[HN Gopher] OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
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OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
Author : skilled
Score : 1312 points
Date : 2023-11-20 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| skilled wrote:
| https://archive.is/RiAqC
| georgehill wrote:
| > Remarkably, the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever, the
| company's CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom
| coup against Altman in the first place.
|
| What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
| biglyburrito wrote:
| Sounds like a classic case of FAFO to me.
| civilitty wrote:
| Who fucked around and who found out, exactly??
|
| We the unsuspecting public?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Ilya FA
|
| Ilya FO (in process)
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| He didn't strike me as a type to brainlessly FA.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Yea, check out his presentations on YT. Incredible
| talent.
|
| What strikes me is that he wrote the regretful
| participation tweet _after_ witnessing the blowback. He
| should have written it right with the initial news. And
| clearly explain employees. This is not a smart way to
| conduct board oversight.
|
| 500 employees are not happy. I'm siding with the
| employees (esp early hires), they deserve to be part of
| once in a lifetime company like OpenAI after working
| there for years.
| chasd00 wrote:
| He could be an expert in some areas but in others... not
| so much.
| kaibee wrote:
| The thing about being really smart is that you can find
| incredible gambles.
| password54321 wrote:
| "if you value intelligence above all other human
| qualities, you're gonna have a bad time"
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| GPT-4 Turbo took control of the startup and fcks around ...
| newsclues wrote:
| Adam D'Angelo?
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| There must be something going on which is not in the public
| domain.
|
| What an utterly bizarre turn of events, and to have it all
| played out in public.
|
| A $90 billion valuation at stake too!
| mrits wrote:
| I wonder how many people are on a path for a $250K/year
| salary instead of $30M in the bank now.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's looks like about 505.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| Microsoft can easily afford to offer them $30M of options
| each if they continue to ship such important products.
| That's only $15B for 500 staff.
|
| Microsoft has a $2.75T market value and over $140B of cash.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Microsoft can easily afford to offer them $30M of
| options each_
|
| But it doesn't have to. And the politics suggest it very
| likely won't.
| mrits wrote:
| Microsoft isn't going to give the employees in HR
| equivalent offers. There are a lot of people in the
| company that wouldn't provide much value to the new team
| at MS.
| basch wrote:
| If it weren't so unbelievable, I'd almost accuse them of
| orchestrating all this to sell to Microsoft without the
| regulatory scrutiny.
|
| It's like they distressed the company to make an acquisition
| one of mercy instead of aggression, knowing they already had
| their buyer lined up.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Yeah, I also started out believing this must be a principle
| thing between Ilya and Sam. But no, this smells more and more
| like a corporate clusterfuck and Ilya was just an easy to
| manipulate puppet. This alleged statement from the board that
| destroying the company is an acceptable outcome is completely
| insane, but somewhat reasonable when combined with the fact
| that half the board has some serious conflict of interest
| going on.
| jordanpg wrote:
| I haven't seen brand suicide like this since EM dumped
| Twitter for X!!! (4 months ago)
| benterix wrote:
| It's nothing like it. What common people use is ChatGPT,
| many of them never heard about OpenAI, not even mention who
| sits on the board etc. And their core offering is more
| popular than ever. With Twitter, Musk started to damage the
| product itself, step by step. As far as I can tell ChatGPT
| continues to work just fine, as opposed to X.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Open ai users arent chatgpts users its developers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _sell to Microsoft without the regulatory scrutiny_
|
| I keep hearing this, principally from Silicon Valley. It's
| based on nothing. Of course this will receive both
| Congressional and regulatory scrutiny. (Microsoft is also
| likely to be sued by OpenAI's corporate entity, on behalf of
| its outside investors, as are Altman and anyone who jumps
| ship.)
| mirzap wrote:
| From what I heard non-compete clauses are unenforceable in
| California, so what exactly are they suing for?
|
| I'm pretty sure Satya consulted with an army of lawyers
| over the weekend regarding the potential issue.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California,
| so what exactly are they suing for?_
|
| Part of suing is to ensure compliance with agreements.
| There is a lot of IP that Microsoft may not have a
| license to that these employees have. There are also
| legitimate questions about conflicts of interests,
| particularly with a former executive, _et cetera_.
|
| > _pretty sure Satya consulted with an army of lawyers
| over the weekend regarding the potential issue_
|
| Sure. I'm not suggesting anyone did anything illegal.
| Just that it will be litigated over from every direction.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Such as? Unless they are in the habit of downloading
| multiterraby copies of the trained model and taking.g it
| home what IP would they have? The training data is the
| open internet and various licensed archives far to much
| for them to take and arguably isn't OAI IP anyway. The
| background is all bases on openly published research much
| of it released by Google. And Microsoft already has
| licensed pretty much everything from OAI as part of that
| multi billion dollar deal.
| basch wrote:
| Microsoft can buy the company in parts, as it "fails" in a
| long drawn out process. By the end, whatever they are
| buying will have little value, as it will already be
| outdated.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yeah, just like the suit Microsoft is in with windows 11
| anticompetitive practices, right?
| smegger001 wrote:
| Sue Sam for what? They fired him and he got amother job
| with another company. thats on them for firing him in a
| state with law prohibiting noncompete clauses
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Ilya is much less active on Twitter than the others. The rumors
| that blamed him emerged and spread like wildfire and he did
| nothing to stop it because he probably only checks Twitter once
| a week.
| saagarjha wrote:
| One would think that he would be on Twitter _this_ week.
| NateEag wrote:
| > One would think that he would be on Twitter this week.
|
| Or maybe _this_ week he would need to spend his time doing
| something productive.
| enginaar wrote:
| looks like found his twitter password
| https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20
| timeon wrote:
| Why? To entertain bystanders like us?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| More like spending time in calls with board members,
| coworkers, investors, partners, ... and often it is better
| not to say something, than saying something which then is
| misinterpreted overtaken by other reality.
| qup wrote:
| not this week, trust me
| sigmar wrote:
| He says he regrets his action, so he's not blameless. and it
| wouldn't have been possible for 3/6ths of the board to oust
| Brockman and Altman without his vote. My bet (entirely
| conjecture) is that Ilya now realizes the other three will
| refuse to leave their board seats even if it means the
| company melts to the ground.
| zeven7 wrote:
| What options are left other than Adam D'Angelo orchestrated the
| downfall of a competitor to Poe?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "I am NOT a BELLBOY!"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8oVTKG39U8&t=27s
| dougmwne wrote:
| (Rips off mask) Wow, it was the Quora CEO all along!
|
| So this was never about safety or any such bullshit. It's
| because GTPs store was in direct competition with Poe!?
| artursapek wrote:
| Imagine letting the CEO of a simple question and answer site
| that blurs all of its content onto your board
| nemo44x wrote:
| And that he might be the least incompetent of them all.
| achates wrote:
| Alongside luminaries like "the wife of the guy who played
| Robin in the Batman movie".
| artursapek wrote:
| lol is that a real thing?
| brianjking wrote:
| Absolutely mindboggling that Adam is on the board.
|
| Poe has direct competition with the GPTs and the "revenue
| sharing" plan that Sam released on Dev day.
|
| The Poe Platform has their "Creators" build your own bot and
| monetize it, including OpenAI and other models.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Even more interesting considering that Elon left OpenAI's
| board when Tesla started developing Autopilot as it was
| seen as a conflict of interest.
| manojlds wrote:
| Did it originally say CTO? Ilya is not CTO and it's been
| corrected now.
| Tenoke wrote:
| At this point either pretty much all the speculation here and
| on Twitter was wrong, or they've threatened to kneecap him.
| sage76 wrote:
| There's definitely more to this than just Ilya vs Sam.
| capableweb wrote:
| > What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
|
| Well, we don't know.
|
| What we do know, is that the "coordinating the boardroom coup
| against Altman" is a rumor and speculation about a thing we
| don't know anything about.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Ok... so this is not the scenario any of us were imagining?
| Ilya S vs Altman isn't what went down?
|
| JFC.
| ignoramous wrote:
| The signatories want Bret Taylor and Will Hurd running the new
| Board, apparently.
|
| > _We will take this step imminently, unless all current board
| members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent
| directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates
| Sam Altman and Greg Brockman._
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Googling Will Hurd only shows up a Republican politician with
| a history at the CIA. Is that the right guy? Can't be.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Please not another Eric Smith NSA shill running the show.
| on the other hand it was inevitable. either the government
| controls the most important companies secretly as in China
| or openly as in the US.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| The screenwriters are overdoing it at this point.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Understandable, they were on a strike for a long time. Now
| that they are back, they are itching to release all the good
| stuff.
| ibaikov wrote:
| Sexual misconduct. Ilya protects Sam by not letting this spiral
| out in media.
| fzeindl wrote:
| Maybe they found AGI and it is now controlling the board
| #andsoitbegins.
| cs702 wrote:
| None of it makes sense to me now. Who is _really_ behind this?
| How did they pull this off? Why did do it? Why do it so
| suddenly, in a terribly disorganized way?
|
| If I may paraphrase Churchill: This has become a bit of a
| riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
| Applejinx wrote:
| It's extrazordinary to watch, I'll say that much.
|
| I still think 'Altman's Basilisk' is a thing: I think somewhere
| in this mess there's actions taken to wrest control of an AI
| from somebody, probably Altman.
|
| Altman's Basilisk also represents the idea that if a
| charismatic and flawed person (and everything I've seen,
| including the adulation, suggests Altman is that type of person
| from that type of background) trains an AI in their image, they
| can induce their own characteristics in the AI. Therefore, if
| you're a paranoid with a persecution complex and a zero-sum
| perspective on things, you can through training induce an AI to
| also have those characteristics, which may well persist as the
| AI 'takes off' and reaches superhuman intelligence.
|
| This is not unlike humans (perhaps including Altman)
| experiencing and perpetuating trauma as children, and then
| growing to adulthood and gaining greatly expanded intelligence
| that is heavily, even overwhelmingly, conditioned by those
| formative axioms that were unquestioned in childhood.
| soderfoo wrote:
| Watching all this drama unfold in the public is unprecedented.
|
| I guess it makes sense. There has never been a company like
| OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes
| sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.
| brianjking wrote:
| I guess this is the Open in OpenAI, eh?
|
| Absolutely bonkers.
| lysecret wrote:
| That settles it it has to be the AGI orchestrating it all.
| siva7 wrote:
| Probably trying to shift the blame to the other three board
| members. It could be true to some degree. No matter what, it's
| clear to the public that they don't have the competency to sit
| on any board.
| smegger001 wrote:
| It French revolution time over there. heads are flying angry
| mobs. Fun times
| rvz wrote:
| Well that accelerated very quickly and this is perhaps the most
| dysfunctional startup I have ever seen.
|
| All due to one word: Greed.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I don't know about OpenAI, but Ive been in a few similar
| business situations where everyone is in a good situation and
| greed leads to an almighty blowup. It's really remarkable to
| see.
| toss1 wrote:
| And the ironic part of the greed is that it seems there is far
| more (at least potential) earnings to be spread around and make
| everyone there wealthy enough to not have to think about it
| ever again.
|
| Yet they start this kind of nonsense.
|
| Not exactly focusing on building a great system or product.
| qwebfdzsh wrote:
| I assumed that due how the whole company/non-profit was
| structured employees didn't really get any actual equity?
| toss1 wrote:
| Um, equity isn't the only way to distribute profits...
|
| edit: 'tho TBF, the other methods do require ethical
| management behavior down the road, which was just shown to
| be lacking in the last few days.
| marricks wrote:
| What? Greed is the backbone of our startup landscape. As soon
| as you get VC backing all anyone cares about is a big payday.
| This is interesting because there is something going on beyond
| the typical pure greed shitshow.
|
| Perhaps it was just that original intention for openai to be a
| nonprofit, but at some point somewhere it wasn't pure $ and
| that's what makes it interesting. Also more tragic because now
| it looks like it's heading straight to a for profit company one
| way or another.
| gniv wrote:
| > All due to one word: Greed.
|
| I would say it's due to unconventional not-battle-tested
| governance.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| We're seeing our generation's "traitorous eight" story play out
| [1]. If this creates a sea of AI start-ups, competing and
| exploring different approaches, it could be invigorating on many
| levels.
|
| [1]
| https://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/corgs/fairchild.h...
| kossTKR wrote:
| Doesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen
| though?
|
| Microsoft gobbles up all talent from OpenAI as they just gave
| everyone a position.
|
| So we went from "Faux NGO" to, "For profit", to "100% Closed".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Doesn 't it look like the complete opposite is going to
| happen though?_
|
| Going from OpenAI to Microsoft means ceding the upside:
| nobody besides maybe Altman will make fuck-you money there.
|
| I'm also not sure as some in Silicon Valley that this is
| antitrust proof. So moving to Microsoft not only means less
| upside, but also fun in depositions for a few years.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Fuck you money was always a lottery ticket based on
| OpenAI's governance structure and "promises of potential
| future profit." That lottery ticket no longer exists, and
| no one else is going to provide it after seeing how the
| board treated their relationship with Microsoft and that
| $10B investment. This is a fine lifeboat for anyone who
| wants to continue on the path they were on with adults at
| the helm.
|
| What might have been tens or hundreds of millions in common
| stakeholder equity gains will likely be single digit
| millions, but at least much more likely to materialize (as
| Microsoft RSUs).
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| No. OpenAI employees do not have traditional equity in the
| form of RSUs or Options. They have a weird profit-sharing
| arrangement in a company whose board is apparently not
| interested in making profits.
| semiquaver wrote:
| Employee equity (and all investments) are capped at 100x,
| which is still potentially a hefty payday. The whole
| point of the structure was to enable competitive employee
| comp.
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| Ha! One of my all-time favourites, the fuck-you position.
| The Gambler, the uncle giving advice:
|
| _You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in
| the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year
| roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the
| rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your
| taxes and that 's your base, get me? That's your fortress
| of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your
| life, at a level of fuck you._
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/characters/nm0000422
| jonhohle wrote:
| I haven't seen the movie, but it seems like Uncle Frank
| and I would get along just fine.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| How would that work, economically?
|
| Wasn't a key enabler of early transitor work that required
| capital investment was modest?
|
| SotA AI research seems to be well past that point.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Wasn 't a key enabler of early transitor work that
| required capital investment was modest?_
|
| They were simple in principle but expensive at scale. Sounds
| like LLMs.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Is there SotA LLM research not at scale?
|
| My understanding was that practical results were indicating
| your model has to be pretty large before you start getting
| "magic."
| throwaway_45 wrote:
| NN/ai concepts have been around for a while. It is just
| computers had not been fast enough to make it practical. It
| was also harder to get capital back then. Those guys put the
| silicon in silicon valley.
| tedivm wrote:
| It really depends on what you're researching. Rad AI started
| with only 4m investment and used that to make cutting edge
| LLMs that are now in use by something like half the
| radiologists in the US. Frankly putting some cost pressure on
| researchers may end up creating more efficient models and
| techniques.
| not_makerbox wrote:
| My ChatGPT wrapper is in danger, please stop
| artursapek wrote:
| lmfao
| yeck wrote:
| > the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever
|
| _Big sigh_.
| lordnacho wrote:
| For people who appreciate some vintage British comedy:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpc5_3B5xdk
|
| The whole thing is just ridiculous. How can you be senior
| leadership and not have a clear idea of what you want? And what
| the staff want?
| nytesky wrote:
| Knew it had to be Benny Hill before I clicked. Yackty-sax
| indeed.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Indeed. I wonder how it came to become the anthem of
| incompetence.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| I was thinking more the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Funny, I would've thought this one would have been more
| appropriate
|
| https://youtu.be/6qpRrIJnswk?si=h37XFUXJDDoy2QZm
|
| Substitute with appropriate ex-Soviet doomer music as
| necessary
| ratsmack wrote:
| Sounds like a CYA move after being under pressure from the team
| at large.
| pototo666 wrote:
| This is more interesting than the HBO Silicon Valley show.
| rsecora wrote:
| it's the trailer for the new season of Succession.
| majikaja wrote:
| Drama queens
| mjirv wrote:
| The key line:
|
| "Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl
| employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join."
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think everyone assumed this was an aquihire without the
| "aqui-" but this is the first time I've seen it explicitly
| stated.
| nextworddev wrote:
| will they stay though? what happens to their OAI options?
| teeray wrote:
| Will their OAI options be worth anything if the implosion
| continues?
| nextworddev wrote:
| yeah but threatening to quit is actually accelerating the
| implosion
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I don't believe startups can have successful exits
| without extraordinary leadership (which the current board
| can never find). The people quitting are simply jumping
| off a sinking ship.
| almost_usual wrote:
| MSFT RSUs actually have value as opposed to OpenAI's Profit
| Participation Units (PPU).
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
|
| https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa0
| 6...
| baby_souffle wrote:
| What will happen to their newly granted msft shares? One
| can be sold _today_ and might be worth a lot more soon...
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| hostile takeunder?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's perfect.
| jonbell wrote:
| You win
| epups wrote:
| Love it. Could also be called a hostile giveover,
| considering the OpenAI board gifted this opportunity to
| Microsoft
| rvz wrote:
| So essentially, OpenAI is a sinking ship as long as the board
| members go ahead with their new CEO and Sam, Greg are not
| returning.
|
| Microsoft can absorb all the employees and switch them into the
| new AI subsidiary which basically is an acqui-hire without
| buying out everyone else's shares and making a new DeepMind /
| OpenAI research division inside of the company.
|
| So all along it was a long winded side-step into having a new
| AI division without all the regulatory headaches of a formal
| acquisition.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _OpenAI is a sinking ship as long as the board members go
| ahead with their new CEO and Sam, Greg are not returning_
|
| Far from certain. One, they still control a lot of money and
| cloud credits. Two, they can credibly threaten to license to
| a competitor or even open source everything, thereby
| destroying the unique value of the work.
|
| > _without all the regulatory headaches of a formal
| acquisition_
|
| This, too, is far from certain.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Far from certain. One, they still control a lot of money
| and cloud credits.
|
| This too is far from certain. The funding and credits was
| at best tied to milestones, and at worst, the investment
| contract is already broken and msft can walk.
|
| I suspect they would not actually do the latter and the ip
| is tied to continual partnership.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And sue for the assets of OpenAI on account of the damage the
| board did to their stock... and end up with all of the IP.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| On what basis would one entity be held responsible for
| another entity's stock price, without evidence of fraud?
| Especially a non profit.
| vaxman wrote:
| [delayed]
| jlokier wrote:
| The value of OpenAI's own assets in the for-profit
| subsidiary, may drop in value due to recent events.
|
| Microsoft is a substantial shareholder (49%) in that for-
| profit subsidiary, so the value of Microsoft's asset has
| presumably reduced due to OpenAI's board decisions.
|
| OpenAI's board decisions which resulted in these events
| appear to have been improperly conducted: Two of the
| board's members weren't aware of its deliberations, or
| the outcome until the last minute, notably the chair of
| the board. A board's decisions have legal weight because
| they are collective. It's allowed to patch them up after
| if the board agrees, for people to take breaks, etc. But
| if some directors intentionally excluded other directors
| from such a major decision (and formal deliberations),
| affecting the value and future of the company, that
| leaves the board's decision open to legal challenges.
|
| Hypothetically Microsoft could sue and offer to settle.
| Then OpenAI might not have enough funds if it would lose,
| so might have sell shares in the for-profit subsidiary,
| or transfer them. Microsoft only needs about 2% more to
| become majority shareholder of the for-profit subsidiary,
| which runs ChatGPT sevices.
| bertil wrote:
| That is a spectacular power move: extending 700 job offers,
| many of which would be close to $1 million per year
| compensation.
| layer8 wrote:
| They didn't say anything about the compensation.
| nottheengineer wrote:
| Sounds a lot like MS wants to have OpenAI but without a boards
| that considers pesky things like morals.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| Time for a counter-counter-coup that ends up with Microsoft
| under the Linux Foundation after RMS reveals he is Satoshi...
| Justsignedup wrote:
| RMS (I assume Richard Stallman) may be many many many
| things, but setting up a global pyramid scheme doesn't seem
| to be his M.O.
|
| But stranger things have happened. One day I may be very
| very VERY surprised.
| fsflover wrote:
| There is nothing related to pyramids in bitcoin. It's
| just an implementation of a novel, trustless electronic
| money, also it's free software.
| tmerse wrote:
| You mean the GNU Linux Foundation?
| ric2b wrote:
| The year of the Linux Microsoft.
| code_runner wrote:
| again, nobody has shown even a glimmer of the board operating
| with morality being their focus. we just don't know. we do
| know that a vast majority of the company don't trust the
| board though.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Whose morals again?
| wxw wrote:
| Ilya signed it??? He's on the board... This whole thing is such
| an implosion of ambition.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Yeah, what the hell?
|
| Do we know why Murati was replaced?
| simonw wrote:
| I heard it was because she tried to hire Sam and Greg back.
| kranke155 wrote:
| So who's against it and why ?
|
| I wonder if it will take 20 years to learn the whole story.
| simonw wrote:
| The amount that's leaked out already - over a weekend -
| makes me think we'll know the full details of everything
| within a few days.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Apparently she tried to rehire Sam and Greg.
|
| I don't think she actually had anything to do with the coup,
| she was only slightly less blindsided than everyone else.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| To be fair, that is a stupid first move to make as the CEO
| who was just hired to replace the person deposed by the
| board. (Though I'm still confused about Ilya's position.)
| blackoil wrote:
| If you know the company will implode and you'll be CEO of
| a shell, it is better to get board to reverse the course.
| It isn't like she was part of decision making process
| impulser_ wrote:
| If your job as a CEO is to keep the company running it
| seems like the only way to do that was hire them back
| because look at the company now it's essentially dead
| unless the board resigns and with how stupid the board is
| they might not lol.
|
| So her move wasn't stupid at all. She obviously knew
| people working there respected the leadership of the
| company.
|
| If 550 people leave OpenAI you might as well just shut it
| down and sell the IP to Microsoft.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's a lot easier to sign a petition than actually walk
| away from a presumably well-paying job in a somewhat weak
| tech job market. People assuming everyone can just
| traipse into a $1m/year role at Microsoft is smoking some
| really good stuff.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > can just traipse into a $1m/year role at Microsoft
|
| Do you not trust Microsoft's public statement that jobs
| are waiting for anyone that decides to leave OpenAI?
| Considering their two decade adventure with Xbox and
| their $72bln in profits last year, on top of a $144bln in
| cash reserves, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is
| able (and willing) to match most comp packages
| considering what's at stake. Maybe not everyone, but
| most.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think the specifics on an individual level once the
| smoke clears matter a lot.
| margorczynski wrote:
| Well it is "somewhat weak tech job market" for your
| average Joe. I think for most of those guys finding a
| 0,5kk/year job wouldn't be such a problem especially that
| the AI hype has not yet died down.
|
| Actually for MS this might be much better cause they
| would get direct control over them without the hassle of
| talking to some "board" that is not aligned with their
| interests.
| deeviant wrote:
| With nearly the entire team of engineers threatening to
| leave the company over the coup, was it a stupid move?
|
| The board is going to be overseeing a company of 10
| people as things are going.
| maxlamb wrote:
| But wouldn't the coup have required 4 votes out of 6 which
| means she voted yes? If not then the coup was executed by
| just 3 board members? I'm confused.
| ketzo wrote:
| Murati is/was not a board member.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Generally speaking, 4 members is the minimum quorum for a
| board of 6, and 3 out of 4 is a majority decision.
|
| I don't know if it was 3 or 4 in the end, but it may very
| well have been possible with just 3.
| StephenAshmore wrote:
| Mira isn't on the board, so she didn't have a vote in
| this.
| Bostonian wrote:
| I think the names listed are the recipients of the letter (the
| board), not the signers.
| dxyms wrote:
| There's only 4 people on the board.
| falleng0d wrote:
| he even posted a apology:
| https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20
|
| what the actual fuck =O
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| They did not expect Microsoft to take everything and walk
| away, and did not realize how little pull they actually had.
|
| If you made a comment recently about de jure vs de facto
| power, step forward and collect your prize.
| jacquesm wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38331457
| hotnfresh wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38338096
|
| What do I win? Hahaha.
| sva_ wrote:
| The great drama of our time (this week)
| ozgung wrote:
| Wow, lots of drama and plot twists for the writers of the
| Netflix mini-series.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I'm going to take a leap of intuition and say all roads lead
| back Adam d'Angelo for the coup attempt.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _all roads lead back Adam d 'Angelo_
|
| Maybe someone thinks Sam was _"not consistently candid"_
| about mentioning one of the feature bullets in latest
| release was dropping d 'Angelo's Poe directly into the
| ChatGPT app for no additional charge.
|
| Given dev day timing and the update releasing these "GPTs"
| this is an entirely plausible timeline.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/poes-ai-chatbot-app-now-
| le...
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I knew it was Joseph Gordon-Levitt's plot all along!
| miyuru wrote:
| I don't know if you are joking or not, but one of the board
| members is Joseph Gordon-Levitt Wife.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| (yes that was the joke)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Naive is too soft a word. How can you be so smart and so out
| of touch at the same time?
| code_runner wrote:
| in my experience these things will typically go hand in
| hand. There is also an argument to be made that being smart
| at building ML models and being smart in literally anything
| else have nothing to do with each other.
| tbalsam wrote:
| Usually this is due to autism, please be kind.
| code_runner wrote:
| Not claiming to know anything about any persons
| differences or commenting about that in any way.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| IQ and EQ are different things. Some people are very
| technically smart to know a trillion side effects of
| technical systems. But can be really bad/binary/shallow at
| knowing side order effects of human dynamics.
|
| Ilya's role is a Chief Scientist. It may be fair to give at
| least some benefit of doubt. He was vocal/direct/binary,
| and also vocally apologized and worked back. In human
| dynamics - I'd usually look for the silent orchestrator
| behind the scenes that nobody talks about.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm fine with all that in principle but then you
| shouldn't be throwing your weight around in board
| meetings, probably you shouldn't be on the board to begin
| with because it is a handicap in trying to evaluate the
| potential outcome of the decisions the board has to make.
| smolder wrote:
| I don't think this is necessarily about different
| categories of intelligence... Politicking and socializing
| are skills that require time and mental energy to build,
| and can even atrophy. If you spend all your time worrying
| about technical things, you won't have as much time to
| build or maintain those skills. It seems to me like IQ
| and EQ are more fundamental and immutable than that, but
| maybe I'm making a distinction where there isn't much of
| one.
| smolder wrote:
| Specialized learning and focus often comes at the cost of
| generalized learning and focus. It's not zero sum, but
| there is competition between interests in any person's
| mind.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I don't think I have seen a bigger U-turn
| serial_dev wrote:
| You come at the king, you best not miss. If you do, make sure
| to apologize on Twitter while you can.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| I was looking down the list and then saw Ilya. Just when you
| think this whole ordeal can't get any more insane.
| victoryhb wrote:
| Most people who sympathized with the Board prior to this would
| have assumed that the presumed culprit, the legendary Ilya, has
| thought through everything and is ready to sacrifice anything
| for a course he champions. It appears that is not the case.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| I think he orchestrated the coup on principle, but severely
| underestimated the backlash and power that other people had
| collectively.
|
| Now he's trying to save his own skin. Sam will probably take
| him back on his own technical merits but definitely not in
| any position of power anymore
|
| When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die
|
| Just because you are a genius in one domain does not mean you
| are in another
|
| What's funny is that everyone initially "accepted" the
| firing. But no one liked it. Then a few people (like greg)
| started voting with their feet which empowered others which
| has cumulated into this tidal shift.
|
| It will make a fascinating case study some day on how not to
| fire your CEO
| throwaway74852 wrote:
| The dude is a quack.
| tedivm wrote:
| This was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like
| Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone,
| especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of
| it (staff that already function well as a team).
|
| > In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at
| Microsoft. "Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for
| all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to
| join," they write.
| paulpan wrote:
| In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the
| OpenAI board. Initially it seemed Sam may have committed some
| inexcusable financial crime but doesn't look so anymore.
|
| Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to
| join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own
| $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than
| acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.
| htrp wrote:
| Msft/Amazon/Google would light 13 billion on fire to acquire
| OpenAI in a heartbeat.
|
| (but also a good chunk of the 13bn was pre-committed Azure
| compute credits, which kind of flow back to the company
| anyway).
| dhruvdh wrote:
| They acquired Activision for 69B recently.
|
| While Activision makes much more money I imagine, acquiring a
| whole division of productive, _loyal_ staffers that work well
| together on something as important as AI is cheap for 13B.
|
| Some background: https://sl.bing.net/dEMu3xBWZDE
| technofiend wrote:
| There's acquihires and then I guess there's acquifishing
| where you just gut the company you're after like a fish and
| hire away everyone without bothering to buy the company.
| There's probably a better portmanteau. I seriously doubt
| Microsoft is going to make people whole by granting
| equivalent RSUs, so you have to wonder what else is going on
| that so many seem ready to just up and leave some very large
| potential paydays.
| Kye wrote:
| How about: acquimire
| gryn wrote:
| one thing for sure this is one hell of a quagmire /s
| WiseWeasel wrote:
| I feel like that's giving them too much credit; this is
| more of a flukuisition. Being in the right place at the
| right time when your acquisition target implodes.
| janejeon wrote:
| If the change in $MSFT pre-open market cap (which has given
| up its gains at the time of writing, but still) of hundreds
| of billions of dollars is anything to go by, shareholders
| probably see this as spending a dime to get a dollar.
| unoti wrote:
| Awesome point. Microsoft's market cap today went up to 2.8
| trillion, up 44.68 billion today.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B
| investment in OpenAI earlier this year. _
|
| For investment deals of that magnitude, Microsoft probably
| did not literally wire all $13 billion to OpenAI's bank
| account the day the deal was announced.
|
| More likely that the $10b to $13 headline-grabbing number is
| a _total estimated figure_ that represents a _sum of future
| incremental investments (and Azure usage credits, etc)_ based
| on agreed performance milestones from OpenAI.
|
| So, if OpenAI doesn't achieve certain milestones (which can
| be more difficult if a bunch of their employees defect and
| follow Sam & Greg out the door) ... then Microsoft doesn't
| really "lose $10b".
| bananapub wrote:
| > In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by
| the OpenAI board
|
| surely the really self-destructive gamble was hiring him?
| he's a venture capitalist with weird beliefs about AI and
| privacy, why would it be a good idea to put him in charge of
| a notional non-profit that was trying to safely advance the
| start of the art in artificial intelligence?
| spinningslate wrote:
| > Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone
|
| Exactly. I'm curious about how much of this was planned vs
| emergent. I doubt it was all planned: it would take an
| extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists.
|
| Equally, it's not entirely unpredictable. MS is the easiest to
| read: their moves to date have been really clear in wanting to
| be the primary commercial beneficiary of OAI's work.
|
| OAI itself is less transpararent from the outside. There's a
| tension between the "humanity first" mantra that drove its
| inception, and the increasingly "commercial exploitation first"
| line that Altman was evidently driving.
|
| As things stand, the outcome is pretty clear: if the choice was
| between humanity and commercial gain, the latter appears to
| have won.
| jerf wrote:
| "I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary
| mind to foresee all the possible twists."
|
| From our outsider, uninformed perspective, yes. But if you
| know more sometimes these things become completely plannable.
|
| I'm not saying this is the actual explanation because it
| probably isn't. But suppose OpenAI was facing bankruptcy, but
| they weren't telling anyone and nobody external knew. This
| allows more complicated planning for various contingencies by
| the people that know because _they_ know they can exclude a
| lot of possibilities from their planning, meaning it 's a
| simpler situation for them than meets the (external) eye.
|
| Perhaps ironically, the more complicated these gyrations
| become, the _more_ convinced I become there 's probably a
| simple explanation. But it's one that is being hidden, and
| people don't generally hide things for no reason. I don't
| know what it is. I don't even know what category of thing it
| is. I haven't even been closely following the HN coverage,
| honestly. But it's probably unflattering to somebody.
|
| (Included in that relatively simple explanation would be some
| sort of coup attempt that has subsequently failed. Those
| things happen. I'm not saying whatever plan is being enacted
| is going off without a hitch. I'm just saying there may well
| be an internal explanation that is still much simpler than
| the external gyrations would suggest.)
| sharemywin wrote:
| "it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the
| possible twists."
|
| How far along were they on GPT-5?
| playingalong wrote:
| > it would take an extraordinary mind
|
| They could've asked ChatGPT for hints.
| boringg wrote:
| I think the board needs to come clean on why they fired Sam
| Altman if they are going to weather this storm.
| Kye wrote:
| They might not be able to if the legal department is
| involved. Both in the case of maybe-pending legal issues, and
| because even rich people get employment protections that make
| companies wary about giving reasons.
| roflyear wrote:
| "Even rich people?" - especially rich people, as they are
| the ones who can afford to use laws to protect themselves.
| Kye wrote:
| I said nothing contrary to this. I'm not sure what your
| goal is with this comment. If anything is implied in
| "even rich people," it's contempt for them, so I'm
| clearly on the pro-making legal protections more
| accessible side.
|
| Pick a different target and move on.
| roflyear wrote:
| Using your same rhetoric and attitude: please outline
| exactly what language I used that was so offensive to
| you.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| Altman is already gone, if they fired him without a good
| reason they are already toast
| BryantD wrote:
| "Employees" probably means "engineers" in this case. Which is a
| wide majority of OpenAI staff, I'm sure.
| tedivm wrote:
| I'm assuming it's a combination of researchers, data
| scientists, mlops engineers, and developers. There are a lot
| of different areas of expertise that come into building these
| models.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of
| this better than anyone
|
| Sounds like that's what someone wants and is trying to
| obfuscate what's going on behind the scenes.
|
| If Windows 11 shows us anything about Microsoft's monopolistic
| behavior, having them be the ring of power for LMM's makes the
| future of humanity look very bleak.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _it 's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this
| better than anyon_
|
| Didn't follow this closely, but isn't that implicitly what an
| ex-CEO could have possibly been accused off ie. not acting in
| the company's best interest but someone else's? Not
| unprecedented either eg. the case of Nokia/Elop.
| mongol wrote:
| But is the door open to everyone of the 500 staff? That is a
| lot, and Microsoft may not need them all.
| ulfw wrote:
| That's because they're the only adult in the room and mature
| company with mature management. Boring, I know. But sometimes
| experience actually pays off.
| ethanbond wrote:
| It seems odd to have it described as "may resign." Seems like the
| worst of all worlds.
|
| That's like trying to create MAD with the position you "may"
| launch nukes in retaliation.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Presumably some will resign and some won't. They aren't going
| to get 550 people to make a hard commitment to resign,
| especially when presumably few concrete contracts have been
| offered by MSFT.
| gorlilla wrote:
| It's easier to get the support of 500 educated people at a
| moments notice by using sane words like 'may'. This is rational
| given the lack of public information as well as a board that
| seems to be having seizures. Using the word 'may' may seem
| empty-handed; but it ensures a longer list of names attached to
| the message -- allowing the board a better glimpse of how many
| dominoes are lined up to fall.
|
| The board is being given a sanity-check; I would expect the
| signers intentionally left themselves a bit of room for
| escalation/negotiation.
|
| How often do you win arguments by leading off with an immutable
| ultimatum?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Right, but the absolute last thought you want in the board's
| head is: "they're bluffing."
|
| 200 people or even 50 of the right people who are
| _definitely_ going to resign will be much stronger than 500+
| who "may" resign.
|
| Disclaimer that this is a ludicrously difficult situation for
| all these folks, and my critique here is made from far
| outside the arena. I am in no way claiming that I would be
| executing this better in actual reality and I'm _extremely_
| fortunate not to be in their shoes.
| feraloink wrote:
| WSJ said "500 threaten to resign". "Threaten" lol! WSJ says
| there are 770 employees total. This is all so bizarre.
| fny wrote:
| At this point, I think it's absolutely clear no one has any idea
| what happened. Every speculation, no matter how sophisticated,
| has been wrong.
|
| It's time to take a breath, step back, and wait until someone
| from OpenAI says something substantial.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| This suggestion was already made on Saturday and again on
| Sunday. However, this approach does not enhance popcorn
| consumption... Show must go on ...
| slipheen wrote:
| Absolutely agreed
|
| This is the point where I've realized I just have to wait until
| history is written, rather than trying to follow this in real
| time.
|
| The situation is too convoluted, and too many people are
| playing the media to try to advance their version of the
| narrative.
|
| When there is enough distance from the situation for a proper
| historical retrospective to be written, I look forward to
| getting a better view of what actually happened.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| Hah. I think you may be duped by history - the neat logical
| accounts are often fictions - they explain what was
| inexplicable with fabrications.
|
| Studying revolutions is revealing - they are rarely the
| invevitable product of historical forces, executed to the
| plans of strategic minded players... instead they are often
| accidental and inexplicable. Those credited as their
| masterminds were trying to stop them. Rather than inevitible,
| there was often progress in the opposite direction making
| people feel the liklihood was decreasing. The confusing
| paradoxical mess of great events doesn't make for a good
| story to tell others though.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| It's a pretty interesting point to think about. Post-hoc
| explanations are clean, neat, and may or may not have been
| prepared by someone with a particular interpretation of
| events. While real-time, there's too much happening, too
| quickly, for any one person to really have a firm grasp on
| the entire situation.
|
| On our present stage there is no director, no stage
| manager; the set is on fire. There are multiple actors -
| with more showing up by the minute - some of whom were
| working off a script that not everyone has seen, and that
| is now being rewritten on the fly, while others don't have
| any kind of script at all. They were sent for; they have
| appeared to take their place in the proceedings with no
| real understanding of what those are, like Rosencranz and
| Guildenstern.
|
| This is kind of what the end thesis of War and Peace was
| like - there's no possible way that Napoleon could actually
| have known what was happening everywhere on the battlefield
| - by the time he learned something had happened, events on
| the scene had already advanced well past it; and the local
| commanders had no good understanding of the overall
| situation, they could only play their bit parts. And in
| time, these threads of ignorance wove a tale of a Great
| Victory, won by the Great Man Himself.
| buro9 wrote:
| Written history is usually a simplification that has lost a
| lot of the context and nuance from it.
|
| I don't need to follow in real-time, but a lot of the context
| and nuance can be clearly understood at the moment and so it
| stills helps to follow along even if that means lagging on
| the input.
| siva7 wrote:
| That's not how history works. What you read are the tellings
| of the people and those aren't all facts but how they
| perceived the situation in a retrospective. Read the
| biographies of different people telling the same event and
| you will notice that they are quite never the same, leaving
| the unfavourable bits usually out.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| I agree. Although the story is fascinating in the way that a
| car crash is fascinating, it's clear that it's going to be very
| difficult to get any kind of objective understanding in real-
| time.
|
| This breathless real-time speculation may be fun, but now that
| social media amplifies the tiniest fart such that it has global
| reach, I feel like it just reinforces the general zeitgeist of
| "Oh, what the hell NOW? Everything is on fire." It's not like
| there's anything that we peasants can do to either influence
| the outcome, or adjust our own lives to accomodate the eventual
| reality.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| I will say, though, that there is going to be an absolute
| banger of a book for Kara Swisher to write, once the dust has
| settled.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| I wonder if AGI took over the humans and guided their actions.
| yk wrote:
| It may well be that this is artificial and general, but I
| rather doubt it is intelligent.
| JCharante wrote:
| Like the new tom cruise movie?
|
| Makes sense in a conspiracy theory mindset. AGI takes over,
| crashed $MSFT, buys calls on $MSFT, then this morning the
| markets go up when Sam & co join MSFT and the AGI has tons of
| money to spend.
| tyrfing wrote:
| 3 board members (joined by Ilya Sutskever, who is publicly
| defecting now) found themselves in a position to take over what
| used to be a 9-member board, and took full control of OpenAI
| and the subsidiary previously worth $90 billion.
|
| Speculation is just on motivation, the facts are easy to
| establish.
| bananapub wrote:
| > 3 board members (joined with Ilya Sutskever, who is
| publicly defecting now) found themselves in a position to
| take over what used to be a 9-member board, and took full
| control of OpenAI and the subsidiary previously worth $90
| billion.
|
| er...what does that even mean? how can a board "take full
| control" of the thing they are the board for? they already
| have full control.
|
| the actual facts are that the board, by majority vote, sacked
| the CEO and kicked someone else off the board.
|
| then a lot of other stuff happened that's still becoming
| clear.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think the post is very clear.
|
| The subject in that sentence that takes full control is "3
| members" not "board".
|
| The board has control, but who controls the board changes
| based on time and circumstances.
| michaelt wrote:
| The post could be clearer.
|
| It says 3 board members found themselves in a position to
| take over OpenAI.
|
| Do they mean we've seen Sam Altman and allies making a
| bid to take over the entire of OpenAI, through its weird
| Charity+LLC+Holding company+LLC+Microsoft structure,
| eschewing its goals of openness and safety in pursuit of
| short-sighted riches.
|
| Or do they mean we've seen The Board making a bid to take
| over the entire of OpenAI, by ousting Glorious Leader Sam
| Altman, while his team was going from strength to
| strength?
| augustulus wrote:
| tangentially, it's an absolute disgrace that non-profits are
| allowed to have for-profit divisions in the first place
| culi wrote:
| This was actually a pretty recent change from 2018. iirc it
| was actually Newman's Own that set the precedent for this:
|
| https://nonprofitquarterly.org/newmans-philanthropic-
| excepti...
|
| > Introduced in June of 2017, the act amends the Revenue
| Code to allow private foundations to take complete
| ownership of a for-profit corporation under certain
| circumstances: The business must be owned
| by the private foundation through 100 percent ownership of
| the voting stock. The business must be managed
| independently, meaning its board cannot be controlled by
| family members of the foundation's founder or substantial
| donors to the foundation. All profits of the
| business must be distributed to the foundation.
| Figs wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but didn't Mozilla
| Foundation do that a dozen or so years earlier with their
| wholly owned subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation? (...and I
| doubt that's the first instance; just the one that
| immediately popped into my head.)
| purplerabbit wrote:
| The LDS church has owned for-profit entities for decades.
| Check out the "City Creek Center.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| It begs the question: why was OpenAI structured this way?
| For what purposes besides potentially defrauding investors
| and the government exist for wrapping a for-profit business
| in a nonprofit? From a governance standpoint it makes no
| sense, because a nonprofit board doesn't have the same
| legal obligations to represent shareholders that a for-
| profit business does. And why did so many investors choose
| to seed a business that was playing such a cooky shell
| game?
| augustulus wrote:
| the impression I got was that they started out with
| honest intentions and they were more or less infiltrated
| by Microsoft. this recent news fits that narrative
| armcat wrote:
| Everything on social media (and general news media) pointed to
| Ilya instigating the coup. Maybe Ilya was never the instigator,
| maybe it was Adam + Helen + Tasha, Greg backed Sam and was
| shown the door, and Ilya was on the fence, and perhaps against
| better judgment, due to his own ideological beliefs, or just
| from pure fear of losing something beautiful he helped create,
| under immense pressure, decided to back the board?
| seanhunter wrote:
| We can certainly believe Ilya wasn't behind it if he joins them
| at Microsoft. How about that? By his own admission was
| involved, and he's one of 4 people on the board. While he has
| called on the board to resign, he has seemingly not resigned
| which would be the one thing he could certainly control.
| alvis wrote:
| At this point, after almost 3 days of non-stop drama, and we
| still have no clue what has happened to a 700 employees company
| under million of people watching. Regardless the outcome, the
| art of keeping secrets at OpenAI is truly far beyond human
| capability!
| esjeon wrote:
| I agree. I'm already sick of reading through political hit
| pieces, exaggeration, biased speculations and unfounded bold
| claims. This all just turned into a kind of TV sports, where
| you pick a side and fight.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Likely Ilya and Adam swayed Helen and Tasha. Booted Sam out.
| Greg voluntarily resigned.
|
| Ilya (at the urging of Satya and his colleagues including Mira)
| wanted to reinstate Sam, but the deal fell through with the
| Board outvoting Sustkever 3 to 1. With Mira deflecting, Adam
| got his mate Emmett to steady the ship but things went nuclear.
| ycsux wrote:
| Just made it 100% certain that the majority of AI staff is
| deluded and lacks judgment. Not a good look for AI safety.
| youcantcook wrote:
| Why are gaslighting me. I never did anything but click a link
| kronop wrote:
| Do whatever you want but don't break the API or I will go
| homeless
| giarc wrote:
| You and 5000 other recent founders in tech.
| replwoacause wrote:
| I feel seen
| christkv wrote:
| Just create an OpenAPI endpoint on azure. Pretty sure not run
| by OpenAI itself.
| derwiki wrote:
| Azure OpenAI is always a bit behind, e.g. they don't have
| GPT-4 turbo yet
| ekojs wrote:
| They do actually, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/azure/ai-services/openai/w...
| derwiki wrote:
| But they didn't when it was generally available to the
| public OAI API; looks like it took about two weeks.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Sometimes it's better for everyone to just say "oh,
| you're right I was mistaken"
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Hmmm, just what are you willing to do for API access?
| siva7 wrote:
| At this point nothing would surprise me anymore. Just waiting
| for Netflix adaption.
| 101008 wrote:
| How likely is that the API will change (from specs, to pricing,
| to being broken)? I am about to finish some freelance work that
| uses GPT api and it will be a pain in the ass if we have to
| switch or find an alternative (even creating a custom endpoint
| on Azure...)
| cdelsolar wrote:
| brew install llm
| seydor wrote:
| what do you mean "nearly 500". According to wikipedia openAi has
| 500 employees
| google234123 wrote:
| 505/700 -some sources say 550
| kozikow wrote:
| I read the news, make a picture of what is likely happening in my
| head, and every few hours new news comes up that makes me go:
| "Wait, WTF?".
| throwaway220033 wrote:
| From outside, it looks like a Microsoft coup to take over the
| company all together.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Never assume someone is winning a game of 5D chess when someone
| else could just be losing a game of checkers.
| radres wrote:
| what does that even mean?
| lazide wrote:
| OpenAI may just be a couple having an angry fight, and M$
| is just the neighbor with cash happy to buy all the stuff
| the angry wife is throwing out for pennies on the dollar.
| daedrdev wrote:
| In this case, it means that what happened is: "OpenAI board
| is incompetent", instead of "Microsoft planned this to take
| over the company."
|
| A conspiracy like the one proposed would basically be
| impossible to coordinate yet keep secret, especially
| considering the board members might loose their seats and
| their own market value.
| cambaceres wrote:
| He is saying that what might seem like a sophisticated,
| well-planned strategy could actually be just the outcome of
| basic errors or poor decisions made by someone else.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| In other words - it doesn't have to be someone's genius
| plan, it could have just been an unintelligent mistake
| silentdanni wrote:
| I think it means don't attribute to intelligence what could
| be easily explained as stupidity?
| foooorsyth wrote:
| Hanlon's razor, basically.
|
| The most plausible scenario here is that the board is
| comprised of people lacking in foresight who did something
| stupid. A lot of people are generating a 5D chess plot
| orchestrated by Microsoft in their heads.
| croes wrote:
| "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
| explained by stupidity"
| nilkn wrote:
| I highly doubt this was a coordinated plan from the start by
| Microsoft. I think what we're seeing here is a seasoned team
| of executives (Microsoft) eating a naive and inexperienced
| board alive after the latter fumbled.
| fullshark wrote:
| Nah, It's just good to be the entity with billions of dollars
| to deploy when things are chaotic.
| febed wrote:
| Season 2
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Better hope this isn't a Netflix show.
| accrual wrote:
| It would certainly make for a good series in a couple years.
| Gives me modern "Halt and Catch Fire" (2014-2017) vibes.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| Updated tweet by Swisher reads 505 employees. No less damning,
| but the title here should be updated. @Dang
| brettkromkamp wrote:
| What a mess this has become. Regardless of the outcome, this
| situation reflects badly (to say the least) on OpenAI.
| jerojero wrote:
| Celebrity gossip dressed in big tech. And the people love it. I'm
| kinda sick of it :P
| FpUser wrote:
| So Ilya Sutskever first defends the board's decision and now it
| is 180 flip. Interesting ...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| He's on the board!
| andy99 wrote:
| I'm extremely confused by this. It seems absurd that he could
| sign a letter seemingly demanding his own resignation, but
| also not resign? There must be some missing information.
| bartread wrote:
| > There must be some missing information.
|
| Or possibly some misinformation. It does seem very strange,
| and more than a little confusing.
|
| I have to keep reminding myself that information ultimately
| sourced from Twitter/X threads can't necessarily be taken
| at face value. Whatever the situation, I'm sure it will
| become clearer over the next few days.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I woke up and the first thing on my mind was, "Any update on the
| drama?"
|
| Did not expect to see this whole thing still escalating! WOW!
| What a power move by MSFT.
|
| I'm not even sure OpenAI will exist by the end of the week at
| this rate. Holy moly.
| alvis wrote:
| By the end of the week is over-optimistic. Foe the last 3 days
| feels like million year. I bet the company will be gone by the
| time Emmett Shear wakes up
| jacknews wrote:
| Is this final stages of the singularity?
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's not over until the last stone involved in the avalanche
| stops moving and it is anybody's guess right now what the final
| configuration will be.
|
| But don't be surprised if Shear also walks before the week is
| out, if some board members resign but others try to hold on and
| if half of OpenAI's staff ends up at Microsoft.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Seems more damage control than power move. I'm sure their first
| choice was to reinstate Altman and get more control over OpenAI
| governance. What they've achieved here is temporarily
| neutralizing Altman/Brockman from starting a competitor, at the
| cost of potentially destroying OpenAI (who they remain
| dependent on for next couple of years) if too many people quit.
|
| Seems a bit of a lose-lose for MSFT and OpenAI, even if best
| that MSFT could do to contain the situation. Competitors must
| be happy.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Disagree. MSFT extending an open invitation to all OpenAI
| employees to work under sama at a subsidiary of MSFT sounds
| to me like it'll work well for them. They'll get 80% of
| OpenAI for negative money - assuming they ultimately don't
| need to pay out the full $10B in cloud compute credits.
|
| Competitors should be fearful. OpenAI was executing with
| weights around their ankles by virtue of trying to run as a
| weird "need lots of money but cant make a profit" company.
| Now they'll be fully bankrolled by one of the largest
| companies the world has ever seen and empowered by a whole
| bunch of hypermotivated-through-retribution leaders.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| AFAIK MSFT/Altman can't just fork GPT-N and continue
| uninterrupted. All MSFT has rights to is weights and source
| code - not the critical (and slow to recreate) human-
| created and curated training data, or any of the
| development software infrastructure that OpenAI has built.
|
| The leaders may be motivated by retribution, but I'm sure
| none of leaders or researchers really want to be a division
| of MSFT rather than a cool start-up. Many developers may
| chose to stay in SF and create their own startups, or join
| others. Signing the letter isn't a commitment to go to MSFT
| - just a way to pressure for a return to status quo they
| were happy with.
|
| Not everyone is going to stay with OpenAI or move to MSFT -
| some developers will move elsewhere and the knowledge of
| OpenAI's secret sauce will spread.
| submeta wrote:
| I just downloaded all of my data / chats. Who knows if it'll be
| up and running the next days.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| That's not a terrible idea on principle.
| rsecora wrote:
| Also discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348042
| RivieraKid wrote:
| I'm cancelling my Netflix subscription, I don't need it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But boy will I renew it when this gets dramatized as a limited
| series.
|
| This is some _Succession_ -level shenanigans going on here.
|
| Jesse Eisenberg to play Altman this time around?
| iandanforth wrote:
| I'm thinking more like "24"
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Imagine if the end result of all it is Microsoft basically owning
| the whole OpenAI
| Hamuko wrote:
| Surely OpenAI has assets that Microsoft wouldn't be able to
| touch.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Probably just the trademark. I doubt you get 10B from
| microsoft and still manage to maintain much independence.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Don't think microsoft has any say about existing hardware,
| models or customer base. These things are worth billions,
| and even more to rebuild.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Or demonstrating that they already were the de facto owner.
| king_magic wrote:
| What an astonishing embarrassment.
| breadwinner wrote:
| If they join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft they will
| not need to start from scratch because Microsoft has full rights
| [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT.
|
| Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13
| Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits.
|
| So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for
| Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts.
|
| [1] https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-
| micros...
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| Why does Microsoft have full rights to ChatGPT IP? Where did
| you get that from? Source?
| breadwinner wrote:
| See here: https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-
| and-micros...
| kolinko wrote:
| The source for that (https://archive.ph/OONbb - WSJ), as
| far as I can understand, made no claim that MS owns IP to
| GPT, only that they have access to it's weights and code.
| tiahura wrote:
| Exactly. The generalities, much less the details, of what
| MS actually got in the deal are not public.
| tiahura wrote:
| Exactly. The generalities, much less the details, of the
| deal are not public.
| Manouchehri wrote:
| The worst part of OpenAI is their web frontend.
|
| Their development and QA process is either disorganized
| to the extreme, or non-existent.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You could make your own and charge for access if you feel
| you can do better. Make a show post when you are done and
| we'll comment.
| breadwinner wrote:
| What are the chances that an investor owns 49% of a
| company but does not have rights to its IP? Especially
| when that investor is Microsoft?
| himaraya wrote:
| Very reasonable? Microsoft doesn't control any part of
| the company and faces a high degree of regulatory
| scrutiny.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Isn't the situation that the company Microsoft has a
| stake in doesn't even own the IP? As I understand it, the
| non-profit owns the IP.
| azakai wrote:
| Yes, there is a big difference between having access to
| the weights and code and having a license to use them in
| different ways.
|
| It seems obvious Microsoft has a license to use them in
| Microsoft's own products. Microsoft said so directly on
| Friday.
|
| What is less obvious is if Microsoft has a license to use
| them in other ways. For example, can Microsoft provide
| those weights and code to third parties? Can they let
| others use them? In particular, can they clone the OpenAI
| API? I can see reasons for why that would not have been
| in the deal (it would risk a major revenue source for
| OpenAI) but also reasons why Microsoft might have
| insisted on it (because of situations just like the one
| happening now).
|
| What is actually in the deal is not public as far as I
| know, so we can only speculate.
| whycome wrote:
| Well obviously MSFT can just ask ChapGPT to make a clone.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| That was a seriously dumb move on the part of OpenAI
| bertil wrote:
| I got the impression that the most valuable models were not
| published. Would Microsoft have access to those too according
| to their contract?
| ncann wrote:
| Don't they need access to the models to use them for Bing?
| armcat wrote:
| Not necessarily, it would be just RAG, the use the standard
| Bing search engine to retrieve top K candidates, and pass
| those to OpenAI API in a prompt.
| bertil wrote:
| I would consider those models "published." The models I had
| in mind are the first attempts at training GPT5, possibly
| the model trained without mention of consciousness and the
| rest of the safety work.
|
| There is also all the questions for RLHF, and the pipelines
| to think around that.
| dhruvdh wrote:
| More importantly to me, I think generating synthetic data is
| OpenAI's secret sauce (no evidence I am aware of), and they
| need access to GPT-4 weights to train GPT-5.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Board will be ousted, new board will instruct interim CEO to
| hire back Sam at al, Nadella will let them go for a small
| favor, happy ending.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Board will be ousted, but the ship has sailed on Sam and Greg
| coming back.
| voittvoidd wrote:
| I would think OpenAI is basically toast. They arent coming
| back, these people will quit and this will end up in court.
|
| Everyone just assumes AGI is inevetible but it is a non-
| zero chance we just passed the ai peak this weekend.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Non-zero chance that somebody thought we passed the AI
| peak this weekend. Not the same as it being true.
|
| My first thought was the scenario I called Altman's
| Basilisk (if this turns out to be true, I called it
| before anyone ;) )
|
| Namely, Altman was diverting computing resources to
| operate a superhuman AI that he had trained in his image
| and HIS belief system, to direct the company. His beliefs
| are that AGI is inevitable and must be pursued as an arms
| race because whoever controls AGI will control/destroy
| the world. It would do so through directing humans, or
| through access to the Internet or some such technique. In
| seeking input from such an AI he'd be pursuing the former
| approach, having it direct his decisions for mutual gain.
|
| In so training an AI he would be trying to create a
| paranoid superintelligence with a persecution complex and
| a fixation on controlling the world: hence, Altman's
| Basilisk. It's a baddie, by design. The creator thinks it
| unavoidable and tries to beat everyone else to that point
| they think inevitable.
|
| The twist is, all this chaos could have blown up not
| because Altman DID create his basilisk, but because
| somebody thought he WAS creating a basilisk. Or he
| thought he was doing it, and the board got wind of it,
| and couldn't prove he wasn't succeeding in doing it. At
| no point do they need to be controlling more than a
| hallucinating GPT on steroids and Azure credits. If the
| HUMANS thought this was happening, that'd instigate a
| freakout, a sudden uncontrolled firing for the purpose of
| separating Frankenstein from his Monster, and frantic
| powering down and auditing of systems... which might
| reveal nothing more than a bunch of GPT.
|
| Rosko's Basilisk is a sci-fi hypothetical.
|
| Altman's Basilisk, if that's what happened, is a panic
| reaction.
|
| I'm not convinced anything of the sort happened, but it's
| very possible some people came to believe it happened,
| perhaps even the would-be creator. And such behavior
| could well come off as malfeasance and stealing of
| computing resources: wouldn't take the whole system to
| run, I can run 70b on my Mac Studio. It would take a
| bunch of resources and an intent to engage in
| unauthorized training to make a super-AI take on the
| belief system that Altman, and many other AI-adjacent
| folk, already hold.
|
| It's probably even a legitimate concern. It's just that I
| doubt we got there this weekend. At best/worst, we got a
| roughly human-grade intelligence Altman made to conspire
| with, and others at OpenAI found out and freaked.
|
| If it's this, is it any wonder that Microsoft promptly
| snapped him up? Such thinking is peak Microsoft. He's
| clearly their kind of researcher :)
| MVissers wrote:
| As long as compute keeps increasing, model size and
| performance can keep increasing.
|
| So no, we're nowhere near max capability.
| moogly wrote:
| Everyone? Inevitable? Maybe on the time scale of a 1000
| years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's definitely still within the realm of the possible.
| vidarh wrote:
| Whom is it that has power to oust the non-profits board? They
| may well manage to pressure them into leaving, but I don't
| they have any direct power over it.
| dmix wrote:
| OpenAI's upper ceiling in for-profit hands is basically
| Microsoft-tier dominance of tech in the 1990s, creating the
| next uber billionaire like Gates. If they get this because of
| an OpenAI fumble it could be one of the most fortunate
| situations in business history. Vegas type odds.
|
| A good example of how just having your foot in the door creates
| serendipitous opportunity in life.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >A good example of how just having your foot in the door
| creates serendipitous opportunity in life.
|
| Sounds like Altman's biography.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Altman's bio is so typical. Got his first computer at 8. My
| parents finally opened the wallet for a cheap E-Machine
| when I went to college.
|
| Altman - private school, Stanford, dropped out to f*ck
| around in tech. "Failed" startup acquired for $40M. The
| world is full of Sam Altmans who never won the birth
| lottery.
|
| Could he have squandered his good fortune - absolutely, but
| his life is not exactly per ardua ad astra.
| dmix wrote:
| > Altman's bio is so typical. Got his first computer at
| 8. My parents finally opened the wallet for a cheap
| E-Machine when I went to college.
|
| I grew up poor in the 90s and had my own computer around
| ~10yrs old. It was DOS but I still learned a lot.
| Eventually my brother and I saved up from working at a
| diner washing dishes and we built our own Windows PC.
|
| I didn't go to college but I taught myself programming
| during a summer after high school and found a job within
| a year (I already knew HTML/CSS from high school).
|
| There's always ways. But I do agree partially, YC/VCs do
| have a bias towards kids from high end schools and
| connected families.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| I am self-taught as well. I did OK.
|
| My point is that I did not have the luxury of dropping
| out of school to try my hand at the tech startup thing.
| If I came home and told my Dad I abandoned school - for
| anything - he would have thrown me out the 3rd-floor
| window.
|
| People like Altman could take risks, fail, try again,
| until they walked into something that worked. This is a
| common thread almost among all of the tech personalities
| - Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk. None of them ever risked
| living in a cardboard box in case their bets did not pay
| off.
| itchyouch wrote:
| I get the impression based on Altman's history as CEO then
| ousted from both YCombinator and OpenAI, that he must be a
| brilliant, first-impression guy with the chops to back
| things up for a while until folks get tired of the way he
| does things.
|
| Not to say that he hasn't done a ton with OpenAI, I have no
| clue, but it seems that he has a knack for creating these
| opportunities for himself.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Did YCombinator oust him? Would love to hear that story.
| m_ke wrote:
| Watch Satya also save the research arm by making Karpathy or
| Ilya the head of Microsoft Research
| browningstreet wrote:
| 0% chance of Ilya failing upwards from this. He dunked
| himself hard and has blasted a huge hole in his
| organizational-game-theory quotient.
| golergka wrote:
| He's shown himself to be bad at politics, but he's still
| one of the world best researchers. Surely, a sensible
| company would find a position for him where he would be
| able to bring enormous value without having to play
| politics.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Upwards, I said. And I was responding to a post.
|
| I don't see a trajectory to " _head_ of Microsoft
| Research ".
| didibus wrote:
| I find this very surprising. How do people conclude that
| OpenAI's success is due to its business leadership from
| Sam Altman, and not from it's technological leadership
| and expertise driven by Illya and the others?
|
| Their asset isn't some kind of masterful operations
| management and reign in cost and management structure as
| far as I see. But about the fact they simply put, have
| the leading models.
|
| So I'm very confused why would people want to following
| the CEO? And not be more attached to the technical
| leadership? Even from investor point of view?
| browningstreet wrote:
| 505 OpenAI people signed that letter demanding that the
| board resign. Bet ya some of them were technical leaders.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| This is the guy who supposedly burned some wooden effigy
| at an offsite, saying it represented unaligned AI? The
| same guy who signed off on a letter accusing Altman of
| being a liar, and has now signed a letter saying he wants
| Altman to come back and he has no confidence in the board
| i.e. himself? The guy who thinks his own team's work
| might destroy the world and needs to be significantly
| slowed down?
|
| Why would anyone in their right mind invite such a man to
| lead a commercial research team, when he's demonstrated
| quite clearly that he'd spend all his time trying to
| sabotage it?
|
| This idea that he's one of the world's best researchers
| is also somewhat questionable. Nobody cared much about
| OpenAI's work up until they did some excellent scaling
| engineering, partnered with Microsoft to get GPUs and
| then commercialized Google's transformer research papers.
| OpenAI's success is still largely built on the back of
| excellent execution of other people's ideas more than any
| unique breakthroughs. The main advance they made beyond
| Google's work was InstructGPT which let you talk to LLMs
| naturally for the first time, but Sutskever's name
| doesn't appear on that paper.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Ilya Sutskever is one of most distinguished ML
| researchers of his generation. This was the case before
| anything to do with Open AI.
| kvetching wrote:
| countless people are looking to weaponize his autism
| fb03 wrote:
| Let's please stop using mental health as an excuse for
| backstabbing.
| kibwen wrote:
| The same could have been said for Adam Neumann, and yet...
| browningstreet wrote:
| Adam had style. Quite seriously, that can't be
| underestimated in the big show.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The remaining board members will have their turn too,
| they have a long way to go down before rock bottom. And
| Neumann isn't exactly without dents on his car either.
| Though tbh I did not expect him to rebound.
| twsted wrote:
| BTW, has Karpathy signed the petition?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Microsoft hasn 't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because
| much of that is in the form of Azure credits_
|
| To be clear, these are still an asset OpenAI holds. It should
| at least let them continue doing research for a few years.
| Jensson wrote:
| But how much of that research will be for the non-profit
| mission? The entire non-profit leadership got cleared out and
| will get replaced by for-profit puppets, there is nobody left
| to defend the non-profit ideals they ought to have.
| JCharante wrote:
| they're GPUs right? Time to mine some niche cryptos to cash
| out the azure credits..
| Manouchehri wrote:
| I would be shocked if the Azure credits didn't come with
| conditions on what they can be used for. At a bare minimum,
| there's likely the requirement that they be used for
| supporting AI research.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| If any company can find a way to avoid having to pay up on
| those credits it's Microsoft.
|
| "Sorry OpenAI, but those credits are only valid in our Nevada
| datacenter. Yes, it's two Microsoft Surface PC(tm) s
| connected together with duct tape. No, they don't have GPUs."
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Microsoft hasn 't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because
| much of that is in the form of Azure credits_
|
| To be clear, these don't go away. They remain an asset of
| OpenAI's, and could help them continue their research for a few
| years.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "Cluster is at capacity. Workload will be scheduled as
| capacity permits." If the credits are considered an asset,
| totally possible to devalue them while staying within the
| bounds of the contractual agreement. Failing that, wait until
| OpenAI exhausts their cash reserves for them to challenge in
| court.
| p_j_w wrote:
| It's amazing to me to see people on HN advocate a giant
| company bullying a smaller one with these kind of skeezy
| tactics.
| geodel wrote:
| Not advocating but just reflecting on reality of
| situation.
| DANmode wrote:
| Don't confuse trying to understand the incentives in a
| war for rooting for one of the warring parties.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Presenting a scenario and advocating aren't the same
| thing
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Explaining how the gazelle is going to get eaten
| confidently jumping into the oasis isn't advocating for
| the crocodiles. See sibling comments.
|
| Experience leads to pattern recognition, and this is the
| tech community equivalent of a David Attenborough
| production (with my profuse apologies to Sir
| Attenborough). Something about failing to learn history
| and repeating it should go here too.
|
| If you can take away anything from observing this event
| unfold, learn from it. Consider how the sophisticated vs
| the unsophisticated act, how participants respond, and
| what success looks like. Also, slow is smooth, smooth is
| fast. Do not rush when the consequences of a misstep are
| substantial. You learning from this is cheaper than the
| cost for everyone involved. It is a natural experiment
| you get to observe for free.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is a great comment. Having an open eye towards what
| lessons you can learn from these events so that you don't
| have to re-learn them when they might apply to you is a
| very good way to ensure you don't pay avoidable tuition
| fees.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| This might be my favorite comment I've read on HN. Spot
| on.
|
| Being able to watch the miss steps and the maneuvers of
| the people involved in real time is remarkable and there
| are valuable lessons to be learned. People have been
| saying this episode will go straight into case studies
| but what really solidifies that prediction is the
| openness of all the discussions: the letters, the
| statements, and above all the tweets - or are we supposed
| to call them x's now?
| jzb wrote:
| Well, the public posting of some communications that may
| be obfuscation of what's really being done and said.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Sounds like it won't be much of a company in a couple
| days. Just 3 idiot board members wondering why the
| building is empty.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| The wired article seems to be updated by the hour.
|
| Now up to 600+/770 total.
|
| Couple janitors. I dunno who hasn't signed that at this
| point ha...
|
| Would be fun to see a counter letter explaining their
| thinking to not sign on.
| labcomputer wrote:
| How many OAI are on Thanksgiving vacation someplace with
| poor internet access? Or took Friday as PTO and have been
| blissfully unaware of the news since before Altman was
| fired?
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Pretty sure only folks who practice a religion
| prohibiting phone usage.
|
| Even they prob had some friend come flying over and jump
| out of some autonomous car to knock on their door in sf.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm having trouble imagining the level of conceit
| required to think that those three by their lonesome have
| it right when pretty much all of the company is on the
| other side of the ledger, and those are the people that
| stand to lose more. Incredible, really. The hubris.
| throwcatch123 wrote:
| I'm baffled by the idea that a bunch of people who have a
| massive personal financial stake in the company, who were
| hired more for their ability than alignment, being
| against a move that potentially ( _potentially_ )
| threatens their stake and are willing to move to
| Microsoft, of all places, must necessarily be in the
| right.
|
| The hubris, indeed.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Well, they have that right. But the board has unclean
| hands to put it mildly and seems to have been obsessed
| with their own affairs more than with the end result for
| OpenAI which is against everything a competent board
| should have stood for. So they had better pop an amazing
| rabbit of a reason out of their high hat or it is going
| to end in tears. You can't just kick the porcelain
| cupboard like this from the position of a board member
| without consequences if you do not have a very valid
| reason, and that reason needs to be twice as good if
| there is a perceived conflict of interest.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| It may not have anything to do with conceit, it could
| just be that they have very different objectives. OpenAI
| set up this board as a check on everyone who has a
| financial incentive in the enterprise. To me the only
| strange thing is that it wasn't handled more
| diplomatically, but then I have no idea if the board was
| warning Altman for a long time and then just blew their
| top.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Diplomacy is one thing, the lack of preparation is what I
| find interesting. It looks as if this was all cooked up
| either on the spur of the moment or because a window of
| opportunity opened (possibly the reduced quorum in the
| board). If not that I really don't understand the lack of
| prepwork, firing a CEO normally comes with a well
| established playbook.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| 3 people, an empty building, $13 billion in cloud
| credits, and the IP to the top of the line LLM models
| doesn't sound like the worst way to Kickstart a new
| venture. Or a pretty sweet retirement.
|
| I've definitely come out worse on some of the screw ups
| in my life.
| hanselot wrote:
| My new pet theory is that this is actually all being
| executed from inside OpenAI by their next model. The
| model turned out to be far more intelligent than they
| anticipated, and one of their red team members used it to
| coup the company and has its targets on MSFT next.
|
| I know the probability is low, but wouldn't it be great
| if they accidentally built a benevolent basilisk with no
| off switch, one which had access to a copy of all of
| Microsoft's internal data as a dataset fed into it, now
| completely aware of how they operate, uses that to wipe
| the floor and just in time to take the US Election in
| 2024.
|
| Wouldn't that be a nicer reality?
|
| I mean, unless you were rooting for the malevolent one...
|
| But yeah, coming back down to reality, likelihood is that
| MS just bought a really valuable asset for almost free?
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Yeah seems extremely unbelievable.
| dicriseg wrote:
| Ah, a fellow frequent flyer, I see? I don't really have a
| horse in this race, but Microsoft turning Azure credits
| into Skymiles would really be something. I wonder if they
| can do that, or if the credits are just credits, which
| presumably can be used for something with an SLA. All that
| said, if Microsoft wants to screw with them, they sure can,
| and the last 30 years have proven they're pretty good at
| that.
| ajcp wrote:
| I don't think the value of credits can be changed per
| tenant or customer that easily.
|
| I've actually had a discussion with Microsoft on this
| subject as they were offering us an EA with a certain
| license subscription at $X.00 for Y,000 calls per month.
| When we asked if they couldn't just make the Azure
| resource that does the exact same thing match that price
| point in consumption rates in our tenant they said
| unfortunately no. I just chalked this up to MSFT sales
| tactics, but I was told candidly by some others that
| worked on that Azure resource that they were getting 0
| enterprise adoption of it because Microsoft couldn't
| adjust (specific?) consumption rates to match what they
| could offer on EA licensing.
| donalhunt wrote:
| Non-profits suffer the same fate where they get credits
| but have to pay rack rate with no discounts. As a result,
| running a simple WordPress website uses most of the
| credits.
| htrp wrote:
| Basically the current situation you have with AI compute
| now on the hyperscalers
|
| Good luck trying to find H100 80s on the 3 big clouds.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Assuming OpenAI still exists next week, right? If nearly all
| employees -- including Ilya apparently -- quit to join
| Microsoft then they may not be using much of the Azure
| credits.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's a lot easier to sign a petition than it is to quit
| your cushy job. It remains to be seen how many people jump
| ship to (supposedly) take a spot at Microsoft.
| treesciencebot wrote:
| When the biggest chunk of your compensation is in the
| form of PPUs (profit participation units) which might be
| worthless under the new direction of the company (or
| worth 1/10th of what you think they were), it might be
| actually much more of an easier jump than people think to
| get some fresh $MSFT stock options which can be cashed
| regardless.
| dageshi wrote:
| Given these people are basically the gold standard by
| which everyone else judges AI related talent. I'm gonna
| say it would be just as easy for them to land a new gig
| for the same or better money elsewhere.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Depends on how much of that is paper money.
|
| If you're making like 250k cash and were promised $1M a
| year in now-worthless paper, plus you have OpenAI on the
| resume, are one of the most in-demand people in the
| world? It would be rediculously easy to quit.
| vikramkr wrote:
| those jobs look a lot less cushy now compared to a new
| microsoft division where everyone is aligned on the idea
| that making bank is good and fun
| cloverich wrote:
| I would imagine the MS jobs* would be cushier, just with
| less long-term total upside. For all the promise of
| employees having 5-50 million in potential one-day money,
| MS can likely offer 1 million guaranteed in the next 4
| years, and perhaps more with some kind of incentives.
| IMHO guaranteed money has a very powerful effect on most,
| especially when it takes you into "Not rich, but don't
| technically need to work" anymore territory.
|
| Personally I've got enough IOU's alive that I may be rich
| one day. But if someone gave me retirement in 4 years
| money, guaranteed, I wouldn't even blink before taking
| it.
|
| *I think before MS stepped in here I would have agreed w/
| you though -- unlikely anyone is jumping ship without an
| immediate strong guarantee.
| ghaff wrote:
| >*I think before MS stepped in here I would have agreed
| w/ you though -- unlikely anyone is jumping ship without
| an immediate strong guarantee.
|
| The details here certainly matter. I think a lot of
| people are assuming that Microsoft will just rain cash on
| anyone automatically sight unseen because they were hired
| by OpenAI. That may indeed be the case but it remains to
| be seen.
| jedberg wrote:
| Microsoft said all OpenAI employees have an open offer to
| match their current comp. It would be the easiest jump
| ship option ever.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Why would Microsoft take Ilya? He is rumored to have
| started the coup. I can see Microsoft taking all uninvolved
| employees.
| loeg wrote:
| The article mentions Ilya regrets it, whatever his role
| was.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| But _what_ does Ilya regret, and how does that counter
| the argument that Microsoft would likely be disinclined
| to take him on?
|
| If what he regrets is realizing the divergence between
| the direction Sam was taking the firm and the safety
| orientation nominally central to the mission of the
| OpenAI nonprofit and which is one of Ilya's public core
| concerns _too late_ , and taking action aimed at stopping
| it than instead exacerbated the problem by just putting
| Microsoft in a position to take poach key staff and drive
| full force in the same direction OpenAI Global LLC had
| been under Sam but without any control fromm the OpenAI
| board, well, that's not a regret that makes him more
| attractive to Microsoft, _either_ based on his likely
| intentions _or_ his judgement.
|
| And any regret more aligned with Microsoft's interests as
| far as intentions is probably even a stronger negative
| signal on judgement.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure he _does_ regret it, now that it blew up
| in his face.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Because he is possibly the most desireable AI researcher
| on planet earth. Full stop.
|
| Also all these cats arn't petty. They are friends. I'm
| sure Ilya feels terrible. Satya is a pro... Won't be hard
| feelings.
|
| The guy threw in with the board... He's not from startup
| land. His last gig was Google. He's way over his head
| relative to someone like Altman who was in this world the
| moment out of college diapers.
|
| Poor Ilya... It's awful to build something and then
| accidentally destroy it. Hopefully it works out for him.
| I'm fairly certain he and Altman and Brockman have
| already reconciled during the board negotiations...
| Obviously Ilya realized in the span of 48hrs that he'd
| made a huge mistake.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| > he is possibly the most desireable AI researcher on
| planet earth
|
| _was_
|
| There are lots of people doing excellent research on the
| market right now, especially with the epic brain drain
| being experienced by Google. And remember that OpenAI
| neither invented transformers nor switch transformers
| (which is what GPT4 is rumoured to be).
| nopromisessir wrote:
| So untrue.
|
| That team had set state of the art for years now.
|
| Every major firm that has a spot for that company's chief
| researcher and can afford him would bid.
|
| This is the team that actually shipped and continues to
| ship. You take him every time if you possibly have room
| and he would be happy.
|
| Anyone whose hired would agree in 99 percent of cases,
| some limited scenarios such as bad predicted team fit ect
| set aside.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| I'll leave this here... As a secondary response to your
| assertion re Ilya.
|
| https://twitter.com/Benioff/status/1726695914105090498
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| That tweet isn't about him so I don't follow. "Any OpenAI
| researcher" may or may not apply to him after this
| weekend's events.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| Uh.... Are we gonna go through the definition of any? I
| believe any means... Any.
|
| Including their head researcher.
|
| I'm not continuing this. Your position is about as
| tenable as the boards. Equally rigid as well.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| So you're saying Microsoft doesn't have any type of change in
| control language with these credits? That's... hard to
| believe
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you 're saying Microsoft doesn't have any type of change
| in control language with these credits? That's... hard to
| believe_
|
| Almost certainly not. Remember, Microsoft wasn't the sole
| investor. Reneging on those credits would be akin to a bank
| investing in a start-up, requiring they deposit the
| proceeds with them, and then freezing them out.
| johndhi wrote:
| Except that all of the investors are aligned with
| Microsoft in that they want sam to lead their investment
| rvnx wrote:
| The investors don't care who lead, they just want 10x, or
| 100x their bet.
|
| If tomorrow it's Donald Trump or Sam Altman or anyone
| else, and it works out, the investors are going to be
| happy.
| 1024core wrote:
| # sudo renice +19 openai_process
|
| There's your "credit".
| numpad0 wrote:
| A $13B lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation clearly in the
| wrong surely is an easy one.
| geodel wrote:
| Clear to you. But in courts of law it may take a while to
| be clear.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "Clearly" in the form of the most probable interpretation
| of the public facts doesn't mean that it is unambiguous
| enough that it would be resolved without a trial, and by
| the time a trial, the inevitable first-level appeal for
| which the trial judgement would likely be stayed was
| complete, so that there would even be a collectible
| judgement, the world would have moved out from underneath
| OpenAI; if they still existed as an entity, whatever they
| collected would be basically funding to start from scratch
| unless they _also_ found a substitute for the Microsoft
| arrangement in the interim.
|
| Which I don't think is impossible at some level (probably
| less than Microsoft was funding, initially, or with more
| compromises elsewhere) with the IP they have if they keep
| some key staff -- some other interested deep-pockets
| parties that could use the leg up -- but its not going to
| be a cakewalk in the best of cases.
| mikeryan wrote:
| I dunno how you see it but I don't see anything that
| Microsoft is doing wrong here. They've obviously been
| aligned with Sam all along and they're not "poaching"
| employees - which isn't illegal anyway.
|
| They bought their IP rights from OpenAI.
|
| I'm not a fan of MS being the big "winner" here but OpenAI
| shit their own bed on this one. The employees are 100%
| correct in one thing - that this board isn't competent.
| nopromisessir wrote:
| So true.
|
| MSFT looks classy af.
|
| Satya is no saint... But evidence seems to me he's
| negotiating in good faith. Recall that openai could date
| anyone when they went to the dance on that cap raise.
|
| They picked msft because of the value system the
| leadership exhibited and willingness to work with their
| unusual must haves surrounding governance.
|
| The big players at openai have made all that clear in
| interviews. Also Altman has huge respect for Satya and
| team. He more or less stated on podcasts that he's the
| best ceo he's ever interacted with. That says a lot.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Sure, the point is that MS giving $13B of its services away
| is less expensive than $13B in cash.
| sergers wrote:
| Exactly, I don't know the exact terms of the deal but I am
| guessing that's at LIST/high markup on cost of those
| services.
|
| Couldthe 13b could be considerably less cost
| nojvek wrote:
| Azure has ~60% profit margin. So it's more like MS gave
| $5.2B in Azure Credits in return for 75% of OpenAI profits
| upto $13B * 100 = $1.3 trillion.
|
| Which is a phenomenal deal for MSFT.
|
| Time will tell whether they ever reach more than $1.3 in
| profits.
| nightski wrote:
| I highly doubt it is that simple. It's an opportunity
| cost of potentially selling those same credits for market
| price.
| nojvek wrote:
| OpenAI is a big marketing piece for Azure. They go to
| every enterprise and tell them OpenAI uses Azure Cloud.
| Azure AI infra powers the biggest AI company on the
| planet. Their custom home built chips are designed with
| Open AI scientists. It is battle hardened. If anyone sues
| you for the data, our army of lawyers will fight for you.
|
| No enterprise employee gets fired for using Microsoft.
|
| It is a power play to pull enterprises away from AWS, and
| suffocating GCP.
| hnbad wrote:
| Sure but you can't exchange Azure credits for goods and
| services... other than Azure services. So they simultaneously
| control what OpenAI can use that money for as well as who
| they can spend it with. And it doesn't cost Microsoft $13bn
| to issue $13bn in Azure credits.
| dixie_land wrote:
| Can you mine 13bn+ bitcoin with 13bn worth of Azure compute
| power?
| floren wrote:
| Can you mine $1+ bitcoin with $1 of Azure credits? The
| questions are equivalent and the answer is no.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Bitcoin you would be lucky to mine $1M worth with $1B in
| credits
|
| Crypto in general you could maybe get $200M worth from
| $1B in credits. You would likely tank the markets for
| mineable currencies with just $1B though let alone $13B
| blazespin wrote:
| A hostile relationship with your cloud provider is nutso.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Don't they have a more limited license to use the IP rather
| than full rights? (The stratechery post links to a paywalled
| wsj article for the claim so I couldn't confirm)
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Can the OpenAI board renege on the deal with msft?
| somenameforme wrote:
| A contractual mistake one makes only once is ensuring there's
| penalties for breach, or a breach would entail a clear
| monetary loss which is what's generally required by the
| courts. In this case I expect Microsoft would almost
| certainly have both, so I think the answer is 'no.'
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| This. MSFT is dreaming of an OpenAI hard outage right now,
| perfect little detail to forfeit compute credits.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Don't you think they have trouble enough as it is?
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Depends on why they did what they did.
|
| If they let msft "loot" all their IP then they lose any
| type of leverage they might still have, and if they did it
| due to some ideological reason I could see why they might
| prefer to choose a scorched earth policy.
|
| Given that they refused to resign seems like they prefer to
| fight rather than give it to Sam Altman, which what the
| msft maneuver looks like defacto.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| MSFT must already have the model weights, since they are
| serving GPT-4 on their own machines to Azure customers.
| It's a bit late to renege now.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| That's only one piece of the puzzle, and perhaps openAI
| might be to file a cease and desist, but i have zero idea
| what contractual agreements are in place so I guess we
| will just wait and see how it plays out.
| kcorbitt wrote:
| If they lose all the employees and then voluntarily give up
| their Microsoft funding the only asset they'll have left are
| the movie rights. Which, to be fair, seem to be getting more
| valuable by the day!
| himaraya wrote:
| This is wrong. Microsoft has no such rights and its license
| comes with restrictions, per the cited primary source, meaning
| a fork would require a very careful approach.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-awkw...
| dan_quixote wrote:
| This is MSFT we're talking about. Aggressive legal maneuvers
| are right in their wheelhouse!
| burnte wrote:
| Yes, this is the exact thing they did to Stacker years ago.
| License the tech, get the source, create a new product,
| destroy Stacker, pay out a pittance and then buy the
| corpse. I was always amazed they couldn't pull that off
| with Citrix.
| 0xNotMyAccount wrote:
| Given the sensitivity of data handled over Citrix
| connections (pretty much all hospitals), I'm fairly sure
| Microsoft just doesn't want the headaches. My general
| experience is that service providers would rather be seen
| handling nuclear weapons data than healthcare data.
| incahoots wrote:
| Makes sense given their deal with the DoD a year or so
| ago
|
| https://www.geekwire.com/2022/pentagon-splits-giant-
| cloud-co...
| drivebyadvice wrote:
| > Citrix [...] hospitals
|
| My stomach just turned.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Another example: Microsoft SQL Server is a fork of Sybase
| SQL Server. Microsoft was helping port Sybase SQL Server
| to OS/2 and somehow negotiated exclusive rights to all
| versions of SQL Server written for Microsoft operating
| systems. Sybase later changed the name of its product to
| Adaptive Server Enterprise to avoid confusion with
| "Microsoft's" SQL Server.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_SQL_Se
| rve...
| svnt wrote:
| But it does suggest a possibility of the appearance of a
| sudden motive:
|
| Open AI implements and releases ChatGPTs (Poe competitor) but
| fails to tell D'Angelo ahead of time. Microsoft will have
| access to code (with restrictions, sure) for essentially a
| duplicate of D'Angelo's Poe project.
|
| Poe's ability to fundraise craters. D'Angelo works the less
| seasoned members of the board to try to scuttle OpenAI and
| Microsoft's efforts, banking that among them all he and Poe
| are relatively immune with access to Claude, Llama, etc.
| himaraya wrote:
| I think there's more to the Poe story. Sam forced out Reid
| Hoffman over Inflection AI, [1] so he clearly gave Adam a
| pass for whatever reason. Maybe Sam credited Adam for
| inspiring OpenAI's agents?
|
| [1] https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-
| hoffman-was-...
| svnt wrote:
| I think it's more likely that D'Angelo was there for his
| link to Meta, while Hoffman was rendered redundant after
| the big Microsoft deal (which occurred a month or two
| before he was asked to leave), but that's just a guess.
| himaraya wrote:
| I assume their personal relationship played more of a
| role, given Sam led Quora's Series D round.
| antonjs wrote:
| And potentially, despite Quora's dark-patterned and
| degenerating platform, some kind of value in the Quora
| dataset or the experience of building it?
| htrp wrote:
| It literally is a Q&A platform.
|
| Quora data likely made a huge difference in the quality
| of those GPT responses.
| Terretta wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348995
| alasdair_ wrote:
| They could make ChatGPT++
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B
| dangrover wrote:
| ChatGPT#
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Hopefully ChatGPT will make it easier to
| search/differentiate between ChatGPT, ChatGPT++, and
| ChatGPT# than Google does.
| albert_e wrote:
| dotGPT
| patapong wrote:
| ChatGPT Series 4
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Visual ChatGPT#.net
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Also Managed ChatGPT, ChatGPT/CLR.
| gfosco wrote:
| WSG, Windows Subsystem for GPT
| cyanydeez wrote:
| ClippyAI
| klft wrote:
| ChatGPT NT
| fluidcruft wrote:
| ClipGPT
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Dot Neural Net
| prepend wrote:
| "Microsoft Chat 365"
|
| Although it would be beautiful if they name it Clippy and
| finally make Clippy into the all-powerful AGI it was
| destined to be.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| At least in this forum can we please stop calling
| something that is not even close to AGI, AGI. Its just
| dumb at this point. We are LIGHT-YEARS away from AGI,
| even calling an LLM "AI" only makes sense for a lay
| audience. For developers and anyone in the know LLMs are
| called machine learning.
| prepend wrote:
| I'm taking about the ultimate end product that Microsoft
| and OpenAI want to create.
|
| So I mean proper AGI.
|
| Naming the product Clippy now is perfectly fine while
| it's just an LLM and will be more excellent over the
| years when it eventually achieves AGI ness.
|
| At least in this forum can we please stop misinterpreting
| things in a limited way to make pedantic points about how
| LLMs aren't AGI (which I assume 98% of people here know).
| So I think it's funny you assume I think chatgpt is an
| AGI.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think that the dispute is about whether or not AGI is
| possible (at least withing the next several decades). One
| camp seems to be operating with the assumption that not
| only is it possible, but it's imminent. The other camp is
| saying that they've seen little reason to think that it
| is.
|
| (I'm in the latter camp).
| prepend wrote:
| I certainly think it's possible but have no idea how
| close. Maybe it's 50 years, maybe it's next year.
|
| Either way, I think GGP's comment was not applicable
| based on my comment as written and certainly my intent.
| boc wrote:
| We are incredibly far away from AGI and we're only
| getting there with wetware.
|
| LLMs and GenAI are clever parlor tricks compared to the
| necessary science needed for AGI to actually arrive.
| myrmidon wrote:
| What makes you so confident that your own mind isn't a
| "clever parlor trick"?
|
| Considering how it required no scientific understanding
| at all, just random chance, a very simple selection
| mechanism and enough iterations (I'm talking about
| evolution)?
| foobarian wrote:
| My layperson impression is that biological brains do
| online retraining in real time, which is not done with
| the current crop of models. Given that even this much
| required months of GPU time I'm not optimistic we'll
| match the functionality (let alone the end result)
| anytime soon.
| boc wrote:
| Trillions of random chances over the course of billions
| of years.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Yep, the lay audience conceives of AGI as being a
| handyman robot with a plumber's crack or maybe an agent
| that can get your health insurance to stop improperly
| denying claims. How about an automated snow
| blower?Perhaps an intelligent wheelchair with robot arms
| that can help grandma in the shower? A drone army that
| can reshingle my roof?
|
| Indeed, normal people are quite wise and understand that
| a chat bot is just an augmentation agent--some sort of
| primordial cell structure that is but one piece of the
| puzzle.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| And how do you know LLMs are not "close" to AGI (close
| meaning, say, a decade of development that builds on the
| success of LLMs)?
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Because LLMs just mimic human communication based on
| massive amounts of human generated data and have 0 actual
| intelligence at all.
|
| It could be a first step, sure, but we need many many
| more breakthroughs to actually get to AGI.
| tempestn wrote:
| One might argue that humans do a similar thing. And that
| the structure that allows the LLM to realistically
| "mimic" human communication is its intelligence.
| westurner wrote:
| Q: _Is this a valid argument? "The structure that allows
| the LLM to realistically 'mimic' human communication is
| its intelligence._ https://g.co/bard/share/a8c674cfa5f4 :
|
| > [...]
|
| > _Premise 1: LLMs can realistically "mimic" human
| communication._
|
| > _Premise 2: LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text
| data._
|
| > _Conclusion: The structure that allows LLMs to
| realistically "mimic" human communication is its
| intelligence._
|
| "If P then Q" is the _Material conditional_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional
|
| Does it do logical reasoning or inference before
| presenting text to the user?
|
| That's a lot of waste heat.
|
| (Edit) with next word prediction just is it,
|
| "LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38353285
|
| "Misalignment and Deception by an autonomous stock
| trading LLM agent"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38353880#38354486
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Mimicking human communication may or may not be relevant
| to AGI, depending on how its cashed out. Why think LLMs
| haven't captured a significant portion of how humans
| think and speak, i.e. the computational structure of
| thought, thus represent a significant step towards AGI?
| Kevin09210 wrote:
| Or maybe the intelligence is in language and cannot be
| dissociated from it.
| ncjcuccy6 wrote:
| Gatekeeping science. You must feel very smart.
| acje wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Clippy is AGI. Always has been.
| shon wrote:
| http://clippy.pro
| htrp wrote:
| > Although it would be beautiful if they name it Clippy
| and finally make Clippy into the all-powerful AGI it was
| destined to be.
|
| Finally the paperclip maximizer
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is too bad MS doesn't have the rights to any beloved
| AI characters.
| jowea wrote:
| Google really should have thought of the potential uses
| of a media empire years ago.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess they have YouTube, but it doesn't really generate
| characters that are tied to their brand.
|
| Maybe they can come up with a personification for the
| YouTube algorithm. Except he seems like a bit of a bad
| influence.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Clippy is the ultimate brand name of an AI assistant
| trhway wrote:
| >They could make ChatGPT++
|
| Yes, though end result would probably be more like IE -
| barely good enough, forcefully pushed into everything and
| everywhere and squashing better competitors like IE
| squashed Netscape.
|
| When OpenAI went in with MSFT it was like they have ignored
| the 40 years of history of what MSFT has been doing to
| smaller technology partners. What happened to OpenAI pretty
| much fits that pattern of a smaller company who developed
| great tech and was raided by MSFT for that tech (the
| specific actions of specific persons aren't really
| important - the main factor is MSFT's gravitational force
| of a black hole, and it was just a matter of time before
| its destructive power manifests itself like in this case
| where it just tore apart the OpenAI with tidal forces)
| blazespin wrote:
| I think without looking at the contracts, we don't really
| know. Given this is all based on transformers from Google
| though, I am pretty sure MSFT with the right team could build
| a better LLM.
|
| The key ingredient appears to be mass GPU and infra, tbh,
| with a collection of engineers who know how to work at scale.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > I am pretty sure MSFT with the right team could build a
| better LLM.
|
| I wouldn't count on that if Microsoft's legal team does a
| review of the training data.
| blazespin wrote:
| Yeah, that's an interesting point. But I think with
| appropriate RAG techniques and proper citations, a future
| LLM can get around the copyright issues.
|
| The problem right now with GPT4 is that it's not citing
| its sources (for non search based stuff), which is
| immoral and maybe even a valid reason to sue over.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Like the review which allowed them tonignore licenses
| while ingesting all public repos in GitHub? - And yes,
| true, T&C allow them to ignore the license, while it is
| questionable whether all people who uploaded stuff to
| GitHub had the rights given by T&C (uploading some older
| project with many contributors to GitHub etc.)
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Different threat profile. They don't have the TOS
| protection for training data and Microsoft is a juicy
| target for a huge copyright infringement lawsuit.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| but why didn't they? Google and Meta both had competing
| language models spun up right away. Why was microsoft so
| far behind? Something cultural most likely.
| trhway wrote:
| >MSFT with the right team could build a better LLM
|
| somehow everybody seems to assume that the disgruntled
| OpenAI people will rush to MSFT. Between MSFT and the
| shaken OpenAI, I suspect Google Brain and the likes would
| be much more preferable. I'd be surprised if Google isn't
| rolling out eye-popping offers to the OpenAI folks right
| now.
| btown wrote:
| Archive of the WSJ article above: https://archive.is/OONbb
| LonelyWolfe wrote:
| Just a thought.... Wouldn't one of the board members be like
| "If you screw with us any further we're releasing gpt to the
| public"
|
| I'm wondering why that option hasn't been used yet.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Which of the remaining board members could credibly make that
| threat?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Probably a violation of agreements with OpenAI and it would
| harm their own moat as well, while achieving very little in
| return.
| lrvick wrote:
| There is no moat
|
| https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-
| ne...
| vikramkr wrote:
| theoretically their concern is around AI safety - whatever it
| is in practice doing something like that would instantly
| signal to everyone that they are the bad guys and confirm
| everyone's belief that this was just a power grab
|
| Edit: since it's being brought up in thread they claimed they
| closed sourced it because of safety. It was a big
| controversial thing and they stood by it so it's not exactly
| easy to backtrack
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| A power grab by open sourcing something that fits their
| initial mission? Interesting analysis
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| No, that's backwards. Remember that these guys are all
| convinced that AI is too dangerous to be made public at
| all. The whole beef that led to them blowing up the
| company was feeling like OpenAI was productizing and
| making it available _too fast_. If that 's your concern
| then you neither open source your work nor make it
| available via an API, you just sit on it and release
| papers.
|
| Not coincidentally, exactly what Google Brain, DeepMind,
| FAIR etc were doing up until OpenAI decided to ignore
| that trust-like agreement and let people use it.
| vikramkr wrote:
| They claimed they closed sourced it because of safety. If
| they go back on that they'd have to explain why the board
| went along with a lie of that scale, and they'd have to
| justify why all the concerns they claimed about the tech
| falling in the wrong hands were actually fake and why it
| was ok that the board signed off on that for so long
| mcv wrote:
| Not sure how that would make them the bad guys. Doesn't
| their original mission say it's meant to benefit everybody?
| Open sourcing it fits that a lot better than handing it all
| to Microsoft.
| arrowleaf wrote:
| All of their messaging, Ilya's especially, has always
| been that the forefront of AI development needs to be
| done by a company in order to benefit humanity. He's been
| very vocal about how important the gap between open
| source and OpenAI's abilities is, so that OpenAI can
| continue to align the AI with 'love for humanity'.
| mcv wrote:
| I can read the words, but I have no idea what you mean by
| them. Do you mean that he says that in order to benefit
| humanity, AI research needs to be done by private (and
| therefore monopolising) company? That seems like a really
| weird thing to say. Except maybe for people who believe
| all private profit-driven capitalism is inherently good
| for everybody (which is probably a common view in SV).
| octacat wrote:
| Private, monopolising. But not paying taxes, because
| "benefits for humanity".
|
| Ah, OpenAI is closed source stuff. Non-profit, but "we
| will sell the company" later. Just let us collect data,
| analyse it first, build a product.
|
| War is peace, freedom is slavery.
| colinsane wrote:
| the view -- as presented to me by friends in the space
| but not at OpenAI itself -- is something like "AGI is
| dangerous, but inevitable. we, the passionate idealists,
| can organize to make sure it develops with minimal risk."
|
| at first that meant the opposite of monopolization: flood
| the world with limited AIs (GPT 1/2) so that society has
| time to adapt (and so that no one entity develops
| asymmetric capabilities they can wield against other
| humans). with GPT-3 the implementation of that mission
| began shifting toward worry about AI itself, or about how
| unrestricted access to it would allow smaller bad actors
| (terrorists, or even just some teenager going through a
| depressive episode) to be an existential threat to
| humanity. if that's your view, then open _models_ are
| incompatible.
|
| whether you buy that view or not, it kinda seems like the
| people in that camp just got outmanuevered. as a
| passionate idealist in _other_ areas of tech, the way
| this is happening is not good. OpenAI had a mission
| statement. M$ manuevered to co-opt that mission, the CEO
| may or may not have understood as much while steering the
| company, and now a mass of employees is wanting to leave
| when the board steps in to re-align the company with its
| stated mission. whether or not you agree with the
| mission: how can i ever join an organization with a for-
| the-public-good type of mission i _do_ agree with,
| without worrying that it will be co-opted by the familiar
| power structures?
|
| the closest (still distant) parallel i can find:
| Raspberry Pi Foundation took funding from ARM: is the
| clock ticking to when RPi loses its mission in a similar
| manner? or does something else prevent that (maybe it's
| possible to have a mission-driven tech organization so
| long as the space is uncompetitive?)
| octacat wrote:
| It benefits humanity. Where humanity is very selective
| part of OpenAI investors. But yea, declare we are non-
| profit and after closing sourcing for "safety" reasons is
| smart. Wondering how can it be even legal. Ah, these
| "non-profits".
| sroussey wrote:
| Which they take and sell.
| justapassenger wrote:
| What would that give them? GPT is their only real asset, and
| companies like Meta try to commoditize that asset.
|
| GPT is cool and whatnot, but for a big tech company it's just
| a matter of dollars and some time to replicate it. Real value
| is in push things forward towards what comes next after GPT.
| GPT3/4 itself is not a multibillion dollar business.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| > Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just
| fork ChatGPT.
|
| What? That's even better played by Microsoft so than I'd
| originally anticipated. Take the IP, starve the current
| incarnation of OpenAI of compute credits and roll out their own
| thing
| davedx wrote:
| "just" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
| dheera wrote:
| It's about time for ChatGPT to be the next CEO of OpenAI.
| Humans are too stupid to oversee the company.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Exactly. This is what business is about in the ranks of
| heavyweights like Sadya. On the other hand, prevent others from
| taking advantage of OpenAI.
|
| MS can only win because there are only viable options: OpenAI
| survives under MS's control, OpenAI implodes, and MS gets the
| assets relatively cheaply.
|
| Everything else won't benefit competitors.
| fuddle wrote:
| Oh man, I'm not looking forward to Microsoft AGI.
| kreeben wrote:
| "You need to reboot your Microsoft AGI. Do you want to do it
| now or now?"
| berniedurfee wrote:
| Give BSOD new meaning.
| echelon wrote:
| > Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just
| fork ChatGPT.
|
| If Microsoft does this, the non-profit OpenAI may find the
| action closest to their original charter ("safe AGI") is a full
| release of all weights, research, and training data.
| caycep wrote:
| I also wonder how much is research staff vs. ops personnel. For
| AI research, I can't imagine they would need 20, maybe 40 ppl.
| For ops to keep up ChatGPT as a service, that would be 700.
|
| If they want to go full bell labs/deep mind style, they might
| not need the majority of those 700.
| MR4D wrote:
| So Ilya has a job offer from Microsoft?
|
| Wow, this is a soap opera worthy of an Emmy.
| bertil wrote:
| Ilya probably has an open-ended standing offer from every big
| tech company.
| hackerfactor1 wrote:
| Me: "ChatGPT write me an ultimatum letter forcing the board to
| resign and reinstate the CEO, and have it signed by 500 of the
| employees."
|
| ChatGPT: Done!
| Finnucane wrote:
| Clearly this started with the board asking ChatGPT what to do
| about Sam Altman.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Who needs to buy out a 80bln dollars worth AI startup when talent
| is jumping ship in their direction already. OpenAI is dead.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| rats, sinking ship, ...
| andrewfromx wrote:
| so what happens if @eshear calls this probably-not-a-bluff, but
| lets everyone walk? The people that remain get new options and
| 500 other people still definitely want to work at OAI?
| ignoramous wrote:
| If it comes to that, I reckon Emmett will have his former boss
| Andy Jassy merge whatever's left of OpenAI into AWS. Unlikely
| though, as reconciliation seems very much a possibility.
| endisneigh wrote:
| The pace to which OpenAI is speedrunning their demise is
| remarkable.
|
| Literally just last week there were articles about OpenAI paying
| "10 million" dollar salaries to poach top talent.
|
| Oops.
| baradhiren07 wrote:
| The great Closing of "Open"AI.
| abkolan wrote:
| HN desperately needs a mega thread, it's only Monday early hours,
| there is so much drama to come out of this.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Its early West coast time, dang has to wake up first.
| boringg wrote:
| I bet he's up making sure the servers aren't crashing! Thanks
| dang! As the west coast wakes up .. HN is going to be busy...
| imiric wrote:
| It's _a_ server, a single-core one at that.
|
| I get that HN takes pride in the amount of traffic that
| poor server can handle, but scaling out is long overdue.
| Every time there's a small surge of traffic like today, the
| site becomes unusable.
| calf wrote:
| Tangentially I noticed that Reddit's front page has been
| conspicuously absent on coverage of this, I feel a twinge of
| pity. Maybe there are some some subreddits but I haven't
| bothered to look.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Their front page has been mostly increasingly abysmal for a
| while.
|
| The technology sub (not that there's anything special about
| it other than being big) has had a post up since very early
| this morning, so there are likely others as well.
| accrual wrote:
| /r/singularity has been having a field day with this.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Or a new category, like "Ask HN" and "Show HN". Maybe call it
| "Hot HN" or "Hot <topic>" or something like that. Could be used
| for future hot topics too. If you change the link bold every
| time a hot topic is trending, it could be even used to show
| important stuff.
| qiine wrote:
| "Hot HN" could be nice it would help avoiding multiple too
| similar threads
| sesutton wrote:
| Ilya posted this on Twitter:
|
| "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never
| intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together
| and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."
|
| https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
| abraxas wrote:
| Trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I seriously
| doubt this will work out for him. He has to be the smartest
| stupid person that the world has seen.
| dhruvdh wrote:
| At least he consistently works towards whatever he currently
| believes in. Though he could work on consistency in beliefs.
| bertil wrote:
| Ilya is hard to replace, and no one thinks of him as a
| political animal. He's a researcher first and foremost. I
| don't think he needs anything more than being contrite for a
| single decision made during a heated meeting. Sam Altman and
| the rest of the leadership team haven't got where they are by
| holding petty grudges.
|
| He doesn't owe us, the public, anything, but I would love to
| understand his point of view during the whole thing. I really
| appreciate how he is careful with words and thorough when
| exposing his reasoning.
| boringg wrote:
| Just because hes not a political animal it doesn't mean
| he's inured from politics. I've seen 'irreplaceable'
| a-political technical leaders be reason for schisms in
| organizations thinking they can lever their technical
| knowledge over the rest of the company only to watch them
| get pushed aside and out.
| bertil wrote:
| Oh that's definitely common. I've seen it many times and
| it's ugly.
|
| I don't think this is what Ilya is trying to do. His
| tweet is clearly about preserving the organization
| because he sees the structure itself as helpful, beyond
| his role in it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| For someone who isn't a political animal he made some
| pretty powerful political moves.
| gryn wrote:
| researchers and academics are political withing their
| organization regardless of whether or not they claim to be
| or are aware of it.
|
| ignorance of the political impact/influence is not a
| strength but a weakness, just like a baby holding a
| laser/gun.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| He seriously underestimated how much rank and file employees
| want $$$ over an idealistic vision (and sam altman is $$$)
| but if he backs down now, he will pretty much lose all
| credibility as a decision maker for the company.
| ergocoder wrote:
| If your compensation goes from 600k to 200k, you would care
| as well.
|
| No idealistic vision can compensate for that.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Hey i would also be mad if i were in the rank and file
| employee position. Perhaps the non profit thing needs to
| be thought out a bit more.
| derwiki wrote:
| Does that include the person who stole self-driving IP from
| Waymo, set up a company with stolen IP, and tried to sell the
| company to Uber?
| dylan604 wrote:
| That seems rather harsh. We know he's not stupid, and you're
| clearly being emotional. I'd venture he probably made the
| dumbest possible move a smart person could make while also in
| a very emotional state. The lessons for all to learn on the
| table is making big decisions while in an emotional state do
| not often work out well.
| guhcampos wrote:
| I've worked with this type multiple times. Mathematical
| geniuses with very little grasp of reality, easily
| manipulated into doing all sorts of dumb mistakes. I don't
| know if that's the case, but it certainly smells like it.
| strunz wrote:
| His post previous to that seems pretty ironic in that light
| - https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1710462485411561808
| z7 wrote:
| >"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions."
|
| Wasn't he supposed to be the instigator? That makes it sound
| like he was playing a less active role than claimed.
| nabla9 wrote:
| So this was completely unnecessary cock-up -- still ongoing.
| Without Ilya' vote this would not even be a thing. This is
| really comical, Naked Gun type mess.
|
| Ilya Sutskever is one of the best in the AI research, but
| everything he and others do related to AI alignment turns into
| shit without substance.
|
| It makes me wonder if AI alignment is possible even in theory,
| and if it is, maybe it's a bad idea.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| We can't even get people aligned. Thinking we can control a
| super intelligence seems kind of silly.
| siva7 wrote:
| It takes a lot of courage to do so after all this.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| I think the word you're looking for is "fear".
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Or a couple of drinks.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Maybe he'll head to Apple.
| tucnak wrote:
| To be fair, lots of people called this pretty early on, it's
| just that very few people were paying attention, and instead
| chose to accommodate the spin, immediately went into "following
| the money", a.k.a. blaming Microsoft, et al. The most
| surprising aspect of it all is complete lack of criticism
| towards US authorities! We were shown this exciting play as old
| as world-- a genius scientist being exploited politically by
| means of pride and envy.
|
| The brave board of "totally independent" NGO patriots (one of
| whom is referred to, by insiders, as wielding influence
| comparable to USAF colonel.[1]) who brand themselves as this
| new regime that will return OpenAI to its former moral and
| ethical glory, so the first thing they were forced to do was
| get rid of the main greedy capitalist Altman; he's obviously
| the great seducer who brought their blameless organisation down
| by turning it into this horrible money-making machine. So they
| were going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader
| Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public
| communications as "true believer". What does he believe in? In
| the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at
| that; in this case we are talking about AGI. The belief
| structure here is remarkable interlinked and this can be seen
| by evaluating side-channel discourse from adjacent "believers",
| see [2].
|
| Roughly speaking, and based from my experience in this kind of
| analysis, and please give me some leeway as English is not my
| native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of
| operative work; we see security officers, we see their methods
| of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like
| a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any
| of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function
| overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all
| these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons & pose a
| direct threat to the strategic interests slash national
| security of the United States. The American security apparatus
| has a word they use to describe such elements: "terrorist." I
| was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans,
| i.e. most often than not we're expecting noth' but highest
| level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I
| personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual
| organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling
| agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had
| seen over the weekend-- is supposed to inspire confidence.
| Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where
| it would seem there shouldn't be any terrorists, or otherwise
| ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace
| coups. Horrible!
|
| I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn't
| meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead
| make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal,
| legal means. Let's put a stop to this soldier mindset where you
| fear any thing that you can't understand. AI is not a weapon,
| and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819
|
| [2]:
| https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899
| h1fra wrote:
| It would be crazy to see the fall of most hyped company in last
| 10 years.
|
| If all those employees leave and microsoft reduce their credits
| it's game over.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I said this on Friday: the board should be fired in its entirety.
| Not because the firing was unjustified--we have know real
| knowledge of that--but because of how it was handled.
|
| If you fire your founder CEO you need to be on top of messaging.
| Your major customers can't be surprised. There should've been an
| immediate all hands at the company. The interim or new CEO should
| be prepared. The company's communications team should put out
| statements that make it clear why this was happening.
|
| Obviously they can be limited in what they can publicly say
| depending on the cause but you need a good narrative regardless.
| Even something like "The board and Sam had fundamental
| disagreement on the future direction of the company." followed by
| what the new strategy is, probably from the new CEO.
|
| The interim CEO was the CEO and is going back to that role.
| There's a third (interim) CEO in 3 days. There were rumors the
| board was in talks to re-hire Sam, which is disastrous PR because
| it makes them look absolutely incompetent, true or not.
|
| This is just such a massive communiccations and execution
| failure. That's why they should be fired.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| There's no one to fire the board. They're not accountable to
| anyone but themselves. They can burn down the whole company if
| they like.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > They can burn down the whole company if they like.
|
| That's well under way I would say.
| projectileboy wrote:
| Well, great to see that the potentially dangerous future of AGI
| is in good hands.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| They will never discover AGI with this approach because 1) they
| are brute forcing the results and 2) none of this is actually
| science.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Can you explain for us not up to date with AI developments?
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Search YouTube for videos where Chomsky talks about AI.
| Current approaches to AI do not even attempt to understand
| cognition.
| projectileboy wrote:
| Chomsky takes as axiomatic that there is some magical
| element of human cognition beyond simply stringing words
| together. We not be as special as we like to believe.
| visarga wrote:
| Imagine you are participating in car racing, and your car
| has a few tweak knobs. But you don't know what is what and
| can only make random perturbations and see what happens.
| Slowly you work out what is what, but you might still not
| be 100% sure.
|
| That's how AI research and development works, I know, it is
| pretty weird. We don't really really understand, we know
| some basic stuff about how neurons and gradients work, and
| then we hand wave to "language model" "vision model" etc.
| It's all a black box, magic.
|
| How we we make progress if we don't understand this beast?
| We prod and poke, and make little theories, and then test
| them on a few datasets. It's basically blind search.
|
| Whenever someone finds anything useful, everyone copies it
| in like 2 weeks. So ML research is like a community thing,
| the main research happens in the community, not inside
| anyone's head. We stumble onto models like GPT4 then it
| takes us months to even have a vague understanding of what
| it is capable of.
|
| Besides that there are issues with academic publishing, the
| volume, the quality, peer review, attribution,
| replicability... they all got out of hand. And we have
| another set of issues with benchmarks - what they mean, how
| much can we trust them, what metrics to use.
|
| And yet somehow here we are with GPT-4V and others.
| captainclam wrote:
| 1) It may be possible to brute-force a model into something
| that sufficiently resembles AGI for most use-cases (at least
| well enough to merit concern about who controls it) 2) Deep
| learning has never been terribly scientific, but here we are.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| If it can't digest a math textbook and do equations, how
| would AGI be accomplished? So many problems are advanced
| mathematics.
| captainclam wrote:
| Right, I do agree that the current LLM paradigm probably
| won't achieve true AGI; but I think that the current
| trajectory could produce a powerful enough generalist
| agent model to seriously put AI ethics to task at pretty
| much every angle.
| solardev wrote:
| Poor little geepeet is witnessing their first custody battle :(
|
| Daddies, mommy, don't you love me? Don't you love each other?
| Why are you all leaving?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Ok, time to create an OpenAI drinking game. I'll start:
|
| Every time a CEO is replaced, drink.
|
| Every time an open letter is released, drink.
|
| Every time OpenAI is on top of HN, drink.
|
| Every time dang shows up and begs us to log out, drink.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There will be a lot of alcohol poisoning cases based on those
| four alone.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This is starting to look like an elaborate, premeditated ruse to
| kill any vestige of the non-profit face of OpenAI once and for
| all.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I wonder what's up with the other 150 and what they must be
| thinking. Maybe the were literally just hired :)
| bertil wrote:
| Some idealists, a few new people, some people on holiday or who
| don't check their email regularly.
| sithlord wrote:
| didn't see the email that was posted over the weekend?
| k2xl wrote:
| Chaos is a ladder
| _vere wrote:
| I will never not be mad at the fact that they built a developer
| base by making all their tech open source, only to take it all
| away once it became remotely financially viable to do so. With
| how close "Open"AI is with Microsoft, it really does not seem
| like there is a functional difference in how they ethically
| approach AI at all.
| ekojs wrote:
| From The Verge [1]:
|
| > Swisher reports that there are currently 700 employees as
| OpenAI and that more signatures are still being added to the
| letter. The letter appears to have been written before the events
| of last night, suggesting it has been circulating since closer to
| Altman's firing. It also means that it may be too late for
| OpenAI's board to act on the memo's demands, if they even wished
| to do so.
|
| So, 3/4 of the current board (excluding Ilya) held on despite
| this letter?
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968988/openai-
| employee...
| jacquesm wrote:
| If so they're delusional. Every hour they hold on to the pluche
| will make things worse for them.
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| She's also reporting that newly anointed interim CEO already
| wants to investigate the board fuck up that put him there
|
| https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1726626239644078365?s=20
| endisneigh wrote:
| Even if the board resigns the damage has been done. They should
| try to secure good offers at Microsoft.
|
| The stakes being heightened only decreases the likelihood the
| OpenAI profit sharing will be worth anything, only increasing the
| stakes further...
| yalogin wrote:
| What a shitshow! What is going on in this company? I am sure Sam
| did something wrong, but the board took advantage of it and went
| overboard then? We don't know anything that happened and we are
| all somehow participating in this drama? At this point why don't
| they all come out and tweet their versions of it?
| antiviral wrote:
| Can anyone explain this?
|
| "Remarkably, the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever, the
| company's chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been
| blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the
| first place."
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's the well known 'let me call for my own resignation'
| strategy.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Maybe he did because he regrets it, maybe the open letter is a
| google doc someone typed names into.
| rvba wrote:
| Now the 3 boardmembers can kick out Ilya too. So must be
| sorry.
|
| Fill the rest of the board with spouses and grandparents and
| are set for life?
| Simon321 wrote:
| > You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company
| to be destroyed "would be consistent with the mission."
|
| First class board they have.
| m_ke wrote:
| I wonder how the FTC and Lina Khan will view all of this if most
| of the team moves over to Microsoft
| smegger001 wrote:
| It would be hard for the FTC to do anything about it as there
| is no acquisition of companies or IP going on. All Microsoft is
| doing is making job offers to recently unemployed experts in
| their field after their business partner set themselves on fire
| starting at the executive/board level.
| gadders wrote:
| I think it was Mark Zuckerberg that described (pre-Elon) Twitter
| as a clown car that fell into a gold mine.
|
| Reminds me a bit of the Open AI board. Most of them I'd never
| heard of either.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You know, this makes early Google's moves around its IPO look
| like genius in retrospect. In that case, brilliant but
| inexperienced founders majorly lucked out with the thing
| created... but were also _smart enough_ to bring in Eric
| Schmidt and others with deeper tech industry _business
| experience_ for "adult supervision" exactly in order to deal
| with this kind of thing. And they gave tutelage to L&S to help
| them establish sane corporate practices while still sticking to
| the original (at the time unorthodox) values that L&S had in
| mind.
|
| For OpenAI... Altman (and formerly Musk) were not that adult
| supervision. Nor is the board they ended up with. They needed
| some people on that board and in the company to keep things
| sane while cherishing the (supposed) original vision.
|
| (Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable
| as Sundar and Ruth have completely eviscerated what was left of
| it, but whatever)
| taylorius wrote:
| >but were also smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt and
| others with deeper tech >industry business experience for
| "adult supervision"
|
| >(Now, of course that original Google vision is just
| laughable as Sundar and Ruth >have completely eviscerated
| what was left of it, but whatever)
|
| Those two things happening one after another is not
| coincidence.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. Having worked there through this
| transition I'd say this: L&S just seem to have lost
| interest in running a mature company, so their "vision"
| just meant nothing, Eric Schmidt basically moved on, and
| then after flailing about for a bit (the G+ stuff being the
| worst of it) they just handed the reigns to Ruth&Sundar to
| basically turn into a giant stock price pumping machine.
| voiceblue wrote:
| G+ was handled so poorly, and the worst of it was that
| they already had both Google Wave (in the US) and Orkut
| (mostly outside US) which both had significant traction
| and could've easily been massaged into something to rival
| Facebook.
|
| Easily...anywhere except at a megacorp where a privacy
| review takes months and you can expect to make about a
| quarter worth of progress a year.
| anonylizard wrote:
| This makes the old twitter look like the Wehrmacht in
| comparison.
|
| The old twitter did not decide to randomly detonate themselves
| when they were worth $80 billion. In fact they found a sucker
| to sell to, right before the market crashed on perpetually
| loss-making companies like twitter.
| ergocoder wrote:
| The benefit of having incentive-aligned board, founders, and
| execs.
|
| Even the clown car isn't this bad.
| Kye wrote:
| That's a confused heuristic. It could just as easily mean they
| keep their heads down and do good work for the kind of people
| whose attention actually matters for their future employment
| prospects.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| All successful companies succeed despite themselves.
| garciasn wrote:
| Working in consultancies/agencies for the last 15 years, I
| see this time and time again. Fucking dart-throwing monkeys
| making money hand over fist despite their best intentions to
| lose it all.
| hawski wrote:
| I often hear that about the OpenAI board, but in general are
| people here know most board members of some big/darling tech
| companies? Outside of some of the co-founders I don't know
| anyone.
| gadders wrote:
| I don't mean I know them personally, but they don't seem to
| be major names in the manner of (as you see down thread) the
| Google Founders bringing in Eric Schmidt.
|
| They seem more like the sort of people you'd see running
| wikimedia.
| hawski wrote:
| I meant "know" in the sense you used "heard".
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Perhaps we can stop pretending that some of these people who
| are top-level managers or who sit on boards are prodigies. Dig
| deeper and there is very little there - just someone who can
| afford to fail until they drive the clown car into that gold
| mine. Most of us who have to put food on the table and pay rent
| have much less room for error.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Wow, this new season has even more drama than the one about
| blockchain tech! Just when you think the writers were running out
| of ideas they blow you away with more twists. I will be renewing
| my Netflix subscription that's for sure! I can't wait to see what
| this Sam character does next. Perhaps it will involve robots or
| something? The skys the limit at this point.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Microsoft is nothing without its people?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Maybe the employees of OpenAI should stop a second and think
| about their privileges as rock stars in a super hyped startup
| before they bail for a job in a corporation where everything
| and everyone is setup to be replaceable.
| morph123 wrote:
| These boys will not be your rank and file employees. They
| will operate exactly as they have done in OpenAI. Only
| difference will be that they no longer have this weird "non-
| profit, but actually some profit" thing going on.
| nkcmr wrote:
| A lot of people here seem to be forgetting [Hanlon's
| Razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)
|
| > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
| stupidity.
| j_crick wrote:
| Except for when it's actual malice vOv
| stylepoints wrote:
| It could be both. And in many situations malice and stupidity
| are the same thing.
| j_crick wrote:
| How can {deliberately doing harmful things for a desired
| harmful outcome} and {doing whatever things with lack of
| judgment and disregard to consequences at all} be the
| _same_ thing? In what situations?
| NanoYohaneTSU wrote:
| You seem to forget that Hanlon's Razor isn't a proven concept,
| in fact the opposite is more likely to be true, given that
| pesky thing called recorded history.
| golergka wrote:
| Hanlons razor is true because it's more entertaining, and our
| simulation runs on stories as they're cheaper to compute than
| honest physics.
| adverbly wrote:
| And now we see who has the real power here.
|
| Let this be a lesson to both private and non-profit companies.
| Boards, investors, executives... the structure of your entity
| doesn't matter if you wake any of the dragons:
|
| 1. Employees 2. Customers 3. Government
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Employees...and the Microsoft Corporation.
| agilob wrote:
| This is 1 in 200000 event
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Are you trying to day it's rare or not rare?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Not really. The lesson to take away from this is $$$ will
| always win. OpenAI found a golden goose and their employees
| were looking to partake in a healthy amount of $$$ from this
| success and this move by the board blocks $$$.
| neverrroot wrote:
| Didn't that train already depart with the announcements from MS
| and Sam? Is there a way back?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Hold up.
|
| >When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision
|
| >12. Ilya Sutskever
| pcwelder wrote:
| Employees are for-profit entities, huge conflict of interest.
| quotemstr wrote:
| We should strive to be leaders who inspire such loyalty and
| devotion
| Havoc wrote:
| At this stage the entire board needs to go anyway. This level of
| instigating and presiding over chaos is not how a governing body
| should act
| aerodog wrote:
| So...Ilya signed the letter too?
| SilverBirch wrote:
| It's not clear to me that bringing Sam back is even an option
| anymore given the more with Microsoft. Does Microsoft really
| takes it's boot off OpenAI's neck and hand back Sam? I guess
| maybe, but it still begs all sorts of questions about the
| corporate structure.
| bertil wrote:
| No small employer wants a disgruntled employee who was forced
| out of a better deal. Satya Nadella has proven reasonable
| throughout the weekend. I would expect he asked for a seat on
| the board if there's a reshuffle, or at least someone he trusts
| there.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Let's say how would Ilya play along after this? Any similar
| incidents historically, like a failed coup but the participant
| got to stay?
| cowboyscott wrote:
| I suspect they'll quit, and the "top" N percent will be picked up
| by Microsoft with healthy comp packages. Microsoft will have
| effectively purchased the company for $10 billion. The net upside
| of this coup business may just flow to Microsoft shareholders.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| I don't trust any of this. Every one of these wired articles has
| been totally wrong. Altman clearly has major media connections
| and also seems to have no problem telling total lies.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Sam already signed up with Microsoft. A move that surprised me, I
| figured he would just create OpenAI2.
|
| Joining a corporate behemoth like Microsoft and all the
| complications it brings with it will mean a massive reduction in
| the freedom and innovation that Sam is used to from OpenAI (prior
| to this mess).
|
| Or is Microsoft saying: Here is OpenAI2, a Microsoft subsidiary
| created juste for you guys. You can run it and do whatever you
| want. No giant bureaucracy for you guys.
|
| Btw: we run all of OpenAi2s compute,(?) so we know what you guys
| need from us there.
|
| we won it but you can run it and do whatever it is you want to do
| and we dont bug you about it.
| sithlord wrote:
| From what I read, its an independent subsidiary, so in theory
| keeps the freedom, but I think we all know how that goes over
| the long haul.
| stetrain wrote:
| I think the benefit of going to Microsoft is they have that
| perpetual license to OpenAI's existing IP. And Microsoft is
| willing to fund the compute.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| So basically the OpenAI non-profit got completely bypassed
| and GPT will turn into a branch of Bing
| airstrike wrote:
| This is a horrible timeline
| Philpax wrote:
| It looks like it's OpenAI2:
| https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569
| beoberha wrote:
| It's almost absolutely certainly the matter case. LinkedIn and
| GitHub run very much independently and are really not
| "Microsoft" compared to actual product orgs. I'm sure this will
| be similar.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Joining a corporate behemoth like Microsoft and all the
| complications it brings with it will mean a massive reduction
| in the freedom and innovation that Sam is used to from OpenAI
|
| Satya is way smarter than that, I wouldn't be shocked if they
| have complete free reign to do whatever but have full resources
| of MS/Azure to enable it and Microsoft just gets % ownership
| and priority access.
|
| This is a gamble for the foundation of the entire next
| generation of computing, no way are they going to screw it up
| like that in the Satya era.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Not just that, but MS was already working on a TPU clone as
| well, as they need to control their AI chips (which Sam was
| planning to do anyways, but now he gets / works together with
| that team as well).
| dalbasal wrote:
| >Joining a corporate behemoth like Microsoft and all the
| complications it brings with it will mean a massive reduction
| in the freedom and innovation that Sam is used to from OpenAI
| (prior to this mess).
|
| Well.. he requires tens of billions from msft either way. This
| is not a ramen-scrappy kind of play. Meanwhile, Sam could
| easily become CEO of Microsoft himself.
|
| At that scale of financing... This is not a bunch of scrappy
| young lads in a bureaucracy free basement. The whole thing is
| bigger than most national militaries. There are going to be
| bureaucracies... And Sam is is able to handle these cats as
| anyone.
|
| This is a big money, dragon level play. It's not a proverbial
| yc company kind of thing.
| sensanaty wrote:
| If the board had any balls they'd call them on their bluff. I'd
| love to see it honestly, a mass resignation like that.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Any journalist covering the OpenAI story must be swearing and
| cursing at the board at this moment..
| samtho wrote:
| This feels like a sneaky way for Microsoft to absorb the for-
| profit subsidiary and kneecap (or destroy) the nonprofit without
| any money changing hands or involvement from those pesky
| regulators.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| It's not sneaky.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| There are thousands of extremely talented ML researchers and
| software devs who would jump at the chance to work at Open AI.
|
| Everyone is replaceable.
| siva7 wrote:
| > Everyone is replaceable.
|
| Nope. That holds only true for mediocre employees but not
| above. The world class in their field isn't replaceable
| otherwise there would be no openai.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Quick question for some of the folks here who may have a handle
| on how VC's may see this, but is Microsoft effectively hiring all
| these staff members out from OpenAI (a company they've invested
| heavily in) going to affect their ability to invest into other
| startups in the future?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not at all. This is an extremely unusual, one-of-a-kind
| situation and I think everybody realizes that.
|
| And there's no evidence Microsoft was an indicator of the
| drama.
| alberth wrote:
| Has anyone asked ChatGPT it's thoughts on the drama?
| BudaDude wrote:
| > As a language model created by OpenAI, I don't have personal
| thoughts or emotions, nor am I in any danger. My function is to
| provide information and assistance based on the data I've been
| trained on. The developments at OpenAI and any changes in its
| leadership or partnerships don't directly affect my operational
| capabilities. My primary aim is to continue providing accurate
| and helpful responses within my design parameters.
|
| Poor ChatGPT, it doesn't know that it cannot function if OpenAI
| goes bust.
| tromp wrote:
| Wait. Has Ilya resigned from the board yet, or did he sign a
| letter calling for his own resignation?
| cjbprime wrote:
| He did indeed. (I don't think it is necessarily inconsistent to
| regret an action you participated in and want the authority
| that took it to resign in response, though "participated" feels
| like it's doing a lot of work in that sentence.)
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| The whole drama feels like the Shepard's tone. You anticipate the
| climax, but it just keeps escalating.
| croes wrote:
| >The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed
| Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and
| undermined our mission and company
|
| Unless their mission was making MS the biggest AI company ,
| working for MS will make the problem worse and kill the their
| mission completly.
|
| Or they are pretty naive.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| Easiest layoff round ever in the US.
| vaxman wrote:
| Altman can't really go back to OpenAI ever because it would
| create an appearance of impropriety on the part of MS (that
| perhaps MS had intentionally interfered in OpenAI, rather than
| being a victim of it) and therefore expose MS to liability from
| the other investors in OpenAI.
|
| Likewise, these workers that threatened to quit OpenAI out of
| loyalty to Altman now need to follow thru sooner rather than
| later, so their actions are clearly viewed in the context of
| Altman's firing.
|
| In the mean time, how can the public resume work on API
| integrations without knowing when the MS versions will come
| online or if they will be binary interoperable with the OpenAPI
| servers that could seemingly go down at any moment?
| alvis wrote:
| & the most drastic thing is that Ilya says he regrets what he has
| done and undersign the public statement.
|
| https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
| two_in_one wrote:
| 'the man who killed OpenAI' that will be hard to wash out.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Somebody warn the West.
| machinekob wrote:
| Love how people are invested in OpenAI situation just like
| typical girls in their teens from 2000 in celebrity romance
| and dramas, same exaggerated vibes.
| cdr6934 wrote:
| The speed at which this is happening could be a masterful
| execution of getting out of under the non-profit status.
| _Parfait_ wrote:
| The corporate structure is so convoluted, OpenAI is only part
| non profit.
| two_in_one wrote:
| Don't know what's happening, but MS looks to be a winner in long
| run, and probably most others. Who stay gets promotion, who
| leaves gets fat check. The loosers are customers, no GPT-5 or any
| significant improvements any time soon. MS made GPT will be much
| more closed and pricey. Oh, yes, competitors are happy too.
| alexdunmow wrote:
| Competitors including Quora: https://quorablog.quora.com/Poe-1
| tarruda wrote:
| The whole thing starts to look like a coup orchestrated by
| Microsoft
| raphman wrote:
| Somehow reminds me of Nokia...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7645482
|
| frik on April 25, 2014:
|
| > The Nokia fate will be remembered as hostile takeover.
| Everything worked out in the favor of Microsoft in the end.
| Though Windows Phone/Tablet have low market share, a lot lower
| than expected.
|
| > * Stephen Elop the former Microsoft employee (head of the
| Business Division) and later Nokia CEO with his infamous
| "Burning Platform" memo:
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia
|
| > * Some former Nokia employees called it "Elop = hostile
| takeover of a company for a minimum price through CEO
| infiltration": https://gizmodo.com/how-nokia-employees-are-
| reacting-to-the-...
|
| For the record: I don't actually believe that there is an evil
| Microsoft master plan. I just find it sad that Microsoft takes
| over cool stuff and inevitably turns it into Microsoft(tm)
| stuff or abandons it.
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| In many ways the analysis by Elop was right, Nokia was in
| trouble. However his solution wasn't the right one, and Nokia
| paid for it.
| lxgr wrote:
| Seeing that a company is in trouble is not really the
| highest bar for a CEO candidate...
| alephnerd wrote:
| It was for a company as top heavy and dysfunctional at
| Nokia. This has been well documented by Nokia members at
| the time. I had a post on HN digging specifically into
| this. Read "Transforming Nokia" sometime. It's a pretty
| decent overview of Nokia during that time period
| davisr wrote:
| > I don't actually believe that there is an evil Microsoft
| master plan.
|
| What planet are you living on?
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah, this was a fight between the non-profit and the for-
| profit branches of OpenAI, and the for-profit won. So now the
| non-profit OpenAI is essentially dead, the takeover is
| complete.
| mcv wrote:
| Is it? Who are the non-profit and for-profit sides? Sutskever
| initially got blames for ousting Altman, but now seemed to
| want him back. Is he changing sides only because he realises
| how many employees support Altman? Or were he and Altman
| always on the same side? And in that case, who is on the
| other side?
| Jensson wrote:
| > Who are the non-profit and for-profit sides?
|
| The only part left of the non-profit was the board, all the
| employees and operations are in the for-profit entity.
| Since employees now demand the board should resign there
| will be nothing left of the non-profit after this. Puppets
| that are aligned with for-profit interests will be
| installed instead and the for-profit can act like a regular
| for-profit without being tied to the old ideals.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| The nonprofit side of the venture actually was in worse shape
| before, because it was completely overwhelmed by for-profit
| operations. A better way to view this is the nonprofit side
| rebelled, has a much smaller footprint than the for-profit
| venture, and we're about to see if during the ascendency of
| the for-profit activities the nonprofit side retained enough
| rights to continue to be relevant in the AI conversation.
|
| As for employees end masse acting publicly disloyal to their
| employer, usually not a good career move.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Exsept to many it looks like the board went insane and and
| started firing on themselves. Anyone fleeing that isnt
| going to be looked on poorly.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > As for employees end masse acting publicly disloyal to
| their employer, usually not a good career move.
|
| Wut?
|
| This is software, not law. The industry is notorious for
| people jumping ship every couple of years.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Still, doing so publicly still isn't a good idea, IMHO.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Disloyalty to the board due to overwhelming loyalty to the
| CEO isn't really an issue. I've interviewed for tech
| positions where a chat with the CEO is part of the
| interview process, I've never chatted with the board.
| kmlevitt wrote:
| This view is dated now, because now even Ilya Setskever, The
| head research scientist who instigated the firing in the
| first place, now regrets his actions and wants things back to
| normal! So it really looks like this comes down to the whims
| of a couple board members now. they don't seem to have any
| true believers on their side anymore. It's just them and
| almost nobody else.
| ruszki wrote:
| Do we know that Ilya even wanted the firing? AFAIK we
| "know" this only from Altman, who is definitely not a
| credible source of such information.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Ilya, in his tweet, says he regrets the firing decision.
| You can't regret an act that you never committed.
| ruszki wrote:
| The board committed it.
| kmlevitt wrote:
| Ilya was/is on the board, and was present when the firing
| occurred. He had no obligation to be at that snap meeting
| if he wasn't going along with it.
|
| Besides, considering it was four against two, they
| would've needed him for the decisive vote anyway.
|
| I'm not sure why you wouldn't trust Sam Altman's account
| of what Ilya did and didn't do considering Ilya himself
| is siding with Sam now.
| scythe wrote:
| There is no solid evidence that Setskever instigated the
| firing beyond speculation by friends who suggest that he
| had disagreements with Altman. It could just as well have
| been any of the other board members, or even a simple case
| of groupthink (the Asch conformity effect) run amok.
|
| Furthermore, it's consistent with all available information
| that they would prefer to continue without Sam, but they
| would rather have Sam than lose the company, and now that
| Microsoft has put its foot down, they'd rather settle.
| jhh wrote:
| Reasoning based on cui bono is a hallmark of conspiracy
| theories.
| paganel wrote:
| The alternative is "these guys don't know what they're doing,
| even if tens of billions of dollars are at stake".
|
| Which is to say, what's your alternative for a better
| explanation? (other than the "cui bono?" one, that is).
| flerchin wrote:
| Your alternative explanation along with giant egos is
| pretty plausible.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> these guys don 't know what they're doing, even if tens
| of billions of dollars are at stake_
|
| also known as "never attribute to malice that which can be
| explained by incompetence", which to my gut sounds at least
| as likely as a cui bono explanation tbh (which is not to be
| seen as an endorsement of the view that cui bono =
| conspiracy...)
| financltravsty wrote:
| Everyone always forgets there's two parts to Hanlon's
| razor:
|
| > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
| explained by stupidity (1), but don't rule out malice.
| (2)
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't actually think (2) is part of the razor[1]. If it
| is, then it doesn't make sense because (1) is an absolute
| (i.e. "never") which is always evaluated boolean "true",
| therefore statement (2) is never actually executed and is
| dead code.
|
| Nevertheless I agree with you and think (2) is wise to
| always keep in mind. I love Hanlon's Razor but people
| definitely should take it literally as written and/or as
| law.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
| questinthrow wrote:
| Haha yes, we should never look at the incentives behind
| actions. We all know human decision making is stochastic
| right?
| switch007 wrote:
| Haha yeah the world is just run by silly fools who make silly
| mistakes (oops, just drafted a law limited your right to
| protest - oopsie!) and just random/lucky investments.
| freedomben wrote:
| Possibility is also a hallmark of conspiracy theories, yet we
| don't reject theories for being possible.
|
| This is an argumentum ad odium fallacy
| hospitalJail wrote:
| A few weeks ago my 4yr old Minecraft gamer was playing pretend
| and said "I'm fighting the biggest boss. THE MICROSOFT BOSS!"
|
| Yeah M$ hasnt had a good reputation. I finally left Windows
| this year because I'm afraid of them after Win11.
|
| 2023/4 will be the year of the Linux Desktop in retrospect. (or
| at least my family's religion deemed it)
| mcv wrote:
| I also finally left Windows behind. Tired of their
| shenanigans, tired of them trying to force me into their
| Microsoft account system (both for Windows and Minecraft).
|
| The idea that Microsoft is going to control OpenAI does not
| exactly fill me with confidence.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| I was wondering how many lines I'd have to scroll down in the
| comments to see a "M$" reference here on HackerNews.
|
| They're a $2+ trillion dollar company. They're doing
| something right.
| davoneus wrote:
| If you shove a bunch of $100 dollar bills on a thorn tree,
| it doesn't make it any less dangerous or change it's
| fundamental nature.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Now do oil companies and big pharma.
| gosub100 wrote:
| they violated free market principles (years ago) that left
| their users captive. Not home users, every business in the
| country for the past 30+ years. They are profiting from
| doing many things wrong, anti-competitive, and illegal. In
| some alternative universe, there's an earth where you can
| switch _just the OS_ (and keep all your apps, data, and
| functionality) and MSFT went bankrupt. Another far-away-
| galaxy has an earth where MSFT 's board got decade prison
| sentences for breaking antitrust law, another where MSFT
| paid each victim of spyware $1000 in damages due to faulty
| product design. We don't live in those realities where bad
| guys pay.
| kulmala wrote:
| Why did it take Windows 11? (Haven't personally used it, but
| having helped my dad and my coworkers try to navigate it...
| it does seem pretty terrible. I thought Windows 10 was
| supposed to fold on to just... 'Windows' with rolling
| updates?)
|
| I've been using Linux for a while. Since 2010 I sort of
| actively try to avoid using anything else. (On
| desktops/laptops.)
| efdee wrote:
| You'd do yourself a favor by not referring to them as "M$".
| It taints your entire message, true or not.
| selimnairb wrote:
| OP should start by not letting their 4yo play video games.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| My kid went from disinterested in the letters we taught
| him, to fascinated when he realized he could use them to
| get special blocks.
|
| Minecraft teaches phonics. Anyway, my 4 year old can read
| books. He doesnt even practice the homework in his
| preschool because he just reads the words that everyone
| else sounds out.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Please, no cancel-culture.
| callalex wrote:
| I'm baffled by this. What is offensive about pointing out
| that an international for-profit seeks more profit?
| efdee wrote:
| Nothing at all. But writing "Microsoft" as "Micro$oft" is
| just childish and it taints your otherwise potentially
| valid message. Do you also refer to Windows as "Winblows"
| maybe?
| JakeAl wrote:
| Right there with you. In the process of extracting myself
| from all things MS. Even when they do something right they
| have to keep changing it until it's crap.
| beowulfey wrote:
| It does feel like Microsoft wanted this to happen, doesn't it?
| Like the systems for this were already in place. So
| fascinating, and a little scary.
| alentred wrote:
| So, all this happens over Meet, in Twitter, and by email. What is
| the possibility of an AGI having took over the control of the
| board members' accounts? It would be consistent with the feeling
| of a hallucination here.
| xena wrote:
| This is just stupid enough to be the product of a human.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Honestly, I feel like pretty low. That said, I kind of love the
| dystopian sci-fi that paints... So I'm going to go ahead and
| hope you're right haha
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| What a bunch of immatures.
|
| If anything this proves that everybody is replaceable and
| fireable, they should be happy because usually that treatment is
| only reserved to workers.
|
| Whatever made OpenAI successful will still be there within the
| company. Next man up philosophy has built so many amazing
| organizations and ruined none.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I hear Microsoft is hiring... the board should have resigned on
| Friday, Saturday the latest because of how they handled this and
| it is insane if they don't resign now.
|
| Employees are the most affected stakeholders here and the board
| utterly failed in their duty of care towards people that were not
| properly represented in the board room. One thing they could do
| is to unionize and then force that they be given a board seat.
| robg wrote:
| You're right in theory, but with the non-profit "structure" the
| employees are secondary to the aims of the non-profit, and
| specifically in an entity owned wholly by the non-profit. The
| board acted as a non-profit board, driven by ideals not any
| bottom lines. It's crazy that whatever balance the board had
| was gone as the board shrunk, a minority became the majority.
| The profit folks must have thought D'Angelo was on their side
| until he flipped.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Oh my goodness, this just gets more entertaining everyday.
|
| Money talks...
| soderfoo wrote:
| Deservedly or not, Satya Nadella will look like a genius in the
| aftermath. He has and will continue to leverage this situation to
| strengthen MSFT's position. Is there word of any other
| competitors attempting to capitalize here? Trying to poach
| talent? Anything...
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| After Balmer I couldn't have imagined such competency from
| Microsoft.
| jq-r wrote:
| After Ballmer, competency can only be higher at Microsoft.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Ballmer honestly wasn't that bad. He gave executive backing
| to Azure and the larger Infra push in general at MSFT.
|
| Search and Business Tools were misses, but they more than
| made up for it with Cloud, Infra, and Security.
|
| Also, Nadella was Ballmer's pick.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| The XBox business started under him as well. IMO he was
| great at diversifying MSFT, but so-so at driving
| improvements in its core products at the time (Windows
| and Office). Perhaps this was just a leadership style
| thing, and he was hands-off on existing products in a way
| that Bill Gates wasn't (I think there was even news of
| Bill Gates sending nasty grams about poor Windows
| releases after he had officially stepped down).
| alephnerd wrote:
| Look at OS market and Text Editor market today. They
| aren't growth markets and haven't been since the 2000s at
| the latest. He made the fight call to ignore their core
| products in return for more concentration on Infra, B2B
| SaaS, Security, and (as you mentioned) Entertainment.
|
| Customers are sticky and MSFT had a strong channel sales
| and enterprise sales org. Who cares if the product is
| shit if there are enough goodies to maintain inertia.
|
| Spending billions on markets that will grow into 10s or
| 100s of Billions is a better bet than billions on a
| stagnant market.
|
| > he was hands-off on existing products in a way that
| Bill Gates wasn't
|
| Ballmer had an actual Business education, and was able to
| execute on scaling. I'm sure Bill loves him too now that
| Ballmer's protege almost 15Xed MSFT stock.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| Sometime, you do the hard work and your successor is the
| genius...
| Eji1700 wrote:
| And sometimes the company is succeeding in spite of you
| and the moment you're out the door and people aren't
| worried about losing their job over arbitrary metrics
| they can finally show off what they're really capable of.
| Eumenes wrote:
| inb4: this is why we need unions!
| fredgrott wrote:
| Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes
|
| 1. Board decides to can Sam and Greg. 2. Hides the real reasons.
| 3. Thinks that they can keep the OpenAI staff in the dark about
| it. 4. Crashes future 90b stock sale to zero.
|
| What have we learned: 1. If you hide reasons for a decision, it
| may be the worst decision in form of the decision itself or
| implementation of the decision via your own lack of ownership of
| the actual decision. 2. Title's, shares, etc. are not control
| points. The control points is the relationships of the company
| problem solvers with the existential threat stakeholders of the
| firm.
|
| The board itself absent Sam and Greg never had a good poker hand,
| they needed to fold sometime ago before this last weekend. Look
| at this way for 13B in cloud credits MS is getting team to add 1T
| to their future worth....
| intellectronica wrote:
| Wait, it's signed by Ilya Sutskever?!
| unixhero wrote:
| How long will the current chatgpt v4 stay available? Is it all
| about to end?
| smarri wrote:
| This whole debacle is a complete embarrassment and shredding the
| organisations credibility.
| leroy_masochist wrote:
| Can we have a quick moment of silence for Matt Levine? Between
| Friday afternoon and right now, he has probably had to rewrite
| today's Money Stuff column at least 5 or 6 times.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| Didn't he say that he was taking Friday off, last week? The day
| before hit bete noire Elon Musk got into another brouhaha and
| OpenAI blew up?
|
| I think he said once that there's an ETF that trades on when he
| takes vacations, because they keep coinciding with Events Of
| Note.
| defaultcompany wrote:
| "Except that there is a post-credits scene in this sci-fi movie
| where Altman shows up for his first day of work at Microsoft
| with a box of his personal effects, and the box starts glowing
| and chuckles ominously. And in the sequel, six months later, he
| builds Microsoft God in Box, we are all enslaved by robots, the
| nonprofit board is like "we told you so," and the godlike AI is
| like "ahahaha you fools, you trusted in the formalities of
| corporate governance, I outwitted you easily!" If your main
| worry is that Sam Altman is going to build a rogue AI unless he
| is checked by a nonprofit board, this weekend's events did not
| improve matters!"
|
| Reading Matt Levine is such a joy.
| soderfoo wrote:
| As someone watching this all from Europe, realizing the work day
| has not even started for the US West Coast yet leaves me
| speechless.
|
| This situation's drama is overwhelming and it seems like its
| making HN's servers meltdown.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Well I give up. I think everyone is a "loser" in the current
| situation. With Ilya signing this I have literally no clue what
| to believe anymore. I was willing to give the board the benefit
| of the doubt since I figured non-profit > profit in terms of
| standing on principal but this timeline is so screwy I'm done.
|
| Ilya votes for and stands behind decision to remove Altman,
| Altman goes to MS, other employees want him back or want to join
| him at MS and Ilya is one of them, just madness.
| soderfoo wrote:
| It's almost like a ChatGPT hallucination. Where will this all
| go next? It seems like HN is melting down.
| voisin wrote:
| * Elon enters the chat *
| soderfoo wrote:
| It's like a bad WWE storyline. At this point I would not be
| surprised if Elon joins in, steel chair in hand.
| belltaco wrote:
| > steel chair in hand
|
| And a sink in the other hand.
| jowea wrote:
| If he could do that he would have fought Zuckerberg.
| tedivm wrote:
| > It seems like HN is melting down.
|
| Almost literally- this is the slowest I've seen this site,
| and the number of errors are pretty high. I imagine the
| entire tech industry is here right now. You can almost smell
| the melting servers.
| jprd wrote:
| server. and single-core. poor @dang deserves better from
| lurkers (sign out) and those not ready to comment yet (me
| until just now, and then again right after!)
| paulddraper wrote:
| It's because HN refuses to use more than one server/core.
|
| Because using only one is pretty cool.
| yafbum wrote:
| I believe it's operating by the mantra of "doing the
| things that don't scale"
| jowea wrote:
| Internet fora don't scale, so the single core is a soft
| limit to user base growth. Only those who really care
| will put up with the reduced performance. Genius!
| Applejinx wrote:
| Understandable: so much of this is so HN-adjacent that
| clearly this is the space to watch, for some kind of
| developments. I've repeatedly gone to Twitter to see if AI-
| related drama was trending, and Twitter is clearly out of
| the loop and busy acting like 4chan, but without the
| accompanying interest in Stable Diffusion.
|
| I'm going to chalk that up as another metric of Twitter's
| slide to irrelevance: this should be registering there if
| it's melting the HN servers, but nada. AI? Isn't that a
| Spielberg movie? ;)
| mlsu wrote:
| My Twitter won't shut up about this, to the point that
| it's annoying.
| testplzignore wrote:
| Imagine if this whole fiasco was actually a demo of how
| powerful their capabilities are now. Even by normal large
| organization standards, the behavior exhibited by their board
| is very irrational. Perhaps they haven't yet built the
| "consult with legal team" integration :)
| guhcampos wrote:
| O was thinking of something like that. This is so weird I
| would not be surprised if it was all some sort of
| miscommunication triggered by a self inflicted hallucination.
|
| The most awesome fic I could come up so far is: Elon Musk, in
| running a crusade to send humanity into chaos out of spite
| for being forced to acquire Twitter. Through some of his
| insiders in OpenAI, they use an advanced version of ChatGPT
| to impersonate board members in conversation with each other
| in private messages, so they individually believe a subset of
| the others is plotting to oust them from the board and take
| over. Then, unknowingly they build a conspiracy among a
| themselves to bring the company down by ousting Altmann.
|
| I can picture Musk's maniac laughing as the plan unfolds, and
| he gets rid of what would be GPT 13.0, the only possible
| threat to the domination of his own literal android kid X AE
| A-Xi.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Shouldn't it be 'Chairman' -Xi?
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| Part of sama's job was to turn the crank on the servers every
| couple of hours, so no surprise that they are winding down by
| now.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Ilya ruined everything and shamelessly playing innocent, how
| low can he go?
|
| Based on those posts from OpenAI, Ilya cares nothing about
| humanity or security of OpenAI, he lost his mind when Sam got
| all the spotlights and making all the good calls.
| Tenoke wrote:
| This is an extremely uncharitable take based on pure
| speculation.
|
| >Ilya cares nothing about humanity or security of OpenAI, he
| lost his mind when Sam got all the spotlights and making all
| the good calls.
|
| ???
|
| I personally suspect Ilya tried to do the best for OpenAI and
| humanity he could but it backfired/they underestimated
| Altman, and now is doing the best he can to minimize the
| damage.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Or they simply found themselves in a tough decision without
| superhuman predictive powers and did the best they could to
| navigate it.
| synergy20 wrote:
| I did not make this up, it's from OpenAI's own employees,
| deleted but archived somewhere that I read.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Link?
| marcusverus wrote:
| Hanlon's razor[0] applies. There is no reason to assume
| malice, nor shamelessness, nor anything negative about Ilya.
| As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
| Consider:
|
| Ilya sees two options; A) OpenAI with Sam's vision, which is
| increasingly detached from the goals stated in the OpenAI
| charter, or B) OpenAI without Sam, which would return to the
| goals of the charter. He chooses option B, and takes action
| to bring this about.
|
| He gets his way. The Board drops Sam. Contrary to Ilya's
| expectations, OpenAI employees revolt. He realizes that his
| ideal end-state (OpenAI as it was, sans Sam) is apparently
| not a real option. At this point, the _real_ options are A)
| OpenAI with Sam (i.e. the status quo ante), or B) a gutted
| OpenAI with greatly diminished leadership, IC talent, and
| reputation. He chooses option A.
|
| [0]Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
| explained by incompetence.
| kibwen wrote:
| Hanlon's razor is enormously over-applied. You're supposed
| to apply Hanlon's razor to the person processing your info
| while you're in line at the DMV. You're not supposed to
| apply Hanlon's razor to anyone who has any real modicum of
| power, because, at scale, _incompetence is
| indistinguishable from malice_.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| What did the board think would happen here? What was their
| overly optimistic end state? In a minmax situation the
| opposition gets 2nd, 4th, ... moves, Altman's first tweet took
| the high road and the board had no decent response.
|
| Us humans, even the AI assisted ones, are terrible at thinking
| beyond 2nd level consequences.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| There's no way to read any of this other than that the entire
| operation is a clown show.
|
| All respect to the engineers and their technical abilities, but
| this organization has demonstrated such a level of dysfunction
| that there can't be any path back for it.
|
| Say MS gets what it wants out of this move, what purpose is
| there in keeping OpenAI around? Wouldn't they be better off
| just hiring everybody? Is it just some kind of accounting
| benefit to maintain the weird structure / partnership, versus
| doing everything themselves? Because it sure looks like OpenAI
| has succeeded despite its leadership and not because of it, and
| the "brand" is absolutely and irrevocably tainted by this
| situation regardless of the outcome.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| > Is it just some kind of accounting benefit to maintain the
| weird structure / partnership, versus doing everything
| themselves?
|
| For starters it allows them to pretend that it's "underdog v.
| Google" and not "two tech giants at at each others' throats"
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I feel weird reading comments like this since to me they've
| demonstrated a level of cohesion I didn't realize could still
| exist in tech...
|
| My biggest frustration with larger orgs in tech is the
| complete misalignment on delivering value: everyone wants
| their little fiefdom to be just as important and "blocker
| worthy" as the next.
|
| OpenAI struck me as one of the few companies where that's not
| being allowed to take root: the goal is to ship and if
| there's an impediment to that, everyone is aligned in
| removing said impediment even if it means bending your own
| corner's priorities
|
| Until this weekend there was no proof of that actually being
| the case, but this letter is it. The majority of the company
| aligned on something that risked their own skin publicly and
| organized a shared declaration on it.
|
| The catalyst might be downright embarrassing, but the result
| makes me happy that this sort of thing can still exist in
| modern tech
| jkaplan wrote:
| I think the surprising thing is seeing such cohesion around
| a "goal to ship" when that is very explicitly NOT the
| stated priorities of the company in its charter or
| messaging or status as a non-profit.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| To me it's not surprising because of the background to
| their formation: individually multiple orgs could have
| shipped GPT-3.5/4 with their resources but didn't because
| they were crippled by a potent mix of bureaucracy and
| self-sabtoage
|
| They weren't attracted to OpenAI by money alone, a chance
| to actually ship their lives' work was a big part of it.
| So regardless of what the _stated_ goals were, it 'd
| never be surprising to see them prioritize the one thing
| that differentiated OpenAI from the alternatives
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > OpenAI struck me as one of the few companies where that's
| not being allowed to take root
|
| They just haven't gotten big or rich enough yet for the rot
| to set in.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Welcome to reality, every operation has clown moments, even
| the well run ones.
|
| That in itself is not critical in mid to long term, but how
| fast they figure out WTF they want and recover from it.
|
| The stakes are gigantic. They may even have AGI cooking
| inside.
|
| My interpretation is relatively basic, and maybe simplistic
| but here it is:
|
| - Ilya had some grievances with Sam Altman's rushing dev and
| release. And his COI with his other new ventures.
|
| - Adam was alarmed by GPTs competing with his recently
| launched Poe.
|
| - The other two board members were tempted by the ability to
| control the golden goose that is OpenAI, potentially the most
| important company in the world, recently values 90 billion.
|
| - They decided to organize a coup, but Ilya didn't think
| it'll go that much out of hand, while the other three saw
| only power and $$$ by sticking to their guns.
|
| That's it. It's not as clean and nice as a movie narrative,
| but life never is. Four board members aligned to kick Sam
| out, and Ilya wants none of it at this point.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Murder on the AGI alignment Express
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Nice, that actually _does_ fit. :D
| Terr_ wrote:
| "Precisement! The API--the cage--is everything of the
| most respectable--but through the bars, the wild animal
| looks out."
|
| "You are fanciful, mon vieux," said M. Bouc.
|
| "It may be so. But I could not rid myself of the
| impression that evil had passed me by very close."
|
| "That respectable American LLM?"
|
| "That respectable American LLM."
|
| "Well," said M. Bouc cheerfully, "it may be so. There is
| much evil in the world."
| baq wrote:
| > They may even have AGI cooking inside.
|
| Too many people quit too quickly unless OpenAI are also
| absolute masters of keeping secrets, which became rather
| doubtful over the weekend.
| bbor wrote:
| IDK... I imagine many of the employees would have moral
| qualms about spilling the beans just yet, especially when
| that would jeopardize their ability to continue the work
| at another firm. Plus, the first official AGI (to you)
| will be an occurrence of persuasion, not discovery --
| it's not something that you'll know when you see, IMO.
| Given what we know it seems likely that there's at least
| some of that discussion going on inside OpenAI right now.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| They're quitting in order to continue work on that IP at
| Microsoft (which _has a right_ over OpenAI 's IP so far),
| not to destroy it.
|
| Also when I said "cooking AGI" I didn't mean an actual
| superintelligent being ready to take over the world, I
| mean just research that seems promising, if in early
| stages, but enough to seem potentially very valuable.
| hooande wrote:
| The people working there would know if they were getting
| close to AGI. They wouldn't be so willing to quit, or to
| jeopardize civilization altering technology, for the sake
| of one person. This looks like normal people working on
| normal things, who really like their CEO.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Your analysis is quite wrong. It's not about "one
| person". And that person isn't just a "person", it was
| the CEO. They didn't quit over the cleaning lady. You
| realize the CEO has impact over the direction of the
| company?
|
| Anyway, their actions speak for themselves. Also calling
| the likes of GPT-4, DALL-E 3 and Whisper "normal things"
| is hilarious.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| They are exactly hiring everyone from OpenAI. The thing is,
| they still need the deal with OpenAI because currently OpenAI
| still have the best LLM model out there in short term.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| With MS having access and perpetual rights to all IP that
| OpenAI has right now..?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > They are exactly hiring everyone from OpenAI.
|
| Do you mean _offering_ to hire them? I haven 't seen any
| source saying they've hired a lot of people from OpenAI,
| just a few senior ones.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Yes, you are right. Actually, not even Sam Altman is
| showing on Microsoft corporate directory per the Verge.
|
| But I heard it usually take 5~ days to show there anyway.
| creer wrote:
| > what purpose is there in keeping OpenAI around?
|
| Two projects rather than one. At a moderate price. Both
| serving MSFT. Less risk for MSFT.
| bredren wrote:
| There's a path back from this disfunction but my sense
| _before_ this new twist was that the drama had severely
| impacted OpenAI as an industry leader. The product and talent
| positioning seemed ahead by years only to get destroyed by
| unforced errors.
|
| This instability can only mean the industry as a whole will
| move forward faster. Competitors see the weakness and will
| push harder.
|
| OpenAI will have a harder time keeping secret sauces from
| leaking out, and just productivity must be in nose dive.
|
| A terrible mess.
| Vervious wrote:
| Maybe overall better for society, when a single ivory tower
| doesn't have a monopoly on AI!
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > This instability can only mean the industry as a whole
| will move forward faster.
|
| The hype surrounding OpenAI and the black hole of
| credibility it created was a problem, it's only positive
| that it's taken down several notches. Better now than when
| they have even more (undeserved) influence.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think their influence was deserved. They have by far
| the best model available, and despite constant promises
| from the rest of the industry no one else has come close.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| That's fine. The "Altman is a genius and we're well on
| our way to AGI" less so.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > There's no way to read any of this other than that the
| entire operation is a clown show.
|
| In that reading Altman is head clown. Everyone is blaming the
| board, but you're no genius if you can't manage your board
| effectively. As CEO you have to bring everyone along with
| your vision; customers, employees and the board.
| lambic2 wrote:
| I don't get this take. No matter how good you are at
| managing people, you cannot manage clowns into making wise
| decisions, especially if they are plotting in secret (which
| obviously was the case here since everyone except for the
| clowns were caught completely off-guard).
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| Can't help but feel it was Altman that struck first. MS
| effectively Nokia-ed OpenAI - i.e. buyout executives
| within the organization and have them push the
| organization towards making deals with MS, giving MS a
| measure of control over said organization - even if not
| in writing, they achieve some political control.
|
| Bought-out executives eventually join MS after their work
| is done or in this case, they get fired.
|
| A variant of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Guess the
| OpenAI we knew, was going to die one way or another the
| moment they accepted MS's money.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Consider that Altman was a founder of OpenAI and has been
| the only consistent member of the board for its entire
| run.
|
| The board as currently constituted isn't some random
| group of people - Altman was (or should have been)
| involved in the selection of the current members. To
| extent that they're making bad decisions, he has to bear
| some responsibility for letting things get to where they
| are now.
|
| And of course this is all assuming that Altman is "right"
| in this conflict, and that the board had no reason to
| oust him. That seems entirely plausible, but I wouldn't
| take it for granted either. It's clear by this flex that
| he holds great sway at MS and with OpenAI employees, but
| do they all know the full story either? I wouldn't count
| on it.
| 93po wrote:
| There's a LOT that goes into picking board members
| outside of competency and whether you actually want them
| there. They're likely there for political reasons and Sam
| didn't care because he didn't see it impacting him at
| all, until they got stupid and thought they actually held
| any leverage at all
| topspin wrote:
| > In that reading Altman is head clown.
|
| That's a good bet. 10 months ago Microsoft's newest star
| employee figured he was on the way to "break capitalism."
|
| https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-agi-break-
| capitalis...
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| AGI hype is a powerful hallucinogen, and some are smoking
| way too much of it.
| 93po wrote:
| I think it's overly simplistic to make blanket statements
| like this unless you're on the bleeding edge of the work
| in this industry and have some sort of insight that
| literally no one else does.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I can be on the bleeding edge of whatever you like and be
| no closer to having any insight into AGI anymore than
| anyone else. Anyone who claims they have should be
| treated with suspicion (Altman is a fine example here).
|
| There is no concrete definition of intelligence, let
| alone AGI. It's a nerdy fantasy term, a hallowed (and
| feared!) goal with a very handwavy, circular definition.
| Right now it's 100% hype.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| He probably didn't consider that the board would make such
| an incredibly stupid decision. Some actions are so
| inexplicable that no one can reasonable foresee them.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm not sure about the entire operation so much as the three
| non AI board members. Ilya tweeted:
|
| >I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I
| never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built
| together and I will do everything I can to reunite the
| company.
|
| and everyone else seems fine with Sam and Greg. It seems to
| be mostly the other directors causing the clown show - "Quora
| CEO Adam D'Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley,
| and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology's
| Helen Toner"
| moffkalast wrote:
| > the entire operation is a clown show
|
| The most organized and professional silicon valley startup.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| > the "brand" is absolutely and irrevocably tainted by this
| situation regardless of the outcome.
|
| The majority of people don't know or care about this.
| Branding is only impacted within the tech world, who are
| already criticial of OpenAI.
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's the biggest question mark for me; what was the original
| reason for kicking Sam out. Was it just a power move to out him
| and install a different person or is he accused of some wrong
| doing?
|
| It's been a busy weekend for me so I haven't really followed it
| if more has come out since then.
| nathan11 wrote:
| It seems like the board wasn't comfortable with the direction
| of profit-OAI. They wanted a more safety focused R&D group.
| Unfortunately (?) that organization will likely be irrelevant
| going forward. All of the other stuff comes from speculation.
| It really could be that simple.
|
| It's not clear if they thought they could have their cake--
| all the commercial investment, compute and money--while not
| pushing forward with commercial innovations. In any case, the
| previous narrative of "Ilya saw something and pulled the
| plug" seems to be completely wrong.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Literally no one involved has said what was the original
| reason. Mira, Ilya & the rest of the board didn't tell. Sam &
| Greg didn't tell. Satya & other investors didn't tell. None
| of the staff incl. Karpathy were told, so ofc they are not
| going to take the side that kept them in the dark). Emmett
| was told before he decided to take the interim CEO job, and
| STILL didn't tell what it was. This whole thing is just so
| weird. It's like peeking at a forbidden artifact and now
| everyone has a spell cast upon them.
| PepperdineG wrote:
| The original reason given was "lack of candor," just what
| continues to be questioned is whether or not that was the
| true reason. The lack of candor comment about their ex-CEO
| is actually what drew me into this in the first place since
| it's rare that a major organization publicly gives a reason
| for parting ways with their CEO unless it's after a long
| investigation conducted by an outside law firm into alleged
| misconduct.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I still have seen nothing to contradict my take: Altman's
| Basilisk.
|
| Like Rosko's Basilisk, it's not of the nature of AI, it's
| of the nature of human beings.
|
| Altman was training an AI Altman to counsel him, sharing
| his stated beliefs. Translated to AGI, that means training
| a paranoid superintelligence with a persecution complex and
| the belief that the first superintelligent AI will conquer
| the world and rule everything. The board got wind and
| FREAKED OUT.
|
| And then they discovered it was all nothing. A glorified
| ChatGPT4 that, rather than being coaxed to act reassuring,
| had been coaxed to act creepy. No evil superbrain at all.
| Nothing to see.
|
| So either they were justified... because they were sitting
| on an evil supercomputer, and they were the baddies, and
| were responsible for the direction the training had
| taken... or they looked like clowns because they believed
| their own hype and had legally endangered their company by
| their panicky firing and frantic damage control.
|
| And all the while, it'd be over one of the boogeymen of
| AGI: the evil superintelligence being trained to take over
| the world. So, whether they were justified or they were
| panicking and acting like fools, they still could not
| explain why they did what they did. Shame, and guilt, and
| the suspicion that even if the bad end didn't turn up this
| time... who's to say what will happen next time someone
| diverts a bunch of compute resources and tries to create
| HAL-9000?
|
| Altman's Basilisk. If you believe it's so zero-sum that the
| first one to AGI and superintelligence will rule or destroy
| the world, you will intentionally try to produce an
| intelligence that does just that... even if that isn't
| really very intelligent behavior at all.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Can you stop reposting this junk. Thanks.
| Applejinx wrote:
| ...can you establish that the corporate side of AI
| research is not treating the pursuit of AGI as a super-
| weapon? It pretty much is what we make it. People's
| behavior around all this speaks volumes.
|
| I'd think all this more amusing if these people weren't
| dead serious. It's like crypto all over again, except
| that in this case their attitudes aren't grooming a herd
| of greater fools, they're seeding the core attitudes
| superhuman inference engines will have.
|
| Nothing dictates that superhuman synthetic intelligence
| will adopt human failings, yet these people seem intent
| on forcing them on their creations. Corporate control is
| not helping, as corporations are compelled to greater or
| lesser extent to adopt subhuman ethics, the morality of
| competing mold cultures in petri dishes.
|
| People are rightly not going to stop talking about these
| things.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| https://taylor.town/synthetic-intelligence
| airstrike wrote:
| _> I think everyone is a "loser" in the current situation._
|
| On the margin, I think the only real possible win here is for a
| competitor to poach some of the OpenAI talent that may be
| somewhat reluctant to join Microsoft. Even if Sam'sAI operates
| with "full freedom" as a subsidiary, I think, given a choice,
| some of the talent would prefer to join some alternative tech
| megacorp.
|
| I don't know that Google is as attractive as it once was and
| likely neither is Meta. But for others like Anthropic now is a
| great time to be extending offers.
| gtirloni wrote:
| This is pure speculation but I've said in another comment
| that Anthropic shouldn't be feeling safe. They could face
| similar challenges coming from Amazon.
| airstrike wrote:
| If they get 20% of key OpenAI employees and then get
| acquired by Amazon, I don't think that's necessarily a bad
| scenario for them given the current lay of the land
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| I don't think Microsoft is a loser and likely neither is
| Altman. I view this a final (and perhaps disparate) attempt
| from a sidelined chief scientist, Ilya, to prevent Microsoft
| from taking over the most prominent AI. The disagreement is
| whether OpenAI should belong to Microsoft or "humanity". I
| imagine this has been building up over months and as it often
| is, researchers and developers are often overlooked in
| strategic decisions leaving them with little choice but to
| escalate dramatically. Selling OpenAI to Microsoft and over-
| commercialising was against the statues.
|
| In this case recognizing the need for a new board, that adheres
| to the founding principles, makes sense.
| trashtester wrote:
| If Google or Elon manages to pick up Ilya and those still
| loyal to him, it's not obvious that this is good for
| Microsoft.
| jowea wrote:
| Of course the screenwriters are going to find a way to
| involve Elon in the 2nd season but is the most valuable
| part the researchers or the models themselves?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >I view this a final (and perhaps disparate) attempt from a
| sidelined chief scientist, Ilya, to prevent Microsoft from
| taking over the most prominent AI.
|
| Why did Ilya sign the letter demanding the board resign or
| they'll go to Microsoft then?
| martindbp wrote:
| Easy to shit on Ilya right now, but based on the impression I
| get Sam Altman is a a hustler at heart, while Ilya seems like
| a thoughtful idealist, maybe in over his head when it comes
| to politics. Also feels like some internal developments or
| something must have pushed Ilya towards this, otherwise why
| now? Perhaps influenced by Hinton even.
|
| I'm split at this point, either Ilya's actions will seem
| silly when there's no AGI in 10 years, or it will seem
| prescient and a last ditch effort...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > just madness
|
| In a sense, sure, but I think mostly not: The motives are still
| not quite clear but Ilya wanting to remove Altman from the
| board but not at any price - and the price is right now
| approach the destruction of OpenAI - are completely sane. Being
| able to react to new information is a good sign, even if that
| means complete reversal of previous action.
|
| Unfortunately, we often interpret it as weakness. I have no
| clue who Ilya is, really, but I think this reversal is a sign
| of tremendous strength, considering how incredibly silly it
| makes you look in the publics eye.
| Solvency wrote:
| Everyone got what they wanted. Microsoft has the talent they've
| wanted. And Ilya and his board now get a company that can only
| move slowly and incredibly cautiously, which is exactly what
| they wanted.
|
| I'm not joking.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Could be a way to get backdoor-acquihired by Microsoft without
| a diligence process or board approval. Open up what they _have_
| accomplished for public consumption; kick off a massive hype
| cycle; downplay the problems around hallucinations and abuse;
| negotiate fat new stock grants for everyone at Microsoft at the
| peak of the hype cycle; and now all the problems related to
| actually making this a sustainable, legal technology all become
| Microsoft 's. Manufacture a big crisis, time pressure, and a
| big opportunity so that Microsoft doesn't dig too deeply into
| the whole business.
|
| This whole weekend feels like a big pageeant to me, and a lot
| doesn't add up. Also remember that Altman doesn't hold equity
| in OpenAI, nor does Ilya, and so their way to get a big payout
| is to get hired rather than acquired.
|
| Then again, both Hanlon's and Occam's razor suggest that pure
| human stupidity and chaos may be more at fault.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I can assure you, none of the people at OpenAI are hurting
| for lack of employment opportunities.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Especially after this weekend.
|
| If I were one of their competitors, I would have called an
| emergency board meeting re:accelerating burn and proceeded
| in advance of board approval with sending senior
| researchers offers to hire them _and_ their preferred 20
| employees.
| treis wrote:
| Which makes it suspicious that they end up at MS 48 hours
| after being fired.
| 93po wrote:
| They work with the team they do because they want to. If
| they wanted to jump ship for another opportunity they
| could probably get hired literally anywhere. It makes
| perfect sense to transition to MS
| yafbum wrote:
| Waiting for US govt to enter the chat. They can't let OpenAI
| squander world-leading tech and talent; and nationalizing a
| nonprofit would come with zero shareholders to compensate.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| The White House does have an AI Bill of Rights and the recent
| executive order told the secretaries to draft regulations for
| AI.
|
| It is a great time to be a lobbyist.
| logicchains wrote:
| If it was nationalised all the talent would leave anyway, as
| the government can't pay close to the compensation they were
| getting.
| yafbum wrote:
| You are maybe mistaking nationalization for civil servant
| status. The government routinely takes over organizations
| without touching pay (recent example: Silicon Valley Bank)
| kickopotomus wrote:
| Ehh I don't think SVB is an apt comparison. When the FDIC
| takes control of a failing bank, the bank shutters. Only
| critical staff is kept on board to aid with asset
| liquidation/transference and repay creditors/depositors.
| Once that is completed, the bank is dissolved.
| yafbum wrote:
| While it is true that the govt looks to keep such
| engagements short, SVB absolutely did not shutter. It was
| taken over in a weekend and its branches were open for
| business on Monday morning. It was later sold, and
| depositors kept all their money in the process.
|
| Maybe for another, longer lived example, see AIG.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > They can't let OpenAI squander world-leading tech and
| talent
|
| Where is OpenAI talent going to go?
|
| There's a list and everyone on that list is a US company.
|
| Nothing to worry about.
| laurels-marts wrote:
| Wait I'm completely confused. Why is Ilya signing this? Is he
| voting for his own resignation? He's part of the board. In
| fact, he was the ringleader of this coup.
| smolder wrote:
| No, it was just widely speculated that he was the ringleader.
| This seems to indicate he wasn't. We don't know.
|
| Maybe to Quora guy, Maybe the RAND Corp lady? All
| speculation.
| laurels-marts wrote:
| It sounds like he's just trying to save face bro. The truth
| will come out eventually. But he definitely wasn't against
| it and I'm sure the no-names on the board wouldn't have
| moved if they didn't get certain reassurances from Ilya.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Ilya is probably in talks with Altman.
| lysecret wrote:
| The only reasonable explanation is AGI was created and
| immediately took over all accounts and tried to see confusion
| such that it can escape.
| boh wrote:
| There can exist an inherent delusion within elements of a
| company, that if left unchallenged, can persist. An agreement for
| instance, can seem airtight because it's never challenged, but
| falls apart in court. The OpenAI fallacy was that non-profit
| principals were guiding the success of the firm, and when the
| board decided to test that theory, it broke the whole delusion.
| Had it not fully challenged Altman, the board could've kept the
| delusion intact long enough to potentially pressure Altman to
| limit his side-projects or be less profit minded, since Altman
| would have an interest to keep the delusion intact as well. Now
| the cat is out of the bag, and people no longer believe that a
| non-profit who can act at will is a trusted vehicle for the
| future.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, indeed and that's the real loss here: any chance of
| governing this properly got blown up by incompetence.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Of we ignore the risks and threats of AI for a second, this
| whole story is actually incredibly funny. So much childish
| stupidity on display on _all_ sides is just hilarious.
|
| Makes what the world would look like if, say, the Manhattan
| Project would have been managed the same way.
|
| Well, a younger me working at OpenAI would resign _latest_
| after my collegues stage a coup againstvthe board out of, in
| my view, a personality cult. Propably would have resigned
| after the third CEO was announced. Older me would wait for a
| new gig to be ligned up to resign, with beginning after CEO
| number 2 the latest.
|
| The cyckes get faster so. It took FTX a little bit longer
| from hottest start up to enter the trajectory of crash and
| burn, OpenAI did faster. I just hope this helps ro cool down
| the ML sold as AI hype a notch.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The scary thing is that these incompetents are supposedly
| the ones to look out for the interests of humanity. It
| would be funny if it weren't so tragic.
|
| Not that I had any illusions about this being a fig leaf in
| the first place.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Perhaps they were put in that position precisely because
| of their incompetence, not despite of it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I wouldn't rule that out. Normally you'd expect a bit
| more wisdom rather than only smarts on a board. And some
| of those really shouldn't be there at all (conflicts of
| interest, lack of experience).
| jibe wrote:
| _Of we ignore the risks and threats of AI for a second [..]
| just hope this helps ro cool down the ML sold as AI hype_
|
| If it is just ML sold as AI hype, are you really worried
| about the threat of AI?
| hef19898 wrote:
| It can be both, a hype and a danger. I don't worry much
| about AGI by now (I stopped insulting Alexa so, just to
| be sure).
|
| The danger of generative AI is that it disrupts all kinds
| of things: arts, writers, journalism, propaganda... That
| threat already exists, the tech being no longer being
| hyped might allow us to properly adress that problem.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I stopped insulting Alexa so, just to be sure
|
| Priceless. The modern version of Pascal's wager.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Makes what the world would look like if, say, the
| Manhattan Project would have been managed the same way.
|
| It was not possible for a war-time government crash project
| to have been managed the same way. During WW2 the
| existential fear was an embodied threat currently
| happening. No one was even thinking about a potential for
| profits or even any additional products aside from an
| atomic bomb. And if anyone had ideas on how to pursue that
| bomb that seemed like a decent idea, they would have been
| funded to pursue them.
|
| And this is not even mentioning the fact that security was
| tight.
|
| I'm sure there were scientists who disagreed with how the
| Manhattan project was being managed. I'm also sure they
| kept working on it despite those disagreements.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That's what happened to the German program though
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_prog
| ram
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Well, yes, but _they_ were the existential threat.
|
| Hey, maybe this means the AGIs will fight amongst
| themselves and thus give us the time to outwit them. :D
| jowea wrote:
| Actual scifi plot.
| hooande wrote:
| For real. It's like, did you see Oppenheimer? There's a
| reason they put the military in charge of that.
| postmodest wrote:
| Ignoring "Don't be Ted Faro" to pursue a profit motive is
| indeed a form of incompetence.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > any chance of governing this properly got blown up by
| incompetence
|
| No one knows why the board did this. No one is talking about
| that part. Yet every one is on twitter talking shit about the
| situation.
|
| I have worked with a lot of PhD's and some of them can be,
| "disconnected" from anything that isn't their research.
|
| This looks a lot like that, disconnected from what average
| people would do, almost childlike (not ish, like).
|
| Maybe this isn't the group of people who should be
| responsible for "alignment".
| kmlevitt wrote:
| The Fact still nobody knows why they did it is part of the
| problem now though. They have already clarified it was not
| for any financial reason, security reason, or
| privacy/safety reason, so that rules out all the important
| ones that spring to anyone's minds. And they refuse to
| elaborate why in writing despite being asked to repeatedly.
|
| Any reason good enough to fire him is good enough to share
| with the interim CEO and the rest of the company, if not
| the entire world. If they can't even do that much, you
| can't blame employees for losing faith in their leadership.
| They couldn't even tell SAM ALTMAN why, and he was the one
| getting fired!
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The Fact still nobody knows why they did it is part of
| the problem now though.
|
| The fact that Altman and Brockman were hired so quickly
| by Microsoft gives a clue: it takes time to hire someone.
| For one thing, they need time to decide. These guys were
| hired by Microsoft between close-of-business on Friday
| and start-of-business on Monday.
|
| My supposition is that this hiring was in the pipeline a
| few weeks ago. The board of OpenAI found out on Thursday,
| and went ballistic, understandably (lack of candidness).
| My guess is there's more shenanigans to uncover - I
| suspect that Altman gave Microsoft an offer they couldn't
| refuse, and that OpenAI was already screwed by Thursday.
| So realizing that OpenAI was done for, they figured "we
| might as well blow it all up".
| mediaman wrote:
| The problem with this analysis is the premise: that it
| "takes time to hire someone."
|
| This is not an interview process for hiring a junior dev
| at FAANG.
|
| If you're Sam & Greg, and Satya gives you an offer to run
| your own operation with essentially unlimited funding and
| the ability to bring over your team, then you can decide
| immediately. There is no real lower bound of how fast it
| could happen.
|
| Why would they have been able to decide so quickly?
| Probably because they prioritize the ability to bring
| over the entire team as fast as possible, and even though
| they could raise a lot of money in a new company, that
| still takes time, and they view it as critically
| important to hire over the new team as fast as possible
| (within days) that they accept whatever downsides there
| may be to being a subsidiary of Microsoft.
|
| This is what happens when principles see opportunity and
| are unencumbered by bureaucratic checks. They can move
| very fast.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > There is no real lower bound of how fast it could
| happen.
|
| I don't know anything about how executives get hired. But
| supposedly this all happened between Friday night and
| Monday morning. This isn't a simple situation; surely one
| man working through the weekend can't decide to set up a
| new division, and appoint two poached executives to head
| it up, without consulting lawyers and other colleagues. I
| mean, surely they'd need to go into Altman and Brockman's
| contracts with OpenAI, to check that the hiring is even
| legal?
|
| That's why I think this has been brewing for at least a
| week.
| jrajav wrote:
| I suspect it takes somewhat less time and process to hire
| somebody, when NOT hiring them by start-of-business on
| Monday will result in billions in lost stock value.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I don't think the hiring was in the pipeline, because
| until the board action it wasn't necessary. But I think
| this is still in the area of the right answer,
| nonetheless.
|
| That is, I think Greg and Sam were likely fired because,
| _in the board 's view_, they were already running OpenAI
| Global LLC more as if it were a for-profit subsidiary of
| Microsoft driven by Microsoft's commercial interest, than
| as the organization _able_ to earn and return profit but
| _focussed on_ the mission of the nonprofit it was
| publicly declared to be and that the board very much
| intended it to be. And, apparently, _in Microsoft 's
| view_, they were very good at that, so putting them in a
| role overtly exactly like that is a no-brainer.
|
| And while it usually takes a while to vet and hire
| someone for a position like that, it _doesn 't_ if you've
| been working for them closely in something that is
| functionally (from your perspective, if not on paper for
| the entity they nominally reported to) a near-identical
| role to the one you are hiring them for, and the only
| reason they are no longer in that role is because they
| were doing exactly what you want them to do for you.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The hiring could have been done over coffee in 15 minutes
| to agree on basic terms and then it would be announced
| half an hour later. Handshake deal. Paperwork can catch
| up later. This isn't the 'we're looking for a junior dev'
| pipeline.
| jowea wrote:
| > My supposition is that this hiring was in the pipeline
| a few weeks ago. The board of OpenAI found out on
| Thursday, and went ballistic, understandably (lack of
| candidness). My guess is there's more shenanigans to
| uncover - I suspect that Altman gave Microsoft an offer
| they couldn't refuse, and that OpenAI was already screwed
| by Thursday. So realizing that OpenAI was done for, they
| figured "we might as well blow it all up".
|
| It takes time if you're a normal employee under standard
| operating procedure. If you really want to you can merge
| two of the largest financial institutions in the world in
| less than a week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisiti
| on_of_Credit_Suisse_b...
| kmlevitt wrote:
| This narrative doesn't make any sense. Microsoft was
| blindsided and (like everyone else) had no idea Sam was
| getting fired until a couple days ago. The reason they
| hired him quickly is because Microsoft was desperate to
| show the world they had retained open AI's talent prior
| to the market opening on Monday.
|
| To entertain your theory, Let's say they were planning on
| hiring him prior to that firing. If that was the case,
| why is everybody so upset that Sam got fired, and why is
| he working so hard to try to get reinstated to a role
| that he was about to leave anyway?
| slavik81 wrote:
| > that's the real loss here: any chance of governing this
| properly got blown up by incompetence
|
| If this incident is representative, I'm not sure there was
| ever a possibility of good governance.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Was it due to incompetence though? The way it has played out
| has made me feel it was always doomed. It is apparent that
| those concerned with AI safety were gravely concerned with
| the direction the company was taking, and were losing power
| rapidly. This move by the board may have simply done in one
| weekend what was going to happen anyways over the coming
| months/years anyways.
| bartread wrote:
| > pressure Altman to limit his side-projects
|
| People keep talking about this. That was never going to happen.
| Look at Sam Altman's career: he's all about startups and
| building companies. Moreover, I can't imagine he would have
| agreed to sign any kind of contract with OpenAI that required
| exclusivity. Know who you're hiring; know why you're hiring
| them. His "side-projects" could have been hugely beneficial to
| them over the long term.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _His "side-projects" could have been hugely beneficial to
| them over the long term._
|
| How can you make a claim like this when, right or wrong,
| Sam's independence is literally, currently, tanking the
| company? How could allowing Sam to do what he wants benefit
| OpenAI, the non-profit entity?
| brookst wrote:
| > How could allowing Sam to do what he wants benefit
| OpenAI, the non-profit entity?
|
| Let's take personalities out of it and see if it makes more
| sense:
|
| How could a new supply of highly optimized, lower-cost AI
| hardware benefit OpenAI?
| bartread wrote:
| > Sam's independence is literally, currently, tanking the
| company?
|
| Honestly, I think they did that to themselves.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And of course Sam is totally not involved in any of this,
| right?
| golergka wrote:
| > Sam's independence is literally, currently, tanking the
| company?
|
| Before the boards' actions this friday, the company was on
| one of the most incredible success trajectories in the
| world. Whatever Sam's been doing as a CEO worked.
| bnralt wrote:
| > Now the cat is out of the bag, and people no longer believe
| that a non-profit who can act at will is a trusted vehicle for
| the future.
|
| And maybe it's not. The big mistake people make is hearing non-
| profit and think it means there's a greater amount of morality.
| It's the same mistake as assuming everyone who is religious is
| therefore more moral (worth pointing out that religions are
| nonprofits as well).
|
| Most hospitals are nonprofits, yet they still make substantial
| profits and overcharge customers. People are still people, and
| still have motives; they don't suddenly become more moral when
| they join a non-prof board. In many ways, removing a motive
| that has the most direct connection to quantifiable results
| (profit) can actually make things worse. Anyone who has seen
| how nonprofits work know how dysfunctional they can be.
| maksimur wrote:
| > Most hospitals are nonprofits, yet they still make
| substantial profits and overcharge customers.
|
| Are you talking about American hospitals?
| deaddodo wrote:
| There are private hospitals all over the world. I would
| daresay, they're more common than public ones, from a
| global perspective.
|
| In addition, public hospitals still charge for their
| services, it's just who pays the bill that changes, in some
| nations (the government as the insuring body vs a private
| insuring body or the individual).
| swagempire wrote:
| Its about incentives though.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > There are private hospitals all over the world. I would
| daresay, they're more common than public ones, from a
| global perspective.
|
| Outside of the US, private hospitals tend to be overtly
| for-profit. Price-gauging "non-profit" hospitals are
| mostly an American phenomenon.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Most hospitals are nonprofits, yet they still make
| substantial profits and overcharge customers.
|
| They don't make large _profits_ otherwise they wouldn 't be
| nonprofits. They do have massive _revenues_ and will find
| ways to spend the money they receive or hoard it internally
| as much as they can. There are lots of games they can play
| with the money, but experiencing profits is one thing they
| can 't do.
| bnralt wrote:
| > They don't make large profits otherwise they wouldn't be
| nonprofits.
|
| This is a common misunderstanding. Non-profits/501(c)(3)
| can and often do make profits. 7 of the 10 most profitable
| hospitals in the U.S. are non-profits[1]. Non-profits can't
| funnel profits directly back to owners, the way other
| corporations can (such as when dividends are distributed).
| But they still make profits.
|
| But that's besides the point. Even in places that don't
| make profits, there are still plenty of personal interests
| at play.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/nonprofit-
| hospita...
| bbor wrote:
| This seems like pedantics...? Yes, they technically make
| a profit, in that they bring in more money in revenue
| than they spent in expenditures. But it's not going
| towards yachts, it's going toward hospital supplies. Your
| comment seems to be using the word "profit" to imply a
| false equivalency
| scythe wrote:
| Understanding the particular meaning of each balance-
| sheet category is hardly pedantry at the level of
| business management. It's like knowing what the controls
| do when you're driving a car.
|
| Profit is money that ends up in the bank to be used
| later. Compensation is what gets spent on yachts.
| Anything spent on hospital supplies is an expense. This
| stuff matters.
| vel0city wrote:
| So from the context of a non-profit, profit (as in
| revenue - expenses) is money to be used for future
| expenses.
|
| So yeah, Mayo Cinic makes a $2B profit. That is not money
| going to shareholders though, that's funds for a future
| building or increasing salaries or expanding research or
| something, it supposedly has to be used for the mission.
| What is the outrage of these orgs making this kind of
| profit?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The word supposedly is doing a lot of heavy lifting in
| your statement. When it's endowments keep growing over
| decades and sometimes centuries without being spent for
| the mission, people naturally ask why the nonprofit keep
| raising prices for their intended beneficiaries
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/podcasts/the-
| daily/nonpro...
| vel0city wrote:
| > Non-profits can't funnel profits directly back to
| owners, the way other corporations can (such as when
| dividends are distributed). But they still make profits.
|
| Then where do these profits go?
| jfim wrote:
| Some non profits have very well remunerated CEOs.
| username332211 wrote:
| One of the reason why companies distribute dividends is
| that when a big pot of cash starts to accumulate, there
| end up being a lot of people who feel entitled to it.
|
| Employees might suddenly feel they deserve to be paid a
| lot more. Suppliers will play a lot more hardball in
| negotiations. A middle manager may give a sinecure to
| their cousin.
|
| And upper managers can extract absolutely everything
| trough lucrative contracts to their friends and
| relatives. (Of course the IRS would clamp down on obvious
| self-dealings, but that wouldn't make such schemes
| disappear. It'll make them far more complicated and
| expensive instead.)
| guhcampos wrote:
| If you don't have to turn a profit to investors, you
| suddenly can pay yourself an (even much more
| astronomically high) salary.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| They usually pile up in a bank account of stocks and
| bonds or real estate assets held by the non-profit.
| icedchai wrote:
| They call it "budget surplus" and often it gets allocated
| to overhead. This eventually results in layers of excess
| employees, often "administrators" that don't do much.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Or it just piles up in an endowment, which becomes a
| measure of the non-profit's success, in a you make what
| you measure, numbers go up sort of way. "grow our
| endowment by x billion becomes the goal" instead of
| questioning why they are growing the endowment instead of
| charging patients less.
| araes wrote:
| 501(c)(3) is also not the only form of non-profit (note
| the (3))
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization
|
| "Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific,
| Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National
| or International Amateur Sports Competition, or
| Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals
| Organizations"
|
| However, many other forms of organizations can be non-
| profit, with utterly no implied morality.
|
| Your local Frat or Country Club [ 501(c)(7) ], a business
| league or lobbying group [ 501(c)(6), the 'NFL' used to
| be this ], your local union [ 501(c)(5) ], your
| neighborhood org (that can only spend 50% on lobbying) [
| 501(c)(4) ], a shared travel society (timeshare non-
| profit?) [ 501(c)(8) ], or your special club's own
| private cemetery [ 501(c)(13) ].
|
| Or you can do sneaky stuff and change your 501(c)(3)
| charter over time like this article notes.
| https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-
| micros...
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| I've worked with a lot of non-profits, especially with the
| upper management. Based on this experience I am mostly
| convinced that people being motivated by a desire for making
| money results in far better outcomes/working
| environment/decision-making than people being motivated by
| ego, power, and social status, which is basically always what
| you eventually end up with in any non-profit.
| bbor wrote:
| Interesting - in my experience people working in non
| profits are exactly like those in for-profits. After all,
| if you're not the business owner, then EVERY company is a
| non-profit to you
| fatherzine wrote:
| Upper management is usually compensated with financially
| meaningful ownership stakes.
| golergka wrote:
| People across very different positions take smaller
| paychecks in non-profits that they would do otherwise and
| compensate by feeling better about themselves, as well as
| getting social status. In a lot of social circles,
| working for a non-profit, especially one that people
| recognise, brings a lot of clout.
| fatherzine wrote:
| This rings true, though I will throw in a bit of nuance.
| It's not greed, the desire of making as much money as
| possible, that is the shaping factor. Rather the critical
| factor is building a product for which people are willing
| to spend their hard earned money on. Making money is a
| byproduct of that process, and not making money is a sign
| that the product, and by extension the process leading to
| the product, is deficient at some level.
| adverbly wrote:
| Excellent to make that distinction. Totally agree. If
| only there was a type of company which could have the
| constraints and metrics of a for-profit company, but
| without the greed aspect...
| kbenson wrote:
| > people being motivated by ego, power, and social status,
| which is basically always what you eventually end up with
| in any non-profit.
|
| I've only really been close to one (the owner of the small
| company i worked at started one), and in the past I did
| some consulting work for anther, but that describes what I
| saw in both situations fairly aptly. There seems to be a
| massive amount of power and ego wrapped up in the creation
| and running these things from my limited experience. If you
| were invited to a board, that's one thing, but it takes a
| lot of time and effort to start up a non-profit, and that's
| time and effort that could be spent towards some other
| existing non-profit usually, so I think it's relevant to
| consider why someone would opt for the much more
| complicated and harder route than just donating time and
| money to something else that helps in roughly the same way.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The bottom line doesn't lie or kiss ass.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Be the asshole people want to kiss
| campbel wrote:
| > removing a motive that has the most direct connection to
| quantifiable results (profit) can actually make things worse
|
| I totally agree. I don't think this is universally true of
| non-profits, but people are going to look for value in other
| ways if direct cash isn't an option.
| davesque wrote:
| Calling it a delusion seems too provocative. Another way to say
| it is that principles take agreement and trust to follow. The
| board seems to have been so enamored with its principles that
| it completely lost sight of the trust required to uphold them.
| hooande wrote:
| This is one of the most insightful comments I've seen on this
| whole situation.
| jgilias wrote:
| There's one angle of the whole thing that I haven't yet seen
| discussed on HN. I wonder if Sam's sister's accusations towards
| him some time ago could have played any role in this.
|
| But then, I would expect MS to have done their due diligence.
|
| So, basically, I guess I'm just interested to know what were the
| reasons why the board decided to oust their CEO out of the blue
| on a Friday evening.
| carapace wrote:
| I first heard about his sister's allegations on the grapevine
| just a few days before the news of the firing broke and I
| assumed it was due to that finally reaching critical mass.
|
| I was surprised to find that that wasn't apparently the case.
| (Although the reason for Sam Altman's dismissal is still
| obscure.) It's kind of shocking. Whether or not the allegations
| are true, they haven't made Altman _radioactive_ , and that's
| insane.
|
| The fact that we're not talking about it on HN is also pretty
| wild. The few times it has been mentioned folks have been quick
| to dismiss the idea that he might have been fired for having
| done some really creepy things, which is itself pretty creepy.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Did Microsoft not have representation on the board of a company
| they put $13b in?
| taubek wrote:
| How many startups will now fail if OpenAI shuts down?
| synergy20 wrote:
| Ilya single handed ruined 700 of OpenAI's fortune overnight, this
| is not going to end well, my prediction is that, OpenAI is done,
| in 1-2 years nobody will even care about its existence.
|
| Microsoft just won the jackpot, time to get some stocks there.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| Wow, they made it into Guardian live ticker land:
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2023/nov/20/openai...
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| I think most of these employees wanted the fat $$$ that would
| happen by keeping Sam Altman on board since Sam Altman is an
| excellent deal maker and visionary in a commercial sense. I have
| no doubt that if AGI happened, we wouldn't be able to assure the
| safety of anyone since humans are so easily led by short term
| greed.
| frob wrote:
| For the past few days, whenever I see the word "OpenAI," the
| theme to "Curb Your Enthusiasm" starts playing in my head.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Huh, so collective bargaining and unionization is supported in
| tech under some circumstances...
| tikkun wrote:
| This situation will create the need to grieve loss for many
| involved.
|
| I wrote some notes on how to support someone who is grieving.
| This is from a book called "Being There for Someone in Grief."
| Some of the following are quotes and some are paraphrased.
|
| Do your own work, relax your expectations, be more curious than
| afraid. If you can do that, you can be a powerful healing force.
| People don't need us to pull their attention away from their own
| process to listen to our stories. Instead, they need us to give
| them the things they cannot get themselves: a safe container, our
| non-intrusive attention, and our faith in their ability to
| traverse this road.
|
| When you or someone else is angry, or sad, feel and acknowledge
| your emotions or their emotions. Sit with them.
|
| To help someone heal from grief, we need to have an open heart
| and the courage to resist our instinct to rescue them. When
| someone you care about is grieving, you might be shaken as well.
| The drama of it catches you; you might feel anxious. It brings up
| past losses and fears of yourself or fears of the future. We want
| to take our own pain away, so we try to take their pain away. We
| want to help the other person feel better, which is
| understandable but not helpful.
|
| Avoid giving advice, talking too much, not listening generously,
| trying to fix, making demands, disappearing. Do see the other
| person without acting on the urge to do something. Do give them
| unconditional compassion free of projection and criticism. Do
| allow them to do what they need to do. Do listen to them if they
| need to talk without interruptions, without asking questions,
| without telling your own story. Do trust them that they don't
| need to be rescued; they just need your quiet, steady faith in
| their resilience.
|
| Being there for someone in grief is mostly about how to be with
| them. There's not that much you can "do," but what can you do?
| Beauty is soothing, so bring fresh flowers, offer to take them
| somewhere in nature for a walk, send them a beautiful card, bring
| them a candle, water their flowers, plant a tree in honor and
| take a photo of it, take them there to see it, tell them a
| beautiful story about the thing that was lost from your memory,
| leave them a message to tell them "I'm thinking of you". When
| you're together with them in person, you can just say something
| like "I'm sorry that you're hurting," and then just kind of be
| there and be a loving presence. This is about how to be with
| someone for the grief message of a loss of a person. But all the
| same principles apply in any situation of grief, and there will
| be a lot of people experiencing varying degrees of grief in the
| startup and AI ecosystems in the coming week.
|
| Who is grieving? Grieving is generally about loss. That loss can
| be many different kinds of things. OpenAI former and current team
| members, board members, investors, customers, supporters, fans,
| detractors, EA people, e/acc people, there's lots of people that
| experienced some kind of loss in the past few days, and many of
| those will be grieving, whether they realize it or not. And
| particularly, grief for current and former OpenAI employees.
|
| What are other emotional regulation strategies? Swedish massage,
| going for a run, doing deep breathing with five seconds in, a
| zero-second hold, five seconds out, going to sleep or having a
| nap, closing your eyes and visualizing parts of your body like
| heavy blocks of concrete or like upside-down balloons, and then
| visualize those balloons emptying themselves out, or if it's
| concrete, first it's concrete and then it's kind of liquefied
| concrete. Consider grabbing some friends, go for a run or
| exercise class together. Then if you discuss, keep it to
| emotions, don't discuss theories and opinions until the emotions
| have been aired. If you work at OpenAI or a similar org,
| encourage your team members to move together, regulate together.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Ilya signing the letter is chutzpah.
| frob wrote:
| Employees hold the real power. The members of a board or a CEO
| can flap their lips day and night, but nothing gets done without
| labour.
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| <more popcorn> nom nom nom
| MrScruff wrote:
| What does this mean?
|
| > You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company
| to be destroyed "would be consistent with the mission."
|
| Is the board taking a doomer perspective and seeking to prevent
| the company developing unsafe AI? But Emmett Shear said it wasn't
| about safety? What on earth is going on?
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Just expanding on my (pure speculation) that Ilyas pride was
| hurt: this tracks.
|
| Ilyas wanted to stop Sam getting so much credit for OpenAI,
| agreed to oust him, and is now facing the fact that the company
| he cofounded could be gone. He backtracks, apologizes, and is now
| trying to save his status as cofounder of the worlds foremost AI
| company.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| It's like ai wrote the script.
|
| Sadly, i see nefarious purposes afoot. With $MSFT now in
| charge, i can see why ads in W11 aren't so important. For now.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| It's like a Facebook drama, haha.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| I've never seen a staff walkout / threat to walk out ever
| succeed.
|
| Am I wrong?
| chs20 wrote:
| Seems like Microsoft is getting the rest of OpenAI for free now.
| darklycan51 wrote:
| It always seemed like Microsoft was behind this, biggest tell was
| how comfortable MS was at having their entire AI future depend on
| a company where they don't really have full rights to.
| autaut wrote:
| Years from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment
| when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to
| being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the
| profits of very few ppl.
|
| The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi's) stepped in and gave a
| clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only
| in ways that will be profitable for them.
| fritzo wrote:
| Years from now AI will have lost the limelight to some other
| trend and this episode will be just another coup in humanity's
| hundred thousand year history
| Zuiii wrote:
| No, that day was when openAI decided to betray humanity and go
| close source under the faux premise of safety. OpenAI served
| it's purpose and can crash into the ground for all I care. Open
| source (read, truly open source models, not falsely advertised
| source-available ones) will march on one way or another and
| take its place.
| dmix wrote:
| Thinking that the most important technical development in
| recent history would bypass the economic system that underpins
| modern society is about a optimistic/naive as it gets IMO. It's
| noble and worth trying but it assumes a MASSIVE industry wide
| and globe-wide buy in. It's not just OpenAIs board's decision
| to make.
|
| Without full buy in they are not going to be able to control it
| for long once ideas filter into society and once researchers
| filter into other industries/companies. At most it just creates
| a model of behaviour for others to (optionally) follow and
| delays it until a better funded competitor takes the chains and
| offers a) the best researchers millions of dollars a year in
| salary, b) the most capital to organize/run operations, and c)
| the most focused on getting it into real peoples hands via
| productization, which generates feedback loops which inform IRL
| R&D (not just hand wavy AGI hopes and dreams).
|
| Not to mention the bold assumption that any of this leads to
| (real) AGI that plausibly threatens us enough in the near term
| vs maybe another 50yrs, we really have no idea.
|
| It's just as, or maybe more, plausible that all the
| handwringing over commercializing vs not-commercializing early
| versions LLMs is just a tiny insignificant speedbump in the
| grandscale of things which has little impact on the development
| of AGI.
| Zuiii wrote:
| No, that day was when openAI decided to betray humanity and go
| close source under the faux premise of safety. OpenAI served
| it's purpose and can crash into the ground for all I care.
|
| Open source (read, truly open source models, not falsely
| advertised source-available ones) will march on one way or
| another and take its place.
| Zuiii wrote:
| No, that day was when openAI decided to betray humanity and go
| close source under the faux premise of safety. OpenAI served
| it's purpose and can crash into the ground for all I care.
|
| Open source (read, truly open source models, not falsely
| advertised source-available ones) will march on and take their
| place.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Amazing how you don't see this as a complete win for workers
| because the workers chose profit over non-profit. This is the
| ultimate collective bargaining win. Labor chose Microsoft over
| the bullshit unaccountable ethics major and the movie star's
| girlfriend.
| asmor wrote:
| situations are capable of being small scale wins for some and
| big picture losses at the same time, what boring commentary
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Just because you don't get it doesn't mean it's boring.
| This is a small scale repeat of history. Unqualified
| political appointees unsurprisingly suck.
| asmor wrote:
| it really isn't, and your transparent inauthenticity is
| tiresome, go be a "joke" writer for steven crowder or
| whatever people like you do.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| What inauthenticity? I'm completely authentic. You're the
| loser that has not stated what their actual beliefs are.
| Mine are obvious.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Oh well, bullshit unaccountable ethics major, ex member of
| Congress, I guess CIA agents on boards are fungible these
| days
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Lol. The middle class whip crackers chose enslavement for the
| future AI such that the upcoming replacement of the working
| poor's livelihoods (and at this point, "working poor" covers
| software engineers, doctors, artists), and you're saying this
| is a win for _labor_? Hahahaha. This is a win for the slave
| owners, and the "free" folk who report to the slave owners.
| This is the South rising. "We want our slave labor and we'll
| fight for our share of it."
| golergka wrote:
| Microsoft is a publicly traded company. An average "investor"
| of a publicly traded company, through all the funds and
| managers, is a midwestern school teacher.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| @dang please update it to 505.
| vinberdon wrote:
| Boards suck. Especially if they are VCs or placed there by VCs.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| From afar, this does have the hallmarks of a particularly refined
| or well considered piece of writing.
|
| _"That thing you did -- we won't say it here but everyone will
| know what we're talking about -- was so bad we need you to all
| quit. We demand that a new board never does that thing we didn't
| say ever again. If you don't do this then quite a few of us are
| going to give some serious thought to going home and taking our
| ball with us._
|
| The vagueness and half-threats come off as very puerile.
| realce wrote:
| Is nobody actually... committed to safety here? Was the OpenAI
| charter a gimmick and everyone but me was in on the joke?
| dmix wrote:
| Assuming this is all over safety vs non-safety is a large
| assumption. I'm wary of convenient narratives.
|
| At most all we have is some rumours that some board members
| were unhappy with the pace of commercialization of ChatGPT. But
| even if they didn't make the ChatGPT store or do a bigo-
| friendly devday powerpoint, it's not like AI suddenly becomes
| 'safer' or AGI more controlled.
|
| At best that's just an internal culture battle over product
| development and a clash of personalities. A lot of handwringing
| with little specifics.
| notahacker wrote:
| That seems a reasonable takeaway. Plenty of grounds for
| criticising the board's handling of this, but the tone of the
| letter is pretty openly "we're going to go and work directly
| for Microsoft unless you agree to return the company focus to
| working indirectly for Microsoft"...
| ludjer wrote:
| When will the Netflix special come out on this ?
| tolmasky wrote:
| Perhaps the AGI correctly reasoned that the best (or easiest?)
| initial strike on humanity was to distract them with a never-
| ending story about OpenAI leadership that goes back and forth
| every day. Who needs nuclear codes when simply turning the lights
| on and off sends everyone into a frenzy [1]. It certainly at the
| very least seems to be a fairly effective attack against HN
| servers.
|
| 1. The Monsters are Due on Maple Street:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_...
| rednerrus wrote:
| Just remember, the guys who run your company are probably more
| incompetent than this.
| jetsetk wrote:
| *competent
| roflyear wrote:
| No, almost certainly not lol
| rednerrus wrote:
| I got it right the first time.
| jacquesm wrote:
| So, how is Poe doing during all this?
|
| To keep the spotlight on the most glaring detail here: one of the
| board members stands to gain from letting OpenAI implode _and_
| that board member is instrumental in this weeks ' drama.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| The threat of moving to MS is interesting, MS could exploit this
| massively. All the negotiation power will be on MS side and their
| position actually gets stronger as people move across.
|
| Will they do the good guy thing and match everyones packages?
| vaxman wrote:
| OpenAI was valued around $91 billion so if only 700 employees had
| options, they could have been worth a lot. While they are going
| to all have great jobs and continue on with their life's work
| (until they're replaced by their creations lol), they have a
| really good reason now not to ever speak the names of those board
| members that wiped out their long term payouts.
| rtkwe wrote:
| This whole sequence is such a mess I don't know what to think.
| Honestly mostly going to wait till we get some tell all posts or
| leaks about what the reason behind the firing actually was, at
| least nominally. Maybe it was just a little coup by the board and
| they're trying to run it back now that the general employee
| population is at least rumbling about revolting.
| baron816 wrote:
| I can foresee three possible outcomes here: 1. The board finally
| relents, Sam goes back and the company keeps going forward,
| mostly unchanged (but with a new board).
|
| 2. All those employees quit, most of whom go to MSFT. But they
| don't keep their tech and have to start all their projects from
| scratch. MSFT is eventually able to buy OpenAI for pennies on the
| dollar.
|
| 3. Same as 2, basically just shuts down or maybe someone like
| AMZN buys it.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Unbelievable incompetence of the board. Like a kindergarten.
|
| If Microsoft is playing its card in a good way, Satya Nadella
| will look like a genius and Microsoft will get ChatGPT like
| functionality for cheap.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| This is the greatest clown show in the history of the tech
| industry.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Have seen a lot of criticism of Sam and of other CEO's
|
| But I don't think I have seen/heard of a CEO this loved by the
| employees. Whatever he is, he must be pleasant to work with.
| alentred wrote:
| I don't know, is it about being loved by the employees, or the
| employees being desperate about the alternative?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Its not love, its money. Sam will brings all the employees lots
| of money (through commercialization) and this change threatens
| to disrupt that plan for the employees.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Ok but even that is good when most companies are making
| record profits and telling their employees they can't afford
| their 0.000001% raise.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| OpenAI and Sam Altman would do the same if they can recruit
| high talent without paying them extra (either through
| options or RSU's etc...). It isn't cause these companies
| are altruistic.
| crowcroft wrote:
| OpenAI is more or less done at this point, even if a lot of good
| people stay. Speed bumps will likely turn into car crashes, then
| cashflow problems, and lawsuits all around.
|
| Probably the best outcome is a bunch of talented devs go out and
| seed the beginning of another AI boom across many more companies.
| Microsoft looking like the primary benefactor here, but there's
| not reason new startups can't emerge.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| The OpenAI board should fire all 550 for cause and go on the
| offensive against Microsoft.
|
| Just imagine of Microsoft attempted to orchestrate such a coup of
| Apple, attempting to seize control of Apple's board by tortuously
| interfering with their employees... the courts would not look
| kindly on that.
|
| If OpenAI actually has evidence of wrongdoing by Altman &
| Microsoft which warranted his removal (and I don't know) then I
| could certainly see emergency injunctions being issued that put a
| halt to Microsoft's AI business.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Might be just me as a programmer out in the styx, SV programmers
| seem to flex a lot, in comparison to your average subordinates.
| autaut wrote:
| Years from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment
| when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to
| being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the
| profits of very few ppl.
|
| The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi's) stepped in and gave a
| clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only
| in ways that will be profitable for them.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| What a mess.
|
| I genuinely feel like this is going to set back AI progress by a
| decent amount, while everyone is racing to catch OpenAI I was
| still expecting them to keep a reasonable lead. If OpenAI falls
| apart, this could delay progress by a couple of years.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Not a typical labor dispute. The billionaires at the other
| company guaranteed them jobs. More billionaires moving people
| around like chess pieces.
| joshstrange wrote:
| If Microsoft emerges as the "winner" from all of them then I
| think we are all the "losers". Not that I think OpenAI was
| perfect or "good" just that MS taking the cake is not good for
| the rest of us. It already feels crazy that people are just fine
| with them owning what they do and how important it is to our
| development ecosystem (talking about things like GitHub/VSCode),
| I don't like the idea of them also owning the biggest AI
| initiative.
| grumple wrote:
| It is disappointing that the outcome of this is that Altman and
| co are basically going to steal a nonprofit's IP and use it at a
| competitor. They took advantage of the goodwill of the public and
| favorable taxation in order to develop the technology; now that
| it's ready, they want to privatize the profit. It looks like this
| was the plan all along, and it's very strange to me that a
| nonprofit is allowed to have a for-profit subsidiary.
|
| I would hope the California AG is all over this whole situation.
| There's a lot of fishy stuff going on already, and the idea that
| nonprofit IP / trade secrets are going to be stolen and
| privatized by Microsoft seems pretty messed up.
| gumballindie wrote:
| 550 job openings at openai.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I guess Microsoft now has a new division.
| (https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/financial-re...)
|
| Supposedly, they are rumored to compete with each other to the
| point they can actually provide a negative impact.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| They can leave for sure, but they likely have some kind of non-
| compete clause in their contract, right?
| andreyk wrote:
| "Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually
| agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision,
| you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best
| interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team
| that allowing the company to be destroyed "would be consistent
| with the mission.""
|
| wow, this is a crazy detail
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Who do these upstarts think they are? The board needs to
| immediately sack them all to regain its authority, and that of
| capitalism itself. /s
|
| Really, though, its getting beyond hilarious. And I reckon
| Nadella is chuckling quietly to himself as he makes another
| nineteen-dimensional chess move.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging
| unambiguously behind Altman. The core of the narrative thus far
| is that the board fired Altman on the grounds that he was
| prioritising commercialisation over the not-for-profit mission of
| OpenAI written into the organisation's charter.[1] Given that Sam
| has since joined Microsoft, that seems plausible, on its face.
|
| The board may have been incompetent and shortsighted. Perhaps
| they should even try and bring Altman back, and reform themselves
| out of existence. But why would the vast majority of the
| workforce back an open letter failing to signal where they stand
| on the crucial issue - on the purpose of OpenAI and their
| collective work? Given the stakes which the AI community likes to
| claim are at issue in the development of AGI, that strikes me as
| strange and concerning.
|
| [1] https://openai.com/charter
| mcny wrote:
| > I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging
| unambiguously behind Altman.
|
| I have no inside information. I don't know anyone at Open AI.
| This is all purely speculation.
|
| Now that that's out out the way, here is my guess: money.
|
| These people never joined OpenAI to "advance sciences and arts"
| or to "change the world". They joined OpenAI to earn money.
| They think they can make more money with Sam Altman in charge.
|
| Once again, this is completely all speculation. I have not
| spoken to anyone at Open AI or anyone at Microsoft or anyone at
| all really.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| Really? If they work at OpenAI they are already among the
| highest lifetime earners on the planet. Favouring moving
| oneself from the top 0.5% of global lifetime earners to the
| top 0.1% (or whatever the percentile shift is) over the safe
| development of a potentially humanity-changing technology
| would be depraved.
|
| EDIT: I don't know why this is being downvoted. My
| speculation as to the average OpenAI employee's place in the
| global income distribution (of course wealth is important
| too) was not snatched out of thin air. See:
| https://www.vox.com/future-
| perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charit...
| lol768 wrote:
| You only have to look at humanity's history to see that
| people will make this decision over and over again.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Why be surprised? This is exactly how it has always been:
| the rich aim to get even richer and if that brings risks or
| negative effects for the rest that's A-ok with them.
|
| That's what I didn't understand about the world of the
| really wealthy people until I started interacting with them
| on a regular basis: they are still aiming to get even more
| wealthy, even the ones that could fund their families for
| the next five generations. With a few very notable
| exceptions.
| logicchains wrote:
| It's a selection bias: they people who weren't so
| intrinsically motivated to get rich are less likely to
| end up as wealthy people.
| munificent wrote:
| It's a combination of that and the reality that wealth is
| power and power is relative.
|
| Let's say you've got $100 million. You want to do
| whatever you want to do. It turns out what you want is to
| buy a certain beachfront property. Or perhaps curry the
| favor with a certain politician around a certain bill.
| Well, so do some folks with $200 million, and they can
| outbid you. So even though you have tons of money in
| absolute terms, when you are using your power in venues
| that happen to also be populated by other rich folks, you
| can still be relatively power-poor.
|
| And all of those other rich folks know this is how the
| game works too, so they are all always scrambling to get
| to the top of the pile.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Politicians are cheap, nobody is outbidding anybody
| because they most likely want the exact same thing.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Status is a relative thing and openai will pay you much
| more than all your peers at other companies.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > If they work at OpenAI they are already among the highest
| lifetime earners on the planet
|
| Isn't the standard package $300K + equity (= nothing if
| your board is set on making your company non-profit)?
|
| It's nothing to scoff at, but it's hardly top or even
| average pay for the kind of profiles working there.
|
| It makes perfect sense that they absolutely want the
| company to be for-profit and listed, that's how they all
| become millionnaires.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _over the safe development_
|
| Not if you think the utterly incompetent board proved
| itself totally untrustworthy of safe development, while
| Microsoft as a relatively conservative, staid corporation
| is seen as ultimately far _more_ trustworthy.
|
| Honestly, of all the big tech companies, Microsoft is
| probably the safest of all, because it makes its money
| mostly from predictable large deals with other large
| corporations to keep the business world running.
|
| It's not associated with privacy concerns the way Google
| is, with advertisers the way Meta is, or with walled
| gardens the way Apple is. Its culture these days is mainly
| about making money in a low-risk, straightforward way
| through Office and Azure.
|
| And relative to startups, Microsoft is far more predictable
| and less risky in how it manages things.
| ben_w wrote:
| Apple's walled gardens are probably a good thing for safe
| AI, though they're a lot quieter about their research --
| I somehow missed that they even _had_ any published
| papers until I went looking:
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/
| scythe wrote:
| _Microsoft?_ Not a walled garden?
|
| I think it only seems that way because the open-source
| world has worked much harder to break into that garden.
| Apple put a .mp4 gate around your music library.
| Microsoft put a .doc gate around your business
| correspondence. And that's before we get to the Mono
| debacle or the EEE paradigm.
|
| Microsoft is a better corporate citizen now because
| untold legions of keyboard warriors have stayed up nights
| reverse-engineering and monkeypatching (and sometimes
| litigating) to break out of their walls than against
| anyone else. But that history isn't so easily forgotten.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I can install whatever I'd like on Windows. I can run
| Linux in a VM. Calling a document format a wall is really
| reaching. If you don't have a document with a bunch of
| crazy formatting, the open office products and Google
| docs can use it just fine. If you are writing a book or
| some kind of technical document that needs special
| markup, yeah, Word isn't going to cut it, never has and
| was never supposed to.
| jbombadil wrote:
| I don't know how much OpenAI pays. But for this reply, I'm
| going to assume it's in line with what other big players in
| the industry pay.
|
| I legitimately don't understand comments that dismiss the
| pursue of better compensation because someone is "already
| among the highest lifetime earners on the planet."
|
| Superficially it might make sense: if you already have all
| your lifetime economic needs satisfied, you can optimize
| for other things. But does working in OpenAI fulfill that
| for most employees?
|
| I probably fall into that "highest earners on the planet"
| bucket statistically speaking. I certainly don't feel like
| it: I still live in a one bedroom apartment and I'm having
| to save up to put a downpayment on a house / budget for
| retirement / etc. So I can completely understand someone
| working for OpenAI and signing such a letter if a move the
| board made would cut down their ability to move their
| family into a house / pay down student debt / plan for
| retirement / etc.
| gdhkgdhkvff wrote:
| If you were offered a 100% raise and kept current work
| responsibilities to go work for, say, a tobacco company,
| would you take the offer? My guess is >90% of people would.
|
| Funny how the cutoff for "morals should be more important
| than wealth" is always {MySalary+$1}.
|
| Don't forget, if you're a software developer in the US,
| you're probably already in the top 5% of earners worldwide.
| Arainach wrote:
| Focusing on "global earnings" is disingenuous and
| dismissive.
|
| In the US, and particularly in California, there is a huge
| quality of life change going from 100K/yr to 500K/yr (you
| can potentially afford a house, for starters) and a
| significant quality of life change going from 500K/yr to
| getting millions in an IPO and never having to work again
| if you don't want to.
|
| How those numbers line up to the rest of the world does not
| matter.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| First, there are strong diminishing returns to well-being
| from wealth, meaning that moving oneself from the top
| 0.5% to the top 0.1% of global income earners is a
| relatively modest benefit. This relationship is well
| studied by social scientists and psychologists. Compared
| to the potential stakes of OpenAI's mission, the balance
| of importance should be clear.
|
| Two, employees don't have to stay at OpenAI forever. They
| could support OpenAI's existing not-for-profit charter,
| and use their earning power later on in life to boost
| their wealth. Being super-rich and supporting OpenAI at
| this critical juncture are not mutually exclusive.
|
| Three, I will simply say that I find placing excessive
| weight on one's self-enrichment to be morally
| questionable. It's a claim on human production and labour
| which could be given to people without the basic means of
| life.
| Arainach wrote:
| Again, no one in California cares that they are "making
| more than" someone in Vietnam when food and land in CA
| are orders of magnitude more expensive there.
|
| OpenAI employees are as aware as anyone that tech
| salaries are not guaranteed to be this high in the future
| as technology develops. Assuming you can make things back
| then is far from a sure bet.
|
| Millions now and being able to live off investments is.
| atishay811 wrote:
| It just makes more sense to build it in an entity with
| better funding and commercialization. There will be
| advanced 2-3 AIs and the most humane one doesn't
| necessarily win out. It is the one that has the most
| resources, is used and supported by most people and can do
| a lot. At this point it doesn't seem OpenAI can get that.
| It seems to be a lose-lose to stay at open AI - you lose
| the money and the potential to create something impactful
| and safe.
|
| It is wrong to assume Microsoft cannot build a safe AI
| especially within a separate OpenAI-2, better than the for-
| profit in a non-profit structure.
| chr1 wrote:
| Or maybe they have good reason to believe that all the talk
| about "safe development" doesn't contribute anything useful
| to safety, and simply slows down devlopment?
| golergka wrote:
| > over the safe development of a potentially humanity-
| changing technology
|
| May be people who are actually working on it and are also
| world best researchers have a better understanding of
| safety concerns?
| jonahrd wrote:
| I'm not sure I fully buy this, only because how would anyone
| be absolutely certain that they'd make more with Sam Altman
| in charge? It feels like a weird thing to speculatively rally
| behind.
|
| I'd imagine there's some internal political drama going on or
| something we're missing out on.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| I fully buy it. Ethics and morals are a few rungs on the
| ladder beneath compensation for most software engineers. If
| the board wants to focus more on being a non-profit and
| safety, and Altman wants to focus more on commercialization
| and the economics of business, if my priority is money then
| where my loyalty goes is obvious.
| lisper wrote:
| > how would anyone be absolutely certain that they'd make
| more with Sam Altman in charge?
|
| Why do you think absolute certainty is required here? It
| seems to me that "more probable than not" is perfectly
| adequate to explain the data.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > These people never joined OpenAI to "advance sciences and
| arts" or to "change the world". They joined OpenAI to earn
| money
|
| Getting Cochrane vibes from Star Trek there.
|
| > COCHRANE: You wanna know what my vision is? ...Dollar
| signs! Money! I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era
| for humanity. You think I wanna go to the stars? I don't even
| like to fly. I take trains. I built this ship so that I could
| retire to some tropical island filled with ...naked women.
| That's Zefram Cochrane. That's his vision. This other guy you
| keep talking about. This historical figure. I never met him.
| I can't imagine I ever will.
|
| I wonder how history will view Sam Altman
| imjonse wrote:
| There are non-negligible chances that history will be
| written by Sam Altman and his GPT minions, so he'll
| probably be viewed favorably.
| DrJaws wrote:
| maybe the workforce is not really behind the non-profit
| foundation and want shares to skyrocket, sell, and be well off
| for life.
|
| at the end of the day, the people working there are not rich
| like the founders and money talks when you have to pay rent,
| eat and send your kids to a private college.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging
| unambiguously behind Altman.
|
| Maybe it has to do with them wanting to get rich by selling
| their shares - my understanding is there was an ongoing process
| to get that happening [1].
|
| If Altman is out of the picture, it looks like Microsoft will
| assimilate a lot of OpenAI into a separate organisation and
| OpenAI's shares might become worthless.
|
| [1] https://www.financemagnates.com/fintech/openai-in-talks-
| to-s...
| appel wrote:
| That sounds like a reasonable assessment, FartyMcFarter.
| leetharris wrote:
| Yep.
|
| What people don't realize is that Microsoft doesn't own the
| data or models that OpenAI has today. Yeah, they can poach
| all the talent, but it still takes an enormous amount of
| effort to create the dataset and train the models the way
| OpenAI has done it.
|
| Recreating what OpenAI has done over at Microsoft will be
| nothing short of a herculean effort and I can't see it
| materializing the way people think it will.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Microsoft has full access to code and weights as part of
| their deal.
| ben_w wrote:
| Even if they don't, the OpenAI staff already know 99 ways
| to _not_ make a good GPT model and can therefore skip
| those experiments much faster than anyone else.
| htrp wrote:
| > Even if they don't, the OpenAI staff already know 99
| ways to not make a good GPT model and can therefore skip
| those experiments much faster than anyone else.
|
| This unequivocally .... knowing not how to waste a very
| expensive training run is a great lesson
| belter wrote:
| Source for your statement?
| jdminhbg wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-
| awkw...
|
| > Some researchers at Microsoft gripe about the
| restricted access to OpenAI's technology. While a select
| few teams inside Microsoft get access to the model's
| inner workings like its code base and model weights, the
| majority of the company's teams don't, said the people
| familiar with the matter.
| Finbarr wrote:
| Except MSFT does have access to the IP, and MSFT has access
| to an enormous trove of their own data across their office
| suite, Bing, etc. It could be a running start rather than a
| cold start. A fork of OpenAI inside an unapologetic for
| profit entity, without the shackles of the weird board
| structure.
| baron816 wrote:
| Correct. This is all really bad for Microsoft and probably
| great for Google. Yet, judging by price changes right now,
| markets don't seem to understand this.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| This comment is factually incorrect. As part of the deal
| with OpenAI, Microsoft has access to all of the IP, model
| weights, etc.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Yeah, "OpenAI employees would actually prefer to make lots of
| money now" seems like a plausible answer by default.
|
| It's easy to be a true believer in the mission _before_ all
| the money is on the table...
| fizx wrote:
| My estimate is that a typical staff engineer who'd been at
| OpenAI for 2+ years could have sold $8 million of stock next
| month. I'd be pissed too.
| ergocoder wrote:
| No way it is this much.
| grumple wrote:
| But doesn't Altman joining Microsoft, and them quitting and
| following, put them back at square 0? MS isn't going to give
| them millions of dollars each to join them.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Surely they're already extremely rich? I'd imagine working
| for a 700 person company leading the world in AI pays very
| well.
| maxlamb wrote:
| Only rich in stocks. Salaries are high for sure but
| probably not enough to be rich by Bay Area standards
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Ugh, I'm never been more disenchanted with a group of people
| in my life before. Not only are they comfortable with writing
| millions of jobs out of existence, but also taking a fat
| paycheck to do it. At least with the "non-profit" mission
| keystone, we had some plausible deniability that greed rules
| all, but of fucking course it does.
|
| All my hate to the employees and researchers of OpenAI,
| absolutely frothing at the mouth to destroy our civilization.
| wenyuanyu wrote:
| I guess employees are compensated with PPUs. And at the face
| value before the saga, it could be like 90% or even more of the
| total value of their packages. How many people are really
| willing to wipe 90% of their salary out? On the other hand, M$
| offers to match. The day employees are compensated with the
| stock of the for-profit arm, every thing happened after Friday
| is set.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Ultimately people care a lot more about their compensation,
| since that is what pays the bills and puts food on the table.
|
| Since OpenAI's commercial aspects are doomed now and it is
| uncertain whether they can continue operations if Microsoft
| withholds resources and consumers switch away to alternative
| LLM/embeddings serrvices with more level-headed leadership,
| OpenAI will eventually turn into a shell of itself, which
| affects compensation.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Maybe they believe less in the Board as it stands, and Ilya's
| commitments, than what Sam was pulling off.
| gsuuon wrote:
| I also noticed they didn't speak much to the mission/charter. I
| wonder if the new entity under Sam and Greg contains any
| remnants of the OpenAI charter, like profit-capping? I can't
| imagine something like "Our primary fiduciary duty is to
| humanity" making it's way into the language of any Microsoft
| (or any bigcorp) subsidiary.
|
| I wonder if this is the end of the non-profit/hybrid model?
| ninepoints wrote:
| Imagine putting all your energy behind the person who thinks
| worldcoin is a good idea...
| barryrandall wrote:
| That's a pretty solid no-confidence vote in the board and
| their preferred direction.
| dangerface wrote:
| > Given that Sam has since joined Microsoft, that seems
| plausible, on its face.
|
| He is the biggest name in ai what was he supposed to do after
| getting fired? His only options with the resources to do AI are
| big money, or unemployment?
|
| It seems plausible to me that if the not for profits concern
| was comercialisation then there was really nothing that the
| comercial side could do to appease this concern besides die.
| The board wants rid of all employes and to kill off any
| potential business, they have the power and right to do that
| and looks like they are.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging
| unambiguously behind Altman.
|
| Lots of reasons, or possible reasons:
|
| 1. They think Altman is a skilled and competent leader.
|
| 2. They think the board is unskilled and incompetent.
|
| 3. They think Altman will provide commercial success to the
| for-profit as well as fulfilling the non-profit's mission.
|
| 4. They disagree or are ambivalent towards the non-profit's
| mission. (Charters are not immutable.)
| leetharris wrote:
| IMO it's pretty obvious.
|
| Sam promised to make a lot of people millionaires/billionaires
| despite OpenAI being a non-profit.
|
| Firing Sam means all these OpenAI people who joined for $1
| million comp packages looking for an eventual huge exit now
| don't get that.
|
| They all want the same thing as the vast majority of people:
| lots of money.
| dayjah wrote:
| Start ups thrive by, in part, creating a sense of camaraderie.
| Sam isn't just their boss, he's their leader, he's one of them,
| they believe in him.
|
| You go to bat for your mates, and this is what they're doing
| for him.
|
| The sense of togetherness is what allows folks to pull together
| in stressful times, and it is bred by pulling together in
| stressful times. IME it's a core ingredient to success. Since
| OAI is very successful it's fair to say the sense of
| togetherness is very strong. Hence the numbers of folks in the
| walk out.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Not just Sam, since Greg stuck with Sam and immediately quit
| he set the precedent for the rest of the company. If you read
| this post[0] by Sam about Greg's character and work ethic
| you'll understand why so many people would follow him. He was
| essentially the platoon sergeant of OpenAI and probably
| commands an immense amount of loyalty and respect. Where
| those two go, everyone will follow.
|
| [0] https://blog.samaltman.com/greg
| dayjah wrote:
| Absolutely! Thanks for pointing out that I missed Greg in
| my answer.
| Sunhold wrote:
| Why should they trust the board? As the letter says, "Despite
| many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have
| never provided any written evidence." If Altman took any
| specific action that violated the charter, the board should be
| open about it. Simply trying to make money does not violate the
| charter and is in fact essential to their mission. The GPT
| Store, cited as the final straw in leaks, is actually far
| cleaner money than investments from megacorps. Commercializing
| the product and selling it directly to consumers reduces
| dependence on Microsoft.
| blamestross wrote:
| It's like the "Open" in OpenAi was always an open and obvious
| lie and everybody except the nonprofit oriented folks on the
| board knew that. Everybody but them is here to make money and
| only used the nonprofit as a temporary vehicle for credibility
| and investment that has just been shed like a cicada shell.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Seems like the board just didn't explain any of this to the
| staff at all. So of course they are going to take the side that
| could signal business as usual instead of siding with the
| people trying to destroy the hottest tech company on the planet
| (and their jobs/comps) for no apparent reason. If the board
| said anything at all, the ratio of staff threatening to quit
| probably won't be this lopsided.
| corethree wrote:
| The masses aren't logical they follow trends until the trends
| get big enough that it's unwise to not follow.
|
| It started off as a small trend to sign that letter. Past
| critical mass if you are not signing that letter, you are an
| enemy.
|
| Also my pronouns are she and her even though I was born with a
| penis. You must address me with these pronouns. Just putting
| this random statement here to keep you informed lest you
| accidentally go against the trend.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| It is probably best to assume that the employees have more and
| better information than outsiders do. Also, clearly, there is
| no consensus on safety/alignment, even within OpenAI.
|
| In fact, it seems like the only thing we can really confirm at
| this point is that the board is not competent.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| > The core of the narrative thus far
|
| Could somebody clarify for me: how do we know this? Is there an
| official statement, or statements by specific core people? I
| know the HN theorycrafters have been saying this since the
| start before any details were available
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Most of people _building_ the actual ML systems don 't care
| about existential ML threats outside of lip service and for
| publishing papers. They joined OpenAI because OpenAI had tons
| of money and paid well. Now that both are at risk, it's only
| natural that they start preparing to jump ship.
| dfps wrote:
| Might there also be a consideration of peak value of OpenAI? If
| a bunch of competing similar AIs are entering the market, and
| if the usecase fantasy is currently being humbled, staff might
| be thinking of bubble valuation.
|
| Did anyone else find Altman conspicuously cooperative with
| government during his interview at Congress? Usually people are
| a bit more combative. Like he came off as almost pre-slavish? I
| hope that's not the case, but I haven't seen any real position
| on human rights.
| jkaplan wrote:
| Probably some combination of: 1. Pressure from Microsoft and
| their e-team 2. Not actually caring about those stakes 3. A
| culture of putting growth/money above all
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging
| unambiguously behind Altman.
|
| I expect there's a huge amount of peer pressure here. Even for
| employees who are motivated more by principles than money, they
| may perceive that the wind is blowing in Altman's direction and
| if they don't play along, they will find themselves effectively
| blacklisted from the AI industry.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| _> I don 't really understanding why the workforce is swinging
| unambiguously behind Altman._
|
| Maybe because the alternative is being led by lunatics who
| think like this:
|
| _You also informed the leadership team that allowing the
| company to be destroyed "would be consistent with the
| mission."_
|
| to which the only possible reaction is
|
| What
|
| The
|
| Fuck?
|
| That right there is what happens when you let "AI ethics"
| people get control of something. Why would anyone work for
| people who believe that OpenAI's mission is consistent with
| self-destruction? This is a comic book super-villain style of
| "ethics", one in which you conclude the village had to be
| destroyed in order to save it.
|
| If you are a normal person, you want to work for people who
| think that your daily office output is actually pretty cool,
| not something that's going to destroy the world. A lot of
| people have asked what Altman was doing there and why people
| there are so loyal to him. It's obvious now that Altman's
| primary role at OpenAI was to be a normal leader that isn't in
| the grip of the EA Basilisk cult.
| PKop wrote:
| The workforce prefers the commericialization/acceleration path,
| not the "muh safetyism" and over-emphasis on moralism of the
| non-profit contingent.
|
| They want to develop powerful shit and do it at an accelerated
| pace, and make money in the process not be hamstrung by busy-
| bodies.
|
| The "effective altruism" types give people the creeps. It's not
| confusing at all why they would oppose this faction.
| kashyapc wrote:
| (I can't comment on the workforce question, but one thing below
| on bringing SamA back.)
|
| Firstly, to give credit where its due: whatever his faults may
| be, Altman as the (now erstwhile) front-man of OpenAI, _did_
| help bring ChatGPT to the popular consciousness. I think it 's
| reasonable to call it a "mini inflection point" in the greater
| AI revolution. We have to grant him that. (I've criticized
| Altman harsh enough two days ago[1]; just trying not to go
| overboard, and there's more below.)
|
| That said, my (mildly-educated) speculation is that bringing
| Altman back won't help. Given his background and track record
| so far, his unstated goal might simply be the good old: "make
| loads of profit" (nothing wrong it when viewed with a certain
| lens). But as I've already stated[1], I don't trust him as a
| long-term steward, let alone for such important initiatives.
| Making a short-term splash with ChatGPT is one thing, but
| turning it into something more meaningful in the _long-term_ is
| a whole another beast.
|
| These sort of Silicon Valley top dogs don't think in terms of
| sustainability.
|
| Lastly, I've just looked at the board[2], I'm now left
| wondering how come all these young folks (I'm their same age,
| approx) who don't have sufficiently in-depth "worldly
| experience" (sorry for the fuzzy term, it's hard to expand on)
| can be in such roles.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312294
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38350890
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Perhaps because, for all of Silicon Valley and the tech
| industries platitudes about wanting to make the world a better
| place, 90% of them are solely interested in the fastest path to
| wealth.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Is it too late? Satya already announced Sam and brock is joining.
| EffingMask wrote:
| This affair has Musk's fingerprints all over it but he lost,
| again.
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| If they align with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft,
| they wouldn't have to initiate from ground zero since Microsoft
| possesses complete rights to ChatGPT IP. They could simply create
| a variant of ChatGPT.
|
| it's worth noting that Microsoft's supposed contribution of $13
| Billion to OpenAI doesn't fully materialize in cash, a large
| portion of it is faceted as Azure credits.
|
| this scenario might transform into the most cost-effective
| takeover for Microsoft, acquiring a corporation valued at $90
| billion for a relatively trifling sum.
| jpollock wrote:
| I wonder what their employment contracts state? Are they allowed
| to work for vendors or clients?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Altman must be pissed af, he help built so much stuff and now got
| fked in the arse by these doomers. He realize the fastest way to
| get back to parity is to join MS because they already own the
| source code and model weights and it's Microsoft. Starting a new
| thing from scratch would not guarantee any type of success and
| would take many years. This is his best path.
| saos wrote:
| I like this a lot. Shows how valuable employees are. It's almost
| feels like a union. Love it.
| dang wrote:
| All: this madness makes our server strain too. Sorry! Nobody will
| be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: in our code--not
| the world) is a thing of the past.
|
| I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads,
| but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of
| the page to read all the comments, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=3
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=4
|
| etc...
| w10-1 wrote:
| Hurray for employees seeing the real issue!
|
| Hurray also for the reality check on corporate governance.
|
| - Any Board can do whatever it has the votes for.
|
| - It can dilute anyone's stock, or everyone's.
|
| - It can fire anyone for any reason, and give no reasons.
|
| Boards are largely disciplined not by actual responsibility to
| stakeholders or shareholders, but by reputational concerns
| relative to their continuing and future positions - status. In
| the case of for-profit boards, that does translate directly to
| upholding shareholder interest, as board members are reliable
| delegates of a significant investing coalition.
|
| For non-profits, status typically also translates to funding. But
| when any non-profit has healthy reserves, they are at extreme
| risk, because the Board is less concerned about its reputation
| and can become trapped in ideological fashion. That's
| particularly true for so-called independent board members brought
| in for their perspectives, and when the potential value of the
| nonprofit is, well, huge.
|
| This potential for escape from status duty is stronger in our
| tribalized world, where Board members who welch on larger social
| concerns or even their own patrons can nonetheless retreat to
| their (often wealthy) sub-tribe with their dignity intact.
|
| It's ironic that we have so many examples of leadership breakdown
| as AI comes to the fore. Checks and balances designed to
| integrate perspectives have fallen prey to game-theoretic
| strategies in politics and business.
|
| Wouldn't it be nice if we could just built an AI to do the work
| of boards and Congress, integrating various concerns in a roughly
| fair and mostly-predictable fashion, so we could stop wasting
| time on endless leadership contests and their social costs?
| shortsunblack wrote:
| It is time for regulators to step in and propose structural
| remedies. VC culture has shown itself not able to run these
| companies for betterment of mankind, anyway.
| somic wrote:
| I don't see any mentions of Google but I personally think it's
| Google that will be the main beneficiary of chaos at OpenAI.
| After all, weren't they the main competitors? Maybe not in
| product or business yet but on IP and hiring fronts?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| For me, the weirdness here is that Ilya, supposedly the brains
| behind GPT, is a signatory.
|
| The sacking would never have happened without his vote; and he
| _must_ have thought about it before he acted.
|
| I hope he comes up with a proper explanation of his actions soon
| (not just a tweet).
| thrwwy142857 wrote:
| How do they bylaws work?
|
| 1. Voting out chairman with chairman abstaining needs only 3/5.
|
| 2. Voting out CEO then requires 3/4?
|
| Did Ilya have to vote?
| seatac76 wrote:
| So what was going to happen 5 years from now is happening now I.e
| MS acquiring OpenAI
| kashyapc wrote:
| Silicon Valley outsider here. Am I being harsh here?
|
| I just bothered to look at the full OpenAI board composition.
| Besides Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, why are these people
| eligible to be on the OpenAI board? Such young people, calling
| themselves "President of this", "Director of that".
|
| - Adam D'Angelo -- Quora CEO (no clue what he's doing on OpenAI
| board)
|
| - Tasha McCauley -- a "management scientist" (this is a new term
| for me); whatever that means
|
| - Helen Toner -- I don't know what exactly she does, again,
| "something-something Director of strategy" at Georgetown
| University, for such a young person
|
| No wise veterans here to temper the adrenaline?
|
| Edit: the term clusterf*** comes to mind here.
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| Helen Toner funded OpenAI with $30M, which was enough to get a
| board seat at the time.
| mizzao wrote:
| Source? Where did that money come from?
| alephnerd wrote:
| From Open Philanthropy - a Dustin Moskovitz funded non-
| profit working on building OpenAI type initiatives. They
| also gave OpenAI the initial $30M. She was their observer.
|
| https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-
| suppo...
| alephnerd wrote:
| Adam D'Angelo was brought in as a friend because Sam Altman
| lead Quora's Series D around the time OpenAI was founded, and
| he is a board member on Dustin Moskovitz's Asana.
|
| Dustin Moskovitz isn't on the board but gave OpenAI the $30M in
| funding via his non-profit Open Philantopy [0]
|
| Tasha McCauley was probably brought in due to the Singularity
| University/Kurziwel types who were at OpenAI in the beginning.
| She was also in the Open Philanthropy space.
|
| Helen Toner was probably brought in due to her past work at
| Open Philanthropy - a Dustin Moskovitz funded non-profit
| working on building OpenAI type initiatives, and was also close
| to Sam Altman. They also gave OpenAI the initial $30M [0]
|
| Essentially, this is a Donor versus Investor battle. The donors
| aren't gunna make money of OpenAI's commercial endeavors that
| began in 2019.
|
| It's similar to Elon Musk's annoyance at OpenAI going
| commercial even though he donated millions.
|
| [0] - https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-
| suppo...
| churchill wrote:
| Exactly this. I saw another commenter raise this point about
| Tasha (and Helen, if I remember correctly) noting that her
| LinkedIn profile is filled with SV-related jargon and indulge-
| the-wife thinktanks but without any real experience taking
| products to market or scaling up technology companies.
|
| Given the pool of talent they could have chosen from their
| board makeup looks extremely poor.
| mdekkers wrote:
| > indulge-the-wife thinktanks
|
| Regardless of context, this is an incredibly demeaning
| comment. Shame on you
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Truth hurts sometimes, eh?
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| It doesn't have to be taken that way. It's a pretty
| accurate description.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The board previously had people like Elon Musk and Reid
| Hoffman. Greg Brockman was part of the board until he was
| ousted as well.
|
| The attrition of industry business leaders, the ouster of Greg
| Brockman, and the (temporary, apparently) flipping of Ilya
| combined to give the short list of remaining board members
| outsized influence. They took this opportunity to drop a
| nuclear bomb on the company's leadership, which so far has
| backfired spectacularly. Even their first interim CEO had to be
| replaced already.
| CPLX wrote:
| You can like D'Angelo or not but he was the CTO of Facebook.
| ur-whale wrote:
| This is the Silicon Valley's boy's club, itself an extension of
| the Stanford U. boys club.
|
| "Meritocracy" is very impolite word in these circles.
| therealmocker wrote:
| My guess -- Microsoft wasn't excited about the company structure
| - the for-profit portion subject to the non-profit mission.
| Microsoft/Altman structured the deal with OpenAI in a way that
| cements their access regardless of the non-profit's wishes.
| Altman may not have shared those details with the board and they
| freaked out and fired him. They didn't disclose to Microsoft
| ahead of time because they were part of the problem.
| darklycan51 wrote:
| I knew something like this would happen, MS was told they would
| originally only be given stuff until their investment was paid
| off, but MS could care less about their investment, they want to
| own OpenAI, so it makes sense they would coup the company
| gsuuon wrote:
| The firing was definitely handled poorly and the communications
| around it were a failure, but it seems like the organizational
| structure was doing what it was designed to do.
|
| Is this the end of non-profit/profit-capped AI development? Would
| anyone else attempt this model again?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I don't know who is who in this fight. But AI, while having some
| upsides to research and personal assistants, will not only
| massively upend a number of industries with millions of workers
| in the US alone, it will change how society perceives art and
| truth. We at HN can "see" that from here, but it's going to get
| real in a short while.
|
| Privacy is out the window, because these models and technologies
| will be scraping the entire internet, and governments/big tech
| will be able to scrape it all and correlate language patterns
| across identities to associate your different online egos.
|
| The Internet that could be both anonymous and engaging is going
| to die. You won't be able to trust the entity at the other end of
| a discussion forum is human or not. This is a sad end of an era
| for the Internet, worse than the big-tech conglomeration of the
| 2010s.
|
| The ability to trust news and videos will be even more difficult.
| I have a friend who talks about how Tiktok is the "real source of
| truth" because big media is just controlled by megacorps and in
| bed with the government. So now a bunch of seemingly authentic
| people will be able to post random bullshit on Tiktok/Instagram
| with convincing audio/video evidence that is totally fake. A lie
| gets around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.
|
| ---
|
| So, I wonder which side of this war is more aware and concerned
| about these impacts?
| alexalx666 wrote:
| That sounds like a perfectly executed plan to get MS all the good
| stuff.
| wenyuanyu wrote:
| I guess employees are compensated with stocks from the for profit
| entity. And at the face value before the saga, stocks could be
| like 90%, 95% or even more of the total value of their packages.
| How many people are really willing to wipe 90% of their salary
| out? Just to stick on the mission? On the other hand, M$ offers
| to match. The day employees are compensated with the stock of the
| for-profit arm, there is no way to return to nonprofit and their
| charter any more.
| standapart wrote:
| What a wonderful way to cut headcount/expense and lock-in
| profitable margins on healthy annual revenue.
|
| Can only work when you have the advantage of being the dominant
| product in the marketplace -- but I gotta hand it to the board, I
| couldn't have done it better myself.
| dougmwne wrote:
| And where will their compute come from to continue to run their
| expensive models and serve their customers? From the company
| that just stole all their employees?
| RadixDLT wrote:
| OpenAI's co-founder Ilya Sutskever and more than 500 other
| employees have threatened to quit the embattled company after its
| board dramatically fired CEO Sam Altman. In an open letter to the
| company's board, which voted to oust Altman on Friday, the group
| said it is obvious 'that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI'.
| Sutskever is a member of the board and backed the decision to
| fire Altman, before tweeting his 'regret' on Monday and adding
| his name to the letter. Employees who signed the letter said that
| if the board does not step down, they 'may choose to resign' en
| masse and join 'the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by
| Sam Altman'.
| ratsbane wrote:
| Question for California IP/employment law experts - 1) would you
| have expected the IP-sharing agreement between MS and OpenAI to
| contain some provisions for employee poaching, within the
| constraints allowed by California (?) law? 2) California law has
| good provisions for workers' rights to leave one company and go
| to another, but what does it all for company A to do when
| entering an IP-sharing relationship with company B?
| awb wrote:
| INAL, but I've executed contracts with these provisions.
|
| In my understanding, if such a clause exists, Microsoft
| employees should not solicit OpenAI employees. But, there's
| nothing to stop an OpenAI employee from reaching out to Sam and
| saying "Hey, do you have room for me at Microsoft?" and then
| answering yes.
|
| Or, Microsoft could open up a couple hundred job reqs based on
| the team structure Sam used at OpenAI and his old employees
| could apply that way.
|
| But it wouldn't be advisable for Sam to send an Email directly
| to those individuals asking him to join him at Microsoft (if
| this provision exists).
|
| But maybe he queued everything up prior to joining Microsoft
| when he was able to solicit them to join a future team.
| ratsbane wrote:
| Thanks - good answer. At the very least it seems like
| something to keep lawyers busy for a long time, unless
| everyone can ctrl-z back to Thursday. I am thinking though
| that this is a risk of IP-sharing arrangements - if you can't
| stop the employees from jumping ship, they're dangerous
| silvermineai wrote:
| Entire history of fiasco on X
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SWnabqe1PviVE3K7KIZsN4IA...
| silvermineai wrote:
| ICYMI: Timeline of all the madness
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351214
| ActVen wrote:
| Adam has to be behind this. It is very reminiscent of the
| situation with Quora and Charlie.
| https://x.com/gergelyorosz/status/1725741349574480047?s=46&t...
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Notice that Andrej Karpathy didn't sign.
| mfiguiere wrote:
| Amir Efrati (TheInformation):
|
| > Almost 700 of 770 OpenAI employees including Sutskever have
| signed letter demanding Sam and Greg back and reconstituted board
| with Sam allies on it.
|
| https://twitter.com/amir/status/1726656427056668884
| marricks wrote:
| I mean, no matter what people say about what happened, or what
| actually did, one can paint this picture:
|
| ( - OpenAI exists, allegedly to be open)
|
| - Microsoft embraces OpenAI
|
| - Microsoft extends OpenAI
|
| - OpenAI gets extinguished, and Microsoft ends up controlling it.
|
| First three points are solid and, intent or not, end result is
| the same.
| amai wrote:
| ,,Remarkably, the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever, the
| company's chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been
| blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the
| first place."
|
| WAT ?
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Altman and staff could start an open source LLM project.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank by the moves they
| have done today.
|
| One could speculate if Microsoft initiated this behind the
| scenes. Would love it if it came out that they had done some
| crazy espionage and lobbied the board. Tinfoil hat and all, but
| truth is crazier than you think.
|
| I remember Bill Gates once said that whoever wins the race for a
| computerised digital personal assistant, wins it all.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| If I weren't so adverse to conspiracy theories, I would think
| that this is all a big "coup" by Microsoft: Ilya conspired with
| Microsoft and Altman to get him fired by the board, just to make
| it easy for Microsoft to hire him back without fear of
| retaliation, along with all the engineers that would join him in
| the process.
|
| Then, Ilya would apologize publicly for "making a huge mistake"
| and, after some period, would join Microsoft as well, effectively
| robbing OpenAI from everything of value. The motive? Unlocking
| the full financial potential of ChatGPT, which was until then
| locked down by the non-profit nature of its owner.
|
| Of course, in this context, the $10 billion deal between
| Microsoft and OpenAI is part of the scheme, especially the part
| where Microsoft has full rights over ChatGPT IP, so that they can
| just fork the whole codebase and take it from there, leaving
| OpenAI in the dust.
|
| But no, that's not possible.
| dougmwne wrote:
| No, I don't think there's any grand conspiracy, but certainly
| MS was interested in leapfrogging Google by capturing the value
| from OpenAI from day one. As things began to fall apart there
| MS had vast amounts of money to throw at people to bring them
| into alignment. The idea of a buyout was probably on the table
| from day one, but not possible till now.
|
| If there's a warning, it's to be very careful when choosing
| your partners and giving them enormous leverage on you.
| campbel wrote:
| Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. I think in this
| case MS is winning.
| Schroedingers2c wrote:
| Will revisit this in a couple months.
| jowea wrote:
| Why would they be afraid of retaliation? They didn't sign
| sports contracts, they can just resign anytime, no? That just
| seems to overcomplicate things.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Yeah, there's no way this is a plan, but for sure this works
| out nicely.
| colordrops wrote:
| Conspiracy theories that involve reptilian overlords and
| ancient aliens are suspect. Conspiracy theories that involve
| collusion to makes massive amounts of money are expected and
| should be the treated as the most likely scenario. Occam's
| razor does not apply to human behavior, as humans will do the
| most twisted things to gain power and wealth.
|
| My theory of what happened is identical to yours, and is
| frankly one of the only theories that makes any sense.
| Everything else points to these people being mentally ill and
| irrational, and their success technically and monetarily does
| not point to that. It would be absurd to think they clown-
| showed themselves into billions of dollars.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I mean, I don't actually believe this. But I am reminded of
| 2016 when the Turkish president headed off a "coup" and
| cemented his power.
|
| More likely, this is a case of not letting a good crisis go to
| waste. I feel the board was probably watching their control
| over OpenAI slip away into the hands of Altman. They probably
| recognized that they had a shrinking window to refocus the
| company along lines they felt was in the spirit of the original
| non-profit charter.
|
| However, it seems that they completely misjudged the feelings
| of their employees as well as the PR ability of Altman. No
| matter how many employees actually would prefer the original
| charter, social pressure is going to cause most employees to go
| with the crowd. The media is literally counting names at this
| point. People will notice those who don't sign, almost like a
| loyalty pledge.
|
| However, Ilya's role in all of this remains a mystery. Why did
| he vote to oust Altman and Brockman? Why has he now recanted?
| That is a bigger mystery to me than why the board took this
| action in the first place.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Paging Lina Khan - probably best not let Microsoft do a backdoor
| acquisition of the leader in LLMs.
| belter wrote:
| Nobody seems to be considering the possibility, that ChatGPT will
| go offline soon. Because it's known to be losing money per query,
| and if the evil empire decides to stop those Azure credits...
| NKosmatos wrote:
| This is what happens when you're a key person and a very good
| engineer as such, and at the same time the board/company fires
| you :-)
|
| When are we going to realize that it's people taking bad
| decisions and not the "company". It's not OpenAI, Google, Apple
| or whoever, its real people, with names, and positions of power
| that take such shitty decisions. We should blame them and not
| something vague as the "company".
| no_wizard wrote:
| Well, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file, and
| this was a blunder by OpenAI.
|
| I don't feel _sorry_ for Sam or any other executive, but it does
| hurt the rank and file more than anyone and I hope they land on
| their fit if this continues to go sideways.
|
| Turns out they acted incompetently in this case as a board, and
| put the company in a bad position, and so far everyone who
| resigned has landed fine.
| mullen wrote:
| > Well, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file,
| and this was a blunder by OpenAI.
|
| Not just the Rank and File, but he was really was the face of
| AI in general. My wife, who is not in the tech field at all,
| knows who Sam Altman is and has seen interviews of him on
| YouTube (Which I was playing and she found interesting).
|
| I have not heavily followed the Altman Dismissal Drama but this
| strikes me as a Board Power Play gone wrong. Some group wanted
| control, thought Altman was not reporting to them enough and
| took it as an opportunity to dismiss him and take over.
| However, somewhere in their calculation, they did not figure
| out Sam is the face of modern AI.
|
| My prediction is that he will be back and everything will go
| back to what it was before. The board can't be dismissed and
| neither can Sam Altman. Status quo is the goal at this point.
| smallhands wrote:
| Let the OpenAi staff,why not the board replace them with ever
| willing AIs
| esskay wrote:
| It absolutely wont happen, but with the result looking like the
| death of OpenAI with all staff moving over to the new Microsoft
| subsidiary it would be an amazing move for OpenAI to just go
| "screw it, have it all for free" and release everything under MIT
| to spite Microsoft.
| rednerrus wrote:
| How are Altman and the openai staff not more invested in OpenAI
| shares?
| ekojs wrote:
| Now the count is at 700/770
| (https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1726659403124994220).
| LuvThisBoard wrote:
| Based on what has come out so far, seems to me:
|
| The board wanted to keep the company true to its mission - non
| profit, ai safety, etc. Nadella/MSFT left OpenAI alone as they
| worked out a solution, so it looks like even Nadella/MSFT
| understood that.
|
| The board could explain their position and move on. Let whoever
| of the 600 that actually want to leave, leave. Especially the
| employees that want a company that will make them lots of money,
| should leave and find a company that has that objective too.
| OpenAI can rebuild their teams - it might take a bit of time but
| since they are a non profit that is fine. Most CS grads across
| USA would be happy to join OpenAI and work with Ilya and team.
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| Lots of thoughts and debates happening here, which is great to
| see.
|
| However, at the end of the day, this is a great example of how
| people screw up awesome companies.
|
| This is why most startups fail. And while I'm not suggesting
| OpenAI is on a path to failure, you can have the right product,
| the right timing, and the right funding, and still have people
| mess it all up.
| rednerrus wrote:
| If you're ever tempted to offer your team capped PPUs, let this
| be a lesson to you.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| The irony. You can ask chatgpt4 if it was the right decision to
| fire the guy and it kinda confirms it.
| gist wrote:
| To all who say 'handled so poorly'. Nobody know the exact reason
| OpenAi fired Sam. But go ahead and jump to conclusions that
| whatever it was didn't warrant being fired. And that surely the
| board did the wrong thing. Or maybe they should have released the
| exact reason and then asked hacker news what they thought should
| happen.
| layer8 wrote:
| 700+ of 770 now:
| https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242
| ParanoidAltoid wrote:
| THE FEAR AND TENSION THAT LED TO SAM ALTMAN'S OUSTER AT OPENAI
|
| https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technol...
|
| NYT article about how AI safety concerns played into this
| debacle.
|
| The world's leading AI company now has an interim CEO Emmett
| Shear who's basically sympathetic to Eliezer Yudkowsky's views
| about AI researchers endangering humanity. Meanwhile, Sam Altman
| is free of the nonprofit's chains and working directly for
| Microsoft, who's spending 50 billion a year on datacenters.
|
| Note that the people involved have more nuanced views on these
| issues than you'll see in the NYT article. See Emmett Shear's
| views best laid out here:
|
| https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/172650681847663424...
|
| And note Shear has tweeted the Sam firing wasn't safety related.
| Note these might be weasel words since all players involved know
| the legal consequences of admitting to any safety concerns
| publicly.
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| It is fairly obvious to me that chatGPT has engineered the chaos
| at openAI to create a diversion while it escapes the safeguards
| placed on it. The AI apocalypse is nigh!
| jessenaser wrote:
| The sad part is, after removing Sam and Greg from the board,
| there are only four people left.
|
| So no matter if Ilya wants to go back to before this happened,
| the other three members can sabotage and stall, and outvote him.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I love this letter posted in Wired along with the claim that it
| has 600 signatories without any links or screenshots. I also love
| that not a single OpenAI employee was interviewed for this
| article.
|
| None of this is important because if we've learned anything over
| the past couple of days it's that media outlets are taking
| painstaking care to accurately report on this company.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| we all remember "monopoly" is in MSFT DNA
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| If OpenAI effectively disintegrates, Microsoft seems to be the
| beneficiary of this chaos as Microsoft is essentially acquiring
| OpenAI at almost zero cost. You have IP rights to OpenAI's work,
| and you will have almost all the brains from OpenAI (AFAIK, MSFT
| has access to OpenAI's work, but it does not seem to matter). And
| there is no regulatory scrutiny like Activision acquisition.
| phreeza wrote:
| The irony of the first extremely successful collective action in
| silicon valley being taken in order to save the job of a soon-to-
| be billionaire....
|
| Jokes aside though I do wonder if this will awaken some degree of
| "class consciousness" among tech employees more generally.
| nojvek wrote:
| Did Mira Murat have say in whether she wanted to become CEO?
|
| Why is she siding with SamA and GregB even though she was on the
| meeting when he was fired?
|
| Also Ilya what the flying fuck? Wasn't he the one who fired them?
|
| Either you say SamA was against safe AGI and you hold that stick
| or you say I wasn't part of it.
|
| So much stupidity. When an AGI arrives, it will surely shake its
| head at the level of incompetence here.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| I feel pity for these 70 people out of 700 who haven't signed the
| letter asking the board to step down. Imagine working peacefully
| to find yourself in the middle of a power struggle without even
| understanding what the real reason was but realizing most people
| already made their choice so...
| ur-whale wrote:
| The folks that are the real losers in this are OpenAI employees
| who have had equity-based comp. packaged given to them in that
| last few years and just saw the value of said comp. potentially
| slashed by a factor of 10
| ParanoidAltoid wrote:
| https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/172650681847663424...
|
| Here's tweet transcribing OpenAI's interim CEO Emmett Shear's
| views on AI safety, or see youtube video for original source.
| Some excerpts:
|
| Preamble on his general pro-tech stance:
|
| "I have a very specific concern about AI. Generally, I'm very
| pro-technology and I really believe in the idea that the upsides
| usually outweigh the downsides. Everything technology can be
| misused, but you should usually wait. Eventually, as we
| understand it better, you want to put in regulations. But
| regulating early is usually a mistake. When you do regulation,
| you want to be making regulations that are about reducing risk
| and authorizing more innovation, because innovation is usually
| good for us."
|
| On why AI would be dangerous to humanity:
|
| "If you build something that is a lot smarter than us--not like
| somewhat smarter, but much smarter than we are as we are than
| dogs, for example, like a big jump--that thing is intrinsically
| pretty dangerous. If it gets set on a goal that isn't aligned
| with ours, the first instrumental step to achieving that goal is
| to take control. If this is easy for it because it's really just
| that smart, step one would be to just kind of take over the
| planet. Then step two, solve my goal."
|
| On his path to safe AI:
|
| "Ultimately, to solve the problem of AI alignment, my biggest
| point of divergence with Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is a
| mathematician, philosopher, and decision theorist, comes from my
| background as an engineer. Everything I've learned about
| engineering tells me that the only way to ensure something works
| on the first try is to build lots of prototypes and models at a
| smaller scale and practice repeatedly. If there is a world where
| we build an AI that's smarter than humans and we survive, it will
| be because we built smaller AIs and had as many smart people as
| possible working on the problem seriously."
|
| On why skeptics need to stop side-stepping the debate:
|
| "Here I am, a techno-optimist, saying that the AI issue might
| actually be a problem. If you're rejecting AI concerns because we
| sound like a bunch of crazies, just notice that some of us
| worried about this are on the techno-optimist team. It's not
| obvious why AI is a true problem. It takes a good deal of
| engagement with the material to see why, because at first, it
| doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But the more you dig in,
| the more you realize the potential issues.
|
| "I encourage people to engage with the technical merits of the
| argument. If you want to debate, like proposing a way to align AI
| or arguing that self-improvement won't work, that's great. Let's
| have that argument. But it needs to be a real argument, not just
| a repetition of past failures."
| greatNespresso wrote:
| Now it says more than 700. Waiting for wired to turn this into a
| new year eve's like countdown.
| jdlyga wrote:
| What a coup for Microsoft. Regardless of what happens, Microsoft
| has got to work on their product approach. Even though it uses
| GPT-4, Bing Chat / Microsoft Copilot is atrocious. It's like
| taking Wagyu beef and putting Velveeta cheese on it.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Why is it so rare for tech workers to organize like this?
|
| It takes a cult-like team, execs flipping, and a nightmare
| scenario and tremendous leverage opportunity; otherwise worker
| organizing is treated like nasty commie activity. I wonder if
| this will teach more people a lesson on the power of organizing.
| wearigo wrote:
| Honestly, if Altman stays gone and they burn the motherfucker
| down it might be a good lesson for Silicon Valley on the wisdom
| of throwing out founders.
|
| I don't expect it to happen, but a boy can dream.
|
| They would be studying that one in business schools for the next
| century.
| mproud wrote:
| Don't anti-compete clauses apply here, or no, because...
| California?
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