[HN Gopher] No "malfeasance" behind Sam Altman's firing, OpenAI ...
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No "malfeasance" behind Sam Altman's firing, OpenAI memo says
Author : felixbraun
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-11-18 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| jayveeone wrote:
| So why the spectacle? Why the melodramatic press release and
| thoughtless communication with investors?
|
| I will not shed a tear for Altman or Microsoft, but this
| fantastic Friday massacre, don't seem to line up with cause.
| morph123 wrote:
| As smart as the people are at OpenAI they sure do some incredibly
| stupid things.
|
| I guess it proves that this "company" is ran by scientists and
| not business people, which I guess is reassuring?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The company is run, somehow, by people who have never run much
| of anything in their lives. Results are as expected.
|
| How that situation came about would be an interesting story in
| itself.
| belter wrote:
| Does that not apply also to Sam Altman?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Did only Sam have Satya Nadella's phone number? Seems like a
| rude surprise for a Friday afternoon.
| belter wrote:
| Your concern for Microsoft feelings is noted...
| tempsy wrote:
| I mean most of the people high up in the company as well as the
| entire board appear to be fairly junior (early to mid 30s).
| jessenaser wrote:
| If this was a division over the safety of models, the safest
| thing they could do is to release older models as soon as they
| release a new one.
|
| If they release GPT-5 (closed), then they should release GPT-3.5
| with its weights, stack, and documentation.
|
| Real research can be done to see what safety precautions can be
| learned from it, as the successors are quite similar. For
| example, GPT-3.5 is still updated with features as of Dev Day,
| and gives a quite similar tech stack to the newest models.
|
| --> What no one on Earth wants to bet on is a few people in San
| Francisco figuring safety out, when the rest of the world could
| be working on that. <--
|
| If a model is leaked to the public, you have no time to prepare
| for safety. The damage is done.
|
| If a model is kept forever behind closed doors you do not follow
| your mission of safe AGI. This only proves that overnight moves
| could be made that destabilizes who has control over the most
| powerful models. At least an open release of older models shows
| your dedication to innovation and safety.
|
| I'd bet that since Microsoft has a copy of the stack and weights,
| and that the US govt has their own Azure instance cloud, the US
| already has a copy of OpenAI's technology. So its not going to
| die if OpenAI crumbles. It just goes to two different hands.
|
| ---
|
| And this is just a bare minimum step. Not even considering this
| means there is a larger problem than ideological division. It is
| more like a power grab.
|
| *As much as people think that releasing models is a safety risk,
| it might just be the best thing you can do.*
|
| ---
|
| Economical Steps for a release that satisfies safety and
| investment (don't give away your MOAT):
|
| Current Model: GPT-4; Faster/Cheaper option: GPT-3.5; Fully
| Release GPT-3
|
| Current Model: GPT-5; Faster/Cheaper option: GPT-4; Fully Release
| GPT-3.5
|
| Current Model: GPT-6; Faster/Cheaper option: GPT-5; Fully Release
| GPT-4
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Define "safety," because for me and others, the definition
| seems to be "not projecting politically-incorrect views or
| information" or just straight up censorship.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| "Safety" = "Our company is safe from competition, thanks to
| captive regulators."
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The only thing that immediately comes to mind is you don't
| want a model capable of writing a Stuxnet-type cyberweapon
| for a script kiddie to use.
|
| All the other stuff about nuclear/chemical/biological/illegal
| drugs etc. is basically nonsense, that information is in the
| public domain already and the way governments try to control
| it is through legal restrictions like Select Agent Rules.
| Likewise, the result of giving most people a recipe for a
| chemical weapon is that they'll end up poisoning themselves,
| and those who won't already possess the requisite skills
| (happily the vast majority of trained experts in these fields
| aren't psychopaths). The real risk here is governments doing
| such things in the name of national security, I think.
|
| The other argument that many have adopted, that LLMs will
| make such cunningly clever arguments that gullible humans
| will follow them to their own destruction (I assume this
| means getting the masses to embrace communism or fascism or
| tax the uber-wealthy or something like that) seems utterly
| ridiculous to me, even though that's probably the "AI threat"
| I've seen the most ink spilled about. The best defense
| against such dark arts is simply teaching critical thinking
| skills to children.
| jessenaser wrote:
| At bare minimum it is to define and understand what are the
| capabilities of a model.
|
| Just like with missiles. They could be short range, ICBM, or
| nuclear.
|
| So if a model could make real looking videos that could
| confuse even expert analysis, and the general public, then we
| should prepare by doing X, Y, Z, so that the public cannot be
| confused by fake video, since we have some preventions.
|
| X, Y, Z, are mitigations. They do not, and will not work if
| they are censorship, since the other person can release a
| model that is uncensored and use it. That misses the point of
| the problem. Since others have it, your mitigation is to make
| software systems where you can sort posts by being real or
| fake. How you do it is an example of safety research.
|
| Safety is not talking about restricting models, it is talking
| about mitigating the negative effects of a weapon used the
| wrong way. Same thing with code. Malware will exist, so you
| must make a firewall, or train employees to not click
| phishing links, ...
|
| The safety research is finding the best methods of
| mitigation, and a small team in SF is not going to be the
| best at doing this. If the world knew the extent of a model,
| they know what extent of mitigations they can do.
|
| Overnight actions and power struggles in an organization can
| happen. If the world had these models, even the risk of
| OpenAI using them in a bad way, or restricting access to just
| themselves on usage of models, would be a more minimal risk
| issue, since two models ago are open.
| yankput wrote:
| This really feel like a supervillain origin story though
|
| Now Sam should make a green goblin mask and learn how to fly
| around town
| sage76 wrote:
| Ilya is spiderman then lol.
| croes wrote:
| Duplicate
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38322688
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| OpenAI has been bleeding money for a while [0]. Why would it be
| so crazy that the board wants heads to roll? The craziest part
| really is that he literally was allowed to give a keynote like a
| week ago (a good one), but of course, have they sacked him
| before... what kind of message that sends. Instead, he got sacked
| after, ANNOUNCEMENTS WERE MADE!
|
| 0: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-losing-money-chatgpt
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| 1. It seems like everyone in the space is loosing money and yet
| investors still seem willing to just keep throwing more at
| them.
|
| 2. From other accounts, the people they fired were the ones
| leaving more heavily towards commercialization. Based on what
| I've read (which is certainly multiple steps removed from the
| source), these would have been the wrong members to oust if the
| goal was to make more money.
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