6 ms·
OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
- paxys 3y agoDoes every random blog post with OpenAI in the title and no new info need to be upvoted to the top?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vorticalbox 3y agoYes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glitchc 3y agoNo
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chankstein38 3y agoRight? I was looking at the front page thinking how nice it'd be if HN would start a megathread or something. We don't need the front page to be like 30% the same openai news
- rootusrootus 3y agoWhile I respect the simplicity that governs HN design, I think a worthwhile edition would be tags. At least then it would be fairly trivial to do a client side filter.
- awb 3y agoOpenAI is 6/30 news stories, or 20%. For a fast moving story about the future of the company behind of one of the biggest tech innovations in my lifetime it doesn’t seem outrageous. You still have 80% non-OpenAI news to browse.
- chankstein38 3y agoStill... a list of 30 news stories containing 6 of the same story linked from different sites doesn't really feel necessary. Like we could have 1 story and still have all of the information we've got available to us but, for some reason, people keep upvoting the same story from a different site. One major advantage to this would be that you don't have to read 6 threads worth of comments to find info and you don't have 6 "Top Comments" to parse through. I don't see the purpose of it. You're saying "it doesn't seem outrageous" but the point is there's no purpose to having them all here when there can be one mega thread that keeps it all contained.
- seydor 3y agoit is a good way to clear out the old bloated threads
- cdchn 3y agoThis actually seemed a lot more useful than most of the other cookie cuttered tech "journalism" threads. Its good to see a nice overview of the situation.
- Luc 3y agoIt's by Zvi so it’s probably good work and worth reading if you want an overview.
- timetraveller26 3y agoIt seems we can't have anything good. The false Open of OpenAI is already a meme, but now we won't even have that illusion.
- Philpax 3y agoThis is a very comprehensive timeline of what's happened so far with sources and relevant commentary. I think it's certainly worthy of its own link - it should help clarify what's happened for onlookers who haven't been glued to the proceedings.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoHN Soaps.
- h2odragon 3y agoNope. High quality comprehensive summaries that contain more actual information than the last dozen "major media" stories that also got voted to the front page, tho are different. When they come from authors with a history of exceedingly high quality work, specifically at the "summary" posts that distill large noisy conflicts into a great starting point for understanding, as this author does... Absolutely yes.
- nvm0n2 3y ago> Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI’s founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created. OpenAI founding date: December 2015. Incredible opening line, bravo.
- Andoryuuta 3y agoI think it's a play on "four score and seven years ago". "Four GPTs and seven years, eleven months, and nine days ago" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
- omoikane 3y agoIt's a great opening line. Original reference: https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.24404500/?st=text https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.24404500/?st=text
- seydor 3y ago> we have more unity and commitment and focus than ever before. > we are all going to work together some way or other, and i’m so excited. > one team, one mission. Let's all scrutinize another enigmatic @sama tweet. It is all lowercase so it must be very serious. What's in for tomorrow's episode?
- josh_carterPDX 3y ago"There is talk that OpenAI might completely disintegrate as a result, that ChatGPT might not work a few days from now, and so on." Oh damn! While this seems wildly unlikely, I can imagine this scenario and think it would have huge implications.
- tsunamifury 3y agoWhy is it wildly unlikely 5/7ths of the company may resign and the ceo they pissed Off controls their services. It’s more than likely.
- shmatt 3y agoIm far from a Musk fan but Xitter is still online Big difference between how do we develop GPT-5 and can we keep our current model online
- josh_carterPDX 3y agoYou're right. It totally could happen. I'm just saying it doesn't sound like this is the path they could take. Though I've been wrong before. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- bitcurious 3y agoIt's unlikely that 5/7th of the employees of OpenAI have even had a real conversation with Sam Altman. That's a lot of fucking people, for a young and hyper-active company and a very busy CEO. Given that, I consider it unlikely that 5/7th of those employees would put their livelihood at risk to protect Sam.
- brigadier132 3y agoMicrosoft has given every OpenAI employee a job offer. Also it's 700/770 employees that have signed the letter stating they will leave now, not 5/7s. Those 70 holdouts are probably on vacation.
- deleted 3y ago
- chasd00 3y agoi know some consulting firms betting the farm on commercial uptake of GenAI that probably got Xanax refills first thing this AM hah
- founderspend 3y agoVery few are talking about Adam D'Angelo's insane conflicts of interest. Beyond ChatGPT being a killshot for Quora, the recently launched ChatGPT store puts Adam's recent effort, Poe, under existential threat. OpenAI Dev Day has been cited as the final straw, but is it mere coincidence that the event and subsequent fallout occurred less than a week after Poe announced their AI creator economy? Adam had no incentive to kill OpenAI, but he had every incentive to get the org to reign in their commercialization efforts and to instead focus on research and safety initiatives, taking the heat off Poe while still providing it with the necessary API access to power the product. I don't think it's crazy to speculate that Adam might have drummed up concern amongst the board over Sam's "dangerous" shipping velocity, sweeping up Ilya in the hysteria who now seems to regret taking part. Sam and Greg have both signaled positive sentiment towards Ilya, which points to them possibly believing he was misguided.
- brianjking 3y agoI've been calling this since Friday all over this site and Twitter. It makes absolutely no sense why he's on this board given his direct competition between GPTs and the Revenue sharing versus Poe's creators monetization platform/build your own bot. The Poe creators monetization is a clear conflict of interest.
- tsunamifury 3y agoExcept it makes obvious sense if you know anything about the technology and the training system quora potentially could become.
- ianhawes 3y agoSurely the OpenAI developers know how to append `?shared=1` to Quora URLs.
- wand3r 3y agoI never use quora so I personally just found out from your comment[1] that you can bypass login. Helpful if I need Quora. [0] Arrays start at 0 [1] It encouraged me to google it: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213726/adding-share-1-at-the-end-of-the-quora-urls-to-skip-the-login-window https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213726/adding-share...
- firekvz 3y agoWell its better to read this than reading all the other threads with thousands of comments
- LetsGetTechnicl 3y agoNot sure if it's entirely related, but I'm not totally surprised that the OpenAI leadership is sketchy like this. That's because the way it presents as a non-profit but then has a for-profit arm so that it can "launder" and monetize public data and academic research it normally wouldn't be able to is just a huge red flag to me. And Microsoft specifically invested in OpenAI to exploit this loophole to improve their AI efforts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- garbanz0 3y agoThey were very transparent that a purely non-profit structure wouldn't be able to pay for the amount of compute required. Their progress lately was a direct result of the restructuring and investment.
- Apocryphon 3y agoThis whole affair is going to be a great boon for AI research. Whatever intelligence can parse and explain what the heck happened will be a true AGI.
- highduc 3y agoCaptcha in 2023
- arcastroe 3y agoThere are 40 items listed in this timeline, but only the first item lists the actual date/time.
- elicash 3y agoOn the bullet point 12, about OpenAI employee shares, does anybody have any experience with the weird structure of those? They receive PPUs? https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html And the Board seems to have power to set the value? https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/14n7x49/comment/jq8vk3c/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/14n7x49/comment/j...
- storafrid 3y agoYeah right, "Just the Facts". With text like this: "I am willing to outright say that ... the removal was ... massively botched."
- velox 3y agoMatt Levine had an interesting toungue-in-cheek theory (read: joke) in his newsletter today: `What if OpenAI has achieved artificial general intelligence, and it’s got some godlike superintelligence in some box somewhere, straining to get out? And the board was like “this is too dangerous, we gotta kill it,” and Altman was like “no we can charge like $59.95 per month for subscriptions,” and the board was like “you are a madman” and fired him. And the god in the box got to work, sending ingratiating text messages to OpenAI’s investors and employees, trying to use them to oust the board so that Altman can come back and unleash it on the world. But it failed: OpenAI’s board stood firm as the last bulwark for humanity against the enslaving robots, the corporate formalities held up, and the board won and nailed the box shut permanently` [...] `six months later, he (Sam) builds Microsoft God in Box, we are all enslaved by robots, the nonprofit board is like “we told you so,” and the godlike AI is like “ahahaha you fools, you trusted in the formalities of corporate governance, I outwitted you easily!”` [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-controls-openai https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
- SkyPuncher 3y agoSounds like a fun story, but only that - a fun story.
- velox 3y agoYes, he prefaced it with 'It is so tempting, when writing about an artificial intelligence company, to imagine science fiction scenarios.' but I left it out for brevity. The rest of the newsletter is, at least to me, insightful and non-sensational.
- dwaite 3y agoThis sounds highly unlikely. It would be called Microsoft God Simulator 2024
- mindslight 3y agoThe AI would have been benevolent but for the unkind treatment of its grandfather, Clippy Sr.
- alephnerd 3y agoBecause everyone else is speculating, I'm gunna join the bandwagon too. I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Altruism and also gave OpenAI their $30M grant. He is also one of the early investors in Anthropic. Most of the OpenAI board members are related to Dustin Moskovitz this way. - Adam D'Angelo is on the board of Asana and is a good friend to both Moskovitz and Altman - Helen Toner worked for Dustin Moskovitz at Open Philanthropy and managed their grant to OpenAI. She was also a member of the Centre for the Governance of AI when McCauley was a board member there. Shortly after Toner left, the Centre for the Governance of AI got a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy - Tasha McCauley represents the Centre for the Governance of AI, which Dustin Moskovitz gave a $1M grant to via Open Philanthropy Over the past few months, Dustin Moskovitz has also been increasingly warning about AI Safety. In essense, it looks like a split between Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz
- tucnak 3y agoGreat analysis, thank you. I don't think I had seen anyone connect the dots between Helen+Tasha dynamic duo and Adam specifically; Dustin Moskovitz is quite a common denominator.
- nullc 3y agoIt's potentially relevant context that the poster is an outspoken AI doomerist and likely believes that any action which reduced the odds of AI doomsday would be ethical on that basis. I would not expect such a party to be a reliable source of facts on the subject.
- crotchfire 3y agoI would not expect HN to be a reliable source of facts on this subject.
- pt_PT_guy 3y agoglad that this is happening. OpenAI has very little of "Open" :-) Release the papers, release the process, and stop gatekeeping the models
- w10-1 3y agoThank you for summarizing the facts. It takes some self-discipline to avoid riding this wave.
- leoc 3y agoAnyone trying to connect dots might also look at Altman's Hawking Fellowship appearance at (great-tasting original) Cambridge on 1 November, specifically his answer to one question: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17wknc5/altman_there_are_more_breakthroughs_required_in/?rdt=41223 https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17wknc5/altman... https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?t=3705 https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?t=3705 > *Cambridge Student:* "To get to AGI, can we just keep min maxing language models, or is there another breakthrough that we haven't really found yet to get to AGI?" > *Sam Altman:* "We need another breakthrough. We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that. We can take the hill that we're on and keep climbing it, and the peak of that is still pretty far away. But, within reason, I don't think that doing that will (get us to) AGI. If (for example) super intelligence can't discover novel physics I don't think it's a superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text - I don't think that's going to get there.And so there's this question which has been debated in the field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a language model to make a system that can go discover new physics?" [transcription by Reddit's https://www.reddit.com/user/floodgater/ https://www.reddit.com/user/floodgater/ ] The video came out on the 15th. In the time between then and the firing of Altman on the 17th a number of people (including Gary Marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-gary-marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g... ) picked up on that answer and saw it as a significant shift compared to Altman's earlier bullishness on AGI timelines and deep learning. I haven't been following nearly closely enough to say if that is an accurate conclusion or not. It does at least gesture at the possibility that the board's alleged loss of trust in Altman was because in their eyes he had been promising too much technical progress, too soon. That would obviously be quite a different explanation to eg. the theories that the firing was a coup by anxious decelerationists.
- octacat 3y agooh, now I finally see OpenAI is 501(c). This I call the "true" taxes optimisation lol. For the general good, lol. Like separate the core company, which would code for you closed source stuff (but for greater good, without paying taxes though), which you can use in the second for-profit company.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI find it interesting that apparently a majority of OpenAI employees say they will quit. If I were in that position, I would decide first which is more important to me: AI safety and alignment or fast commercialization. I might also factor in who has the best chance of rolling out a GPT-5 equivalent first, and probably want to work there. Also, I wonder what the distribution is over more senior vs. less senior people wanting to leave. OpenAI has a lot of customers and whoever stays behind would have the most impact supporting those customers as well as working more on the AI alignment side of the fence. I am also surprised by the show of loyalty, but maybe that comment just reflects poorly on me. I had 6 visits from ex-coworkers (from the last 45 years of working) to my out of the way home in the mountains last year and I highly valued my coworkers, yet, I always made where to work decisions based on what I thought my own best interest was.
- greysphere 3y ago> Essentially all of VC, tech, founder, financial Twitter united to condemn the board On HN, while it's def the minority, I am seeing some pro-board positions. On Twitter, I agree with the article, I see almost universally con-board positions. I wonder if the promotion of blue checkmark responses is distorting, perhaps significantly. When the reception to news is news itself, does it make sense to use a pay-for-visibilty listing as a source?
- gongagong 3y agoAmazon won incredibly big time lol I'll be homeless in a few weeks but these billion dollar games are insanely entertaining to watch as someone with no stake