the massive equity package in their employment decisions? Personally i saw the for-profit subsidiary as a pretty decent middle ground. Obviously this action took place because the current board felt the company moved too far in the for-profit direction. While they do have the technical right and ability to fire Sam and Greg, and it was the "right" thing to do to bring the company back to the non-profit roots, do you really think the employees saw it the same way? How many hours do the board minus Ilya actually contribute in a week to OpenAI? None of the board members minus Ilya were even around before the for-profit subsidy was created so can they truly align the new OpenAI with something they didnt experience? Also an aspect i didn't really see anywhere but they had 3 board members leave in 2023. How would those board members have voted? I'd guess probably not to fire Sam but i have no clue. Also why did they not add more board members when those left? Did Sam and Greg want the board expanded again but the other 3 kept voting to not expand and to keep the power?
CPLX 3y ago
Why would a charity time staffing announcements to the hours of the stock market?
- danielbln 3y ago
  Because they don't exist in a vacuum and relationships matter, even to a charity, and not pissing off a trillion dollar company for no good reason might be beneficial.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    Why would it be beneficial if the mission of the charity is explicitly to keep AI technology from being under the influence and control of private trillion dollar companies?
    - terafo 3y ago
      I don't know, maybe because it's their main partner that have given them billions of dollars and which is literally running their servers?
      - CPLX 3y ago
        But the servers are basically there to support the product that they’re selling. What if they feel like they shouldn’t be focused on selling a product? In the 20 threads about this topic on HN over the last few days I’m really kind of blown away by the inability for people to see a different worldview than their own. Wanting a stake in hot in demand super valuable tech company that’s growing rapidly is a value judgment. Not everyone wants that. Some people actively think companies like this are harming society.
        terafo 3y ago
        > But the servers are basically there to support the product that they’re selling. Everything they do needs LOTS of compute. GPT-4 training alone took 100 million GPU hours to train. And they are constantly training new models. And even non-training research is VERY expensive[1]. Without compute that organization is as good as dead. [1] https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neurons-in-language-models https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neur...

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.
- goosinmouse 3y ago
  I feel like once the for-profit "genie" is out of the bottle, it can't be put back in. How many employees have they hired since 2018 that are the absolute best of the best of the industry? How influential was the massive equity package in their employment decisions? Personally i saw the for-profit subsidiary as a pretty decent middle ground. Obviously this action took place because the current board felt the company moved too far in the for-profit direction. While they do have the technical right and ability to fire Sam and Greg, and it was the "right" thing to do to bring the company back to the non-profit roots, do you really think the employees saw it the same way? How many hours do the board minus Ilya actually contribute in a week to OpenAI? None of the board members minus Ilya were even around before the for-profit subsidy was created so can they truly align the new OpenAI with something they didnt experience? Also an aspect i didn't really see anywhere but they had 3 board members leave in 2023. How would those board members have voted? I'd guess probably not to fire Sam but i have no clue. Also why did they not add more board members when those left? Did Sam and Greg want the board expanded again but the other 3 kept voting to not expand and to keep the power?

CPLX 3y ago

Why would a charity time staffing announcements to the hours of the stock market?

danielbln 3y ago
Because they don't exist in a vacuum and relationships matter, even to a charity, and not pissing off a trillion dollar company for no good reason might be beneficial.
- CPLX 3y ago
  Why would it be beneficial if the mission of the charity is explicitly to keep AI technology from being under the influence and control of private trillion dollar companies?
  - terafo 3y ago
    I don't know, maybe because it's their main partner that have given them billions of dollars and which is literally running their servers?
    - CPLX 3y ago
      But the servers are basically there to support the product that they’re selling. What if they feel like they shouldn’t be focused on selling a product? In the 20 threads about this topic on HN over the last few days I’m really kind of blown away by the inability for people to see a different worldview than their own. Wanting a stake in hot in demand super valuable tech company that’s growing rapidly is a value judgment. Not everyone wants that. Some people actively think companies like this are harming society.
      - terafo 3y ago
        > But the servers are basically there to support the product that they’re selling. Everything they do needs LOTS of compute. GPT-4 training alone took 100 million GPU hours to train. And they are constantly training new models. And even non-training research is VERY expensive[1]. Without compute that organization is as good as dead. [1] https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neurons-in-language-models https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neur...