4 ms·

Guess OpenAI that was actually open was dead the moment Altman took MS money and completely change the organization. People there got a taste of the money and t

Guess OpenAI that was actually open was dead the moment Altman took MS money and completely change the organization. People there got a taste of the money and the mission went out the window. A lesson to learn I guess, just because something claims to be a nonprofit with a mission doesn’t mean it is/always will be so. All it takes is a corporation with deep pockets to compromise a few important people*, indirectly giving them a say in the organization, and things can change very quickly. * This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform.

roflyear 3y ago
My take as well - and the board acted too late. Sam probably promised people loads of cash, and that's the "candid" aspect we're missing on.
StableAlkyne 3y ago
I honestly wish Windows Phone had stuck around. I didn't particularly like the OS (too much like Win8), but it would at least be a viable alternative to the Apple-Google duopoly.
- rkagerer 3y ago
  I'd love a modern Palm phone, myself. With the same pixelated, minimalist interface.
theamk 3y ago
"few important people"? 95% of the company went with Altman. That's a popular vote if I have ever seen one.. Nokia was completely different, I doubt any of their regular employees supported Elop.
- roflyear 3y ago
  Right, what if what he wasn't being candid about was "we could be rich!" or "we're going to be rich!" messaging to the employees? Or some other messaging that he did not share with the board? Etc.. etc..
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  You compromise the “few” to get a foot and your money in the door. After that, money will work its magic.
nostromo 3y ago
GPUs run on cash, not goodwill. AI researchers also run on cash -- they have plenty of options and an organization needs to be able to reward them to keep them motivated and working. OpenAI is only what it is because of its commercial wing. It's not too different from the Mozilla Foundation, which would be instantly dead without their commercial subsidiary. I would much rather OpenAI survives this and continues to thrive -- rather than have Microsoft or Google own the AI future.
- mcguire 3y ago
  How is one commercial entity better than another?
  - qwytw 3y ago
    Having more competition is usually inherently better than having less competition?
  - px43 3y ago
    Microsoft is intimately connected to the global surveillance infrastructure currently propping up US imperialism. Parts of the company basically operate as a defense contractor, not much different from Raytheon or Northrup Grumman. For what it's worth, Google has said it's not letting any military play with any of their AI research. Microsoft apparently has no such qualms. Remember when the NSA offered a bounty for eavesdropping on Skype, then Microsoft bought Skype and removed all the encryption? https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... Giving early access to emerging AGI to an org like Microsoft makes me more than a bit nervous. Recall from this slide in the Snowden leak : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_... that PRISM was originally just a Microsoft thing, very likely built by Microsoft to funnel data to the NSA. Other companies were added later, but we know from the MUSCULAR leak etc, that some companies like Google were added involuntarily, by tapping fiber connections between data centers.
- thrwmoz 3y ago
  >Mozilla Firefox, once a dominant player in the Internet browser market with a 30% market share, has witnessed a significant decline in its market share. According to Statcounter, Firefox's global market share has plummeted from 30% in 2009 to a current standing of 2.8%. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-internet-browser-market-share-gains-to-74/1082/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-internet... Yes where would Mozi//a be without all that cash? Let it die so something better can take its place already.
brokencode 3y ago
How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? The board still, after days of intense controversy, have yet to clearly explain how Altman was betraying the mission. Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board? If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Exactly. All this "AI safety" stuff is at this point pure innuendo.
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Because the mission is visibly abandoned. There's nothing "open" about OpenAI. We may not know how the mission was abandoned but we know Sam was CEO, hence responsible.
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    What as "open" about it before that?
    - iteratethis 3y ago
      The first word in their company name.
  - thrwmoz 3y ago
    There was never anything open about open ai. If there were I should have access to their training data, training infra setup and weights. The only thing that changed is the reason why the unwashed masses aren't allowed to see the secret sauce: from alignment to profit. A plague on both their houses.
    - marricks 3y ago
      They don't publish papers now, they actually published papers and code before. No doubt OpenAI was never a glass house... but it seems extremely disingenuous to say their behavior hasn't changed.
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Do you realize without support by Microsoft: - There would be no GPT-3 - There would be no GPT-4 - There would be no DALL-E 2 - There would be no DALL-E 3 - There would be no Whisper - There would be no OpenAI TTS - OpenAI would be bankrupt? There's no "open version" of OpenAI that actually exists. Elon Musk pledged money then tried to blackmail them into becoming the CEO, then bailed, leaving them to burn. Sam Altman, good or bad, saved the company with his Microsoft partnership.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Elon running OpenAI would have made this timeline look downright cozy in comparison
nullptr_deref 3y ago
okay, i finally understand how the world works. if it is important stuff, then it is necessary to write everything in a lowercase letters. what i understood from recent events in tech is that whatever people say or do, capital beats ideology and the only value that comes forth is through capital. where does this take us then? to a comment like this. why? because no matter what people think inside, the outside world is full of wolves. the one who is capable of eating everyone is the king. there is an easy way to do that. be nice. even if you are not. act nice. even if you are not. will people notice it? yes. but would they care? for 10 min, 20 min or even 1 day. sooner or later they will forget the facade as long as you deliver things.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  You are correct!
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  You and Adam Curtis need to spend some time together I’d suggest watching “Can’t get You out of my head” Why does capital win? Because we have no other narrative. And it killed all our old ones and absorbs all our new ones.
  - nullptr_deref 3y ago
    i was really naive believing there was any another option. if it is about capital and if it is the game, then i am ready to play now. can't wait to steal so many open source project out there and market it. obviously it will be hard but hey, it is legal and doable. just stating this fact because i never had the confident to pull it off. but after recent events, it started making sense. so whatever people do is now mine. i am gonna live with this motto and forget the goodwill of any person. as long as i can craft a narrative and sell whatever other create, i think that should be okay. what do you think of it? i am talking about the things like MIT license and open-source. how far will it take me? as long as i have ability to steal the content and develop on top of stolen content, pretty sure i can make living out of it. please note, it doesn't imply openai stole anything. what i am trying to imply is that, i am free to steal and sell stuff others made for free. i never had that realization until today. going by this definition, value can be leeched off other people who are doing things for free!
fallingknife 3y ago
I don't think this is a fair conclusion. Close to 90% of the employees have signed a letter asking for the board to resign. Seems like that puts the burden of proof on the board.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  A board that basically accused Altman, publicly, of wrongdoing of some kind which appears to be false. To bring Altman back, or issue an explanation, would require retracting that; which brings in serious questions about legal liability for the directors. Think about it. If you are the director of the company, fire the CEO, admit you were wrong even though nothing materially changed 3 days later, and severely damaged the company and your investors - are you getting away without a lawsuit? Whether it be from investors, or from Altman seeking to formally clear his name, or both? That's a level of incompetence that potentially runs the risk of piercing into personal liability (aka "you're losing your house"). So, you can't admit that you were wrong (at least, that's getting risky). You also can't elaborate on what he did wrong, because then you're in deep trouble if he actually didn't do anything wrong [1]. Your hands are tied for saying anything regarding what just happened, and it's your own fault. All you can do is let the company implode. [1] A board that was smarter would've just said that "Altman was a fantastic CEO, but we believe the company needs to go a different direction." The vague accusations of wrongdoing were/are a catastrophic move; both from a legal perspective in tightening what they can say, and also for uniting the company around Altman.
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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ta1243 3y ago
> * This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform. To me, RIM circa 2008 would have been a far better acquisition for Microsoft. Blackberry was embedded in corporate world, the media loved it (Obama had one), the iphone and android were really new.
darkerside 3y ago
It also reminds me of, Don't Be Evil
mannerheim 3y ago
> compromise a few important people* Haven't 700 or so of the employees signed onto the letter? Hard to argue it's just a few important people who've been compromised when it's almost the entire company.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  Why did you think 700 signed on? Money. Who let the money in? Altman.
  - mannerheim 3y ago
    That's a very different claim than just a few compromised people, then. That's almost the entire company that's 'compromised'.
    - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      You compromise a few influential people in the organization to get a foot in the door and ultimately your money - which you control. Your money will do the rest.
      - mannerheim 3y ago
        The 700 other employees who've signed on have agency. They can refuse to go to Microsoft, and Microsoft wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Microsoft's money isn't some magical compelling force that makes everyone do what they want, otherwise they could have used it on the board in the first place.
        TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
        Money changes people. Especially when it’s a lot of money. They got used to the money and they want it to keep flowing - the charter be damned. Everyone has a price.
        3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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caycep 3y ago
All I can say is NEURIPS will be interesting in 2 weeks...
kitsune_ 3y ago
I think the steward-ownership / stewardship movement might suffer a significant blow with this.
ben_w 3y ago
Could be, but it isn't necessarily so. There's a whole range of opinions about AI as it is now or will be in the near future: for capabilities, I've seen people here stating with certainty everything from GPT being no better than 90s Markov chains to being genius level IQ; for impact, it (and diffusion models) are described even here as everywhere on the spectrum from pointless toys to existential threats to human creativity. It's entirely possible that this is a case where everyone is smart and has sincerely held yet mutually incompatible opinions about what they have made and are making.
huevosabio 3y ago
Non-profits are often misrepresented as being somehow morally superior. But as San Francisco will teach you, status as non-profit has little or nothing to do with being a mission driven organization. Non-profits here are often just another type of company, but one where the revenue goes entirely to "salaries". Often their incentives are to perpetuate whatever problem there are there to supposedly solve. And since they have this branding of non-profit, they get little market pressure to actually solve problems. For all the talk of alignment, we already have non-human agents that we constantly wrestle to align with our general welfare: institutions. The market, when properly regulated, does a very good job of aligning companies. Democracy is our flawed but acceptable way of dealing with monopolies, the biggest example being the Government. Institutions that escape the market and don't have democratic controls often end up misaligned, my favorite example being US universities.

roflyear 3y ago

My take as well - and the board acted too late. Sam probably promised people loads of cash, and that's the "candid" aspect we're missing on.

StableAlkyne 3y ago

I honestly wish Windows Phone had stuck around. I didn't particularly like the OS (too much like Win8), but it would at least be a viable alternative to the Apple-Google duopoly.

rkagerer 3y ago
I'd love a modern Palm phone, myself. With the same pixelated, minimalist interface.

theamk 3y ago

"few important people"? 95% of the company went with Altman. That's a popular vote if I have ever seen one.. Nokia was completely different, I doubt any of their regular employees supported Elop.

roflyear 3y ago
Right, what if what he wasn't being candid about was "we could be rich!" or "we're going to be rich!" messaging to the employees? Or some other messaging that he did not share with the board? Etc.. etc..
TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
You compromise the “few” to get a foot and your money in the door. After that, money will work its magic.

nostromo 3y ago

GPUs run on cash, not goodwill. AI researchers also run on cash -- they have plenty of options and an organization needs to be able to reward them to keep them motivated and working. OpenAI is only what it is because of its commercial wing. It's not too different from the Mozilla Foundation, which would be instantly dead without their commercial subsidiary. I would much rather OpenAI survives this and continues to thrive -- rather than have Microsoft or Google own the AI future.

mcguire 3y ago
How is one commercial entity better than another?
- qwytw 3y ago
  Having more competition is usually inherently better than having less competition?
- px43 3y ago
  Microsoft is intimately connected to the global surveillance infrastructure currently propping up US imperialism. Parts of the company basically operate as a defense contractor, not much different from Raytheon or Northrup Grumman. For what it's worth, Google has said it's not letting any military play with any of their AI research. Microsoft apparently has no such qualms. Remember when the NSA offered a bounty for eavesdropping on Skype, then Microsoft bought Skype and removed all the encryption? https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... Giving early access to emerging AGI to an org like Microsoft makes me more than a bit nervous. Recall from this slide in the Snowden leak : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_... that PRISM was originally just a Microsoft thing, very likely built by Microsoft to funnel data to the NSA. Other companies were added later, but we know from the MUSCULAR leak etc, that some companies like Google were added involuntarily, by tapping fiber connections between data centers.
thrwmoz 3y ago
>Mozilla Firefox, once a dominant player in the Internet browser market with a 30% market share, has witnessed a significant decline in its market share. According to Statcounter, Firefox's global market share has plummeted from 30% in 2009 to a current standing of 2.8%. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-internet-browser-market-share-gains-to-74/1082/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-internet... Yes where would Mozi//a be without all that cash? Let it die so something better can take its place already.

brokencode 3y ago

How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? The board still, after days of intense controversy, have yet to clearly explain how Altman was betraying the mission. Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board? If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?

paulddraper 3y ago
Exactly. All this "AI safety" stuff is at this point pure innuendo.
iteratethis 3y ago
Because the mission is visibly abandoned. There's nothing "open" about OpenAI. We may not know how the mission was abandoned but we know Sam was CEO, hence responsible.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  What as "open" about it before that?
  - iteratethis 3y ago
    The first word in their company name.
- thrwmoz 3y ago
  There was never anything open about open ai. If there were I should have access to their training data, training infra setup and weights. The only thing that changed is the reason why the unwashed masses aren't allowed to see the secret sauce: from alignment to profit. A plague on both their houses.
  - marricks 3y ago
    They don't publish papers now, they actually published papers and code before. No doubt OpenAI was never a glass house... but it seems extremely disingenuous to say their behavior hasn't changed.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

Do you realize without support by Microsoft: - There would be no GPT-3 - There would be no GPT-4 - There would be no DALL-E 2 - There would be no DALL-E 3 - There would be no Whisper - There would be no OpenAI TTS - OpenAI would be bankrupt? There's no "open version" of OpenAI that actually exists. Elon Musk pledged money then tried to blackmail them into becoming the CEO, then bailed, leaving them to burn. Sam Altman, good or bad, saved the company with his Microsoft partnership.

hughesjj 3y ago
Elon running OpenAI would have made this timeline look downright cozy in comparison

nullptr_deref 3y ago

okay, i finally understand how the world works. if it is important stuff, then it is necessary to write everything in a lowercase letters. what i understood from recent events in tech is that whatever people say or do, capital beats ideology and the only value that comes forth is through capital. where does this take us then? to a comment like this. why? because no matter what people think inside, the outside world is full of wolves. the one who is capable of eating everyone is the king. there is an easy way to do that. be nice. even if you are not. act nice. even if you are not. will people notice it? yes. but would they care? for 10 min, 20 min or even 1 day. sooner or later they will forget the facade as long as you deliver things.

RecycledEle 3y ago
You are correct!
tsunamifury 3y ago
You and Adam Curtis need to spend some time together I’d suggest watching “Can’t get You out of my head” Why does capital win? Because we have no other narrative. And it killed all our old ones and absorbs all our new ones.
- nullptr_deref 3y ago
  i was really naive believing there was any another option. if it is about capital and if it is the game, then i am ready to play now. can't wait to steal so many open source project out there and market it. obviously it will be hard but hey, it is legal and doable. just stating this fact because i never had the confident to pull it off. but after recent events, it started making sense. so whatever people do is now mine. i am gonna live with this motto and forget the goodwill of any person. as long as i can craft a narrative and sell whatever other create, i think that should be okay. what do you think of it? i am talking about the things like MIT license and open-source. how far will it take me? as long as i have ability to steal the content and develop on top of stolen content, pretty sure i can make living out of it. please note, it doesn't imply openai stole anything. what i am trying to imply is that, i am free to steal and sell stuff others made for free. i never had that realization until today. going by this definition, value can be leeched off other people who are doing things for free!

fallingknife 3y ago

I don't think this is a fair conclusion. Close to 90% of the employees have signed a letter asking for the board to resign. Seems like that puts the burden of proof on the board.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
A board that basically accused Altman, publicly, of wrongdoing of some kind which appears to be false. To bring Altman back, or issue an explanation, would require retracting that; which brings in serious questions about legal liability for the directors. Think about it. If you are the director of the company, fire the CEO, admit you were wrong even though nothing materially changed 3 days later, and severely damaged the company and your investors - are you getting away without a lawsuit? Whether it be from investors, or from Altman seeking to formally clear his name, or both? That's a level of incompetence that potentially runs the risk of piercing into personal liability (aka "you're losing your house"). So, you can't admit that you were wrong (at least, that's getting risky). You also can't elaborate on what he did wrong, because then you're in deep trouble if he actually didn't do anything wrong [1]. Your hands are tied for saying anything regarding what just happened, and it's your own fault. All you can do is let the company implode. [1] A board that was smarter would've just said that "Altman was a fantastic CEO, but we believe the company needs to go a different direction." The vague accusations of wrongdoing were/are a catastrophic move; both from a legal perspective in tightening what they can say, and also for uniting the company around Altman.

deleted 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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ta1243 3y ago

> * This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform. To me, RIM circa 2008 would have been a far better acquisition for Microsoft. Blackberry was embedded in corporate world, the media loved it (Obama had one), the iphone and android were really new.

darkerside 3y ago

It also reminds me of, Don't Be Evil

mannerheim 3y ago

> compromise a few important people* Haven't 700 or so of the employees signed onto the letter? Hard to argue it's just a few important people who've been compromised when it's almost the entire company.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
Why did you think 700 signed on? Money. Who let the money in? Altman.
- mannerheim 3y ago
  That's a very different claim than just a few compromised people, then. That's almost the entire company that's 'compromised'.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    You compromise a few influential people in the organization to get a foot in the door and ultimately your money - which you control. Your money will do the rest.
    - mannerheim 3y ago
      The 700 other employees who've signed on have agency. They can refuse to go to Microsoft, and Microsoft wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Microsoft's money isn't some magical compelling force that makes everyone do what they want, otherwise they could have used it on the board in the first place.
      - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
        Money changes people. Especially when it’s a lot of money. They got used to the money and they want it to keep flowing - the charter be damned. Everyone has a price.
        3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

caycep 3y ago

All I can say is NEURIPS will be interesting in 2 weeks...

kitsune_ 3y ago

I think the steward-ownership / stewardship movement might suffer a significant blow with this.

ben_w 3y ago

Could be, but it isn't necessarily so. There's a whole range of opinions about AI as it is now or will be in the near future: for capabilities, I've seen people here stating with certainty everything from GPT being no better than 90s Markov chains to being genius level IQ; for impact, it (and diffusion models) are described even here as everywhere on the spectrum from pointless toys to existential threats to human creativity. It's entirely possible that this is a case where everyone is smart and has sincerely held yet mutually incompatible opinions about what they have made and are making.

huevosabio 3y ago

Non-profits are often misrepresented as being somehow morally superior. But as San Francisco will teach you, status as non-profit has little or nothing to do with being a mission driven organization. Non-profits here are often just another type of company, but one where the revenue goes entirely to "salaries". Often their incentives are to perpetuate whatever problem there are there to supposedly solve. And since they have this branding of non-profit, they get little market pressure to actually solve problems. For all the talk of alignment, we already have non-human agents that we constantly wrestle to align with our general welfare: institutions. The market, when properly regulated, does a very good job of aligning companies. Democracy is our flawed but acceptable way of dealing with monopolies, the biggest example being the Government. Institutions that escape the market and don't have democratic controls often end up misaligned, my favorite example being US universities.