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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 a
by 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- narinxas 3y agoso 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 agoYou’re saying that Meta and Microsoft want to be acquired by Alphabet/Google? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- narinxas 3y agono, 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
- Uehreka 3y ago> 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 So you said “literal alphabet”, because you weren’t talking about Alphabet, you were instead referring to Google’s parent entity, which is Alphabet? I’m a big fan of wordplay, but I prefer to use it to reveal truths, not obscure them. Either way I don’t think that what you’re talking about is going to happen.
- narinxas 3y agoI'm neither obscuring nor revealing a truth becuase these events are ongoing. and I'm being quick and lose with the use of words. facebook cannot merge with microsoft because facebook is a subsidiary of meta corporation. but on the level of analysis i'm trying to think in, google's antitrust case agaisnt their government (which is done), microsoft's recent purchase of activision blizzard (which was almost undone but got through in the end) all have a hand in this. who will win more out of this? microsoft? or google/alphabet?? facebook does seem like a smaller player, microsoft OWNS gaming now (specially after blizzard-activision). but Meta is very insterested in gaming technology. so maybe they can also "poach" some talent now that openAI is all but publically bankrupt?? how long ago did Meta try to do their own crypto "Libra"? fact of the matter LLMs are chinese tech. else tiktok would have been successfully stopped. why did all this happen after chinese visit due to a trade union in south asia? finally, I know of 3 giant corporations that have repeated the re-structuring which from my viewpoint was pioneered by google/alphabet. one is facebook/meta, and the other is a chinese company (alibaba?) I don't even know this which is ok because I am ranting on the internet in a buried discussion in a public forum
- ianhawes 3y ago> People like Sam and Satya expect people to be self-interested and not tear everything down. Bingo. I think there is also a factor of this being a non-profit board, where the board is not beholden to shareholders in the same way. For example, you presumably have no standing to sue a NP BOD for breach of fiduciary duty vs. a corporate BOD. I don't know the intricacies of the laws surrounding this, but I expect that the none-Microsoft investors in OpenAI who are seeing their investments dissolve in real time are probably asking their lawyers that right now. Adam D'Angelo seems like someone acting in their own self-interest and that of his company, Quora. The move to bring in Emmett Shear at the 11th hour seems like a move right out of his playbook. What exactly does Adam stand to gain from a weakened or destroyed OpenAI?
- lazide 3y agoIt feels like a weird divorce to me, where one side of the couple wants kids and the other side wants to party and go to Tahiti every couple months. Before this, they were able to make things work - until someone said the quiet things out loud, and now they’re clearly going their separate ways while going ‘wtf just happened’.
- alsodumb 3y agoAdam stands to gain the most from a weakened OpenAPI product. Not from OpenAPI outright stopping commercialization, but stopping it just enough to still have API but not products like GPT store and agents. It's not about Quora, which is a shit show either way, but it's about his AI chat company, Poe. Poe started customizable AI agents and also started their own store for AI agents - they were the first to do this. And Poe uses OpenAI API for this, they are essentially a wrapper company. When OpenAI announced custom agents and store on DevDay, it was a fundamental threat to Poe, and a very strong conflict of interest for Adam. You also hear from everyone that things started getting sour after DevDay. I'm pretty sure Adam played his part in the shit show with his own motives.
- himaraya 3y agoFor whatever reason, Sam knowingly gave Adam a pass. He forced out Reid Hoffman over Inflection AI. https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-privately-unhappy-about-leaving-openais-board https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...
- newsclues 3y agoAlso https://poe.com/adam https://poe.com/adam
- maxbaines 3y agowhat Poe is doing seems odd for such a company. I am doing the same with baarilliant.ai in my spare time.
- nilkn 3y agoAs new datapoints emerge (like Ilya's expression of regret), it's certainly starting to look like most folks got it wrong and Ilya was not the architect of this chaos but rather Adam. Let's hope that Ilya's genuine moral and ethical concerns were not taken advantage of over the last few months to pit him against Sam just because Adam didn't want to see both his ventures (Quora, Poe) crash and burn.
- zozbot234 3y ago> Outside Amazon, Google and MS, who actually has the hardware, even if you have the money? nVidia, and others as well. But they'd rather use it for something more worthwhile than a dumb hallucinating parrot.
- tyingq 3y ago> - Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego Interesting comment, given this: https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoHallelujah, spot on. Whenever I see major clusters like this, and tons of folks online are so quick to go to outlandish "4D chess" conspiracy theories, I'm always reminded of that meme "People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been product managers." We like to think that big execs and leaders are some super smart geniuses when we're not disparaging them (and they may be, but only in specific areas), but they're still just people, and they are afflicted with jealousy and envy and spite and lack of forethought just like the rest of us, and they make mistakes accordingly. They particularly make mistakes when you're trying to organize a big group of people.
- paradox242 3y agoI have two brothers, one of which around 2019 fell down a couple YouTube rabbit holes and came out repeating things about flat earth, QAnon, and just about every other comorbid conspiracy theory circulating at that time. He honestly believes that there is some global cabal involving tens of thousands of people to hide the fact that the earth is flat. He especially makes the fundamental error of assuming that all of the "evidence" he has collected is ultimately attributable to a single source, and that there exist world-wide organizations that are eminently capable and efficient in keeping these things going and largely under wraps. My brother was in the military, and I have seen the inside of many large organizations, and this is just not anywhere in our experience. At best the world somehow runs along in a kind of controlled chaos, it is one enormous coordination problem and there are too many competing interests at work in any one area.
- Solvency 3y ago[flagged]
- raincom 3y agoPerfect reply. Every statement and its contrary can be made plausible with right arguments.
- Scharkenberg 3y ago
- swalsh 3y agoIf what David Grusch is saying about UAP is true (and please don't let this thread turn into a debate about that), this feels like it's falling into a similar pattern. A potential world changing capability is being developed, the type of capability that whoever controls it, and masters it, can gain control of EVERYTHING. So I think there's an internal divide, both sides have good intentions. They want the best for the people they think they're protecting. In the case of UAP, it was to protect US national security. In the case of OpenAI, I think it's to attempt a slow transition of the global economy. But on the opposite side, that has to be balanced with the potential widespread benefits of opening it up. In the case of AI, we could open it up, but what if the Chinese, or a malevolent capitalist entity uses the technology to go full speed ahead, and accumulates the entire economy under their sole control. This weekend, there was an event by a group called the SOL foundation for UAP. They revealed something called the "Slow Disclosure" [1], a process to avert what they call "Catastrophic Disclosure". I see AI falling into similar power dynamics. Keep it all to yourself because you trust yourself, and let it out only after you've fully mastered it... or take a risk of letting the world start mastering it with you, but start to realize the world changing benefits immediately. Both sides have good points, nobody is wrong. People just have different risk tolerance. OpenAI looks a lot like our government today, internally divided, a few people with the power to choose which path we go in history. That's a lot of power, you better believe things are going to look weird on the outside. [1] https://twitter.com/tinyklaus/status/1726061116730609692 https://twitter.com/tinyklaus/status/1726061116730609692
- rtkwe 3y agoIMO the only actually new thing we've actually seen with UAPs/UFOs is that people are making the claims under oath now. His whole public testimony was one giant tease with no concrete info and a lot of 2nd+ hand innuendo. The whole 'slow disclosure' idea reeks to me of the same punting of putting up the evidence that happened in 2020 with the Kraken and the entirety of the Q nonsense. The people pushing it didn't have evidence and assumed they could either BS their way past not having it or someone would come forward out of nowhere with it and the timelines always moved out to accommodate the lack of anything coming out. I'll believe it when I see some actual evidence.
- dpflan 3y agoI find this whole thing hilarious. Clearly the CEO was going ham doing AI things and becoming the face of this wave of AI, and events that occurred made the board react to save the ideology of the entity -- which is the way the entity was structured, also 49% is not ownership, it's close, but not exactly. The firing was meant try to dampen the ego and influence of the CEO as well. Now, there is a new CEO, great. But yeah, morale is going to be pretty much in flux for a while. This has clearly disrupted OpenAI's ability to function and therefore contribute more to either research and/or productization. Sam and Greg going to M$FT only matter if their influence and leadership can bring the right people together. OpenAI had the right people to create GPT-3+, but now, seems like they won't. M$ST probably won't either. Now each entity is actually weakened for a number of months I would presume. M$FT will try to push forward whatever productization of the current AI products it has access to. OpenAI will struggle to figure out if it's a pure research entity now or what.
- dpflan 3y agoHm, well, then, let's just wait out more details...
- auggierose 3y ago> Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego, Altman being the public face, he was left out of Time 100 AI leaders in favor of Greg, etc. Do you mean [1]? Sam, Greg and Ilya are all in there, the first two under Leaders, and Ilya under Thinkers. [1] https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/ https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/
- barrkel 3y agoFair enough, I removed it, though I believe leaders > thinkers on the status scale.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoNah, it's just a function of "role". The leaders section is principally business people whereas the thinkers section is principally academics and practitioners.
- lvl102 3y agoThere’s something massive brewing here that involves Microsoft. And it stinks. One thing is for certain, Google is clearly a major loser here. They completely blew the lead in AI.
- davedx 3y agoHow on Earth is Google a loser? OpenAI is splitting down the middle, if not imploding entirely. It's not like Microsoft will be able to just get Sam and Greg new Macbooks and have all the OpenAI engineering suddenly be internal there. This is going to cause a gigantic amount of operational pain. Google will be quietly smiling and catching up.
- pasttense01 3y agoIt's a short term vs long term thing: Short term it is going to slow Microsoft down because it will take a while to get a while to get software development back on course. Long term it will speed thing up because OpenAI is concerned by safety issues and will thus be more cautious about software release, while Microsoft has no such inhibitions.
- lvl102 3y agoOpenAI is basically in the bag for MSFT. While we enjoyed reading and speculating about the drama this weekend, Microsoft managed to eat the whole thing without anyone complaining. Meanwhile, Google still has nothing. Heck, even Facebook/Meta is ahead of the game.
- ryandvm 3y agoI would say Google is one of the few companies that directly benefit from OpenAI+Microsoft hitting a heavy patch of turbulence.
- dude2000bc 3y agocorrection: Ilya was on Time 100 AI, along with folks like Hinton.
- olalonde 3y ago> At least two members of the board probably were genuinely more concerned about AI alignment Is there any evidence that Altman's firing was even related to AI alignment? All I've seen is people speculating about it.
- neuronic 3y agoIsn't almost everything right now speculation, uncertainty & conjecture? We have only little insight and not even the participating parties might have a full understanding of the situation because motives and choices might be hidden. Microsoft just saw chaos and made a very smart move before someone else could.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago- Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego, Altman being the public face, he was left out of Time 100 AI leaders in favor of Greg, etc. But Ilya Sutskever is on the Time 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023 list, assuming that's the one you're referring to.
- barrkel 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38350698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38350698
- peteradio 3y agoYou don't need cloud for the compute.