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OpenAI's Murati Aims to Re-Hire Altman, Brockman After Exits
- dkarras 3y agowill they skip the interview?
- muttantt 3y agoIf Bret Taylor manages to weasel his way into this company... it will be the most brilliant staged coup in all of history.
- gkoberger 3y ago“Interim CEO Mira Murati plans to rehire Sam and Greg, and is in talks with board rep Adam D’Angelo to do so (in what capacity is not yet finalized). However, concurrently, the OpenAI board is looking to hire its own CEO, and has reached out to two candidates that we’ve spoken to, both prominent execs” https://x.com/emilychangtv/status/1726457543629914389?s=46 https://x.com/emilychangtv/status/1726457543629914389?s=46 I can’t imagine why any CEO would want to take the job and be Sam’s boss. There’s no way that goes well.
- brianjking 3y agoGotta love that Adam D'Angelo who has a clear conflict of interest with Poe to OpenAI's GPTs release from dev day is still on the board and is now somehow the one tasked with leading this negotiation from the boards side.
- jondwillis 3y agoLmao this just clicked for me. I was reading about the many iterations of OpenAI’s board’s various conflicts of interests. But I hadn’t used Poe and didn’t realize it was basically characters/Agents.
- brianjking 3y agoThat you can charge people to use, literally almost exactly what GPTs are (minus that those are supposed to be a revenue share from ChatGPT Plus subscribers). https://poe.com/earnings_tos https://poe.com/earnings_tos
- beeyaw 3y agoThere's no conflict of interest with (what he believes to be) OpenAI's principles and his job as a board member. There was no conflict in reality either until two weeks ago.
- hindsightbias 3y agoElon might be available.
- jatins 3y agoI am surprised we haven't heard that he's trying to insert himself into this somehow
- tayo42 3y agoThe reason he left in the first place was becasue they didn't want him to run it. He was on the board years ago.
- icy_deadposts 3y agoI think there is a consensus that developing AGI is the most important thing for the continued existence of human civilization. And we know a chair or table will not stand with just two legs. In fact some believe the USA grew into the most prosperous and powerful country because its founder were wise enough to design the government with three branches, each with their own powers and checks and balances between them. We have seen that Ilya and Sam can not work together on their own. With only two natural leaders, there is no way to solve any dispute, as voting would lead to a stalemate. I believe Elon has a lot to bring to the table here, he nearly perfectly fills in the deficiencies of the other two - Elon has a strong grounding in ethics and morals (consider how many of his ventures post Paypal have been to truly benefit human society rather than just make money) which I feel could rein in Sam's tendency to ruthlessly pursue profit with questionable morality - see WorldCoin. Additionally, I think his real world experience could counter-balance some of the naivete we've seen with Ilya since his rather sudden entrance into the spotlight. I truly hope the right people consider this and can convince Elon to step up and fulfill what may be considered his true potential.
- hindsightbias 3y agoSeems strange to me Elon would prioritize Twitter over the greatest threat/opportunity in humanity of AGI to Microsoft. Seems a bit Capt. Obvious, maybe he can get Ilya. "Replying to Nadella's post, Musk then wrote, “Now they will have to use Teams!"
- acyou 3y agoI interpret the article as saying she's working on rehiring Greg as president and Sam as CEO, in "parallel" with the board looking for a different CEO.
- kijin 3y agoMira Murati is interim CEO. Her job is to find [edit: not hire] a new CEO, after which she can either resign or return to her previous role.
- PepperdineG 3y ago>I can’t imagine why any CEO would want to take the job and be Sam’s boss. There’s no way that goes well. She could be doing a move from The Expanse where she's Jim Holden and Sam is Camina Drummer (plus Adam is Chrisjen Avasarala).
- diziet 3y agohttps://archive.is/ZKvDe https://archive.is/ZKvDe
- himaraya 3y agoAs I suspected, the board never intended to resign. They knew what they started.
- aidaman 3y ago[flagged]
- JCM9 3y agoSo the board fired the CEO and appointed a new one. The new CEO now wants to hire the old CEO back but now the board doesn’t want either of them to be CEO and is trying to find a totally new CEO. What a friggin’ mess.
- nicce 3y agoShe is interim CEO, meaning that her job is to hire new CEO. And she is not hiring the old CEO into CEO role. Edit: Not to choose the CEO but do the practical things
- acyou 3y agoTo the contrary, I would prefer to interpret the article's wording as saying she's working on rehiring Sam and Greg into their old positions, presumably directly against the board's wishes.
- nicce 3y agoFrom the article: > in a capacity that has yet to be finalized Very hard to say.
- adastra22 3y agoNo it is the board’s job to hire the new ceo. The interim ceo is supposed to run the company.
- nostrademons 3y agoIt's the board's job to hire the new CEO. The interim CEO runs the company until a permanent CEO is found. The interim CEO can hire people below her (advisers, other C-suite execs) but has no authority to hire the permanent CEO.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- junofan 3y ago
- Shank 3y agoI see literally no reason for Sam to stay without a full board resignation and return to CEO. All other options are just downsides when he can walk, start Newco, and take everyone with him. He'd lose the restrictive governance model and gain full-control. I think Murati is actually on team Altman, but that just makes me think that he should walk even more. Take Murati and start Newco with the exact same org chart.
- m3kw9 3y agoLmao start from scratch when they have gpt4 already?
- consumer451 3y agoMy gut has the same feeling, but to put numbers on it, for a 1.76 trillion parameter model... - It takes 10s of millions of dollars in GPU time for training? - Curation of data to train on - Maybe 10s of thousands of man hours for reinforcement? - How many lines of code are written for the nets and data pipelines? Does anyone have any insight on these numbers?
- adastra22 3y ago100M for GPT-4 I think. They would be in a strong position to negotiate a discount on that GPU bill though.
- rubyn00bie 3y agoYes. GPT-4 is surely a drop in the hat compared to the endgame. Each generation of hardware becomes more and more capable, and hardware is what matters in the end. If anything starting fresh would likely pay off in an enormous way for him, as cash would be easy to raise, and he would be able to maintain his position indefinitely without risk of the board losing their minds. Get NVidia, AMD, or Apple to help fund the new entity and/or get some chip designers on board to push things further than OpenAI can without reaching into Microsoft’s pocket. A pocket I’m sure will be much tighter after the recent chicanery. Capital would NOT a problem at this point as it’s beyond proof of concept… A normal start up, trying to prove itself, sure, but at this point Altman has proven the idea and himself at the helm. I’d also argue the dataset they used to train it, is not that relevant long term. As the data itself was agglomerated from the internet and can be had again. Even better data perhaps because the copyright holders can become investors. You really just need the capacity to deal with it, from ingestion to legal, which is a capital problem.
- aidaman 3y agothis is by far the craziest timeline
- ratsmack 3y agoIt will make a great movie though.
- mindcrime 3y agoI hope they get David Fincher to direct, based on a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, and have Jessie Eisenberg playing sama. Andrew Garfield can play Brad, and Justin Timberlake can play the part of Ilya Sustskever. And of course the score has to be by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor.
- acyou 3y agoNow we know were Murati sits. Are they planning to fire her too? Sounds like they would rather "replace her", problem being that probably no one credible will agree to do it at this point, except maybe Ilya?
- aidaman 3y agohow many coups will it take to end this
- dang 3y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- wg0 3y agoAnd as someone lately quipped but paraphrasing: "Those who can't align six board members safely would surely align AGI safely." May the lords of linear algebra and calculus have mercy on us.
- voidfunc 3y ago[flagged]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoI think the word "alignment" is being used in 2 different senses here
- ShamelessC 3y agoThis site is so salty toward computer people.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- siva7 3y agoEspecially since one board member has through his own investments a clear conflict of interest with openai under sam’s direction, the other has a hurt ego over sam limiting temporarily resources for his research, the other two remain question marks over why they even sit in a board that directs a 90bn company. This has not much to do with ai safety but with very personal motives. A clown show of a board.
- wg0 3y agoI am not familiar with the board situation but this "AI safety" pipe dream, I have thoughts on that: We should be thankful that AGI is not possible in far future but otherwise, this AGI alignment and safety etc is just corporate speak and plain BS. A super intelligent entity that can outsmart you (to the level of DeepBlue or Alpha Go dominating the mere mortals) cannot be subservient to you at the same time. It is just as impossible as for a triangle to have more than 180 degree angles in total. That is, "alignment" is logically, philosophically and mathematically impossible. Such an entity will cleverly lead us towards its own goals playing the long game (even if spanning over several centuries or millennia) and would be aligning _us_ all the while pretending to be aligned all along so cleverly that we won't ever be noticing ever till the very last act. Downvotes are welcome but AGI that's also guaranteed to be aligned and subservient is logically impossible and this can be taken as pretty much as an axiom. PS: We are yet having trouble controlling LLMs to say things nicely or nice things safely let alone AGI.
- aliljet 3y agoAt this stage, I wonder if @sama and @gdb could just form ReOpenedAI? They could at least forgoe to pretense of the work being for some kind of greater good than profit.
- anotherhue 3y agoLibreAI surely?
- ah765 3y agoGuessing they want to rehire Altman and Brockman into their old positions, while still keeping them off the board. I think maybe the trigger was that Sam was doing some board-unfriendly moves like signing business contracts with MS without running it by the board, and they found out about this and booted him out hastily. But now they got too much backlash, and are hoping to just go back to normal, but still can't accept Sam keeping the board seats in case he tries again.
- adastra22 3y agoThere is now way the Sam and Greg are coming back unless (1) the entire board resigns, and (2) Sam, Greg, and Satya chooses the new board.
- ah765 3y agoI'd guess that Sam probably won't take the deal too, though I don't think their relations are necessarily as bad as people imagine. I think the board is just considering this option, and also looking for other people in the likely case that Sam doesn't accept. But I really doubt they'll consider personally resigning.
- adastra22 3y agoThe last 48 hours have made clear that the majority of talent at OpenAI would jump ship for Sam and Greg’s new venture, and they’d have the full support of Microsoft and OpenAI’s other investors. OpenAI would be left with a husk of a company and their chief customer and investor extraditing themselves. This is very much an existential moment. Ilya, if he is being rational, needs to choose between an OpenAI that he has some continuing involvement in, lead by Sam’s gang, or bankruptcy. He is fooling himself if he thinks there is a third path here.
- m3kw9 3y agoRehiring Altman as coffee boy?
- jimmar 3y agoThis feels like Succession, but without the nepotism. Big egos, struggle for power, lots of money on the line.
- brianjking 3y agoless good soundtrack too.
- whatshisface 3y agoBased on the million dollar salaries and the unlikelihood of there even being that many ultra-valuable people to hire, there is also quite likely a massive amount of nepotism...
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI hope they don't give Sam a ceremonial "chief evangelist" position and hire some boomer board ass kisser to be CEO
- jessenaser 3y agoProves the board just wanted power, and only power. All of the engineers, Sam, and Greg are probably entirely reasonable. If you really wanted to ensure safety like it always has been, you can express your concerns and get basically what you wanted. They will pay up the bill: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment If you disagreed on what would lead to AGI, LLM vs more components, then you can just see it play out. Same thing as the specific transformer being a light at the end of the tunnel that OpenAI pivoted to, the researchers will find what makes the AI more intelligent over time. Only if you wanted to entirely stop the AI development would this occur for you to do. But this is probably a minimal goal if you are a researcher, you want to keep researching. Instead, only if you wanted to stop OPENAI's AI, would you do this. At the end of the day, the board probably was a conflict of interest, and had no real concerns. Power grab 101.
- jessenaser 3y agoUPDATE: Mira removed as CEO as soon as showing sympathy and talks for Sam and Greg to come back. Proves the power grab argument further. There is no reason to cycles CEOs by the day, you will have no stability. At best you could say incompetent board, at worst…
- karmasimida 3y agoI will say at this point, let Sam cook, build a new company, take the people and let the board make a fool of themselves.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoIt seems like a mess -- but what would you do if you were on the board of a nonprofit that believes it's developing the world's most important technology, and you conclude that the CEO is lying to you and/or violating the charter? I don't know if there are any good options. Paul Graham says Sam is "extremely good at becoming powerful", "you could parachute him into an island of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king". I don't understand why I'm supposed to support a machiavellian power-seeker to develop the world's most important technology. I just hope he doesn't slip ice-nine into my food after I publish this comment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma... Edit: I suspect the mods of Hacker News downranked this comment, it's voted to +15 points but sits near the bottom of the page... Maybe try not to be quite so cartoonishly evil guys?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- consumer451 3y agohmm, interesting, I couldn't find that "parachute him..." part of the quote in any archived version of the article. Oh, I see, it was here: http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agohttps://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
- John7149 3y ago[flagged]
- karmasimida 3y agoInformation just reported this: Breaking: Sam Altman Will Not Return as CEO of OpenAI https://www.theinformation.com/articles/breaking-sam-altman-will-not-return-as-ceo-of-openai https://www.theinformation.com/articles/breaking-sam-altman-...
- himaraya 3y ago> Emmett Shear is New Interim CEO
- reducesuffering 3y agoHoly shit. This is huge. Emmett Shear is in the AI Existential Risk camp.
- himaraya 3y ago> My understanding is that Sam is in shock. https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101?s=61&t=6vVtFt60tCas2AOW8eVIfA https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101?...
- charlie0 3y agoOf course, this is a must from the board members. They certainly won't pick a CEO who's not in that camp.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoTechnically Sam is too, he signed this letter: https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 3y agoWow, this is not a good article. One of the main issues is the board’s responsibility and legal requirement to support the non-profit’s 501 charter. No mention of this at all in the article! At least one of the article’s authors seems to have a friendship with Sam Altman based on two interviews I have watched with them (and this is just my opinion). It seems to me like the article was written in support of Microsoft’s position, not surprising since Microsoft may be an advertiser in Bloomberg’s media. I wish Sam Altman the very best in his future projects, and as a fan of OpenAI’s work I would like to see rapid progress. However, the more I dig into this, I agree more with the board taking some strong measures to meet their legal obligations. Sorry if this sound like a rant, but I am growing tired of reading articles and then have to do the extra work of analyzing if and why I am being shown biased material. What happened to news outlets fairly telling both sides of the story.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- charlie0 3y agoI'd say Elon Musk is a top pick for the alt-ceo. He seems to share the very same concerns regarding AI as the board members that fired Sam. Of course, Musk has had backlash for Neura-link not being focused enough on safety, so who knows. I would figure that the board needs to find someone who shares their beliefs and is also a very good CEO. Wonder who else would fit the bill here.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agoSurely you realize he was on the board for the first 3 years and is the primary reason why the current board shares his concerns about AI
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pikseladam 3y agoMost of the people here don't know who founded OpenAI and why they founded it. Board in the question is the real developers of this technology and has members known to be not sold before. Ilya and his team is the core developer even we can call them inventors of this tech. While others who paid by sam can be replaced, the core teams always stated that they want "open" sourced project and not a value and profit based company. I think it is a good thing that OpenAI won't let silicon valley bully run into company. They spent whole their life on this technology and they won't let any "i'm the network guy and i'm the CEO" type of guy sell and brag about it. He even went to take Hawking Fellowship award. What? Bro, let ilya or alec take it. What a douche!
- siva7 3y agoThat’s not true. Key researchers responsible for GPT-4 have quit over the events. There is not a single “core” team. There are different sides and views on this matter.
- pikseladam 3y agoCan you share their names? GPT-4 is a larger and boarder tech of GAN and GPT-1. How GPT-4 responsible researchers are "key people". Also yes there is a core team. Ilyas team and Jan Leike. Alec and super-alignment. Ilya and alec created the core tech. others just help it to become a product. The 2 scientist quit over this was working on risk evaluation and manager? How they are key developers? --- im not saying their work is not important