7 ms·
Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message. I'm
by alsodumb 3y ago
Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message.
I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of them) who joined OpenAI recently with pure financial incentives. They'll jump to Sam's new company cause of course that's where they'd make real money.
This coupled with investors like Microsoft backing off definitely makes it fair to question the survival of OpenAI in the form we see today.
And this is exactly what makes me question Adam D'Angelo's motives as a board member. Maybe he wanted OpenAI to slow down or stop existing, to keep his Poe by Quora (and their custom assistants) relevant. GPT Agents pretty much did what Poe was doing overnight, and you can have as many as them with your existing 20$ ChatGPT Plus subscription. But who knows I'm just speculating here like everyone else.
- moralestapia 3y agoAlso, serious investors won't touch OpenAI with a ten foot pole after these events. There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya). Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single largest investor and it didn't even warrant a courtesy phone call to let them know of all this fiasco (even thought some savants were saying they shouldn't have to, because they "only" owned 49% of the LLC. LMAO). Next bit of news will be Microsoft pulling out of the deal but, unlike this board, Satya is not a manchild going through a crisis, so it will happen without it being a scandal. MS should probably just grow their own AI in-house at this point, they have all the resources in the world to do so. People who think that MS (a ~50 old company, with 200k employees, valued at almost 3 trillion) is now lost without OpenAI and the Ilya gang must have room temperature IQs.
- visarga 3y ago200k MS employees can't do what 500 from OAI can, the more you pile on the problem, the worse the outcome. The problem with Microsoft is that, like Google, Amazon and IBM, they are not a good medium for radical innovation, are old, ossified companies. Apple used to be nimble when Steve was alive, but went to coasting mode since then. Having large revenue from old business is an obstacle in the new world, maybe Apple was nimble because it had small market share.
- codebolt 3y agoMS isn't starting from scratch, it already has the weights of the worlds most powerful LM, and it's all running on their datacenters. Even without Sam, they just need to keep the current momentum going. Maybe axe ChatGPT and focus solely on Bing/Copilot going forward. It would give me great satisfaction to see the laughing stock search engine of the past decade being the undisputed face of AI over the next.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> Apple used to be nimble when Steve was alive, but went to coasting mode since then Give me a break. Apple Watch and Air pods are far and away leaders in their category, Apple's silicon is a huge leap forward, there is innovation in displays, CarPlay is the standard auto interface for millions of people, while I may question the utility the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, iPhone is still a juggernaut (and the only one of these examples that predate Jobs' passing), etc. etc. Other companies dream about "coasting" as successfully.
- Freedom2 3y ago> Apple Watch and Air pods are far and away leaders in their category, By what metric? I prefer open hardware and modifiable software - these products are in no way leaders for me. Not to mention all the bluetooth issues my family and friends have had when trying to use them.
- cloverich 3y agoMy first question to this scenario would be: Could MS provide the seed funding for Sam's next gig? As in, they bet on OpenAI, and either OpenAI keeps on keeping on or Sam's gig steals the thunder, and they presumably have the cash to play a role in both.
- moralestapia 3y agoSurprise surprise! https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122?s=46 https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122?s=46
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- didibus 3y agoBut OpenAI is a non for profit that was exploring a goal that it saw financial incentives as misaligned. It's what kind of got it achieved. Because every other company didn't really see the benefit of going straight to AGI, instead working on incremental addition and small iteration. I don't know why the board decided to do what it did, but maybe it sees that OpenAI was moving away from R&D and too much into operations and selling a product. So my point is that, OpenAI started as a charity and literally was setup in a way to protect that model, by having the for-profit arm be governed by the non-for-profit wing. The funny thing is, Sam Altman himself was part of the people who wanted it that way, along with Elon Musk, Illya and others. And I kind of agree, what kind of future is there here? OoenAI becomes another billion dollar startup that what? Eventually sells out with a big exit? It's possible to see the whole venture as taking away from the goal set out by the non for profit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 15457345234 3y agoIt's always been my observation that the actual heavyweights of any hardcore engineering project are the ones that avoid snarky lightweight platforms like twitter like the plague. I would imagine that if you based hiring and firing decisions on the metric of 'how often this employee tweets' you could quite effectively cut deadwood. With that in mind...
- icy_deadposts 3y ago[flagged]
- alsodumb 3y agoThat's not the case with AI community. Twitter is heavily used by almost every professor/researcher/PhD student who is doing learning. Ilya has one. Heck even Jitendra Malik who's probably as old as my grand father joined twitter.
- haldujai 3y agoMostly for professional purposes such as networking and promoting academic activities. Sometimes for their side startups. I rarely see a professor or PhD student voicing a political viewpoint (which is what the Sam Altman vs Ilya Sutskever debate is) on their Twitter.
- OfficialTurkey 3y agoI have never used twitter but this strikes me as a strange take at best. Many of the most brilliant and passionate engineers I've had the pleasure to work with have been massive shitposters.
- 15457345234 3y ago> massive shitposters Yes, agreed, but on _twitter_? The massive_disgruntled_engineer_rant does have a lot of precedent but I've never considered twitter to be their domain. Mailing lists, maybe.
- haldujai 3y ago> Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter Selection bias?
- alsodumb 3y agoNot if it's a big sample set. There's a guy on twitter who make a list with every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter and almost all of them did react to Sams tweet in a supportive way.
- haldujai 3y agoLarge sample =/= (inherently) representative. What percentage of OpenAI researchers are on Twitter? Follow-up: Why is only some fraction on Twitter? This is almost certainly a confounder, as is often the case when discussing reactions on Twitter vs reactions in the population.
- 15457345234 3y ago> every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter Literally the literal definition of 'selection bias' dude, like, the pure unadulterated definition of it.
- alsodumb 3y agoLike I said, if the subset of OpenAI researchers who are on twitter is very small, sure. But people in AI/learning community are very active on twitter. I don't know every AI researcher on OpenAIs payroll. But the fact that most active researchers (looking at the list of OpenAI paper authors, and tbh the people I know, as a researcher in this space) are on twitter.
- 15457345234 3y ago> But the fact that most active researchers ... are on twitter On twitter != 'active on twitter' There's a biiiiiig difference between being 'on twitter' and what I shall refer to kindly as terminally online behaviour aka 'very active on twitter.'
- threeseed 3y agoTeam Sam = Team Money. If you're an employee at OpenAI there is a huge opportunity to leave and get in early with decent equity at potentially the next giant tech company. Pretty sure everyone at OpenAI's HQ in San Francisco remembers how many overnight millionaires Facebook's IPO created.
- majikaja 3y agoMoney = building boring enterprise products, not building AI gods I would suspect
- threeseed 3y agoOpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products. Which likely most of the company was working on.
- sangnoir 3y agoOpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products under Sam Altman's leadership
- mirzap 3y agoAnd that could be a core problem. He wasn't really free to decide the speed of development. He wanted to change that and deliver faster. Obviously, they achieved something in the past weeks, so doomers pulled the plug to stop him.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bnralt 3y agoThere's a financial incentive. And there will be more opportunity for funding if you jump ship as well (it seems like OpenAI will have difficulty with investors after this). But also, if you're a cutting edge researcher, do you want to stay at a company that just ousted the CEO because they thought the speed of technology was going too fast (it's sounded like this might be the reason)? You don't want to be shackled when by the organization becoming a new MIRI.
- alex_young 3y agoThe heart tweet rebellion is about as meaningful as adding a hashtag supporting one side of your favorite conflict. Come on. “By 5 pm everyone will quit if you don’t do x”. Response: tens of heart emojis.
- alsodumb 3y agoIt wasn't a question of "will these people quit there jobs at OpenAI and get into the job market because they support Sam". It was a question of whether they'd leave OpenAI and join a new company that Sam starts with billions in funding at comparable or higher comp. In that case, of course who the employees are siding with matters.
- hipadev23 3y agoAnyone worth a shit will leave and go work with Sam. OpenAI will be left with a bunch of below average grifters.
- Gigablah 3y agoOnly on HN: your worth is tied to your choice of CEO.
- austhrow743 3y agoIn a dispute between people willing to sacrifice profit for values and those chasing the profit, why on earth would you put grifters on team values over profit?
- throwawayhno 3y agoWelcome to hn. Here it's all about money
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bertil 3y agoI'm assuming the original comment meant that the grifters would not be extended a new offer after their colleagues learned that they were not as good as their CV said at open AI.
- behringer 3y agoWhy a researcher would concern him or herself with management politics is beyond me? Particularly with a glorified sales man. Sounds like they aren't spending enough time actually working.
- bertil 3y agoMy experience of academic research is that there's a lot of energy spent on laboratory politics.
- alsodumb 3y agoIt's not just management politics - it's about money and what they want to work on. A lot of researchers like to work on cutting edge stuff, that actually ends up in a product. Part of the reason why so many researchers moved from Google to OpenAI was to be able to work on products that get into production. > Particularly with a glorified sales man > Sounds like they aren't spending enough time actually working. Lmao I love how people come down to personal attacks on people.
- vvrm 3y agoBecause a salesman’s skills complements those of a researcher. Salesman sells what the researcher built and brings in money to keep the lights on. Researcher gets to do what they love without having to worry about the real world. That’s a much sweeter deal than a micromanaging PI.
- wyager 3y agoGiven that the board coup was orchestrated by AI safetyists, it likely has a pretty direct bearing on life as a researcher. What are you allowed to work on? What procedures and red tape are in place? Etc.
- babyshake 3y agoPresumably there is some IP assignment agreement that would make it tricky for Sam to start an OpenAI competitor without a lot of legal exposure?
- zq 3y agoThe two most important to OpenAI's mission - Alec Radford and Ilya Sutskever - did not respond with a heart.