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I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. If it’s true that Altman won’t re
by TechnicolorByte 3y ago
I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend.
If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this?
Will be super interesting when all the details come out regarding the board’s decision making. I’m especially curious how the (former) CEO of Twitch gets nominated as interim CEO.
Finally, if Altman goes his own way, it’s clear the fervent support he’s getting will lead to massive funding. Combined with the reporting that he’s trying to create his own AI chips with Middle East funding, Altman has big ambitions for being fully self reliant to own the stack completely.
No idea what the future holds for any of the players here. Reality truly is stranger than fiction.
- tempsy 3y agoYeah Emmett Shear seems like an odd choice if they’re worried about retention because 1) Twitch was never known to be a particularly great place to work and 2) he stepped down for some reason and not because Twitch was in an amazing place or anything at the time
- himaraya 3y agoEmmett's just a placeholder after Murati turned. I suspect he won't stay in his position for long.
- PepperdineG 3y agoRecursive Interim CEOs. Will there be a Mandelbrot set of Interim CEOs?
- sgift 3y agoThe new research focus demanded by the board in the name of safety will be an CEO AI, which will be aligned to humanities interests - the benchmark to show this will be if it does whatever the board wants. It's the only way to make sure they cannot be stabbed in the back again by a pesky human.
- mickdarling 3y agoThis particular board won’t even let ChatGPT help the CEO because they’re afraid there’s a Basilisk hiding in every response.
- dehrmann 3y agoAnd people say there aren't real-world applications to n-ary tree rebalancing.
- vintermann 3y agoI laughed, but actually I think the utility of tree rebalancing is widely appreciated!
- sanxiyn 3y agoEmmett Shear is probably the person most friendly to OpenAI board's AI safety agenda among possible candidates. Source: have a look at his Twitter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- altdataseller 3y agoOpenAI has hundreds more employees, all of whom are incredibly smart. While they will definitely lose the leadership and talent of those two, it’s not as if a nuclear bomb dropped on their HQ and wiped out all their engineers! So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me
- simultsop 3y agoWith a PR damage such this one, if they survive it will be a miracle.
- jxf 3y agoBut a number of those other employees have said they'll leave if Altman isn't rehired.
- zombiwoof 3y agoBullshit. They are not quitting
- 15457345234 3y agoThey're either not quitting or they've outed themselves as being part of a personality cult and they'll just hinder things if they're not ejected promptly.
- TechnicolorByte 3y agoEven if you don’t believe many employees would consider leaving for Altman, I find it probable that many would consider leaving for financial reasons. What will their PPUs be worth if OpenAI is seen as a funding risk?
- bartimus 3y agoMaybe not instantly. But there's a version where they don't agree with certain decisions and will now be more open to other opportunities.
- 3y ago
- ignoramous 3y ago> No idea what the future holds for any of the players here. Reality truly is stranger than fiction. Is it though? "No outcome where [OpenAI] is one of the big five technology companies. My hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big." -Adam D'Angelo
- Palmik 3y agoI guess he would prefer is the existing incumbents got even larger, or if his competitor to ChatGPT (Poe) could capture significant fraction of the market.
- _factor 3y agoCan’t beat em so join em? You’re framing this as a capitalist competition. Non-profits don’t care if their “competitors” win market share.
- chubot 3y agoWhat I think is funny is how the whole "we're just doing this to make sure AI is safe" meme breaks down, if you have OpenAI, Anthropic, and Altman AI all competing, which seems likely now. Do you really need all 3? Is each one going to claim that they're the only ones who can develop AGI safely? Since Sam left, now OpenAI is unsafe? But I thought they were the safe ones, and he was being reckless. Or is Sam just going to abandon the pretense, competing Google- and Microsoft-style? e.g. doing placement deals, attracting eyeballs, and crushing the competition. Surely that's what you need for safety?
- zombiwoof 3y agoTwo words: Laundry Buddy Sam doomed himself. Laundry Buddy is the new Clippy
- chubot 3y agoIf we do not release Laundry Buddy, that increases humanity's extinction risk
- ryanSrich 3y agoCan someone explain to me what they mean by "safe" AGI? I've looked in many places and everyone is extremely vague. Certainly no one is suggesting these systems can become "alive", so what exactly are we trying to remain safe from? Job loss?
- hsrada 3y agoDeath. The default consequence of AGI's arrival is doom. Aligning a super intelligence with our desires is a problem that no one has solved yet. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." ---- Listen to Dwarkesh Podcast with Eliezer or Carl Shulman to know more about this.
- bnralt 3y ago> Aligning a super intelligence with our desires is a problem that no one has solved yet. It's a problem that we haven't seen the existence of yet. It's like saying no one has solved the problem of alien invasions.
- mym1990 3y agoMiddle East funding and fully self reliant seem to be at odds here.
- brotchie 3y agoDon't fully believe this, but the only rational explanation I can see is that Ilya knows they have AGI. - Nuke employee morale: massive attrition, not getting upside (tender offer), - Nuke the talent magnet: who's going to want to work there now? - Nuke Microsoft relationship: all those GPUs gone, - Nuke future fundraising: who's going to fund this shit show? Just doesn't make sense.
- lazystar 3y agoburnout and sleep deprivation can lead to some pretty bad choices; thats why you want to surround yourself with people that will stand up to you when your ideas and plans suffer from too much tunnel vision. sounds like the other 3 board members were yes-men/women; the house of cards was there for a while, it seems.
- upwardbound 3y agoReminds me of the very ending of the show Silicon Valley. Crazy twist and great last two episodes of the show.
- vultour 3y agoPeople really need to stop with this AGI bullshit. They make a glorified Markov chain and suddenly they should have AGI? Self-driving cars are barely able to stay on the road after all this time, but sure, someone's hiding conscious machines in their basement.
- jumelles 3y agoThe dirty secret of the business world is that the C-suite is the most easily replaceable.
- vaxman 3y agoNo, OpenAI will not survive as a company with more than one shareholder. At the end of the day, MSFT has a fiduciary duty to its own shareholders. MSFT has set certain expectations for its own financial performance based on its agreements with OpenAI and MSFT shares traded based on those expectations. Now OpenAI has sustained a hemorrhage of its leadership that negotiated those agreements, including a public admission by OpenAI of deception in their boardroom and private talk of a potential competitor involving employees. The only question is if OpenAI will capitulate or the lawyers and supply chain will be leveraged to compel their cooperation with protecting the MSFT shareholders. MSFT has deep enough pockets to retain all of the workers. One way or another, the IP and their ops are now the property of the bank, in this case MSFT shareholders. Let’s hope nobody goes to jail by resisting what is a standard cleanup operation at this point.
- vaxman 3y ago“Sorry, we are reporting a write down of $10 billion due to potential misrepresentations of commercial intent that occurred in our OpenAI portfolio.” Things you will never hear Satya Nadella say. Way more likely he will coordinate to unify as much of their workers as he can to continue on as a subsidiary, with the rest left to go work something out with other players crazy/desperate enough to trust them.
- theptip 3y agoThe big question in my mind is the reported threat from MSFT to withhold cloud credits (i.e. the actual currency of their $10B investment). Is this true? And are they going to follow through? I don't buy for a second that enough employees will walk to sink the company (though it could be very be disruptive). But for OpenAI, losing a big chunk of their compute could mean they are unable to support their userbase and that could permanently damage their market position.
- cthalupa 3y agoThe report was that investors were talking to microsoft about the threat to withhold credits. Which does not say whether microsoft was open to the idea or ultimately chose to pursue that path.
- borissk 3y agoMS is not going to randomly withhold cloud credits, as OpenAI is going to sue them for billions of damages.
- vaxman 3y agoSo they should keep buying H100s (and H200s) and pouring billions into their own chips on the expectation that OpenAI will fulfill its contractual obligations under THESE circumstances? If they stop doing that, how long before all of Azure is busy on a money losing chat program under all new leadership that doesn’t have the same plan that was sold to MSFT?
- justcool393 3y agowas it even reported? i heard a bunch of stuff that seemed to be hypothetical guessing like "satya must be furious" that seemed to morph into "it was reported satya is furious" i've seen similar with the cloud credits thing, people just pontificating whether it's even a viable strategy.
- GreedClarifies 3y agoDon’t have twits on the board. Lesson learnt.
- yeck 3y agoWell, despite what Musk did, X (Twitter?) has still been limping along for quite a while now. While more abrupt and surprising, this doesn't seem nearly as bad as that.
- extheat 3y agoThis is far worse. OpenAI simply cannot survive without Microsoft and skeleton staff. It's not like a static codebase where you can keep the service up and running indefinitely barring bugs. Why would anyone building with the OpenAI APIs, their customers, have any faith in the company if they openly don't care about business? Working on AI is highly capital intensive, on the scale of many tens of billions of dollars. Where are they going to get that funding? How will they pay their staff? There is no way Microsoft is going to HODL after this embarrassment.
- yeck 3y agoMusk fired most of the engineers. I'd be pretty surprised if we see the level of attrition at OpenAI getting within an order of magnitude of that. We are just making predictions, though. I could be way off the mark and many more people are willing to jump ship than I imagine. As for Microsoft, if they let OpenAI go, then what? Does Google pick them up? Elon? They are still looking to invent AGI, so I'd be surprised if no one wants to take advantage of that opportunity. I'd expect Microsoft to be aware of this and weigh into their calculus.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seydor 3y agoCan microsoft buy IP from openAI? recruit their engineers? asking for a friend
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3y agoExclusive use up until pre-AGI tech.
- dehrmann 3y ago> I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. That's kinda what happened. The latest gist I read was that the non-profit, idealistic(?) board clashed with the for-profit, hypergrowth CEO over the direction to take the company. When you read the board's bios, they're weren't ready for this job (few are; these rocket ship stories are rare), the rocket ship got ahead of their non-profit goals, and they found themselves in over their heads, then failed to game out how this would go over (poor communication with MS, not expecting Altman to get so much support). From here, the remaining board either needs to either surface some very damning evidence (the memo ain't it) or step down and let MS and Sequoia find a new board (even if they're not officially entitled to do that). Someone needs to be saying mea culpa.
- sanxiyn 3y agoI am not sure why. As far as I can tell, the board doesn't need to answer to anyone.
- dehrmann 3y agoI think the diagram I saw showed they don't actually answer to MS, VCs, or employee investors? And not even that they're out-voted, they don't answer to them at all.
- sanxiyn 3y agoAs far as I can tell, this is correct.
- g42gregory 3y agoUnfortunately (or fortunately?), you always have to answer to somebody. In this board's case, they have to answer to investors, Microsoft in particular. Why? Because Microsoft can pull the money (apparently they only sent a fraction of $10Bn so far) and can sabotage the partnership deal. The OpenAI won't meet the payroll and won't be able to run the GPU farm. Microsoft already threatened to do exactly that. My suspicion is that Microsoft will do exactly that: they will pull the money, sabotage the partnership deal and focus on rebuilding GPT in-house (with some of the key OpenAI people hired away). They will do this gradually, on their own timetable, so that it does not disrupt the GPT Azure access to their own customers. I doubt that there could be a replacement for the Microsoft deal, because who would want to go through this again? OpenAI might be able to raise a billion or two from the hard core AI Safety enthusiasts, but they won't be able to raise $10s of Billions needed to run the next cycle of scaling.