6 ms·

Giving 2 people the same project? Isnt this like the thing to do to get differing approaches and then release the amalgamation of the two? I thought these sorts

Giving 2 people the same project? Isnt this like the thing to do to get differing approaches and then release the amalgamation of the two? I thought these sorts of things are common. Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO? This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.

valine 3y ago
Steve Jobs famously had two iPhone teams working on concepts in parallel. It was click wheel vs multi-touch. Shockingly the click wheel iPhone lost.
- throwawayapples 3y ago
  and the Apple (II etc) vs Mac teams warring with each other.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    You're thinking Lisa vs. Mac. Apple ][ didn't come into the picture until later when some of the engineers started playing around with making a mouse card for the ][.
- fakedang 3y ago
  Seriously? Click wheel iPhone lost shockingly? The click wheel on most laptops wears out so fast for me, and the chances of that happening on a smaller phone wheel is just so much higher.
  - potatoman22 3y ago
    (It was sarcasm)
    - fakedang 3y ago
      Oops, sorry, didn't get that. I had suspected it was one of those Luddite HNer comments bemoaning changes in tech, and nostalgically reminiscing on older times.
- brandall10 3y ago
  I thought the design team always worked up 3 working prototypes from a set of 10 foam mockups. There was an article from someone with intimate knowledge of Ives lab some years back stating this was protocol for all Apple products.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  Another element of that was the team that tried to adapt iPodOS for iPhone vs Forstall's team that adapted OSX.
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    I think it was also a contest between all web ui (like WebOS) bs Cocoa.
stingraycharles 3y ago
I remember a few years ago when there was some research group that was able to take a picture of a black hole. It involved lots of complicated interpretation of data. As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct. So yes, it’s absolutely a valid strategy.
- campbel 3y ago
  Yep! I've done eng "bake-offs" as well, where a few folks / teams work on a problem in isolation then we compare and contrast after. Good fun!
  - cyrnel 3y ago
    Not good fun when it's done in secret. That happened to me, and I was gaslit when I discovered the competing git repo. Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.
    - moorow 3y ago
      Yeah, doing it in secrecy is a recipe for Bad Things. I worked at a startup that completely died because of it.
    - campbel 3y ago
      Yeah that sounds toxic, this was done with everyones knowledge
- msravi 3y ago
  Did the teams know that there was another team working on the same thing? I wonder how that affects working of both teams... On the other hand, not telling the teams would erode the trust that the teams have in management.
discordance 3y ago
Happens all the time. Teams of people at Google work on the same features, only to find out near launch that they lost to another team who had been working on the same thing without their knowledge.
- PurelyApplied 3y ago
  [flagged]
- zebnyc 3y ago
  How does that work? Do they have the same the same PM, requirements? Is it just different tech / achitectures adopted by different teams. Fascinating
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    Give a goal (ex. make it more intuitive/easier for the user to do X), have 2 teams independently work on it, A/B test them, winner gets merged.
  - discordance 3y ago
    It is fascinating, very wasteful and also often devastating for the teams involved who worked very hard who then have their work thrown away. PMs/TPMs/POs may not know as they're on different teams. Often it's just a VP game and decided on preference or a power play and not on work quality/outcome.
fluidcruft 3y ago
I guess it depends on whether any of them actually got the assignment. One way to interpret it is that nobody is taking that assignment seriously. So depending on what that assignment is and how important that particular assignment is to the board, then it may in fact be a big deal.
- kumarvvr 3y ago
  Does a board give an assignment to the CEO or teams? If the case is that the will of the board is not being fulfilled, then the reasoning is simple. The CEO was told to do something and he has not done it. So, he is ousted. Plain and simple. This talk about projects given to two teams and what not is nonsense. The board should care if its work is done, not how the work is done. That is the job of the CEO.
  - fluidcruft 3y ago
    Frankly the information that is available is extremely non-specific and open to interpretation and framing by whoever wants to tell one story or another. The way I see it something as specific as "has not done xyz" is a specific thing that can be falsified and invites whatever it is into the public to be argued about and investigated whereas "not sufficiently candid" does not reveal much and just says that a majority of the board doesn't trust him. Altman and all the people directly involved know what's going on, outsiders have no need to know so we're just looking at tea leaves and scraps trying to weave narratives. And I agree the board should care if the work is actually done and that's where if the CEO seems to be bluffing that the work is being done or blowing it off and humoring them then it becomes a problem about the CEO not respecting the board's direction.
WalterBright 3y ago
Back in the late 80s, Lotus faced a crisis with their spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. Should they: 1. stick with DOS 2. go with OS/2 3. go with Windows Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Which would have had been a tradeoff too. More time to market, fewer people on each project, slowed down by cross platform code.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    They would have just forked the code and maybe merged some changes back and forth, no real need for cross-platform code.
    - primax 3y ago
      This was pre-1983. Forking wasn't a thing at the time. Any kind of code management was cutting edge, and cross-platform shared code wasn't even dreamed of yet.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        Fork just means two groups start with the same code and work independently. It was a thing.
      - bawolff 3y ago
        Forking and merging is a social phenomenom. Sure git makes it easier, but nothing stopping anyone from just copying and pasting as appropriate. Not to mention diff(1) was invented in 1974, and diff3(1) in 1979, so there were already tools to help with this, even if not as well developed as modern tools. I'm also pretty sure cross-platform code was a thing in 1983. Maybe not to the same extent and ease as now, but still a thing.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Was that verbatim the reason or an angry persons characterisation?
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Also when a project is vital to a company, you cannot just give it to one team. You need to derisk
hooloovoo_zoo 3y ago
Giving two groups of researchers the same problem is guaranteeing one team will scoop the other. Hard to divvy up credit after the fact.
danbmil 3y ago
The CEO's I've worked for have mostly been mini-DonaldT's, almost pathologically allergic to truth, logic, or consistency. Altman seems way over on the normal scale for CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. I'm sure he can knock two eggs together to make an omelette, but these piddling excuses for firing him don't pass the smell test. I get the feeling Ilya might be a bit naive about how people work, and may have been taken advantage of (by for example spinning this as a safety issue when it's just a good old fashioned power struggle)
- danbmil 3y ago
  as for multiple teams with overlapping goals -- are you kidding me? That's a 100% legit and popular tactic. Once CEO I worked with relished this approach and called it a "Steel-cage death match"!
- aravindgp 3y ago
  You were right Ilya was naive , he regrets his decision on twitter. And he was taken advantage of by power hungry people behind.
hal009 3y ago
As mentioned by another person in this thread [0], it is likely that it was Ilya's work that was getting replicated by another "secret" team, and the "different opinions on the same person" was Sam's opinions of Ilya. Perhaps Sam saw him as an unstable element and a single point of failure in the company, and wanted to make sure that OpenAI would be able to continue without Ilya? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=38357843 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=38357843
- kmlevitt 3y ago
  Firing Sam as a way of sticking up for Ilya would make more sense if Ilya wasn’t currently in support of Sam getting his job back.
  - onimishra 3y ago
    I’m not sure Ilya was anticipating this to more or less break OpenAI as a company. Ilya is all about the work they do, and might not have anticipated that this would turn the entire company against him and the rest of the board. And so, he is in support of Sam coming back, if that means that they can get back to the work at hand.
    - kmlevitt 3y ago
      Perhaps. But if the board is really so responsive to Ilya's concerns, why have they not reversed the decision so that Ilya can get his wish?
- 015a 3y ago
  This is an interesting theory when combined with this tweet from Google DeepMind's team lead of Scalable Alignment [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/1726754277618491416 https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141... The "Sam is actually a psychopath that has managed to swindle his way into everyone liking him, and Ilya has grave ethical concerns about that kind of person leading a company seeking AGI, but he can't out him publicly because so many people are hypnotized by him" theory is definitely a new, interesting one; there has been literally no moment in the past three days where I could have predicted the next turn this would take.
m3kw9 3y ago
How did they get 4 board to fire him because he tried to A B test a project?
clnq 3y ago
Consider for a moment: this is what the board of one of the fastest growing companies in the world worries about - kindergarten level drama. Under them - an organization in partnership with Microsoft, together filled with exceptional software engineers and scientists - experts in their field. All under management by kindergarteners. I wonder if this is what the staff are thinking right now. It must feel awful if they are.

valine 3y ago

Steve Jobs famously had two iPhone teams working on concepts in parallel. It was click wheel vs multi-touch. Shockingly the click wheel iPhone lost.

throwawayapples 3y ago
and the Apple (II etc) vs Mac teams warring with each other.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  You're thinking Lisa vs. Mac. Apple ][ didn't come into the picture until later when some of the engineers started playing around with making a mouse card for the ][.
fakedang 3y ago
Seriously? Click wheel iPhone lost shockingly? The click wheel on most laptops wears out so fast for me, and the chances of that happening on a smaller phone wheel is just so much higher.
- potatoman22 3y ago
  (It was sarcasm)
  - fakedang 3y ago
    Oops, sorry, didn't get that. I had suspected it was one of those Luddite HNer comments bemoaning changes in tech, and nostalgically reminiscing on older times.
brandall10 3y ago
I thought the design team always worked up 3 working prototypes from a set of 10 foam mockups. There was an article from someone with intimate knowledge of Ives lab some years back stating this was protocol for all Apple products.
mikepurvis 3y ago
Another element of that was the team that tried to adapt iPodOS for iPhone vs Forstall's team that adapted OSX.
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  I think it was also a contest between all web ui (like WebOS) bs Cocoa.

stingraycharles 3y ago

I remember a few years ago when there was some research group that was able to take a picture of a black hole. It involved lots of complicated interpretation of data. As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct. So yes, it’s absolutely a valid strategy.

campbel 3y ago
Yep! I've done eng "bake-offs" as well, where a few folks / teams work on a problem in isolation then we compare and contrast after. Good fun!
- cyrnel 3y ago
  Not good fun when it's done in secret. That happened to me, and I was gaslit when I discovered the competing git repo. Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.
  - moorow 3y ago
    Yeah, doing it in secrecy is a recipe for Bad Things. I worked at a startup that completely died because of it.
  - campbel 3y ago
    Yeah that sounds toxic, this was done with everyones knowledge
msravi 3y ago
Did the teams know that there was another team working on the same thing? I wonder how that affects working of both teams... On the other hand, not telling the teams would erode the trust that the teams have in management.

discordance 3y ago

Happens all the time. Teams of people at Google work on the same features, only to find out near launch that they lost to another team who had been working on the same thing without their knowledge.

PurelyApplied 3y ago
[flagged]
zebnyc 3y ago
How does that work? Do they have the same the same PM, requirements? Is it just different tech / achitectures adopted by different teams. Fascinating
- hanniabu 3y ago
  Give a goal (ex. make it more intuitive/easier for the user to do X), have 2 teams independently work on it, A/B test them, winner gets merged.
- discordance 3y ago
  It is fascinating, very wasteful and also often devastating for the teams involved who worked very hard who then have their work thrown away. PMs/TPMs/POs may not know as they're on different teams. Often it's just a VP game and decided on preference or a power play and not on work quality/outcome.

fluidcruft 3y ago

I guess it depends on whether any of them actually got the assignment. One way to interpret it is that nobody is taking that assignment seriously. So depending on what that assignment is and how important that particular assignment is to the board, then it may in fact be a big deal.

kumarvvr 3y ago
Does a board give an assignment to the CEO or teams? If the case is that the will of the board is not being fulfilled, then the reasoning is simple. The CEO was told to do something and he has not done it. So, he is ousted. Plain and simple. This talk about projects given to two teams and what not is nonsense. The board should care if its work is done, not how the work is done. That is the job of the CEO.
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  Frankly the information that is available is extremely non-specific and open to interpretation and framing by whoever wants to tell one story or another. The way I see it something as specific as "has not done xyz" is a specific thing that can be falsified and invites whatever it is into the public to be argued about and investigated whereas "not sufficiently candid" does not reveal much and just says that a majority of the board doesn't trust him. Altman and all the people directly involved know what's going on, outsiders have no need to know so we're just looking at tea leaves and scraps trying to weave narratives. And I agree the board should care if the work is actually done and that's where if the CEO seems to be bluffing that the work is being done or blowing it off and humoring them then it becomes a problem about the CEO not respecting the board's direction.

WalterBright 3y ago

Back in the late 80s, Lotus faced a crisis with their spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. Should they: 1. stick with DOS 2. go with OS/2 3. go with Windows Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.

quickthrower2 3y ago
Which would have had been a tradeoff too. More time to market, fewer people on each project, slowed down by cross platform code.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  They would have just forked the code and maybe merged some changes back and forth, no real need for cross-platform code.
  - primax 3y ago
    This was pre-1983. Forking wasn't a thing at the time. Any kind of code management was cutting edge, and cross-platform shared code wasn't even dreamed of yet.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Fork just means two groups start with the same code and work independently. It was a thing.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      Forking and merging is a social phenomenom. Sure git makes it easier, but nothing stopping anyone from just copying and pasting as appropriate. Not to mention diff(1) was invented in 1974, and diff3(1) in 1979, so there were already tools to help with this, even if not as well developed as modern tools. I'm also pretty sure cross-platform code was a thing in 1983. Maybe not to the same extent and ease as now, but still a thing.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Was that verbatim the reason or an angry persons characterisation?

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago

Also when a project is vital to a company, you cannot just give it to one team. You need to derisk

hooloovoo_zoo 3y ago

Giving two groups of researchers the same problem is guaranteeing one team will scoop the other. Hard to divvy up credit after the fact.

danbmil 3y ago

The CEO's I've worked for have mostly been mini-DonaldT's, almost pathologically allergic to truth, logic, or consistency. Altman seems way over on the normal scale for CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. I'm sure he can knock two eggs together to make an omelette, but these piddling excuses for firing him don't pass the smell test. I get the feeling Ilya might be a bit naive about how people work, and may have been taken advantage of (by for example spinning this as a safety issue when it's just a good old fashioned power struggle)

danbmil 3y ago
as for multiple teams with overlapping goals -- are you kidding me? That's a 100% legit and popular tactic. Once CEO I worked with relished this approach and called it a "Steel-cage death match"!
aravindgp 3y ago
You were right Ilya was naive , he regrets his decision on twitter. And he was taken advantage of by power hungry people behind.

hal009 3y ago

As mentioned by another person in this thread [0], it is likely that it was Ilya's work that was getting replicated by another "secret" team, and the "different opinions on the same person" was Sam's opinions of Ilya. Perhaps Sam saw him as an unstable element and a single point of failure in the company, and wanted to make sure that OpenAI would be able to continue without Ilya? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=38357843 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=38357843

kmlevitt 3y ago
Firing Sam as a way of sticking up for Ilya would make more sense if Ilya wasn’t currently in support of Sam getting his job back.
- onimishra 3y ago
  I’m not sure Ilya was anticipating this to more or less break OpenAI as a company. Ilya is all about the work they do, and might not have anticipated that this would turn the entire company against him and the rest of the board. And so, he is in support of Sam coming back, if that means that they can get back to the work at hand.
  - kmlevitt 3y ago
    Perhaps. But if the board is really so responsive to Ilya's concerns, why have they not reversed the decision so that Ilya can get his wish?
015a 3y ago
This is an interesting theory when combined with this tweet from Google DeepMind's team lead of Scalable Alignment [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/1726754277618491416 https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141... The "Sam is actually a psychopath that has managed to swindle his way into everyone liking him, and Ilya has grave ethical concerns about that kind of person leading a company seeking AGI, but he can't out him publicly because so many people are hypnotized by him" theory is definitely a new, interesting one; there has been literally no moment in the past three days where I could have predicted the next turn this would take.

m3kw9 3y ago

How did they get 4 board to fire him because he tried to A B test a project?

clnq 3y ago

Consider for a moment: this is what the board of one of the fastest growing companies in the world worries about - kindergarten level drama. Under them - an organization in partnership with Microsoft, together filled with exceptional software engineers and scientists - experts in their field. All under management by kindergarteners. I wonder if this is what the staff are thinking right now. It must feel awful if they are.