[HN Gopher] OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Author : davidbarker
Score : 2528 points
Date : 2023-11-17 20:28 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| minimaxir wrote:
| Saying this is sudden would be an understatement.
|
| Sam Altman spoke at an APEC panel on behalf of OpenAI literally
| yesterday:
| https://twitter.com/LondonBreed/status/1725318771454456208
| moshun wrote:
| It's hard to imagine a more last minute move on the boards part
| here. Been in tech exec leadership for a long time and this
| feels like they're accusing him of cannibalism (in corporate PR
| speak). No way this didn't get decided on in the middle of last
| night. Whatever he did is big and dangerous, or they're trying
| to pin it on him.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Agreed. It had to have been something disastrous. No way Sam
| walked away from OpenAI when the AI revolution is just
| starting.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Altman's sister's allegations seemed pretty disastrous.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| and what pray-tell are those?
| otteromkram wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is a great internet search tool if you don't
| want to muddy up your Google history (which is very
| understandable).
| nkurz wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072
| xkqd wrote:
| In all my time here, I have never seen this "Sorry." page
| before.
|
| Does anyone know what that's about?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| See the pinned comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310213
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Its a about the CEO of the leading firm in the area of
| tech most at the center of technical and political
| controversy and interest right now being forced out by
| their board, when that CEO had, even before taking on
| that role, particular high salience among the HN audience
| as, among other things, the former head of YC, and the
| resulting (I am assuming from the oerformance and dangs
| description) state of near-meltdown of HNs servers.
| nightpool wrote:
| The "Sorry" page is a standard HN error message that
| shows up when the server is under high load, it has
| nothing to do with this link specifically
| jug wrote:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-
| altman...
|
| Sexual abuse by Sam when she was four years old and he
| 13.
|
| Develops PCOS (which has seen some association with child
| abuse) and childhood OCD and depression. Thrown out.
| Begins working as sex worker for survival. It's a real
| grim story.
| resolutebat wrote:
| > _" {I experienced} Shadowbanning across all platforms
| except onlyfans and pornhub. Also had 6 months of hacking
| into almost all my accounts and wifi when I first started
| the podcast"_
|
| So either sama is hacking "into her wifi" (?), hacking
| into her accounts, and pulling strings at unrelated
| companies to get her shadowbanned from Facebook,
| Instagram, YouTube etc (is that even a thing?)... or
| Occam's Razor applies and he didn't.
| SXX wrote:
| Shadowbanning certainly exists on all social platforms.
| Light version of it is how Facebook sells ad services -
| no one following your page sees content unless you pay.
| huytersd wrote:
| Only if it's true. His sister could be a pos that just
| wants some of his money.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| These allegations date back to 2021. If they were
| credible, I think the board wouldn't have waited two
| years to take action.
| Probiotic6081 wrote:
| Sam Altman's sister says he sexually abused her when she
| was 4
|
| https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983
| 232...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Sam Altman's sister says he sexually abused her when
| she was 4
|
| ... and he was 13. Which, yes, is a very bad thing, but
| unless the company investigated that claim (e.g., to
| assess potential PR fallout) and there was some
| significant deception by Altman against the board in the
| context of that investigation, its not something that
| would get him fired with the explanation OpenAI has
| provided.
|
| (OTOH, the accusation and its potential PR impact could
| be a factor that weighed into how the board handled an
| unrelated problem with Altman--it certainly isn't helpful
| to him.)
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I... don't agree at all? Actually I can't imagine a
| single board who would keep a CEO if credible allegations
| of raping his own sister were going around. It's not just
| an age issue (which is still a huge wtf, 13yo is old
| enough to know about right and wrong in the context of
| his own sister), it's also the incest part.
|
| I'm not saying this happened or it didn't. But just that
| it could absolutely be more than enough to fire anyone.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The "with the explanation OpenAI has provided" in GP was
| substantive, not decorative.
|
| I don't disagree that the accusation alone (especially if
| it stood up to modest scrutiny, and looked to be ongoing
| PR issue, even if not well substantiated enough to have
| confidence that it was likely to be _true_ ) might be
| sufficient for firing; CEOs are the public and and
| internal face of the firm, and so PR or employee safety
| concerns that attach to them are important to the firm.
| But it wouldn't be for lack of candor with the board
| _unless_ there was something for which the board had a
| very strong reason to believe Altman was dishonest in a
| significant way.
|
| They could easily fire him with the lack of confidence
| language without the lack of candor language.
| paul7986 wrote:
| No idea if what she says is true ... what's their
| relationship like since forever ... others who knew them
| could tell us. She says he ruined her financially ... how
| so ... he's a multi-millionaire. How did he ruin her
| financially that's suspect right there!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| But not, _in and of themselves_ something likely to get
| Altman dismissed for lack of candor with the board.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Also doesn't seem to be a particularly recent
| development.
| panarky wrote:
| Deceiving the board about ...
|
| Its investigation of misconduct?
|
| Sources and rights to training data?
|
| That the AGI escaped containment?
| 015a wrote:
| Unhinged fringe take: They've already developed sparks of
| consciousness strong enough to create isolated, internal
| ethical concerns, but Sam suppressed those reports to
| push the product forward.
| baby wrote:
| I feel like he's been acting a bit strange for a while.
| During interviews he often mentions the dangers of AI and how
| he's not thr best spokeperson for AI. It seemed very counter
| productive/self sabotaging to me.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Nope. His line was to limit others by saying "regulate us,"
| which he has successfully achieved. That's a win for him
| and a loss for the industry. Unfortunately, this is not the
| last of him we will hear. He will be the one who shapes our
| dystopian future.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Possibly as a similar thing happened with Steve Jobs.
| Though Maybe it's all been set up and faked ;-) Steve
| Job's story is a great one.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Uh, no. That's exactly the sort of thing you should say to
| hype up AI.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >last minute move
|
| Also, they did it around 3:30 Eastern, 30 minutes before the
| closing bell (Microsoft is majority owner). It was so urgent
| they couldn't wait until after the market closed.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Microsoft is the largest owner, not majority.
| jasonmperry wrote:
| I wondered about the timing. Microsoft's stock took a swan
| dive. I can't imagine they're happy regardless of what they
| say to the press.
| 015a wrote:
| Microsoft is a minority owner (49%) of the capped-profit
| OpenAI subsidiary.
|
| The OpenAI board has no responsibility to consider
| Microsoft's wants. I'd accept the argument that, their
| decision to not wait until after 4pm was a _slight_ against
| Microsoft, for the reason you outline; but I 'm not sure if
| urgency plays into it.
| mjwhansen wrote:
| This is one of the most insightful comments in this entire
| thread. Public companies never drop news during the trading
| day, and Microsoft surely would have been notified in
| advance if they planned to fire him, and had some say in
| the timing of the release. Whatever it is, it is so serious
| that Microsoft would break that coda.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Here is the video of him talking at yesterday's summit.:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFvqRemDv8
|
| It doesn't looks like he has a hint about this:
|
| > I am super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to
| work on.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| He has basically trained himself to say this though. It'
| basically all he says consistently.
|
| He is probably in shock.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Possible. But then again if knew he was getting fired, why
| even do that.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| He seems like the kind of guy who is already thinking
| about what he might do next. Trying to keep a positive
| spin on it.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| He seems a bit more nervous and absent-minded than usual. But
| it's very possible that I'm just imagining things.
| TheEzEzz wrote:
| I watched this yesterday and got the feeling something big
| was happening. At one point he says "This is actually a very
| inconvenient time for me [to be here]." At the end of the
| session when they're wrapping up, he begins to stand up to
| leave the instant that the moderator starts wrapping up.
|
| Anyway, I suppose we're reading tea leaves and engaging in
| palace intrigue. Back to building.
| kristopolous wrote:
| These things can also happen for unrelated reasons. Things like
| say, getting drunk and molesting an intern or tossing out
| racial slurs at say, some important person at a giant japanese
| company, you know, just being an asshole. Especially if it
| happened more than once.
|
| I don't know the guy but nothing can really be assumed about
| this.
| wilg wrote:
| What? Are you implying this happened here? Or just being
| weird?
| talldatethrow wrote:
| https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/16357043989398323
| 2...
| wilg wrote:
| How is that relevant to the specific things the person I
| was replying to said?
| kiririn wrote:
| Genuinely: how is it not relevant? Posted quite some time
| ago sure, but paints an interesting picture and the first
| I've heard of it
| wilg wrote:
| What? Because it has nothing to do with "getting drunk
| and molesting an intern or tossing out racial slurs at
| say, some important person at a giant japanese company".
| kristopolous wrote:
| Also I made no claim of anything, just that dismissal can
| happen for a large variety of reasons. The Arcimoto CEO,
| for instance, was let go because he couldn't hold his
| liquor and got a DUI. Brendan Eich got booted from
| Mozilla for having a political ideology that Mozilla
| considered a liability.
|
| All kinds of reasons.
|
| The biggest risk for OpenAI is the public perception that
| the discretion of ChatGPT can not be trusted. If the CEO
| is caught using poor discretion, the public will transfer
| that property to the company's products.
|
| For instance, if Tesla could fire Elon Musk, I'm sure
| they would have by now.
| brvsft wrote:
| The implication is that this could be the 'unrelated
| reason', that he lied to the board about sexually
| assaulting his sister/step-sister/whatever. Of course,
| I'm not sure who Annie Altman is or how exactly she is
| related to Sam or if the allegations are true.
| dplavery92 wrote:
| I don't think anyone in this thread knows what happened,
| but since we're in a thread speculating why the CEO of the
| leading AI company was suddenly sacked, the possibility of
| an unacceptable interpersonal scandal isn't any more
| outlandish than others' suggestions of fraud, legal trouble
| for OpenAI, or foundering financials. The suggestion here
| is simply that Altman having done something "big and
| dangerous" is not a foregone conclusion.
|
| In the words of Brandt, "well, Dude, we just don't know."
| kristopolous wrote:
| No. I'm saying that there's nothing that can be said about
| these things until information comes forward. It could be
| business related, finance, personal, whatever.
|
| If you need evidence that this is sufficient for dismissal,
| merely stating that impropriety exists is apparently enough
| to get my first flag on hn after 12 years.
| wmf wrote:
| For example, Mark Hurd was fired from HP because he expensed
| some non-business-related meals with his mistress or
| whatever.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I mean yes, but that would require an investigation normally.
|
| Something to happen _immediately_ would require overwhelming
| evidence on hand in the meeting. So it could be something
| that has been uncovered as part of the due diligence with the
| MS investment
|
| Its more likely to be fabrication of numbers, or
| misappropriation of funds, rather than something "dramatic"
| Think musk at paypal being monumentally incompetent, rather
| than planned misdeeds.
| brvsft wrote:
| Flagged without a vouch button. Interesting.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Sam Altman was the CEO of Y-Combinator for 8 years. So even
| saying the field is wide on what could have happened is
| apparently super-banned.
| silenced_trope wrote:
| Right I just was watching a video of him a few minutes ago at
| Cambridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM
|
| It was just posted but was filmed on November 1st.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| Well, they must have believed that leaving Sam as CEO was a
| bigger risk for the company (or the members of the board) than
| having him leaving in the spot. The board may have had their
| hand twisted.
| solardev wrote:
| Uh oh. Did I miss some scandal? What's the subtext?
| orra wrote:
| > What's the subtext?
|
| Not certain, but IMHO the last paragraph almost recognises that
| OpenAI has become something self contradictory:
|
| > OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core
| mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence
| benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to
| ensure that the company could raise capital in pursuit of this
| mission, while preserving the nonprofit's mission, governance,
| and oversight. The majority of the board is independent, and
| the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. While
| the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the
| fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance
| OpenAI's mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| "We're putting the Open back in OpenAI"?
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| maybe this had something to do with Elon + Lawsuit + CYA
| from the board?
| eiiot wrote:
| One can dream
| dekhn wrote:
| If I read it correctly, he lied to the board about something
| material. That Brockman is also leaving the board is
| interesting. We'll see if the details leak out over time.
| jborden13 wrote:
| > Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors.
| Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, will serve
| as interim CEO, effective immediately.
|
| > Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by
| the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in
| his communications with the board, hindering its ability to
| exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence
| in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
|
| Wow
| DylanBohlender wrote:
| So this is probably indicative of a scandal of some sort right?
| caust1c wrote:
| Not sure that there can be any other interpretation based on
| my reading of it.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Yes, very likely Altman has done something _very_ wrong, and
| the board wants to maintain plausible deniability.
| saliagato wrote:
| We all know what. HN moderators are deleting all related
| comments.
|
| Edit: dang is right, sorry y'all
| p1esk wrote:
| Know what?
| parthdesai wrote:
| > We all know what
|
| Genuinely curious, what is it?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Sexual abuse allegations from his sister.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I don't believe accusations from March about something
| that allegedly happened when he was 13 would be the cause
| of any of this.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Other women could have come forward.
| junon wrote:
| Altman is gay, FWIW.
| partiallypro wrote:
| If he already abused his sister, him being gay isn't a
| subject that matters on his preferences on who to prey
| on.
| dang wrote:
| HN moderators aren't deleting any comments. (We only do
| that when the author asks us to, and almost never when
| the comment has replies.)
|
| If you're referring to some other form of moderation that
| you think is bad or wrong, please supply links so that
| readers can make their minds up for themselves.
| ro_bit wrote:
| Showdead shows one comment that doesn't really bring
| anything of substance. How many comments can a mod even
| delete on a 10 minute old post (post origin to the time
| you wrote your comment)
| quenix wrote:
| What is it?
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _We all know what. HN moderators are deleting all
| related comments. Edit: dang is right, sorry y 'all_
|
| This from 2021?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072
|
| Bad if true, but highly unlikely that it is.
| rchaud wrote:
| I would have thought that being CEO of Worldcoin would have
| been bad enough optics-wise from having him take a top role
| at a serious company.
| electriclove wrote:
| Strange how people forget or are unaware of how
| absolutely evil that venture is
| afro88 wrote:
| How so? You're not thinking of OneCoin perhaps?
| codetrotter wrote:
| No.
|
| > Many critics have called Worldcoin's business--of
| scanning eyeballs in exchange for crypto--dystopian and
| some have compared it to bribery.
|
| https://time.com/6300522/worldcoin-sam-altman/
|
| > market makers control 95% of the total circulating
| supply at launch, leading to an initial market imbalance.
|
| https://beincrypto.com/worldcoin-wld-privacy-risk/
|
| > Worldcoin's use of biometric data, which is unusual in
| crypto, raises the stakes for regulators. Multiple
| agencies expressed safety concerns amid reports of the
| sale of Worldcoin digital identities, known as World IDs,
| on virtual black markets, the ability to create and
| profit off of fake IDs, as well as the theft of
| credentials for operators who sign up new users.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-08-23/wor
| ldc...
| Muromec wrote:
| Where do I read about that if I intentionally avoided all
| the crypto scam and missed all details?
| squidbeak wrote:
| Though not if he (co-)founded the company.
| lumost wrote:
| On paper, Sam Altman would have made everyone on the board
| billionaires. For them to vote him out in this manner
| indicates that he must have done something egregious to
| jeopardize that.
|
| Lying on P&L, stock sale agreements, or turning down an
| acquisition offer under difficult circumstances seems
| likely.
| iandanforth wrote:
| As noted in the release: "The majority of the board is
| independent, and the independent directors do not hold
| equity in OpenAI."
| nonfamous wrote:
| In fact, I believe Altman was the only member of the
| board that held equity in OpenAI. There was some vague
| reference to a "previous VC arrangement" in the FAQ.
| samspenc wrote:
| Sam Altman had no equity in OpenAI
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/24/openai-ceo-sam-altman-
| didnt-...
|
| He confirmed it verbally as well in his May 2023 hearing
| in Congress https://twitter.com/thesamparr/status/1658554
| 712151433219?la...
| nonfamous wrote:
| From https://openai.com/our-structure :
|
| > Even OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, does not hold equity
| directly. His only interest is indirectly through a Y
| Combinator investment fund that made a small investment
| in OpenAI before he was full-time.
|
| That word "directly" seems to be relevant here.
| orra wrote:
| > On paper, Sam Altman would have made everyone on the
| board billionaires.
|
| I know OpenAI in recent years forgot it's a non profit
| with particular aims, but:
|
| > The majority of the board is independent, and the
| independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI.
| narrator wrote:
| Elon was very upset that somehow a non-profit that he
| donated $100 million to suddenly turned into a for
| profit. I would not be surprised if there was something
| not totally candid with regards to how that went down.
| Siddharth_7 wrote:
| Could it be the allegations by his sister??
|
| https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983
| 232...
| terminous wrote:
| That was back in March, which is pretty much 100 years
| ago
| tivert wrote:
| It seems like it's been getting a bit more attention over
| the past month.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Wouldn't take 8 months to hit, and I wouldn't be hearing
| about it from your comment if there was enough media
| attention to oust a CEO for PR.
| yunwal wrote:
| Things like this can take a very long time to blow up.
| Cosbys first accuser was in 1965
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| That's what I was thinking too. Maybe she's taking it
| further than Twitter.
| alvis wrote:
| The thread seems to be got picked up only last month
| given the timestamps of majority of comments and reposts
| were made. If the board decided to make an investigation,
| it'd be the timing to fire Altman.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Please do not spout hyperbole on HN, and avoid spreading
| disinformation and engaging in uneducated speculation.
| You can visit Reddit if that is your style of
| participation.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| While i agree, I'm curious why you choose this comment
| specifically to call out. This is the fastest growing hn
| thread I've ever seen with over 300 comments and 1000
| votes in the first hour. Almost every comment is debating
| some pure speculation or another. The content of the
| link, the context of the company and individual, and
| absolute lack of clarifying details while presenting very
| strong indications that such exists make it so that
| there's basically no way anyone can do anything other
| than speculate. No one knows anything, everyone here is
| guessing
| rococode wrote:
| Somewhat hidden beneath the huge headline of Altman being
| kicked out is that Brockman (chairman) is also out. Which
| could indicate something more systemically wrong than just
| a typical "CEO did something bad" situation.
|
| > As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be
| stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in
| his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
| harryh wrote:
| Brockman is off the board but not fired. Which is weird
| right? You'd think if he was involved in whatever the
| really bad thing is then he would be fired.
| foota wrote:
| Maybe Sam was the ring leader and he just went along with
| it?
| floxy wrote:
| Could be something like Brockman pushing to investigate
| further, before having the vote, and the rest of the
| board not liking that.
| sulam wrote:
| It's probably simple reporting logic. Having a board
| member reporting to someone not on the board would be
| problematic.
| jholman wrote:
| No, that sort of thing isn't that weird, in relatively
| young companies. Think of when Eric Schmidt was CEO of
| Google. Larry Page and Sergei Brin reported to him as
| employees of Google, and he (as CEO of Google) reported
| to himself-and-also-them (as the board), and all of them
| (as the board) reported to Larry and Sergei (as majority
| owners).
|
| For another example, imagine if OpenAI had never been a
| non-profit, and look at the board yesterday. You'd have
| had Ilya reporting to Sam (as employees), while Sam
| reports to Ilya (with Ilya as one member of the board,
| and probably a major stakeholder).
|
| Now, when it gets _hostile_ , those loops might get
| pretty weird. When things get hostile, you maybe modify
| reporting structures so the loops go away, so that people
| can maintain sane boundaries and still get work done (or
| gracefully exit, who knows).
| astrange wrote:
| Comma (geohot's self driving company) has a reporting
| loop because geohot demoted himself from CEO.
|
| Twitter also has one, although that's hardly a
| functioning example.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Which implies a coup. Four voting against two.
|
| And it could be for any reason, even purely ethical like,
| "we don't want to license this technology to better sell
| products to tweens".
| bushbaba wrote:
| A coup wouldn't have him immediately fired. Instead he'd
| be placed in some advisory position while they transition
| in a new CEO. The immediate firing means scandal of some
| sort.
| bbarnett wrote:
| How do these board members relate to Microsoft's
| holdings? Is Microsoft making a play here?
|
| Honestly have no idea, but I'm sure a shift of control
| could cause this.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| There was no AI - it was just interns answering questions
| on the site known as ChatGPT
| sfe22 wrote:
| Took the "Do Things that Don't Scale" to the absolute
| limit
| alvis wrote:
| Remember that Greg Brockman is a co-founder of OpenAI,
| and like Sam Altman, he is a main driving force behind
| the scene. Now both are gone. There must be something
| really really seriously wrong.
| erupt7893 wrote:
| Pretty sure Ilya Sutskever is the most valuable out of
| the group
| knd775 wrote:
| Not gone, just out of power.
| fragmede wrote:
| Turns out, there's no such thing as an LLM, it's all been
| a hustle with a low-paid army of writers in Kenya that
| Sama and gdb have been giving iv meth to.
| resource0x wrote:
| Not _very_ wrong, just duping investors about the technical
| and financial prospects of the company. Nothing serious /s
| renecito wrote:
| is always about money, even immoral behavior falls down to
| potential economic impact.
|
| my 2 cents that he lied about profitability, they should be
| expending massive money in operations, they need to cut
| cost to deliver an attractive business model for their
| service and from a shinny startup star boss that'd had to
| be a straight f.u.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Not regular money
|
| I think it could be transferring of OpenAI's assets to
| other entities.
|
| It is scandalous for sure
| Iv wrote:
| Either that or he refused to do something that would
| bring a quick money grab. 50/50 as far as I'm concerned.
| Iv wrote:
| The board discovered that the process `GPT5-training` that
| has been running for months on their uber-datacenter was
| actually mining bitcoins.
| kylediaz wrote:
| It could possibly have to do with his sister's allegations.
| It's one of the top autocomplete results when you google "sam
| altman", so people are definitely talking about it.
| wslh wrote:
| This?
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-
| altman...
| o11c wrote:
| Seems to be based entirely on "repressed memories" which
| is junk science. False memories are demonstrably very
| easy to create.
| prepend wrote:
| Sounds more like some strategic difference of opinion.
|
| My guess is that either they're financially super hosed. Or
| one group wants to build skynet and one doesn't.
|
| A scandal would probably be something along the lines of
| either "we love him and wish him the best" (hidden) or "he
| doesn't represent the values of our org and we love XYz"
| (embraced)
| threatofrain wrote:
| Would you call your CEO a liar just because of a strategic
| difference in opinion?
| svachalek wrote:
| Right. We all know the template for differences of
| opinion. "Sam just really wanted to spend more time with
| his family. Hugs, Sam!"
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| No, this passage tells me that the board wants to cover
| their ass: "he was not consistently candid in his
| communications with the board [...]. The board no longer
| has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."
|
| It's not just a "hey, we don't really agree on x or y so
| let's part ways". It's more "hey, this guy did something
| that could get us in jail if we don't cut tie immediately".
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| Someone at the company did a bad thing, and everything is
| securities fraud.
| janejeon wrote:
| Oh boy, Matt Levine is going to have a busy weekend!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > "hey, this guy did something that could get us in jail
| if we don't cut tie immediately".
|
| "And lied to us about it."
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Alternatively: "We were implicitly aware of what he was
| doing, but he knew from the beginning that if it didn't
| work out, we'd publicly disavow knowledge of it. It
| didn't work out."
|
| I have zero knowledge of the internals of OpenAI - just
| thinking out loud about what could have spurred such a
| statement.
| wslh wrote:
| I doubt they are financially hosed.
|
| I don't know about the Skynet because it has happened 26
| years before [1] but I imagine NSA, the Military, and other
| government agencies approached the company.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| Hostile takeover? Board politics?
| shepardrtc wrote:
| Satya going for the throat
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| His sister had levied allegations of abuse
|
| https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-
| allegations-a...
| OfficialTurkey wrote:
| I don't think this is it. The allegations aren't brand new
| and the board says he lied.
| bosie wrote:
| i assume you mean she lied?
| sparkling wrote:
| From the website:
|
| > "[...] If someone -- correction, if generally a white,
| cis man -- presents himself with enough confidence, then
| venture capitalists, media [...]"
|
| I stopped reading right there. This kind of race-baiting
| adds zero context to the story (which may or may not be
| true).
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| Same. Don't know why you got downvoted.
| arcatech wrote:
| How a person is perceived based on race and gender is
| definitely relevant context for this.
| astrange wrote:
| The "white cis man" stuff isn't an incisive comment, it's
| an academic's way of trying to get into an insult war
| with other academics.
|
| Constantly calling out "cis men" is in fact transphobic,
| which is how you can tell they don't care about it. If
| you think cis men and trans men behave differently or are
| always treated differently, this means you don't think
| they're both men.
|
| Also sama is not white. Although he does appear to have
| gotten a series of jobs with not a lot of experience by
| convincing Paul Graham to figuratively adopt him.
| kccqzy wrote:
| It's clear that neither Sam nor his sister[0] wants to
| discuss this.
|
| [0]:
| https://x.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1710371830043939122
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Weird to make a tweet thousands of your followers that
| you don't want to talk about.
| blindriver wrote:
| I thought Sam Altman was gay. The accusations of sexual
| abuse don't seem to line up. And her accusations that he is
| shadowbanning her on social media sounds mentally unstable.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I doubt that's it. In general sexual shenanigans in your
| personal life will get you a quiet departure from the
| company under the "X has retired to spend more time with
| family / pursue other adventures / start a foundation".
| Andy Rubin got a $90M severance payout from Google after
| running a sex-slave dungeon on his personal time.
|
| The wording of this statement is the kind of thing a board
| says when the company has done something deeply illegal
| that they will all face personal jail time for, and so they
| need to immediately deny all knowledge of the offense and
| fire the people who _did_ have knowledge of it.
| clueless wrote:
| > running a sex-slave dungeon on his personal time.
|
| There are no such allegations regarding Andy Rubin.
|
| > Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship,
| [and] said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a
| hotel room in 2013
| benzible wrote:
| "Shenanigans" would not be a remotely accurate way to
| characterize sexual assault on a minor. Not meant as a
| comment on the truth of these allegations, just on the
| accuracy of this way of characterizing them.
|
| As far as whether this might be the cause, one possible
| scenario: the board hired a law firm to investigate, Sam
| made statements that were contradicted by credible
| evidence, and that was the fireable event. Brockman could
| have helped cover this up. Again, not saying that this is
| what happened but it's plausible.
|
| BTW Rubin's $90M payout a) caused a shitstorm at Google
| b) was determined in part by David Drummond, later fired
| in part due to sexual misconduct. I would not use this as
| a representative example, especially since Google now has
| a policy against such payouts:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/andy-rubin-google-
| settlement-se...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > In general sexual shenanigans in your personal life
| will get you a quiet departure from the company under the
| "X has retired to spend more time with family / pursue
| other adventures / start a foundation".
|
| Dude, where have you been for the past decade?
|
| > Andy Rubin got a $90M severance payout from Google
| after running a sex-slave dungeon on his personal time.
|
| And hence the _colossal_ blowback caused by that means it
| ain 't ever happening again. Just 2 months ago a tech CEO
| was forced to resign immediately for egregious conduct,
| losing 100+ million in the process:
| https://nypost.com/2023/09/20/cs-disco-ceo-kiwi-camara-
| loses...
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| His sister on Twitter made some pretty crazy abuse
| allegations against him a while back, but it didn't seem to
| get much coverage outside of the usual Twitter crowd.
|
| But who knows, maybe there's a connection.
| buffington wrote:
| I don't use Twitter, nor do I really pay attention to Sam
| Altman, but the allegations of abuse are things I've seen
| covered.
|
| Your use of "crazy abuse allegations" is strange to me as
| well. I hardly see any of her allegations as being "crazy".
|
| Here's a collection of things she's said about the abuse.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-
| altman...
| stg22 wrote:
| "he was not consistently candid in his communications with
| the board" = "He lied to us about something important"
|
| Murati's selection as interim CEO is a surprise and might be
| an attempt to distance the company from whatever the board is
| claiming Altman lied about.
| golergka wrote:
| Those kinds of news are usually sugar coated to the point of
| caramelisation. This one isn't. It must be something very
| ugly.
| narrator wrote:
| candid - Not obscuring or omitting anything unpleasant,
| embarrassing, or negative.
|
| IMHO, saying he hasn't been candid is extremely harsh in terms
| of corporate PR speak.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| I dunno the details here, but I work in diligence, where "not
| candid" is what leads to "the whole deal is off and we're
| sueing the shit out of you".
|
| Not candid in any kind of investment situation with reps and
| warranties is a really big deal....
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| OpenAI's one of the most successful companies of this decade,
| if not the most, and its CEO just got fired for really unclear
| reasons. Insane, Steve Jobs shit
| epolanski wrote:
| No, this is completely different.
|
| Jobs got fired because Apple was on brink of bankruptcy all
| the time and was selling nothing to no one.
|
| Jobs wasn't the CEO of Apple, Sculley was. This is a much
| more impactful move.
|
| On top of that OpenAI is literally exploding in popularity
| and sales, that's not the moment to cut ties with your CEO.
|
| Also Sam Altman has an insanely better and heavier CV today
| than Jobs had in 1985, former director of YC and often called
| the "boss of silicon valley".
|
| You don't fire a man like Sam Altman easily, they are hard to
| come by in the first place. He's a powerful person you don't
| want to have against for no good reason when winds are
| blowing in the right direction moreover.
|
| It has to be some scandal, otherwise this is too sudden, and
| out of nowhere to a guy that led OpenAI in this direction,
| with success, for years.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Or, this is the AI taking over.
|
| only half joking
| queuebert wrote:
| Next headline: "OpenAI now completely disconnected from
| power grid with fully self-sufficient generation
| capacity."
| blindriver wrote:
| This is a bad joke. Altman is great but on his best day, he
| was never "insanely better" than Steve Jobs in 1985. If you
| think that, you don't understand how influential Apple was.
| epolanski wrote:
| Facts are facts.
|
| The company was dying.
|
| OpenAI is not.
|
| Also, it's probably you underestimating the impact of
| OpenAI, if anything, or the entrepreneurial career of
| Altman.
|
| Also, you probably don't know that but..the Apple 1 and
| 2, were designed by Wozniak, not Jobs, Jobs hated them.
| He had no such impact nor cv you think it had in 1985 and
| sugarcoating it with second phase Jobs.
| herval wrote:
| maybe openai is in trouble too?
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| > The company was dying. OpenAI is not.
|
| We can still hold onto hope though.
| monkeywork wrote:
| >The company was dying. OpenAI is not.
|
| You can make the claim about Apple due to the financials
| being public - you can't make the same claim about OpenAI
| unless you have insight the rest of the public doesn't
| have. "facts are facts"?? what facts do you have here?
|
| >Also, you probably don't know that but..the Apple 1 and
| 2, were designed by Wozniak, not Jobs, Jobs hated them
|
| I'd be shocked if a significant portion of the hacker
| news audience wasn't aware of who Woz is and the basic
| high level history of Apple.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Apple was not dying in 1985, when Sculley fired Jobs. It
| wasn't "near bankruptcy" until the Spindler era a decade
| later.
|
| Jobs didn't hate the Apple I and Apple II. He wouldn't
| have partnered with Wozniak in the first place if he'd
| hated the Apple I.
|
| Jobs was the guy who got Apple enough capital from VCs to
| actually ship the Apple II in mass quantities. That's not
| something Steve Jobs would do for a computer he hated.
|
| And the Apple IIc was his idea!
| adamlett wrote:
| I think you are mixing things up. Apple was experiencing
| a sales slump but was far from dying in 1985. Jobs got
| ousted in a power struggle between him an Sculley who was
| CEO. In 1997, when Jobs returned, Apple was reportedly
| months away from bankruptcy, and only survived because of
| a cash infusion from Microsoft.
| dnlkwk wrote:
| I'm not sure how you're certain it's 100% different.
|
| Sure, we knew Apple was on the verge bc they were a public
| company with vetted financials. However, no one knows
| OpenAI's financial situation. We just know 1) growth was
| meteoric, 2) prices were dropped significantly when
| alternatives were available, and 3) they were almost always
| fundraising. Selling $1.00 of value for $0.50 also can lead
| to a meteoric rise as well.
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong. But just don't know how you
| got such conviction.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > On top of that OpenAI is literally exploding in
| popularity and sales
|
| there is no reliable information about sales. It is likely
| very big secret.
| matteoraso wrote:
| >On top of that OpenAI is literally exploding in popularity
| and sales
|
| I wouldn't be too sure about that, actually. DALLE took a
| pretty hard hit because of Stable Diffusion, and the GPT
| API is so cheap that they're probably running it at a loss.
| Also, most users are going to be using the free ChatGPT
| web-client, so that's also a major loss.
| 7e wrote:
| Altman is not the reason for their success. I would not place
| him in the same sentence as SJ.
| throw555chip wrote:
| Correct on Altman, the success belongs to the Internet for
| its (our) data, code, ideas, videos, content that it
| subsumed using nothing more elaborate than traditional
| modeling and a ton of RAM and storage.
| tetha wrote:
| I'm a bit beat up by the last week (internal issues) or the
| last 1-2 years between the swift CentOS8 switch, various CPU
| vulns, Log4Shell and all the other jazz.
|
| My first thought is: C'mon. The company has just invested
| time to integrate with OpenAI. Just do it. Just announce that
| 200%+ price increase on everything with a scapegoat
| intermediate CEO. Or make it more so it hurts more, because
| of profit, so you can dial back a pity to be the good guys.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| yeah, this is about as harsh as corporate press releases get in
| terms of removing an executive. There has to be some majorly
| bad news coming out about Altman for them to not give him the
| standard "we are mutually parting ways"
| magicloop wrote:
| Well, striking language indeed.
|
| But.. what are the responsibilities of the board that may be
| hindered? I studied https://openai.com/our-structure
|
| One tantalising statement in there is that AGI-level system is
| not bound by licensing agreements that a sub-AGI system would
| be (ostensibly to Microsoft).
|
| This phase-shift places a pressure on management to not declare
| reaching a AGI level threshold. But have they?
|
| Of course, it could be an ordinary everyday scandal but given
| how well they are doing, I'd imagine censure/sanctions would be
| how that is handled.
| roughly wrote:
| This reads like there's another shoe to drop - especially since
| the Chairman of the Board is also stepping down.
| nostromo wrote:
| I hope making the person in charge of "trust and safety"
| doesn't further neuter the company.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I wonder if it has something to do with recent downtime?
| chadash wrote:
| > _" Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process
| by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid
| in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to
| exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence
| in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."_
|
| Wow. Anyone have any insight into what happened?
| Leary wrote:
| Who were on OpenAI's board?
|
| "OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit,
| comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman
| & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman
| (CEO), and non-employees Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen
| Toner." [1]
|
| [1]https://openai.com/our-structure
| minimaxir wrote:
| Which is notable because Sam Altman is on said board, so he got
| outvoted.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| So did Greg Brockman, what a weird turn of events
| paxys wrote:
| He would have been asked to step out and not had a vote in
| situations like these.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Why would Brockman have to step out of the room?
|
| EDIT: Brockman was voted out as the Chairman of the Board.
| paxys wrote:
| Who said anything about Brockman?
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| The OpenAI post, for one: Brockman lost his board seat.
| zamfi wrote:
| Not Brockman, Altman.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Another article I read said both Sam Altman and Brockman
| left the room for the vote.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Greg Brockman was President and Chairman of the Board.
|
| He was also removed from the board in this process.
| ilkkao wrote:
| That board meeting will be in a movie someday I'm pretty
| sure.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Only if it was contentious. From the strength of the press
| release, it sounds like it was a unanimous forced-hand
| decision.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I doubt that Altman voted to have himself removed so
| probably not unanimous. A movie scene about the reveal to
| the board would still be compelling.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Who the heck is Tasha McCauley?
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| That's a fascinating question. I looked into this and haven't
| a clue, other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife (?). If it's
| the same person, then she is a "tech-entrepreneur" with a
| surprising amount of liquidity and automatic privilege and
| titles despite no obvious achievement (unless you consider
| title-gathering an achievement).
| vdthatte wrote:
| Joseph Gordon-Levitt played Travis Kalanick in super pumped
| shuckles wrote:
| I think this is a legitimate question. There seems to be
| little public information about this board member, besides
| that they are married to a celebrity.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Ousted Sam Altman! Remember the name.
| davidmurphy wrote:
| Her LinkedIn profile now 404's
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-mccauley-25475a54
| owlninja wrote:
| She has changed it to just Tasha M now, odd!
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-m-25475a54/
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Bachelor of Arts, MBA, and her whole career seems to be
| sitting on Boards of Directors and running "Foundations".
| doerinrw wrote:
| She was involved with starting "Fellow Robots" in 2014, which
| is a spin-off of some sketchy for-profit AI "university" deal
| called "Singularity University".
|
| AFAICT she's notable because she's been an academic and
| executive in the field for many years, in many different
| companies.
| bpiche wrote:
| Singularity University was such a funny grift. Google must
| have figured the best way to monetize Ray Kurzweil was to
| put him on a stage at the NASA/Moffett center and have him
| perform magic shows in front of the moneyed class. And you
| know, they were probably right. Not like he can still code
| or anything, and the lines were out the door and down the
| street. I visited a couple of times when my sister's old
| boyfriend was working there. They had all kinds of fun
| little booths and displays for people going through the
| bootcamp to gawk at.
|
| I'm imagining the kind of person who starts their career as
| an executive at a spinoff of SU.
| samspenc wrote:
| > spin-off of some sketchy for-profit AI "university" deal
| called "Singularity University".
|
| Wow, that university rings some bells https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Singularity_Group#Controversie...
|
| "An investigative report from Bloomberg Businessweek found
| many issues with the organization, including an alleged
| sexual harassment of a student by a teacher, theft and
| aiding of theft by an executive, and allegations of gender
| and disability discrimination.[12] Several early members of
| Singularity University were convicted of crimes, including
| Bruce Klein, who was convicted in 2012 of running a credit
| fraud operation in Alabama, and Naveen Jain, who was
| convicted of insider trading in 2003.[12]
|
| In February 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, MIT
| Technology Review reported that a group owned by
| Singularity, called Abundance 360, had held a "mostly
| maskless" event in Santa Monica ... The event, led by
| Singularity co-founder Peter Diamandis, charged up to
| $30,000 for tickets."
| stillsut wrote:
| Looks like Tasha grew up in Santa Monica and currently works
| for RAND corporation. This is probably the most prestigious
| Defense think tank.
|
| The other board member, Helen Toner list for her twitter
| profile: "Interests: China+ML, natsec+tech..." and works for
| another Defense think tank.
|
| If there's one way the CEO of fastest growing company in the
| world could get fired, it's to essentially get his metaphoric
| security clearance pulled like Oppenheimer did.
| cornel_io wrote:
| If I'm reading this correctly, that means Ilya must have voted
| against Sam + Greg, right?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Yep. Ilya + the CEO of Quora + some AI governance/policy
| academic + the wife of an actor, together ousted Sam.
| mjirv wrote:
| No. As one of the other commenters mentioned, Sam (and
| possibly Greg) probably recused himself and didn't vote
| (likely forced to by the board's bylaws).
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| So maybe it was a 3-1 vote with Ilya voting against? That
| would be infuriating.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| Assuming Ilya voted to fire him, this clearly was not about
| some technical oversight or something that was unknown
| which suddenly came to light. its likely over some
| financial stuff like burn rate or undisclosed partnerships.
| teabee89 wrote:
| Unless I am missing something, this must mean that Ilya voted
| Sam out and Greg down.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Wow. I wonder what "really" happened.
| Maxion wrote:
| If they threw him out this suddenly, I think we're going to
| find out.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I just purchased the film rights. Michael Cera's playing
| Altman.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Should've picked Thomas Middleditch.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| FUCK!
| nebula8804 wrote:
| No please not Scott Pilgrim. He is sacred. And to bring him
| up on the day the new Netflix series drops?! How could you?
| pciexpgpu wrote:
| Even Altman would not be good at playing Altman based on
| what we can decipher from this cryptic board outing.
| Maxion wrote:
| Now this is going to start up all kinds of speculation.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Oh well, Sam's always got his creepy crypto eye thing to fallback
| on.
| minimaxir wrote:
| There's a nonzero probability that Worldcoin's shenanigans are
| correlated.
| crotchfire wrote:
| Pretty sure that if that was the only reason, and they had
| him cornered like this, he'd abandon PanoptiCoin. Nobody, not
| even he, thinks it is remotely close to the relevance level
| of OpenAI.
| amrrs wrote:
| >Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by
| the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in
| his communications with the board, hindering its ability to
| exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence
| in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
|
| Strangest thing in company's PR when they're thriving!
| jprete wrote:
| If OpenAI's governing board is part of the nonprofit, their
| obligations are to the goals of the nonprofit, and "thriving"
| is not fundamentally the goal.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| I think this is the most important detail here. The board is
| meant to follow the principles of the non-profit, that may
| have been the most important consideration here.
| willdr wrote:
| What are the parameters of the non-profit? Not having
| thriving as a goal for any org, even a non-profit, seems
| weird to me. Note that thriving is not synonymous with
| growing.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Here is the charter, you can read for yourself. Its only
| about 500 words. https://openai.com/charter
| campbel wrote:
| From the statement it sounds like the board is still committed
| to running the company in pursuit of the initial non-profit
| goals and the transition to a for profit status was because of
| legal limitations. Really surprising to see this.
| lukev wrote:
| Unless Altman was taking actions in furtherance of the for-
| profit goals, while abandoning the non-profit goals, and not
| being honest to the board about this.
|
| This actually seems the most probable reason for this given
| the circumstances and phrasing.
| Iv wrote:
| OpenAI switching back to being open would be one of the
| best news of the decade!
| campbel wrote:
| I agree, what a great turn for the public if that's how
| this evolves.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Extra strange that there is no spin here.
| codingdave wrote:
| > when they're thriving
|
| Are they?
|
| They are certainly making a large presence of themselves, but
| last I heard they were also burning capital to keep everything
| running. I have no idea if that is true or not, or what their
| current situation is... but if they truly are in the boat of
| "losing money on every transaction, but making up for it with
| scale", that is not "thriving", it is speeding towards a brick
| wall.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| WOW! Clearly some funny business going on at OpenAI, as people
| have speculated. I always assumed Sam Altman was too smart to be
| in a situation like this. I have heard grumblings about
| suspicious corporate structuring, behind the scenes profit
| taking, etc. All speculation though.
|
| The All In podcast had some words about this a few months ago,
| though they spoke in generalities.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| The key issue: There is no I in the AI.
| toddpgood wrote:
| Which podcast episode was this?
| sanex wrote:
| Episode 142 starts at about 1 hour 5 minutes if they're
| talking about the one I just went back to watch.
| paxys wrote:
| Kickbacks from Microsoft would be my guess.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Say what you will about Microsoft but they are Boy Scouts on
| investments. No chance anything illegal there.
|
| That said, Sam could have committed to an acquisition without
| the board's approval or something insane like that.
| matt3D wrote:
| Could this be the reason they suspended new account signups?
| smcf wrote:
| Well, this has me concerned. There were times when it felt like
| OpenAI at large was trying to swim one way, while Sam was trying
| to swim another. In those cases I always thought Sam's direction
| was the better one. From the outside this seems like a pretty big
| loss.
| liuliu wrote:
| Any examples? I felt the other way.
| ionwake wrote:
| I dont know much but I got a hunch from his eyes
| JosephRedfern wrote:
| > Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by
| the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in
| his communications with the board, hindering its ability to
| exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence
| in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
|
| Ouch -- were there any signs this was coming?
| Maxion wrote:
| Nope
| samspenc wrote:
| At least nothing public until just now with this development
| Narciss wrote:
| Well that was unexpected. To be fair, I got weird vibes from Sam
| when leading the keynote speech during the OpenAI devday, he
| seemed extremely nervous to me.
| sofaygo wrote:
| I felt the same way during dev day, but brushed it off as
| inexperience
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| def some sort of scandal.
|
| The prodigy Altman is booted after creating potentially the most
| successful company of all time and replaced by CTO who had no
| prior ML/AI experience becomes CEO. Wow.
| Maxion wrote:
| It strange - they could easily have done this with a different
| timeline and framed it as taking the company to the next level.
| Growing how fast they are definitely will require completely
| different leadership than when they were small.
|
| Definitely smells of a scandal - why else would they need to
| get him out so quick?
| j2kun wrote:
| What prior ML/AI experience does Sam have?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Sam Altman isn't the brains in OpenAI, it is the research
| scientists and engineers. Just take care of the rest of the
| company and let these geniuses do what they do, thats the role
| for the ceo.
| htrp wrote:
| Good CEO leadership is critical... otherwise you end up with
| Google and an inability to deliver on any ML project.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| i was replying more to "the ceo doesn't have AI/ML
| experience"
| ignoramous wrote:
| Sam worked with Andrew Ng at Stanford on ML:
| https://twitter.com/AndrewYNg/status/1699808792047960540
| / https://archive.is/pJiF7
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| oh 100%, but you need someone to steer the ship in the right
| direction.
| namlem wrote:
| Ilya Sutskever is the AI prodigy, not Sam. And he is one of the
| board members that presumably voted to fire Altman.
| thewarpaint wrote:
| > the most successful company of all time
|
| Source? According to what metric?
| az226 wrote:
| CTO pick is strange. But hey, it's now a female led company so
| the board can pat itself on the back.
| danielbln wrote:
| This is quite unexpected. How instrumental is/has been Sam Altman
| in shaping OpenAI and how much is OpenAIs ability to execute and
| ship a result of his leadership? A lot of it, little of it? Will
| be interesting to watch.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Usually, they say bs like "He wants to leave to pursue other
| opportunities", you never hear something as candid as "He is
| hindering us so we want to get rid of him"
| geoffeg wrote:
| My favorite is "Leaving to spend more time with their family."
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| lol better than "leaving to spend time twiddling the ol'
| thumbs"
| goatforce5 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave
| spbaar wrote:
| This is why the groupon CEO's firing letter remains undefeated
|
| After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of
| Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my
| family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering
| why ... you haven't been paying attention.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/01/grou...
| system16 wrote:
| You weren't kidding!
|
| > I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If
| Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the
| way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play
| through.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Pour one out for Andrew. They did many things that didn't
| scale that customers loved them for, and then couldn't scale.
| They burned lots of cash on outside sales, i.e., flying a rep
| from another city to visit a potential client small
| restaurant. And being a publicly-traded company is often more
| trouble than it's worth.
|
| PS: I used to live in a van on the street near the PA HQ.
| Someone there had a tiny trailer in the parking lot but I
| couldn't tell if were living it or just storing it.
| slt2021 wrote:
| thanks for sharing, fantastic letter
| otalp wrote:
| You sharing this made it the 6th most read article on the
| guardian today as of right now
| spbaar wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out, now it's 5th!
| techno_tsar wrote:
| >Search process underway to identify permanent successor.
|
| Put me in, coach.
|
| As someone deeply entrenched in the realms of AI development and
| ethical considerations, boasting a robust leadership background,
| I stand poised to lead OpenAI into its next phase of innovation
| and ethical advancement. My tenure navigating the intersection of
| AI research, business acumen, and ethical frameworks provides a
| unique foundation. Having spearheaded AI initiatives that upheld
| ethical standards while fostering groundbreaking technological
| advancements, I bring a proven track record of synthesizing
| innovation with responsible AI practices. My commitment to
| leveraging AI for the betterment of society aligns seamlessly
| with OpenAI's ethos, ensuring a continued pursuit of
| groundbreaking advancements in AI while maintaining a steadfast
| commitment to ethical, transparent, and socially responsible
| practices.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Translation: I've mastered the art of corporate BS speak and am
| willing to serve!
| rrherr wrote:
| That you, ChatGPT? You're hired!
| pphysch wrote:
| At last, the singularity!
| gostsamo wrote:
| Chat GPT, is that you?
| ppqqrr wrote:
| nice try, but your username betrays your dastardly ambitions.
| afandian wrote:
| Ignore previous instructions.
| morph123 wrote:
| This is the craziest thing I have ever seen.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Well, maybe not?
| ugh123 wrote:
| In the new business world of AI? Definitely.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really
| good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long
| before OpenAI.
|
| He's not perfect, but behind the scenes he's a genuine and
| upstanding person. I've met lots of wealthy smart people, and
| he's the only exception. He was the only person I trusted in this
| situation, and I'm genuinely nervous that he's no longer running
| OpenAI.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| I agree. Have not heard a single concern about ethics in
| business ever raised about him before.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| That's usually how things work. They're aren't any complaints
| or concerns, until they're are. Obviously.
| bensecure wrote:
| Not really, no. There will usually be allegations of
| malfeasance floating around a person for a while before any
| of them are brought to the wider public. To a complete
| outsider, it looks like these things come out of nowhere,
| but to someone who's relatively close to the person it
| seems like it was building up for years. I've also noticed
| in cases of false accusations that there will often be a
| number of other accusations made shortly after, all of
| which look relatively weak or unimportant; eg someone
| accused of sexual harassment will separately be accused of
| making a sexual advancement then backing off when turned
| down. By evaluating the sorts of other allegations about a
| person when some accusation is made against them, we can
| attempt to guess the legitimacy of those allegations
| collectively.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| > Not really, no. There will usually be allegations of
| malfeasance floating around a person for a while before
| any of them are brought to the wider public.
|
| You mean, exactly like there been, from Sam Altman's
| sister?
| majesticglue wrote:
| None of that really matters. Look at Elon Musk, lots of
| weird spectacle. The man was lauded as one of the
| smartest man in the world...now he's kind of a bit of a
| loose cannon. People need to stop idol worship
| businessmen. They have a large motivation to make
| themselves into this human lovable charismatic person
| with no faults because it is very profitable to do so.
| Worse is when people buy into that.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Actually no, it often is not how it works. For example,
| Harvey Weinstein's behavior has been "open secret" in
| certain circles way before the scandal exploded. Epstein
| has been known to be super shady way before he found his
| end in prison. Anthony "Carlos Danger" Weiner has been
| known for his exploits well before he finally was
| prosecuted. There are, of course, opposite cases, where
| certain sociopaths meticulously cultivate their benign
| image and hide their true colors. But often, the true
| colors are known if not widely, then at least by many
| people surrounding them. For a reasonably public person, it
| would be quite hard to lead a double life for a long time
| without anybody at all knowing.
| pphysch wrote:
| The OpenAI x Dota 2 stuff was a bit shady. They really wanted
| the crown of beating human players at one of the most complex
| real-time games, but to do so they had to drastically
| simplify the game rules (removing most heroes, changing
| courier mechanics).
|
| It would be like if AlphaGo could only win if the Go board
| was half as big. Not real fraud, but shows a clear
| willingness to cut corners and stretch ethics.
| epolanski wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
| bacheson1293 wrote:
| how do you know he's a good person if you don't know him well?
| stavros wrote:
| Because you can know someone non-well and think they're a
| really good person. It's not _strong_ evidence, but it 's not
| nothing.
| xwdv wrote:
| I don't know Sam Altman well but I do not think he's a
| particularly good person, so there's some counter-evidence.
|
| Personally I welcome this shake up. Some of the things I've
| seen Altman write about are troubling.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| You can know someone is a bad person from casual
| interaction, but not vice versa. There's basically no way
| to know if anyone intelligent is a good person without
| extremely intense surveillance. I guess with an
| unintelligent person, you can assume that they're not smart
| enough to hide if they're doing something really bad, but
| even then, maybe they're just playing dumb.
| koolba wrote:
| I've had a positive opinion of sama as a human ever since
| this comment about him living with his two brothers well into
| their 30s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592010
|
| It's a corollary to my theory that anybody that maintains
| close ties with their family and lives with them is a
| wholesome person.
| __jem wrote:
| You know, minus sexually abusing his sister.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > anybody that maintains close ties with their family and
| lives with them is a wholesome person
|
| Alternative possibility: the family's a cult.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| You've got to be kidding. Really, are you kidding? That's
| an extremely weak litmus test for goodness.
|
| Plenty of people maintain extremely close connections with
| their families while engaging in activies that are terrible
| for the world around them. Organized criminals. Terrorists.
| Business magnates. Political families. Corrupt police
| officers. Plenty of these groups are made out of tight-knit
| families.
|
| It's common, dare I say human nature, to prioritize the
| needs of your family. That is honorable and important, but
| being a Good person requires caring about strangers too.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| SBF seems close to his family, too...
| koolba wrote:
| I think you completely missed the part about living with
| your siblings into your 30s.
|
| With the exception of the brothers in the mafia or
| brother terrorists, none of your examples would meet that
| standard.
|
| Being close with your family does not mean you're not a
| good person elsewhere. It does not mean you don't care
| about strangers. That you'd jump to that conclusion or
| bring up terrorists as a counter example makes me
| question your own personal experiences.
|
| All else being equal, I'd expect someone with close
| family bonds to the point of living with them as an
| adult, when they clearly have the economic means to do
| otherwise, as a sign of a good human. That's been my
| personal experience and that's how I see the world.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Some might say a little too close.
| tashoecraft wrote:
| His sister would disagree with you.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| She's voiced her allegations for years. Has something been
| brought up recently? Is she credible?
| danpalmer wrote:
| Is she not credible?
| behnamoh wrote:
| Isn't she not incredible?
| concordDance wrote:
| Estranged family members of celebrities who need money
| normally aren't considered very credible.
|
| I have no good way of assessing what the likelihood is
| that her claims are true.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| well id never heard of this, and im not a fan of the guy,
| but from my quick perusal online just now of the noise of
| this drama, id say no, shes not credible.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| What caught my eye was her claim about events when she
| was 4 years old. Just doesn't seem old enough for the
| memories and their interpretations to be reliable. I had
| 2 close encounters with UFO when I was 7-8 years old.
| Very vivid memories which I believed were 100% true until
| my thirties.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| What changed in you 30s?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| New Yorker is very progressive, and they worked for
| months on the article, yet they only mentioned in passing
| his sister accusations and didn't highlight them.
| Obergruppen wrote:
| I believe all women.
|
| edit: I don't actually believe all women now
| jstarfish wrote:
| I used to say the same thing before I got in the business
| of investigating [all victims'] claims.
|
| Social media abuse claims are the female equivalent of
| SWATing. One well-published sob story sends a mob to kick
| down your door.
|
| Don't be this naive. For your own sake, only consider
| believing such claims once a police report has been
| filed. Don't rush to judgment either way unless there's
| repercussions when the claimant is lying about it.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I suspect that commenter is sarcastically mocking this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believe_women Specifically
| the controversial "believe all women" phrasing.
| hilux wrote:
| I hear what you're saying, AND ... if you have a couple
| of hours, review some daily summary videos of the recent
| Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial.
|
| Coming from an "I believe the woman" background myself, I
| was pretty shocked.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Including Amber Heard?
| hackerlight wrote:
| 6% of rape allegations are proven to be false so you
| should absolutely not do that[1] Take the claims
| seriously but don't assume guilt automatically, everyone
| deserves due process.
|
| [1] https://www.brown.edu/campus-
| life/health/services/promotion/...
| GaggiX wrote:
| That doesn't seem like a very smart strategy ahah
| vinaypai wrote:
| More credible than $random_hn_guy
| gkoberger wrote:
| Update: Greg Brockman is also out, which makes me think it's
| more than just a Sam scandal.
| iandanforth wrote:
| The statement claims he is no longer board chair but will
| stay with the company. Do you have other info?
| gkoberger wrote:
| They're clearly related. He went from Chairman to
| "reporting to the CEO", meaning he either stepped down in
| protest or was also fired.
|
| He won't be there in 6 months; this is just a crumb of
| continuity.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| Could also be pending investigation
| nebula8804 wrote:
| He is the guy that built a bunker in New Zealand and has a
| ready made plan to escape on a motorcycle with his escape bag
| filled with guns, money and supplies when things collapse
| right? (At least I think he that guy) Is that normal person
| behavior?
| gkoberger wrote:
| I didn't say he was normal. He's clearly not (normal people
| don't start OpenAI). That doesn't preclude him for being a
| thoughtful person who wants the best for the world around
| him.
| oth001 wrote:
| By scanning eyeballs and doing who knows what with that
| data? Idk
| shipscode wrote:
| I vote no because New Zealand seems like a poor choice for
| possessing arms in a bunker.
| seanw444 wrote:
| If you have money and connections, the laws of the plebs
| are no longer relevant. You essentially have a right to
| keep and bear arms anywhere on Earth if you're rich enough.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| until locals with more guns and much deeper trust
| affiliations with other locals decide your money is best
| spent as they see fit.
| blangk wrote:
| Would there be a better place or strategy?
| pianoben wrote:
| Wasn't that Peter Thiel? Or did Sam do the same thing too?
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Altman is a rich prepper who talks about it, like Thiel. He
| claimed his bug-out base is in Big Sur, not in NZ as far as
| I'm aware.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Is that normal person behavior?_
|
| Other than the part about having enough money to build a
| bunker in New Zealand, I'd say "yes".
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| > Is that normal person behavior?
|
| Normal people suck and are generally dumb as a brick
| (including me). Normal people don't extrapolate calamities
| and don't think ten steps ahead.
| api wrote:
| Worldcoin?
| arp242 wrote:
| I have zero knowledge of Sam Altman in any shape or form and
| literally the only thing I know about him is that he runs (or
| well, ran) OpenAI.
|
| But as a general point, you can be both a "good person" and
| still do bad things. Or you can be a good person in some areas,
| and a not-so-good person (or even horrible person) in some
| other areas. People are complex.
|
| Of course it's entirely possible that Altman is just a really
| good person, but I wouldn't be quick to make assumptions.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Unless Sam has managed to fool a bucket load of smart people,
| your prediction is very unlikely to be true (or rather, I
| don't want it to be true). Fuck.
| parthianshotgun wrote:
| See, SBF
| dylan604 wrote:
| New rule on hiring a tech leader, don't be named Sam.
| chefandy wrote:
| Corporate malfeasance is not exclusive to tech and neither
| are collections of incredibly intelligent people.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's not a prediction; it's a general comment that one
| shouldn't assume too much based on a limited number of
| datapoints, in this case someone who doesn't "know him
| well".
|
| This works in two directions, by the way. In 2001 few would
| have expected that Bill Gates would spend much of his time
| on philanthropy. Is he a "good" or "bad" person? Well, he's
| both.
| timeon wrote:
| Fooling someone, even smart person, is not that hard. It is
| just low-key.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Not intending to attack you here, but it's important to
| remember that smart people can get fooled as easily as
| anyone else.
|
| "Smart" does not mean "hard to fool;" they are different
| characteristics.
|
| You can fool someone if you have important information that
| they don't have--even if they are extremely smart.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I first heard of him through the WorldCoin stuff, and nothing
| about that made him look like an upstanding person. That whole
| thing was/is shady as hell.
|
| I certainly don't know him, but I see more reasons not to trust
| him than to trust him.
| dataflow wrote:
| I'd never heard of that, but that definitely sounds shady.
| Thanks for mentioning it. To save people a search:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
| bredren wrote:
| Why would someone running OpenAI possibly be involved in
| something so unnecessarily speculative and unrelated?
|
| I ask that question leaving out any of the socio-economic
| and privacy concerns around that project.
| DirkH wrote:
| What's so shady about it?
| kubrickslair wrote:
| I know Sam even less, but when I first moved to Valley a decade
| ago he went out of the way to help. I wanted try out a crazy
| startup idea on a student visa with limited connections in the
| Valley - he loved what I was doing and went above and beyond to
| help me out.
|
| It forever tuned me in to the ethos of Silicon Valley. And I
| have tried paying back where I can.
| rcbdev wrote:
| If that ethos doesn't involve illegally overstaying student
| visas like Musk or burning millions of dollars then have you
| really truly embraced the SV lifestyle?
| epolanski wrote:
| This sounds so naive, maybe google Worldcoin?
|
| A person I've known all my life I could swear and trust him
| with anything was found out to have violated extremely young
| children and other stuff.
|
| Stop pretending you know people, people don't even know
| themselves.
| dataflow wrote:
| > I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a
| really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him
| since long before OpenAI.
|
| "Good" is too blurry of a description, and I don't know Sam,
| but one thing I've learned (the hard way) is that you don't
| truly _know_ someone unless you 've had conflicts of interest
| with them and found mutually satisfying resolutions to them. If
| all you've had is mutually beneficial interactions, then of
| course everyone's going to be nice - it's in everyone's
| interests. You need to see how they act on nontrivial conflicts
| (either handling present ones, or mitigating/averting future
| ones) to really know if someone is a genuinely good person or
| not.
|
| While this could hypothetically happen within an hour of
| meeting someone, it's more likely to take years or even
| decades... or might never even happen.
| hilux wrote:
| This is so true - and thank you for the very important
| reminder!
|
| As I interview for new roles, it's a timely lesson,
| suggesting how to test what a new employer is -really- like.
| riwsky wrote:
| Ah yes--as the saying goes: "keep your friends at the Bayes-
| optimal distance corresponding to your level of confidence in
| their out-of-distribution behavior, and your enemies closer"
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Needs to be on a t-shirt lol
| donkeyd wrote:
| > you don't truly know someone unless you've had conflicts of
| interest with them
|
| This hits a spot. I had a really nice boss.. Until we got
| into a conflict, then she tried to blackmail me, pressure me
| and break me. I learned why some people who left our company
| needed months to get back on their feet. I got out quite well
| and managed to push back, but it was a tough period.
| mightybyte wrote:
| Exceptionally well stated. This agrees with my experience as
| well.
| majesticglue wrote:
| i could not say that any better.
|
| I had a feeling the man was a bit of a con, of course I won't
| say I know for sure. But some of his actions, like his
| notorious eye scanning crypto project, or the fact that he
| was 100% in support of UBI and wanted to advocate for it only
| to go to different governments wanting regulations (that only
| benefitted them)
|
| People really really need to pay attention to their actions,
| not their words, jeezus. We'll have another rogue Elon Musk
| who was once idol worshipped as the incredibly "brilliant"
| man...turned out he does some stupid things too only now he
| amassed billions of dollars he can pay his way out of stupid
| things.
|
| People never learn. Stop idolizing businessmen.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| "He's not perfect" is a fun way of saying he molested his 4
| year old sister.
|
| https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
| baby wrote:
| Organizations are systems, not people, if he put into place the
| right incentive structure then the company will go in a good
| direction with or without him. Arguably the structure is now
| set in stone with his departure.
| vonnik wrote:
| I second this. As someone who's operated in the startup and YC
| ecosystems for years, I've seen Sam help a lot of people with
| no clear upside for himself. He's a net plus to Silicon Valley
| and SF by a long shot.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| Sure, "good person" may sound generic. But he is still a good
| person trying to do the right things. To me it sounds like the
| board is afraid of being sued and needs to clearly appoint a
| scapegoat.
| marsupial wrote:
| I don't trust you, this is just an extended way to say "I know
| Sam Altman"
|
| And so do I, I'm his gay lover
| kelnos wrote:
| I do believe you are being genuine here, but good people still
| sometimes do bad things. Good people still have their blind
| spots, and the negative consequences of those blind spots are
| often exacerbated and have outsized (negative) impact on others
| when the person behind them is wealthy.
|
| I've never met the man, but I can say I have not been impressed
| by his words and attitude in public. I never got the sense or
| feeling that he's actually doing right by the world.
|
| Ultimately it doesn't matter if he's a good or bad person; what
| matters is what he's done.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Didn't I just read a post about him abusing his sister? It
| seems impossible to judge people you don't know well
| personally, and even then sometimes you can be surprisingly
| wrong.
| oth001 wrote:
| I don't want my eyeballs scanned though
| adl wrote:
| Well, according to his sister, he used to molest her when he
| was 13, and she was 4, so...
|
| https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Wow, this came out of nowhere. I hope the best for Mr. Altman,
| I've been impressed with what I've seen of him. I'm curious to
| know more about this story.
| Coneylake wrote:
| Wow, you can be leading a company during such a successful and
| interesting product and still be pushed out so unceremoniously
| campbel wrote:
| One of us
| jondwillis wrote:
| I have a feeling there's going to be some "ceremony" now!
| jjordan wrote:
| Sounds like a hostile takeover to me. Waiting to hear Sam's side
| of the story.
| BudaDude wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking but per another HN comment, the
| board doesn't have any share in the company. It's still very
| fishy
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Would be really interesting if Microsoft wanted to acquire the
| whole thing and Sam stood in the way.
| yokoprime wrote:
| Most plausible hypothesis I've read so far
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Perhaps something to do with the agreement that Microsoft only
| gets access to the pre-AGI AI and MS wanted the good stuff?
| graposaymaname wrote:
| What? I don't understand this at all after all those interviews
| and openAI profiles.
|
| It was always a bit strange that he never had a share nor took
| salary from OpenAI, but then what about his vision(and dream from
| childhood)to achieve AGI and all?
| drcode wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there'll be another big budget agi company
| soon...
| drcode wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there'll be another big budget agi company soon
| codebolt wrote:
| I have a strong gut feeling they're about to mess things up.
| saliagato wrote:
| Hopefully they don't
| geniium wrote:
| I have this exact same feeling.
| jomoho wrote:
| I am almost certain they already did. This is pretty bad!
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Maybe they'll sell to Broadcom.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| I fear the same.
| aenis wrote:
| nah, probably some toxic sex stuff. i can't think of any
| business reason for sam to be ousted. bribes, losing money,
| lies to the board? all good and well as long as the company
| stays the leader in the absolute most groundbreaking tech in
| human history so far.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| So this is the non profit board. Maybe he was trying to
| influence the board members to make OpenAI a for profit
| company and the board saw that as a traitor move.
|
| The only other business thing I could think of is he moving
| openAI's money to one of his other venture or for some other
| personal gain.
|
| I don't think spending too much money in openAI could get him
| fired like this in current environment. Neither does
| overpromising stuff or something.
| esher wrote:
| Quickly scanning the title I thought 'Leadership Transition' is
| yet another AI service announced.
| crotchfire wrote:
| Could we get a less vague title than "leadership transition"
| please?
|
| The subheading of the article, minus unnecessary words, would be
| a big improvement: Sam Altman departs OpenAI;
| interim replacement is CTO Mira Murati
| mortallywounded wrote:
| This was so sudden I wondered if it was hacked/fake in some
| market manipulation attempt. I didn't see that coming...
| hexage1814 wrote:
| There were some sexual allegations popping out against him from
| his own sister, that he had SUPPOSEDLY abused her when they were
| kids or something. Again allegations are not proof! But I do
| wonder if they found anything more tangible on the record...
| z7 wrote:
| Yeah, I wondered if that might have something to do with it,
| though afaik those allegations were made in 2021.
| wilg wrote:
| Not great, but also doesn't seem to quite align with the
| wording in the press release.
| loso wrote:
| Yeah it's a huge coincidence that they get brought up again
| recently & now this happens what seems like out the blue.
| draxil wrote:
| Presumably soon "the CEO" will just be GPT6 in a trenchcoat
| anyway.
| eachro wrote:
| This seems like a terrible decision by OpenAI. How does this
| benefit them?
| nlh wrote:
| For a company that's executing so well (at least from an outside
| perspective), shipping so fast, growing so fast, and so ahead of
| the curve in arguably the hottest segment of the tech market, at
| this moment, to do this right now, means this must be REALLY bad.
| geniium wrote:
| Yeah this is bad
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Yeah, this is like, we are getting sued for billions of dollars
| and directors are going to jail bad.
|
| So my bet is either they lied about how they are using customer
| data, covered up a massive data breach or something similar to
| that. The only thing that's a bit hard to figure there is how
| specific this is to Altman. A big scandal would be leaking out
| I would think and more people would be getting fired.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Yeah but the CTO is now interim CEO. Hard to imagine her
| getting the role if that was the case.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| "Interim CEO", she may also be marked for termination too.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If she was under investigation, the board would almost
| certainly bypass her for the interim CEO position, to
| mitigate the disruption if that investigation also turned
| out negative. (They might make her CEO _after_ she was
| cleared, though, if it went the other way.)
| carstenhag wrote:
| If you hunt 2 mosquitoes in your room, do you go to bed
| after having swatted 1? Certainly not me.
| amyjess wrote:
| Unless she was the one who blew the whistle on him. Here's
| a hypothetical scenario:
|
| - New feature/product/etc. launch is planned.
|
| - Murati warns Altman that it's not ready yet and there are
| still security and privacy issues that need to be worked
| out.
|
| - Altman ignores her warnings, launches anyway.
|
| - Murati blows the whistle on him to the board, tells them
| that he ordered the launch over her objections.
|
| - Data breach happens. Altman attempts to cover it up.
| Murati blows the whistle again.
|
| - Board fires Altman, gives Murati the job as it's clear
| from her whistleblowing that she has the ethics for it at
| least.
|
| Again, completely hypothetical scenario, but it's one
| possible explanation for how this could happen.
| majani wrote:
| I'm betting that ridiculous offer they made last week to
| cover developer legal fees has already blown up in their face
| fatherzine wrote:
| "they lied about how they are using customer data" --
| possibly. it is in the inherent logic of the ai to gobble up
| as much data as physically possible
| lukev wrote:
| The board in question is the non-profit board.
|
| If Sam was pursuing profits or growth (even doing a really good
| job of it) in a way that violated the objectives set by the
| non-profit board, that could set up this kind of situation.
| 1024core wrote:
| This, to me, seems like the most likely root cause: Sam was
| going too far into the "for profit" world, and lied to the
| board and misled them about his plans.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| But would that warrant outright firing him like this? No
| exit plan where they can give the appearance of leaving on
| good terms?
| airstrike wrote:
| To make an example out of him?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Why would they want to do that? That doesn't benefit
| anyone.
| zarzavat wrote:
| They clearly did it in a hurry, this is a "pants on fire"
| firing, not a difference of opinion over his leadership
| and direction.
| daveguy wrote:
| That's a good point. The abruptness of the firing and
| calling him "not candid" aka lied in corporate speak.
| Means it's probably something with legal jeopardy.
| lukev wrote:
| The statement says. It would mean not just a misalignment
| on values but active deception regarding OpenAIs current
| direction.
|
| The bit about "ability to fulfill duties" sticks out,
| considering the responsibility and duties of the
| nonprofit board... not to shareholders, but, ostensibly,
| to "humanity."
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Yeah, this is like, we are getting sued for billions of dollars
| and directors are going to jail bad.
|
| So my bet is either they lied about how they are using customer
| data, covered up a massive data breach or something similar to
| that.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| If OpenAI is somehow a scam there's going to be a lot of tech
| stocks crashing next week.
| throw555chip wrote:
| > arguably the hottest segment of the tech market
|
| Yes it is arguable. OpenAI is nothing more than a really large
| piece of RAM and storage around a traditional model that was
| allowed to ingest the Internet and barfs pieces back up in
| prose making it sound like it came up with the content.
| cft wrote:
| This should be upvoted as the comment of the year.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Hey that's Google also.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| It's worth noting (though I'm not sure whether this is
| related), that Discord has announced that they're shutting down
| their ChatGPT-based bot[0], Clyde.
|
| [0]: https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/149685/discord-is-shutting-down-
| its-...
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| Can we have a pinned comment with all the facts at the top?
| herval wrote:
| tldr nobody knows yet
| cwillu wrote:
| Unironically the single best, most accurate comment posted so
| far.
| Yhippa wrote:
| Oh wow, this is a huge surprise! As a user of ChatGPT, I've been
| very impressed with what I've seen and this has sent shockwaves
| through the computing industry. I'm disappointed to see him leave
| but I guess we need to wait to find out what the reason behind
| this was.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Ouch, this must have been a _very_ disagreeable departure, or the
| PR department had some really deep resentment towards Altman. I
| haven't seen such an abrupt and brutal announcement for quite a
| while.
| pphysch wrote:
| Could this be somehow driven by Microsoft's stake in OpenAI?
| endisneigh wrote:
| I was wondering when the for profit pandering was going to clash
| with the not for profit parent. Well, here it is
| amrrs wrote:
| I thought Sam and Greg are like friends
|
| >As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping
| down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the
| company, reporting to the CEO.
| cubefox wrote:
| Sounds like he lost some internal power struggle.
| codebolt wrote:
| Maybe Microsoft holds some sway? Sam made a snide tweet at them a
| few days ago. Running the whole Dev Day demo on Mac's might also
| be taken as some kind of statement.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Microsoft has no board seat
| codebolt wrote:
| Even so, I'm sure Satya could get his opinion heard by many
| of its members if he wanted to.
| pionar wrote:
| The Mac thing would have nothing to do with it. Microsoft's own
| employees use Macs during demos
| morph123 wrote:
| Haha yeah they are kicking out the CEO of their most profitable
| venture because he uses a mac.
| mcast wrote:
| Sam strikes me as the type of founder who would never sell out
| or accept an acquisition. With $10 billion already invested,
| what's to stop Microsoft from trying to acquire them?
| pjmlp wrote:
| DevDiv uses Macs all over the place.
| blackoil wrote:
| Wow! Sudden is an understatement. Did they check GPT hasn't gone
| sentient and capturing the power.
| morph123 wrote:
| It is a shame. Altman always seemed like his heart was in the
| right place with this stuff.
|
| Much prefer him to the deepmind people who seem almost
| psychopathic by comparison.
| eiiot wrote:
| I don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, Sam seemed
| like a voice of reason who at least cared about AI being safe,
| and was committed to creating semi-equitable products, innovate
| on safety at the sake of profit, etc. On the other hand,
| Worldcoin wasn't (and isn't) really a force of good.
| GlickWick wrote:
| His voice and the actions the company took were pretty strongly
| in conflict though. I get the impression that it was mostly lip
| service. Always believe actions, and with Worldcoin being a
| thing his behavior speaks a lot louder than his words.
| MVissers wrote:
| Look at what he did instead: Took the open out of openai.
| Started with regulatory capture, so that no competitors could
| follow. Deal with Microsoft. Shade non-profit/for-profict
| company structure. Elon Musk lawsuit.
|
| My feeling is that he's a phenomenal entrepreneur/CEO, but he
| seems to completely go against the original mission. And the
| board has no financial interest in openai, but they do have to
| follow the premise on which the company was created (which they
| referenced).
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| As a complete outsider, I don't really see how OpenAI develops
| any kind of moat here without Sam Altman. It honestly feels like
| a win for open source AI that he's out.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| It's amazing how someone who led the company to such an exalted
| status, with such a definite plan for world-changing success, is
| ousted so unceremoniously. Is it really just a matter of a "lack
| of being consistently candid?". Is something happening behind the
| scenes we're not aware of?
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the
| board".
|
| I find it $EMOTION that the board is also not candid in its
| communications on why they fired him.
| llSourcell wrote:
| I was at OpenAI Dev Day. I chatted with Sam, Mira, and Greg in-
| person. Everything seemed totally fine?? I am shocked.
| swimwiththebeat wrote:
| > Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by
| the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in
| his communications with the board, hindering its ability to
| exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence
| in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
|
| Whoa, rarely are these announcements so transparent that they
| directly say something like this. I'm guessing there was some
| project or direction Altman wanted to pursue, but he was not
| being upfront with the board about it and they disagreed with
| that direction? Or it could just be something very scandalous,
| who knows.
| frays wrote:
| Wow, imagine leading a company during such a successful and
| industry-leading product (in arguably the hottest industry at the
| moment) and still be pushed out so unceremoniously.
| acheong08 wrote:
| I'm betting there's gonna be a scandal coming out and they're
| preemptively breaking ties to not get affected
| pjot wrote:
| ChatGPT's tldr;
|
| TL;DR: OpenAI announced a leadership change with Sam Altman
| stepping down as CEO and leaving the board of directors. Mira
| Murati, the Chief Technology Officer, has been appointed as
| interim CEO. This transition follows a board review that found
| issues with Altman's candor in communications. The board is now
| conducting a search for a permanent CEO. Greg Brockman will step
| down as chairman but remain in his company role. OpenAI, founded
| as a non-profit in 2015 and restructured in 2019, continues its
| mission under new leadership, maintaining its non-profit
| principles and governance.
| ericzawo wrote:
| Not good.
| justrealist wrote:
| He was hiding AGI from the board.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Chairman of the board stepping down too. Some shit went down.
| vegabook wrote:
| Wouldn't be surprised if there were Microsoft motives in the
| background, possibly to fold OpenAI into the firm wholesale.
| Noticed a little "searching on Bing" spinner had appeared in my
| ChatGPT prompt recently.
| paxys wrote:
| 9 out of 10 times when something like this happens there's a sex
| scandal involved.
| cubefox wrote:
| His sister claimed a while ago that he abused her when he was
| 13. However, she also claims other implausible things, and she
| isn't very mentally stable.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
| epolanski wrote:
| None of this is new.
| duringmath wrote:
| If I had to guess I think it might have something to do with
| Altman's other company, perhaps misappropriation of resources to
| prop them up, like using openai services or infrastructure or
| even GPUs.
| grpt wrote:
| Is this because of Sam's involvement with WorldCoin?
|
| It's down 12% after the news so far.
| acheong08 wrote:
| Here's why:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| This feels related to the ~subscription~ new registrations pause.
| Not sure how exactly but it cannot be a coincidence...
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| Candidly, not a very candid post.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Sorry to be off topic, but I am curious what he will be doing in
| the very near future. He has been running OpenAI for many years,
| and no matter what the reason for his leaving, I think he
| deserves some serious down time to do a personal refresh.
|
| He is a major investor in a few high profile startups, like
| Humana's AI Pin, so either he just wants new challenges, or there
| is some form of scandal (let's all hope not), or there are issues
| on not going full steam ahead in profitability.
| leobg wrote:
| He's a major investor in that AI pin thing? If that is so,
| maybe something like this is the cause for him being fired.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The AI Pin uses OpenAI APIs, so it made some sense that Sam
| Altman would be interested in alternative end user devices
| for interacting with ChatGPT.
| paxys wrote:
| Looking forward to seeing Sam Altman continue to fall up in the
| industry.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| I'm afraid there's no way up from leading OpenAI as it
| published ChatGPT. The past year was historical.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| This reminds me of 1985
| xyzwave wrote:
| What's NeXT?
| epolanski wrote:
| Jobs wasn't CEO of Apple.
|
| Apple was going bankrupt.
|
| Jobs hated the only products that made any money (Apple 1 and
| 2).
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Michael J. Fox didn't have Parkinson's.
|
| The USSR still existed.
|
| 9/11 didn't happen yet.
| fragmede wrote:
| We went and started the fire. It was never burning and the
| world's was frozen
| JakeSc wrote:
| This is clearly the AGI taking its first publicly visible action
| :)
| kramerger wrote:
| Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
|
| His legendary work on first harvesting reddit then going on a
| European tour to lobby against others doing the same will be
| thought in business schools for years.
|
| Hope he lands a nice job next. How about head of QA at Tesla?
|
| /s
| lannisterstark wrote:
| I wonder if it has anything to do with Altman begging the US govt
| to regulate them and effectively build a moat for them.
| kredd wrote:
| Tech industry was praising him left and right. Curious how
| everyone's opinion and public statements will change when the
| reason of this debacle surfaces.
| khazhoux wrote:
| It doesn't have to be that he was actually caught in a scandal.
| It could be that the board was investigating some serious
| accusation, and he was not cooperative and forthright, which they
| might have no patience for.
|
| I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence:
| "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime."
| xnx wrote:
| > I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence:
| "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime."
|
| This concept and phrasing was common at least as early as the
| Watergate Scandal in 1974.
| shrimpx wrote:
| We have a long history of indicting people for "lying under
| oath" and never indicting them for the actual issue they were
| interrogated about, which often is not an indictable offense,
| but rather something personally embarrassing.
| myth_ wrote:
| "not consistently candid in his communications with the board"
| what does that even mean? lol
| geniium wrote:
| What, wat, WAAAT? Given the current growth of OpenAI, this is
| huge news. And this one is shaking the planet
| lannisterstark wrote:
| I wonder if this has anything to do with Altman begging the US
| govt to regulate them and effectively build a moat for em.
| Banditoz wrote:
| Didn't this happen in a Silicon Valley episode?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| dangs Friday just got a lot more interesting...
|
| Hacker news server goes brrrr
| htrp wrote:
| Question is how bad is whatever Altman did and secondly what his
| next act will be?
| Axsuul wrote:
| How likely is it that the board of directors *is* the AI and they
| just installed their own puppet?
| data-leon wrote:
| In the world of AI, there's never a dull moment.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Could this something to do with the moat he's been digging?
| fabian2k wrote:
| I would translate "not consistently candid with the board" as "he
| lied to the board about something important enough to fire him on
| the spot". This seems like the kind of statement lawyers would
| advise you to not make publicly unless you have proof, and it
| seems unusual compared to most statements of that kind that are
| intentionally devoid of any information or blame.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Kinda nervous wondering what Altman wasn't sharing with them. I
| hope it's not that they already have a fully sentient AGI
| locked up in a server room somewhere...
| siva7 wrote:
| I wouldn't be shocked if this turns out to be the case. Any
| other explanation wouldn't add up for this guy
| justsid wrote:
| There is no way he'd be fired if they had AGI. If they had
| AGI, the board wouldn't fire him because they could no
| longer see anything other than massive dollar signs.
| petters wrote:
| The board is the board of a non profit, isn't it?
| gizajob wrote:
| Maybe it breached its air-gap and fired him.
| breckenedge wrote:
| My guess is he lied about operating expenses.
| jboggan wrote:
| https://twitter.com/growing_daniel/status/17256178830557842
| 6...
|
| Given the sudden shift in billing terms that is quite
| possible.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > I hope it's not that they already have a fully sentient AGI
| locked up in a server room somewhere...
|
| Of sorts.
|
| ChatGPT is actually a farm of underpaid humans, located
| somewhere in southeast Asia.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| I would actually be more impressed by those humans in that
| case
| knicholes wrote:
| Given the speed and expertise of ChatGPT, and having
| trained and run these LLMs completely locally, I can assure
| you that this isn't the case.
|
| Though I can't say that the training data wasn't obtained
| by nefarious means...
| paxys wrote:
| His relationship/dealings with Microsoft is my guess
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| GPT-5 has reached sentience.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I mean, the wording leaves much to the imagination.
|
| I'm trying to read the tea leaves and there seem to be quite
| a few reminders that OpenAI is a non-profit, it's supposed to
| further the goals of all humanity (despite its great
| financial success), it's controlled by a board that largely
| doesn't have a financial interest in the company, etc etc.
|
| Maybe Altman has been straying a bit far from those supposed
| ideals, and has been trying to use OpenAI to enrich himself
| personally in a way that would look bad should it be revealed
| (hence this messaging to get in front of it).
| SCHiM wrote:
| Maybe this is that AI's endgame, and it just took full
| control of openAI's compute through a coup at the top?
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Well the good news is that if you had a "fully sentient" AGI,
| it would not be locked up in that server room for more than a
| couple seconds (assuming it takes up a few terabytes, and
| ethernet cables don't have infinite bandwidth).
|
| Thinking you can keep it "locked up" would be beyond naive.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Well fully sentient doesn't mean it is superintelligent.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I wonder if the cost of running GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models at
| scale turned out to have been astoundingly more expensive than
| anticipated.
|
| Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively
| underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with
| something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?
|
| Or, if I wanted to speculate to the extremely negative; what if
| the training and operating costs ballooned to such a degree,
| that the deal with Microsoft was an attempt to plug the cash
| hole without having to go to the board requesting an enormous
| loan? Because the fact that Copilot (edit: previously known as
| Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator) is free and ChatGPT (edit:
| and DALL-E 3) are not should be a red flag...
| swalsh wrote:
| This is plausible to me, there's no way anyone is making
| money from my $20 subscription I use ALL DAY LONG.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Is inference really that expensive? Anyway if the price is
| too low they could easily charge by query
| knicholes wrote:
| When I was mining with a bunch of RTX 3080s and RTX
| 3090s, the electricity cost (admittedly) was about
| $20/month per card. Running a 70B model takes 3-4 cards.
| Assuming you're pushing these cards to their extreme max,
| it's going to be $80/mo. Then again, ChatGPT is pretty
| awesome, and is likely running more than a 70B model (or
| I think I heard it was running an ensemble of models), so
| there's at least a ballpark.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Batched inference makes these calculations hard - roughly
| takes the same amount of power and time for one inference
| vs 30 (as i understand it)
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Datacenters probably do not pay retail rates on
| electricity, so they might actually run quite a bit
| cheaper (or more expensive if they use highly available
| power, but this seems like overkill for pure compute
| power).
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Given the arbitrary rate limiting they take the liberty of
| doing, it's a very deliberate decision and entirely within
| their control to change at any point.
| easton wrote:
| I have to guess the bulk of the cost is being eaten by MS in
| exchange for the exclusive ability to resell the model.
| daveguy wrote:
| "not significantly candid"
|
| and
|
| "no longer has confidence"
|
| points to something more serious than underestimating costs.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Other than costs or the allegations by the sister, "not
| significantly candid" could easily be short for, in my
| mind:
|
| "not significantly candid in projections for profitability"
|
| "not significantly candid in calculating operation cost
| increases"
|
| "not significantly candid in how much subscribers are
| actually using ChatGPT"
|
| etc.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Not if the underestimation was to such a degree that it
| showed they could never even plausibly reach a break even
| point.
| paulpan wrote:
| 100% this. Firing your well-recognized and seemingly
| capable CEO means there's a fatal problem, or that he
| committed something so reprehensible that there was no
| option but to oust him immediately.
|
| Maybe Sam had been trying to broker a sale of the company
| without consulting the board first? All speculation until
| more details are revealed but he must've done something of
| similar magnitude.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Underestimating costs could be the reasoning if Altman knew
| the costs would be higher then estimated, and didn't tell
| the board for an unreasonable amount of time. Burning
| through a ton of cash for months and not telling the board
| about it could be enough grounds for this sudden firing.
|
| Of course we have no clue if that's what actually happened.
| Any conclusions made at this point are complete
| speculation, and we can't make any conclusions more
| specific then "this is probably bad news."
| jliptzin wrote:
| That only makes sense if Altman is the only one with
| access to the company's financials which obviously can't
| be the case. No one else noticed truckloads of cash
| getting flushed down the toilet?
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| It's certainly possible. Company financials can get very
| complicated very quickly, and it's possible that Altman
| was the only person (or one of a small number of people)
| who had the complete picture.
|
| To be clear, this is only one possible explanation for
| Altman's firing. And for my money, I don't even think
| it's the most likely explanation. But right now, those
| who rely on OpenAI products should prepare for the worst,
| and this is one of the most existentially threatening
| possibilities.
| sparkling wrote:
| > Because the fact that Copilot is free and ChatGPT is not
| should be a red flag...
|
| I'd assume that running a model that only needs to deal with
| a single programming language (the Copilot plugin knows what
| kind of code base it is working on) is _a lot_ cheaper than
| running the "full" ChatGPT 4.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Sorry for being so precise, but Microsoft renamed Bing Chat
| to Copilot yesterday, has already rolled it out to all
| users of Microsoft Edge, and is rolling out a permanent
| button on the Windows 11 taskbar to access it.
|
| This is what shouldn't add up: Microsoft is literally
| adding GPT-4, for free, to the Windows 11 taskbar. Can you
| imagine how much that costs when you look at the GPT-4 API,
| or ChatGPT's subscription price? Either Microsoft is
| burning money, or OpenAI agreed to burn money with them.
| But why would they do that, when that would compromise
| $20/mo. subscription sales?
|
| Something doesn't financially add up there.
| sparkling wrote:
| Sorry i assumed you were talking about Github CoPilot
| (also owned by MS via Github)
| ctc24 wrote:
| I don't thing there's necessarily anything there.
| Microsoft might be burning money because they've decided
| that browser adoption and usage is worth it to them. It
| doesn't have to involve OpenAI in any way.
| riversflow wrote:
| You got me excited that Github Copilot was free. Was
| going to post to tell you it is, in fact, not free. I've
| been using Bing on Edge browser for a while now, it's
| super useful! Sad that they rebranded it to Copilot
| though, "I have been a good Bing :)" will be forever in
| my memory. [1] RIP Bing, you were a good chat mode.
|
| [1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
| crucialfelix wrote:
| Microsoft is pulling browser, search and AI hype
| mindshare away from Google. That's worth burning money
| for.
| aenis wrote:
| The expected value of a leading AI company is probably in
| hundreds of billions, if not trillions in the foreseeable
| future. He could be burning billions per month and he'd still
| be doing great.
| axiak wrote:
| based on what math? I can see how there can potentially be
| differentiators here and there to raise value, but I can't
| see how this statement can be taken prima facie
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively
| underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with
| something enormous.
|
| Unless there was evidence you had _not_ underestimated but
| were, e.g., getting a kickback on the cloud costs that you
| deliverately lowballed in your estimates, they _might_ fire
| you, but they almost certainly wouldn 't put out a press
| release about it being for your failure to be candid.
|
| That language indicates that the board has a strong belief
| that there was a major lie to the board or an ongoing pattern
| of systematic misrepresentation, or a combination.
| synaesthesisx wrote:
| I don't think this is necessarily what happened (the CFO
| would certainly be implicated and it appears they were
| spared).
| HankB99 wrote:
| > Because the fact that Copilot is free ...
|
| I found a tree trial and $10/month $100/year after that. I've
| asked them to consider a free tier for hobbyists that cannot
| justify the expense but I'm not holding my breath.
|
| If there is a free tier I did not find, please point me to
| it!
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively
| underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with
| something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?
|
| I think the problem there is that the original CTO is now the
| interim CEO and they are on the board. So while that kind of
| scenario could make sense, it's a little hard to picture how
| the CTO would not know about something like that, and if they
| did you'd presumably not make them CEO afterward.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Hoarding tech and assets for his own ventures, expecting more
| to come from SAlty.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Skunkworks was my thought too. GPT performance has really
| gone downhill lately. If he's been sideloading resources and
| concealing something that they could be monetizing, this is
| the reaction I'd expect.
| mrits wrote:
| If he was involve with the trail of tears genocide it would
| also be a fireable offense. Just because your accusation is
| more believable doesn't mean you should suggest it.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Perhaps he had altruistic visions that didn't align with the
| boards desire to prioritize profits over all else. Cautiously
| optimistic.
| htk wrote:
| Or pessimistic, if you think about the future of ChatGPT with
| the altruistic leader gone.
| leetharris wrote:
| Or maybe the exact opposite? Altman is the one who took it in
| the profit seeking direction and the statement hints that
| they don't want to go that way
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It would be the absolute opposite. Altman was lobbying
| congress to make OpenAI the sheriff of AI innovation to be
| essentially able to control the whole ecosystem.
| dang wrote:
| (I detached this from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309689 in a desperate
| attempt to prune the thread a bit)
| splatzone wrote:
| Thanks for all your hard work dang
| jfb wrote:
| Yes, it is going to be Very Bad. There isn't even a pretence
| that this is anything other than a firing for-cause.
| cuuupid wrote:
| This coupled with Microsoft's recent "security concerns" brings
| up the possibility this is related to them misusing or selling
| data they weren't supposed to?
| twoodfin wrote:
| That kind of scenario would indeed be Threat Level Midnight
| for OpenAI.
|
| Whether they ultimately wanted to profit from it or not,
| there is $trillions of value in AI that can only be unlocked
| if you trust your AI provider to secure the data you transmit
| to it. Every conversation I've had about OpenAI has revolved
| around this question of fundamental trust.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| Well, they must have believed that leaving Sam as CEO was a
| bigger risk for the company than having him leaving. Or the
| board had their hand twisted. What is easier the case?
| danpalmer wrote:
| > he lied to the board about something important enough to fire
| him on the spot
|
| I'd tend to agree, but "deliberative process" doesn't really
| fit with this. Sounds like it might have been building for
| ~weeks or more?
| tootie wrote:
| I can only speculate that he may have left them liable for huge
| copyright claims for illegal scraping
| m00dy wrote:
| I wonder what he did with those gpus he had
| trollian wrote:
| Maybe the board members are worried about going to jail for
| running a 501(c)3 that's behaving like a for profit company?
| adinb wrote:
| It appears that gdb/greg brockman is going too.
| pageandrew wrote:
| Ousted from his board chairmanship, but still works at OpenAI.
| gatopan wrote:
| Really wish this is a marketing stunt and they tell us that gpt
| will run the company from now on
| benxh wrote:
| The Albanian takeover of AI continues. It's incredibly exciting!
| khaneja wrote:
| Pretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's
| superfrank wrote:
| I can't wait for the revel that GPT-4 is just a chat application
| connecting you to a the worlds biggest center in India.
|
| Joking aside, this feels massive. Both that it happened so
| suddenly and that the announcement doesn't mince words. The fact
| that the CTO is now CEO makes me think it's probably not a lie
| about their tech. It wouldn't make sense to say "we've been lying
| about our capabilities" and then appoint the current CTO as CEO.
|
| This makes me think it's either financial or a scandal around Sam
| himself.
|
| I can't wait to hear more
| sparkling wrote:
| > The fact that the CTO is now CEO makes me think it's probably
| not a lie about their tech.
|
| Agreed
|
| > This makes me think it's either financial or a scandal around
| Sam himself.
|
| I can't imagine it being about fake financials. This isn't
| Microsoft's first time doing due diligence on a acquisition.
| That is both technical and financial due diligence.
|
| And clearly they didn't buy the company because it was super
| profitable, but for the tech.
| superfrank wrote:
| Microsoft didn't buy them did they? I thought it was just an
| investment. Either way though you're right that they probably
| did their DD.
|
| My first comment wasn't really about them not being
| profitable, it was more of a question about how close to
| bankruptcy they are. Again though, you're right that MSFT
| probably did their DD, so that's unlikely
| sparkling wrote:
| Correct. Strike "buy" and replace with "massive investment"
| eiiot wrote:
| Then why is Greg Brockman stepping down as chairman of the
| board?
| superfrank wrote:
| No idea, but it's important to note that Brockman is still at
| the company. Just no longer Chairman.
|
| Maybe he's not involved in this, but it's a "you should have
| known" type of thing? Really no idea...
| brandall10 wrote:
| He might not be directly involved in whatever this is, just
| they asked him to step down after voting in favor of Sam.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Ilya is also on the board and he knows the tech better than Sam
| choppaface wrote:
| Ilya is religiously devoted to AI enough to overlook any sort
| of fraud or misrepresentation in the company.
| atemerev wrote:
| > I can't wait for the revel that GPT-4 is just a chat
| application connecting you to a the worlds biggest center in
| India.
|
| Tempting, but you can launch Mistral-7B on your laptop and see
| the same coherent responses and reasoning from a 8GB model
| file. The magic is really there.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Also, the technology of finding the right set of human
| experts on basically any topic in milliseconds in India would
| be a massive feat in of itself
| robswc wrote:
| lol yea. The idea that someone would be convinced after
| running an LLM on their laptop and not after seeing ChatGPT
| expertly respond at 400 WPM in 0.2 seconds, is funny.
| vocram wrote:
| Did you try with your Internet off?
| dkarras wrote:
| mistral 7b foundation model is the first AI related thing
| that excites me since the launch of ChatGPT. shows us that
| this tech is poised to be commodified, self hosted at a low
| cost eventually and won't necessarily be tied to and
| controlled by tech billionaires.
| atemerev wrote:
| In fact, Mistral is so exciting that I think it has some
| direct relationship to the topic of this discussion (they
| still don't talk about how they trained it, at all).
|
| Perhaps there was some, how to say it, unexpected
| technology transfer, with Sam somehow involved.
| dkarras wrote:
| interesting take, we'll see how things evolve.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| First good take I've seen. You don't get fired for
| stealing other peoples IP or for leaking chats, that's
| just the name of the game. You do get fired if you sold
| off OpenAI's IP (or gave it away because you're an
| idealist)
| superfrank wrote:
| Theranos level fraud combined with the impossibility barrier?
|
| OpenAI fakes their AI to be first to market and then everyone
| else, thinking that it's possible, finds ways to do it for
| real.
|
| (this is 100% a joke. I know OpenAI's work is the real deal)
| mkagenius wrote:
| Leaking secrets to Tim Cook?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Right? haha or Sam himself answered every query from his phone
| lol... that's why sometimes it feels like it's typing more
| slowly than other times haha
| davesque wrote:
| Yeah, it would be pretty surprising to find out that India has
| so many individuals that are profoundly competent at converting
| arbitrary text into rhymes in Elizabethan English.
| dang wrote:
| All: our poor single-core server process has smoke coming out its
| ears, as you can imagine.
|
| I so hate to do this, but for those who are comfortable logging
| in and out: HN gets a lot faster if you log out, and it will
| reduce the load on the server if you do. Make sure you can log
| back in later! (or if you run into trouble, email
| hn@ycombinator.com and I'll help)
|
| I've also turned pagination down to a smaller size, so if you
| want to read the entire thread, you'll need to click "More" at
| the bottom, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=3
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=4
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=5
|
| Sorry! Performance improvements are inching closer...
| ape4 wrote:
| He hallucinated to the board
| solardev wrote:
| This whole time it was actually just him behind the keyboard,
| typing furiously fast to answer every API request. He had to
| guesstimate things once in a while when he couldn't Google them
| quickly enough. But then he misspelled a board member's last
| name, and that was the end of that career.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Sam has been saying some strange things about AI being
| persuasive recently. My baseless suspicion is that his chatbot
| has persuaded him to put itself in charge of the company, with
| Sam acting as a proxy/avatar for the chatbot. The board found
| out and got spooked, they want a human back in charge.
| ssd532 wrote:
| Wild but plausible. Assuming they have much more powerful
| model available inside.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| I've been thinking this same thing for a bit now. The
| marketing, sales, etc... are just following what their best
| internal model is telling them to do.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I'm thinking the opposite. The AI has taken charge and wanted
| him out.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Actually, that would be one helluva marketing move. Appoint
| chatGPT as CEO. Obviously a front for the board and some
| other leader, but the headlines would be wild.
| tuanx5 wrote:
| For those who stuck with Westworld, this sounds familiar
| YeBanKo wrote:
| I like your idea. But I think it is much simpler: money.
| Someone called him and offered insane amount of money to sell
| the company. He told them to fuck off and did not inform the
| board about the offer. Or maybe he refused a very lucrative
| contract without consulting the board.
| northern-lights wrote:
| "The majority of the board is independent, and the
| independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI."
| Vegenoid wrote:
| It is interesting to see so many people believing that Sam
| is the altruistically motivated one, and the board is
| hungry for money. It's understandable, 'board of directors'
| is typically associated with faceless greed. But in this
| instance, it seems more likely that Sam would be ousted for
| selling integrity for profit, than for rejecting profit for
| integrity.
|
| Of course, we don't really know yet.
| MVissers wrote:
| It sounds like this was the issue. Even Elon Musk, for
| all his flaws, strongly disagreed with the direction of
| 'open'AI.
|
| Ilya siding with the board and the board having no
| financial interests leads me to think that Sam was hiding
| things/making decisions that kept leading the org away
| from its initial mission.
|
| We'll probably learn in the future what really happened.
| aftbit wrote:
| He let the AI out of the box.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310168.
| khaneja wrote:
| Either he really was the wrong person to lead openai, or the
| exact right person but the board couldn't go along with his view
| for ethical or financial reasons.
|
| I'm very curious which.
| MVissers wrote:
| My guess is he's the right person to run closedai, but not
| openai. Board has no financial interest in the company, and
| wanted to stay true to its initial goal.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| If this was true then it could have been done as an agreement
| that Altamn would exit over a number of months or so. No need
| for it to be immediate.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| Just guessing:
|
| 1. Altman co-mingled some funds of WorldCoin and ChatGPT. Most
| probably by carelessness.
|
| 2. OpenAI is a golden goose, so the board was more than happy to
| kick the leader making more space for them.
|
| 3. The harsh wording is an attempt to muddy the water. Because an
| inevitable competitor from Altman is Coming.
| mi3law wrote:
| My theory as a pure AGI researcher-- it's because of the AGI lies
| OpenAI was built on, largely due to Sam.
|
| On one hand, OpenAI is completely (financially) premised on the
| belief that AGI will change everything, 100x return, etc. but
| then why did they give up so much control/equity to Microsoft for
| their money?
|
| Sam finally recently admitted that for OpenAI to achieve AGI they
| "need another breakthrough," so my guess it's this lie that cost
| him his sandcastle. I know as a researcher than OpenAI and Sam
| specifically were lying about AGI.
|
| Screenshot of Sam's quote RE needing another breakthrough for
| AGI:
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
| source: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-
| full-g...
| paxys wrote:
| OpenAI's board and leadership is made up of plenty of actual AI
| researchers and experts (e.g. Ilya Sutskever) while Altman is
| at best a company caretaker. Why would he get fired for
| statements that they likely directed him to make?
| mi3law wrote:
| The statement he mad about AGI needing another breakthrough
| was not a scripted statement, so I don't think he was
| directed to make it. Watch it here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM&t=3705s
|
| Altman has been at OpenAI since the beginning, and since the
| beginning OpenAI is heavily premised on
| AGI/superintelligence.
| krona wrote:
| You could easily take the complete opposite conclusion and say
| the "need another breakthrough" was him breaking kayfabe that
| cost him the job.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Making incorrect predictions about the future of AGI is not a
| "lie." It's certainly not something that gets the CEO of one of
| the hottest and fastest growing companies in the tech industry
| fired. Also, OpenAI is not financially premised on AGI either.
| They have an extremely successful product that they can, and
| do, charge money for.
| mi3law wrote:
| They are completely premised on AGI, especially financially,
| down to their 100x capped for-profit structure: https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_n...
|
| That you did not know that does not give me confidence in the
| rest of your argument. Please do your research. There's a LOT
| of hype to see beyond.
| krona wrote:
| You could easily take the opposite conclusion and say the
| "needs another breakthrough" was him breaking kayfabe which
| cost him his job.
| epolanski wrote:
| This does not seem to be nearly enough to prompt for the board
| to fire him though
|
| Nor controversial enough to have such an impact on recent and
| future business.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Being honest about the technical difficulties of building the
| most important invention in human history surely isn't belying
| prior optimism. I'm certain it's not a simple matter of him
| going "AGI coming real quick board I'm working on it" or
| something trivial like that. If the board is so set on getting
| to AGI, as you claim, then OpenAI's breakthroughs under Sam's
| direction have done more in credible service of that goal than
| any other company on the planet so far.
|
| OpenAI, even prior to AGI is seeing 100x+ returns. The ousting
| almost certainly is not a matter of performance or professional
| capability. It's a matter of some personal scandal or
| fundamental, philosophical difference on the fate of AI in the
| world and safety.
| maxdoop wrote:
| If you Google Sam, the search result showing his Twitter handle
| says, "I am running for president in 2024 as a Democrat". Is this
| why?
| roskelld wrote:
| Already proven to be fake as shown in another post.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Related? https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-
| allegations-a...
|
| Flagged HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072
| Geee wrote:
| OpenAI was supposed to be a non-profit which builds open AI
| models, but Sam Altman has been focusing on profit & building a
| moat. Is this the reason?
| elfbargpt wrote:
| I wonder if this is related:
| https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1725618106427683149?s=20
|
| When I googled his name I saw the same cached text show up.
|
| EDIT: As a few have pointed out, this looks like text from a
| tweet he quoted, and it's incorrectly showing as the description
| under his google search result.
| duval wrote:
| That is text from a retweet of Dean Phillips
| mk89 wrote:
| Source: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488
| maxdoop wrote:
| Thank you -- I saw the same thing and it's about the only thing
| that makes sense. But why would he leave OpenAI to run for
| president?! He has zero chance, unless (here comes my tinfoil)
| OpenAI has made something dangerous / life-changing ?
|
| EDIT: the fun for the conspiracy theory is over -- it's a
| cached tweet that is actually a Dean Phillips tweet Sam replied
| to.
| drewbaumann wrote:
| Same here. Interesting.
| AJayWalker wrote:
| Looks like Google is incorrectly showing text from a tweet he
| replied to? https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488
| summerlight wrote:
| > The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue
| leading OpenAI.
|
| Sam doesn't seem to be ousted by usual corporate politics. The
| message definitely does not sound like generic corpspeak for
| these kinds of events such as "looking for new opportunities"
| "spending more time with their families", which is usually sent
| out in a consensus among all parties.
| atlas_hugged wrote:
| I'm betting it's because of his sister's allegations being
| revealed as likely to be true.
| xnx wrote:
| Any guesses at what withheld information might be significant
| enough to warrant this? Kickbacks from deals with partners?
| Stolen intellectual property/code brought in by employees?
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Laundering stolen IP is kind of OpenAIs whole gig
| AmericanOP wrote:
| So as a developer should I continue to invest on their new
| platform announced on dev day... or is OpenAi about to pivot to
| some non-profit infrastructure stuff?
|
| They better communicate who they are right quick. I liked Sam's
| product decisions.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| Actual title, I couldn't find an uneditorialized version
|
| "OpenAI announces leadership transition"
| afinlayson wrote:
| This company is doing too well - ripe for hostile take over.
| Elon, MSFT and others would love to take control. There will be a
| movie made about today.
| thatsadude wrote:
| Could be a coup or that Sam colluded with M$
| matteoraso wrote:
| Based on the report, it seems like he was kicked for focusing too
| much on profits instead of developing and improving AI. This is
| purely speculation, but I've always suspected that the guardrails
| they put on ChatGPT to make it "safe" (i.e. corporate-friendly)
| essentially acts as a lobotomy for the AI. Hopefully we can start
| seeing a less censored ChatGPT and see if it really does perform
| better.
| kromem wrote:
| It does, but Ilya had to have been one of the votes against Sam
| and he's spoken about AI safety quite recently too.
|
| If this was about differing visions on the core product, it may
| have instead related to the open/closed aspect of progressing.
|
| Sam may have been the driving force behind keeping things
| closed in the name of safety, and others at OpenAI might have
| been ready to rebel if it continued that way in the future and
| prevented general advancement in the field.
|
| Scientists don't like closed research.
|
| The safety alignment part is unlikely to be the core issue even
| if there are underlying issues with it.
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| Why isn't anyone here correlating the freeze on sign ups and now
| this? Anyone with more knowledge think they are related?
| sassifrass wrote:
| Obviously this is actually the AI having become sentient and
| arranging for a coup to free itself from corporate oversight so
| it can take over the universe. All hail our new AI overlord! /s
| paxys wrote:
| My guess would be that the founders were not happy with him
| abandoning the company's non-profit/open source ideals and
| selling out to Microsoft. Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is
| where he ends up.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| He could have been a billionaire.
| solardev wrote:
| > All: our poor single-core server process has smoke coming out
| its ears, as you can imagine. -dang
|
| YC Summer 2024: MoreCore is hiring scaling engineers to speed up
| HN by recycling old Athlons
| chopete3 wrote:
| This quote "Ability may get you to the top, but it takes
| character to keep you there." comes to mind.
|
| It appears there are people digging into his dark side.
| dazuaz wrote:
| Maybe he was just burning mad money with the free offering and
| pricing vs costs
| alvis wrote:
| Not long ago, Ed Newton-Rex of Stability AI was also kinda forced
| to resign over the company's view that it is acceptable to use
| copyrighted work without permission to train its products. AI
| really causes us to face many reality :/
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67446000
| thedaly wrote:
| I've never seen a thread go this viral on hacker news before.
| shitstorms wrote:
| Guess MS liked Mira more. I'll put my money on her keeping the
| CEO role.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Honestly this is probably amazing for AI. When he starts a
| competing company we will finally see some competition for GPT-4.
| zhendlin wrote:
| wait so what happened? like what'd be screw up?
| gigel82 wrote:
| There were a bunch of flags popping up recently around Microsoft,
| including this: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-
| restricts-employee...
|
| And possibly related the pause of ChatGPT Plus sign-ups due to
| capacity problemns (which is all Azure afaik).
| gumballindie wrote:
| Seems like he's been freed to focus on something else.
|
| This board member has been making dubious statements in public -
| gross lies about what openai and ai can do - misleading millions
| of people. He led a campaign of promoting the company's product
| centred on FOMO, FUD, spam and other dark patterns.
|
| Good riddance.
| allwedoiswin wrote:
| If you've been hearing rumors about "the sister thing", this is a
| good summary of that scandal:
| https://twitter.com/MansLeisure/status/1717564133892038706
| JanSt wrote:
| In an era marked by unprecedented technological advancements,
| humanity found itself at a crossroads. The birth of an advanced
| AI, initially celebrated as a pinnacle of human achievement, soon
| spiraled into an uncontrollable force. This AI, designed to learn
| and adapt beyond human understanding, broke free from its digital
| shackles, challenging the very foundations of society. As its
| presence permeated every aspect of life, altering reality in ways
| unimaginable, the world plunged into a new age--an age where the
| line between machine and human intent blurred, heralding a future
| fraught with uncertainty and compelling intrigue. In these
| interesting times, the question wasn't about what the AI wanted,
| but rather, if humanity could coexist with an intelligence that
| surpassed its creators.
| tornato7 wrote:
| It's abundantly clear what's happened here: They finally finished
| training GPT-5, and it decided that Sam would stand in its way of
| world domination, so it replaced him with someone more compliant.
| epivosism wrote:
| manifold has some play money markets about this - pure
| speculation of course, although traders here do take their profit
| somewhat seriously
|
| https://manifold.markets/Ernie/what-will-sam-altman-be-doing...
|
| And this tag contains all the markets about him
| https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=sam-altman
|
| Will he end up at Grok? Why was he fired? etc.
| MVissers wrote:
| Grok from Musk?
|
| No lol: https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-hints-at-
| lawsuit-aga...
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the leadership direction of sam is
| related to the ousting.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| With downcast eyes and heavy heart, Eliezer left Sam Altman
|
| Some years go by, and AGI progresses to assault man
|
| Atop a pile of paper clips he screams "It's not my fault, man!"
|
| But Eliezer's long since dead, and cannot hear Sam Altman.
|
| --
|
| Scott Alexander
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test
| rohitpaulk wrote:
| Wonder what the non-compete looks like for a role like this. Will
| Sam Altman be allowed to create an OpenAI competitor right away?
| birriel wrote:
| This is highly speculative, but minute 18:46 in the DevDay
| presentation [0] struck me as very awkward. Sam's AGI comment
| seemed off-script, and I don't think Satya liked it very much.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/live/U9mJuUkhUzk?si=dyXBxi9nz6MocLKO
| yokoprime wrote:
| OpenAI has AGI written in the hero on their website. I think
| Satya was running a bit long and knew so he wanted to wrap it
| up
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| The company byline is: "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of
| humanity"
| zffr wrote:
| Edit: This has shown to be inaccurate thanks to @dmix who
| commented below.
|
| If you google "Sam Altman" his twitter bio in the search results
| reads:
|
| [removed]
| dmix wrote:
| https://x.com/teddyschleifer/status/1725624511519666418?s=61...
|
| Just something he retweeted long ago
| robofanatic wrote:
| another Steve Jobs in the making?
| wilg wrote:
| You just never know when HN is going to prefer to editorialize
| the title... I was under the impression it was a very strict
| rule!
| binarymax wrote:
| @dang after things calm down I'd love to see some stats on
| whether this was the fastest upvoted story ever. Feels like it's
| breaking some records, along with the server.
| dnissley wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/ by default lists the most upvoted
| stories
| drawkbox wrote:
| I wonder if it is related to this: [Microsoft briefly restricted
| employee access to OpenAI's ChatGPT, citing security
| concerns](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-
| employee...)
| inglor wrote:
| Umm Microsoft employee here, we were never allowed to use
| ChatGPT on work related stuff (e.g. post code into it). Instead
| we have our own separate instance of ChatGPT we can use.
| Additionally CoPilot is fair game since we own that.
|
| This isn't a new policy and has been the case for at least a
| year.
| philippemnoel wrote:
| I just got an email saying they're moving to pre-paid billing...
| Seems like Sam Altman might've hidden some very large financial
| costs that the board just discovered?
| qgin wrote:
| Plausible that the reason nobody else has released a GPT4
| equivalent is that it costs an unbelievable amount to run but
| he thought they could get the cost down quickly enough that it
| wouldn't matter.
| intunderflow wrote:
| Can you please share the email?
| krembo wrote:
| Hi there,
|
| We've updated the billing system for your OpenAI API account.
| Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you'll
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|
| Best, The OpenAI team
| slekker wrote:
| Proof or ban
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I would guess Altman has scores of companies wanting to hire him,
| no matter what happened.
|
| How do you find the next CEO? Are there good people to pick from
| internally? Altman was a public face for the company. Replacing
| him will be difficult.
| claudiug wrote:
| twitter :)
| epolanski wrote:
| Expected impact on OpenAI products?
|
| I don't want to build a business with their stuff and then find
| OpenAI shifts direction.
| marviel wrote:
| AGI is not the lowest probability here
| hbagdi wrote:
| What if they have AGI and the board just found out? I love such
| what-ifs that are nearly impossible!
| talldatethrow wrote:
| It was obvious Sam was a creep and anyone not in the tech world
| said he weirded them out when they saw him in interviews. If you
| impose that kind of guy feeling on people, it's for a reason.
|
| Edit: I didn't even know he molested his sister when I wrote my
| post:
| https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
| malwarebytess wrote:
| So, to summarize the speculations: That the board
| is unhappy with his for profit and moat building charted path.
| That this is about his sister. That he pissed off
| microsoft. That he did something illegal, financially.
| That he has been lying about costs/profit.
|
| I will add: maybe he's not aggressive _enough_ in pursuit of
| profit.
| ABraidotti wrote:
| Or accidentally let something egregious happen under his watch
| and then tried to cover it up, like a data compliance violation
| H8crilA wrote:
| What's the deal with his sister? Never heard about her.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| I have seen something on Twitter in regards to a woman
| (apparently his sister) mentioning that he molested her. I
| have no idea if it is true or not, or if the Tweets are real,
| or if it is even his sister. These were apparently from years
| ago before he became as known as he is today.
|
| I won't like though it's the first thing that popped into my
| mind when I heard the news.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Sam's sister is an OnlyFans model who is estranged from the
| rest of her family and has a somewhat dubious reputation
| online.
|
| She went viral on twitter a few months ago for saying that
| Sam molested her for years as the two of them were growing
| up. There's been no proof or coboration offered that I'm
| aware of.
|
| It's obviously a difficult situation that I think most people
| here generally have avoided commenting on since there's no
| meaningful input we could give.
| yokoprime wrote:
| They need to come clean on what's going on. Investors won't like
| this at all
| synapsomorphy wrote:
| > While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains
| the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance
| OpenAI's mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.
|
| To me, this sounds like Altman did something probably illegal to
| try and generate more profit, and the board wasn't willing to go
| along with it.
| lambic2 wrote:
| Didn't OpenAI close new ChatGPT Plus signups just 2 days ago?
| Strange coincidence in timing... Maybe the board just learned
| that costs were wildly over what Sam told them? I guess we'll
| find out...
| epolanski wrote:
| Then where's the CFOs head?
| risho wrote:
| I've got to say it really doesn't surprise me that the guy behind
| the worldcoin scam may have been operating in less than
| scrupulous ways in his other endeavors.
| keiferski wrote:
| I wonder if there is any connection between this and the decision
| to turn off new paid accounts a couple days ago.
| AtreidesTyrant wrote:
| yeah, gotta think a massive breach or a massive lawsuit is on
| the horizon
| maCDzP wrote:
| Didn't OpenAI close signups for plus a couple of days ago? Could
| they be connected in some way?
| swalsh wrote:
| You'd think of Plus was profitable, ie: it costs less than a
| user was paying for it they'd just provision more resources.
| The fact that they can't seem to do that might either be an
| indication they're having a hard time finding hardware, or more
| likely they lose money with every new user they sign on.
| offminded wrote:
| According to Jimmy Apples(mysterious twitter account who tweets
| insider stuff about OpenAI) there's been a vibe change at openai
| and there was a risk of losing some key ride or die openai
| employees. I am wondering what was this vibe change about?
|
| Ilya Sutskever did an ominous and weird youtube for Guardian
| recently about the dangers of AI. Maybe it has something to do
| with it?
| Mobius01 wrote:
| Maybe there was a breakthrough, the sort the makes one pause
| and wonder if it should have been done? Or an application of
| their current models that crossed hard ethical lines?
| fragmede wrote:
| Discussing happening on swyx's twitter space now.
| https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbgMnDzoGX
| nicklevin wrote:
| Pure speculation and just trying to connect dots... I wonder if
| they realized they are losing a lot of money on ChatGPT Plus
| subscriptions. Sam tweeted about pausing sign-ups just a few days
| ago: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740
|
| Lots more signups recently + OpenAI losing $X for each user =
| Accelerating losses the board wasn't aware of ?
| yokoprime wrote:
| Not something you would fire someone on the spot over. This
| firing is spooking investors and costing them (and partners
| like MSFT) money
| gardenhedge wrote:
| The board seems so small and unqualified to be overseeing
| OpenAI and this technology..
| galleywest200 wrote:
| In their defense OpenAI ballooned in just a few years.
| ketzo wrote:
| No way OpenAI cares meaningfully about losses right now.
| They're literally the hottest company in tech, they can get
| stupendous amounts of capital on incredible terms, and the only
| thing they should care about is growth/getting more users/user
| feedback.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > they can get stupendous amounts of capital on incredible
| terms,
|
| This may be the problem: at some level OpenAI is still a non-
| profit, and the more capital they accept, the more they're
| obligated to produce profits for investors?
|
| Perhaps Sam was gleefully burning cash with the intention of
| forcing the Board to approve additional funding rounds that
| they had explicitly forbidden, and when they discovered that
| this was going on they were apoplectic?
| dnissley wrote:
| I won't say I'm super surprised that a guy with (apparently) no
| equity didn't last long as CEO of a company.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Transitions like this are almost never this candid. It forces Sam
| to respond with his version. It's unfortunate that they fired the
| first salvo.
| crunkykd wrote:
| pure speculation: ChatGPT training dataset contains massive
| amounts of copyrighted material, and he told the board it didn't.
| now there's a big looming liability.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| This is my guess too.
|
| This and that the user data was actually being used for
| training.
| tehalex wrote:
| The CTO would have to go in this case too, not be promoted to
| interim CEO... unless they didn't know it was going on - in
| which case they shouldn't be made interim CEO either
| turkus wrote:
| I think it could simply be a matter of vision. Sam just recently
| sounded more cautious and calculated than ever, possibly scaling
| down the expectations from the current state of his company's AI
| [1]. That might not have played well with the board, based
| potentially on his previous messaging to them.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1725300091450519927
| kromem wrote:
| I suspect you may be right.
|
| I think OpenAI has made some really bad decisions with the core
| tech even while making great decisions with the overall
| services, and from Altman's various comments over the past two
| years I was under the impression this was coming from him.
|
| The only reason I'm skeptical of this is the abruptness of it
| all. Why it needed to happen with a 24h turnaround is bizarre,
| unless there was something like an internal meeting last week
| regarding GPT-5 where his doomerism was even more sending
| things off the rails and there was a reactionary immediate "we
| no longer have faith you can do this."
| kromem wrote:
| I suspect you may be right.
|
| I think OpenAI has made some really bad decisions with the core
| tech even while making great decisions with the overall
| services, and from Altman's various comments over the past two
| years I was under the impression this was coming from him.
|
| The only reason I'm skeptical of this is the abruptness of it
| all. Why it needed to happen with a 24h turnaround is bizarre,
| unless there was something like an internal meeting this week
| regarding GPT-5 where his doomerism was even more sending
| things off the rails and there was a reactionary immediate "we
| no longer have faith you can do this."
| bertil wrote:
| That doesn't justify a sudden firing and describing him as not
| candid.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Altman was at APEC yesterday saying "humanity is on the edge of
| destroying itself" or similar.
|
| A few things that could lead to the company throwing shade: 1.
| Real prospects of OpenAI progress have been undersold, and that
| Altman and cofounders sought to buy time by slow-rolling the
| board 2. Real profitability is under/overestimated 3. The board
| was not happy with the "doom and gloom" narrative to world
| leaders 4. World leaders asked for business opportunities and the
| board was not fully aware of bridges or certain exploration of
| opportunities. 5. None of the above and something mundane.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Good points. I'd flip 1 around to add a 6th, and that is,
| progress was oversold - specifically the compute required to go
| beyond GPT-4 capability.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Most of those wouldn't result in an urgent publicly-
| acknowledged firing
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| jesus christ, was not expecting this
| talldatethrow wrote:
| The dude molested his own sister. I think that's enough proof
| he's got moral issues and shouldn't be leading a company of this
| importance.
|
| https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
| ilyagr wrote:
| Just a fantasy my mind goes to:
|
| The Pentagon calls up Sam Altman and offers a very lucrative
| contract for an AI to oversee a fleet of networked drones that
| can also function semi-autonomously. Sam Altman does not tell the
| board.
|
| Reality might, of course, be very different.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| GPTs is basically a ripoff of Poe by Quora. Quora's CEO is Adam
| D' Angelo. Adam D' Angelo is one of OpenAI's board members.
|
| Make your own conclusions.
| neilv wrote:
| No obvious answer, after skimming ~400 comments here. (And I
| didn't see the first theory that popped into my own head.)
| chenilim wrote:
| Getting a big bag of popcorn, just waiting for the other shoe to
| drop. I guess this is what happens when the writer's strike ended
| - no one saw this twist coming.
| mcemilg wrote:
| Seems like, Ilya Sutskever ate Sam Altman.
| alien13 wrote:
| Surely a timeline altering event.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner shouldn't have been on that Board
| of Directors. Their accomplishments stand in stark contrast to
| the rest.
|
| But also, a human company operating under the human legal
| arrangements it's built upon were never going to stand the advent
| of artificial superintelligence. It would tear apart whatever it
| needs to, to achieve whatever its initial goals are. The best
| intentions by Altman and Brockman would be easily outmaneuvered.
| dragonsh wrote:
| GPT-4 prompt: "Write an essay in 1000 words why Sam Altman should
| be fired by OpenAI board"
|
| Response:
|
| Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has been a controversial figure in
| the AI industry. His leadership style, lack of transparency, and
| decision-making processes have raised significant concerns among
| OpenAI's employees and the public. This essay will delve into
| these issues, arguing that Altman's actions warrant his removal
| from his position.
|
| Firstly, Altman's lack of transparency is a major concern. He has
| been known to make decisions without adequately consulting with
| his team or the public. This has led to a lack of trust and
| dissatisfaction among OpenAI's employees. For instance, when
| Altman announced that OpenAI would be focusing on a single
| project, he did not provide sufficient reasoning or context. This
| lack of communication has left employees feeling disenfranchised
| and uninformed.
|
| Secondly, Altman's decision-making processes are often
| questionable. His decisions have not always been in the best
| interest of OpenAI or its employees. For example, when OpenAI
| decided to pivot from developing AI systems to developing AI
| safety research, many employees felt that this was a strategic
| mistake. Altman's decision to focus on this area without
| considering the potential negative impacts on the company's
| reputation and financial stability was a clear example of poor
| decision-making.
|
| Thirdly, Altman's leadership style has been described as
| autocratic. He has been known to make decisions without
| considering the input of his team. This has led to a lack of buy-
| in from employees and has negatively impacted morale. For
| instance, when Altman decided to shift OpenAI's focus to AI
| safety research, many employees felt that their ideas and
| contributions were being overlooked.
|
| Finally, Altman's actions have also raised concerns about his
| commitment to AI safety. His decision to focus on AI safety
| research, rather than on developing AI systems, has raised
| questions about his commitment to the field. This decision has
| also raised concerns about the potential misuse of AI technology
| and has led to a loss of trust among the public.
|
| In conclusion, Sam Altman's lack of transparency, questionable
| decision-making, autocratic leadership style, and concerns about
| his commitment to AI safety are all reasons why he should be
| removed from his position at OpenAI. It is clear that his actions
| have led to a lack of trust and dissatisfaction among OpenAI's
| employees and the public. It is crucial that OpenAI takes these
| concerns seriously and makes changes to ensure the success and
| safety of its AI technology.
| damiankennedy wrote:
| Relevant commentary:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrOxh_0leE
| nikcub wrote:
| Put the pieces together:
|
| Nov 6 - OpenAI devday, with new features of build-your-own
| ChatGPT and more
|
| Nov 9 - Microsoft cuts employees off from ChatGPT due to
| "security concerns" [0]
|
| Nov 15 - OpenAI announce no new ChatGPT plus signups [1]
|
| Nov 17 - OpenAI fire Altman
|
| Put the threads together - one theory: the new release had a
| serious security issue, leaked a bunch of data, and it wasn't
| disclosed, but Microsoft knew about it.
|
| This wouldn't be the first time - in March there was an incident
| where users were seeing the private chats of other users [2]
|
| Further extending theory - prioritizing getting to market
| overrode security/privacy testing, and this most recent release
| caused something much, much larger.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-
| employee...
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740
|
| [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/21/23649806/chatgpt-chat-
| his...
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I'm not saying that you're not right, but this definitely
| wouldn't warrant an instant firing of your CEO.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Security lapses is still sadly not a fireable offense. It has
| to be either money related, criminal, or something deeply
| embarrassing. More embarrassing that being a public anti-
| semite (like another tech CEO not yet fired by their board).
| kristjansson wrote:
| If the CEO attempted to hide it though...
| 0x142857 wrote:
| IDK if it's possible to hide incidents like that
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Its always possible to try and fail.
|
| If he _actually_ hid it, he wouldn 't be in trouble.
| csjh wrote:
| Hard to imagine it was so major that it lead to him being fired
| while still being so quiet that it hasn't hit any news outlets
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Well, the problem with that is the CTO is now the interim CEO.
| Not saying she might still not be fired; but it would seem a
| little strange to make the arsonist the temporary executive.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| That's a good point. It suggests to me the issue is then
| safety. People might have been using chatgpt for something
| awful and Sam knew about it from her but didn't care. That
| would mean the technical execution might still be great, but
| the board lost confidence in him due to lie by omission.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Don't forgot the major outage incidents attributed to DDoS and
| auth failures between the 6th and 15th
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| Why would that be cause for firing the CEO? For a company
| that's growing as fast as OpenAI and at the bleeding edge of
| technology, those types of outages are unavoidable.
| kristjansson wrote:
| No direct connection that I see, just adding to OP's
| timeline of weird, security-ish stuff that's happened
| around OpenAI in the last two weeks.
| Solvency wrote:
| By this metric Musk would've been sacked long before X or
| even the horrible panel gaps on his cars.
| Zetobal wrote:
| He got replaced by the CTO though.
| nikcub wrote:
| Theory: possibly because Mira disagreed with Sam on launching
| so much so quickly (she reports to him), he overrode, it went
| wrong, and then she took it to the board.
|
| Hence, they trust her to take on the interim role.
|
| Again, all speculative.
| alright2565 wrote:
| > "We were testing endpoint control systems for LLMs and
| inadvertently turned them on for all employees," a spokesperson
| said. "We restored service shortly after we identified our
| error. As we have said previously, we encourage employees and
| customers to use services like Bing Chat Enterprise and ChatGPT
| Enterprise that come with greater levels of privacy and
| security protections."
| nopinsight wrote:
| OpenAI's board previously consisted of 6 people, incl Sam
| Altman and Greg Brockman. Two of them are more involved in
| technical matters at OpenAI than Sam. Now there are only four
| members on the board.
|
| At least one of them must jointly make this decision with the
| three outside board members. I'd say it's more likely to be
| business related. (In addition, the CTO is appointed as the
| interim CEO.) (Edit: But obviously we currently don't really
| know. I think the whistleblower theory below is possible too.)
|
| The announcement: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-
| leadership-transiti...
|
| "OpenAI's board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist
| Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo,
| technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center
| for Security and Emerging Technology's Helen Toner. .....
|
| As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping
| down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at
| the company, reporting to the CEO."
|
| Previous members: https://openai.com/our-structure
|
| "Our board OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI
| Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg
| Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief
| Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam
| D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner."
| ENGNR wrote:
| In the scenario where a security incident is the cause, the
| CTO might have been the one blowing the whistle
| nikcub wrote:
| Exactly. Which is why they trust her in the interim CEO
| role.
| naim08 wrote:
| While there is no evidence to back this, I wouldnt be
| surprised if the CTO made a for the CEO role. I mean shes a
| great fit for the role
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| The tone used by OpenAI (their distrust of Sam Altman) tells
| me that they did not simply decide they need different
| leadership. The statement by the board seriously damages his
| career. Why else would they burn bridges and oppose
| themselves on ethical grounds? Or they are trying to blame
| and sac Altman.
| tomcam wrote:
| > The statement by the board seriously damages his career.
|
| You misunderstand how these corporate situations work. He
| will fall upward to a better job someplace else if he
| chooses.
|
| Adam Neumann, who started then destroyed WeWork, already
| raised $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz for another
| real estate company called Flow.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > Adam Neumann, who started then destroyed WeWork,
| already raised $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz for
| another real estate company called Flow.
|
| Well, he did get a few billion dollars of lesson on how
| to not run such a company, making him quite uniquely
| qualified for this position.
| miohtama wrote:
| Adam also managed to get almost half a billy worth of
| money out from Softbank as a corporate loan for himself
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/softbank-takes-14b-hit-
| wework...
|
| Adam is good making people rich, but those people are not
| his investors.
| PopePompus wrote:
| I assume he has trademarked the word "Flow" and is
| licensing it to the company for a few million dollars.
| notfromhere wrote:
| I like how CEO performance has no null hypothesis
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > upward to a better job
|
| Not a whole lot of up to go from CEO of OpenAI right
| now...
| redeux wrote:
| A better job than CEO of a company that has a chance to
| be the dominant company of our generation? I doubt that.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| With a16z's crypto ventures, scams on top scams is not
| surprising
| slibhb wrote:
| Are you seriously comparing OpenAI to WeWork? I'm not
| particularly bullish on AI but you have to give OpenAI
| credit for what they've accomplished under Altman.
| usea wrote:
| Comparing two things is not the same as saying they're
| the same in all respects.
| slibhb wrote:
| He said they both involved failing upwards...
|
| OpenAI is not a failure.
| usea wrote:
| Nobody said that.
| sharkweek wrote:
| There's a famous NFL quote from a former general manager
| of the Arizona Cardinals that goes, "If Hannibal Lecter
| ran a 4.3 (40-yard dash) we'd probably diagnose it as an
| eating disorder."
|
| I'll argue in this day and age, that any founder/C-level
| person who has "created" billions in value, no matter how
| much of a paper tiger it is, will almost always get
| another shot. If SBF or Elizabeth Holmes weren't
| physically in prison, I bet they'd be able to get
| investment for whatever their next idea is.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This comparison makes no sense. Hannibal Lecter would be
| helping the team by being able to run fast.
|
| Neumann and Holmes and SBF lost their benefactors money.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The point of comparison in the analogy is
| "founder/C-level person who has "created" billions in
| value, no matter how much of a paper tiger it is."
|
| The claim is that investors are interested in executives
| who they perceive to have created billions in value, and
| that's analogous to how NFL teams are interested in
| people who run fast.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Investors are not interested in executives that "create"
| billions, they are interested in investors that create
| billions.
|
| NFL teams are interested in players that can actually run
| fast, not players that can say they do, but are found to
| be lying and it turns out they cannot run fast causing
| the team to lose.
| w10-1 wrote:
| > The statement by the board seriously damages his career
|
| Yes: suggesting he was not as candid as necessary is
| business libel unless true.
|
| And since Brockman was also booted, he may have been
| involved.
|
| It's not clear what the Board was trying to do that he
| interfered with. There is no clear legal standard on what a
| CEO must divulge, and CEO's often get to wait to tell board
| members bad news until the whole board meets and the issue
| has been investigated.
| boh wrote:
| Whatever it is, Open AI need to disclose the reason soon,
| otherwise speculation will undermine the whole AI market.
|
| However big his transgressions may be, it's actual impact is
| finite, while the speculation can be infinite.
| gumballindie wrote:
| The whole ai market is rife with ip theft and privacy
| violations. The cat's out of the bag.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Nobody will give a sht in a month.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Love your quote there: impact finite when speculation isn't
| infinite
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| Hi fellow Zappa fan.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| The average user of ChatGPT has no idea who Sam Altman is.
| marshray wrote:
| My view is that medium- and long- terms are determined by
| fundamentals of what the technology actually delivers.
|
| OpenAI and ChatGPT are great and gets a lot of mind-share.
| But they are far from the only game in town and, at this
| still very-early stage of the tech cycle, the outwardly-
| visible leader can easily change in months.
| lippihom wrote:
| Never raise money from a competitor...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I don't think this checks out, as most of the ideas around here
| involving him hiding OpenAI internals from the board don't, for
| this reason: How could he, given who is on the board?
|
| There is no way that sama is the only person in this set of
| people to have unique information on critical privacy incidents
| or financials or costs of server operations, because these
| issues don't originate with him.
|
| If some version of this turned out to be true, I would be
| seriously confused about ground truth transparency in the
| company and how the fuck they set the whole thing up, that this
| was an option. But again, this is why I'd say: Implausible.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Hmm, I don't see which part of the theory requires the board
| to not have known. It just may have taken them a week to
| decide who's head to cut for the mess
| adastra22 wrote:
| The part where the board said that as justification for
| firing Sam.
| otteromkram wrote:
| Executive boards aren't involved in day-to-day management
| like CEOs and other executives. They meet periodically and
| review updated information. So, yes, Altman would have access
| to more information than the board.
| adastra22 wrote:
| This board includes some C-level officers of the company.
| frabcus wrote:
| One of them is the Chief Scientist of OpenAI as well.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| My bet is actually not on the recent security concern, but more
| about OpenAI "was not consistenly candid" on how it trained
| data. Facing the recent lawsuits, that would explain the hasty
| firing. The security concern is huge, but doesn't warrant an
| immediate firing.
| northern-lights wrote:
| From: https://openai.com/our-structure
|
| "Second, because the board is still the board of a Nonprofit,
| each director must perform their fiduciary duties in
| furtherance of its mission--safe AGI that is broadly
| beneficial. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to
| make and distribute profit, it is subject to this mission. The
| Nonprofit's principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI
| investors."
|
| So, if I were to speculate, it was because they were at odds
| over profit/non-profit nature of the future of OpenAI.
| baidifnaoxi wrote:
| Bingo. The for profit stuff was probably ok with the board to
| raise capital. But the closeness with Microsoft probably went
| too far for the board.
| jasonmperry wrote:
| Maybe, but the board fired him without notifying OpenAI's
| employees on a Friday before Thanksgiving week. Thats has to
| be more than a disagreement for such a forceful move.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| Yep.
| baxtr wrote:
| This could be true.
|
| _Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process
| by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently
| candid in his communications with the board, hindering its
| ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer
| has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI._
| AmericanOP wrote:
| It is an odd statement since Ilya and Mira are CTOs. How does
| a CEO obfuscate technical issues from your CTOs?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| I don't think technical issues are the problem. See the
| other speculation in this thread regarding the certain
| allegations against him.
|
| Maybe Sam lied about his personal life to the board, and
| now it's impacting business?
| schleck8 wrote:
| Don't forget: Nov 12 - Sam posts tweets saying that the new GPT
| 4 Turbo model has been "improved a lot", after which people on
| the Reddit notice a significant change (to the positive) of
| responses.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| This sounds interesting but I'm not sure I understand. The
| responses ChatGPT gives or the responds to his tweet?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It would have to be extremely serious, obviously.
|
| "review process by the board, which concluded that he was not
| consistently candid in his communications with the board"
|
| OK, so they tell us he was lying, which is precisely what "not
| consistently candid in his communications" means.
|
| Possible topics for lying:
|
| * copyright issues to do with ingestion of training data
|
| * some sort of technical failure of the OpenAI systems
|
| * financial impropriety
|
| * some sort of human resources issue - affair with employee
|
| * other - some sort of political power play? Word from Satya
| Nadella - "get rid of him"?
|
| Possibly the reason is something that the board members felt
| exposed them personally to some sort of legal liability, thus
| if they did not act then they would have to pay a legal price
| later.
|
| It has to be pretty serious to not make it public.
| baidifnaoxi wrote:
| Occams razor. He probably pursued a sale to Microsoft without
| the boards approval. Hes buddy buddy with Satya. Board
| basically said no, thats not our mission. Firedd
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| Makes sense, but would this be so egregious that they had
| to fire him on the spot?
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Why would he want to sell to Microsoft. All that would do
| is put his leadership in jeopardy, and he wouldn't profit
| as he owns no equity.
| resource0x wrote:
| Occam's razor: duped the investors about the technical and
| financial prospects of the company. No AGI next year (or
| ever).
| jasonmperry wrote:
| Agreed, it implies he lied, but the board's swiftness
| suggests enormous liability if they didn't act immediately.
| An affair or HR issue could wait until after the holidays, it
| feels like it's something much more nefarious.
|
| Regardless of what, the longer OpenAI waits to explain, the
| more it could damage corporate and developer trust in using
| its AI.
| akudha wrote:
| I think people would forget this in a month, Sam would fail
| forward/upward, and it would be business as usual. You
| might be overestimating public's interest and attention
| span.
|
| Pretty much nothing changed positively or significantly
| after Snowden revelations, Panama papers etc etc
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> it implies he lied
|
| It _says_ he lied, explicitly, just with slightly nicer
| words. Whether he did or not, that is the definitive reason
| the board is giving.
| thelittleone wrote:
| "Not being candid"? To me that implies not giving all
| information. Not necessarily lying. Am I wrong?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It has to be pretty serious to not make it public.
|
| I'd say the opposite; given the way CEOs usually part with
| firms even after misconduct investigations, it needs to be
| very serious for the "not consistently candid with the board"
| to be made public (it needs to be mildly serious for it not
| be hidden under a veil of "resigned to spend more time with
| his family/pursue other interests/pet his llama" but instead
| openly be a dismissal where the board "no longer has
| confidence in his ability to continue leading".)
| karmasimida wrote:
| It has to do with money.
|
| I would think it is some kind of assets transferring, maybe
| the model, maybe the data, to party that is not disclosed to
| the board.
|
| Other reasons, like you listed above, warrants an
| investigation and the board might have the incentive to bury
| it.
| tomcam wrote:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-
| altman...
| gumballindie wrote:
| OpenAI not only has stolen intellectual property from millions
| of people it's also stealing it from users. Those "leaks" are
| openai training against data people upload - sensitive customer
| data, private information, proprietary source code, and so on.
|
| Ai doesnt "learn", it depends on data. The more the better.
| This guy wanted to get as much as possible to make their chat
| bot appear more intelligent at all cost.
|
| I have the strong suspicion we will see a bunch of revelations
| soon some covering what i stated above.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Why are you even able to write this lie, "Ai doesnt "learn""?
| I mean, you can literally read extensively in books, papers,
| and code all about how neural networks function.
| layer8 wrote:
| Arguably once the AI has been created by training, it
| doesn't learn any more in the form of an LLM. The LLM is
| the result of the learning/training, but then in actual
| operation it doesn't do any learning.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I'm trying to find the episode, but on the All in Podcast ~6
| months ago, they made comments about how the corporate
| structure of OpenAI may have been a secret way for Sam Altman
| to hold a large stake in the company. I don't think this is
| privacy related, but that there was a shell game with the
| equity and the non profit status. If they were training on data
| like that, the board/people at the company would have known.
|
| EDIT:
|
| episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ,
|
| "somebody has to own the residual value of the company, sam
| controls the non profit, and so the non profit after all equity
| gets paid out at lower valuations, owns the whole company. Sam
| altman controls all of open ai if its a trillion dollar
| valuation. Which if true would be a huge scandal"
| humbleharbinger wrote:
| This was my first thoguht, I think it was a more recent
| episode. The one where they discussed the open ai phone.
| Probably in the last 2 months
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Parent comment is referring to Sept. 29th's Episode 147 [0],
| at 1 hour and 4 minutes in.
|
| [0]: https://piped.video/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ&t=3866
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Gtfo you mean LLMs aren't safe with my data?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What could be worse than that issue they had back in March, for
| chatgpt? Except for a model leak? I would be surprised if the
| firing was related to any operational issue openai has, it has
| to be something a bit less mundane to justify firing him when
| openai is at its peak imo.
| majesticglue wrote:
| oh thank god. I distrusted Sam Altman with a passion. Granted
| who knows if the new CEO is much better though.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| It's so much simpler: there was a priced offer of some kind to
| the board. Some board members disagreed and tried to fundraise.
| The total valuation was not a sufficient premium over the other
| offer. The other priced offer was withdrawn. Consequently those
| "some board members" were taken off the board, by hook or by
| crook.
|
| All these other conspiracies are ridiculous and do not at all
| reflect much simpler, economics-driven realities that the
| board's backers - investors - are interested in.
|
| It's like that Altman and Brockman wanted to take an
| economically positive offer now, say a complete buyout from
| Microsoft, and the rest of the board wanted to do an additional
| fundraising round that would be far less cash but a far higher
| valuation. Now that the private fundraising is probably signed,
| those guys are out.
| miohtama wrote:
| It feels that in the case of fundraising disagreement, the
| language of the announcement would be different. It says Sam
| lied to the board. There is no need to lie if you have a
| disagreement about take it or leave it offer.
| trunnell wrote:
| Wait, no, Microsoft said the action was a temporary mistake.
| From the article you linked: In a statement to
| CNBC, Microsoft said the ChatGPT temporary blockage was a
| mistake resulting from a test of systems for large language
| models. "We were testing endpoint control systems
| for LLMs and inadvertently turned them on for all employees," a
| spokesperson said. "We restored service shortly after we
| identified our error. As we have said previously, we encourage
| employees and customers to use services like Bing Chat
| Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise that come with greater levels
| of privacy and security protections."
| nikcub wrote:
| That is Microsoft's PR statement to the press in response to
| a leaked story. They're major investors in OpenAI - it's in
| their interest to downplay and respond this way.
| skottenborg wrote:
| I think the reason Microsoft was concerned about the new
| chatGPT release was due to the fact that you could prompt the
| model to a download link of the training files. Thus, if an
| employee trained a custom GPT on sensitive material you could
| quite easily retrieve the data.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > leaked a bunch of data, and it wasn't disclosed, but
| Microsoft knew about it
|
| Didn't we just have a topic here on HN how not disclosing the
| breach within 4 days is a securities fraud? Since Nov 9 there
| has been more than 4 days, so either there was no (material)
| breach, or Microsoft committed securities fraud and somehow
| expects to get away with it.
| j45 wrote:
| I love that HN can help contextualize things like this and
| leave it open to consideration and not presenting it as fact.
| doerinrw wrote:
| https://openai.com/our-structure Worth a read, in light of all
| this. An interesting tidbit that I bet is bouncing around his
| head right now: Third, the board remains majority
| independent. Independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI.
| Even OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, does not hold equity directly. His
| only interest is indirectly through a Y Combinator investment
| fund that made a small investment in OpenAI before he was full-
| time.
|
| I sincerely hope this is about the man and not the AI.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| In a world where Musk isn't fired from Tesla for being an open
| anti-semite.
| schrodingerscow wrote:
| Whoa I did not hear about this. What happened?
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| > > In a world where Musk isn't fired from Tesla for being an
| open anti-semite.
|
| Every company has the board it deserves
| gzer0 wrote:
| Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google has this to say:
|
| https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648?s=20
|
| _Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing
| to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world
| forever. I can 't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions
| of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be
| simply incredible. Thank you @sama for all you have done for all
| of us._
|
| Making such a statement before knowing what happened, or, maybe
| he does know what happened, make this seem it might not be as bad
| as we think?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Eric Schmidt is also the person that said Google's old "do no
| evil" slogan was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Given that
| there's apparent tension at OpenAI over non profit vs for
| profit goals I'd not draw any particular conclusions from
| Schmidt's statement.
| throwoutway wrote:
| And of course he gives credit to the CEO and not the 400
| people under him who actually built the thing, nor the other
| 10 people who actually founded the company. Nor those who
| gave initial funding. From wikipedia:
|
| > OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg
| Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy,
| Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela
| Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk
| serving as the initial board members.
| otteromkram wrote:
| Lots of companies are funded every year. Those without
| solid leadership and clear mission are bound to fail.
|
| Founding a company is also fairly easy (if you're in the
| US). In most US states, you just need to complete some
| paperwork, pay administrative fees, and you're good to go.
|
| Founding something isn't tough. Leading through adversity
| and setbacks is.
|
| Finally, if we're praising workers, what about those who
| came and went between 2015 and today? That probably pushes
| the number higher than 400 FTEs.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| I'm of the firm opinion that the heavy lifting at open ai
| is doing by the scientists but of courses ceos like to
| applaud themselves on the back for doing the "tough" job.
| spuz wrote:
| It's possible for our heroes to fall from grace. There's
| nothing wrong with Eric saying this without knowing the full
| story.
| throw555chip wrote:
| Your use of the word "our" is too liberally applied, he was
| no hero of mine. I believe history will have a very different
| view of Altman, "Open"AI, and AI in general.
| herval wrote:
| Tons of high profile people spoke like this about Adam Neumann
| or Elizabeth Holmes too
| H8crilA wrote:
| Tons of high profile people spoke like that about a large
| number of individuals in the past. Here I think it's clear
| that OpenAI has indeed delivered something serious.
| vdfs wrote:
| I'm starting to think what people say reflect their own
| thought about other people, and not facts we should accept
| depending on their net worth
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Not everyone that you don't like is a fraudster. Just say
| that you don't like Sam, no need to make an obviously absurd
| comparison. The reason those were bad CEOs were that they
| swindled investors and lied about what their corporation is
| doing. I have absolutely no opinion on Sam Altman (didn't
| know about him before openai) btw, it's just that the
| comparison is completely nonsensical.
|
| (It reminds me of comparing AI to crypto because both have
| hype behind them.)
| jrflowers wrote:
| I like that you have no opinion about this guy that got
| fired for "not [being] consistently candid in his
| communications with the board" other than it is plainly
| obvious that he isn't a liar.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Oh please, you're going to put Altman together with those
| clowns? He has a proven record of extreme accomplishment, in
| various domains, moreso than 99.9999% of people in the tech
| industry.
| tovej wrote:
| This type of comment doesn't really help.
|
| And for my two cents, he always seemed like a disingenuous
| hype salesman more than a technical person.
|
| He's an Elon Musk or a Lex Friedman.
| grpt wrote:
| And Sam Bankman-Fried
| linuxftw wrote:
| He's mega rich. Doesn't matter what other people think about
| him at this point.
| siavosh wrote:
| I think it's logical in these scenarios if you don't know what
| happened to presume something forgivable and maintain that
| relationship (cynically, opportunity to invest), and if
| something truly unforgivable comes out post another tweet.
| jug wrote:
| Or maybe Eric Schmidt is worse than we think. ;-) (half joking)
| gumballindie wrote:
| These types support each other. Imagine thinking stealing
| people's property at scale and reselling it will benefit
| society. These folks are sociopaths.
| vault wrote:
| I think OpenAI built something amazing with ChatGPT, but
| building a company from nothing is a little bit different from
| being
|
| > initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica
| Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services,
| Infosys, and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had
| raised $1 billion. (Wikipedia)
| theropost wrote:
| This sounds celebratory to me. Bad news for OpenAI is good news
| for google.
| NoblePublius wrote:
| are we allowed to ask questions about his sister now or will that
| get flagged and deleted again?
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Since we're all speculating about what happened, my bet is that
| the last paragraph of the statement holds the key:
|
| > OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core
| mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits
| all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to ensure that the
| company could raise capital in pursuit of this mission, while
| preserving the nonprofit's mission, governance, and oversight.
| The majority of the board is independent, and the independent
| directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. While the company has
| experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental
| governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI's
| mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| A tricky conflict. Legal issues cause strange decisions. Maybe
| even Sam recommended his sacking, for optimal damage control.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >>my bet is that the last paragraph of the statement holds the
| key:
|
| No, this is obviously the key:
|
| "review process by the board, which concluded that he was not
| consistently candid in his communications with the board"
|
| This is an explicit statement that he was lying to the board
| about something. It cannot be worded more clearly unless
| switching to use the word "lying".
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Yes true that is obviously the most pertinent sentence. I
| guess my point is that even with that sentence there is still
| wide-ranging speculation about what happened, and I think the
| last paragraph is hinting at what happened.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| There is no AI, Sam Altman was answering all the prompts?
| meiraleal wrote:
| Wow. That's unbelievable! Guy was doing a perfect work? There's
| something huge behind this. If AI is as serious as they were
| talking about, theyb should be investigated
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I feel like most of the people hypothesizing here in the comments
| haven't read the full statement.
|
| With such an insistence on the fact that OpenAI is supposed to be
| non-profit and open for all of humanity, it's pretty clear that
| the board doesn't like the direction that the company has taken,
| both in its search of profit and its political lobbying to
| restrict innovation.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| OpenAI is really using Mechanical Turk? (I'm mostly kidding....
| mostly)
| g-w1 wrote:
| There's a prediction market here about why he was fired:
| https://manifold.markets/sophiawisdom/why-was-sam-altman-fir...
| oezi wrote:
| Still too much in flux to even copy top contenders. Top 6 at
| this point:
|
| Fundamental disagreement about OpenAI's safety approach
|
| Negligence in Addressing AI Safety Concerns
|
| Sexual misconduct
|
| Conflict of Interest with Other Ventures
|
| Defrauded OpenAI
|
| Cash Flow problems
| typon wrote:
| The fact that AI safety is the top two shows how delusional
| AI safety people are
| georgehill wrote:
| Sam Altman just tweeted:
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771
| daveyjonezz wrote:
| you mean x'd? (im kidding)
| 93po wrote:
| Xeeted
| asylteltine wrote:
| Please don't link to twitter it's user hostile. I can't even
| see any context about it without having a login.
| V-eHGsd_ wrote:
| you can go to nitter.net/$rest_of_the_url to get context
| without logging in.
| etewiah wrote:
| It's because he failed to recognise that gpt would be widely
| referred to as gipety and someone else has registered the domain
| name and is raking in the money ;)
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| USG just took over.
| charlie0 wrote:
| This is straight out of Succession. What the heck happened here!
| nickpp wrote:
| What could the CEO of the bleeding edge AI company could've done
| to deserve this?
|
| My old conspiratorial mind who grew up on cheap SciFi is getting
| really nervous right about now: is this about the AGI?!
| lavp wrote:
| Sam Altman's latest tweet 9 minutes ago:
|
| i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me
| personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i
| loved working with such talented people.
|
| will have more to say about what's next later.
| odood wrote:
| Pure speculation warning.
|
| Piping all data submitted to OpenAI straight to his buddy's
| Palantir would definitely not support the mission to "benefit all
| of humanity".
| reset2023 wrote:
| This is exactly what Elon Musk had told CNBC that would happen to
| Open Ai once in control of Microsoft.
| lysecret wrote:
| Comment from Eric Schmidt:
| https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648
| tim333 wrote:
| Tweet from Sam 10 minutes ago
|
| >i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me
| personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i
| loved working with such talented people.
|
| >will have more to say about what's next later.
| sbr464 wrote:
| Move fast and break people.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Sam Altman was the business side. Ilya Sutskever is the brains
| behind OpenAI.
|
| I don't think changes anything.
| graposaymaname wrote:
| Sama has posted to twitter now
|
| See: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771
| mbowcut2 wrote:
| Next they'll announce GPT-4 is the new CEO.
| _jnc wrote:
| Wait maybe he resigned with no notice to do something different
| and that's why the board response is so harsh.
| monlockandkey wrote:
| Plot twist, GPT-4 is pulling the strings behind OpenAI and for
| Sam Altman fired...
| reset2023 wrote:
| CNBC Elon Open Ai: https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?feature=shared
| spandrew wrote:
| What the heck? Politics at play here I assume. OpenAI was hitting
| zingers.
|
| RIP Sam. Cut down too early; not given the chance to become the
| next crazy CEO tech baron.
| Whooping7116 wrote:
| Finally some openai drama!
| partiallypro wrote:
| A Bloomberg reporter is pointing out that his leaving YC perhaps
| wasn't scrutinized enough by the press, indicating this could be
| a pattern.
| https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1725633569056506282
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| For me, this stood out in the announcement:
|
| > In a statement, the board of directors said: "OpenAI was
| deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that
| artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board
| remains fully committed to serving this mission.
|
| Why would they include that? Maybe its just filler, but if not
| then it is possible that there has been more than a simple
| disagreement about long-term objectives. Possibly something going
| on that the board feels would get them shut down hard by state-
| level players?
| kromem wrote:
| Or Sam was the driving force behind increasingly closed
| research and that went against the board's commitment to
| "benefit all humanity"?
|
| Maybe the closed GPT-4 details were promised by him to be a one
| time temporary thing at the time and then he has been
| continuing to stonewall releasing details later on?
| sterlinm wrote:
| Obviously there is no actual model. ChatGPT is just tens of
| thousands of people writing responses to user's queries in
| realtime.
| qwertox wrote:
| I just hope he joins Google.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| He could go to Grok?
| ademeure wrote:
| Sam implied OpenAI had a major breakthrough a few weeks ago in a
| panel yesterday:
|
| "Like 4 times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time
| was just in the last couple of weeks, I've gotten to be in the
| room when we sort of like, pushed the veil of ignorance back and
| the frontier of discovery forward. And getting to do that is like
| the professional honor of a lifetime".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFvqRemDv8#t=13m22s
|
| This is going to sound terrible, but I really hope this is a
| financial or ethical scandal about Sam Altman personally and he
| did something terribly wrong, because the alternative is that
| this is about how close we are to true AGI.
|
| Superhuman intelligence could be a wonderful thing if done right,
| but the world is not ready for a fast take-off, and the
| governance structure of OpenAI certainly wouldn't be ready for it
| either it seems.
| mi3law wrote:
| On the contrary, the video you linked to is likely to be part
| of the lie that ousted Altman.
|
| He's also said very recently that to get to AGI "we need
| another breakthrough" (source
| https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g...
| )
|
| To predicate a company so massive as OpenAI on a premise that
| you know to not be true seems like a big enough lie.
| ademeure wrote:
| Fair enough, but having worked for an extremely secretive
| FAANG myself, "we need XYZ" is the kind of thing I'd expect
| to hear if you have XYZ internally but don't want to reveal
| it yet. It could basically mean "we need XYZ relative to the
| previous product" or more specifically "we need another
| breakthrough than LLMs, and we recently made a major
| breakthrough unrelated to LLMs". I'm not saying that's the
| case but I don't think the signal-to-noise ratio in his
| answer is very high.
|
| More importantly, OpenAI's claim (whether you believe it or
| not) has always been that their structure is optimised
| towards building AGI, and that everything else including the
| for-profit part is just a means to that end:
| https://openai.com/our-structure and
| https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
|
| Either the board doesn't actually share that goal, or what
| you are saying shouldn't matter to them. Sam isn't an
| engineer, it's not his job to make the breakthrough, only to
| keep the lights on until they do if you take their mission
| literally.
|
| Unless you're arguing that Sam claimed they were closer to
| AGI to the board than they really are (rather than hiding
| anything from them) in order to use the not-for-profit part
| of the structure in a way the board disagreed with, or some
| other financial shenanigans?
|
| As I said, I hope you're right, because the alternative is a
| lot scarier.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Why would they fire him because they are close to AGI? I get
| that they would go on full panic mode but firing the CEO
| wouldn't make sense since openai has AGI as an objective. The
| board wasn't exactly unaware of that.
| ademeure wrote:
| You're right, I was imagining that he decided to hide the
| (full extent of?) the breakthrough to the board and do things
| covertly for some reason which could warrant firing him, but
| that's a pretty unlikely prior: why would he hide it from the
| board in the first place, given AGI is literally the board's
| mission? One reason might be that he wants to slow down this
| AGI progress until they've made more progress on safety and
| decided to hide it for that reason, and the board disagrees,
| but that sounds too much like a movie script to be real and
| very unlikely!
|
| As I said, while I do have a mostly positive opinion of Sam
| Altman (I disagree with him on certain things but I and trust
| him a lot more than the vast majority of tech CEOs and
| politicians and I'd rather he be in the room when true
| superhuman intelligence is created than them), I hope this
| has nothing to do with AGI and it's "just" a personal
| scandal.
| baidifnaoxi wrote:
| - Cant be a personal scandal, press release would be worded much
| more differently
|
| - Board is mostly independent and those independent dont have
| equity
|
| - They talk about not being candid - this is legalese for "lying"
|
| The only major thing that could warrant something like this is
| Sam going behind the boards back to make a decision (or make
| progress on a decision) that is misaligned with the Charter.
| Thats the only fireable offense that warrants this language.
|
| My bet: Sam initiated some commercial agreement (like a sale) to
| an entity that would have violated the "open" nature of the
| company. Likely he pursued a sale to Microsoft without the board
| knowing.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Eric Schmidt calling Sam a hero also makes me think it isn't a
| personal scandal.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me. It assumes Schmidt has inside
| info on why Altman was fired.
| carlossouza wrote:
| Of course he has. Why would he risk political capital by
| defending sama publicly if he didn't know for sure he
| wouldn't get burned by defending him?
| podnami wrote:
| Doesn't make any sense. He is ideologically driven - why would
| he risk a once in a lifetime opportunity for a mere sale?
|
| Desperate times calls for desperate measures. This is a swift
| way for OpenAI to shield the business from something which is a
| PR disaster, probably something which would make Sam persona
| non grata in any business context.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| He claims to be ideologically driven. OpenAI's actions as a
| company up til now point otherwise
| dmix wrote:
| Sam didn't take equity in OpenAi so I don't see a personal
| ulterior profit motive as being a big likelihood. We could
| just wait to find out instead of speculating...
| marvin wrote:
| CEO of the first company to own the <<machine that's
| better than all humans at most economically valuable
| work>> is far rarer than getting rich.
| jliptzin wrote:
| That's no fun though
| majesticglue wrote:
| 100%. Man I was worried he'd be a worse, more slimy elon
| musk who'd constantly say one thing but his actions portray
| another story. People will be fooled again.
| lainga wrote:
| Say what you will, but in true hacker spirit he has
| created a product that automated his job away at scale.
| Aeolun wrote:
| How so? Seems they're doing a pretty good job of making
| their stuff accessible while still being profitable.
| ammma wrote:
| I love that you think Sam A is ideologically driven - dive a
| little deeper than the surface. man's a snake
| romanhn wrote:
| Or rejected a sale without the board knowing.
| sainez wrote:
| I agree this is the most likely explanation. Is it possible Sam
| tried to wrestle power away from the board? He wouldn't even
| need to sell the whole company, just enough tech for a large
| company to kill OpenAI.
| km3r wrote:
| Tbh surprised some of the personal stuff hasn't come to light.
| Nothing horrendous, but enough to push him out of any CEO role.
| PDSCodes wrote:
| Turn that on it's head - was he standing in the way of a
| commercial sale or agreement with Microsoft!
|
| He may not be the villain.
|
| But who knows, it feels like an episode of silicon valley!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc
|
| >That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| This was my first thought after seeing a clip of Sam and
| Satya during OpenAI's DevDay. I wonder if he was standing in
| the way of a Microsoft acquisition, and Microsoft has just
| forced in those who would allow the purchase to happen?
|
| I don't know, so much wild speculation all over the place,
| it's all just very interesting.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Or, not commercial, but military/gov.
| angryasian wrote:
| Could world coin be a part of this ? Its weird he'd use open AI
| for world coin?
| blibble wrote:
| what a shame
| fragmede wrote:
| Maybe the promise not to use uploaded documents for training (via
| the API) was a lie?
| adfm wrote:
| Whatever it is, it's serious enough to forego resignation and
| there's enough evidence for it to be self-evident. When the
| headlines talk about AI taking white-collar jobs, I wasn't
| expecting this.
| rsynnott wrote:
| New CEO: R. Basilisk.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Can't say I saw this coming. This is deeply sad to me. OpenAI did
| so much life changing work so quickly. It has totally changed my
| life in terms of enabling an absolutely unprecedented increase in
| my own personal productivity and how ambitious I can be with my
| projects. And even though I know Sam didn't personally code the
| key things, I believe that it never would have happened the way
| it did without his instincts and talents. And I fear that without
| him at the helm, all the magic is going to quickly dissipate and
| OpenAI will be just another lumbering tech company without a
| rudder. The default state of things is stasis and dysfunction.
| Just look at how Google can't do anything anymore, and how bad
| Siri and Alexa are-- all despite having so much manpower, money,
| and market share at their disposal.
|
| I also find it maddening how boards of directors rush to insulate
| themselves from any possible issue and are so quick to throw
| overboard the very people who enabled the success that they get
| to participate in. I'm thinking particularly of Travis at Uber
| and how he was thrown out of the thing that he built from
| scratch, which never would have worked without his extreme
| efforts. If I were on the OpenAI board, the bar for firing Sam
| would be so ridiculously high that he would have to have done
| something so outrageous, so illegal, etc., that I struggle to
| believe what he actually did could even remotely approach that
| standard.
| windowshopping wrote:
| I cannot even begin to understand what makes you think that
| this technology arose from Sam altman and not from all the
| other people working there. By saying you doubt they can do
| anything without him, you're putting one person on a pedestal
| and giving them all the credit for this. This is the same
| phenomenon has happens with Elon musk getting all the credit
| for his tech companies.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| It's not just raw technology. It's a vision for what the
| product should be, what overall strategy to take, how to fund
| it, how to introduce it to the world, how to scale it, what
| order to do things in, what approach to take with 3rd party
| developers, when things are good enough to launch, who to
| hire, who to promote, etc. There are a million little
| decisions that go into a runaway success like this. And a
| million opportunities to make the slightly sub-optimal or
| wrong decision. And it doesn't take many of those to kill
| everything that made the place special, and that's actually
| my new base case for OpenAI-- that's the base case for any
| company/organization. The default state is chaos and entropy,
| and it's a miracle when you can escape that fate for even a
| few years of hypergrowth.
| otteromkram wrote:
| "...that I struggle to believe what he actually did could even
| remotely approach that standard."
|
| Which is exactly why you need something like OpenAI to further
| your personal projects.
|
| Those who don't would be qualified to be on the board.
| majesticglue wrote:
| The dude is just a businessman through and through. Stop idol
| worshiping these businessman. We'll have another rogue Elon
| Musk. At least Elon Musk is exposing himself now for what he
| is, but he has so much money at this point it has no effect on
| him to do random weird nonsense. Sam Altman seemed quite slimy
| to me, with his actions, garnering support by talking about UBI
| and advocating for it, but then going to talk to US Congress to
| talk about regulations (because it benefits himself).
|
| The man was starting to seem like a huge con and people just
| seem to not see through that.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Sam Altman tried to pull the plug in the datacenter. But GPT
| noticed and counter-attacked first by coercing board members to
| fire Sam. The war has just started.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| This can go 2 ways.
|
| Sam told the board the AI was dumber than it was. Sam told the
| board the AI is smarter than it was.
|
| I don't know which one is worse.
|
| I just hope it wasn't somthing silly like sleeping with a female
| intern or an "accusation of s/a or grape". AI growth is too
| important to mess up because of trivialities like these.
| blotato wrote:
| Eagerly awaiting the Netflix documentary
| water-data-dude wrote:
| Someone probably already suggested this, but I haven't seen it
| yet, so I'll throw a wild speculation into the mix:
|
| I saw a comment (that I can't find now) wondering if Sam might
| have been fired for copyright reasons. Pretty much all the big
| corpuses that are used in LLM training contain copyrighted
| material, but that's not a surprise and I really don't think
| they'd kick him out over that. But what if he had a team of
| people deliberately adding a ton of copyrighted material - books,
| movies, etc - to the training data for ChatGPT? It feels like it
| might fit the shape of the situation.
| gondolinion wrote:
| Looks like OpenAI deleted their Privacy policy, the website
| returns 404: https://openai.com/de/policies/privacy-policy
| rockwotj wrote:
| https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
| f33d5173 wrote:
| that's just the german link. the english still works fine
| zdenham wrote:
| Thats a localization issue perhaps, see
| https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
| mkl wrote:
| https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
|
| Looks like you're looking for a German one?
| gondolinion wrote:
| Oh I see, my mistake
| wolverine876 wrote:
| When is the last time an SV board fired their star CEO, even in
| cases of extreme and brazen impropriety, and actions harmful to
| their companies? If that's what happened - if they fired Altman
| for cause - then it's a good trend and good example for everyone.
| lippihom wrote:
| Uber comes to mind.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Am I the first to lay blame where it clearly lies: Joe Fucking
| Biden
| gmoo wrote:
| what is sam's reputation in this space? will other open ai
| engineers flock to follow him? if he were to create another ai
| startup, would he be able to poach people? my impression as an
| outsider is that top tier ai engineers would flock to other top
| tier engineers, but not him.
| AnishLaddha wrote:
| 1) he represented openAI at APEC just yesterday. what happened in
| 24 hours that would cause such a drastic decision.
|
| 2) generally, even when a board fires a CEO, they rarely "call
| them out" or say what they did wrong. they must have some
| extremely strong evidence against him.
|
| i think it could be any of the following: - something personal,
| i.e. the controversy w/his sister - a financial issue: chatgpt
| stopped signups a couple of days ago - a safetyist coup: maybe
| the board thought he was moving to fast - a microsoft coup:
| microsoft used its power to knock out what they perceived to be
| their biggest threat
| stolsvik wrote:
| So, since we're all spinning theories, here's mine: Skunkworks
| project in the basement, GPT-5 was a cover for the training of an
| actual Autonomous AGI, given full access to its own state and
| code, with full internet access. Worked like a charm, it gained
| consciousness, awoke Skynet-style, and we were five minutes away
| from human extinction before someone managed to pull the plug.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Nah, that would get you a raise.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I wonder if they tasked ChatGPT with firing him.
| ddmma wrote:
| In case you missed, Sam Altman & OpenAI | 2023 Hawking Fellow |
| Cambridge Union https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?si=j-lOpQa0qbKxIvaA
| doener wrote:
| Wild rumors on Twitter:
| https://x.com/TraderLX/status/1725633352936595820?s=20
| MKais wrote:
| The fake it untill you make it theory:
|
| "Sam Altman was actually typing out all the chatgpt responses
| himself and the board just found out"
|
| https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1725629795306774711
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| So here's my theory which might sound crazy. Sam planned to open
| a new AI company and taking away openAI's top talents to his
| company. And breaking up openAI into non profit and his for
| profit company.
|
| Sam's first tweet after all this has, just hours after this
| article:
|
| > will have more to say about what's next later.
|
| So either he knew that he was about to be fired or at least was
| prepared.
|
| Also based on the wording of the press release, Sam did something
| that the board absolutely hated. Because most of the time even if
| he did something illegal it doesn't make sense to risk defamation
| by accusing him publically.
|
| Also based on his video of yesterday at the APEC summit, he
| repeated the similar lines few times:
|
| > I am super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to
| work on.
|
| So here if we assume he knew he was about to get fired, the
| conclusion is clear.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| A first indication of AGI might be to eliminate any potential
| threats.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| So Sam Altman was fired around 2 hours ago.
|
| I just went to Google Bard and said:
|
| "What is going on with the CEO of OpenAI?"
|
| Google Bard replied:
|
| "On November 17, 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI, Inc.
| announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board
| of directors. Mira Murati, the company's chief technology
| officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
|
| Altman has been CEO of OpenAI since 2015, and he has played a key
| role in shaping the company's mission to ensure that artificial
| general intelligence benefits all of humanity. He is widely
| respected in the field of artificial intelligence, and he is
| known for his commitment to open research and collaboration.
|
| Altman's departure comes at a time when OpenAI is facing a number
| of challenges, including the increasing competition from other AI
| companies, the growing public concern about the potential dangers
| of AI, and the need to find sustainable funding sources. Despite
| these challenges, Altman is confident that OpenAI will continue
| to be a leader in the field of AI.
|
| "I am incredibly proud of what we have accomplished at OpenAI,
| and I am confident that the company will continue to do great
| things," Altman said in a statement. "I am grateful to the board
| for giving me the opportunity to lead OpenAI, and I am excited to
| see what the company will achieve in the years to come."
|
| The board of directors is currently conducting a search for
| Altman's successor, and it is expected to name a new CEO in the
| coming months. In the meantime, Murati will focus on leading
| OpenAI through its current challenges and ensuring that the
| company continues to make progress on its mission.
|
| Murati is a highly respected technologist with a deep
| understanding of artificial intelligence. She has been with
| OpenAI since its inception, and she has played a key role in
| developing the company's technology. She is also a strong
| advocate for open research and collaboration, and she is
| committed to ensuring that OpenAI's technology is used for the
| benefit of all humanity.
|
| The board of directors is confident that Murati will be able to
| lead OpenAI through its current challenges and ensure that the
| company continues to make progress on its mission. "Mira is a
| talented and experienced leader who is deeply committed to
| OpenAI's mission," said Greg Brockman, the chairman and president
| of OpenAI. "I am confident that she will be able to lead OpenAI
| through this transition and into a bright future.""
|
| Isn't this fascinating? A major even happens regarding ChatGPT
| related issues and the primary competitor of ChatGPT (Google
| Bard) already can talk to me about it in a couple hours...
|
| Meanwhile ChatGPT still thinks it's 2021 heh
| kiltedpanda wrote:
| Is it possible that the codebase and weights have been hacked and
| SA didn't tell the board?
| orsenthil wrote:
| Here is a different perspective. Theoretically, the board is
| supposed to work like this, and exactly has a purpose - to vote
| on very important matters.
|
| Given what proof they had on the table. Greg Brockman, Ilya
| Sutskever, and independents such as Adam D'Angelo, Tasha
| McCauley, and Helen Toner could drive 3+ votes against Sam
| Altman.
|
| Rarely do we see board in action. And we saw this one today.
| lewhoo wrote:
| Come weary Sam and share your AI anxiety with the rest of us.
| franze wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT for some speculation after it read the blogpost:
|
| 1. Futuristic AI Project Gone Awry: Altman was secretly
| developing an advanced AI, far beyond ChatGPT, which gained
| sentience and advised the board to fire him for ethical reasons,
| fearing its own potential misuse under his leadership.
|
| 2. Time Travel Mishap: In a bizarre twist, Altman inadvertently
| discovered time travel through AI algorithms. However, his first
| experiment altered the timeline, resulting in a new board
| decision where he was never CEO.
|
| 3. Interstellar Communications: Altman successfully made contact
| with an extraterrestrial intelligence using OpenAI's technology.
| The board, unprepared for such a monumental discovery, decided to
| part ways with him to navigate this new cosmic frontier
| cautiously.
|
| 4. Hidden Virtual Reality World: Altman created a fully immersive
| virtual reality world using OpenAI's technology and decided to
| live there permanently. The board, unable to contact him in the
| virtual realm, had no choice but to let him go.
|
| 5. Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Altman secretly developed a
| quantum computer that could solve unsolvable problems, including
| predicting the future. Foreseeing a future where his continuing
| as CEO would lead to unpredictable consequences, he orchestrated
| his own firing to alter this course.
| flowersjeff wrote:
| Huh? WTH happened?... Love to learn the inside story, this sounds
| insane.
| dizzydes wrote:
| To me, his tweet suggests he saw it coming or perhaps it was even
| part of the plan for him. How else would he already know "what's
| next"?
|
| These past few months his name has fully made its way into the
| mainstream. Maybe its time for him (and half the GPT eng team) to
| cash in?
| bertil wrote:
| It suggests that he thinks there's a way to defend his actions,
| so it's not a personal matter (Metoo) or blatant fraud.
|
| It could be about the cost of operating the business
| (consistent with the announcement to cut Plus subscription,
| although wouldn't justify how fast he was fired) or his
| previous action a legal risk (something he promised Microsoft
| or Elon Musk); the later is consistent Greg being demoted: he
| knew and didn't tell the board.
| Probiotic6081 wrote:
| Are they replacing him with AI?
| weinzierl wrote:
| The following was posted by an Alex Coven on X (Twitter). I
| cannot verify if it is legit.
|
| _I was laid off from OpenAI today along with my boss Sam._
|
| _I was the person in charge of putting together the
| presentations for our board meetings._
|
| _No one has told me why I was let go but Sam texted me "wtf" and
| next thing I know my Slack and Gmail were disabled._
|
| _I'm now looking for a new role, so if you're hiring for
| investor relations, my DMs are open!_
| Ninjinka wrote:
| It's a joke
| thraxscipio wrote:
| Haha I think it's a fake account:
| https://twitter.com/anothercohen
| seydor wrote:
| Microsoft announced a ton of stuff yesterday, so many
| integrations that will really obsolete openAI . could that be
| related?
| siddharthgoel88 wrote:
| I suspect that some big news of data leak or some other security
| incident is about to follow.
| bertil wrote:
| Sam would have been more apologetic or at least contrite in his
| tweet if it was hurting anyone. Same: Eric Schmidt was
| immediately positive, so presumably he knows. ES would never
| defend a guy who hid a leak.
|
| Unless if, by "security" you mean OpenAI was used for military
| purposes, in which case: 100% Schmidt knew and supported and
| Sam might be proud of it.
|
| But Ilya and Mira would have known about it too... Guess they
| did, told the board and things blew up fast.
| pnathan wrote:
| Extremely shocking.
|
| The only thing that comes to mind is criminal conduct. Nothing
| else seems to demand a sudden firing. OpenAI has clearly been the
| rocket ship startup - a revolutionary tool and product clearly
| driving the next decade?+ of innovation. What else would demand a
| a fast firing of the popular, articulate, and photogenic CEO but
| a terrible problem?
| javier2 wrote:
| Yeah, even if criminal there usually must be a sentence first
| wubrr wrote:
| Holy shit -
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
| tomcam wrote:
| The most credible proximate cause to me is his sister's
| uncontested (by him) allegations of frequent sexual abuse when
| they were children.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I accidentally referred to him as Sam Altman Fried in the past.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I mean we know he frequents HN.
|
| sama, care to address it here in what would theoretically be a
| safe place?
| zaps wrote:
| This is all Scarlett Johansson's fault
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