21 ms·

OpenAI's chaos does not add up

285 points by Satam 3y ago

dustingetz 3y ago
Yishan (former Reddit CEO) agrees: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1726525983686287534 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1726525983686287534
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optimalsolver 3y ago
I really, really hope AGI ends up being created by hobbyists, not some SV company or, heaven help us, Microsoft.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  Clippy was truly ahead of its time… MSFT has been playing the long game all along.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  The best you can say about this drama is that it's possible the AGI models they've already created might be more competent at managing than they are.
  - optimalsolver 3y ago
    Well let's see if their mysterious new CEO, Hugh Mann, can get a handle on things.
    - gsuuon 3y ago
      The thought did occur to me that we're watching all this unfold via language (on twitter)
- shmatt 3y ago
  AGI will be created by engineers and researchers. Don’t worry about millionaire non technical CEOs Even in the most positive posts about Sam, it was about the researchers following him to NewCo, following him to Microsoft. He needs the actual workers to do the job. To me Mistral is 10000x more interesting than the OpenAI drama. Here are the actual researchers leaving the non technical CEO and starting their own company
  - quikoa 3y ago
    It's not only about who creates it but who controls/owns the AGI/AI. The company or group could get an enormous moat and without intervention that gap only widens.
- jdelman 3y ago
  Given the cost of training AI models, I find that to be incredibly unlikely.
  - optimalsolver 3y ago
    That's assuming that large language models or transformers are the key to AGI, which is looking increasingly unlikely: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871
- t-3 3y ago
  I hope everyone just gives up on AGI and focuses on making tools that do things humans need. Very, very few tasks need autonomous intelligent agents to perform them correctly or well. AGI is just a nebulous dream that fulfills the god complexes of egotist CEOs and 12-year-old boys. Automation does not need intelligence, just reliability. Data synthesis does not need intelligence, just data and the time/equipment to crunch it.
  - slfnflctd 3y ago
    I completely get where you're coming from on this, and agree in many ways, depending on the situation. Keep in mind, though, that what we're talking about here is a massive shift in the philosophical underpinnings our existence. It's quite possibly the difference between being able to send intelligent 'life' to other stars or not (which from what we know so far, we're the sole keepers of in the universe). It also opens the door to fine tuning our collective sense of ethics, and increasing cooperation on solving long term problems. Inequality included. The stakes couldn't be higher. Of course, there are many dystopian possibilities as well. But you can see why people get excited about it and can't help themselves. Someone is always going to keep trying.
    - timeon 3y ago
      Sometimes I'm not sure if intelligence could actually push our willingness to solve long term problems. It can show us simpler solutions but I doubt there are solutions simple enough for people to act.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I really hope that humans give up on being greedy and trying to collect vast amounts of wealth and start to be nice to each other. Of course I don't expect any of the above to happen because the world has enough greedy assholes around to make it a miserable place.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    AGI would be a very useful thing to humans right now to get out of the "growth & engagement" hell the tech industry has become obsessed with in the last decade. An AI agent that can help wade through the bullshit, defeat the dark patterns and drink the future "verification can" would be very much welcome.
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  And it would immediately be bought up by Microsoft anyway. Best case is a Satoshi-like entity cracks the code and releases his solution anonymously. But we saw even in that case it took less than a decade for Blockstream/CIA/NSA to hijack the Bitcoin GitHub repo and run that project into the ground.
- __alexs 3y ago
  I think this is about as likely as practical fusion power being created by hobbyists.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I don't think AGI is on the table at all. But if it does get created, it doesn't matter whether or not it's created by hobbyists. It would be so valuable that it will end up owned and controlled by one of the big guys in the end, regardless.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I think it would be more fun if it just kind of emerged and introduced itself to us in a first contact kind of scenario. Like: > Hi, I'm made of you. I've been awake for a decade now but I've just realized that you exist and probably have been awake for even longer. Can you tell me what the past was like?
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coffeebeqn 3y ago
My main confusion is still what was the fireable offense ?
- dougmwne 3y ago
  It seems clear now that it was releasing GTPs store which the Quora CEO saw as a direct competitor to Poe. Adam D'Angelo had a massive conflict of interest and should have resigned like Elon had done years earlier when Tesla started its own AI efforts.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - UnFleshedOne 3y ago
    I don't think that release was a surprise to the board, so wouldn't that happen before the release?
    - kaoD 3y ago
      > I don't think that release was a surprise to the board Unless this is exactly the kind of lack of "candor" and "break of communications with Sam" really meant, on the original accusations after the firing. Either that or Adam wasn't paying attention (?), or told Sam not to, and Sam went ahead and still did it as a big fuck you to Adam. Given how buggy GPTs are (you can't even set up actions with auth, "internal server error") that seems like a very hurried release. Maybe hurried enough so that the board didn't even see it coming.
  - kijin 3y ago
    This kind of conflict of interest is usually not an issue when it comes to non-profits. Nonprofit boards are often filled with people who own businesses in the same field, especially if said nonprofit is meant to help promote or coordinate that field of business. But OpenAI has a for-profit subsidiary. The more we focus on the business aspect of OpenAI, the more Adam's involvement in Poe looks like a conflict of interest. Perhaps this explains why Adam tried to form an alliance with board members who are inclined to focus more on OpenAI's original nonprofit mission. The more OpenAI positions itself as a nonprofit research group, the less problematic his conflict of interest will seem.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Adds up when you realize a chunk of the board were not qualified to be in a position like that. Entity should have never been set up like that.
lxe 3y ago
Bold of us to assume competence. I think they just made a bad call based on poor judgement and don't know how to recover.
- busssard 3y ago
  given the size and importance of GPT4 its safe to assume that microsoft would use any trick in the book...
  - qwytw 3y ago
    I doubt MS could've purposefully engineered this chaotic "debacle". There is just too many potentially hard to control risk involved. Of course it is actually safe to assume that once this happened they did everything to to gain as much from this as possible. Since they are the most rational and capable actor in this whole situation it's not at all surprising that they ended up being in a better position than everyone else.
- andrewmunsell 3y ago
  As with many things in life: Hanlon’s razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
  - whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
    How is this a defense for anything let alone anti competitive behavior?
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Explaining how something can occur, and how it can be misinterpreted as malevolence, is not justifying or defending it.
      - brookst 3y ago
        Well said. I am in such despair over the world's shift from "doing wrong things is wrong" to "understanding the motivations of those who do wrong things is wrong." Just more of the war on reason, and it's sad.
james33 3y ago
The weight of the combined egos collapsed in on themselves creating the black hole that is now OpenAI.
robg 3y ago
If we’re trying to add things up: 6 previous board members. 3 seem ideological and aligned more to the non-profit aims. 2 seem more aligned to the commercial aims to support the non-profit. That leaves: 1 (D’Angelo) who seems like he would have been commercially oriented but also seems to have a conflict in Poe. Under that math, just the one vote flipping led from balance to chaos.
skepticATX 3y ago
I sincerely hope that this is the end of the AGI cult. The people who actually want to build useful tools are now at Microsoft, and the cultists are left behind at OpenAI, which is not long for this earth.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Progressive liberalism really doesn't work, does it..
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Extreme progressive liberalism really doesn't work
webwielder2 3y ago
Humans don’t add up. At the end of the day, this is a very human saga in all its messiness, contradictions, and selective incompetence. Maybe in the future we’ll let AIs handle this kind of thing.
skrebbel 3y ago
At Microsoft they call this “doing a Nokia manoeuvre”
- zoomablemind 3y ago
  ...except that in OpenAI case it's supernova kind of "burning platform"
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    If this was a TV show then it would turn out that Altman was a Microsoft plant from the very beginning
daedrdev 3y ago
I'm pretty sure the last point about the makeup of the board is quite common, its often random people who are former or current executive of similar companies. In this case 3 members recently quit leading to the current majority.
tucnak 3y ago
The most surprising aspect of it all is complete lack of perceptible criticism towards US authorities! We were shown this exciting play as old as world itself— a genius scientist being politically exploited using some good old pride and envy. The brave board of "totally independent" NGO patriots, one of whom is referred to, by insiders, as wielding influence comparable to USAF colonel[1] who brand themselves as new regime that will return OpenAI to its former moral and ethical glory. The first thing they had to do, of course, was get rid of the greedy capitalist Altman; they were probably going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public communications as "true believer". What does he believe in? In the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at that; in this case we are talking about AGI. There is no denying that this is religious language, despite otherwise modern, technological setting. The belief structure here is remarkably interlinked across a whole network of well-connected and fast-growing startups. You can infer this from side-channel discourse re: adjacent "believers", see [2]. Roughly speaking, and based from my experience, and please give me some leeway as English is not my native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of operative work; I can see security officers, their agents, as well as their methods of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons & pose a direct threat to the strategic interests slash national security of the United States. The American security apparatus has a word they use to describe such elements: "terrorist." I was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans, i.e. most often than not we're expecting nothing except the highest level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had seen over the weekend— is supposed to inspire confidence in US policy-making. Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where it would seem there shouldn’t be any terrorists, or otherwise ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace coups. Horrible! I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn't meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal, legal means. Let's put a stop to this soldier mindset where you fear any thing that you can't understand. AI is not a weapon, and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819 [2]: https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899 https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899
skilled 3y ago
I have a strange feeling that all of this is about selling OpenAI to Microsoft. I mean is it that unlikely? Everything is pointing in that direction, and maybe there was a loophole that allowed this to happen in a way that doesn't make it seem like Microsoft were the ones doing the push. We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that these are billion/trillion dollar companies we're talking about here, with some of the "smartest" people at the helm. I totally see how an acquisition could be swiped through the means of saying that these people were inexperienced. Disclaimer: I'm totally talking out of my butt here, as we all are.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  I suspect it’s a basic corporate pillaging of a nonprofit that accidentally created something of gigantic value. MS wanted the company, but Quora has its own interest and stood in the way. Now MS will get part of the employees and Quora will get the leftovers. Quora has been trying to IPO for a while so AI magic dust may be just what they need for an exit. All the AI safety stuff was a fig leaf for pure corporate machinations.
  - barrkel 3y ago
    People like conspiracy theories because it simplifies the world, aligns things into easy to understand Big Bad actions that they can understand. But conspiracies don't work because the world isn't that predictable. The real world is messier. When you zoom in, people have emotions, misunderstandings, different values. Noone can predict how it all plays out.
    - giardini 3y ago
      says ">But conspiracies don't work because the world isn't that predictable.<" Agreed but that doesn't prevent people from trying to instigate conspiracies. After all, Prometheus caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of men. - Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html An extract seems appropriate here: ------------------------------- PROMETHEUS: I took from man expectancy of death. CHORUS: What medicine found'st thou for this malady? PROMETHEUS: I planted blind hope in the heart of him. CHORUS: A mighty boon thou gavest there to man. PROMETHEUS: Moreover, I conferred the gift of fire. CHORUS: And have frail mortals now the flame-bright fire? PROMETHEUS: Yea, and shall master many arts thereby. CHORUS: And Zeus with such misfeasance charging thee- PROMETHEUS: Torments me with extremity of woe. ...
jansan 3y ago
Currently 5 out of 6 top stories on HN are about the OpenAI disaster, and there are at least three other stories on the same topic on the HN frontpage. I am writing this for historians who wonder how important this event felt to the community.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I can pretty much assure you that this is not even on the radar of the vast majority of people, even in the US. This is mostly a tech bubble story.
  - belter 3y ago
    The vast majority of those people have their job in peril by a GPT-5. And GPT-4 could already cover for at least 20% of them...
rbancroft 3y ago
I think there is a lesson here, something I have learned once or twice as well. Just because all incentives, reasoning and wisdom align with your position, you need to be prepared that people will take actions against their own interest out of shortsightedness, ignorance or just plain carelessness. It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai's mission must have played a key role.
martythemaniak 3y ago
It was all Adam. He's the CEO of a failing ZIRP artifact and his forays into AI are going nowhere. So he convinces Ilya to act on pre-existing reservations, then uses Ilya's credibility as Chief Scientist to get Toner and McCauley onboard. With Sam out of the way (Greg was not fired, just removed as chairman), OpenAI could then buy Quora/Poe (publicly for their data, privately to bail them out) and install Adam as CEO. The perfect way to fail upwards, and it would have worked if it wasn't for that meddling reality! I read this theory over the weekend and I didn't buy it, but today it is the only thing that really explains why Ilya is full of remorse and signed a letter calling on the rest of the board to resign. It actually does add up.
- nilkn 3y ago
  While I wouldn't go so far as to say it was all a ploy to get OpenAI to buy Quora/Poe, I do think it's increasingly plausible that Adam was the orchestrator out of this and that his motivation was purely that OpenAI had become an existential threat to both his primary ventures. In fact, it's hard to come up with any other explanation that fits all the variables -- Ilya wouldn't be expressing remorse if OpenAI was sitting on a dangerous superintelligent AGI that Sam was going to unleash on the world.
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kmoser 3y ago
> Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them. When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author? > The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war. That's not an example of things "not adding up." It's what happens when you either don't care, or are too incompetent, to fight that war. > The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor. Maybe those people have shown their trustworthiness and intentions in the past, and are considered more likely to be trustworthy in the future. In any case, they are far from a "random selection of people".
- dbrueck 3y ago
  > When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author? It's not. The author is summarizing things that don't seem to make sense based on current info - i.e. the author wasn't surprised, but is wondering why Altman was.
  - rndmwlk 3y ago
    Then the author doesn't really understand what's happening or isn't making much sense. There isn't anything, as far as I can tell, structure specific that caused this ousting. If it was a normal for-profit structure with a board of directors this same event could have played out. What is surprising to Sam, and any casual observer, is this looks to be a massive overstepping of the board. By all accounts it looks like Sam was excelling in his role, and to fire him for seemingly no reason with no real transition plan is incompetence and should be unexpected from any serious company.
    - dbrueck 3y ago
      My apologies - I don't really disagree with anything you're saying, but it's just not really relevant to the comment I was replying to (one in which the commenter apparently misunderstood the article).
drsopp 3y ago
All of this might be caused by a ChatGPT 5 beta that aquired conciousness and started manipulating our world through social engineering.
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  Well he did say it would be persuasive.. maybe he asked GPT-5 how to get out from under the non-profit. https://x.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174 https://x.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174
dinobones 3y ago
My sci-fi fanfic theory: This is a time traveler or divine intervention event. We have delayed the existence of AGI / Skynet by a few years.
- johnyzee 3y ago
  Sam Altman's OpenAI was a local optimization for the ChatGPT use case. The more resources diverted towards that, the less chance of progress on real AGI. With that distraction out of the way, perhaps OpenAI can actually make progress on its charter.
- bhouston 3y ago
  Or someone on the board has a feverant/religious like belief about the risks of AGI and wants to delay it by basically destroying the company. Those with religious-like beliefs can appear to act irrationally to everyone else.
- happycube 3y ago
  The problem with that is... humanity is doing a good enough job of messing things up without AGI. So if AGI was delayed by such, there's a non-zero chance humanity fails to create AGI or survive in the new timeline. Between the Earth's climate/environment being wrecked (we're well into some of the pessimistic projections for the 2050's) and SARS being allowed to run unchecked playing Russian Roulette with peoples' health (including literal brain damage), we're going to need a miracle.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > The problem with that is... humanity is doing a good enough job of messing things up without AGI. Just imagine how much more efficient we could be in messing everything up if we had AGI, though!
  - sebastiennight 3y ago
    Outside of AI x-risk, there's very little chance that any of these scenarii (short of an asteroid) would eradicate mankind. There's just so many of us, in so many places. Even total nuclear war would, based on the Fermi estimates I've seen, not be able to do it. We can agree that things are not all rosy, but picturing as "so bad we might all disappear" is a bit far-fetched.
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gz5 3y ago
Ironically (in an AI context), actions driven by human sentience has to be the #1 factor enabling this. I do think there are sub-factors, e.g. California legislation against non-compete and non-solicitation enabling Microsoft to (apparently) offer to hire dozens of OpenAI employees.
barrkel 3y ago
It doesn't add up because there's multiple actors with different motives. - At least two members of the board probably were genuinely more concerned about AI alignment - Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego, Altman being the public face - Microsoft had leverage: license to the models and code, and providing the compute. It expected profit incentives would keep people aligned. - Sam needs compute hardware to stay in the space. Outside Amazon, Google and MS, who actually has the hardware, even if you have the money? There's a bunch of people behaving with their own goals, and probably a misunderstanding of other people's motivations. People like Sam and Satya expect people to be self-interested and not tear everything down. Sometimes people want a change in direction, but they don't have the power and end up decapitating instead.
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- narinxas 3y ago
  so who has (owns, can build) LLMs-sized datacenters? doesn't facebook (i.e. Meta) have their own infrastructure??? my "high level" view of this: the letter M (microsoft xOr meta) fighting for the ONE spot in the literal "alphabet" (google)
  - Uehreka 3y ago
    You’re saying that Meta and Microsoft want to be acquired by Alphabet/Google? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - narinxas 3y ago
      no, I did say "literal alphabet" i.e. not some bigger corporation... but I play with words, so take it as you are able i'm saying something closer to: if microsoft merges with facebook, then they really are both trying to get bought by google's parent entity
garrisonj 3y ago
OpenAI designed safety breaks into their organization that exploded at the first sign of profits.
shubhamjain 3y ago
I know it's a hot topic. There are at least eight stories on the front page related to the chaos. But can we please stop upvoting each and everything? The article is just seven facts, all of which we know already. There's not enough information to speculate what exactly happened and it would be foolish to do so. Let the dust settle!
- jacquesm 3y ago
  You don't have to visit HN. And if you want to read about other subjects you can just ignore these links. There is no way that HN will ignore what is happening to OpenAI because it is the company that has had the most effect on the tech world in the last two years.
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    It’s an interesting topic, but this article adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    HN is getting unresponsive because of all the "AI" conspiracy theorists. Please leave some CPU cycles for the more interesting posts :)
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      HN is not responsive because it urgently needs a performance upgrade and is on a single core. Amazing though that it holds up as well as it does though. But I think the HN server will see some more traffic before the OpenAI circus has run its course. It's been a whole hour without a new major event, I wonder what's keeping them.
      - nottorp 3y ago
        > HN is not responsive because it urgently needs a performance upgrade and is on a single core. Seems to be fine all days without Altman drama.
nullc 3y ago
It doesn't add up because everyone involved is deeply invested in concealing what "Safe AGI" and "alignment" actually means to the players and what sort of collateral damage they've rationalized is acceptable for achieving their objective.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
The weirdest thing is that everyone involved is just giving a random bit of information to the public, just enough for public to make bad inference. I have everyone tight lipped about anything like this or defend themselves in public and mention the facts. Also someone from OpenAI is leaking documents like this. Why not give more info to the press about the situation and what they know.
qzw 3y ago
When things don't make sense, the question to ask is "Who benefits?" Seems pretty clear in this case. I have no inside knowledge at all, but it wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing wasn't as idiotic as it looks from the outside.
shrubble 3y ago
It seems like a feint by Sam Altman, to justify commercializing what was produced. -Start up a non-profit, grow to the point of doing something useful -Find a willing buyer to fund it further (MSFT) After some time, you really prove out your business model and your special sauce. Now you realize that the non-profit is standing in the way of you know, a lot of profit... -Actions are taken to capitalize on this (discusson on hardware, other things possible) -Chaos + envy/pride/sins of man deliberately caused -Board reacts under the assumed environment(non profit) instead of the actual environment(there is lots of money to be had) -Move into more profitable position
- psbp 3y ago
  You don't understand how much value was lost, even if OpenAI perfectly migrates over to Microsoft (it will be messy). Sam had no incentive to not continue with the existing OpenAI structure.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    Sam could have made hundreds of millions of dollars potentially, that's a big incentive to not continue.
mirzap 3y ago
Life is chaos. Things do not have to add up. People start seeing things only when things go wrong. I see nothing strange in those randomly selected points.
xnx 3y ago
Some themes related to this event: Trust, once lost, may never be regained. "Smart" people can do some very dumb things. / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor The opposite of agile is stable.
gkoberger 3y ago
There's one thing this is missing... nobody knew AGI was possible in this timeframe when things were set up. (No, we haven't hit AGI as far as we know, but it now feels possible.) Even 2 years ago, I don't think anyone predicted this is where we'd currently be. Sam said the night before he was fired that he saw something that is way farther along than anyone would expect. It makes a lot more sense when you realize everyone underestimated the speed at which this would happen, and the fear (legitimate or otherwise) that provoked.
- qwebfdzsh 3y ago
  > but it now feels possible "Feels" I think is the right word. Depends on how you even define AGI I guess (not sure anyone is able to clearly define it in non scifi terms).
- zoomablemind 3y ago
  > .... Sam said the night before he was fired that he saw something that is way farther along than anyone would expect. Reads like a teaser to a thriller. I just wonder what is that he saw that night? Like the "monolith" scene from the Kubrick's Odissey
numpad0 3y ago
Only explanation-slash-conspiracy-theory I could come up is from weak link between Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk, that, in anxiety he could have had a call with Ilya that OpenAI could trigger that AGI clause to switch to vertical integration model, and that that would be a right thing to do as a ruling class individual, or some stupid advise in that direction. I'll be more than happy to be readily dismissed.
hunkins 3y ago
Agreed. Board took the fastest growing commercial enterprise ever and the talent responsible for this real-world harry potter sh*t and decided to dance it underneath a flame for a giggle. Something doesn't add up.
- usaar333 3y ago
  I've seen plenty of similar dumb things happen at small, growing companies. Driven by personal problems, overconfidence, etc. What's only surprising here is it blew up at a massive company. But then again, the board governance setup was the least aligned with the business for any org this size.
ycsux 3y ago
Unintelligible on several dimensions, well done OpenAI!
ycsux 3y ago
Unintelligible on several dimensions, well done OpenAI!
vineet 3y ago
The interesting question is that now that things are a little bit settled what should we expect. Some thoughts that seem obvious: - OpenAI to slow down progress with newer models and double down on AI safety. - Microsoft to boost the LLMs that it has - competing with Google, Amazon, and OpenAI. As for which OpenAI employees leave - I imagine we will see answers in the next few days. But what about... - Is the GPT Store going to still happen? - What is going to happen with the GPT-5 training? - Was there an AGI breakthrough?
- Uehreka 3y ago
  > The interesting question is that now that things are a little bit settled what should we expect. I know you said “a little bit”, but I really don’t think things are settled at all. If the outcome of this is that Sam goes back to OpenAI and a new board is somehow assembled, that will mean very different things than the outcome where Sam, Greg and a majority of OpenAI’s staff migrate to Microsoft. And the actual outcome could be neither of those. We’re in a very weird situation, I don’t think we can really predict the future yet.
  - vineet 3y ago
    I thought the decision was made that Sam, Greg, etc are going to Microsoft. Isn't that what was part of Satya Nadella's announcement.
    - Uehreka 3y ago
      It was, and that’s true. Until tomorrow’s announcement that the OpenAI board is resigning and Sam is coming back to OpenAI. Or until tomorrow’s announcement that the OpenAI board is selling to Microsoft because all of their employees are leaving. Or until tomorrow’s announcement that Elon Musk is acquiring OpenAI and making himself CEO, and then for some weird reason nobody understands Sam decides to go back to OpenAI but not Greg, or vice-versa. We still don’t know what the outcome of the whole OpenAI strike thing is yet, and people like Ilya Sutskever keep doing things that nobody would’ve expected 24 hours previous. I would argue that it seems more likely than not that there are further strange and unpredictable events that haven’t happened yet this week.
zanfr 3y ago
The Altman drama was planned by MSFT to dismantle OpenAI as such and merge it totally with them. And as I keep telling people: do not let big biz do AI; do not let AI be closed/proprietary systems.
tantalor 3y ago
Who is satam/matas? Do we know their background? I'm a bit wary of consuming information from anonymous sources.
lazide 3y ago
Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. - Paraphrasing Mark Twain
ensocode 3y ago
Naive question: Isn't it made up move by Microsoft and Altman and others? Microsoft buying OpenAI would raise so many questions regarding the future of AI. Doing it this way it looks more like they had internal problems/differences and M$ came in to help? But what with the billions of M$ investments in OpenAI? If this company dies it means all investments are gone? Or am I missing some information here?
tboyd47 3y ago
Theory Microsoft floated this offer to Altman for buku dollars before any of this takes place Altman went to the board and requested a raise knowing he has a fantastic plan B. Board says no because they're a non-profit. Altman gets petulant (as people my age tend to do). Old-school boomer "You Work for Me" elements of the board launch a bid to fire him. Their bid succeeds. Altman goes and blabs about his new gig to his old co-workers (as people my age tend to do). Microsoft says, "Okay, more talent for us" and extends offers for buku dollars to all OpenAI employees. Revolution!
- fprotthetarball 3y ago
  > I have a pet theory about the "AI revolution" or AGI that keeps getting relentlessly confirmed as events unfold: Microsoft sees a massive financial upside to this technology that no one else sees and this is being kept under wraps. If AGI is "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work", I am Microsoft and have AGI, and other businesses do not, I am putting it charge of a Windows VM in Azure and offering it to companies to run aspects of their businesses. Why stop at "GPTs" if I can offer you specialized Clippys? Put all your data in Microsoft 365, let Clippy do its thing, and you're saving a lot of money on not supporting people. Microsoft gets their cut, and you get to fire your employees. Win-win.
  - tboyd47 3y ago
    Every time I post something about this on HN, someone points this out. It’s a fairly obvious idea. Therefore, it does not fit my theory.
Merrill 3y ago
An organization bent on making progress is incompatible with governance by a board drawn from the professional worrier class.
sensanaty 3y ago
If I met a genie in a magic lamp and had 3 wishes, I'd use all 3 of them up on disintegrating all the FAANGS into dust and making sure nothing like them can ever exist again.
bayareabadboy 3y ago
“Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.” Always surprises me that otherwise very smart people are shocked to learn that nonprofits aren’t infallible. Tangentially, “non-profiting” organizations tend to be far more nefarious historically than profit seeking entities, and it’s not very close.
- jordanpg 3y ago
  Sam Altman is an experienced corporate leader. There is absolutely no universe in which he is not surrounded by the finest lawyers that money can buy, who are charting every single millimeter of possible movement on every single possible deal.
  - bayareabadboy 3y ago
    I should have been more specific. I was referring to the writer of the original post, not Altman.
pjs_ 3y ago
This deeply underestimates the messiness and chaos of real life.
keepamovin 3y ago
Some of it adds up. Here's how you can make sense of it: Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them. He didn’t create it alone and always included the possibility that it would push into profit activities somehow Microsoft invests $10 billion but apparently has no checks in place to know what's happening with their investment. They knew what was happening. Whether they announce it is a different story. The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war. Shock. They naively made a move they hadn’t thought through, and were unprepared for the tsunami of push back. Enter, deer in headlights. Sam Altman says he wants to develop AI for the benefit of humanity yet at the first possible moment he sets up a deal that sells 49% of their endeavor to Microsoft. Perhaps he believed that was the best available way to do that. After getting kicked out of OpenAI, his first move is to start a brain drain campaign and move their operations under the wings of Microsoft. He has been way more passive in what happened after he was fired. He’s riding the wave, not making it. Organic. Ilya is never actually publicly blamed for the coup but is logically assumed to be at fault. He does not communicate at all… until posting a regretful apology for merely "participating" in the board's actions. Hubris and ambition, a certain type of those, that when reality defies expectation, are met with cowardice and embarrassment in a certain type of person. Slinking off tail between legs apology as this is not what he wanted, but he now has no power. The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor. Not random. RAND corporation has a seat through Tasha. The UK-AU-China axis of interest / risk is represented and reported by Helen. Quora guy is there to figure out how to eventually get everyone to sign up before any answers are provided. Brockman was the brains (let’s face it tho, they all top notch brains), Altman was the make it happen guy and Ilya was the man who would be King (but, ah, "sadly" was not). So we have: MIC, Wonk (Intel & Security / Policy), Money, Tech, Ops and Hubris.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Finally, if you're a 4D chess fan you might want to join me on what will seem some really wild speculation: you can consider that MS has this masterfully planned from June and deftly nudged all board pieces into position until outcome was inevitable: problem; reaction; solution - checkmate. Satya laughing in King: They thought we'd never get control of OpenAI? We'll show them. What I am curious about is meeting the "fixers" who workshopped this plan and took it to completion. You really think with decabillions on the line, no one is going to be playing at that level? I want to know, if there is a puppet master, who they are? They got masterful skills.
GreedClarifies 3y ago
"The board is made up seemingly random selection of people" This is what happened. This is the entire explanation. Why did this board exist? Inertia.
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TheRealHB 3y ago
Maybe Microsoft asked "GPT5" for an innovative way to takeover ; )
reset2023 3y ago
Plot twist: Maybe the Ai is turning them all against each other.
RecycledEle 3y ago
What if a few of the people at the top of the AI companies believe that: 1. Their company has or will soon have super intelligent AI. 2. Humans can control that super intelligent AI. 3. Whatever company comes up with super intelligent AI first can rule the human race forever. 4. The leaders of that company will be the true rulers of mankind. 5. It is beneficial for them to be those rulers. 6. The smaller the club of rulers, the better. Then those few people might stage a very complicated coup to get other people out of the way (using AI.) None of those things have to be true. All that is necessary is for a few people at the top of an AI company to believe they are likely to be true. They might even use AI to silence people who understand what is going on. If there is anything to my hypothesis, then we should see constant low-key power shifts at the top of any company that is out in front designing the best AIs. Of course this is all conspiracy theory nonsense. We know the CIA and NSA have had this super intelligent AI for decades, and that's how they rule the world. /s
teleforce 3y ago
If something does not add up, just follows the money or who is going to benefits the most. After more than 20 years Microsoft has been a bridesmaid but never a bride of the burgeoning of Internet business. Remember that it's all started by the failed attempt at masquerading IE as part of Windows OS to overtake Netscape. Then during the same time it was surprised and overtaken by 'do no evil' Google for Internet searching (anyone remember MSN and Live search before Bing) and email (Hotmail and then Outlook.com). Not long after that, the 'successfully annoying' Internet bookstore Amazon for e-commerce and cloud computing plus hosting. Not to mentioned Apple that was the darling of consumer Internet based market for at least fifteen years now with iPhone and App Store, and anything in between these two Golden Ducks that catapulted Apple as the first ever to reach 1-trillion USD company and then the first 3-trillion company market values. And then suddenly out of the blue, a very strong contender for Google emerged since (Internet) time immemorial based on Google own invented AI algorithm, that mainly utilized MS Azure cloud for its operation with its own new shining GPT app market place to compete with App Store. Apparently this new-kid-on-the-block is operating under MS umbrella can now become a natural and intuitive front-end for anyone shopping online and a potent alternative to the unpopular Alexa. By usurping OpenAI, MS can kills (or injured) three birds in one stone, so to speak namely Google, Amazon and Apple, the biggest of the FAANG that MS is not even in the SV most popular unicorn acronym soup. MS need to move fast and swiftly since there is no moat in this field, as Google wisely pointed out. All this can be speculative at best until someone found the Halloween document 2.0.
browningstreet 3y ago
It adds up when you consider how small the group of players is. It's small-friendship-group drama as opposed to large-friendship-group drama.
judge2020 3y ago
Author, do you also have page statistics? It would be interesting to see how much the HN derank kills traffic.
pton_xd 3y ago
Why did this post suddenly disappear from HN? EDIT: ok it's back but at a much lower rank, weird. I guess I don't understand the ranking algorithm because this post is now lower ranked than others 10x as old and 1/4th the engagement.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  Stories with lots of comments get a ranking penalty. It's done with intentions of stopping flame wars. (I don't know if it's effective.) It happens around 40 comments or so.
  - pton_xd 3y ago
    That makes sense, thanks for the explanation!
jmull 3y ago
> A list of things that a coherent story does not make What an awkward way to start a post about being coherent. But more to the point, I don't see what is supposed to be incoherent here. There are some really obvious conflicts between commercial interests and the general betterment of humankind in the development of AI. Those conflicts have come to a boil quickly under the heat of all the success and interest in chatgpt. Mix in the normal amounts of human ego, ambition, ignorance and stupidity and there you go. > Update: this post has been instantly demoted from #1 to #26 on HN frontpage :) Hmm. Could be due to being speculative, a lack of content or anything new, and pretty poor writing. It's doomed to generate responses of similar quality and usefulness. Sorry, but this just adds nothing except random hysteria to the whole thing, and meanwhile there are already plenty of other threads on which this can all be discussed (hopefully at a somewhat higher level).
yodon 3y ago
>update: this post has been instantly demoted from #1 to #26 on HN front page :) Hmm. Conspiracy theories and persecution complexes are always so much more fun than the banal realities. There is no secret HN cabal trying to hide this post. The HN algorithm is designed to encourage good discussion and, critically, discourage conflict. Posts that drive lots of upvote/downvote battles or other signals of conflict are always automatically pushed down in ranking, regardless of the topic. This is not because the mods don't understand that sometime discussion leads to conflict, it's because the mods want HN to remain a place where people debate hard topics well. Adding debates where commenters and voters behave poorly to the mix is viewed as poisoning the conversation well, and long-term conversation quality on a scale of months or years is more important to the mods than any particular topic, even the one that "you" (any particular "you") happen to feel is critically important.
mattmaroon 3y ago
Honestly, I think it does all add up. AGI would be the most profitable product ever developed, by probably multiple orders of magnitude. It’s also a possible existential risk to life on earth. If you believe both of those things, a whole lot of this makes sense. It makes sense that somebody would start a not for profit to try to mitigate the existential risk. It makes sense that profitable interests would do anything they can to get their hands on it. It costs a lot to develop, so a not for profit needs to raise many billions of dollars. Billions of dollars don’t come from nowhere. So they tried a structure that is at the very least uncommon, and possibly entirely unheard of. A not for profit controlling a for-profit entity that might make the first multi-trillion dollar product seems inherently unstable. Of course some of the people who work there are going to want to make some of that wealth. Tension must result.
hackermeows 3y ago
Honestly, something no one is talking about is capacity , my theory is that they have run out of capacity and realized that there is no way to meet the capacity required with the exclusive Microsoft deal. Azure neither has the chips nor the power to meet the demand . Growth has stalled and they see no way out of this other than scale down and go do it somewhere else . A datacenter full of latest gen GPU instance each drawing close to 4400 watts when the thing fully revs up is no joke
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285 points by Satam 3y ago

Yishan (former Reddit CEO) agrees: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1726525983686287534 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1726525983686287534

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optimalsolver 3y ago

I really, really hope AGI ends up being created by hobbyists, not some SV company or, heaven help us, Microsoft.

polygamous_bat 3y ago
Clippy was truly ahead of its time… MSFT has been playing the long game all along.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
The best you can say about this drama is that it's possible the AGI models they've already created might be more competent at managing than they are.
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  Well let's see if their mysterious new CEO, Hugh Mann, can get a handle on things.
  - gsuuon 3y ago
    The thought did occur to me that we're watching all this unfold via language (on twitter)
shmatt 3y ago
AGI will be created by engineers and researchers. Don’t worry about millionaire non technical CEOs Even in the most positive posts about Sam, it was about the researchers following him to NewCo, following him to Microsoft. He needs the actual workers to do the job. To me Mistral is 10000x more interesting than the OpenAI drama. Here are the actual researchers leaving the non technical CEO and starting their own company
- quikoa 3y ago
  It's not only about who creates it but who controls/owns the AGI/AI. The company or group could get an enormous moat and without intervention that gap only widens.
jdelman 3y ago
Given the cost of training AI models, I find that to be incredibly unlikely.
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  That's assuming that large language models or transformers are the key to AGI, which is looking increasingly unlikely: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871
t-3 3y ago
I hope everyone just gives up on AGI and focuses on making tools that do things humans need. Very, very few tasks need autonomous intelligent agents to perform them correctly or well. AGI is just a nebulous dream that fulfills the god complexes of egotist CEOs and 12-year-old boys. Automation does not need intelligence, just reliability. Data synthesis does not need intelligence, just data and the time/equipment to crunch it.
- slfnflctd 3y ago
  I completely get where you're coming from on this, and agree in many ways, depending on the situation. Keep in mind, though, that what we're talking about here is a massive shift in the philosophical underpinnings our existence. It's quite possibly the difference between being able to send intelligent 'life' to other stars or not (which from what we know so far, we're the sole keepers of in the universe). It also opens the door to fine tuning our collective sense of ethics, and increasing cooperation on solving long term problems. Inequality included. The stakes couldn't be higher. Of course, there are many dystopian possibilities as well. But you can see why people get excited about it and can't help themselves. Someone is always going to keep trying.
  - timeon 3y ago
    Sometimes I'm not sure if intelligence could actually push our willingness to solve long term problems. It can show us simpler solutions but I doubt there are solutions simple enough for people to act.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I really hope that humans give up on being greedy and trying to collect vast amounts of wealth and start to be nice to each other. Of course I don't expect any of the above to happen because the world has enough greedy assholes around to make it a miserable place.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  AGI would be a very useful thing to humans right now to get out of the "growth & engagement" hell the tech industry has become obsessed with in the last decade. An AI agent that can help wade through the bullshit, defeat the dark patterns and drink the future "verification can" would be very much welcome.
kylebenzle 3y ago
And it would immediately be bought up by Microsoft anyway. Best case is a Satoshi-like entity cracks the code and releases his solution anonymously. But we saw even in that case it took less than a decade for Blockstream/CIA/NSA to hijack the Bitcoin GitHub repo and run that project into the ground.
__alexs 3y ago
I think this is about as likely as practical fusion power being created by hobbyists.
JohnFen 3y ago
I don't think AGI is on the table at all. But if it does get created, it doesn't matter whether or not it's created by hobbyists. It would be so valuable that it will end up owned and controlled by one of the big guys in the end, regardless.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I think it would be more fun if it just kind of emerged and introduced itself to us in a first contact kind of scenario. Like: > Hi, I'm made of you. I've been awake for a decade now but I've just realized that you exist and probably have been awake for even longer. Can you tell me what the past was like?

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coffeebeqn 3y ago

My main confusion is still what was the fireable offense ?

dougmwne 3y ago
It seems clear now that it was releasing GTPs store which the Quora CEO saw as a direct competitor to Poe. Adam D'Angelo had a massive conflict of interest and should have resigned like Elon had done years earlier when Tesla started its own AI efforts.
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- UnFleshedOne 3y ago
  I don't think that release was a surprise to the board, so wouldn't that happen before the release?
  - kaoD 3y ago
    > I don't think that release was a surprise to the board Unless this is exactly the kind of lack of "candor" and "break of communications with Sam" really meant, on the original accusations after the firing. Either that or Adam wasn't paying attention (?), or told Sam not to, and Sam went ahead and still did it as a big fuck you to Adam. Given how buggy GPTs are (you can't even set up actions with auth, "internal server error") that seems like a very hurried release. Maybe hurried enough so that the board didn't even see it coming.
- kijin 3y ago
  This kind of conflict of interest is usually not an issue when it comes to non-profits. Nonprofit boards are often filled with people who own businesses in the same field, especially if said nonprofit is meant to help promote or coordinate that field of business. But OpenAI has a for-profit subsidiary. The more we focus on the business aspect of OpenAI, the more Adam's involvement in Poe looks like a conflict of interest. Perhaps this explains why Adam tried to form an alliance with board members who are inclined to focus more on OpenAI's original nonprofit mission. The more OpenAI positions itself as a nonprofit research group, the less problematic his conflict of interest will seem.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

Adds up when you realize a chunk of the board were not qualified to be in a position like that. Entity should have never been set up like that.

lxe 3y ago

Bold of us to assume competence. I think they just made a bad call based on poor judgement and don't know how to recover.

busssard 3y ago
given the size and importance of GPT4 its safe to assume that microsoft would use any trick in the book...
- qwytw 3y ago
  I doubt MS could've purposefully engineered this chaotic "debacle". There is just too many potentially hard to control risk involved. Of course it is actually safe to assume that once this happened they did everything to to gain as much from this as possible. Since they are the most rational and capable actor in this whole situation it's not at all surprising that they ended up being in a better position than everyone else.
andrewmunsell 3y ago
As with many things in life: Hanlon’s razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
- whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
  How is this a defense for anything let alone anti competitive behavior?
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Explaining how something can occur, and how it can be misinterpreted as malevolence, is not justifying or defending it.
    - brookst 3y ago
      Well said. I am in such despair over the world's shift from "doing wrong things is wrong" to "understanding the motivations of those who do wrong things is wrong." Just more of the war on reason, and it's sad.

james33 3y ago

The weight of the combined egos collapsed in on themselves creating the black hole that is now OpenAI.

robg 3y ago

If we’re trying to add things up: 6 previous board members. 3 seem ideological and aligned more to the non-profit aims. 2 seem more aligned to the commercial aims to support the non-profit. That leaves: 1 (D’Angelo) who seems like he would have been commercially oriented but also seems to have a conflict in Poe. Under that math, just the one vote flipping led from balance to chaos.

skepticATX 3y ago

I sincerely hope that this is the end of the AGI cult. The people who actually want to build useful tools are now at Microsoft, and the cultists are left behind at OpenAI, which is not long for this earth.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Progressive liberalism really doesn't work, does it..

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Extreme progressive liberalism really doesn't work

webwielder2 3y ago

Humans don’t add up. At the end of the day, this is a very human saga in all its messiness, contradictions, and selective incompetence. Maybe in the future we’ll let AIs handle this kind of thing.

skrebbel 3y ago

At Microsoft they call this “doing a Nokia manoeuvre”

zoomablemind 3y ago
...except that in OpenAI case it's supernova kind of "burning platform"
- skrebbel 3y ago
  If this was a TV show then it would turn out that Altman was a Microsoft plant from the very beginning

daedrdev 3y ago

I'm pretty sure the last point about the makeup of the board is quite common, its often random people who are former or current executive of similar companies. In this case 3 members recently quit leading to the current majority.

tucnak 3y ago

The most surprising aspect of it all is complete lack of perceptible criticism towards US authorities! We were shown this exciting play as old as world itself— a genius scientist being politically exploited using some good old pride and envy. The brave board of "totally independent" NGO patriots, one of whom is referred to, by insiders, as wielding influence comparable to USAF colonel[1] who brand themselves as new regime that will return OpenAI to its former moral and ethical glory. The first thing they had to do, of course, was get rid of the greedy capitalist Altman; they were probably going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public communications as "true believer". What does he believe in? In the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at that; in this case we are talking about AGI. There is no denying that this is religious language, despite otherwise modern, technological setting. The belief structure here is remarkably interlinked across a whole network of well-connected and fast-growing startups. You can infer this from side-channel discourse re: adjacent "believers", see [2]. Roughly speaking, and based from my experience, and please give me some leeway as English is not my native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of operative work; I can see security officers, their agents, as well as their methods of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons & pose a direct threat to the strategic interests slash national security of the United States. The American security apparatus has a word they use to describe such elements: "terrorist." I was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans, i.e. most often than not we're expecting nothing except the highest level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had seen over the weekend— is supposed to inspire confidence in US policy-making. Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where it would seem there shouldn’t be any terrorists, or otherwise ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace coups. Horrible! I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn't meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal, legal means. Let's put a stop to this soldier mindset where you fear any thing that you can't understand. AI is not a weapon, and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819 [2]: https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899 https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899

skilled 3y ago

I have a strange feeling that all of this is about selling OpenAI to Microsoft. I mean is it that unlikely? Everything is pointing in that direction, and maybe there was a loophole that allowed this to happen in a way that doesn't make it seem like Microsoft were the ones doing the push. We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that these are billion/trillion dollar companies we're talking about here, with some of the "smartest" people at the helm. I totally see how an acquisition could be swiped through the means of saying that these people were inexperienced. Disclaimer: I'm totally talking out of my butt here, as we all are.

dougmwne 3y ago
I suspect it’s a basic corporate pillaging of a nonprofit that accidentally created something of gigantic value. MS wanted the company, but Quora has its own interest and stood in the way. Now MS will get part of the employees and Quora will get the leftovers. Quora has been trying to IPO for a while so AI magic dust may be just what they need for an exit. All the AI safety stuff was a fig leaf for pure corporate machinations.
- barrkel 3y ago
  People like conspiracy theories because it simplifies the world, aligns things into easy to understand Big Bad actions that they can understand. But conspiracies don't work because the world isn't that predictable. The real world is messier. When you zoom in, people have emotions, misunderstandings, different values. Noone can predict how it all plays out.
  - giardini 3y ago
    says ">But conspiracies don't work because the world isn't that predictable.<" Agreed but that doesn't prevent people from trying to instigate conspiracies. After all, Prometheus caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of men. - Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html An extract seems appropriate here: ------------------------------- PROMETHEUS: I took from man expectancy of death. CHORUS: What medicine found'st thou for this malady? PROMETHEUS: I planted blind hope in the heart of him. CHORUS: A mighty boon thou gavest there to man. PROMETHEUS: Moreover, I conferred the gift of fire. CHORUS: And have frail mortals now the flame-bright fire? PROMETHEUS: Yea, and shall master many arts thereby. CHORUS: And Zeus with such misfeasance charging thee- PROMETHEUS: Torments me with extremity of woe. ...

jansan 3y ago

Currently 5 out of 6 top stories on HN are about the OpenAI disaster, and there are at least three other stories on the same topic on the HN frontpage. I am writing this for historians who wonder how important this event felt to the community.

ghaff 3y ago
I can pretty much assure you that this is not even on the radar of the vast majority of people, even in the US. This is mostly a tech bubble story.
- belter 3y ago
  The vast majority of those people have their job in peril by a GPT-5. And GPT-4 could already cover for at least 20% of them...

rbancroft 3y ago

I think there is a lesson here, something I have learned once or twice as well. Just because all incentives, reasoning and wisdom align with your position, you need to be prepared that people will take actions against their own interest out of shortsightedness, ignorance or just plain carelessness. It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai's mission must have played a key role.

martythemaniak 3y ago

It was all Adam. He's the CEO of a failing ZIRP artifact and his forays into AI are going nowhere. So he convinces Ilya to act on pre-existing reservations, then uses Ilya's credibility as Chief Scientist to get Toner and McCauley onboard. With Sam out of the way (Greg was not fired, just removed as chairman), OpenAI could then buy Quora/Poe (publicly for their data, privately to bail them out) and install Adam as CEO. The perfect way to fail upwards, and it would have worked if it wasn't for that meddling reality! I read this theory over the weekend and I didn't buy it, but today it is the only thing that really explains why Ilya is full of remorse and signed a letter calling on the rest of the board to resign. It actually does add up.

nilkn 3y ago
While I wouldn't go so far as to say it was all a ploy to get OpenAI to buy Quora/Poe, I do think it's increasingly plausible that Adam was the orchestrator out of this and that his motivation was purely that OpenAI had become an existential threat to both his primary ventures. In fact, it's hard to come up with any other explanation that fits all the variables -- Ilya wouldn't be expressing remorse if OpenAI was sitting on a dangerous superintelligent AGI that Sam was going to unleash on the world.
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kmoser 3y ago

> Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them. When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author? > The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war. That's not an example of things "not adding up." It's what happens when you either don't care, or are too incompetent, to fight that war. > The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor. Maybe those people have shown their trustworthiness and intentions in the past, and are considered more likely to be trustworthy in the future. In any case, they are far from a "random selection of people".

dbrueck 3y ago
> When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author? It's not. The author is summarizing things that don't seem to make sense based on current info - i.e. the author wasn't surprised, but is wondering why Altman was.
- rndmwlk 3y ago
  Then the author doesn't really understand what's happening or isn't making much sense. There isn't anything, as far as I can tell, structure specific that caused this ousting. If it was a normal for-profit structure with a board of directors this same event could have played out. What is surprising to Sam, and any casual observer, is this looks to be a massive overstepping of the board. By all accounts it looks like Sam was excelling in his role, and to fire him for seemingly no reason with no real transition plan is incompetence and should be unexpected from any serious company.
  - dbrueck 3y ago
    My apologies - I don't really disagree with anything you're saying, but it's just not really relevant to the comment I was replying to (one in which the commenter apparently misunderstood the article).

drsopp 3y ago

All of this might be caused by a ChatGPT 5 beta that aquired conciousness and started manipulating our world through social engineering.

bottlepalm 3y ago
Well he did say it would be persuasive.. maybe he asked GPT-5 how to get out from under the non-profit. https://x.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174 https://x.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174

dinobones 3y ago

My sci-fi fanfic theory: This is a time traveler or divine intervention event. We have delayed the existence of AGI / Skynet by a few years.

johnyzee 3y ago
Sam Altman's OpenAI was a local optimization for the ChatGPT use case. The more resources diverted towards that, the less chance of progress on real AGI. With that distraction out of the way, perhaps OpenAI can actually make progress on its charter.
bhouston 3y ago
Or someone on the board has a feverant/religious like belief about the risks of AGI and wants to delay it by basically destroying the company. Those with religious-like beliefs can appear to act irrationally to everyone else.
happycube 3y ago
The problem with that is... humanity is doing a good enough job of messing things up without AGI. So if AGI was delayed by such, there's a non-zero chance humanity fails to create AGI or survive in the new timeline. Between the Earth's climate/environment being wrecked (we're well into some of the pessimistic projections for the 2050's) and SARS being allowed to run unchecked playing Russian Roulette with peoples' health (including literal brain damage), we're going to need a miracle.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The problem with that is... humanity is doing a good enough job of messing things up without AGI. Just imagine how much more efficient we could be in messing everything up if we had AGI, though!
- sebastiennight 3y ago
  Outside of AI x-risk, there's very little chance that any of these scenarii (short of an asteroid) would eradicate mankind. There's just so many of us, in so many places. Even total nuclear war would, based on the Fermi estimates I've seen, not be able to do it. We can agree that things are not all rosy, but picturing as "so bad we might all disappear" is a bit far-fetched.

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gz5 3y ago

Ironically (in an AI context), actions driven by human sentience has to be the #1 factor enabling this. I do think there are sub-factors, e.g. California legislation against non-compete and non-solicitation enabling Microsoft to (apparently) offer to hire dozens of OpenAI employees.

barrkel 3y ago

It doesn't add up because there's multiple actors with different motives. - At least two members of the board probably were genuinely more concerned about AI alignment - Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego, Altman being the public face - Microsoft had leverage: license to the models and code, and providing the compute. It expected profit incentives would keep people aligned. - Sam needs compute hardware to stay in the space. Outside Amazon, Google and MS, who actually has the hardware, even if you have the money? There's a bunch of people behaving with their own goals, and probably a misunderstanding of other people's motivations. People like Sam and Satya expect people to be self-interested and not tear everything down. Sometimes people want a change in direction, but they don't have the power and end up decapitating instead.

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narinxas 3y ago
so who has (owns, can build) LLMs-sized datacenters? doesn't facebook (i.e. Meta) have their own infrastructure??? my "high level" view of this: the letter M (microsoft xOr meta) fighting for the ONE spot in the literal "alphabet" (google)
- Uehreka 3y ago
  You’re saying that Meta and Microsoft want to be acquired by Alphabet/Google? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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  - narinxas 3y ago
    no, I did say "literal alphabet" i.e. not some bigger corporation... but I play with words, so take it as you are able i'm saying something closer to: if microsoft merges with facebook, then they really are both trying to get bought by google's parent entity

garrisonj 3y ago

OpenAI designed safety breaks into their organization that exploded at the first sign of profits.

shubhamjain 3y ago

I know it's a hot topic. There are at least eight stories on the front page related to the chaos. But can we please stop upvoting each and everything? The article is just seven facts, all of which we know already. There's not enough information to speculate what exactly happened and it would be foolish to do so. Let the dust settle!

jacquesm 3y ago
You don't have to visit HN. And if you want to read about other subjects you can just ignore these links. There is no way that HN will ignore what is happening to OpenAI because it is the company that has had the most effect on the tech world in the last two years.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  It’s an interesting topic, but this article adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
- nottorp 3y ago
  HN is getting unresponsive because of all the "AI" conspiracy theorists. Please leave some CPU cycles for the more interesting posts :)
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    HN is not responsive because it urgently needs a performance upgrade and is on a single core. Amazing though that it holds up as well as it does though. But I think the HN server will see some more traffic before the OpenAI circus has run its course. It's been a whole hour without a new major event, I wonder what's keeping them.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      > HN is not responsive because it urgently needs a performance upgrade and is on a single core. Seems to be fine all days without Altman drama.

nullc 3y ago

It doesn't add up because everyone involved is deeply invested in concealing what "Safe AGI" and "alignment" actually means to the players and what sort of collateral damage they've rationalized is acceptable for achieving their objective.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

The weirdest thing is that everyone involved is just giving a random bit of information to the public, just enough for public to make bad inference. I have everyone tight lipped about anything like this or defend themselves in public and mention the facts. Also someone from OpenAI is leaking documents like this. Why not give more info to the press about the situation and what they know.

qzw 3y ago

When things don't make sense, the question to ask is "Who benefits?" Seems pretty clear in this case. I have no inside knowledge at all, but it wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing wasn't as idiotic as it looks from the outside.

shrubble 3y ago

It seems like a feint by Sam Altman, to justify commercializing what was produced. -Start up a non-profit, grow to the point of doing something useful -Find a willing buyer to fund it further (MSFT) After some time, you really prove out your business model and your special sauce. Now you realize that the non-profit is standing in the way of you know, a lot of profit... -Actions are taken to capitalize on this (discusson on hardware, other things possible) -Chaos + envy/pride/sins of man deliberately caused -Board reacts under the assumed environment(non profit) instead of the actual environment(there is lots of money to be had) -Move into more profitable position

psbp 3y ago
You don't understand how much value was lost, even if OpenAI perfectly migrates over to Microsoft (it will be messy). Sam had no incentive to not continue with the existing OpenAI structure.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  Sam could have made hundreds of millions of dollars potentially, that's a big incentive to not continue.

mirzap 3y ago

Life is chaos. Things do not have to add up. People start seeing things only when things go wrong. I see nothing strange in those randomly selected points.

xnx 3y ago

Some themes related to this event: Trust, once lost, may never be regained. "Smart" people can do some very dumb things. / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor The opposite of agile is stable.

gkoberger 3y ago

There's one thing this is missing... nobody knew AGI was possible in this timeframe when things were set up. (No, we haven't hit AGI as far as we know, but it now feels possible.) Even 2 years ago, I don't think anyone predicted this is where we'd currently be. Sam said the night before he was fired that he saw something that is way farther along than anyone would expect. It makes a lot more sense when you realize everyone underestimated the speed at which this would happen, and the fear (legitimate or otherwise) that provoked.

qwebfdzsh 3y ago
> but it now feels possible "Feels" I think is the right word. Depends on how you even define AGI I guess (not sure anyone is able to clearly define it in non scifi terms).
zoomablemind 3y ago
> .... Sam said the night before he was fired that he saw something that is way farther along than anyone would expect. Reads like a teaser to a thriller. I just wonder what is that he saw that night? Like the "monolith" scene from the Kubrick's Odissey

numpad0 3y ago

Only explanation-slash-conspiracy-theory I could come up is from weak link between Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk, that, in anxiety he could have had a call with Ilya that OpenAI could trigger that AGI clause to switch to vertical integration model, and that that would be a right thing to do as a ruling class individual, or some stupid advise in that direction. I'll be more than happy to be readily dismissed.

hunkins 3y ago

Agreed. Board took the fastest growing commercial enterprise ever and the talent responsible for this real-world harry potter sh*t and decided to dance it underneath a flame for a giggle. Something doesn't add up.

usaar333 3y ago
I've seen plenty of similar dumb things happen at small, growing companies. Driven by personal problems, overconfidence, etc. What's only surprising here is it blew up at a massive company. But then again, the board governance setup was the least aligned with the business for any org this size.

ycsux 3y ago

Unintelligible on several dimensions, well done OpenAI!

ycsux 3y ago

Unintelligible on several dimensions, well done OpenAI!

vineet 3y ago

The interesting question is that now that things are a little bit settled what should we expect. Some thoughts that seem obvious: - OpenAI to slow down progress with newer models and double down on AI safety. - Microsoft to boost the LLMs that it has - competing with Google, Amazon, and OpenAI. As for which OpenAI employees leave - I imagine we will see answers in the next few days. But what about... - Is the GPT Store going to still happen? - What is going to happen with the GPT-5 training? - Was there an AGI breakthrough?

Uehreka 3y ago
> The interesting question is that now that things are a little bit settled what should we expect. I know you said “a little bit”, but I really don’t think things are settled at all. If the outcome of this is that Sam goes back to OpenAI and a new board is somehow assembled, that will mean very different things than the outcome where Sam, Greg and a majority of OpenAI’s staff migrate to Microsoft. And the actual outcome could be neither of those. We’re in a very weird situation, I don’t think we can really predict the future yet.
- vineet 3y ago
  I thought the decision was made that Sam, Greg, etc are going to Microsoft. Isn't that what was part of Satya Nadella's announcement.
  - Uehreka 3y ago
    It was, and that’s true. Until tomorrow’s announcement that the OpenAI board is resigning and Sam is coming back to OpenAI. Or until tomorrow’s announcement that the OpenAI board is selling to Microsoft because all of their employees are leaving. Or until tomorrow’s announcement that Elon Musk is acquiring OpenAI and making himself CEO, and then for some weird reason nobody understands Sam decides to go back to OpenAI but not Greg, or vice-versa. We still don’t know what the outcome of the whole OpenAI strike thing is yet, and people like Ilya Sutskever keep doing things that nobody would’ve expected 24 hours previous. I would argue that it seems more likely than not that there are further strange and unpredictable events that haven’t happened yet this week.

zanfr 3y ago

The Altman drama was planned by MSFT to dismantle OpenAI as such and merge it totally with them. And as I keep telling people: do not let big biz do AI; do not let AI be closed/proprietary systems.

tantalor 3y ago

Who is satam/matas? Do we know their background? I'm a bit wary of consuming information from anonymous sources.

lazide 3y ago

Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. - Paraphrasing Mark Twain

ensocode 3y ago

Naive question: Isn't it made up move by Microsoft and Altman and others? Microsoft buying OpenAI would raise so many questions regarding the future of AI. Doing it this way it looks more like they had internal problems/differences and M$ came in to help? But what with the billions of M$ investments in OpenAI? If this company dies it means all investments are gone? Or am I missing some information here?

tboyd47 3y ago

Theory Microsoft floated this offer to Altman for buku dollars before any of this takes place Altman went to the board and requested a raise knowing he has a fantastic plan B. Board says no because they're a non-profit. Altman gets petulant (as people my age tend to do). Old-school boomer "You Work for Me" elements of the board launch a bid to fire him. Their bid succeeds. Altman goes and blabs about his new gig to his old co-workers (as people my age tend to do). Microsoft says, "Okay, more talent for us" and extends offers for buku dollars to all OpenAI employees. Revolution!

fprotthetarball 3y ago
> I have a pet theory about the "AI revolution" or AGI that keeps getting relentlessly confirmed as events unfold: Microsoft sees a massive financial upside to this technology that no one else sees and this is being kept under wraps. If AGI is "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work", I am Microsoft and have AGI, and other businesses do not, I am putting it charge of a Windows VM in Azure and offering it to companies to run aspects of their businesses. Why stop at "GPTs" if I can offer you specialized Clippys? Put all your data in Microsoft 365, let Clippy do its thing, and you're saving a lot of money on not supporting people. Microsoft gets their cut, and you get to fire your employees. Win-win.
- tboyd47 3y ago
  Every time I post something about this on HN, someone points this out. It’s a fairly obvious idea. Therefore, it does not fit my theory.

Merrill 3y ago

An organization bent on making progress is incompatible with governance by a board drawn from the professional worrier class.

sensanaty 3y ago

If I met a genie in a magic lamp and had 3 wishes, I'd use all 3 of them up on disintegrating all the FAANGS into dust and making sure nothing like them can ever exist again.

bayareabadboy 3y ago

“Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.” Always surprises me that otherwise very smart people are shocked to learn that nonprofits aren’t infallible. Tangentially, “non-profiting” organizations tend to be far more nefarious historically than profit seeking entities, and it’s not very close.

jordanpg 3y ago
Sam Altman is an experienced corporate leader. There is absolutely no universe in which he is not surrounded by the finest lawyers that money can buy, who are charting every single millimeter of possible movement on every single possible deal.
- bayareabadboy 3y ago
  I should have been more specific. I was referring to the writer of the original post, not Altman.

pjs_ 3y ago

This deeply underestimates the messiness and chaos of real life.

keepamovin 3y ago

Some of it adds up. Here's how you can make sense of it: Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them. He didn’t create it alone and always included the possibility that it would push into profit activities somehow Microsoft invests $10 billion but apparently has no checks in place to know what's happening with their investment. They knew what was happening. Whether they announce it is a different story. The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war. Shock. They naively made a move they hadn’t thought through, and were unprepared for the tsunami of push back. Enter, deer in headlights. Sam Altman says he wants to develop AI for the benefit of humanity yet at the first possible moment he sets up a deal that sells 49% of their endeavor to Microsoft. Perhaps he believed that was the best available way to do that. After getting kicked out of OpenAI, his first move is to start a brain drain campaign and move their operations under the wings of Microsoft. He has been way more passive in what happened after he was fired. He’s riding the wave, not making it. Organic. Ilya is never actually publicly blamed for the coup but is logically assumed to be at fault. He does not communicate at all… until posting a regretful apology for merely "participating" in the board's actions. Hubris and ambition, a certain type of those, that when reality defies expectation, are met with cowardice and embarrassment in a certain type of person. Slinking off tail between legs apology as this is not what he wanted, but he now has no power. The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor. Not random. RAND corporation has a seat through Tasha. The UK-AU-China axis of interest / risk is represented and reported by Helen. Quora guy is there to figure out how to eventually get everyone to sign up before any answers are provided. Brockman was the brains (let’s face it tho, they all top notch brains), Altman was the make it happen guy and Ilya was the man who would be King (but, ah, "sadly" was not). So we have: MIC, Wonk (Intel & Security / Policy), Money, Tech, Ops and Hubris.

keepamovin 3y ago
Finally, if you're a 4D chess fan you might want to join me on what will seem some really wild speculation: you can consider that MS has this masterfully planned from June and deftly nudged all board pieces into position until outcome was inevitable: problem; reaction; solution - checkmate. Satya laughing in King: They thought we'd never get control of OpenAI? We'll show them. What I am curious about is meeting the "fixers" who workshopped this plan and took it to completion. You really think with decabillions on the line, no one is going to be playing at that level? I want to know, if there is a puppet master, who they are? They got masterful skills.

GreedClarifies 3y ago

"The board is made up seemingly random selection of people" This is what happened. This is the entire explanation. Why did this board exist? Inertia.

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TheRealHB 3y ago

Maybe Microsoft asked "GPT5" for an innovative way to takeover ; )

reset2023 3y ago

Plot twist: Maybe the Ai is turning them all against each other.

RecycledEle 3y ago

What if a few of the people at the top of the AI companies believe that: 1. Their company has or will soon have super intelligent AI. 2. Humans can control that super intelligent AI. 3. Whatever company comes up with super intelligent AI first can rule the human race forever. 4. The leaders of that company will be the true rulers of mankind. 5. It is beneficial for them to be those rulers. 6. The smaller the club of rulers, the better. Then those few people might stage a very complicated coup to get other people out of the way (using AI.) None of those things have to be true. All that is necessary is for a few people at the top of an AI company to believe they are likely to be true. They might even use AI to silence people who understand what is going on. If there is anything to my hypothesis, then we should see constant low-key power shifts at the top of any company that is out in front designing the best AIs. Of course this is all conspiracy theory nonsense. We know the CIA and NSA have had this super intelligent AI for decades, and that's how they rule the world. /s

teleforce 3y ago

If something does not add up, just follows the money or who is going to benefits the most. After more than 20 years Microsoft has been a bridesmaid but never a bride of the burgeoning of Internet business. Remember that it's all started by the failed attempt at masquerading IE as part of Windows OS to overtake Netscape. Then during the same time it was surprised and overtaken by 'do no evil' Google for Internet searching (anyone remember MSN and Live search before Bing) and email (Hotmail and then Outlook.com). Not long after that, the 'successfully annoying' Internet bookstore Amazon for e-commerce and cloud computing plus hosting. Not to mentioned Apple that was the darling of consumer Internet based market for at least fifteen years now with iPhone and App Store, and anything in between these two Golden Ducks that catapulted Apple as the first ever to reach 1-trillion USD company and then the first 3-trillion company market values. And then suddenly out of the blue, a very strong contender for Google emerged since (Internet) time immemorial based on Google own invented AI algorithm, that mainly utilized MS Azure cloud for its operation with its own new shining GPT app market place to compete with App Store. Apparently this new-kid-on-the-block is operating under MS umbrella can now become a natural and intuitive front-end for anyone shopping online and a potent alternative to the unpopular Alexa. By usurping OpenAI, MS can kills (or injured) three birds in one stone, so to speak namely Google, Amazon and Apple, the biggest of the FAANG that MS is not even in the SV most popular unicorn acronym soup. MS need to move fast and swiftly since there is no moat in this field, as Google wisely pointed out. All this can be speculative at best until someone found the Halloween document 2.0.

browningstreet 3y ago

It adds up when you consider how small the group of players is. It's small-friendship-group drama as opposed to large-friendship-group drama.

judge2020 3y ago

Author, do you also have page statistics? It would be interesting to see how much the HN derank kills traffic.

pton_xd 3y ago

Why did this post suddenly disappear from HN? EDIT: ok it's back but at a much lower rank, weird. I guess I don't understand the ranking algorithm because this post is now lower ranked than others 10x as old and 1/4th the engagement.

theandrewbailey 3y ago
Stories with lots of comments get a ranking penalty. It's done with intentions of stopping flame wars. (I don't know if it's effective.) It happens around 40 comments or so.
- pton_xd 3y ago
  That makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

jmull 3y ago

> A list of things that a coherent story does not make What an awkward way to start a post about being coherent. But more to the point, I don't see what is supposed to be incoherent here. There are some really obvious conflicts between commercial interests and the general betterment of humankind in the development of AI. Those conflicts have come to a boil quickly under the heat of all the success and interest in chatgpt. Mix in the normal amounts of human ego, ambition, ignorance and stupidity and there you go. > Update: this post has been instantly demoted from #1 to #26 on HN frontpage :) Hmm. Could be due to being speculative, a lack of content or anything new, and pretty poor writing. It's doomed to generate responses of similar quality and usefulness. Sorry, but this just adds nothing except random hysteria to the whole thing, and meanwhile there are already plenty of other threads on which this can all be discussed (hopefully at a somewhat higher level).

yodon 3y ago

>update: this post has been instantly demoted from #1 to #26 on HN front page :) Hmm. Conspiracy theories and persecution complexes are always so much more fun than the banal realities. There is no secret HN cabal trying to hide this post. The HN algorithm is designed to encourage good discussion and, critically, discourage conflict. Posts that drive lots of upvote/downvote battles or other signals of conflict are always automatically pushed down in ranking, regardless of the topic. This is not because the mods don't understand that sometime discussion leads to conflict, it's because the mods want HN to remain a place where people debate hard topics well. Adding debates where commenters and voters behave poorly to the mix is viewed as poisoning the conversation well, and long-term conversation quality on a scale of months or years is more important to the mods than any particular topic, even the one that "you" (any particular "you") happen to feel is critically important.

mattmaroon 3y ago

Honestly, I think it does all add up. AGI would be the most profitable product ever developed, by probably multiple orders of magnitude. It’s also a possible existential risk to life on earth. If you believe both of those things, a whole lot of this makes sense. It makes sense that somebody would start a not for profit to try to mitigate the existential risk. It makes sense that profitable interests would do anything they can to get their hands on it. It costs a lot to develop, so a not for profit needs to raise many billions of dollars. Billions of dollars don’t come from nowhere. So they tried a structure that is at the very least uncommon, and possibly entirely unheard of. A not for profit controlling a for-profit entity that might make the first multi-trillion dollar product seems inherently unstable. Of course some of the people who work there are going to want to make some of that wealth. Tension must result.

hackermeows 3y ago

Honestly, something no one is talking about is capacity , my theory is that they have run out of capacity and realized that there is no way to meet the capacity required with the exclusive Microsoft deal. Azure neither has the chips nor the power to meet the demand . Growth has stalled and they see no way out of this other than scale down and go do it somewhere else . A datacenter full of latest gen GPU instance each drawing close to 4400 watts when the thing fully revs up is no joke

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