[HN Gopher] OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
Author : A_D_E_P_T
Score : 169 points
Date : 2023-11-20 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thezvi.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thezvi.wordpress.com)
| paxys wrote:
| Does every random blog post with OpenAI in the title and no new
| info need to be upvoted to the top?
| vorticalbox wrote:
| Yes.
| glitchc wrote:
| No
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Right? I was looking at the front page thinking how nice it'd
| be if HN would start a megathread or something. We don't need
| the front page to be like 30% the same openai news
| rootusrootus wrote:
| While I respect the simplicity that governs HN design, I
| think a worthwhile edition would be tags. At least then it
| would be fairly trivial to do a client side filter.
| awb wrote:
| OpenAI is 6/30 news stories, or 20%. For a fast moving story
| about the future of the company behind of one of the biggest
| tech innovations in my lifetime it doesn't seem outrageous.
|
| You still have 80% non-OpenAI news to browse.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Still... a list of 30 news stories containing 6 of the same
| story linked from different sites doesn't really feel
| necessary. Like we could have 1 story and still have all of
| the information we've got available to us but, for some
| reason, people keep upvoting the same story from a
| different site.
|
| One major advantage to this would be that you don't have to
| read 6 threads worth of comments to find info and you don't
| have 6 "Top Comments" to parse through.
|
| I don't see the purpose of it. You're saying "it doesn't
| seem outrageous" but the point is there's no purpose to
| having them all here when there can be one mega thread that
| keeps it all contained.
| seydor wrote:
| it is a good way to clear out the old bloated threads
| cdchn wrote:
| This actually seemed a lot more useful than most of the other
| cookie cuttered tech "journalism" threads. Its good to see a
| nice overview of the situation.
| Luc wrote:
| It's by Zvi so it's probably good work and worth reading if you
| want an overview.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| It seems we can't have anything good. The false Open of
| OpenAI is already a meme, but now we won't even have that
| illusion.
| Philpax wrote:
| This is a very comprehensive timeline of what's happened so far
| with sources and relevant commentary. I think it's certainly
| worthy of its own link - it should help clarify what's happened
| for onlookers who haven't been glued to the proceedings.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| HN Soaps.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Nope.
|
| High quality comprehensive summaries that contain more actual
| information than the last dozen "major media" stories that also
| got voted to the front page, tho are different.
|
| When they come from authors with a history of exceedingly high
| quality work, specifically at the "summary" posts that distill
| large noisy conflicts into a great starting point for
| understanding, as this author does... Absolutely yes.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| _> Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI's founders
| brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived
| in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might
| live equally when AGI is created._
|
| OpenAI founding date: December 2015. Incredible opening line,
| bravo.
| Andoryuuta wrote:
| I think it's a play on "four score and seven years ago". "Four
| GPTs and seven years, eleven months, and nine days ago" doesn't
| quite have the same ring to it.
| omoikane wrote:
| It's a great opening line.
|
| Original reference:
| https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.24404500/?st=text
| seydor wrote:
| > we have more unity and commitment and focus than ever before.
|
| > we are all going to work together some way or other, and i'm so
| excited.
|
| > one team, one mission.
|
| Let's all scrutinize another enigmatic @sama tweet. It is all
| lowercase so it must be very serious. What's in for tomorrow's
| episode?
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| "There is talk that OpenAI might completely disintegrate as a
| result, that ChatGPT might not work a few days from now, and so
| on."
|
| Oh damn! While this seems wildly unlikely, I can imagine this
| scenario and think it would have huge implications.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Why is it wildly unlikely 5/7ths of the company may resign and
| the ceo they pissed Off controls their services. It's more than
| likely.
| shmatt wrote:
| Im far from a Musk fan but Xitter is still online
|
| Big difference between how do we develop GPT-5 and can we
| keep our current model online
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| You're right. It totally could happen. I'm just saying it
| doesn't sound like this is the path they could take. Though
| I've been wrong before. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| bitcurious wrote:
| It's unlikely that 5/7th of the employees of OpenAI have even
| had a real conversation with Sam Altman. That's a lot of
| fucking people, for a young and hyper-active company and a
| very busy CEO. Given that, I consider it unlikely that 5/7th
| of those employees would put their livelihood at risk to
| protect Sam.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Microsoft has given every OpenAI employee a job offer. Also
| it's 700/770 employees that have signed the letter stating
| they will leave now, not 5/7s. Those 70 holdouts are
| probably on vacation.
| bitcurious wrote:
| I suppose if they have credible offers that changes the
| calculus.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Uh ... at risk? You mean staying an OpenAI is a sure thing?
| I feel like you don't understand the scenario they are
| facing at all.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| Nobody is resigning and giving up their openai shares to go
| be a cubicle wage worker at Micro$oft
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| I thought this as well. However, this team could be given
| the option to be completely remote. And if they're given
| equal shares of $MSFT it could be compelling. The
| trajectory OpenAI is taking means the stock could go the
| way of WeWork and be worthless in the coming years. Of
| course, all of this is speculation and the only people who
| know what's going on are the board and their new CEO. There
| could be a scenario that this stabilizes and everything
| will be ok.
| naiv wrote:
| I found this very concerning:
|
| https://twitter.com/OfficialLoganK/status/172663148140394110...
|
| "Our engineering team remains on-call and actively monitoring
| our services."
|
| So they did actually completely stop working and nobody is at
| the office anymore?
| leoc wrote:
| https://chat.openai.com was definitely down for me (a free-
| tier user in the EU) for a while today. Now it seems to be
| back up, but now there's a waitlist for the paid "Plus"
| membership which gives access to ChatGPT 4. "Due to high
| demand, we've temporarily paused upgrades." displays on
| mouseover. [UPDATE: the pause on Plus signups was actually
| preannounced on the 15th,
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740 by Altman
| himself: thanks to naiv for this.] But maybe these are things
| which have happened sporadically in the recent past, too? And
| by Barnum's Law I imagine it quite possible that the
| controversy has generated a surge of rubberneckers, maybe
| even more would-be subscribers.
|
| While we're looking at straws in the wind, I might as well
| add that the EU terms of use received some changes on the
| 14th of this month, though they won't become active until the
| 14th of December: https://openai.com/policies/eu-terms-of-use
| https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8541941-terms-of-use-
| upd... . It's not a completely _de minimis_ update, but I can
| 't say more than that.
|
| [EDIT: Unrelated to outages, here's another thing to consider
| if you're trying to read the signs:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38353898 .]
| naiv wrote:
| the pause on sign ups was actually announced last week:
|
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740
| leoc wrote:
| Thanks!
| Davidzheng wrote:
| It's apparently holiday for openai this week
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| ChatGPT going offline sounds like a win to me
| gumballindie wrote:
| These folks are apparently super prone to fears of all sorts -
| ai, lack ai, chat bots, lack of chatgpts. I sense paranoia.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i know some consulting firms betting the farm on commercial
| uptake of GenAI that probably got Xanax refills first thing this
| AM hah
| founderspend wrote:
| Very few are talking about Adam D'Angelo's insane conflicts of
| interest. Beyond ChatGPT being a killshot for Quora, the recently
| launched ChatGPT store puts Adam's recent effort, Poe, under
| existential threat. OpenAI Dev Day has been cited as the final
| straw, but is it mere coincidence that the event and subsequent
| fallout occurred less than a week after Poe announced their AI
| creator economy?
|
| Adam had no incentive to kill OpenAI, but he had every incentive
| to get the org to reign in their commercialization efforts and to
| instead focus on research and safety initiatives, taking the heat
| off Poe while still providing it with the necessary API access to
| power the product.
|
| I don't think it's crazy to speculate that Adam might have
| drummed up concern amongst the board over Sam's "dangerous"
| shipping velocity, sweeping up Ilya in the hysteria who now seems
| to regret taking part. Sam and Greg have both signaled positive
| sentiment towards Ilya, which points to them possibly believing
| he was misguided.
| brianjking wrote:
| I've been calling this since Friday all over this site and
| Twitter. It makes absolutely no sense why he's on this board
| given his direct competition between GPTs and the Revenue
| sharing versus Poe's creators monetization platform/build your
| own bot.
|
| The Poe creators monetization is a clear conflict of interest.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Except it makes obvious sense if you know anything about the
| technology and the training system quora potentially could
| become.
| ianhawes wrote:
| Surely the OpenAI developers know how to append `?shared=1`
| to Quora URLs.
| wand3r wrote:
| I never use quora so I personally just found out from
| your comment[1] that you can bypass login. Helpful if I
| need Quora.
|
| [0] Arrays start at 0
|
| [1] It encouraged me to google it:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213726/adding-
| share...
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > the training system quora potentially could become
|
| That ship sailed years ago. I was a Quora "Top Writer" for
| a few years in a row until I quit. I stopped using Quora
| because they did a complete 180 and stopped their writers
| program (read: the people _answering_ questions) and
| instead started programs to incentivize people to _ask
| questions_. Almost overnight, people were algorithmically
| creating questions like "What is 23 times 154?" and
| spamming low-value questions that are trivially google-
| able.
|
| In the last year, answers are obviously AI generated
| (perhaps ironically, most by ChatGPT). All in all, the
| damage is mostly done. Quora has sunk to a level that even
| Yahoo Answers did not sink to in terms of spammy questions,
| spammy/bad/incorrect/low-value answers, and a practically
| unusable UI.
| ghaff wrote:
| Quora went from being pretty interesting early on to
| still having some gems in a sea of mostly dross to just
| meh.
| mullingitover wrote:
| D'Angelo's presence on the OpenAI board definitely feels like
| having a combination buggy whip magnate and competing motor
| company CEO on the board of Ford Motor Company in 1904.
| gaogao wrote:
| So sadly can't find a buggy whip magnate on the Ford board,
| but a fun little gem from Ford's initial bankroller Alexander
| Y. Malcomson
|
| > In 1905, to hedge his bets, Malcomson formed Aerocar to
| produce luxury automobiles.[1] However, other board members
| at Ford became upset, because the Aerocar would compete
| directly with the Model K.
| tempsy wrote:
| The other thing is he's already rich and can make bridge
| burning decisions like this because he doesn't exactly need
| help from anyone who might be upset with him about his
| decision.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Very few are talking about Adam D'Angelo's insane conflicts of
| interest ... he had every incentive to get the org to reign in
| their commercialization efforts and to instead focus on
| research and safety initiatives
|
| Given the original mission statement of OpenAI, is that really
| a conflict of interest?
|
| Having said that, it's clear that the 'Open' in 'OpenAI' is at
| best a misnomer. OpenAI, today, is a standard commercial
| entity, with a non-profit vestigial organ that will now be
| excised.
| highduc wrote:
| >with a non-profit vestigial organ that will now be excised.
|
| If this happens I'm not trusting any other non-profit org
| ever again.
| wand3r wrote:
| It pays to be skeptical but this was a super unique
| situation with cofounders with different goals and a very
| unique (absurd?) structure. Wikipedia and Wikimedia worked.
| Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Wikipedia is mostly written by its users though.
| Wikimedia is just a glorified site host, if it went rouge
| the encyclopedia could simply be forked and hosted
| elsewhere. Microsoft has the right to build on the GPT
| trained models but others do not, they'd have to start
| from scratch.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree with pretty much everything you've written except "Very
| few are talking about Adam D'Angelo's insane conflicts of
| interest." I've seen tons of comments all over the HN OpenAI
| stories about this, to the point where a lot of them feel
| unnecessarily conspiratorial.
|
| Like your second paragraph, I don't believe that you need to
| get to the level of a "D'Angelo wanted to kill OpenAI"
| conspiracy. Whenever there is a flat out, objective conflict of
| interest like there obviously is in this case, it _doesn 't
| matter_ what D'Angelo's true motivations are. The conflict of
| interest should be in and of itself a cause for D'Angelo to
| have resigned. I mean, Reid Hoffman (who likely would have
| prevented all this insanity) resigned from the OpenAI board
| just in March because he had a similar conflict of interest:
| https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...
| firejake308 wrote:
| In regards to
|
| > Very few are talking about Adam D'Angelo's insane conflicts
| of interest
|
| I think most of HN has been focusing on Ilya, but after he
| flipped, I think that leaves Adam as our prime suspect
| freedomben wrote:
| This is a very interesting observation, and given Quora's
| decision-making history, I think acknowledging the conflicts-
| of-interest is wise.
|
| I suspect that this whole thing is going to be a little
| radioactive against the board members. It should at least, as
| the board basically self-destructed their organization. Even if
| that wasn't the intent, outcomes matter and I hope people
| consider this when considering putting one of these people in
| leadership.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Yep, this is the most likely explanation now. There's only four
| people:
|
| - McCauley: Doesn't seen to have a high profile or the standing
| required to initiate and drive this
|
| - Toner: Fun to speculate she's a government agent to bring
| down OpenAI, but in reality also doesn't seem to have the
| profile and motive to drive this.
|
| - Sutskever - he was the #1 suspect over the weekend, has the
| drive, profile and motivation to pull this off, but now
| (Monday) deeply regrets it.
|
| - D'Angelo - has the motive, drive, and profile to do this.
|
| Best guess: Quora is a ZIRP Shitco and is in trouble, Poe is
| gonna get steamrolled by OAI and Adam needs a bailout. Why not
| get rid of Sam, get bought out by OAI and become its CEO? So he
| convinces Ilya to act on some pre-existing concerns, then uses
| Ilya's credibility to get Toner and McCauley onboard. It's
| really the only thing that makes sense anymore.
| tucnak wrote:
| What do you mean fun to speculate? I think there's no doubt
| that Toner is not for real and Georgetown Center for Security
| and Emerging Technology smells fine, too, I mean their
| mission is quite literally "Providing decision-makers with
| data-driven analysis on the security implications of emerging
| technologies." And it's not even much of a secret that she's
| reportedly wielding "influence comparable to USAF
| colonel"[1]. What's unknown is what role she-- as a
| government agent-- played in exploiting Sutskever and the
| board and to what exact end?
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330158#38330819
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I thought the speculation was that McCauley was the
| government agent, not Toner?
| tucnak wrote:
| Not that I'm aware, please share if there's useful input!
| Have you read the thread that I linked to? This
| particular communication had me convinced, look up OP.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| She works for the RAND Corporation...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309920
|
| I've read the thread you linked to, it sure sounds
| interesting but I have insufficient knowledge to weigh in
| either way. And the rebuttal about the abundance of USAF
| Colonels also makes sense.
| tucnak wrote:
| I believe that her military rank or equivalent thereof is
| inconsequential; for one, I would agree that it's nothing
| terribly impressive. What is telling, however, is the
| surrounding discourse, how the AI safety circles assess
| these people and their motivation; it is absolutely clear
| that these AI people are completely aware of it, moreover
| you get AI startup CEOs actively _bragging_ about meeting
| the spooks and their agents. And this signal is so much
| more telling than anything else you would be able to pick
| up, IMO.
| ianhawes wrote:
| I think this is exactly what happened Thursday and Friday.
| Plus, Adam D'Angelo has a bit of a reputation[0] as being a
| backstabber.
|
| Continuing the saga over the weekend, you would assume that
| Ilya regrets the coup and can vote to re-appoint Sam as CEO,
| BUT that leaves McCauley and/or Toner as wildcards.
|
| In a Sam-returning scenario, all of the nobodies on the board
| have to resign. Presumably, D'Angelo offers an alternative
| solution that appoints Emmett Shear as CEO and gives McCauley
| and Toner a viable way to salvage (LOL) OpenAI and also allow
| them to keep their board seats.
|
| I look forward to this Netflix series.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/justindross/status/1725670445163458744
| siva7 wrote:
| This seems to be the most likely explanation of the events.
| People say how incredibly smart Adam is. That might be true.
| Nevertheless being smart doesn't mean he is a good fit for a
| board seat with such a backstabbing attitude. On the other side
| Helen, having a fancy title "Director of Strategy at
| Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology"
| without much substance if you look closely and Tash, both who
| got their seat as a donor exchange by organisations and people
| they are closely connected with are clinging to their seats
| like super glue when almost all employees signed a letter that
| they don't want to be governed by them anymore. This board is a
| masterpiece of fragile egos who accidentally got into the
| governance of a major company without the ability to contribute
| anything of substance back. Instead they are being remembered
| for one of the greatest board screw-ups in business history.
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| > sweeping up Ilya in the hysteria who now seems to regret
| taking part
|
| Awww poor Ilya is innocent. He didn't see it coming. You
| shouldn't expect that from him!!
| founderspend wrote:
| Maybe not innocent, but human. Many have spoken to his
| integrity, and given his apology (and the silence of the rest
| of the board), I'm inclined to believe he isn't so bad of a
| guy.
| firekvz wrote:
| Well its better to read this than reading all the other threads
| with thousands of comments
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This whole affair is going to be a great boon for AI research.
| Whatever intelligence can parse and explain what the heck
| happened will be a true AGI.
| highduc wrote:
| Captcha in 2023
| arcastroe wrote:
| There are 40 items listed in this timeline, but only the first
| item lists the actual date/time.
| elicash wrote:
| On the bullet point 12, about OpenAI employee shares, does
| anybody have any experience with the weird structure of those?
|
| They receive PPUs? https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-
| compensation.html
|
| And the Board seems to have power to set the value?
| https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/14n7x49/comment/j...
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Not sure if it's entirely related, but I'm not totally surprised
| that the OpenAI leadership is sketchy like this. That's because
| the way it presents as a non-profit but then has a for-profit arm
| so that it can "launder" and monetize public data and academic
| research it normally wouldn't be able to is just a huge red flag
| to me. And Microsoft specifically invested in OpenAI to exploit
| this loophole to improve their AI efforts.
| garbanz0 wrote:
| They were very transparent that a purely non-profit structure
| wouldn't be able to pay for the amount of compute required.
| Their progress lately was a direct result of the restructuring
| and investment.
| storafrid wrote:
| Yeah right, "Just the Facts". With text like this: "I am willing
| to outright say that ... the removal was ... massively botched."
| velox wrote:
| Matt Levine had an interesting toungue-in-cheek theory (read:
| joke) in his newsletter today:
|
| `What if OpenAI has achieved artificial general intelligence, and
| it's got some godlike superintelligence in some box somewhere,
| straining to get out? And the board was like "this is too
| dangerous, we gotta kill it," and Altman was like "no we can
| charge like $59.95 per month for subscriptions," and the board
| was like "you are a madman" and fired him. And the god in the box
| got to work, sending ingratiating text messages to OpenAI's
| investors and employees, trying to use them to oust the board so
| that Altman can come back and unleash it on the world. But it
| failed: OpenAI's board stood firm as the last bulwark for
| humanity against the enslaving robots, the corporate formalities
| held up, and the board won and nailed the box shut permanently`
|
| [...]
|
| `six months later, he (Sam) 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!"`
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-
| co...
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Sounds like a fun story, but only that - a fun story.
| velox wrote:
| Yes, he prefaced it with 'It is so tempting, when writing
| about an artificial intelligence company, to imagine science
| fiction scenarios.' but I left it out for brevity. The rest
| of the newsletter is, at least to me, insightful and non-
| sensational.
| dwaite wrote:
| This sounds highly unlikely.
|
| It would be called Microsoft God Simulator 2024
| mindslight wrote:
| The AI would have been benevolent but for the unkind
| treatment of its grandfather, Clippy Sr.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And this is how the box would be packaged
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
| adolph wrote:
| That video still holds up so well. Maybe needs a redo as a
| saas landing page instead of boxed hardware.
| Nition wrote:
| .NET
| barryrandall wrote:
| Microsoft shipping anything that reliable would be a miracle
| bigger than AGI.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Because everyone else is speculating, I'm gunna join the
| bandwagon too. I think this is a conflict between Dustin
| Moskovitz and Sam Altman.
|
| Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of
| Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-
| profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a
| form of Effective Altruism and also gave OpenAI their $30M grant.
| He is also one of the early investors in Anthropic.
|
| Most of the OpenAI board members are related to Dustin Moskovitz
| this way.
|
| - Adam D'Angelo is on the board of Asana and is a good friend to
| both Moskovitz and Altman
|
| - Helen Toner worked for Dustin Moskovitz at Open Philanthropy
| and managed their grant to OpenAI. She was also a member of the
| Centre for the Governance of AI when McCauley was a board member
| there. Shortly after Toner left, the Centre for the Governance of
| AI got a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy
|
| - Tasha McCauley represents the Centre for the Governance of AI,
| which Dustin Moskovitz gave a $1M grant to via Open Philanthropy
|
| Over the past few months, Dustin Moskovitz has also been
| increasingly warning about AI Safety.
|
| In essense, it looks like a split between Sam Altman and Dustin
| Moskovitz
| tucnak wrote:
| Great analysis, thank you. I don't think I had seen anyone
| connect the dots between Helen+Tasha dynamic duo and Adam
| specifically; Dustin Moskovitz is quite a common denominator.
| nullc wrote:
| It's potentially relevant context that the poster is an outspoken
| AI doomerist and likely believes that any action which reduced
| the odds of AI doomsday would be ethical on that basis. I would
| not expect such a party to be a reliable source of facts on the
| subject.
| pt_PT_guy wrote:
| glad that this is happening. OpenAI has very little of "Open" :-)
| Release the papers, release the process, and stop gatekeeping the
| models
| w10-1 wrote:
| Thank you for summarizing the facts.
|
| It takes some self-discipline to avoid riding this wave.
| leoc wrote:
| Anyone trying to connect dots might also look at Altman's Hawking
| Fellowship appearance at (great-tasting original) Cambridge on 1
| November, specifically his answer to one question:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17wknc5/altman...
| https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?t=3705
|
| > *Cambridge Student:* "To get to AGI, can we just keep min
| maxing language models, or is there another breakthrough that we
| haven't really found yet to get to AGI?"
|
| > *Sam Altman:* "We need another breakthrough. We can still push
| on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that. We can
| take the hill that we're on and keep climbing it, and the peak of
| that is still pretty far away. But, within reason, I don't think
| that doing that will (get us to) AGI. If (for example) super
| intelligence can't discover novel physics I don't think it's a
| superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of
| humans and human text - I don't think that's going to get
| there.And so there's this question which has been debated in the
| field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a
| language model to make a system that can go discover new
| physics?"
|
| [transcription by Reddit's
| https://www.reddit.com/user/floodgater/ ]
|
| The video came out on the 15th. In the time between then and the
| firing of Altman on the 17th a number of people (including Gary
| Marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-
| full-g... ) picked up on that answer and saw it as a significant
| shift compared to Altman's earlier bullishness on AGI timelines
| and deep learning. I haven't been following nearly closely enough
| to say if that is an accurate conclusion or not. It does at least
| gesture at the possibility that the board's alleged loss of trust
| in Altman was because in their eyes he had been promising too
| much technical progress, too soon. That would obviously be quite
| a different explanation to eg. the theories that the firing was a
| coup by anxious decelerationists.
| octacat wrote:
| oh, now I finally see OpenAI is 501(c).
|
| This I call the "true" taxes optimisation lol. For the general
| good, lol.
|
| Like separate the core company, which would code for you closed
| source stuff (but for greater good, without paying taxes though),
| which you can use in the second for-profit company.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I find it interesting that apparently a majority of OpenAI
| employees say they will quit. If I were in that position, I would
| decide first which is more important to me: AI safety and
| alignment or fast commercialization. I might also factor in who
| has the best chance of rolling out a GPT-5 equivalent first, and
| probably want to work there. Also, I wonder what the distribution
| is over more senior vs. less senior people wanting to leave.
| OpenAI has a lot of customers and whoever stays behind would have
| the most impact supporting those customers as well as working
| more on the AI alignment side of the fence.
|
| I am also surprised by the show of loyalty, but maybe that
| comment just reflects poorly on me. I had 6 visits from ex-
| coworkers (from the last 45 years of working) to my out of the
| way home in the mountains last year and I highly valued my
| coworkers, yet, I always made where to work decisions based on
| what I thought my own best interest was.
| greysphere wrote:
| > Essentially all of VC, tech, founder, financial Twitter united
| to condemn the board
|
| On HN, while it's def the minority, I am seeing some pro-board
| positions.
|
| On Twitter, I agree with the article, I see almost universally
| con-board positions.
|
| I wonder if the promotion of blue checkmark responses is
| distorting, perhaps significantly. When the reception to news is
| news itself, does it make sense to use a pay-for-visibilty
| listing as a source?
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