12 ms·

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. Combine that with a totally inexperienced board, and D'Angelo's maneuvering, and you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history

zw123456 3y ago
100% agree. I've seen this type of thing up close (much smaller potatoes but same type of thing) and whatever is getting aired publicly is most likely not the real story. Not sure if the reasons you guessed are it or not, we probably won't know for awhile but your guesses are as good as mine.
mcmcmc 3y ago
This feels like a lot of very one sided PR moves from the side with significantly more money to spend on that kind of thing
LMYahooTFY 3y ago
>Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? What type of politicking and deception is involved in creating a for profit subsidiary which is granted license to OpenAIs research in order to generate wealth? The entire purpose of this legal structure is to keep non-profit owners focused on their mission rather than shareholder value, which in this case is attempting to ethically create an AGI. Edit: to add that this framework was not invented by Sam Altman, nor OpenAI. >Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. Thus the legal structure I described, although this argument is entirely theoretical and assumes such a thing can actually be guarded that well at all, or that model performance and compute will remain correlated.
- jelling 3y ago
  > What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? Yes. Yes and more yes. That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. Because they are supposed to be improving society, not profiting from it.
  - arrosenberg 3y ago
    > That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. That's your belief. The NFL, Heritage Foundation and Scientology are all non-profits and none of them improve society; they all profit from it. (For what its' worth, I wish the law was more aligned with your worldview)
    - aurareturn 3y ago
      FYI, the NFL teams are for profits and pay taxes like normal busineses. The overwhelming majority of the revenue goes to the teams.
      - arrosenberg 3y ago
        I know that, does that change what I said?
        aurareturn 3y ago
        I don't know if it does but my point is to prevent others from thinking that a giant money making entity like the NFL does not pay any taxes.
        hluska 3y ago
        [flagged]
        3y ago
hooande 3y ago
Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. They voted on it and one side won. There isn't a bigger, more interesting story here. This is in fact a very common story that plays out at many software companies. The board of openai ended up making a decision that destroyed billions of dollars worth of brand value and good will. That's all there is to it.
- trhway 3y ago
  >Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. the article below basically says the same. Kind of reminds Friendster and the likes - striking a gold vein and just failing to scale efficient mining of that gold, i.e. the failure is at the execution/operationalization : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-a...
  - Zolde 3y ago
    ChatGPT was too polished and product-ready to have been a runaway low-key research preview, like Meta's Galactica was. That is the legacy you build around it after the fact of getting 1 million users in 5 days ("it was build in my garage with a modest investment from my father"). I had heard (but now have trouble sourcing) that ChatGPT was commissioned after OpenAI learned that other big players were working on a chatbot for the public (Google, Meta, Elon, Apple?) and OpenAI wanted to get ahead of that for competitive reasons. This was not a fluke of striking gold, but a carefully planned business move, generating SV hype, much like how Quora (basically an expertsexchange clone) got to be its hype-darling for a while, helped by powerfully networked investors.
    - trhway 3y ago
      >This was not a fluke of striking gold, but a carefully planned business move Then that execution and operationalization failure is even more profound.
cdogl 3y ago
> Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This prediction predated any of the technology to create even a rudimentary LLM and could be said of more-or-less any transformative technological development in human history. Famously, Marxism makes this very argument about the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of capital. Geoffrey Hinton appears to be an eminent cognitive psychologist and computer scientist (edit: nor economist). I'm sure he has a level of expertise I can't begin to grasp in his field, but he's no sociologist or historian. Very few of us are in a position to make predictions about the future - least of all in an area where we don't even fully understand how the _current_ technology works.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Was Marx wrong?
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Probably. Or at least that turned out to not matter so much. The alternative, keeping both control of resources and direct power in the state, seems to keep causing millions of deaths. Separating them into markets for resources and power for a more limited state seems to work much better. This idea also ignores innovation. New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
    - danans 3y ago
      > New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after. > That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power. Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
PeterStuer 3y ago
What is interesting is the total absence of 3 letter agency mentions from all of the talk and speculation about this.
- smolder 3y ago
  I don't think that's true. I've seen at least one other person bring up the CIA in all the "theorycrafting" about this incident. If there's a mystery on HN, likelihood is high of someone bringing up intelligence agencies. By their nature they're paranoia-inducing and attract speculation, especially for this sort of community. With my own conspiracy theorist hat on, I could see making deals with the Saudis regarding cutting edge AI tech potentially being a realpolitik issue they'd care about.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    I'm sure they are completely hands-off about breakthrough strategic tech. Unless it's the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians or any other of the deplorables, but hey, if it's none of those, we rather have our infiltrants focus on tiktok or twitter ... /s
Sunhold 3y ago
I would rather OpenAI have a diverse base of income from commercialization of its products than depend on "donations" from a couple ultrarich individuals or corporations. GPT-4 cost $100 million+ to train. That money needs to come from somewhere.
- jimmySixDOF 3y ago
  Then there is the Inference cost said to be as high as $0.30 per question asked based on compute cost infrastructure.
Guthur 3y ago
If you don't think the likes of Sam Altman, Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates and the lot of them want to increase their own power you need to think again. At best these individuals are just out to enrich themselves, but many of them demonstrate a desire to affect the prevailing politic and so i don't see how they are different, just more subtle about it. Why worry about the Sauds when you've got your own home grown power hungry individuals.
- achenet 3y ago
  because our home grown power hungry individuals are more likely to be okay with things like women dressing how they want, homosexuality, religious freedom, drinking alcohol, having dogs and other decadent western behaviors which we've grown very attached to
VectorLock 3y ago
It feels like Altman started the whole non-profit thing so he could attract top researchers with altruistic sentiment for sub-FANAAG wages. So the whole "Altman wasn't candid" thing seems to track.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Ok, but the wages were excellent (assuming that the equity panned out, which it seemed very likely it would until last week).
  - margorczynski 3y ago
    So it is possible a lot of those people against Altman being outed are like that because they know the equity they hold will take a dump? I'm not saying they are hypocrites or bad people because of it, just wondering if that might be a factor also.
    - VectorLock 3y ago
      I'd say the 650 out of the 700 people who signed it were those who joined later for the money, and not early for the non-profit's mission.
  - VectorLock 3y ago
    Excellent but not FANAANG astronomical.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Reminds me of a certain rocket company that specializes in launching large satellite constellations that attracts top talent with altruistic sentiment about saving humanity from extinction.
  - VectorLock 3y ago
    No surprise that Musk co-founded OpenAI then. Seems to be pretty much his MO across the board.
curiousgal 3y ago
> taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This is absolutely peak irony! US pouring trillions into its army and close to nothing into its society (infrastructure, healthcare, education...) : crickets Some country funding AI accelerators: THEY ARE A THREAT TO HUMANITY! I am not defending Saudi Arabia but the double standards and outright hypocrisy is just laughable.
- 0xDEADFED5 3y ago
  it's okay to give an example of something bad without being required to list all the other things in the universe that are also bad.
- xinayder 3y ago
  The difference is that the US Army wasn't created with the intent to "keep guns from the hands of criminals" and we all know it's a bad actor. OpenAI, on the other hand...
xinayder 3y ago
So they actually kicked him out because he transformed a non-profit into a money printing machine?
- whelp_24 3y ago
  You that like it's a bad thing for them to do? You wouldn't donate to the Coca-cola company.
kmlevitt 3y ago
People keep speculating sensational, justifiable reasons to fire Altman. But if these were actual factors in their decision, why doesn't the board just say so? Until they say otherwise, I am going to take them at their word that it was because he a) hired two people to do the same project, and b) gave two board members different accounts of the same employee. It's not my job nor the internet's to try to think up better-sounding reasons on their behalf.
- Wronnay 3y ago
  The Issue with these two explanations from the board is that this is normally nothing which would result into firing the CEO. In my eyes these two explanations are simple errors which can occur to everybody and in a normal situation you would talk about these Issues and you could resolve them in 5min without firing anybody.
  - kmlevitt 3y ago
    I agree with you. But that leads me to believe that they did not, in fact, have a good reason to fire their CEO. I'll change my mind about that if or when they provide better reasons. Look at all the speculation on here. There are dozens of different theories about why they did what they did running so rampant people are starting to accept each of them as fact, when in fact probably all of them are going to turn out to be wrong. People need to take a step back and look at the available evidence. This report is the clearest indication we have gotten of their reasons, and they come from a reliable source. Why are we not taking them at their word?
    - katastofik 3y ago
      > Why are we not taking them at their word? Ignoring the lack of credibility in the given explanations, people are, perhaps, also wary that taking boards/execs at their word hasn't always worked out so well in the past. Until an explanation that at least passes the sniff test for truthiness comes out, people will keep speculating. And so they should.
roschdal 3y ago
> the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This!
LZ_Khan 3y ago
Taking money from Saudi's alone should raise a big red flag.
mdisc0rd 3y ago
[dead]
blackoil 3y ago
> money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators Was this for OpenAI or independent venture. If OpenAI than a red flag but an independent venture than seems like a non-issue. There is a demand for AI accelerators, and he wants to enter that business. Unless he is using OpenAI money to buy inferior products or OpenAI wants to work on something competing there is no conflict of interest and OpenAI board shouldn't care.
blackoil 3y ago
> There has to be a bigger story to this. On assumption that board is making a sound decision, it could be simply that board acted stupid and egoistic. Unless they can give better reasons that is a logical inference.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>Combine that with a totally inexperienced board, and D'Angelo's maneuvering, and you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history do we have a ranking of shitshows in tech history though - how does this really compare to Jobs' ouster at Apple. Cambridge Analytics and The Facebook we must do better greatest hits?
osrec 3y ago
What does TC style mean?
- smiley1437 3y ago
  Tech Crunch
- sevagh 3y ago
  Total Compensation
dariosalvi78 3y ago
> you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history the second after Musk taking over Twitter
- achenet 3y ago
  We live interesting times ^_^
throwaway4aday 3y ago
The more likely explanation is that D'Angelo has a massive conflict of interest with him being CEO of Quora, a business rapidly being replaced by ChatGPT and which has a competing product "creator monetization with Poe" (catchy name, I know) that just got nuked by OpenAI's GPTs announcement at dev day. https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization-for-Poe https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization... https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/31/quoras-poe-introduces-an-ai-chatbot-creator-economy/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/31/quoras-poe-introduces-an-a...
- curiousllama 3y ago
  A (potential, unstated) motivation for one board member doesn't explain the full moves of the board, though. Maybe it's a factor, but it's insufficient
dgellow 3y ago
If I understood correctly Altman was CEO of the for-profit OpenAI, not the non-profit. The structure is pretty complicated: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
- tomhallett 3y ago
  I’m curious: if one of the board members “knows” the only way for OpenAI to be truly successful is for it to be a non-profit and “don’t be evil” (Google’s mantra), that if they set expectations correctly and put caps on the for-profit side, it could be successful. But they didn’t fully appreciate how strong the market forces would be, where all of the focus/attention/press would go to the for-profit side. Sam’s side has such an intrinsic gravity, that’s it’s inevitable that it will break out of its cage. Note: I’m not making a moral claim one way or the other, and I do agree that most tech companies will grow to a size/power/monopoly that their incentives will deviate from the “common good”. Are there examples of openai’s structure working correctly with other companies?
detourdog 3y ago
To me this is the ultimate Silicon Valley bike shedding incident. Nobody can really explain the argument, there are "billions" or "trillions" of dollars involved, most likely the whole thing will not change the technical path of the world.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
At some point this is probably about a closed source "fork" grab. Of course that's what practically the whole company is probably planning. The best thing about AI startups is that there is no real "code". It's just a bunch of arbitrary weights, and it can probably be obfuscated very easily such that any court case will just look like gibberish. After all, that's kind of the problem with AI "code". It gives a number after a bunch of regression training, and there's no "debugging" the answer. Of course this is about the money, one way or another.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
> rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. We don't know the end result of this. This could not be in the interest of power. What if everyone is out the job? That might not be such a great concept for the powers that be, especially if everyone is destitute. Not saying it's going down that way, but it's worth considering. What if the powers that be are worried about people being out of line and retard the progress of AI?
k12sosse 3y ago
MBS? Seriously? How badly do you need the money.. good luck not getting hacked to pieces when your AI insults his holiness

zw123456 3y ago

100% agree. I've seen this type of thing up close (much smaller potatoes but same type of thing) and whatever is getting aired publicly is most likely not the real story. Not sure if the reasons you guessed are it or not, we probably won't know for awhile but your guesses are as good as mine.

mcmcmc 3y ago

This feels like a lot of very one sided PR moves from the side with significantly more money to spend on that kind of thing

LMYahooTFY 3y ago

>Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? What type of politicking and deception is involved in creating a for profit subsidiary which is granted license to OpenAIs research in order to generate wealth? The entire purpose of this legal structure is to keep non-profit owners focused on their mission rather than shareholder value, which in this case is attempting to ethically create an AGI. Edit: to add that this framework was not invented by Sam Altman, nor OpenAI. >Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. Thus the legal structure I described, although this argument is entirely theoretical and assumes such a thing can actually be guarded that well at all, or that model performance and compute will remain correlated.

jelling 3y ago
> What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? Yes. Yes and more yes. That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. Because they are supposed to be improving society, not profiting from it.
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  > That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. That's your belief. The NFL, Heritage Foundation and Scientology are all non-profits and none of them improve society; they all profit from it. (For what its' worth, I wish the law was more aligned with your worldview)
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    FYI, the NFL teams are for profits and pay taxes like normal busineses. The overwhelming majority of the revenue goes to the teams.
    - arrosenberg 3y ago
      I know that, does that change what I said?
      - aurareturn 3y ago
        I don't know if it does but my point is to prevent others from thinking that a giant money making entity like the NFL does not pay any taxes.
        hluska 3y ago
        [flagged]
        3y ago

hooande 3y ago

Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. They voted on it and one side won. There isn't a bigger, more interesting story here. This is in fact a very common story that plays out at many software companies. The board of openai ended up making a decision that destroyed billions of dollars worth of brand value and good will. That's all there is to it.

trhway 3y ago
>Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. the article below basically says the same. Kind of reminds Friendster and the likes - striking a gold vein and just failing to scale efficient mining of that gold, i.e. the failure is at the execution/operationalization : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-a...
- Zolde 3y ago
  ChatGPT was too polished and product-ready to have been a runaway low-key research preview, like Meta's Galactica was. That is the legacy you build around it after the fact of getting 1 million users in 5 days ("it was build in my garage with a modest investment from my father"). I had heard (but now have trouble sourcing) that ChatGPT was commissioned after OpenAI learned that other big players were working on a chatbot for the public (Google, Meta, Elon, Apple?) and OpenAI wanted to get ahead of that for competitive reasons. This was not a fluke of striking gold, but a carefully planned business move, generating SV hype, much like how Quora (basically an expertsexchange clone) got to be its hype-darling for a while, helped by powerfully networked investors.
  - trhway 3y ago
    >This was not a fluke of striking gold, but a carefully planned business move Then that execution and operationalization failure is even more profound.

cdogl 3y ago

> Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This prediction predated any of the technology to create even a rudimentary LLM and could be said of more-or-less any transformative technological development in human history. Famously, Marxism makes this very argument about the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of capital. Geoffrey Hinton appears to be an eminent cognitive psychologist and computer scientist (edit: nor economist). I'm sure he has a level of expertise I can't begin to grasp in his field, but he's no sociologist or historian. Very few of us are in a position to make predictions about the future - least of all in an area where we don't even fully understand how the _current_ technology works.

adrianN 3y ago
Was Marx wrong?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Probably. Or at least that turned out to not matter so much. The alternative, keeping both control of resources and direct power in the state, seems to keep causing millions of deaths. Separating them into markets for resources and power for a more limited state seems to work much better. This idea also ignores innovation. New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
  - danans 3y ago
    > New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after. > That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power. Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.

PeterStuer 3y ago

What is interesting is the total absence of 3 letter agency mentions from all of the talk and speculation about this.

smolder 3y ago
I don't think that's true. I've seen at least one other person bring up the CIA in all the "theorycrafting" about this incident. If there's a mystery on HN, likelihood is high of someone bringing up intelligence agencies. By their nature they're paranoia-inducing and attract speculation, especially for this sort of community. With my own conspiracy theorist hat on, I could see making deals with the Saudis regarding cutting edge AI tech potentially being a realpolitik issue they'd care about.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  I'm sure they are completely hands-off about breakthrough strategic tech. Unless it's the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians or any other of the deplorables, but hey, if it's none of those, we rather have our infiltrants focus on tiktok or twitter ... /s

Sunhold 3y ago

I would rather OpenAI have a diverse base of income from commercialization of its products than depend on "donations" from a couple ultrarich individuals or corporations. GPT-4 cost $100 million+ to train. That money needs to come from somewhere.

jimmySixDOF 3y ago
Then there is the Inference cost said to be as high as $0.30 per question asked based on compute cost infrastructure.

Guthur 3y ago

If you don't think the likes of Sam Altman, Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates and the lot of them want to increase their own power you need to think again. At best these individuals are just out to enrich themselves, but many of them demonstrate a desire to affect the prevailing politic and so i don't see how they are different, just more subtle about it. Why worry about the Sauds when you've got your own home grown power hungry individuals.

achenet 3y ago
because our home grown power hungry individuals are more likely to be okay with things like women dressing how they want, homosexuality, religious freedom, drinking alcohol, having dogs and other decadent western behaviors which we've grown very attached to

VectorLock 3y ago

It feels like Altman started the whole non-profit thing so he could attract top researchers with altruistic sentiment for sub-FANAAG wages. So the whole "Altman wasn't candid" thing seems to track.

saagarjha 3y ago
Ok, but the wages were excellent (assuming that the equity panned out, which it seemed very likely it would until last week).
- margorczynski 3y ago
  So it is possible a lot of those people against Altman being outed are like that because they know the equity they hold will take a dump? I'm not saying they are hypocrites or bad people because of it, just wondering if that might be a factor also.
  - VectorLock 3y ago
    I'd say the 650 out of the 700 people who signed it were those who joined later for the money, and not early for the non-profit's mission.
- VectorLock 3y ago
  Excellent but not FANAANG astronomical.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Reminds me of a certain rocket company that specializes in launching large satellite constellations that attracts top talent with altruistic sentiment about saving humanity from extinction.
- VectorLock 3y ago
  No surprise that Musk co-founded OpenAI then. Seems to be pretty much his MO across the board.

curiousgal 3y ago

> taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This is absolutely peak irony! US pouring trillions into its army and close to nothing into its society (infrastructure, healthcare, education...) : crickets Some country funding AI accelerators: THEY ARE A THREAT TO HUMANITY! I am not defending Saudi Arabia but the double standards and outright hypocrisy is just laughable.

0xDEADFED5 3y ago
it's okay to give an example of something bad without being required to list all the other things in the universe that are also bad.
xinayder 3y ago
The difference is that the US Army wasn't created with the intent to "keep guns from the hands of criminals" and we all know it's a bad actor. OpenAI, on the other hand...

xinayder 3y ago

So they actually kicked him out because he transformed a non-profit into a money printing machine?

whelp_24 3y ago
You that like it's a bad thing for them to do? You wouldn't donate to the Coca-cola company.

kmlevitt 3y ago

People keep speculating sensational, justifiable reasons to fire Altman. But if these were actual factors in their decision, why doesn't the board just say so? Until they say otherwise, I am going to take them at their word that it was because he a) hired two people to do the same project, and b) gave two board members different accounts of the same employee. It's not my job nor the internet's to try to think up better-sounding reasons on their behalf.

Wronnay 3y ago
The Issue with these two explanations from the board is that this is normally nothing which would result into firing the CEO. In my eyes these two explanations are simple errors which can occur to everybody and in a normal situation you would talk about these Issues and you could resolve them in 5min without firing anybody.
- kmlevitt 3y ago
  I agree with you. But that leads me to believe that they did not, in fact, have a good reason to fire their CEO. I'll change my mind about that if or when they provide better reasons. Look at all the speculation on here. There are dozens of different theories about why they did what they did running so rampant people are starting to accept each of them as fact, when in fact probably all of them are going to turn out to be wrong. People need to take a step back and look at the available evidence. This report is the clearest indication we have gotten of their reasons, and they come from a reliable source. Why are we not taking them at their word?
  - katastofik 3y ago
    > Why are we not taking them at their word? Ignoring the lack of credibility in the given explanations, people are, perhaps, also wary that taking boards/execs at their word hasn't always worked out so well in the past. Until an explanation that at least passes the sniff test for truthiness comes out, people will keep speculating. And so they should.

roschdal 3y ago

> the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This!

LZ_Khan 3y ago

Taking money from Saudi's alone should raise a big red flag.

mdisc0rd 3y ago

[dead]

blackoil 3y ago

> money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators Was this for OpenAI or independent venture. If OpenAI than a red flag but an independent venture than seems like a non-issue. There is a demand for AI accelerators, and he wants to enter that business. Unless he is using OpenAI money to buy inferior products or OpenAI wants to work on something competing there is no conflict of interest and OpenAI board shouldn't care.

blackoil 3y ago

> There has to be a bigger story to this. On assumption that board is making a sound decision, it could be simply that board acted stupid and egoistic. Unless they can give better reasons that is a logical inference.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

>Combine that with a totally inexperienced board, and D'Angelo's maneuvering, and you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history do we have a ranking of shitshows in tech history though - how does this really compare to Jobs' ouster at Apple. Cambridge Analytics and The Facebook we must do better greatest hits?

osrec 3y ago

What does TC style mean?

smiley1437 3y ago
Tech Crunch
sevagh 3y ago
Total Compensation

dariosalvi78 3y ago

> you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history the second after Musk taking over Twitter

achenet 3y ago
We live interesting times ^_^

throwaway4aday 3y ago

The more likely explanation is that D'Angelo has a massive conflict of interest with him being CEO of Quora, a business rapidly being replaced by ChatGPT and which has a competing product "creator monetization with Poe" (catchy name, I know) that just got nuked by OpenAI's GPTs announcement at dev day. https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization-for-Poe https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization... https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/31/quoras-poe-introduces-an-ai-chatbot-creator-economy/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/31/quoras-poe-introduces-an-a...

curiousllama 3y ago
A (potential, unstated) motivation for one board member doesn't explain the full moves of the board, though. Maybe it's a factor, but it's insufficient

dgellow 3y ago

If I understood correctly Altman was CEO of the for-profit OpenAI, not the non-profit. The structure is pretty complicated: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure

tomhallett 3y ago
I’m curious: if one of the board members “knows” the only way for OpenAI to be truly successful is for it to be a non-profit and “don’t be evil” (Google’s mantra), that if they set expectations correctly and put caps on the for-profit side, it could be successful. But they didn’t fully appreciate how strong the market forces would be, where all of the focus/attention/press would go to the for-profit side. Sam’s side has such an intrinsic gravity, that’s it’s inevitable that it will break out of its cage. Note: I’m not making a moral claim one way or the other, and I do agree that most tech companies will grow to a size/power/monopoly that their incentives will deviate from the “common good”. Are there examples of openai’s structure working correctly with other companies?

detourdog 3y ago

To me this is the ultimate Silicon Valley bike shedding incident. Nobody can really explain the argument, there are "billions" or "trillions" of dollars involved, most likely the whole thing will not change the technical path of the world.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

At some point this is probably about a closed source "fork" grab. Of course that's what practically the whole company is probably planning. The best thing about AI startups is that there is no real "code". It's just a bunch of arbitrary weights, and it can probably be obfuscated very easily such that any court case will just look like gibberish. After all, that's kind of the problem with AI "code". It gives a number after a bunch of regression training, and there's no "debugging" the answer. Of course this is about the money, one way or another.

P_I_Staker 3y ago

> rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. We don't know the end result of this. This could not be in the interest of power. What if everyone is out the job? That might not be such a great concept for the powers that be, especially if everyone is destitute. Not saying it's going down that way, but it's worth considering. What if the powers that be are worried about people being out of line and retard the progress of AI?

k12sosse 3y ago

MBS? Seriously? How badly do you need the money.. good luck not getting hacked to pieces when your AI insults his holiness