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Some perspective ... One developer (Ilya) vs. One businessman (Sam) -> Sam wins Hundreds of developers threaten to quit vs. Board of Directors (biz) refuse to
by taway1874 3y ago
Some perspective ...
One developer (Ilya) vs. One businessman (Sam) -> Sam wins
Hundreds of developers threaten to quit vs. Board of Directors (biz) refuse to budge -> Developers win
From the outside it looks like developers held the power all along ... which is how it should be.
- jejeyyy77 3y ago$$$ vs. Safety -> $$$ wins. Employees who have $$$ incentive threaten to quit if that is taken away. News at 8.
- baby 3y agoWhy are you assuming employees are incentivized by $$$ here, and why do you think the board's reason is related to safety or that employees don't care about safety? It just looks like you're spreading FUD at this point.
- jejeyyy77 3y agoof course the employees are motivated by $$$ - is that even a question?
- Xelynega 3y agoNo, it's just counter to the idea that it was "employee power" that brought sam back. It was capital and the pursuit of more of it. It always is.
- hackerlight 3y agoThe large majority of people are motivated by $$$ (or fame) and if they all tell me otherwise I know many of them are lying.
- mi_lk 3y agoIt's you who are naive if you really think the majority of those 7xx employees care more about safe AGI than their own equity upside
- nh23423fefe 3y agoWhy would anyone care about safe agi? its vaporware.
- mecsred 3y agoEverything is vaporware until it gets made. If you wait until a new technology definitively exists to start caring about safety, you have guaranteed it will be unsafe. Lucky for us this fiasco has nothing to do with AGI safety, only AI technology. Which only affects automated decision making in technology that's entrenched in every fact of our lives. So we're all safe here!
- superturkey650 3y ago> If you wait until a new technology definitively exists to start caring about safety, you have guaranteed it will be unsafe. I don’t get this perspective. The first planes, cars, computers, etc. weren’t initially made with safety in mind. They were all regulated after the fact and successfully made safer. How can you even design safety into something if it doesn’t exist yet? You’d have ended up with a plane where everyone sat on the wings with a parachute strapped on if you designed them with safety first instead of letting them evolve naturally and regulating the resulting designs.
- FartyMcFarter 3y agoThe difference between unsafe AGI and an unsafe plane or car is that the plane/car are not existential risks.
- optymizer 3y agoHow is it an 'existential risk'? Its body of knowledge is publicly available, no?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DirkH 3y agoAssuming employees are not incentivized by $$$ here seems extraordinary and needs a pretty robust argument to show it isn't playing a major factor when there is this much money involved.
- rexarex 3y agoMoney won.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jessenaser 3y agoYes, 95% agreement in any company is unprecedented but: 1. They can get equivalent position and pay at the new Microsoft startup during that time, so their jobs are not at risk. 2. Sam approved each hire in the first place. 3. OpenAI is selecting for the type of people who want to work at a non-profit with a goal in mind instead of another company that could offer higher compensation. Mission driven vs profit driven. Either way on how they got to that conclusion of banding together to quit, it was a good idea, and it worked. And it is a check on power for a bad board of directors, when otherwise a board of directors cannot be challenged. "OpenAI is nothing without its people".
- andersa 3y ago> OpenAI is selecting for the type of people who want to work at a non-profit with a goal in mind instead of another company that could offer higher compensation. Mission driven vs profit driven. Maybe that was the case at some point, but clearly not anymore ever since the release of ChatGPT. Or did you not see them offer completely absurd compensation packages, i.e. to engineers leaving Google? I'd bet more than half the people are just there for the money.
- brrrrrm 3y ago> 1. They can get equivalent position and pay at the new Microsoft startup during that time, so their jobs are not at risk. citation?
- davio 3y agohttps://x.com/kevin_scott/status/1726971608706031670?s=20 https://x.com/kevin_scott/status/1726971608706031670?s=20
- philipwhiuk 3y agoAre you sure Ilya was the root of this. He backed it and then signed the pledge to quit if it wasn't undone. What's the evidence he was behind it and not D'Angelo?
- dr_dshiv 3y agoIf we only look at the outcomes (dismantling of board), Microsoft and Sam seem to have the most motive.
- __loam 3y agoI'm not sure I buy the idea that Ilya was just some hapless researcher who got unwillingly pulled into this. Any one of the board could have voted not to remove Sam and stop the board coup, including Ilya. I'd bet he only got cold feet after the story became international news and after most of the company threatened to resign because their bag was in jeopardy.
- Xelynega 3y agoThat's a strange framing. In that scenario would it not be that he made the decision he thought was right and aligned with openais mission initially, then when seeing the public support Sam had he decided to backtrack so he had a future career?
- jiveturkey 3y agowake up people! (said rhetorically, not accusatory or any other way) This is Altman's playbook. He did a similar ousting at Reddit. This was planned all along to overturn the board. Ilya was in on it. I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist. But fool me ... you can't be fooled again. As they say in Tennessee
- bugglebeetle 3y agoWhat’s the backstory on Reddit?
- 3y ago
- adverbly 3y agoThere are three dragons: Employees, customers, government. If motivated and aligned, any of these three could end you if they want to. Do not wake the dragons.
- pdntspa 3y agoThe Board is another one, if you're CEO.
- elliotec 3y agoI think the parent comment’s point is that the board is not one, since the board was defeated (by the employee dragon).
- pdntspa 3y agoI think the analogy is kind of shaky. The board tried to end the CEO, but employees fought them and won. I've been in companies where the board won, and they installed a stoolie that proceeded to drive the company into the ground. Anybody who stood up to that got fired too.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davesque 3y agoI have an intuition that OpenAI's mid-range size gave the employees more power in this case. It's not as hard to coordinate a few hundred people, especially when those people are on top of the world and want to stay there. At a megacorp with thousands of employees, the board probably has an easier time bossing people around. Although I don't know if you had a larger company in mind when you gave your second example.
- pdntspa 3y agoNo, I'm thinking a smaller company, like 50 people, $20m ARR. Engineering-focused, but not tech
- sokoloff 3y agoIs your first “-> Sam wins” different than what you intended?
- hsavit1 3y agoseems like the union of developers is stronger than the company itself. hence why unions are so frowned upon by big tech corporate leadership
- JacobThreeThree 3y agoAnd yet, this union was threatening to move to a company without unions.
- dylan604 3y agoIt's not like this is the first: One developer (Woz) vs One businessman (Jobs) -> Jobs wins
- stillwithit 3y ago[flagged]
- zerohalo 3y agomore like $$ wins. It's clear most employees didn't care much about OpenAI's mission -- and I don't blame them since they were hired by the __for-profit__ OpenAI company and therefore aligned with __its__ goals and rewarded with equity. In my view the board did the right thing to stand by OpenAI's original mission -- which now clearly means nothing. Too bad they lost out. One might say the mission was pointless since Google, Meta, MSFT would develop it anyway. That's really a convenience argument that has been used in arms races (if we don't build lots of nuclear weapons, others will build lots of nuclear weapons) and leads to ... well, where we are today :(
- joewferrara 3y agoWhere we are today is a world where people do not generally worry about nuclear bombs being dropped. So seems like a pretty good outcome in that example.
- Xelynega 3y agoThe nuclear arms race lead to the cold war, not a "good outcome" IMO. It wasn't until nations started imposing those regulations that we got to the point we're at today with nuclear weapons.
- Quentincestino 3y agoOpenAI developers are redefining the state-of-the-art of AI each 6 months, if the company lose them they already can go bankrupt
- m00x 3y agoIlya signed the letter saying he would resign if Sam wasn't brought back. Looks like he regretted his decision and ultimately got played by the 2 departing board members. Ilya is also not a developer, he's a founder of OpenAI and was the CSO.
- awb 3y agoIt’s a cost / benefit analysis. If people are easily replaceable then they don’t hold nearly as much power, even en mass.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nikcub 3y agoThe employees rapidly and effectively formed a quasi-union to grant themselves a very powerful seat at the table.