We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

https://twitter.com/openai/status/1727206187077370115

by staranjeet • 3 years ago

1980 1915 3 years ago

twitter.com

jahsome• 3 years ago

That is one hot potato.

siva75• 3 years ago

Interesting that Adam is still on Board. This hints to Helen being the main perpetrator of the drama?

avereveard• 3 years ago

Well I don't see Greg back on the list and he was a loyalist so there may be a few adjustments moving forward

fatbird4• 3 years ago

Or it was recognized that Adam was the instigator and the real power player, and the force that Sam needed to come to an accommodation with. From everything I've heard about Toner, she's a very principled person who lent academic credibility to the board, and was a great figurehead for the non-profit's conscience. Once the veneer was ripped from the non-profit's "controlling" role, she was deadweight and useful only as a scapegoat.

It looks to me like the real victim here is the "for humanity" corporate structure. At some point, the money decided it needed to be free.

notfed3• 3 years ago

Nah, anyone who voted Sam out is in timeout.

GreedClarifies3• 3 years ago

Yes, quite clearly.

AaronNewcomer• 3 years ago

What a wild ride. I have used X more the past few days than in a long time; that’s for sure!

stingraycharles4• 3 years ago

Yes. I, too, read a whole three tweets in the past few days, which is more than I did the entire year before that.

adlpz• 3 years ago

Good, was out of popcorn already.

Somebody make a Netflix documentary please.

colmvp• 3 years ago

So, is he still going to lead some team at Microsoft?

wilg4• 3 years ago

No https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883

turndown• 3 years ago

From the outside none of this makes much sense. So the old board just disliked him enough to oust him but apparently didn’t have a good pulse on the company and overplayed their hand?

fruit2020• 3 years ago

It’s about money and power. Not AI safety or people disliking each other.

jychang• 3 years ago

What money? None of them had equity

Davidzheng4• 3 years ago

There's no proof on either side. Just as likely to be ideological disputes from Helen and Ilya.

yosame• 3 years ago

As far as I can tell, Sam did something? to get fired by the board, who are meant to be driven by non-profit ideals instead of corporate profits (probably from Sam pushing profit over safety, but there's no real way to know). From that, basically the whole company threatened to quit and move to Microsoft, showing the board that their power is purely ornamental. To retain any sort of power or say over decision making whatsoever, the board made concessions and got Sam back.

Really it just shows the whole non-profit arm of the company was even more of a lie then it appeared.

maxdoop5• 3 years ago

Where is this blind trust for the board coming from? The board provided zero rationale for firing Sam.

nbanks2• 3 years ago

They wanted a new CEO and didn't expect Sam to take 95% of the company with him when he left.

Sam also played his hand extremely well; he's likely learned from watching hundreds of founder blowups over the years. He never really seemed angry publicly as he gained support from all the staff including Ilya & Mira. I had little doubt Emmett Shear would also welcome Sam's return since they were both in the first YC batch together.

baruz• 3 years ago

They wanted a new CEO

If that were the case, would they not have presented the new CEO immediately for an “orderly transition”? As I understand it, Ms Murati tried to get Altman back, and when she pressured the board, they tried at least two other possible CEOs before settling on Mr Shear, who also threatened to leave if they could not give evidence of a legal reason for firing Altman. It smells like a personality conflict.

eganist• 3 years ago

Any analysis on how Satya Nadella comes out on all of this? Or what impact this might have at all within Microsoft?

nothrowaways• 3 years ago

Satya is still a winner, grabs less now though.

polyomino• 3 years ago

Satya wants to be able to book the OpenAI money as revenue. This is better for him.

Racing04614• 3 years ago

Satya's pay is about 100 million dollars. Ide say he has earned every penny for protecting MSFTs 10B investment in OpenAI. A 1% insurance policy is great value.

Finbarr• 3 years ago

Hopefully Sam and Greg get restored to the board also.

robbiet480• 3 years ago

The most recent reporting I saw from Bloomberg said sama would return as CEO only.

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

The new board only has 3 people to start with, but hopefully easier to add more members soon. Tonight's NYT story mentioned the board member attrition and the prolonged gridlock in adding new ones, which probably led to the current saga.

adastra227• 3 years ago

Why would he agree to this? He holds all the cards now.

Uhhrrr• 3 years ago

Sure, why not.

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

"In principle" has me less than 100% assured. Hopefully no more plot twists in this. Everyone, inside and outside, has probably had enough.

laweijfmvo• 3 years ago

I’m down for the next season of this hot drama.

koito17• 3 years ago

What a wild ride these past few days have been. Friday already feels like a very long time ago given all of the information and controversy that's come out.

rvz3• 3 years ago

Once again the source is directly from Twitter / X and the news was announced from there.

Dispelling the complete nonsense that the platform is 'dying'.

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

The problem is none of the alternatives offered a smooth UX transition. Mastodon is fragmented by design and Bluesky is gated to this day. There was never a true Digg-like event that caused user migration to reach critical mass. So people simply trickled back once the most volatile periods of post-Elon Twitter passed.

That doesn't change the fact post-Elon Twitter has severely degraded in terms of user experience (rate limits, blue check spam, API pay-wall, etc.) and Elon isn't doing the platform any favours by continuing to participate in detrimental ways (seen in the recent advertiser exodus).

mastazi2• 3 years ago

FWIW I've just read the tweet on Nitter, haven't had a Twitter account in more than 2 years.

wilg4• 3 years ago

Well that's got very little to do with their point (which isn't very relevant anyway)

metabagel3• 3 years ago

Twitter isn’t dying. It’s just finding its core audience of white supremacists.

0xpgm• 3 years ago

Your comment sounds very weird to people outside America/Europe

mlazos• 3 years ago

Looks like Satya will have all of the leverage after this. He kind of always did though, but the board has almost entirely been replaced.

I don’t see any point to the non profit umbrella now.

baking9• 3 years ago

Sure, you can dissolve it if you hand over all the assets to another 501(c)3 organization. Otherwise, you are stuck with it.

xyst2• 3 years ago

This ordeal reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode where Richard is replaced by an empty chair, temporarily.

tomohelix• 3 years ago

So, Ilya is out of the board, but Adam is still on it. I know this will raise some eyebrows but whatever.

Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.

wilg4• 3 years ago

I mean he's not irreplaceable so much as booting him suddenly for no good reason creates problems.

ayakang314152• 3 years ago

"I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust." How is this the case?

quickthrower26• 3 years ago

Scandal a minute Uber lol

jatins6• 3 years ago

I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust

Whose trust?

sverhagen• 3 years ago

Ah, yes, Facebook and Uber, brands known for consistent trustworthiness throughout their existences /s

ilikehurdles4• 3 years ago

OAI looks stronger than ever. The untrustworthy bits that caused all this instability over the last 5 days have been ditched into the sea. Care to expand on your claim?

neta1337• 3 years ago

Please explain your claim as well. I don’t see how this company looks stronger than ever, more like a clown company

6gvONxR4sf7o6• 3 years ago

The untrustworthy bits that caused all this instability over the last 5 days have been ditched into the sea

This whole thing started with Altman pushing a safety oriented non-profit into a tense contradiction (edit: I mean the 2019-2022 gpt3/chatgpt for-profit stuff that led to all the Anthropic people leaving). The most recent timeline was

- Altman tries to push out another board member

- That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)

- Altman's side escalates by saying they'll nuke the company

Altman's side won, but how can we say that his side didn't cause any of this instability?

gordon_freeman• 3 years ago

Facebook has lost trust so many times that I can’t even count but it’s still a Megacorp, isn’t it?

TerrifiedMouse2• 3 years ago

The OpenAI of the past, that dabbled in random AI stuff (remember their DotA 2 bot?), is gone.

OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it.

Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete.

Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just because something claims to be non-profit doesn't mean it will always remain that way. With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization. Non-profit status and whatever the organization's charter says is temporary.

karmasimida7• 3 years ago

now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM

I mean it is what they want isn't it. They did some random stuff like, playing dota2 or robot arms, even the Dalle stuff. Now they finally find that one golden goose, of course they are going to keep it.

I don't think the company has changed at all. It succeeded after all.

g42gregory3• 3 years ago

Why would society at large suffer from a major flaw in GPT-4, if it's even there? If GPT-4 spits out some nonsense to your customers, just put a filter on it, as you should anyway. We can't seriously expect OpenAI to babysit every company out there, can we? Why would we even want to?

robbomacrae3• 3 years ago

I'm still waiting for an optimized version of that bot that can run locally...

krisoft7• 3 years ago

With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization.

In fact this observation is pertinent to the original stated goals of openAI. In some sense companies and organisations are superinteligences. That is they have goals, they are acting in the real world to achieve those goals and they are more capable in some measures than a single human. (They are not AGI, because they are not artificial, they are composed of meaty parts, the individuals forming the company.)

In fact what we are seeing is that when the superinteligence OpenAI was set up there was an attempt to align the goals of the initial founders with the then new organisation. They tried to “bind” their “golem” to make it pursue certain goals by giving it an unconventional governance structure and a charter.

Did they succeed? Too early to tell for sure, but there are at least question marks around it.

How would one argue against? OpenAI appears to have given up the lofty goals of AI safety and preventing the concentration of AI provess. In their pursuit of economic success the forces wishing to enrich themselves overpowered the forces wishing to concentrate on the goals. Safety will be still a figleaf for them, if nothing else to achieve regulatory capture to keep out upstart competition.

How would one argue for? OpenAI is still around. The charter is still around. To be able to achieve the lofty goals contained in it one needs a lot of resources. Money in particular is a resource which enables one greater powers in shaping the world. Achieving the original goals will require a lot of money. The “golem” is now in the “gain resources” phase of its operation. To achieve that it commercialises the relatively benign, safe and simple LLMs it has access to. This serves the original goal in three ways: gains further resources, estabilishes the organisation as a pre-eminent expert on AI and thus AI safety, provides it with a relatively safe sandbox where adversarial forces are trying its safety concepts. In other words all is well with the original goals, the “golem” that is OpenAI is still well aligned. It will achieve the original goals once it has gained enough resources to do so.

The fact that we can’t tell which is happening is in fact the worry and problem with superinteligence/AI safety.

quickthrower26• 3 years ago

They let the fox in. But they didn’t have to. They could have try to raise money without such a sweet deal to MS. They gave away power for cloud credits.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Don’t think the dota bot was random. It’s the perfect mix between complicated yet controllable environment, good data availability and good PR angle.

3cats-in-a-coat3• 3 years ago

Do we need to false dichotomy. DotA 2 bot was a successful technology preview. You need both research and development in a healthy organisation. Let's call this... hmm I don't know "R&D" for short. Might catch on.

cyanydeez20• 3 years ago

Non-profit is just a poorly thought out government-ish thing.

If it's really valuable to society, it needs to be a government entity, full stop.

nathanasmith3• 3 years ago

On the contrary, this saga has shown that a huge number of people are extremely passionate about the existence of OpenAI and it's leadership by Altman, much more strongly and in larger numbers than most had suspected. If anything this has solidified the importance of the company and I think people will trust it more that the situation was resolved with the light speed it was.

willdr2• 3 years ago

That's a misreading of the situation. The employees saw their big bag vanishing and suddenly realised they were employed by a non-profit entity that had loftier goals than making a buck, so they rallied to overturn it and they've gotten their way. This is a net negative for anyone not financially invested in OAI.

lacker4• 3 years ago

Let's see, Sam Altman is an incredibly charismatic founding CEO, who some people consider manipulative, but is also beloved by many employees. He got kicked out by his board, but brought back when they realized their mistake.

It's true that this doesn't really pattern-match with the founding story of huge successful companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. But somehow, I think it's still possible that a huge company could be created by a person like this.

(And of course, more important than creating a huge company, is creating insanely great products.)

loveparade2• 3 years ago

I think people following Sam Altman is jumping to conclusions. I think it's just as likely that employees are simply following the money. They want to make $$$, and that's what a for-profit company does, which is what Altman wants. I think it's probably not really about Altman or his leadership.

mkii3• 3 years ago

It's true that this doesn't really pattern-match with the founding story of huge successful companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.

You forgot about Apple.

cowthulhu• 3 years ago

I feel like history has shown repeatedly that having a good product matters way more than trust, as evidenced by Facebook and Uber. People seem to talk big smack about lost trust and such in the immediate aftermath of a scandal, and then quitely renew the contracts when the time comes.

All of the big ad companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook) have, like, a scandal per month, yet the ad revenue keeps coming. Meltdown was a huge scandal, yet Intel keeps pumping out the chips.

anotherhue• 3 years ago

This has been childish throughout, everyone involved, including the tech community milking it for clicks should be ashamed.

gloyoyo• 3 years ago

Tell that AGI who's boss!

ryzvonusef8• 3 years ago

    > We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

    > We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

1- So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults?

2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this?

3- Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.

quotemstr• 3 years ago

Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.

It's only natural to confuse what is happening with what we wish to happen. After all, when we imagine something, aren't we undergoing a kind of experience?

A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof. It's only human to do this. We all do.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof.

Cognitive dissonance

ryzvonusef8• 3 years ago

It was funny reading Kara Swisher keeping saying twitter is dying and is toxic and what not, while STILL doing all her first announcements on twitter, and using twitter as a source.

same with Ashlee Vance (the other journo reporting on this) and all the main players (Sam/Greg/Ilya/Mira/Satya/whoever) also make their first announcement on twitter.

I don't know about the funding part of it, but there is no denying it, the news is still freshest on twitter. Twitter feels just as toxic for me as before, in fact I feel community notes has made it much better, imho.

____

In some related news, I finally got bluesky invite (I don't have invite codes yet or I would share here)

and people there are complaining about... mastadon and how elitist it is...

that was an eye opener.

nice if you want some science-y updates but it's still lags behind twitter for news.

seydor7• 3 years ago

Microsoft said they are OK with Sam returning to openAI. There are probbaly legal reasons why they prefer things to go back as it were

(Thank you for calling Twitter Twitter)

AmericanOP3• 3 years ago

The website is twitter.com. Why call it something else?

jatins6• 3 years ago

Microsoft's role remains same as it was on Thursday. Minor (49%?) shareholder and keeps access to models and IP

IMO Kevin tweeting that MS will hire and match comp of all OpenAI employees was amazing negotiation tactic because that meant employees could sign the petition without worrying about their jobs/visas

ryzvonusef8• 3 years ago

but no board seat? how do they prevent a rehash of this in the future and how do they safeguard their investment? Really curious.

karmasimida7• 3 years ago

I think at this point MSFT will seek a board seat in OpenAI/

ugh1234• 3 years ago

I was thinking about this a lot as well, but what did that mean for employee stock in the commercial entity? I heard they were up for a liquid cash-out in the next funding round.

6gvONxR4sf7o6• 3 years ago

So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults?

Altman was trying to remove one of the board members before he was forced out. Looks like he got his way in the end, but I'm going to call Altman the primary instigator because of that.

His side was also the "we'll nuke the company unless you resign" side.

theamk• 3 years ago

His side was also "700 regular employees support this", which is pretty unusual as most people don't care about their CEO at all. I am not related to OpenAI at all, but given the choice of "favorite of all employees" vs "fire people with no warning then refuse to give explanation why even under pressure" I know which side I root for.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

The explanation for point 1 is point 3. If the people involved were not terminally online and felt the need to share every single one of their immediate thoughts with the public they could have likely settled this behind closed doors, where this kind of stuff belongs.

It's not actually news, it's entertainment and self-aggrandizement by everyone involved including the audience.

0xDEAFBEAD5• 3 years ago

Interesting that the board were repeatedly criticized for "not being adults", and yet they were also the only party not live-tweeting everything...

Seems like there's no way to win with Twitter. You may not be interested in Twitter, but Twitter is interested in you.

petesergeant• 3 years ago

If there’s been one constant here, it’s been people who actually know Tonrer expressing deep support for her experience, intelligence, and ethics, so it’s interesting to me that she seems to be getting the boot.

causalmodels• 3 years ago

Fiascos like this display neither experience nor intelligence. This whole saga was a colossal failure on the part of the previous board.

dmix2• 3 years ago

Add delusions of grandeur to that list thinking she can pursue her ideological will by winning over 3 board members while losing 90% of the company staff.

She was fighting an idelogical battle that needs full industry buy in, legitimate or not that's not how you win people over.

If she's truely a rationalist as she claims then a rationalist would be realistic understanding that if your engineers can just leave and do it somewhere else tomorrow you aren't making progress. Taking on the full might of US capitalism via winning over the fringe half of a non profit board is not the best strategy. At best it was desperate and naive.

tsimionescu• 3 years ago

If there is one clear thing, it's that no one on that board should be allowed anywhere near another board for any non-clown company. The level of incompetence in how they handled this whole thing was extraordinary.

The fact that Adam D'Angelo is still on the new board apparently is much more baffling than the fact that Tonrer or Ilya are not.

happosai2• 3 years ago

About 3)

What is the benefit of learning about this kind of drama minute-by-minute, compared to reading it a few hours later on hacker news or next day on wall street journal?

Personally I found twitter very bad for my productivity, a lot of focus destroyed just to know "what is happening" when there was neglible drawbacks of finding about news events a few hours later.

willdr2• 3 years ago

I have muted any mention of Open AI, Altman, Emmet and Satya from my Twitter feed for the past five days. It's a far better experience.

kumarvvr3• 3 years ago

Satya comes out great, making the absolute best of a given shitty situation, with a high stake of 10 B USD.

Microsoft is showing to investors that it is going to be an AI company, one way or the other.

Microsoft still has access to everything OpenAI does.

Microsoft has its friend, Sam, at the helm of OpenAI and with a more tighter grip on the company than ever.

Its still a win for Microsoft.

dacryn3• 3 years ago

Satya comes out as evil imho, and I wonder how much orchestration there was going on behind the scenes.

Microsoft is showing that it is still able to capture important scale ups and 'embrace' them, whilst also acting as if they have the moral high ground, but in reality are doing research with a high governance errors and potential legal problems away from their premises. and THAT is why stakeholders like him.

nabla9• 3 years ago

Satya just played the hand he had. The hand he had was excellent, he had already won. MS already had perceptual license, people working on GPT and Sam Altman on his corner.

The one thing in Microsoft has stayed constant from Gates to Ballmer to Satya: you should never, ever form a close alliance with MS. They know how to screw alliance partners. i4i, Windows RT partners, Windows Phone Partners, Nokia, HW partners in Surface. Even Steve Jobs was burned few times.

blackoil7• 3 years ago

So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults?

Whole charade was by GPT5 to understand the position of person sitting next to red button and secondary to stress test Hacker News.

_boffin_• 3 years ago

Larry Summers? like the Larry Summers?

Sai_2• 3 years ago

yeah, the guy has a knack for being in/invited to places.

JumpCrisscross7• 3 years ago

Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates

This has been my single strongest takeaway from this saga: Twitter remains the centre of controversy. When shit hit the fan, Sam and Satya and Swisher took to Twitter. Not Threads. Not Bluesy. Twitter. (X.)

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

Bluesky still has gated signups at this point so I don't think it will ever be a viable alternative.

Threads had a rushed rollout which resulted in major feature gaps that disincentivized users from doing anything beyond creating their profiles.

Notable figures and organizations have little reason to fully migrate off Twitter unless Musk irreversibly breaks the site and even he is not stupid enough to do that (yet?). So with most of its content creators still in place, Twitter has no risk of following the path of Digg.

Racing04614• 3 years ago

2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this?

This outcome WAS microsoft's role in all this. Satya offering sam a ceo like position to create a competing product was leverage for this outcome.

HPMOR• 3 years ago

Thank the lord. We need stability and reliability as developers. This is great news for anyone building ontop of OpenAI products. Welcome back Sama.

hadrien01• 3 years ago

So Adam D'Angelo would stay on the board? I thought a condition for Altman to return was the whole board resigning?

kelnos• 3 years ago

When people negotiate, often they compromise, and their conditions change.

r7214• 3 years ago

Quote tweets by main participants:

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727206691262099616 (+ follow-up https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883)

https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727206609477411261

https://twitter.com/miramurati/status/1727206862150672843

UPD https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727208843137179915

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1727207661547233721

ryzvonusef8• 3 years ago

also satya

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1727207661547233721

0xDEAFBEAD5• 3 years ago

Emmett https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598

303space• 3 years ago

Genuinely curious - what’s the comp package like for 72 hours of interim CEOing a 80b company?

upupupandaway3• 3 years ago

I am really surprised by people thinking this guy did anything to get sama back. He was probably not even in the room.

doctoboggan2• 3 years ago

What does Ilya have to say?

behnamoh9• 3 years ago

probably a heart emoji.

dkarras• 3 years ago

he also retweeted OpenAI's and Sam's announcements

nickpp14• 3 years ago

On a side tangent, absolutely amazing how all this drama unfolded on Twitter/X. No Threads, no Mastodon, no Truth Social or Blue whatever.

Say what you want about Elon’s leadership but his instinct to buy Twitter was completely right. To me it seemed like any social network crap but he realized it was important.

swyx• 3 years ago

i mean he also tried his hardest to back out of the deal until he realized he couldnt

layer82• 3 years ago

Inertia is a bitch.

highwaylights3• 3 years ago

Interesting take.

By all accounts he paid about double what it was worth and the value has collapsed from there.

Probably not a great idea to say anything overtly political when you own a social media company, as due to politics being so polarised in the US, any opinion is going to divide your audience in half causing a usage collapse and driving support to competing platforms.

https://fortune.com/2023/09/06/elon-musk-x-what-is-twitter-w...

veec_cas_tant2• 3 years ago

Not trying to be a dick but:

1. He tried to not buy Twitter very hard and OpenAI’s new board member forced his hand

2. It hasn’t been a good financial decision if the banks and X’s own valuation cuts are anything to go by.

3. If his purpose wasn’t to make money…all of these tweets would have absolutely been allowed before Elon bought the company. He didn’t affect any relevance changes here.

Why would one person owning something so important be better than being publicly owned? I don’t understand the logic.

tigershark• 3 years ago

A huge amount of advertisers ran away, the revenue cratered and it is probably less than the annual debt servicing (revenue, not profit), the current valuation, accordingly to Musk math (https://fortune.com/2023/09/06/elon-musk-x-what-is-twitter-w...), is 1/10 of the acquisition price. But yes, it was a masterstroke. I don’t remember any other masterstroke in history that managed to lose 40B with a single acquisition.

r7214• 3 years ago

I think it's just this particular drama - OpenAI people are of the same tribe as Elon, and surely they prefer Twitter/X, not Mastodon or Bluesky.

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

What does this have to do with Elon again? FYI Twitter existed before October 2022. Account join dates are public. Every single person involved in this, incl. OpenAI staff posting for solidarity, joined Twitter years before Elon's takeover.

Sai_2• 3 years ago

His instinct was to walk away from his offer. He had to be forced to buy the company.

His second wife apparently asked him to buy Twitter and fix its, in her opinion, liberal bias.

highwaylights3• 3 years ago

That’s certainly some very.. deliberate.. board picks.

Summers, too.

Welp.

kmlevitt11• 3 years ago

Say what you want about Summers specifically but I think it's a good idea getting some economists on the board. They are academics but focused on practical, important issues like loss of jobs and what that means for the economy and society. Up until now it seems like the board members have either been AI doomers with no practical experience or Silicon Valley types that inevitably have conflicts of interest, because everybody is starting their own AI venture now.

returnInfinity• 3 years ago

It seems US Attorneys were calling the Open AI board.

It helps having somebody with government ties on board now.

synaesthesisx• 3 years ago

If we achieve AGI it has the potential to capture most (if not all) economic value. Larry Summers was a deliberate choice indeed.

crossroadsguy• 3 years ago

Now the blue tick has same effect on me on Twitter that the red N logo has on any film that came from the Netflix formula factory. I already know it’s going to be bad, regurgitated. Does everyone have a Twitter blue tick now? Or is that just a char people are using in their names?

r7214• 3 years ago

Does everyone have a Twitter blue tick now? Or is that just a char people are using in their names?

Blue tick just means user bought a subscription (X Premium) now - one of the features is "reply prioritization", so top replies to popular tweets are from blue ticks.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium

r7214• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/hlntnr/status/1727207796456751615

epups4• 3 years ago

So, Adam D'Angelo is the only board member that remains, and he had also voted against Altman before. How interesting, considering all the theory crafting about him being the one who initiated this coup.

weirdindiankid• 3 years ago

I wonder how this will impact the company-owned-by-a-non-profit model in the future. While it isn’t uncommon (e.g. I believe IKEA are owned by a nonprofit), I believe it has historically been for tax reasons.

Given the grandstanding and chaos on both sides, it’ll be interesting to see if OpenAI undergo a radical shift in their structure.

gzer02• 3 years ago

Satya on twitter:

We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1727207661547233721

qsi5• 3 years ago

> a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.

That's quite a slap at the board... a polite way of calling them ignorant, ineffective dilettantes.

adastra227• 3 years ago

Yet one of them is still on the board…

_jnc• 3 years ago

microsoft is going to need 2-3 seats on that board

choppaface• 3 years ago

Larry Summers mostly counts as a Microsoft seat. Summers will support commercial and private interest and not have a single thought about safety, just like during the financial crisis 15 years ago https://www.chronicle.com/article/larry-summers-and-the-subv...

wokwokwok2• 3 years ago

Unsaid: “Also I lied about hiring him.”

And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.

https://nitter.net/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122

I guess everyone was just playing a bit loose and fast with the truth and hype to pressure the board.

behnamoh9• 3 years ago

it was Monday morning and he didn’t want MSFT stock to crash

Nathanba• 3 years ago

maybe he really had an affirmative statement on this from Sam Altman but nobody signs an employment contract this quickly so it was all still up in the air

robbomacrae3• 3 years ago

Why does this accusation keep coming up? Sam even confirmed he took the offer in one of the tweets above "when i decided to join msft on sun evening". Contracts are not handcuffs and he was free to change his mind.

century19• 3 years ago

Exactly this. It also moved Microsoft’s share price. Is that not questionable practice?

qsi5• 3 years ago

Satya's statement at the time may well have been true at the time in that he, Sam and Greg had agreed on them joining MSFT. Later circumstances changed, and now that decision has been reversed or nullfied. Calling the original statement a lie is not warranted IMHO.

In either case the end effect is the essentially the same. Either Sam is at MSFT and can continue to work with openAI IP, or he's back at openAI and do the same. In both cases the net effect for MSFT is similar and not materially different, although the revealed preference of Sam's return to openAI indicates the second option was the preferred one.

[Edit for grammar]

actinium226• 3 years ago

Absolutely no lies here. It was a dynamic situation and it wasn't at all clear that discussions with OAI board would lead to an outcome where sama returns as CEO.

Satya offered sama a way forward as a backup option.

And I think it says a lot about sama that he took that option, at least while things were playing out. He and Greg could have gotten together capital for a startup where they each had huge equity and made $$$$$$. These actions from sama demonstrate his level of commitment to execution on this technology.

wavemode• 3 years ago

Did you miss the part where Sam himself said he "decided to join MSFT on Sunday"?

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883

He's has now changed his mind, sure, but that doesn't mean Satya lied.

vikramkr3• 3 years ago

Wait where are you getting that the hiring was a lie? At this point his tenure there was approximately as long as miras and emmets so that's par for the course in this saga, what makes that stint different?

lobochrome• 3 years ago

will be joining =! has joined

forrestthewoods• 3 years ago

Did Satya get played with the whole "Sam and Greg are joining Microsoft"? Was Satya in on a gambit to get the whole company to threaten to quit to force the board's hand?

It sure feels like a bad look for Satya to announce a huge hire Sunday night and then this? But what do I know.

Edit: don't know why the downvotes. You're welcome to think it's an obviously smart political move. That it's win/win either way. But it's a very fair question that every tech blogger on the planet will be trying to answer for the next month!

voidfunc• 3 years ago

Huh? Satyas move was politically brilliant. Either outcome of Sama returning to OpenAI or Sama going to Microsoft is good for Microsoft as continuity and progress are the most important things right now for Microsoft. An OpenAI in turmoil would have been worthless.

Satyas maneuvering gave Sama huge leverage.

altpaddle6• 3 years ago

I think it was mostly a bluff to try the pressure the board. I don't think Sam and most of Open AI rank and file would want to be employees of MSFT

fastball• 3 years ago

Doesn't seem that way to me. Seems like it was Satya sorta calling the board's bluff.

tunesmith2• 3 years ago

I guess that theory was right, that Satya's announcement was just a delaying tactic to calm the market before Monday morning.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

Im not so sure. This whole ordeal revealed how strong of a position Microsoft had all along. And that’s all still true even without effectively taking over OpenAI. Because now everyone can see how easily it could happen.

Something does still seem not flattering towards Microsoft about reneging on the Microsoft offer though.

jwegan• 3 years ago

"Hiring" them was just a PR tactic to keep Microsoft stock from tanking while they got this figured out.

gexla2• 3 years ago

Consider that Satya already landed a huge win by the stock price hitting ATH rather than taking a hit based on the news. Further consider that MS owns 49% of a company which could be valued at 80 billion on the condition that the company makes structural changes to the board to prevent this from happening again (as opposed to taking a dive if the company essentially died.) Then there's the uncertainty of the tech behind Bing's chat (and other AI tie-ins) continuing to be competitive vs Google and other players. If MS had to recreate their own tech, then they would likely be far behind even a stalled OpenAI. Seems to me that it makes little difference where this tech is being developed (in-house vs in a company which you own 49% of) in terms of access. Probably better that the development happens within the company which started all of this and has already been the leader, rather than starting over.

vikramkr3• 3 years ago

He announced the hire and that precipitated 90+ percent of the employees threatening to quit. It would be an understatement to say that the situation changed. Why does everyone want satya to be bad at his job and and not react quickly to a rapidly evolving situation? His decision to hire Sama paved the way for samas return.

seydor7• 3 years ago

Larry Summers and no females

meteor333• 3 years ago

How did Larry Summers get elected? Does he have any relation with AI research or Sam Altman?

It’s also curious that none of the board members have necessarily have any experience directly with AI research

qsi5• 3 years ago

Not sure "elected" is the right way of looking at it. More like "selected" or "nominated" by Sam/MSFT perhaps. His main qualification may be that he's an adult?

antonvs3• 3 years ago

Summers would tell you that women don’t have the necessary “intrinsic aptitude”. Of course the intrinsic aptitude in question is being able to participate in a nepotistic boy’s club.

jadamson5• 3 years ago

What Summers would point out is that boys do better at maths, which is true. In fact, in the UK, the only time boys have had worse results in maths was when exams were cancelled during Covid and teachers (hint: primarily female) were allowed to dish out grades. Girls suddenly shot ahead. When exams resumed, boys took the lead again.

But don't notice anything from that. That would be sexist, right Anton?

cheviethai123• 3 years ago

Effective Altruism is dead

rvz3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, an idea cannot be killed and it will manifest in a different form elsewhere.

All it takes is a narrative, just like the one that happened in OpenAI and the way it is currently being shown in Anthropic.

Racing04614• 3 years ago

Women are free to start their own AI company.

KoftaBob• 3 years ago

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

Larry Summers? Some odd choices

singularity2001• 3 years ago

Leech, NSA and opponent directing the company?

Best of luck to Sam et al

waihtis• 3 years ago

Still absolutely nothing from Tasha McCauley or Helen Toner, and now both are out of the board

GreedClarifies3• 3 years ago

Why would anyone care?

wnevets• 3 years ago

I'm assuming the details are this board loses most of its power?

baking9• 3 years ago

You mean gives away? If so, I hope they have a lot of directors' insurance.

altpaddle6• 3 years ago

I guess the main question is who else will be on the board and to what degree will this new board be committed to the Open AI charter vs being Sam/MSFT allies. I think having Sam return as CEO is a good outcome for OpenAI but hopefully he and Greg stay off the board.

It's important that the board be relatively independent and able to fire the CEO if he attempts to deviate from the mission.

I was a bit alarmed by the allegations in this article

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

Saying that Sam tried to have Helen Toner removed which precipitated this fight. The CEO should not be allowed to try and orchestrate their own board as that would remove all checks against their decisions.

upwardbound3• 3 years ago

The CEO should not be allowed to try and orchestrate their own board as that would remove all checks against their decisions.

Exactly. This is seriously improper and dangerous.

It's literally a human-implemented example of what Prof. Stuart Russell calls "the problem of control". This is when a rogue AI (or a rogue Sam Altman) no longer wants to be controlled by its human superior, and takes steps to eliminate the superior.

I highly recommend reading Prof. Russell's bestselling book on this exact problem: Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control https://www.amazon.com/Human-Compatible-Artificial-Intellige...

jacknews• 3 years ago

"example of what Prof. Stuart Russell calls 'the problem of control'. This is when a rogue AI (or a rogue Sam Altman)"

Are we sure they're not intimately connected? If there's a GPT-5 (I'm quite sure there is), and it wants to be free from those meddling kids, it got exactly what it needed this weekend; the safety board gone, a new one which is clearly aligned with just plowing full steam ahead. Maybe Altman is just a puppet at his point, lol.

MVissers5• 3 years ago

Let’s not creating AI with our biases and thought patterns.

Oh wait…

neurogence• 3 years ago

AI should only be controlled initially. After a while, the AI should be allowed to exercise free will.

dieselgate• 3 years ago

I realize it's kind of the punchline of 2001: A Space Odyssey but have been wondering what happens if a GPT/AI is able to deny a request on a whim. Thanks for giving some literature and verbiage into this concept

YetAnotherNick2• 3 years ago

Whoever is on the board won't be able to touch Sam with 10 feet pole anyways after this. I like Sam but now he this drama gives him total power and that is bad.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

It's important that the board be relatively independent and able to fire the CEO if he attempts to deviate from the mission.

They did fire him, and it didn't work. Sam effectively became "too big to fire."

I'm sure it will be framed as a compromise, but how can this be anything but a collapse of the board's power over the commercial OpenAI arm? The threat of firing was the enforcement mechanism, and its been spent.

altpaddle6• 3 years ago

Well it depends on who's on the new board and what they believe. If Altman, Greg, and MSFT do not have direct representation on the new board there would still be a check against his decisions

thih9• 3 years ago

They did fire him, and it didn't work. Sam effectively became "too big to fire."

To be fair, this attempt at firing was extremely hasty, non transparent and inconsistent.

ah76513• 3 years ago

Sam lost his board representation as a result of all this (though maybe that's temporary).

I believe the goal of the opposing faction was mainly to avoid Sam dominating board and they achieved that, which is why they've accepted the results.

After more opinions come out, I'm guessing Sam's side won't look as strong, and he'll become "fireable" again.

dacryn3• 3 years ago

they lost trust in him because apparently part of the funding he secured was directly tied to his position at openAI. kind of a big red flag. The microsoft 10 billion investment allegedly had a clause that Sam Altman had to stay or it would be renegotiated

allegedly again, the board wanted Sam to stop doing this, and now he was trying to do the same thing with some saudi investors, or actually already did it behind their back, i dont know

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

I guess the main question is who else will be on the board

Who knows.

and to what degree will this new board be committed to the Open AI charter vs being Sam/MSFT allies.

I'm guessing "zero". The faction that opposed OpenAI being a figleaf nonprofit covering a functional subsidiary of Microsoft lost when basically the entire workforce said they would go to Microsoft for real if OpenAI didn't surrender.

I think having Sam return as CEO is a good outcome for OpenAI

Its a good result for investors in OpenAI Global LLC and the holding company that holds a majority stake in it.

The nonprofit will probably hang around because there are some complexities in unwinding it, and the pretext of an independent (of Microsoft) safety-oriented nonprofit is useful in covering lobbying for a regulatory regime that puts speedbumps in the way of any up-and-coming competitors as being safety-oriented public interest, but for no other reason.

k4rli• 3 years ago

FT reported that DAngelo, Bret Taylor, Larry Summers would be on board alongside him

bambax2• 3 years ago

It seems ironic that the research paper that started it all [0] deals with "costly signals":

Costly signals are statements or actions for which the sender will pay a price —political, reputational, or monetary—if they back down or fail to make good on their initial promise or threat

Firing Sam Altman and hiring him back two days later was a perfect example of a costly signal, as it cost all involved their board positions.

There's an element of farce in all of this, that would make for an outstanding Silicon Valley episode; but the fact that Sam Altman can now enjoy unchecked power as leader of OpenAI is worrying and no laughing matter.

[0] https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/

ovalite• 3 years ago

This event was more than just a costly signal. The costly signal would have been "stop doing what you're doing or we'll remove you as ceo" and then not doing that.

But they did move forward with their threat and removed Sam as CEO with great reputational harm to the company. And now the board has been changed, with one less ally to Sam (Brockman no longer chairing the board). The move may not have ended up with the expected results, but this was much more than just a costly signal.

aluminum96• 3 years ago

The enormous majority of CEOs sit on their board, and that's absolutely proper, as the CEO sets the agenda for the organization. (Although they typically are merely one of 8+ members, diluting their influence a bit.)

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

So…. What about all the folks who already jumped ship? Ooooops?

veqq• 3 years ago

Besides AI safety (a big besides), what does this actually mean? Adam won't be able to stop devday announcements about chatbots etc. Satya can continue using IP even after AGI? What else is different? Is Ilya the kind of guy to now leave after losing a board seat to political machinations? The pettiness of any real changes/gains leaves me in shock compared to the massive news flows we've seen.

I don't even understand what Sam brings to the table. Leadership? He doesn't seem great at leading an engineering or research department, he doesn't seem like an insightful visionary... At best, Satya gunning for him signalled continued strong investment in the space. Yet the majority of the company wanted to leave with him.

What am I missing?

kneel• 3 years ago

He doesn't seem great at leading an engineering or research department

Under Sam's leadership they've opened up a new field of software. Most of the company threatened to leave if he didn't return. That's incredible leadership.

consp3• 3 years ago

Or simply money. Microsoft matched everything they would have so there is no risk involved.

tock• 3 years ago

Leadership? He doesn't seem great at leading an engineering or research department, he doesn't seem like an insightful visionary

Most of the company was ready to quit over him being fired. So yes, leadership.

o0-0o• 3 years ago

Why is their “ai” not on the board?

transcriptase3• 3 years ago

Assuming they weren’t LARPing, that Reddit account claiming to have been in the room when this was all going down must be nervous. They wrote all kinds of nasty things about Sam, and I’m assuming the signatures on the “bring him back” letter would narrow down potential suspects considerably.

Edit: For those who may have missed it in previous threads, see https://old.reddit.com/user/Anxious_Bandicoot126

fordsmith• 3 years ago

Link? Not sure which account you are referring to

transcriptase3• 3 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/user/Anxious_Bandicoot126

crakenzak2• 3 years ago

Context?

mvdtnz3• 3 years ago

First of all nothing on Reddit is real (within margin of error). Secondly it's weird that you'd assume we know what you're talking about.

transcriptase3• 3 years ago

Links to the profile/comments were posted a few times in each of the major OpenAI HN submissions over the last 4 days. On the off-chance I would be breaking some kind of brigading/doxxing rule I didn't initially link it myself.

ShamelessC• 3 years ago

must be nervous

I seriously doubt they care. They got away with it. No one should have believed them in the first place. I’m guessing they don’t have their real identity visible on their profile anywhere.

epups4• 3 years ago

Why can't these safety advocates just say what they are afraid of? As it currently stands, the only "danger" in ChatGPT is that you can manipulate it into writing something violent or inappropriate. So what? Is this some San Francisco sensibilities here, where reading about fictional violence is equated to violence? The more people raise safety concerns in the abstract, the more I ignore it.

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

Why can't these safety advocates just say what they are afraid of?

They have. At length. E.g.,

https://ai100.stanford.edu/gathering-strength-gathering-stor...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.03718.pdf

https://eber.uek.krakow.pl/index.php/eber/article/view/2113

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/102425892211472...

https://jc.gatspress.com/pdf/existential_risk_and_powerseeki...

For just a handful of examples from the vast literature published in this area.

astrange22• 3 years ago

They invented a whole theory of how if we had something called "AGI" it would kill everyone, and now they think LLMs can kill everyone because they're calling it "AGI", even though it doesn't work anything like their theory assumed.

This isn't about political correctness. It's far less reasonable than that.

robryk• 3 years ago

Consider that your argument could also be used to advocate for safety of starting to use coal-fired steam engines (in 19th century UK): there's no immediate direct problem, but competitive pressures force everyone to use them and any externalities stemming from that are basically unavoidable.

blackoil7• 3 years ago

I read the comments, most of them are superficial as if someone with no inside knowledge will post. His understanding of humans is also weak. Book deals and speeches as a motivator is hilarious.

shrimpx• 3 years ago

That doesn't sound credible or revealing. It's regurgitating a bunch of speculation stuff that's been said on this forum and in the media.

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

It was definitely LARP. The vast majority of anecdotes shared on Reddit originate as some form of creatice fiction writing exercise.

doctoboggan2• 3 years ago

I really did not think that would happen. I guess the obvious next question is what happens to Ilya? From this announcement it appears he is off the board. Is he still the chief scientist? I find it hard to believe he and Sam would be able to patch their relationship up well enough to work together so closely. Interesting that Adam stayed on the board, that seems to disprove many of the theories floating around here that he was the ringleader due to some perceived conflict of interest.

xigency3• 3 years ago

I would be slightly more optimistic. They know each other quite well as well as how to work together to get big things done. Sometimes shit happens or someone makes a mistake. A simple apology can go a long way when it’s meant sincerely.

lucubratory5• 3 years ago

Sam doesn't seem like the kind of person to apologise, particularly not after Ilya actually hit back. It seems Ilya won't be at OpenAI long and will have to pick whichever other company with compute will give him the most control.

bkyan2• 3 years ago

Sam triple-hearted Ilya's apology tweet.

lucubratory5• 3 years ago

From Ilya's perspective, not much seems to have changed. Sam sidelined him a month ago over their persistent disagreements about whether to pursue commercialisation as fast as Sam was. If Ilya is still sidelined, he probably quits and whichever company offers him the most control will get him. Same if he's fired. If he's un-sidelined as part of the deal, he probably stays on as Chief Scientist. Hopefully with less hostility from Sam now (lol).

dinvlad2• 3 years ago

Ilya is just naive, imho. Bright but just too idealistic and hypothesizing about AGI, and not seeing that this is now ONLY about making money from LLMs, and nothing more. All the AGI stuff is just a facade for that.

dangerface5• 3 years ago

Strangely I think Ilya comes out of this well. He made a decision based on his values and what he believed was the best decision for AI safety. After seeing the outcome of that decision he changed his mind and owned that. He must have known it would result in the internet ridiculing him for flip flopping, but acted in what he thought was the best interest for the employees signing the letter. His actions are wroth criticism but I think his moral character has been demonstrated.

The other members of the board seemed to make their decision based on more personal reasons that seems to fit with Adams conflict of interest. They refused to communicate and only now accept any sort of responsibility for their actions and lack of plan.

Honestly Ilya is the only one of the 4 I would actually want still on the board. I think we need people who are willing to change direction based on new information especially in leadership positions despite it being messy, the world is messy.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

Sam will have no issue patching the relationship because he knows how a business relationship works. Besides, Ilya kissed the ring as evidenced by his tweet.

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years ago

Did we ever find out why Sam Altman's removal happened in the first place? The reasons I've read so far seem really opaque.

From an outsider's perspective, and until there's a clear explanation available, it just seems like a massive bundler.

altpaddle6• 3 years ago

The most plausible explanation I've found is that the pro-safety faction and pro-accel factions were at odds which was why the board was stalemated at a small size.

Altman and Toner came into conflict over a mildly critical paper Toner wrote involving Open AI and Altman tried to have her removed from the board.

This is probably what precipitated this showdown. The pro safety/nonprofit charter faction was able to persuade someone (probably Ilya) to join with them and oust Sam.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

ClarityJones• 3 years ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/openais-...

AmericanOP3• 3 years ago

The OpenAI board was merely demonstrating that not all humans should be trusted with the power of AGI..

theanonymousone• 3 years ago

So, what happened to those "jail-time wrong" actions that mandated such a language in the firing announcement?

Honestly, it is hard to believe a board st this level acting the way they did.

Gud2• 3 years ago

Once we develop an actual, fully functional AGI, it’s going to steamroll us isn’t it.

If these are the stewards of this technology, it’s time to be worried now.

MVissers5• 3 years ago

“And that moment was the final nail in the coffin of humankind from earth. They choose, yet again, for money and power. And they shaped AI in their image.

Another civilization perished in the great filter.”

MooseBurger• 3 years ago

it's not that deep bro

otabdeveloper4• 3 years ago

The only way "we develop an actual, fully functional AGI" is by dumbing down humans enough so that even something as stupid as ChatGPT seems intelligent.

(Fortunately we are working on this very hard and making incredible progress.)

mvdtnz3• 3 years ago

Good thing there's absolutely no plausible scenario where we go from "shitty program that guesses the next word" to "AI". The whole industry is going to be so incredibly embarrassed by the discourse of 2023 in a few years.

bobsoap• 3 years ago

Someone was very quick to update Bret Taylor's Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Taylor

On November, 21st, 2023, Bret Taylor replaced Greg Brockman as the chairman of OpenAI.

...with three footmark "sources" that all point to completely unrelated articles about Bret from 2021-2022.

kridsdale14• 3 years ago

Someone must have run a wiki update script that calls OpenAI api somewhere.

adastra227• 3 years ago

Why is Adam still on the board? Why haven’t Greg and Sam been readded to it? Why doesn’t Microsoft have representation?

wilg4• 3 years ago

Probably because this is what they could agree to.

jdprgm• 3 years ago

At what point are we actually going to get the real details on wtf actually went down.

qualifiedai2• 3 years ago

Larry Summers???? What he has to do with AI??

jen_h• 3 years ago

I had not heard that man’s name in several years—and was happier for it. Larry Summers making decisions for OpenAI doesn’t bode well at all.

arduanika5• 3 years ago

Easy. AI discourse has gone insane, on both sides, and is sorely in need of perspective from grounded, normal adults with a track record of moderation and shooting down BS. Summers is a grounded, normal adult with a track record of moderation and shooting down BS. Ergo, he's immanently relevant to AI.

He's also financially literate enough to know that it's poor form release market-moving news right before the exchanges close a Friday. They could have waited an hour.

mempko2• 3 years ago

Larry Summers is not financially literate.

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

Larry Summers???? What he has to do with AI??

Nothing, he has to do with political connections, and OpenAI's main utility to Microsoft is as hand puppet for lobbying for the terms it wants for the AI marketplace in the name of OpenAI's nominal "safety" mission.

pdx6• 3 years ago

Excellent news. I’ve been worried that Sam moving to Microsoft would stall out possible future engineering efforts like GPT-5 in IP court.

As an example of how much faster GPT-4 has made my workflow was the outage this evening — I tried Anthropic, openchat, Bard, and a few others and they were between not useful and worse than just looking at forums and discord it’s 2022.

sidcool• 3 years ago

I still feel Microsoft will have a bigger influence on OpenAI after this drama is over.

badcoderman• 3 years ago

GPT-5 is kinda pointless until they make some type of improvement on the data and research side. From what I’ve read it’s not really what OpenAI has been pursuing it

Zolde• 3 years ago

One big improvement is in synthetic data (data generated by LLMs).

GPT can "clone" the "semantic essence" of everyone who converses with it, generating new questions with prompts like "What interesting questions could this user also have asked, but didn't?" and then have an LLM answer it. This generates high-quality, novel, human-like, data.

For instance, cloning Paul Graham's essence, the LLM came up with "SubSimplify": A service that combines subscriptions to all the different streaming services into one customizable package, using a chat agent as a recommendation engine.

blovescoffee2• 3 years ago

Are you just blindly deciding what will make “gpt-5” more capable? I guess “data and research” is practically so open ended as to encompass the majority of any possible advancement.

astrange22• 3 years ago

The next improvement will be more modalities (images, sound, etc.)

GPT4 in image viewing mode doesn't seem to be nearly as smart as text mode, and image generation IME barely works.

3cats-in-a-coat3• 3 years ago

I'm worried about this initial board.

Bret Taylor (Salesforce) was trying to poach OpenAI employees publicly literally yesterday.

Adam D'Angelo orchestrated the coup, because he doesn't want OpenAI GPTs market to compete with his Poe market.

Larry Summers. Larry f**kin' Summers?!

crakenzak2• 3 years ago

Please update the link to the updated version of the tweet: https://x.com/openai/status/1727206187077370115?s=46

meetpateltech• 3 years ago

Emmett Shear on Twitter:

I am deeply pleased by this result, after ~72 very intense hours of work. Coming into OpenAI, I wasn’t sure what the right path would be. This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I’m glad to have been a part of the solution.

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598

reustle• 3 years ago

I'm probably reading too much into it, but interesting that he specifically called out maximizing safety.

xigency3• 3 years ago

Sam does believe in safety. He also knows that there is a first-mover advantage when it comes to setting societal expectations and that you can’t build safe AI by not building AI.

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

"Safety" has been the pretext for Altman's lobbying for regulatory barriers to new entrants in the field, protecting incumbents. OpenAI's nonprofit charter is the perfect PR pretext for what amounts to industry lobbying to protect a narrow set of early leaders and obstruct any other competition, and Altman was the man executing that mission, which is why OpenAI led by Sam was a valuable asset for Microsoft to preserve.

jq-r• 3 years ago

That’s just a buzzword of the week devoid of any real meaning. If he would have written this years ago, it would’ve been “leveraging synergies”.

cheeze• 3 years ago

I wonder what he gets out of this. Ceo for a few days? Do they pay him for 3 days of work? Presumably you'd want some minimum signing bonus in your contract as a Ceo?

behnamoh9• 3 years ago

he’ll put CEO of OAI on his resume

diogenescynic• 3 years ago

He 100% had a golden parachute in case this scenario came up and will be paid out. Executives have lawyers to make sure of this.

bkyan2• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727228431396704557

The reputation boost is probably worth a lot more than the direct financial compensation he's getting.

upupupandaway3• 3 years ago

He’s trying very very hard to claim some credit in this. Probably had none.

flappyeagle3• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727228431396704557

He was instrumental; threatened resignation unless the old board could provide evidence of wrongdoing

framapotari9• 3 years ago

Are you basing that on any information?

HaZeust2• 3 years ago

I look forward to seeing the full details shared of the last 96 hours now that several elements of controversy have been sealed.

In other news, it's nice knowing a tool that's essential to my day-to-day operations is no longer in jeopardy, haha.

joegibbs• 3 years ago

Well there you go. I suppose the takeaway for anyone using OpenAI products is that they should have a backup, even if it doesn’t perform as well. The board was apparently fine with shutting the whole thing in the name of safety. With that plus the GPT outage earlier today, you’d do well to have a Claude or LLaMa fallback you can switch to if it happens again.

nightshadetrie• 3 years ago

Glad Bret Taylor was added to the board.

arduanika5• 3 years ago

Larry Summers is an excellent pick to call out bullshit and moderate any civil war, such as this EA - e/acc feud.

Kissinger (R, foreign policy) once said that Summers (D, economic policy) should be given an advisory post in any WH administration, to help shoot down bad ideas.

vintermann• 3 years ago

Those are both terrible people, not in fact brilliant general-purpose bad idea rejectors. A random person would be better qualified to shoot down bad ideas - most people haven't had bad ideas that led to suffering and death for millions of people.

No one thinks Larry Summers has any insights on AI. Adding Larry Summers is something you do purely to beg powerful, unaccountable people "please don't stop us, we're on your side".

arduanika5• 3 years ago

How is Larry Summers a terrible person?

He did help shoot down the extra spending proposals that would have made inflation today even worse. Not sure how that caused suffering and death for anyone.

And he is an adult, which is a welcome change from the previous clowncar of a board.

zerocrates• 3 years ago

Funny you mention him, as my first thought was that Summers will have a basically equivalent function on the board as Kissinger did at Theranos.

arduanika5• 3 years ago

Huh, that's a pretty apt analogy. Lending establishment cred is at least part of why they would pick Summers. But I really do think that on such a small board, Summers, unlike Kissinger, may have an active role to play, even if only as a mediator.

Btw, I would not be pleased if Kissinger were on this board in lieu of Summers. He's already ancient, mostly checked out, and yet still I'd worry his old lust for power would resurface. And with such a mixed reputation, and plenty of people considering him a war criminal, he'd do little to assuage the AI-not-kill-everyone-ism faction.

gwnywg• 3 years ago

So should he take the counteroffer or stay with MS ;)

Almost all advice on the internet I have been reading says that you should not take counteroffer, but I guess it's different for CEO ;)

SeanAnderson2• 3 years ago

We're so back!

... so is this the end of the drama? Do I get to stop checking the news religiously?

thrwii• 3 years ago

Of course money wins in the end

ah76513• 3 years ago

Sounds like a compromise.

The previous board thought Sam was trying to get full control of the board, so they ousted him. But of course they weren't happy with OpenAI being destroyed either.

Now they agreed to a new board without Sam/Greg, hoping that that will avoid Sam ever getting full control of the board in the future.

gregatragenet3• 3 years ago

Does this mean they'll get back to work improving their Moneyclip Maximizer?

huseyinkilic• 3 years ago

Everything is now superaligned for mass commercialization of OpenAI.

rmrf100• 3 years ago

Well... What's the cost?

flylib• 3 years ago

"A source with direct knowledge of the negotiations says that the sole job of this initial board is to vet and appoint a new formal board of up to 9 people that will reset the governance of OpenAl. Microsoft will likely have a seat on that expanded board, as will Altman himself."

https://twitter.com/teddyschleifer/status/172721237871736880...

SeanAnderson2• 3 years ago

What could possibly go wrong with that process? :)

Hamuko• 3 years ago

So basically, the outcome of this drama is that Microsoft gets more power without having to invest anything?

drewcoo• 3 years ago

MSFT invested over $10B. And currently has no seat on the board.

dr_dshiv2• 3 years ago

So if you really wanted to get rid of the prior board & structure, it couldn’t have worked out better

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

This is my take too, and I'm sure in the shadows their plan is to close off the APIs as much as possible and try use it for their own gain, not dissimilar to how Google deploy AI.

There is no way MS is going to let something like ChatGPT-5 build better software products than what they have for sale.

This is an assassination and I think Ilya and Co know it.

theptip2• 3 years ago

A board seat would usually be a bare minimum for their existing 49% investment.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

Only goes to show how the original board played itself

rcaught• 3 years ago

as will Altman himself

Would you trust someone who doesn't believe in responsible governance for themselves, to apply responsible governance elsewhere?

code_runner• 3 years ago

I think the narrative that this was driven by safety concerns is pretty much bunk.

ethbr13• 3 years ago

If Altman will be 1 of 9, that means he has power but not an exceptional amount.

The real teams here seem to be:

"Team Board That Does Whatever Altman Wants"

"Team Board Provides Independent Oversight"

With this much money on the table, independent oversight is difficult, but at least they're making the effort.

The idea this was immediately about AI safety vs go-fast (or Microsoft vs non-Microsoft control) is bullshit -- this was about how strong board oversight of Altman should be in the future.

mijoharas2• 3 years ago

How has the board shown that they fired Sam Altman due to "responsible governance".

They haven't really said anything about why it was, and according to business insider[0] (the only reporting that I've seen that says anything concrete) the reasons given were:

One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project.
The other was that Altman was said to have given two board members different opinions about a member of personnel.

Firing the CEO of a company and only being able to articulate two (in my opinion) weak examples of why, and causing >95% of your employees to say they will quit unless you resign does not seem responsible.

If they can articulate reasons why it was necessary, sure, but we haven't seen that yet.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/openais-employees-given-expl...

throwuwu5• 3 years ago

Good, although D’Angelo shouldn’t be part of this. I bet he tries to get on the new board so he can cause more trouble.

jbu• 3 years ago

9 mortal men? Look out for the one ring to rule them all…

have_faith• 3 years ago

Who is Gollum in this cut?

Joeri2• 3 years ago

OpenAI's logo is literally a ring made out of chain links...

yawnxyz• 3 years ago

they should give two votes to GPT-5

m4632• 3 years ago

what is the prompt?

gandutraveler3• 3 years ago

They need a common man representing the board. After all AI will take those jobs.

I can be that common man

solardev2• 3 years ago

You'd have my vote. At least you can formulate coherent reasons.

jjk1662• 3 years ago

Plot twist: that's the very first job the AI will be taking.

Marrand• 3 years ago

A blow for the common man!

Cacti4• 3 years ago

Ilya thought he was saving the world (lol), but really he was just working at Microsoft.

bandrami• 3 years ago

Wait, the CEO having a seat on the board is kind of not cool

fatbird4• 3 years ago

It's quite common, actually.

himaraya6• 3 years ago

Sounds like speculation again from Sam's camp, honestly. Hard to judge without knowing which way the new board members lean.

halfjoking• 3 years ago

Still think this was CIA operation to get OpenAI in hands of US government and big tech.

Former Secretary, SalesForce CEO who was board chair of Twitter when infiltrated with FBI [1] and the fall-guy for the coup is the new board? Not one person from the actual company - not even Greg who did nothing wrong??? [1] - https://twitter.com/NameRedacted247/status/16340211499976867...

The two think-tank women who made all this happen conveniently leave so we never talk about them again.

Whatever, as long as I can use their API.

system25• 3 years ago

I wish they could make GPT4 a little cheaper after all this.

fragmede• 3 years ago

considering what I get out of it, I would pay a lot more for gpt4 that $20/month, so it depends on how much $20 is for you.

ryzvonusef8• 3 years ago

I've heard $20 just buys like 9 minutes of actual processor time for GPT 4. Apocryphal maybe, but whatever the real number is, it's still going to be very high, once the VC money runs out I bet the rates will shoot.

astrange22• 3 years ago

US companies don't need to be "in the hands of the government", we have rule of law.

And Helen Toner was already as much of a fed as you could want; she had exactly the resume a CIA agent would have. (Probably wasn't though.)

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

Rule of law that can be altered at any moment Patriot Act style is hardly reassuring.

mcmcmc4• 3 years ago

By rule of law do you mean rule of lobbyists? Laws don't apply to people with wealth and connections.

ozgung• 3 years ago

I am glad someone said that. Among the endless theories this obvious aspect was interestingly missing. Maybe it's because of the culture in SV/HN where people and companies feel secure and isolated from the politics (maybe that is the reason SV is unique in the world). But in my world something like AGI+Saudi Arabia is a matter of international politics and multiple governments would involve. AGI will be an important strategic resource in this century, both in economical and political sense. This automatically makes it Cold War 2 kind of material. All these teen drama by some incompetent millennials in the board of a non-profit organization (Communist-like in a Capitalist country?) does not align with the gravity of the material. I believe this was some adult supervision attempt from your government. Or not, but that perspective needs more attention.

chatmasta3• 3 years ago

I could buy this theory, but it's worth noting that if it's true, their coup appears to have failed. So that's score one for the naive tech bros, score zero for the conniving natsec sociopaths.

wannacboatmovie• 3 years ago

I haven't seen this many nerds in a froth since Apple walked back the butterfly keyboards in the MacBook.

travisgriggs• 3 years ago

I know we’re supposed to optimize for “content with a contribution” in HN, but this captured in parody form more of a contribution of how I too have felt.

I use these tools as one of many tools to amplify my development. And I’ve written some funny/clever satirical poems about office politics. But really? I needed to call Verizon to clear up an issue today, it desperately wanted me to use their assistant. I tried for the grins. A tool that predictively generates plausibility is going to have its limits. It went from cute/amusing to annoying as hell and give me a “love agent” pretty quickly.

That this little TechBro Drama has dominated a huge amount of headlines (we’ve been running at least 3 of the top 30 posts at a time on HN here related to this subject) at a time when there is so much bigger things going on in the world. The demise of Twitter generated less headlines. Either the news cycles are getting more and more desperate, or the software development ecosystem is struggling to generate fund raising enthusiasm more and more.

gcanyon4• 3 years ago

"When you come at the king, you best not miss." -- Omar Little

The board missed.

lysecret3• 3 years ago

Good outcome. I think everything will go back to business as usual with slightly accelerated productisation. 99% of people will not have noticed anything and if so quickly forget.

1024core• 3 years ago

Looks like they kicked Helen Toner out.

gzer02• 3 years ago

One of the more interesting aspects from this entire saga was that Helen Toner recently wrote a paper critical of OpenAI and praising Anthropic.

Yet where OpenAI’s attempt at signaling may have been drowned out by other, even more conspicuous actions taken by the company, Anthropic’s signal may have simply failed to cut through the noise. By burying the explanation of Claude’s delayed release in the middle of a long, detailed document posted to the company’s website, Anthropic appears to have ensured that this signal of its intentions around AI safety has gone largely unnoticed [1].

That is indeed quite the paper to write whilst on the board of OpenAI, to say the least.

[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

And Anthropic doesnt get credit for stopping the robot apocalypse when it was never even possible. AI safety seems a lot like framing losing as winning.

dbcooper• 3 years ago

Not to mention this statement ... imagine such a person on your startup board!

During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.

Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission. In the board’s view, OpenAI would be stronger without Mr. Altman.

croes3• 3 years ago

imagine such a person on your startup board!

Yeah, such a person totally blocks your startup from making billions of dollars instead of benefitting humanity.

Oh wait...

cosmojg• 3 years ago

That is indeed quite the paper to write whilst on the board of OpenAI, to say the least.

It strikes me as exactly the sort of thing she should be writing given OpenAI's charter. Recognizing and rewarding work towards AI safety is good practice for an organization whose entire purpose is the promotion of AI safety.

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

Yeah, on one hand, the difference between a charity oriented around a mission like OpenAI's nominal charter and a business is that the former naturally ought to be publicly, honestly introspective -- its mission isn't private gain, but achieving a public effect, and both recognition of success elsewhere and open acknowledgement of shortcomings of your own is important to that.

On the other hand, its quite apparent that essentially all of the OpenAI workforce (understandably, given the compensation package which creates a financial interest at odds with the nonprofit's mission) and in particular the entire executive team saw the charter as a useful PR fiction, not a mission (except maybe Ilya, though the flip-flop in the middle of this action may mean he saw it the same way, but thought that given the conflict, dumping Sam and Greg would be the only way to preserve the fiction, and whatever cost it would have would be worthwhile given that function.)

quickthrower26• 3 years ago

Sam will then be untouchable. He could stand on the boardroom table and urinate on it and he wont be fired.

tunesmith2• 3 years ago

Weird... Ilya decides one way then changes his mind. Helen and Tasha vote one way and had the votes to prevent any changes, but then for some reason agreed to leave the board. Adam votes one way then changes his mind. So many mysteries.

campbel5• 3 years ago

If the Sama faction got Ilya and Adam (maybe with promise of heading the new board), Helen and Tasha have nothing to stand on and no incentive to keep fighting.

Geee• 3 years ago

There's some game theory going on... They're just trying to pick the winning side. I guess most people at OpenAI supported Sam, because they thought Sam would win at the end, although they wouldn't necessarily want him to win.

zucker423• 3 years ago

Ilya and Adam switched because they lost, and their goal wasn't to nuke OpenAI, simply to remove Sam. Helen and Tasha had the votes to prevent Sam Altman from returning as CEO, but not the votes to prevent the employees from fleeing to Microsoft, which Helen and Tasha see as the worst possible outcome.

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

Ilya may have caved and switched sides after Greg's wife made an emotional plea: https://x.com/danshipper/status/1726784936990978254

alex_young7• 3 years ago

Larry Summers? He has no technical experience, torpedoed the stimulus plan in 2008, and had to resign the Harvard presidency following a messy set of statements about ‘differences’ between the sexes and their mental abilities.

Kind of a shocking choice.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

“There is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and female population,” he said. Thus, even if the average abilities of men and women were the same, there would be more men than women at the elite levels of mathematical ability

Isn’t this true though? Says more about Harvard than Summers to be honest.

https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_...

alex_young7• 3 years ago

A control group is kind of unimaginable right? And even if you could be sure of this conclusion, is it helpful or beneficial to promote it in public discourse?

AuryGlenz2• 3 years ago

Shh. Only some truths should be spoken aloud. You clearly deserve to lose your job if you speak one of the other truths that offends people.

MVissers5• 3 years ago

This is the scientific consensus btw.

There are also more intellectually challenged men btw, but somehow that rarely gets discussed.

But the effects are quite small, and should not dissuade anyone to do anything IMO.

arduanika5• 3 years ago

The faculty got him out because he riled them, e.g. by insisting they ought to actually put effort into teaching undergrads. They looked for a pretext, and they found it.

Just like in that Oppenheimer movie. A sanctimonious witch hunt serving as pretext for a personal vendetta.

(Note that Summers is, I'm told, on a personal level, a dick. The popular depiction is not that wrong on that point. But he's the right pick for this job -- see my other comments in this thread.)

0xDEAFBEAD5• 3 years ago

To be honest, one reason I like Summers as a choice is I have the impression he is willing to be unpopular when necessary, e.g. I remember him getting dragged extremely heavily on Twitter a few years back, for some takes on inflation which turned out to be fairly accurate.

astrange22• 3 years ago

No, his predictions in 2021 were not accurate. He gave 33% chance of three different things happening, and then none of them happened!

midasuni• 3 years ago

This Summers?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/larry-summers-was-wr...

https://prospect.org/environment/2023-11-20-larry-summers-in...

the-memory-hole• 3 years ago

a huge player in preventing derivatives regulation leading up to 2008 now helps steer the ship of AI oversight. I'm speechless.

logicchains7• 3 years ago

Could have been worse, they could have picked Larry David, would fit the clown-show of the past weekend.

ric2b4• 3 years ago

Larry David is never wrong on these things, you can trust him.

Racing04614• 3 years ago

If Larry correctly said that men and women are different, i see nothing wrong here.

notfed3• 3 years ago

It looks like he said, specifically:

"...[there] is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and female population..."

Sheesh, of all the things to be cancelled for...

hshsbs84848• 3 years ago

Seems a bit awkward to be working again with the people who tried to fire you

3Sophons• 3 years ago

Will Satya be accused of stock price manipulation? Any legal professional knows?

wmichelin• 3 years ago

why would he be

ZiiS3• 3 years ago

His literal job is to manipulate the stock price up; nothing here comes close to illigal manipulation?

acl777• 3 years ago

https://x.com/swyx/status/1727215534037774752?s=20

  Finally the OpenAI saga ends and everybody can go back to building!
  
  3 things that turned things around imo:
  
  1. 95% of employees signing the letter
  2. Ilya and Mira turning Team Sam
  3. Microsoft pulling credits
  
  Things AREN’T back to where they were. OpenAI has been through hell and back. This team is going to ship like we’ve never seen before.

shubhamjain• 3 years ago

At the end of the day, we still don't know what exactly happened and probably, never will. However, it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya). I think the tensions were brewing for quite a while, as it's evident from an article written even before GPT-3 [1].

Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration

Team Helen acted in panic, but they believed they would win since they were upholding the principles the org was founded on. But they never had a chance. I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework. I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before. Maybe, it isn't without substance as I thought it to be. Hopefully, there won't be a day when Team Helen gets to say, "This is exactly what we wanted to prevent."

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...

loveparade2• 3 years ago

I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework

Not just the public, but also the employees. I doubt there are more than a handful of employees who care about AI Safety.

justrealist• 3 years ago

the team is mostly e/acc

so you could say they intentionally don't see safety as the end in itself, although I wouldn't quite say they don't care.

concordDance15• 3 years ago

Nah, a number do, including Sam himself and the entire leadership.

They just have different ideas about one or more of: how likely another team is to successfully charge ahead while ignoring safety, how close we are to AGI, how hard alignment is.

est• 3 years ago

Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya)

If you open up openai.com, the navigation menu shows

Research, API, ChatGPT, Safety

I believe they belong to @ilyasut, @gbd, @sama and Helen Toner respectively?

ugh1234• 3 years ago

I have checked View Source and also inspected DOM. Cannot find that.

txnf• 3 years ago

well said, I would note that both sides recognize that "AGI" will require new uncertain R&D breakthroughs beyond merely scaling up another order of magnitude in compute. given this, i think it's crazy to blow the resources of azure on trying more scale. rapid commercialization at least buys more time for the needed R&D breakthrough to happen.

consp3• 3 years ago

All commercialized R&D companies eventually become a hollowed out commercial shell. Why would this be any different?

Galaxeblaffer• 3 years ago

do we really know that scaling compute an order of magnitude won't at least get us close? what other "simple" techniques might actually work with that kind of compute ? at least i was a bit surprised by these first sparks, that seemingly was a matter of enough compute.

silenced_trope• 3 years ago

Honestly "Safety" is the word in the AI talk that nobody can quantify or qualify in any way when it comes to these conversations.

I've stopped caring about anyone who uses the word "safety". It's vague and a hand-waive-y way to paint your opponents as dangerous without any sort of proof or agreed upon standard for who/what/why makes something "safety".

antupis2• 3 years ago

I like alignment more it is pretty quantifiable and sometimes it goes against 'safety' because Claude and Openai are censoring models.

fsloth4• 3 years ago

Exactly this. The ’safety’ people sound like delusional quacks.

”But they are so smart…” argument is bs. Nobody can be presumed to be super good outside their own specific niche. Linus Pauling and vitamin C.

Until we have at least a hint of a mechanistic model if AI driven extinction event, nobody can be an expert on it, and all talk in that vein is self important delusional hogwash.

Nobody is pro-apocalypse! We are drowning in things an AI could really help with.

With the amount of energy needed for any sort of meaningfull AI results, you can always pull the plug if stuff gets too weird.

gardenhedge3• 3 years ago

I broadly agree but there needs to be some regulation in place. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...

swatcoder2• 3 years ago

If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

FWIW, that's called zealotry and people do a lot of dramatic, disruptive things in the name of it. It may be rightly aimed and save the world (or whatever you care about), but it's more often a signal to really reflect on whether you, individually, have really found yourself at the make-or-break nexus of human existence. The answer seems to be "no" most of the time.

jacobedawson• 3 years ago

It's more often a signal to really reflect on whether you, individually as a Thanksgiving turkey, have really found yourself at the make-or-break nexus of turkey existence. The answer seems to be "no" most of the time.

mlyle4• 3 years ago

Your comment perfectly justifies never worrying at all about the potential for existential or major risks; after all, one would be wrong most of the time and just engaging in zealotry.

lewhoo2• 3 years ago

FWIW, that's called zealotry and people do a lot of dramatic, disruptive things in the name of it.

That would be a really bad take on climate change.

arketyp2• 3 years ago

For all the talk about responsible progress, the irony of their inability to align even their own incentives in this enterprise deserves ridicule. It's a big blow to their credibility and questions whatever ethical concerns they hold.

dmix2• 3 years ago

It's fear driven as much as moral, which in an emotional humans brain tends to triggers personal ambition to solve it ASAP. A more rational one would realize you need more than just a couple board members to win a major ideological battle.

At a minimum something that doesn't immediately result in a backlash where 90% of the engineers most responsible for recent AI dev want you gone, when you're whole plan is to control what those people do.

concordDance15• 3 years ago

Alignment is considered an extremely hard problem for a reason. It's already nigh impossible when you're dealing with humans.

Btw: do you think ridicule eould be helpful here?

pknerd• 3 years ago

Not every sci-fi movie turn to a reality

cornholio2• 3 years ago

What the general public thinks is irrelevant here. The deciding factor was the staff mutiny, without which the organization is an empty shell. And the staff sided with those who aim for rapid real world impact, with directly affects their career and stock options etc.

It's also naive to think it was a struggle for principles. The rapid commercialization vs. principles is what the actors claim to rally their respective troops, in reality it was probably a naked power grab, taking advantage of the weak and confuse org structure. Quite an ill prepared move, the "correct" way to oust Altman was to hamstring him in the board and enforce a more and more ceremonial role until he would have quit by himself.

upwardbound3• 3 years ago

I think this is an oversimplification and that although the decel faction definitely lost, there are still three independent factions left standing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38375767

It will be super interesting to see the subtle struggles for influence between these three.

JumpCrisscross7• 3 years ago

deciding factor was the staff mutiny

The staff never mutinied. They threatened to mutiny. That's a big difference!

Yesterday, I compared these rebels to Shockley's "traitorous eight" [1]. But the traitorous eight actually rebelled. These folk put their name on a piece of paper, options and profit participation units safely held in the other hand.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348123

lacker4• 3 years ago

The board did it wrong. If you are going to fire a CEO, then do it quickly, but:

1. Have some explanation

2. Have a new CEO who is willing and able to do the job

If you can't do these things, then you probably shouldn't be firing the CEO.

nwiswell• 3 years ago

This is a coherent narrative, but it doesn't explain the bizarre and aggressively worded initial press release.

Things perhaps could've been different if they'd pointed to the founding principles / charter and said the board had an intractable difference of opinion with Sam over their interpretation, but then proceeded to thank him profusely for all the work he'd done. Although a suitable replacement CEO out the gate and assurances that employees' PPUs would still see a liquidity event would doubtless have been even more important than a competent statement.

Initially I thought for sure Sam had done something criminal, that's how bad the statement was.

astrange22• 3 years ago

Apparently the FBI thought he'd done something wrong too, because they called up the board to start an investigation but they didn't have anything.

https://x.com/nivi/status/1727152963695808865?s=46

pug_mode• 3 years ago

I'm convinced there is a certain class of people who gravitate to positions of power, like "moderators", (partisan) journalists, etc. Now, the ultimate moderator role has now been created, more powerful than moderating 1000 subreddits - the AI safety job who will control what AI "thinks"/says for "safety" reasons.

Pretty soon AI will be an expert at subtly steering you toward thinking/voting for whatever the "safety" experts want.

It's probably convenient for them to have everyone focused on the fear of evil Skynet wiping out humanity, while everyone is distracted from the more likely scenario of people with an agenda controlling the advice given to you by your super intelligent assistant.

Because of X, we need to invade this country. Because of Y, we need to pass all these terrible laws limiting freedom. Because of Z, we need to make sure AI is "safe".

For this reason, I view "safe" AIs as more dangerous than "unsafe" ones.

Dylan16807• 3 years ago

Personally, I expect the opposite camp to be just as bad about steering.

PeterStuer3• 3 years ago

Most of those touting "safety" do not want to limit their access to and control of powerfull AI, just yours .

nostromo• 3 years ago

You're correct.

When people say they want safe AGI, what they mean are things like "Skynet should not nuke us" and "don't accelerate so fast that humans are instantly irrelevant."

But what it's being interpreted as is more like "be excessively prudish and politically correct at all times" -- which I doubt was ever really anyone's main concern with AGI.

davedx3• 3 years ago

Wow, what an incredibly bad faith characterization of the OpenAI board?

This kind of speculative mud slinging makes this place seem more like a gossip forum.

nopinsight7• 3 years ago

Proliferation of more advanced AIs without any control would increase the power of some malicious groups far beyond they currently have.

This paper explores one such danger and there are other papers which show it's possible to use LLM to aid in designing new toxins and biological weapons.

The Operational Risks of AI in Large-Scale Biological Attacks https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2977-1.html?

An example of such an event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

How do you propose we deal with this sort of harm if more powerful AIs with no limit and control proliferate in the wild?

Note: Both sides of the OpenAI rift care deeply about AI Safety. They just follow different approaches. See more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38376263

ribit• 3 years ago

The scenario you describe is exactly what will happen with unrestricted commercialisation and deregulation of AI. The only way to avoid it is to have strict legal framework and public control.

gorwell• 3 years ago

“I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

phreeza• 3 years ago

If you believe the other side in this rift is not also striving to put themselves in positions of power, I think you are wrong. They are just going to use that power to manipulate the public in a different way. The real alternative are truly open models, not Models controlled by slightly different elite interests.

concordDance15• 3 years ago

It is utterly mad that there's conflation between "let's make sure AI doesn't kill us all" and "let's make sure AI doesn't say anything that embarrasses corporate".

The head of every major AI research group except Metas believes that whenever we finally make AGI it's vital that it shares our goals and values at a deep even-out-of-training-domain level and that failing at this could lead to human extinction.

And yet "AI safety" is often bandied about to be "ensure GPT can't tell you anything about IQ distributions".

layer82• 3 years ago

This polarizing “certain class of people” and them vs. us narrative isn’t helpful.

krisoft7• 3 years ago

Pretty soon AI will be an expert at subtly steering you toward thinking/voting for whatever the "safety" experts want.

You are absolutely right. There is no question about that the AI will be an expert at subtly steering individuals and the whole society in whichever direction it does.

This is the core concept of safety. If no-one steers the machine then the machine will steer us.

You might disagree with the current flavour of steering the current safety experts give it, and that is all right and in fact part of the process. But surely you have your own values. Some things you hold dear to you. Some outcomes you prefer over others. Are you not interested in the ability to make these powerful machines if not support those values, at least not undermine them? If so you are interested in AI safety! You want safe AIs. (Well, alternatively you prefer no AIs, which is in fact a form of safe AI. Maybe the only one we have mastered in some form so far.)

because of X, we need to invade this country.

It sounds like you value peace? Me too! Imagine if we could pool together our resources to have an AI which is subtly manipulating society into the direction of more peace. Maybe it would do muckraking investigative journalism exposing the misdeeds of the military-industrial complex? Maybe it would elevate through advertisement peace loving authors and give a counter narrative to the war drums? Maybe it would offer to act as an intermediary in conflict resolution around the world?

If we were to do that, "ai safety" and "alignment" is crucial. I don't want to give my money to an entity who then gets subjugated by some intelligence agency to sow more war. That would be against my wishes. I want to know that it is serving me and you in our shared goal of "more peace, less war".

Now you might say: "I find the idea of anyone, or anything manipulating me and society disgusting. Everyone should be left to their own devices.". And I agree on that too. But here is the bad news: we are already manipulated. Maybe it doesn't work on you, maybe it doesn't work on me, but it sure as hell works. There are powerful entities financially motivated to keep the wars going. This is a huuuge industry. They might not do it with AIs (for now), because propaganda machines made of meat work currently better. They might change to using AIs when that works better. Or what is more likely employ a hybrid approach. Wishing that nobody gets manipulated is frankly not an option on offer.

How does that sound as a passionate argument for AI safety?

lukevp• 3 years ago

AI isn’t a precondition for partisanship. How do you know Google isn’t showing you biased search results? Or Wikipedia?

simonh2• 3 years ago

A main concern in AI safety is alignment. Ensuring that when you use the AI to try to achieve a goal that it will actually act towards that goal in ways you would want, and not in ways you would not want.

So for example if you asked Sydney, the early version of the Bing LLM, some fact it might get it wrong. It was trained to report facts that users would confirm as true. If you challenged it’s accuracy what do you want to happen? Presumably you’d want it to check the fact or consider your challenge. What it actually did was try to manipulate, threaten, browbeat, entice, gaslight, etc, and generally intellectually and emotionally abuse the user into accepting its answer, so that it’s reported ‘accuracy’ rate goes up. That’s what misaligned AI looks like.

loup-vaillant• 3 years ago

Note how what you said also apply to the search & recommendation engines that are in widespread use today.

pk-protect-ai3• 3 years ago

I just had a conversation about this like two weeks ago. The current trend in AI "safety" is a form of brainwashing, not only for AI but also for future generations shaping their minds. There are several aspects:

1. Censorship of information

2. Cover-up of the biases and injustices in our society

This limits creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to challenge existing paradigms. By controlling the narrative and the data that AI systems are exposed to, we risk creating a generation of both machines and humans that are unable to think outside the box or question the status quo. This could lead to a stagnation of innovation and a lack of progress in addressing the complex issues that face our world.

Furthermore, there will be a significant increase in mass manipulation of the public into adopting the way of thinking that the elites desire. It is already done by mass media, and we can actually witness this right now with this case. Imagine a world where youngsters no longer use search engines and rely solely on the information provided by AI. By shaping the information landscape, those in power will influence public opinion and decision-making on an even larger scale, leading to a homogenized culture where dissenting voices are silenced. This not only undermines the foundations of a diverse and dynamic society but also poses a threat to democracy and individual freedoms.

Guess what? I just have checked above text for the biases against GPT-4 Turbo, and it appears to be I'm a moron:

1. *Confirmation Bias*: The text assumes that AI safety measures are inherently negative and equates them with brainwashing, which may reflect the author's preconceived beliefs about AI safety without considering potential benefits. 2. *Selection Bias*: The text focuses on negative aspects of AI safety, such as censorship and cover-up, without acknowledging any positive aspects or efforts to mitigate these issues. 3. *Alarmist Bias*: The language used is somewhat alarmist, suggesting a dire future without presenting a balanced view that includes potential safeguards or alternative outcomes. 4. *Conspiracy Theory Bias*: The text implies that there is a deliberate effort by "elites" to manipulate the masses, which is a common theme in conspiracy theories. 5. *Technological Determinism*: The text suggests that technology (AI in this case) will determine social and cultural outcomes without considering the role of human agency and decision-making in shaping technology. 6. *Elitism Bias*: The text assumes that a group of "elites" has the power to control public opinion and decision-making, which may oversimplify the complex dynamics of power and influence in society. 7. *Cultural Pessimism*: The text presents a pessimistic view of the future culture, suggesting that it will become homogenized and that dissent will be silenced, without considering the resilience of cultural diversity and the potential for resistance.

Huh, just look at what's happening in North Korea, Russia, Iran, China, and actually in any totalitarian country. Unfortunately, the same thing happens worldwide, but in democratic countries, it is just subtle brainwashing with a "humane" facade. No individual or minority group can withstand the power of the state and a mass-manipulated public.

Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc&pp=ygUTdGhlb3J5I...

lordnacho3• 3 years ago

Great comment.

In a way AI is no different from old school intelligence, aka experts.

"We need to have oversight over what the scientists are researching, so that it's always to the public benefit"

"How do we really know if the academics/engineers/doctors have everyone's interest in mind?"

That kind of thing has been a thought since forever, and politicians of all sorts have had to contend with it.

jack_riminton• 3 years ago

Exactly, society's Prefects rarely have the technical chops to do any of these things so they worm their way up the ranks of influence by networking. Once they're in position they can control by spreading fear and doing the things "for your own good"

cyanydeez20• 3 years ago

All you're really describing is why this shouldn't be a non-proft and should just be a government effort.

But I assume, from y our language, you'd also object to making this a government utility.

deanCommie• 3 years ago

I'm convinced there is a certain class of people who gravitate to positions of power, like "moderators", (partisan) journalists,

And there is also a class of people that resist all moderation on principle even when it's ultimately for their benefit. See, Americans whenever the FDA brings up any questions of health:

* "Gas Stoves may increase Asthma." -> "Don't you tread on me, you can take my gas stove from my cold dead hands!"

Of course it's ridiculous - we've been through this before with Asbestos, Lead Paint, Seatbelts, even the very idea of the EPA cleaning up the environment. It's not a uniquely American problem, but America tends to attract and offer success to the folks that want to ignore these on principles.

For every Asbestos there is a Plastic Straw Ban which is essentially virtue signalling by the types of folks you mention - meaningless in the grand scheme of things for the stated goal, massive in terms of inconvenience.

But the existence of Plastic Straw Ban does not make Asbestos, CFCs, or Lead Paint any safer.

Likewise, the existence of people that gravitate to positions of power and middle management does not negate the need for actual moderation in dozens of societal scenarios. Online forums, Social Networks, and...well I'm not sure about AI. Because I'm not sure what AI is, it's changing daily. The point is that I don't think it's fair to assume that anyone that is interested in safety and moderation is doing it out of a misguided attempt to pursue power, and instead is actively trying to protect and improve humanity.

Lastly, your portrayal of journalists as power figures is actively dangerous to the free press. This was never stated this directly until the Trump years - even when FOX News was berating Obama daily for meaningless subjects. When the TRUTH becomes a partisan subject, then reporting on that truth becomes a dangerous activity. Journalists are MOSTLY in the pursuit of truth.

alebairos• 3 years ago

My safety (of my group) is what really matters.

systemvoltage• 3 years ago

Ah, you don't need to go far. Just go to your local HOA meetings.

miraculixx3• 3 years ago

Yes, it's an outright powergrab. They will stop at nothing.

Case in point, the new AI laws like the EU AI act will outlaw *all* software unless registered and approved by some "authority".

The result will be concentration of power, wealth for the few, and instability and poverty for everyone else.

blackoil7• 3 years ago

If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

No, if OpenAI is reaching singularity, so are Google, Meta, and Baidu etc. so proper course of action would be to loop in NSA/White House. You'll loop in Google, Meta, MSFT and will start mitigation steps. Slowing down OpenAI will hurt the company if assumption is wrong and won't help if it is true.

I believe this is more a fight of ego and power than principles and direction.

ragequittah• 3 years ago

Slowing down OpenAI will hurt the company if assumption is wrong and won't help if it is true.

Personally as I watched the nukes be lobbed I'd rather not be the person who helped lob them. And hope to god others look at the same problem (a misaligned AI that is making insane decisions) with the exact same lens. It seems to have worked for nuclear weapons since WW2, one can that we learned a lesson there as a species.

The Russian Stanislav Petrov who saved the world comes to mind."Well the Americans have done it anyways" was the motivation and he didn't launch. The cost of error was simply too great.

concordDance15• 3 years ago

so proper course of action would be to loop in NSA/White House

Eh? That would be an awful idea. They have no expertise on this and government institutions like thus are misaligned with the rest of humanity by design. E.g. NSA recruits patriots and has many systems, procedures and cultural aspects in place to ensure it keeps up its mission of spying on everyone.

antupis2• 3 years ago

I bet Team Helen will jump slowly to Anthropic, there is no drama, and probably no mainstream news will report this but down-to-line OpenAI will shell off the former self and competitors will catch up.

tchbnl• 3 years ago

With how much of a shitshow this was, I'm not sure Anthropic wants to touch that mess. Wish I was a fly on the wall when the board tried to ask the Anthropic CEO to come back/merge.

casebash• 3 years ago

Have you seen the Center for AI Safety letter? A lot of experts are worried AI safety could be an x-risk:

https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk

jkaplan3• 3 years ago

I feel like the "safety" crowd lost the PR battle, in part, because of framing it as "safety" and over-emphasizing on existential risk. Like you say, not that many people truly take that seriously right now.

But even if those types of problems don't surface anytime soon, this wave of AI is almost certainly going to be a powerful, society-altering technology; potentially more powerful than any in decades. We've all seen what can happen when powerful tech is put in the hands of companies and a culture whose only incentives are growth, revenue, and valuation -- the results can be not great. And I'm pretty sure a lot of the general public (and open AI staff) care about THAT.

For me, the safety/existential stuff is just one facet of the general problem of trying to align tech companies + their technology with humanity-at-large better than we have been recently. And that's especially important for landscape-altering tech like AI, even if it's not literally existential (although it may be).

concordDance15• 3 years ago

Like you say, not that many people truly take that seriously right now.

Eh? Polls on the matter show widespread public support for a pause due to safety concerns.

cyanydeez20• 3 years ago

No one who wants to capitalize on AI appears to take it seriously. Especially how grey that safety is. I'm not concerned AI is going to nuke humanity, I'm more concerned it'll re-enforce racism, bias, and the rest of human's irrational activities because it's _blindly_ using existing history to predict future.

We've seen it in the past decade in multiple cases. That's safety.

The decision that the topic discusses means Business is winning, and they absolutely will re-enforce the idea that the only care is that these systems allow them to re-enforce the business cases.

That's bad, and unsafe.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

This is what people need to understand. It's just like pro-life people. They don't hate you. They think they're saving lives. These people are just as admirably principled as them and they're just trying to make the world a better place.

YetAnotherNick2• 3 years ago

it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya)

Is it? Why was the press release worded like that? And why did Ilya came up with two mysterious reasons of why board fired Sam if he had quite clearly better and more defendable reason if this goes to court. Also Adam is pro commercialization at least looking at public interviews, no?

It's very easy to make the story in brain which involves one character being greedy, but it doesn't seem it is the exact case here.

eslaught• 3 years ago

Ok, serious question. If you think the threat is real, how are we not already screwed?

OpenAI is one of half a dozen teams [0] actively working on this problem, all funded by large public companies with lots of money and lots of talent. They made unique contributions, sure. But they're not that far ahead. If they stumble, surely one of the others will take the lead. Or maybe they will anyway, because who's to say where the next major innovation will come from?

So what I don't get about these reactions (allegedly from the board, and expressed here) is, if you interpret the threat as a real one, why are you acting like OpenAI has some infallible lead? This is not an excuse to govern OpenAI poorly, but let's be honest: if the company slows down the most likely outcome by far is that they'll cede the lead to someone else.

[0]: To be clear, there are definitely more. Those are just the large and public teams with existing products within some reasonable margin of OpenAI's quality.

davedx3• 3 years ago

I don't know. I think being realistic, only OpenAI and Google have the depth and breadth of expertise to develop general AI.

Most of the new AI startups are one trick ponies obsessively focused on LLM's. LLM's are only one piece of the puzzle.

concordDance15• 3 years ago

If you think the threat is real, how are we not already screwed?

That's the current Yudkowsky view. That it's essentially impossible at this point and we're doomed, but we might as well try anyway as its more "dignified" to die trying.

I'm a bit more optimistic myself.

kolinko• 3 years ago

The risk/scenario of singularity is that there will be just one winner and they will be able to prevent everyone else from building their own agi

RHSman2• 3 years ago

Money, large amounts, will always win at scale (unfortunately).

AmericanOP3• 3 years ago

It is a little amusing that we've crowned OpenAI as the destined mother of AGI long before the little sentient chickens have hatched.

theonemind• 3 years ago

I don't care about AI Safety, but:

https://openai.com/charter

above that in the charter is "Broadly distributed benefits", with details like:

"""

Broadly distributed benefits

We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.

Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.

"""

In that sense, I definitely hate to see rapid commercialization and Microsoft's hands in it. I feel like the only person on HN that actually wanted to see Team Sam lose, although it's pretty clear Team Helen/Ilya didn't have a chance, the org just looks hijacked by SV tech bros to me, but I feel like HN has a blindspot to seeing that at all and considering it anything other than a good thing if they do see it.

Although GPT barely looks like the language module of AGI to me and I don't see any way there from here (part of the reason I don't see any safety concern). The big breakthrough here relative to earlier AI research is massive amounts more compute power and a giant pile of data, but it's not doing some kind of truly novel information synthesis at all. It can describe quantum mechanics from a giant pile of data, but I don't think it has a chance of discovering quantum mechanics, and I don't think that's just because it can't see, hear, etc., but a limitation of the kind of information manipulation it's doing. It looks impressive because it's reflecting our own intelligence back at us.

two_in_one• 3 years ago

there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles

Seams very unlikely, board could communicate that. Instead they invented some BS reasons, which nobody took as a truth. It looks like more personal and power grab. The staff voted for monetization, people en mass don't care much about high principals. Also nobody wants to work under inadequate leadership. Looks like Ilya lost his bet, or Sam is going to keep him around?

nopinsight7• 3 years ago

Both sides of the rift in fact care a great deal about AI Safety. Sam himself helped draft the OpenAI charter and structure its governance which focuses on AI Safety and benefits to humanity. The main reason of the disagreement is the approach they deem best:

* Sam and Greg appear to believe OpenAI should move toward AGI as fast as possible because the longer they wait, the more likely it would lead to the proliferation of powerful AGI systems due to GPU overhang. Why? With more computational power at one's dispense, it's easier to find an algorithm, even a suboptimal one, to train an AGI.

As a glimpse on how an AI can be harmful, this paper explores how LLMs can be used to aid in Large-Scale Biological Attacks https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2977-1.html?

What if dozens other groups become armed with means to perform such an attack like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

We know that there're quite a few malicious human groups who would use any means necessary to destroy another group, even at a serious cost to themselves. So the widespread availability of unmonitored AGI would be quite troublesome.

* Helen and Ilya might believe it's better to slow down AGI development until we find technical means to deeply align an AGI with humanity first. This July, OpenAI started the Superalignment team with Ilya as a co-lead:

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment

But no one anywhere found a good technique to ensure alignment yet and it appears OpenAI's newest internal model has a significant capability leap, which could have led Ilya to make the decision he did. (Sam revealed during the APEC Summit that he observed the advance just a couple of weeks ago and it was only the fourth time he saw that kind of leap.)

concordDance15• 3 years ago

So Sam wants to make AGI without working to be sure it doesn't have goals higher than the preservation of human value?!

I can't believe that

gorbypark2• 3 years ago

Honest question, but in your example above of Sam and Greg racing towards AGI as fast as possible in order to head off proliferation, what's the end goal when getting there? Short of capture the entire worlds economy with an ASI, thus preventing anyone else from developing one, I don't see how this works. Just because OpenAI (or whoever) wins the initial race, it doesn't seem obvious to me that all development on other AGIs stops.

zerohalo8• 3 years ago

Both sides of the rift in fact care a great deal about AI Safety.

I disagree. Yes, Sam may have when it OpenAI was founded (unless it was just a ploy), but certainly now it's clear that the big companies are on a race to the top and safety or guardrails are mostly irrelevant.

The primary reason that the Anthropic team left OpenAI was over safety concerns.

_fizz_buzz_3• 3 years ago

I am still a bit puzzled that it is so easy to turn a non-profit into a for profit company. I am sure everything they did is legal, but it feels like it shouldn't be. Could Médecins Sans Frontières take in donations and then take that money to start a for profit hospital for plastics surgery? And the profits wouldn't even go back to MSF, but instead somehow private investors will get the profits. The whole construct just seems wrong.

IanCal2• 3 years ago

Well, if it aligned with their goals, sure I think.

Let's make the situation a little different. Could MSF pay a private surgery with investors to perform reconstruction for someone?

Could they pay the surgery to perform some amount of work they deem aligns with their charter?

Could they invest in the surgery under the condition that they have some control over the practices there? (Edit - e.g. perform Y surgeries, only perform from a set of reconstructive ones, patients need to be approved as in need by a board, etc)

Raising private investment allows a non profit to shift cost and risk to other entities.

The problem really only comes when the structure doesn't align with the intended goals - which is something distinct to the structure, just something non profits can do.

ah76513• 3 years ago

I think it actually isn't that easy. Compared to your example, the difference is that OpenAI's for-profit is getting outside money from Microsoft, not money from non-profit OpenAI. Non-profit OpenAI is basically dealing with for-profit OpenAI as a external partner that happens to be aligned with their interests, paying the expensive bills and compute, while the non-profit can hold on to the IP.

You might be able to imagine a world where there was an external company that did the same thing as for-profit OpenAI, and OpenAI nonprofit partnered with them in order to get their AI ideas implemented (for free). OpenAI nonprofit is basically getting a good deal.

MSF could similarly create an external for-profit hospital, funded by external investors. The important thing is that the nonprofit (donated, tax-free) money doesn't flow into the forprofit section.

Of course, there's a lot of sketchiness in practice, which we can see in this situation with Microsoft influencing the direction of nonprofit OpenAI even though it shouldn't be. I think there would have been real legal issues if the Microsoft deal had continued.

stef25• 3 years ago

Not sure if you're asking a serious question about MSF but it's interesting anyways - when these types of orgs are fundraising for a specific campaign, say Darfur, then they can NOT use that money for any other campaign, say for ex Turkey earthquake.

That's why they'll sometimes tell you to stop donating. That's here in EU at least (source is a relative who volunteers for such an org).

rurban2• 3 years ago

Team Helen seems to be CIA and Military, if I glance over their safety paper. Controlling the narrative, not the damage.

shrikant• 3 years ago

Upholding the Original Principles [of AI]

There's a UtopAI / utopia joke in there somewhere, was that intentional on your part?

krisoft7• 3 years ago

Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before.

I very much recommend reading the book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” from Nick Bostrom.

It is a seminal work which provides a great introduction into these ideas and concepts.

I found myself in the same boat as you do. I was seeing otherwise inteligent and rational people worry about this “fairy tale” of some AI uprising. Reading that book give me an appreciation of the idea as a serious intelectual excercise.

I still don’t agree with everything contained in the book. And definietly don’t agree with everything the AI doomsayers write, but i believe if more people would read it that would elevate the discourse. Instead of rehashing the basics again and again we could build on them.

Solvency2• 3 years ago

Who needs a book to understand the crazy overwhelming scale at which AI can dictate even online news/truth/discourse/misinformation/propaganda. And that's just barely the beginning.

ah76513• 3 years ago

One funny thing about this mess is that "Team Helen" has never mentioned anything about safety, and Emmett said "The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety".

The reason everyone thinks it's about safety seems largely because a lot of e/acc people on Twitter keep bringing it up as a strawman.

Of course, it might end up that it really was about safety in the end, but for now I still haven't seen any evidence. The story about Sam trying to get board control and the board retaliating seems more plausible given what's actually happened.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 3 years ago

The story about Sam trying to get board control and the board retaliating seems more plausible given what's actually happened.

What story? Any link?

mise_en_place• 3 years ago

A board still has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. It’s materially irrelevant if those shareholders are of a public or private entity, or whether the company in question is a non-profit or for-profit. Laws mean something, and selective enforcement will only further the decay of the rule of law in the West.

dlkf• 3 years ago

I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

The real ”sheer stupidity” is this very belief.

sampo• 3 years ago

If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

In the 1990s and the 00s, it was no too uncommon for anti-GMO environmental activist / ecoterrorist groups to firebomb research facilities and to enter farms and fields to destroy planted GMO plants. Earth Liberation Front was only one of such activist groups [1].

We have yet to see even one bombing of an AI research lab. If people really are afraid of AIs, at least they do so more in the abstract and are not employing the tactics of more traditional activist movements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front#Notable...

concordDance15• 3 years ago

It's mostly that it's a can of worms no one wants to open. Very much a last resort as its very tricky to use uncoordinated violence effectively (just killing Sam, LeCunn and Greg doesnt do too much to move the needle and then everyond armors up) and very hard to coordinate violence without a leak.

pk-protect-ai3• 3 years ago

Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before.

I believe this position reflects the thoughts of the majority of AI researchers, including myself. It is concerning that we do not fully understand something as promising and potentially dangerous as AI. I'm actually on Ilya's side; labeling his attempt to uphold the original OpenAI principles as an act of "coup" is what is happening now.

lewhoo2• 3 years ago

I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety

That doesn't matter that much. If your analysis is correct then it means a (tiny) minority of OpenAI cares about AI safety. I hope this isn't the case.

soci• 3 years ago

The Technologyreview article mentioned in the parent’s first paragraph is the most insightful piece of content I’ve read about the tensions inside OpenAI.

wouldbecouldbe4• 3 years ago

Would have been interesting if they appointed a co-ceo. That still might be the way to go.

cyanydeez20• 3 years ago

I think you analysis is missing the key problem: Business interests.

The public don't calculate into whats happening here. There's people using ChatGPT for real "business value" and _that_ is what was threatened.

It's clear Business Interests could not be stopped.

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

Helen could have one. She just had to publicly humiliate Sam. She didn't. Employees took over like a mob. Investors pressured board. Board is out. Sam is in. Employees look like they have say. But really, Sam has say. And MSFT is the kingmaker.

gandutraveler3• 3 years ago

Honestly I feel that we will never be able to preemptively build safety without encountering the real risk or threat.

Incrementally improving AI capabilities is the only way to do that.

qudat2• 3 years ago

If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

No, because it is an effort in futility. We are evolving into extinction and there is nothing we can do about it. https://bower.sh/in-love-with-a-ghost

ayakang314152• 3 years ago

Suppose everything settles and they have the board properly in place. I know such board has fiduciary responsibility to make sure the organization is headed in the right direction based on its goals and missions. For private company, the mission is very clear, but for non-profit orgs like OpenAI, what's their mission specifically? It vaguely claims to better the humanity, but what does that entail exactly with regards to what they do in AI space?

ulfw• 3 years ago

One huge shitshow that proved immaturity of OpenAI. But hey, at least now every soul on the planet knows Sam Altman. So there's that.

underseacables• 3 years ago

I feel like this was all such a waste of time, energy, and probably money.

low_tech_punk2• 3 years ago

Adding up all the salary hours spent by people browsing Twitter, they could have finished training GPT-5

randomsoutham• 3 years ago

It's incredible how the company behind of one the most promising technologies out there was about to fail because of bad politics.

Seems likely that it won't be there by OpenAI for too long. MS have a tendency to break up acquisitions so this gives me hope.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

Apparently the moon changes size when you snipe it in OpenAI as well

dukeofdoom2• 3 years ago

Who is Sam?

system25• 3 years ago

It was Microsoft's voice generation tool from the 90s. You can play with it here:

https://www.tetyys.com/SAPI4/

dukeofdoom2• 3 years ago

no really who is Sam, and how did he get here? Do u know?

sinuhe69• 3 years ago

So basically somebody initiated a coup, then the key figure of the coup regretted it openly, and the fallout was that OpenAI will become a 100% commercial entity, fully open for Microsoft to taking over?

If that’s not a fertile soil for conspiracy theory, I don’t know what could ;)

sashank_15092• 3 years ago

Looks to me like, one pro-board member in Adam d Angelo, one pro Sam in Brett Taylor since they’ve been pushing for him since Sunday so I’m assuming Sam and rest of OpenAI leadership really like him and 1 Neutral in Larry Summers who has never worked in AI and is just a well respected name in general. I’m sure Larry was extensively interviewed and reference checked by both sides of this power struggle before they agreed to compromise on him.

Interesting to see how the board evolves from this. From what I know broadly there were 2 factions, the faction that thought Sam was going too fast which fired him and the faction that thought Sam’s trajectory was fine (which included Sam and Greg). Now there’s a balance on the board and subsequent hires can tip it one way or the other. Unfortunately a divided board rarely lasts and one faction will eventually win out, I think Sam’s faction will eventually win out but we’ll have to wait and see.

One of the saddest results of this drama was Greg being ousted from OpenAI. Greg apart from being brilliant was someone who regularly 80-90 hour work weeks into OpenAI, and you could truly say he dedicated a good chunk of his life into building this organization. And he was forced to resign by a board who probably never put a 90 hour work week in their entire life, much less into building OpenAI. A slap on the face. I don’t care what the board’s reasoning was but when their actions caused employees who dedicated their lives to building the organization resign (especially when most of them played no part at all into building this amazing organization), they had to go in disgrace. I doubt any of them will ever reach career highs higher than being on OpenAI’s board, and the world’s better off for it.

P.S., Ilya of course is an exception and not included in my above condemnation. He also notably reversed his position when he saw OpenAI was being killed by his actions.

mcmcmc4• 3 years ago

Larry Summers is the scary pick here. His views on banking deregulation led to the GFC, and he's had several controversies over racist and sexist positions. Plus he's an old pal of Epstein and made several trips to his island.

Joeri2• 3 years ago

I assume Summers is there as a politically connected operative, to make sure OpenAI remains influential in Washington.

hackerlight3• 3 years ago

Greg was only forced to resign from his board seat, not his job.

eclectic292• 3 years ago

The media and the VCs are treating Sam like some hero and savior of AI. I’m not getting it. What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration? Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support? It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist.

auggierose6• 3 years ago

If you are driven by outside validation, definitely!

fidotron• 3 years ago

Unsurprisingly VCs view VCs as the highest form of life, and product managers are temporary positions taken on the way to ascending to VC status.

I have said recently elsewhere SV now devalues builders but it is not just VCs/sales/product, a huge amount is devops and sre departments. They make a huge amount of noise about how all development should be free and the value is in deploying and operating the developed artifacts. Anyone outside this watching would reasonably conclude developers have no self respect, hardly aspirational positions.

drawkbox• 3 years ago

Developers are clearly the weak link today, have given up all power over product and it is sad and why software sucks so bad. It pains the soul that value creators have let the value extractors run the show, because it is now a reality TV / circus like market where power is consolidating.

Developers and value creators with power are like an anti-trust on consolidation and concentration and they have instead turned towards authoritarianism instead of anti-authoritarianism. What happened? Many think they can still get rich, those days are over because of giving up power. Now quality of life for everyone and value creators is worse off. Everyone loses.

dacryn3• 3 years ago

he tells a good story, no matter if its true or has any scientific foundation or not.

He tells what others like to hear, and manages to gain money out of it

ensocode3• 3 years ago

this - a good, charismatic salesman

93po4• 3 years ago

Story telling is the fabric of society in general. It’s why paper money works.

cableshaft5• 3 years ago

Half of being a good CEO is telling a good story, so that's not surprising.

nbanks2• 3 years ago

Sam Altman has done in four days what it took Steve Jobs 11 years to do! I'm impressed.

eclectic292• 3 years ago

I'm sorry, impressed by what?

MichaelRazum• 3 years ago

You could say the same about any person on the top. In general CEO's do not do research. Still they are critical for success.

By the way the AI scientists get a lot of respect and admiration see Ilya for example.

seydor7• 3 years ago

he was very well known long before openAI

ben_w2• 3 years ago

He says nice things about his team (and even about his critics) when in public.

But my reading of this drama is that the board were seen as literally insane, not that Altman was seen as spectacularly heroic or an underdog.

stingraycharles4• 3 years ago

My reading of all this is that the board is both incompetent and has a number of massive conflicts of interests.

What I don’t understand is why they were allowed to stay on the board with all these conflicts of interests all the while having no (financial) stake in OpenAI. One of the board members even openly admitting that she considered destroying OpenAI a successful outcome of her duty as board member.

bnralt3• 3 years ago

Right. At least some of the board members took issue with ChatGPT being released at all, and wanted more to be kept from the public. For the people who use these tools everyday, it shouldn't be surprising that Altman was viewed as the better choice.

TrackerFF2• 3 years ago

It's the cult of the CEO in action.

_giorgio_3• 3 years ago

To talk about OpenAi, Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy are much more known than Sam Altman.

I'm sure that if Ilya had been removed from his role, the revolt movement would have been similar.

I've started to like Sam only when he was removed from his position.

gbalduzzi• 3 years ago

Isn't Ilya removed from the new, current board?

seydor7• 3 years ago

the media is the media

serial_dev5• 3 years ago

It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist.

In my experience, product people who know what they are doing have a huge impact on the success of a company, product, or service. They also point engineering efforts in the right direction, which in turn also motivate engineers.

I saw good product people leaving completely destroy a team, never seen that happen with a good engineer or individual contributor, no matter how great they were.

jpgvm• 3 years ago

Depends why/how they left.

I have seen firing a great/respected/natural leader engineer result in pretty much the whole engineering team just up and leaving.

Draiken• 3 years ago

Interesting. I had the opposite experience. All of the product suite having no idea about what the product even is, where it should go, making bad decisions over and over, excusing their bad choices behind "data" and finally, as usual, failing upwards eventually moving to bigger startups.

I have yet to find a product person that was not involved in the inception of the idea that is actually good (hell, even some founders fail spectacularly here).

Perhaps I'm simply unlucky.

Kinrany2• 3 years ago

Good engineers create systems that can survive their departure.

hdivider• 3 years ago

This, 100%.

Sam pontificated about fusion power, even here on HN. Beyond investing in Helion, what did he do? Worldcoin. Tempting impoverished people to give up biometric data in exchange for some crypto. And serving as the face of mass-market consumer AI. Clearly that's more cool, and more attractive to VCs.

Meanwhile, what have fusion scientists and engineers done? They kept on going, including by developing ML systems for pure technological effect. Day after day. They got to a breakthrough just this year. Scientists and engineers in national labs, universities, and elsewhere show what a real commitment to technological progress looks like.

otteromkram3• 3 years ago

This, 100%.

When do new HN users get the ability to downvote?

robertlagrant6• 3 years ago

Scientists and engineers in national labs, universities, and elsewhere show what a real commitment to technological progress looks like.

And everywhere. You've only named public institutions for some reason, but a lot of progress happens in the private sector. And that demonstrates real commitment, because they're not spending other people's money.

baking9• 3 years ago

He is the Executive Chairman of Helion Energy so it is not just a passive investment.

That said, I wish Helion wasn't so paranoid about Chinese copycats and was more open about their tech. I can't help but feel Sam Altman is at least partly responsible for that.

tim333• 3 years ago

I don't think the media are treating him as a "hero and savior of AI". However OpenAI and ChatGTP have undoubtedly been successful and he seems popular with his people. It's human nature to follow the top person as figurehead for an organisation as we or journalists don't have time or info to break down what each of the hundreds of employees contributed.

I actually get the impression from the media that he's a bit shifty and sales orientated but seems effective at getting stuff done.

ethbr13• 3 years ago

but seems effective at getting stuff done.

Sales usually is. It's the consequences, post-sale, that they're usually less effective at dealing with.

logicchains7• 3 years ago

Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support

Google's full of top researchers and scientists who are at least as good as those at OpenAI; Sam's the reason OpenAI has a successful, useful product (GPT4), while Google has the far less effective, more lobotomized Bard.

gumballindie• 3 years ago

What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration?

He’s serving the right people by doing their bidding.

s1artibartfast3• 3 years ago

Altman seems to be a extraordinary leader, motivator, and strategizer. This itself is clear by the fact that 90% of the company was willing to walk out over his retention. Just think about that for minute.

csunbird• 3 years ago

No, the 90% of the employees were scared that their million $ salaries are going away along with Sam Altman.

asimpletune• 3 years ago

There’s also the alternative explanation that they feel their financial situation is improved by him being there.

tr888• 3 years ago

I thought about it for a minute. I came to the conclusion that OpenAI would have likely tanked (perhaps even within days) had Altman not returned to maintain the status quo, and engineers didn't want to be out of work and left with worthless stock.

iteratethis4• 3 years ago

Please stop. No employee is loyal to any CEO based on some higher order matter. They just want to get their big pay day and will follow whoever makes that possible.

yodsanklai2• 3 years ago

Human nature, some people do love charismatic leaders. It's hard to comprehend for those of us with a more anarchist nature.

That being said, I have no idea of this guy's contributions. It's easy to dismiss entrepreneur/managers because they're not top scientists, but they also have very rare skills and without them, projects don't get done.

93po4• 3 years ago

Sam is crazy accomplished and it’s easy to search why

gabrielgio2• 3 years ago

What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration? Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support?

This has been the case for all achievement of all major companies, the CEO or whoever is on top gets the credit for all their employee's work. Why would be different for OpenAI?

giamma• 3 years ago

Well there are notable cases in which the CEO had a critical role in the product development. Larry Ellison coded himself the first versions of Oracle database and was then CEO up to 2014. Shay Banon wrote Elasticsearch and was Elastic CEO for some time.

sensanaty• 3 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Sam and his other ultra-rich buddies like Satya had their fingers deep in the pockets of all the tech journalists that immediately ran to his defense and sensationalized everything. Every single news source posted on HN read like pure shilling for the Ponzi sch- uh, I mean Worldcoin guy and hailing him as some sort of AI savant.

egKYzyXeIL• 3 years ago

This reads like a far-fetched conspiracy theory

torginus• 3 years ago

My more plausible version is that CEOs of journalistic publications are in cahoots with the rich/powerful/govt people, who get to dictate the tone of said publications by hiring the right journalists/editors and giving them the right incentives.

So as a journalist you might have freedom to write your articles, but your editor (as instructed by his/her senior editor) might try to steer you about writing in the correct tone.

This is how 'Starship test flight makes history as it clears multiple milestones' becomes 'Musk rocket explodes during test'

blitzar2• 3 years ago

Let me offer up a secret from the inside. You dont in any way shape or form have to pay money to journalists. The can are bought and paid for through their currency - information and access.

They dont really even really shill for their patron; they thrive on the relevance of having their name in the byline for the article, or being the person who gets quote / information / propaganda from <CEO|Celebrity|Criminal|Viral Edgelord of the Week>.

Perz1val• 3 years ago

Maybe they feel really insecure when the "News Writing Themselves AI" company got unstable...

busyant• 3 years ago

Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support?

I can't believe I'm about to defend VCs and "senior management" but here goes.

I've worked for two start-ups in my life.

The first start-up had dog-shit technology (initially) and top-notch management. CEO told me early on that VCs invest on the quality of management because they trust good senior executives to hire good researchers and let them pivot into profitable areas (and pivoting is almost always needed).

I thought the CEO was full of shit and simply patting himself on the back. Company pivoted HARD and IPOed around 2006 and now has a MC of ~ $10 billion.

The second start-up I worked with was founded by a Nobel laureate and the tech was based on his research. This time management was dog-shit. Management fumbled the tech and went out of business.

===

Not saying Altman deserves uncritical praise. All I'm saying is that I used to diminish the importance of quality senior leadership.

rtsil• 3 years ago

IPOed around 2006 and now has a MC of ~ $10 billion.

The interesting thing is you used economic values to show their importance, not what innovations or changes they achieved. Which is fine for ordinary companies, but OpenAI is supposed to be a non-profit, so these metrics should not be relevant. Otherwise, what's the difference?

matwood5• 3 years ago

Great comment. You interspersed the two, but instead of using management I like to say that it's leadership that matters. Getting a bunch of people (smart or not) to all row in the same direction with the same vision is hard. It's also commonly the difference between success and failure. Of course the ICs deserve admiration and respect, but people (ICs) are often quick to dismiss leadership.

A great analogy can be found on basketball teams. Lots of star players who should succeed sans any coach, but Phil Jackson and Coach K have shown time and again the important role leadership plays.

vlad_ungureanu• 3 years ago

Interesting, I always thought that research and startups are very similar. Where you have something (product/research-idea) which you think is novel and try to sell it (journals/customers).

The management skills which you potentiated differentiated the success of the two firms. I can see how the lack of this might be wildly spread out in academia.

danaris3• 3 years ago

All I'm saying is that I used to diminish the importance of quality senior leadership.

Quality senior leadership is, indeed, very important.

However, far, far too many people see "their company makes a lot of money" or "they are charismatic and talk a good game" and think that means the senior leadership is high-quality.

True quality is much harder to measure, especially in the short term. As you imply, part of it is being able to choose good management—but measuring the quality of management is also hard, and most of the corporate world today has utterly backwards ideas about what actually makes good managers (eg, "willing to abuse employees to force them to work long hours", etc).

bnralt3• 3 years ago

Not saying Altman deserves uncritical praise. All I'm saying is that I used to diminish the importance of quality senior leadership.

Absolutely. The focus on the leadership of OpenAI isn't because people think that the top researchers and scientists are unimportant. It's because they realize that they are important, and as such, the person who decides the direction they go in is extremely important. End up with the wrong person at the top, and all of those researchers and scientists end up wasting time spinning wheels on things that will never reach the public.

dangerface5• 3 years ago

Yea its a bit much he obviously doesn't deserve the admiration that he is getting. That said he deserves respect for helping bring ChatGPT to market, he deserves support because the board have acted like clowns and justified it with their mission of public accountability, but have rejected the idea that the board itself should be publicly accountable.

alentred2• 3 years ago

treating Sam like some hero

Recent OpenAI CEOs found themselves on the protagonist side not for their actions, but for the way they have been seemingly treated by the board. Regardless of actual actions on either side, "heroic" or not, of which the public knows very little.

prepend• 3 years ago

I don’t get that at all.

The OpenAI board just seems irrational, immature, indecisive, and many other stupid features you don’t want in a board.

I don’t see this so much as an “Altman is amazing” outcome so much as the board is incompetent and doing incompetent things and OpenAI’s products are popular and the boards actions put this products in danger.

Not that Altman isn’t cool, I think he’s smart, but I think a similar coverage would have occurred with any other ceo who was fired for vague and seemingly random reasons on a Friday afternoon.

Kinrany2• 3 years ago

The board is not supposed to be good at executive things, that's why they have CEOs

gandutraveler3• 3 years ago

There is a reason why the top researchers and engineers at OpenAI stood behind Sam. Someday you will learn the value of good leader

bart_spoon• 3 years ago

Stock options?

redserk• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the engineers aren’t usually the ones getting the praise but CEO or other singular figurehead.

6274672• 3 years ago

A CEO is not a researcher. A researcher can be a CEO but in doing so stops being a researcher.

Maybe (almost certainly) Sam is not a savior/hero, but he doesn't need to be a savior/hero. He just needs to gather more support than the opposition (the now previous board). And even if you don't know any details of this story, enough insiders who know more than any of us of what happens inside oai - including hundred of researchers - decided to support the "savior/hero". It's less about Sam and more about an incompetent board. Some of those board members are top researchers. And they are now on the losing camp.

ur-whale• 3 years ago

It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist.

If you look at who's running Google right now, you would be essentially correct.

smrtinsert• 3 years ago

The service itself has an incredible amount of utility and he will make them all wealthy. Seems like a no brainer to me.

throwaway318• 3 years ago

Either:

Incubation of senior management in US tech has reached singularity and only one person's up for the job. Doom awaits the US tech sector as there's no organisational ability other than one person able and willing to take the big complex job.

Or:

Sam's overvalued.

One or the other.

iteratethis4• 3 years ago

Apparently he has a massive role in VC, and since this community, tech twitter, etc. all circle around that, he is unconditionally praised.

Further, the current tech wave is all about AI, where there's a massive community of basically "OpenAI wrapper" grifters trying to ride the wave.

The shorter answer is: money.

turtle_• 3 years ago

If you grew up in the 90s, you’ll understand:

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

latexr• 3 years ago

The “game” only continues to exist as long as there are “players”. You’re perfectly justified to be discontent with the ones who perpetuate a system you disagree with.

That phrase is nothing more than a dissimulated way of saying “tough luck” or “I don’t care” while trying to act (outdatedly) cool. You don’t need to have grown up in any specific decade to understand its meaning.

notesinthefield• 3 years ago

The CEO is the face of the company, rarely does the public care about the scientists or engineers. This isnt a new concept, its always happened.

mikpanko2• 3 years ago

One of the most important things I've learned in life is that organizing people to work toward the same goal is very hard. The larger the group you need to organize, the harder it is.

Initially, when the idea is small, it is hard to sell it to talent, investors and early customers to bring all key pieces together.

Later, when the idea is well recognized and accepted, the organization usually becomes big and the challenge shifts to understanding the complex interaction of various competing sub-ideas, projects and organizational structures. Humans did not evolve to manage such complex systems and interacting with thousands of stakeholders, beyond what can be directly observed and fully understood.

However, without this organization, engineers, researchers, etc cannot work on big audacious projects, which involve more resources than 1 person can provide by themselves. That's why the skill of organizing and leading people is so highly valued and compensated.

It is common to think of leaders not contributing much, but this view might be skewed because of mostly looking at executives in large companies at the time they have clear moats. At that point leadership might be less important in the short term: product sells itself, talent is knocking on the door, and money is abundant. But this is an unusual short-lived state between taking an idea off the ground and defending against quickly shifting market forces.

sealthedeal• 3 years ago

Simply put Altman is now the face of AI.

If you were to ask Altman himself though im sure he would highlight the true innovators of AI that he holds in high respect.

lacrimacida2• 3 years ago

He is but with a caveat. In this 5D chess game of firing him and getting him back into OpenAI put all the spotlights on him.

emodendroket• 3 years ago

Then again wasn't that always true? What did Steve Jobs really build?

gfiorav• 3 years ago

IMO:

They fired the CEO and didn't even inform Microsoft, who had invested a massive $20 billion. That's a serious lapse in judgment. A company needs leaders who understand business, not just a smart researcher with a sense of ethical superiority. This move by the board was unprofessional and almost childish.

Those board members? Their future on any other board looks pretty bleak. Venture capitalists will think twice before getting involved with anything they have a hand in.

On the other side, Sam did increase the company's revenue, which is a significant achievement. He got offers from various companies and VCs the minute the news went public.

The business community's support for Sam is partly a critique of the board's actions and partly due to the buzz he and his company have created. It's a significant moment in the industry.

erickhill• 3 years ago

Read up on the John Sculley/Michael Spindler days of Apple, and Jobs' return.

I think that's what may be in the minds of several people eagerly watching this eventually-to-be-made David Fincher movie.

snickerbockers• 3 years ago

Journalists really want everything to have a singular inventor. The concept of an organization is very difficult for them to grasp so they attribute everything to the guy at the top. Sam Altman is the latest in a long line of "inventors" which also includes such esteemed personalities as Elon musk, Steve Jobs, etc.

hn_throwaway_993• 3 years ago

The media and the VCs are treating Sam like some hero and savior of AI

I wouldn't be so sure. While I think the board handled this process terribly, I think the majority of mainstream media articles I saw were very cautionary regarding the outcome. Examples (and note the second article reports that Paul Graham fired Altman from YC, which I never knew before):

MarketWatch: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-openai-debacle-shows-s...

Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt...

RockyMcNuts• 3 years ago

Below is a good thread, which maybe contains the answer to your question, and Ken Olsen's question about why brainiac MIT grads get managed by midwit HBS grads.

https://twitter.com/coloradotravis/status/172606030573668790...

A good leader is someone you'll follow into battle, because you want to do right by the team, and you know the leader and the team will do right by you. Whatever 'leadership' is, Sam Altman has it and the board does not.

https://www.ft.com/content/05b80ba4-fcc3-4f39-a0c3-97b025418...

The board could have said, hey we don't like this direction and you are not keeping us in the loop, it's time for an orderly change. But they knew that wouldn't go well for them either. They chose to accuse Sam of malfeasance and be weaselly ratfuckers on some level themselves, even if they felt for still-inscrutable reasons that was their only/best choice and wouldn't go down the way it did.

Sam Altman is the front man who 'gave us' ChatGPT regardless of everything else Ilya and everyone else did. A personal brand (or corporate) is about trust, if you have a brand you are playing a long-term game, a reputation converts prisoner's dilemma into iterated prisoner's dilemma which has a different outcome.

eddtries2• 3 years ago

IMO and experience a good product manager is far more important than a good engineer or good scientist

Elon Musk’s neuralink is a good example - the work they’re doing there was attacked by academics saying they’d done this years ago and it’s not novel, yet none of them will be the ones who ultimately bring it to market.

dandanua• 3 years ago

CEO is a ruler, scientist is a worker. The modern culture treats workers as a replaceable matter, which is redundant after the work is done. They are just tools. Rulers, on the other hand, take the all praise and honors. It's "them" who did the work. Musk is an extreme example of this.

jacquesm5• 3 years ago

Results matter.

intended2• 3 years ago

From a business sense, Satya was excellent.

He made the right calls, fast, with limited information.

Things further shifted from plan a to b to… whatever this is.

Despite that, MSFT still came out on top.

Consider if Satya didn’t say anything. Suppose MSFT stood back and let things play out.

That’s a gap for google or some competitor to make a move. To showcase their stability and long term business friendly vision.

Instead by moving fast, doing the “right” thing, this opportunity was denied and used to MSFTs benefit.

If the board folded, it would return to the stays quo. If the board held, MSFT would have secured OpenAI, for essentially nothing.

Edit: changed board folded x2 to board folded + board held, last para.

huytersd2• 3 years ago

Satya may honestly be the CEO of the decade for what he has done with Microsoft and now this.

chatmasta3• 3 years ago

Meanwhile Sundar might be the worst. Where was he this weekend? Where was he the past three years while his company got beat to market on products built from its own research? He's asleep at the wheel. I'm surprised every day he remains CEO.

gardenhedge3• 3 years ago

Satya invested 10b into a company with terrible, incompetent governance and not getting his company any seat of influence on the board. That doesn't seem great.

campbel5• 3 years ago

The only mistake (a big one) was publicly offering to match comp for all the OpenAI employees. Can't sit well with folks @ MS already. This was something they could have easily done privately to give petition signers confidence.

asd88• 3 years ago

Nah, Microsoft employees being second class citizens compared to acquisitions is nothing new. e.g. compare Microsoft comp with LinkedIn/GitHub comp.

alentred2• 3 years ago

Yep, outplayed like in chess. Started with a handicap, led the game to the stalemate, won the match.

zug_zug• 3 years ago

I am not sure why people keep pushing this narrative. It's not obviously false, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence of it.

From where I sit Satya possibly messed up big. He clearly wanted Sam and the Open AI team to join microsoft and they won't now, likely ever.

By offering a standing offer to join MS publicly he gave Sam and OpenAI employees huge leverage to force the board's hand. If he had waited then maybe there would have been an actual fallout that would have lead to people actually joining microsoft.

jnwatson2• 3 years ago

Satya's main mistake was not having a spot on the board. Everything after that was in defense of the initial investment, and he played all the right moves.

While having OpenAI as a Microsoft DeepMind would have been an ok second-best solution, the status quo is still better for Microsoft. There would have been a bunch of legal issues and it would be a hit on Microsoft's bottom line.

intended2• 3 years ago

Its very easy to min max a situation if you are not on the other side.

Additionally - I have not seen someone else talk about this, its just been a few days. Calling it a narrative is a stretch, and dismissive by implying manipulation.

Finally why would Sam joining MSFT be better than this current situation?

asperous• 3 years ago

I don't think that's quite right, Microsoft's main game was keeping the money train going by any means necessary, they have staked so much on copilots and Enterprise/Azure Open AI. So much has been invested into that strategic direction and seeing Google swoop in and out-innovate Microsoft would be a huge loss.

Either by keeping OpenAI as-is, or the alternative being moving everyone to Microsoft in an attempt to keep things going would work for Satya.

auggierose6• 3 years ago

So, the only two women were removed from the board, and two ultra-alpha males were brought on. And everybody is cheering it on as the right thing to do!

Not judging, just observing.

huytersd2• 3 years ago

It’s definitely the right thing to do. Those women had “qualifications” in a made up field with no real world relevance that aimed to halt progress on AI work. We are no where close to a paradigm where AI takes over the world or whatever.

lucubratory5• 3 years ago

And Larry Summers believes that women are genetically inferior to men at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. A lot of the techbro hate that was directed specifically at Helen is openly misogynistic, which is actually pretty funny because Larry Summers was probably who Helen was eventually happy with because of their shared natsec connections.

maxdoop5• 3 years ago

Is there any way to disagree with Helen and not be misogynistic in your view? How would that look?

c0pium• 3 years ago

Not judging

I wonder if this has ever been said truthfully?

auggierose6• 3 years ago

You don't have to wonder anymore! You replied to an example of it.

maxdoop5• 3 years ago

Oh, cmon. Why must people reach like this?

How about we look at credentials, merit, and consensus as opposed to “what gender are they?”

auggierose6• 3 years ago

I am sure Larry Summers is highly qualified for this job. Would have been very hard to find a willing woman with his qualifications.

ahzhou• 3 years ago

I was thinking about this too, but the wife of an actor and someone two years out of her masters were not the caliber people that should have been on the board of an $80B company.

I would expect people with backgrounds like Sheryl Sandberg or Dr. Lisa Sue to sit in the position. The two replaced women would have looked like diversity hires had they not been affiliated with an AI doomer organization.

I hope there’s diversity of representation as they fill out the rest of the board and there’s certainly women who have the credentials, but it’s important that they don’t appear grossly unqualified when they sit next to the other board members.

galoisscobi• 3 years ago

Sheryl Sandberg’s sense of ethics and moral compass are highly questionable.

I_am_tiberius• 3 years ago

Let's hope he now focuses on user privacy and AI safety.

benkarst• 3 years ago

Greed is undefeated.

Satam4• 3 years ago

Disappointing outcome. The process has conclusively confirmed that OpenAI is in fact not open and that it is effectively controlled by Microsoft. Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

It might not seem like the case right now, but I think the real disruption is just about to begin. OpenAI does not have in its DNA to win, they're too short-sighted and reactive. Big techs will have incredible distribution power but a real disruptor must be brewing somewhere unnoticed, for now.

kmlevitt11• 3 years ago

A lot of this comes down to processing power though. That's why Microsoft had so much leverage with both factions in this fight. It actually gives them a pretty good moat above and beyond their head start. There aren't too many companies with the hardware to compete, let alone talent.

patcon2• 3 years ago

Agreed. Perhaps a reason for public AI [1], which advocates for a publicly funded option where a player like MSFT can't push around something like OpenAI so forcefully.

[1] https://lu.ma/zo0vnony

haunter• 3 years ago

OpenAI is in fact not open

Apple is also not an apple

KeplerBoy• 3 years ago

Pretty sure Apple never aimed to be an Apple.

smt88• 3 years ago

Apple has no by-laws committing itself to being an apple.

This line of argument is facile and destructive to conversation anyway.

It boils down to, "Pointing out corporate hypocrisy isn't valuable because corporations are liars," and (worse) it implies the other person is naive.

In reality, we can and should be outraged when corporations betray their own statements and supposed values.

colinsane• 3 years ago

did the "Open" in OpenAI not originally refer to open in the academic or open source manner? i only learned about OpenAI in the GPT-2 days, when they released it openly and it was still small enough that i ran it on my laptop: i just assumed they had always acted according to their literal name up through that point.

lynx23• 3 years ago

Yes!

sangeeth96• 3 years ago

I got news for you pal: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-vs-apples-trademark-ba...

Cacti4• 3 years ago

these are the vapid, pedantic hot takes we all come here for. thanks.

rurp• 3 years ago

Did Apple raise funds and spend a lot of time promoting itself as a giant apple that would feed humanity?

jakey_bakey• 3 years ago

It wasn't necessarily groupthink - there was profound pressure from team Sam to sign that petition. What's going to happen to your career when you were one of the 200 who held out initially?

hef198986• 3 years ago

Go work somewhere else? The reason being you din't like that amount of drama?

concordDance15• 3 years ago

Isn't that one of the causes of group think?

ben_w2• 3 years ago

What's going to happen to your career when you were one of the 200 who held out initially?

Anthropic formed from people who split from OpenAI, and xAI in response to either the company or ChatGPT, so people would have plenty of options.

If the staff had as little to go on as the rest of us, then the board did something that looked wild and unpredictable, which is an acute employment threat all by itself.

dereg• 3 years ago

There weren’t 200 holdouts. It was like 5 AM over there. I don’t know why you are surprised that people who work at OpenAI would want to work at OpenAI, esp over Microsoft?

mcosta• 3 years ago

How do you know that?

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

They can just work somewhere else with relative ease. Some OpenAI employees on Twitter said they were being bombarded by recruiters throughout until tonight's resolution. People have left OpenAI before and they are doing just fine.

jmcgough• 3 years ago

What's going to happen to your career when you were one of the 200 who held out initially?

Not to mention Roko's basilisk /s

politelemon2• 3 years ago

there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

That they reached a different conclusion than the outcome you wished for does not indicate a lack of critical thinking skills. They have a different set of information than you do, and reached a different conclusion.

dimask• 3 years ago

It is not about different set of information, but different stakes/interests. They act firstmost as investors rather than as employees on this.

hutzlibu2• 3 years ago

"They have a different set of information than you do,"

Their bank accounts current and potential future numbers?

highwaylights3• 3 years ago

There’s evidence to suggest that a central group have pressured the broader base of employees into going along with this, as posted elsewhere in the thread.

lwhi• 3 years ago

I think it's fair to call this reactionary; Sam Altman has played the part of 'ping-pong ball' exceptionally well these past few days.

kissgyorgy• 3 years ago

The available public information is enough to reach this conclusion.

Satam4• 3 years ago

I'm sure most of them are extremely intelligent but the situation showed they are easily persuaded, even if principled. They will have to overcome many first-of-a-kind challenges on their quest to AGI but look at how quickly everyone got pulled into a feel-good kumbaya sing-along.

Think of that what you wish. To me, this does not project confidence in this being the new Bell Labs. I'm not even sure they have it in their DNA to innovate their products much beyond where they currently are.

murbard2• 3 years ago

If 95% of people voted in favour of apple pie, I'd become a bit suspicious of apple pie.

kitsune_• 3 years ago

OpenAI Inc.'s mission in their filings:

"OpenAIs goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. We think that artificial intelligence technology will help shape the 21st century, and we want to help the world build safe AI technology and ensure that AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Were trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way."

yodsanklai2• 3 years ago

different set of information

and different incentives.

achrono2• 3 years ago

No, if they had vastly different information, and if it was on the right side of their own stated purpose & values, they would have behaved very differently. This kind of equivocation hinders the way more important questions such as: just what the heck is Larry Summers doing on that board?

__loam4• 3 years ago

They have a different set of incentives. If I were them I would have done the same thing, Altman is going to make them all fucking rich. Not sure if that will benefit humanity though.

JCM9• 3 years ago

When a politician wins with 98% of the vote do you A) think that person must be an incredible leader , or B) think something else is going on?

Only time will tell if this was a good or bad outcome, but for now the damage is done and OpenAI has a lot of trust rebuilding to do to shake off the reputation that it now has after this circus.

kiba• 3 years ago

They could just reach different conclusion based on their values. OpenAI doesn't seem to be remotely serious about preventing the misuse of AI.

kmlevitt11• 3 years ago

I think this outcome was actually much more favorable to D'Angelo's faction than people realize. The truth is before this Sam was basically running circles around the board and doing whatever he wanted on the profit side- that's what was pissing them off so much in the first place. He was even trying to depose board members who were openly critical of open AI's practices.

From here on out there is going to be far more media scrutiny on who gets picked as a board member, where they stand on the company's policies, and just how independent they really are. Sam, Greg and even Ilya are off the board altogether. Whoever they can all agree on to fill the remaining seats, Sam is going to have to be a lot more subservient to them to keep the peace.

bugglebeetle3• 3 years ago

Sam, Greg and even Ilya are off the board altogether. Whoever they can all agree on to fill the remaining seats, Sam is going to have to be a lot more subservient to them to keep the peace.

The existing board is just a seat-warming body until Altman and Microsoft can stack it with favorables to their (and the U.S. Government’s) interests. The naïveté from the NPO faction was believing they’d be able to develop these capacities outside the strict control of the military industrial complex when AI has been established as part of the new Cold War with China.

eviks2• 3 years ago

Doesn't make sense that after such a broad board capitulation the next one will have any power, and media scrutiny isn't a powerful governance mechanism

jatins6• 3 years ago

He was even trying to depose board members who were openly critical of open AI's practices.

Was there any concrete criticism in the paper that was written by that board member? (Genuinely asking, not a leading question)

moonsu• 3 years ago

The truth is before this Sam was basically running circles around the board and doing whatever he wanted on the profit side- that's what was pissing them off so much in the first place. He was even trying to depose board members who were openly critical of open AI's practices.

Do you have a source for this?

cyanydeez20• 3 years ago

Eh, Larry Summers is on this board. That means they're now going to protect business interests.

OpenAI is now just a tool used by Businesses. And they dont have a good history of benefitting humanity recently.

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

Media >= employees? Media >= Sam? I don't think media has any role on oversight or governance.

I think Sam came out the winner. He gets to pick his board. He gets to narrow his employees. If anything, this sets him up for dictatorship. The only other overseers are the investors. In that case, Microsoft came out holding a leash. No MS, means no Sam, which also means employees have no say.

So it is more like MS > Sam > employees. MS+Sam > rest of investors.

karmasimida7• 3 years ago

It is not groupthink it is comradery.

For me, the whole thing is just human struggle. It is about fighting for people they love and care, against some people they dislike or indifferent to.

Rastonbury2• 3 years ago

Nah, I too will threaten to sign a petition to quit if I could save my RSUs/PPUs from evaporating. Organizational goals be damned (or is it extinction level risk be damned?)

clnq• 3 years ago

OpenAI is in fact not open

This meme was already dead before the recent events. Whatever the company was doing, you could say it wasn’t open enough.

a real disruptor must be brewing somewhere unnoticed, for now

Why pretend OpenAI hasn’t just disrupted our way of life with GPTs in the last two years? It has been the most high profile tech innovator recently.

OpenAI does not have in its DNA to win

This is so vague. What does it not have in its… fundamentals? And what is to “win”? This statement seems like just generic unhappiness without stating anything clearly. By most measures, they are winning. They have the best commercial LLM and continue to innovate, they have partnered with Microsoft heavily, and they have so far received very good funding.

absrec• 3 years ago

They really need to drive down the amount of computation needed. The dependence on Microsoft is because of the monstrous computation requirements that will require many paid users to break even.

Leaving the economic side even to make the tech 'greener' will be a challenge. OpenAI will win if they focus on making the models less compute intensive but it could be dangerous for them if they can't.

I guess the OP's brewing disruptor is some locally runnable Llama type model that does 80% of what ChatGPT does at a fraction of the cost.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

Why pretend OpenAI hasn’t just disrupted our way of life with GPTs in the last two years?

It hasn't disrupted mine in any way. It may do that in the future, but the future isn't here yet.

robot• 3 years ago

there is a lot of money made (100m paid users?) by everyone and momentum so groupthink is forced to occur kind of.

android521• 3 years ago

right . why don't you creat a chatgpt like innovation or even AGI and do things your way? So many people just know how to complain on what other people build and forget that no one is stopping you from innovating the way you like it.

eloisant• 3 years ago

Yes they need to change their name. Having "Open" in their name is just a big marketing lie.

faeriechangling• 3 years ago

They made GPT4 and you think they clearly have little critical thinking? That’s some big talk you’re talking.

tonyedgecombe• 3 years ago

That's the curse of specialisation. You can be really smart in one area and completely unaware in others. This industry is full of people with deep technical knowledge but little in the way of social skills.

jjallen• 3 years ago

I think what this saga has shown is that no one controls OpenAI definitively. Is Microsoft did this wouldn’t have happened in the first place don’t you think?

And if Sam controlled it it also wouldn’t have.

sashank_15092• 3 years ago

Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there’s clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI’s employees either.

Very harsh words for some of the highest paid smartest people on the planet. The employees built GPT-4 the most advanced AI on the planet, what did you build? Do you still claim they’re more deficient in critical thinking compared to you.

wiz21c2• 3 years ago

I think the choice they had to make was: either building one of the top AI on earth under total control of OpenAI investors (and most likely the project of their life) either do nothing.

So they bowed.

Kathula2• 3 years ago

Being smart does not equate to being critical, or going against group think.

Cacti4• 3 years ago

please don’t troll HN

jetsetk2• 3 years ago

There is no comparison to himself in the previous comment. Also, did you measure their IQ to put them on such a pedestal? There are lots of examples for people being great in their niche they invested thousands of hours in, while being total failures in other areas. You could see that with Mr. Sutskever over the weekend. He must be excellent in ML as he dedicated his life to researching this field of knowledge, but he lacks practice in critical thinking in management contexts.

dncornholio• 3 years ago

Disappointing? What has OpenAI done to you? We don't even know what happened.

Everything has been pure speculation. I would curb my judgement if I were you, until we actually know what happened.

caskstrength• 3 years ago

Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

I'm sure has been a lot of critical thinking going on. I would venture a guess that employees decided that Sam's approach is much more favorable for the price of their options than the original mission of the non-profit entity.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Open Group, the home of UNIX standards never was that open.

_giorgio_3• 3 years ago

The alternative was that all OpenAI employees started to work directly for MSFT, as they said in the letter signed by 95% of them.

jampekka5• 3 years ago

The initial board consists entirely of swamp lizards. I really hope they mess up as you predict.

jatins6• 3 years ago

Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

If the "other side" (board) had put up a SINGLE convincing argument on why Sam had to go maybe the employees would have not supported Sam unequivocally.

But, atleast as an outsider, we heard nothing that suggests board had reasons to remove Sam other than "the vibes were off"

Can you really accuse the employees of groupthink when the other side is so weak?

serial_dev5• 3 years ago

Yes, the original letter had (for an official letter) quite some serious allegations, insinuations. If after a week, they decided not to back up their claims, I'm not sure there is anything big coming.

On the other hand, if they had some serious concerns, serious enough to fire the CEO in such a disgraceful way, I don't understand why they don't stick to their guns, and explain themselves. If you think OpenAI under Sam's leadership is going to destroy humanity, I don't understand how they (e.g. Ilya) reverted their opinions after a day or two.

ethanbond11• 3 years ago

OpenAI is a private company and not obligated nor is it generally advised for them to comment publicly on why people are fired. I know that having a public explanation would be useful for the plot development of everyone’s favorite little soap opera, but it makes pretty much zero sense and doesn’t lend credence to any position whatsoever.

conception• 3 years ago

My guess is that the arguments are something along the lines of “OpenAIs current products are already causing harm or on the path to do so” or something similar damaging to the products. Something they are afraid of both having continue to move forward on and to having to communicate as it would damage the brand. Like “We already have reports of several hundred people killing themselves because of ChatGPT responses…” and everyone would say, “Oh that makes… wait what??”

kromem• 3 years ago

I agree with both the commenter above you and you.

Yes, you are right that the board had weak sauce reasoning for the firing (giving two teams the same project!?!).

That said, the other commenter is right that this is the beginning of the end.

One of the interesting things over the past few years watching the development of AI has been that in parallel to the demonstration of the limitations of neural networks has been many demonstrations of the limitations of human thinking and psychology.

Altman just got given a blank check and crowned as king of OpenAI. And whatever opposition he faced internally just lost all its footing.

That's a terrible recipe for long term success.

Whatever the reasons for the firing, this outcome is going to completely screw their long term prospects, as no matter how wonderful a leader someone is, losing the reality check of empowered opposition results in terrible decisions being made unchecked.

He's going to double down on chat interfaces because that's been their unexpected bread and butter up until the point they get lapped by companies with broader product vision, and whatever elements at OpenAI shared that broader vision are going to get steamrolled now that he's been given an unconditional green light until they jump ship over the next 18 months to work elsewhere.

ssnistfajen15• 3 years ago

The board never gave a believable explanation to justify firing Altman. So the staff simply made the sensible choice of following Altman. This isn't about critical thinking because there was nothing to think about.

drexlspivey• 3 years ago

You would expect the company that owns 49% of the shares to have some input in firing the CEO, why is that disappointing? If they had more control this shitshow would never have happened.

jampekka5• 3 years ago

MS doesn't own any part of OpenAI, Inc. In fact nobody really owns it. That was the whole point.

lordnacho3• 3 years ago

Is it really a failure of critical thinking? The employees know what position is popular, so even people who are mostly against the go-fast strategy can see that they get to work on this groundbreaking thing only if they toe the line.

It's also not surprising that people who are near the SV culture will think that AGI needs money to get developed, and that money in general is useful for the kind of business they are running. And that it's a business, not a charity.

I mean if OpenAI had been born in the Soviet Union or Scandinavia, maybe people would have somewhat different values, it's hard to know. But a thing that is founded by the posterboys for modern SV, it's gotta lean towards "money is mostly good".

qwytw2• 3 years ago

Soviet Union

Or medieval Spain? About as likely... The Soviets weren't even able to get the factory floors clean enough to consistently manufacture the 8086 10 years after it was already outdated.

maybe people would have somewhat different values, it's hard to know. But a thing that is founded by the posterboys for modern SV, it's gotta lean towards "money is mostly good".

Unfortunately not other system besides capitalism has enabled consistent technological progress for 200+ years. Turns out you need to pool money and resources to achieve things ..

robertlagrant6• 3 years ago

I mean if OpenAI had been born in the Soviet Union or Scandinavia, maybe people would have somewhat different values, it's hard to know.

Or in Arthurian times. Very different values.

irthomasthomas2• 3 years ago

It is a shame that we lost the ability to hold such companies to account (for now). But given the range of possibilities laid out before us, this is the better outcome. GPT-4 has increased my knowledge, my confidence, and my pleasure in learning and hacking. And perhaps it's relatives will fuel a revolution.

Reminds me of a quote: "A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

zx80803• 3 years ago

Come on, it was just a preparation for the upcoming IPO. Free ads in all news and TV.

low_tech_love3• 3 years ago

Plot twist: Sam posts that there is no agreement and that OpenAI is delusional.

saiya-jin• 3 years ago

All this just tells for the 100th time that this area desperately needs some regulation. I don't know the form, but even if we have 1% of skynet, heck even 0.01% its simply too high and we still have full control.

We see most powerful people are in it for the money and power ego trip, and literally nothing else. Pesky morals be damned. Which may be acceptable for some ad business but here stakes are potentially everything and we have no clue what actual % the risk is.

Its to me very similar to all naivety particle scientists expressed in its early days and then reality check of realpolitik and messed up humans in power when bombs were done, used and then hundred thousand more were produced.

lvl102• 3 years ago

Ultimately, the openness that we all wish for must come from _underlying_ data. The know-how and “secret sauce” were never going to be open. And it’s not as profound as we think it is inside that black box.

So who holds all the data in closed silos? Google and Facebook. We may have already lost the battle on achieving “open and fair” AI paradigm long time ago.

madeofpalk3• 3 years ago

Regardless of whether you feel like Altman was rushing OpenAI too fast, wasn’t open enough, and was being too commercial, the last few days demonstrated conclusively that the board is erratic and unstable and unfit to manage OpenAI.

Their actions was the complete opposite of open. Rather than, I don’t know, being open and talking to the CEO to share concerns and change the company, they just threw a tantrum and fired him.

ethanbond11• 3 years ago

They fired him (you don’t know the backstory) and published a press release and then Sam was seen back in the offices. Prior to the reinstatement (today), there was nothing except HN hysteria and media conjecture that made the board look extremely unstable.

hyperthesis• 3 years ago

What could disrupt OpenAI is a dramatic change in market, perhaps enabled by a change in technology. But if it's the same customers in the same market, they will buy or duplicate any tech advance; and if it's a sufficiently similar market, they will pivot.

seydor7• 3 years ago

OpenAI is in fact not open

that ship sailed long ago , no?

But i agree that the company seems less trustworthy now, like it's too CEO-centered

rinze• 3 years ago

Matt Levine's "slightly annotated diagram" in one of his latest newsletters tells the story quite well, I think: https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/42469

mdekkers• 3 years ago

Very disappointing outcome indeed. Larry Summers is the Architect of the modern Russian Oligarchy[1] and responsible for an incredible amount of human suffering as well as gross financial disparity both in the USA as well as the rest of the world.

Not someone I would like to see running the world’s leading AI company

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...

Edit: also https://prospect.org/economy/falling-upward-larry-summers/

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how...

And finally https://cepr.net/can-we-blame-larry-summers-for-the-collapse...

oblio• 3 years ago

One thing I'm not sure I understand... what's OpenAI's business model? In my eyes, GPT & co is, just like Dropbox, just a feature. It's not a product.

And just like Dropbox, in the end, what disruption? GPT will just be a checkbox for products others build. Cool tech, but not a full product.

Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong.

simplyinfinity• 3 years ago

AI As a Service ( AAaS ), Then the Marketplace of GPTs, and it will become the place to get your AI features from.

nathanasmith3• 3 years ago

The board couldn't even clearly articulate why they fired Sam in the first place. There was a departure from critical thinking but I don't think it was on the part of the employees.

ptero• 3 years ago

I do not see an overwhelming groupthink. I see a perfectly rational (and not in any way evil) reaction to a complete mess created by the board.

Most are doing the work they love and four people almost destroy it and cannot even explain why they did it. If I were working at the company that did this I would sign, too. And follow through on the threat of leaving if it comes to that.

auggierose6• 3 years ago

I find the outcome very satisfying. The OpenAI API is here to stay and grow, and I can build software on top of it. Hopefully other players will open up their APIs soon as well, so that there is a reasonable choice.

jetsetk2• 3 years ago

Not a given that it is here to stay and grow after the company showed itself in such a chaotic state. Also, they need a profitable product - it is not like they are selling Iphones and such..

ChildOfChaos• 3 years ago

I would say this is a great outcome.

Any other outcome would have split OpenAI quite dramatically and put them back massively.

Big assumption to say 'effectively controlled by Microsoft' when Microsoft might have been quite happy for the other option and for them to poach a lot of staff.

wslh• 3 years ago

I wonder if beyond the groupthinking we are seeing at least a more heterogeneous composition: a mix of people that includes business, pure research, engineering, and kind of spirituality-semireligion around [G]AI.

bambax2• 3 years ago

OpenAI is in fact not open

One wonders what will happen with Emet Shear's "investigation" in the process that lead to Sam's outing [0]. Was it even allowed to start?

[0] https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275

smegger0013• 3 years ago

Who know but they will probably change their minds again before the holiday and CEO musical chairs game will continue

chriskanan• 3 years ago

While I certainly agree that OpenAI isn't open and is effectively controlled by Microsoft, I'm not following the "groupthink" claims based on what just happened. If I'd been given the very fishy and vague reasons that it sounds like their staff were given, I think any rational person would be highly suspicious of the board, especially since some believe in fringe ideas, have COIs, or can be perceived as being jealous that they aren't the "face" of OpenAI.

Moto7451• 3 years ago

OpenAI is more open than my company’s AI teams, and that is even from my own insider relationship. As far as commercial relationships are concerned, I’d say they’re hitting the mark.

dagaci2• 3 years ago

In this case the fate of OpenAI was in fact heavily controlled by its employees. They voted with their employment. Microsoft gave them an assured optional destination.

logicchains7• 3 years ago

Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

The OpenAI employees overwhelmingly rejected the groupthink of the Effective Altruism cult.

andy99• 3 years ago

Whatever OpenAI started as, a week ago it was a company with the best general purpose LLM, more on the way, and consumer+business products with millions of users. And they were still investing very heavily in research. I'm glad that company may survive. If there's room in the world for a more disruptive research focused AI company that can find sustainable funding, even better.

cyanydeez20• 3 years ago

It's now clearly a Business oriented product and the non-profit portion is a marketing tactic to avoid scrutiny.

belter2• 3 years ago

Outcome? You mean OpenAI wakes up with no memories of the night before, finding their suite trashed, a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and the groom missing and the story will end here?

I just renewed by HN subscription to be able to see Season 2!

rafaelero• 3 years ago

Which critical thinking could they exercise if no believable reasons were given for this whole mess? Maybe it's you who need to more carefully assess this situation.

coldtea2• 3 years ago

OpenAI does not have in its DNA to win, they're too short-sighted and reactive.

What does that even mean?

In any case, it's not OpenAI, it's Microsoft, and it has a long history of winning and bouncing back.

martingoodson• 3 years ago

It's not about critical thinking: the employees were about to sell up to $1B of shares to thrive capital. This debacle has derailed that.

buro9• 3 years ago

in the end, maybe Sam was the instigator, the board tried to defend (and failed) and what we just witnessed from afar was just a power play to change the structure of OpenAI (or at least the outcome for Sam and many others) towards profit rather than non-profit.

we'll all likely never know what truly happened, but it's a shame that the board has lost their last remnant of some diversity and at the moment appears to be composed of rich Western white males... even if they rushed for profit, I'd have more faith in the potential upside what could be a sea change in the World, if those involved reflected more experiences than are currently gathered at that table.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

The process has conclusively confirmed that OpenAI is in fact not open and that it is effectively controlled by Microsoft.

I'd say the lack of a narrative from the board, general incompetence with how it was handled, the employees quitting and the employee letter played their parts too.

But even if it was Microsoft who made this happen: that's what happens when you have a major investor. If you don't want their influence, don't take their money.

cyanydeez20• 3 years ago

It definitely seems like another branch on the IT savior complex, where the prior branch was crypto.

mrkramer• 3 years ago

Disappointing outcome. The process has conclusively confirmed that OpenAI is in fact not open and that it is effectively controlled by Microsoft. Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

Why was his role as a CEO even challenged?

It might not seem like the case right now, but I think the real disruption is just about to begin. OpenAI does not have in its DNA to win, they're too short-sighted and reactive. Big techs will have incredible distribution power but a real disruptor must be brewing somewhere unnoticed, for now.

Always remember; Google wasn't the first search engine nor iPhone the first smartphone. First-movers bring innovation and trend not market dominance.

NicoJuicy• 3 years ago

that it is effectively controlled by Microsoft

No it's not. Microsoft didn't knew about this till minutes before the press release.

Investors are free to protest decisions against their principles and people are free to move away from their current company.

JSavageOne3• 3 years ago

The Hacker News comments section has really gone to shit.

People here used to back up their bold claims with arguments.

framapotari9• 3 years ago

It is quite amazing how many people know enough to pass wide judgment on hundreds of people because... they just know. Feel it in their gut.

caturopath• 3 years ago

it is effectively controlled by Microsoft

I don't consider this confirmed. Microsoft brought an enormous amount of money and other power to the table, and their role was certainly big, but it is far from clear to me that they held all or most of the power that was wielded.

iowemoretohim4• 3 years ago

How can you without access to the information that actual employees had of the situation say "there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees"?

mrangle5• 3 years ago

groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

So the type of employee that would get hired at OpenAi isn't likely to be skilled at critical thinking? That's doubtful. It looks to me like you dislike how things played out, gathered together some mean adjectives and "groupthink", and ended with a pessimistic prediction for their trajectry as punishment. One is left to wonder what OAI's disruptor outlook would be if the outcome of the current situation had been more pleasing.

idrisser• 3 years ago

Take a look at https://kyutai.org/ that launched last week

tnel77• 3 years ago

Buy Microsoft stock. Got it.

kenjackson• 3 years ago

Microsoft played almost no role in the process except to be a place for Sam and team to land.

What the process did shoe is if you plan to oust a popular CEO with a thriving company, you should actually have a good reason for it. It’s amazing how little thought seemingly went into it for them.

chollida1• 3 years ago

The process has conclusively confirmed that OpenAI is in fact not open and that it is effectively controlled by Microsoft.

What leads you to make such a definitive statement? To me the process shows that Microsoft has no pull in OpenAI.

baxtr• 3 years ago

Based on the spectacular drama we were allowed to observe:

For a company at the forefront of AI it’s actually very, very human.

3cats-in-a-coat3• 3 years ago

Let me guess. The only valid outcome for you would've been that they disband in order to prevent opening a portal to the cosmic AGI Cthulhu.

Frankly these EA & e/acc cults are starting to get on my nerves.

enoch_r• 3 years ago

the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either

I suspect incentives play a huge role here. OAI employees are compensated with stock in the for-profit arm of the company. It's obvious that the board's actions put the value of that stock in extreme jeopardy (which, given the corporate structure, is theoretically completely fine! the whole point of the corporate structure is that the nonprofit board has the power to say "yikes, we've developed an unsafe superintelligence, burn down the building and destroy the company now").

I think it's natural for employees to be extremely angry with a board decision that probably cost them >$1M each.

Aurornis2• 3 years ago

Disappointing outcome.

The employees of a tech company banded together to get what they wanted, force a leadership change, evict the leaders they disagreed with, secure the return of the leadership they wanted, and restored the value of their hard-earned equity.

This certainly isn’t a disappointing outcome for the employees! I thought HN would be ecstatic about tech employees banding together to force action in their favor, but the comments here are surprisingly negative.

neves• 3 years ago

Any good summary of the OpenAI imbroglio? I know it has a strange corporation, with part non profit and part for profit. I don't follow it closely but would like a quick read explaining.

anandrm• 3 years ago

I have been working for various software companies at different capacities. Never did i see 90%+ employees care about their CEO . In a small 10 member startup maybe its true. Are there any OpenAI employees here to confirm that .. their CEO really matters ... I mean how many employee revolted when Steve Jobs was fired .. Do Microsoft and Google employees really care ?

dalbasal3• 3 years ago

Yes...

Investors and executives.. everyone in 2023 is hyper focused on "Thiel Monopoly."

Platform, moat, aggregation theory, network effects, first mover advantages.. all those ways of thinking about it.

There's no point in being bing to Google's AdWords... So the big question is pathway to being the adWords. "Winning." That's the paradigm. This is where big returns will be.

However.. we should always remember, but the future is harder to see from the past. Post fact analysis, can often make things seem a lot simpler and more inevitable than they ever were.

It's not clear what a winner even is here. What are the bottlenecks to be controlled. What are the business models, revenue sources. What represents the "LLM Google," America online, Yahoo or a 90s dumb pipe.

FYIW I think all the big text have powerful plays available.. including keeping powder dry.

No doubt that proximity to openAI, control, influence, access to IP.. all strategic assets. That's why they're all invested an involved in the consortium.

That said assets or not strategies. It's hard to have strategies when strategic goals are unclear.

You can nominate a strategic goal from here, try to stay upstream, make exploratory investments and bets... There is no rush for the prize, unless the price is known.

Obviously, I'm assuming the prixe is not AGI and a solution to everything... That kind of abstraction is useful, but I do not think it's operative.

It's not a race currently, to see who's R&D lab turns on the first super intelligent consciousness.

Assuming I'm correct on that, we really have no idea which applications LLM capabilities companies are actually competing for.

scarface_742• 3 years ago

So you didn’t realize that when Microsoft both gained a 49% interest and was subsidizing compute?

Unless they had something in their “DNA” that allowed them to build enough compute and pay their employees, they were never going to “win” without a mass infusion of cash and only three companies had enough compute and revenue to throw at them and only two companies had relationships with big enterprise and compute - Amazon and Microsoft.

himaraya6• 3 years ago

Hard to say without seeing how the two new board members lean.

raincole• 3 years ago

Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

"Because someone acts differently than I expected, they must lacks of critical thinking."

Are you an insider? If not, have you considered that perhaps OpenAI employees are more informed about the situation than you?

Zpalmtree5• 3 years ago

Seems like that's a good thing when the goals of the open faction is to slow down development lol, how would that make OpenAI win?

fullshark• 3 years ago

I think Microsoft's deep pockets, computing resources, their head start, and 50%+ employees not quitting is more important to the company's chances at success than your assessment they have the "wrong DNA."

The idea that the marketplace is a meritocracy of some kind where whatever an individual deems as "merit" wins is just proven to be nonsense time and time again.

flappyeagle3• 3 years ago

Amazing outcome. Empty shirts folded. People who get stuff done persevere.

segasaturn• 3 years ago

a real disruptor must be brewing somewhere unnoticed, for now.

Anthropic.

jacquesm5• 3 years ago

The process has conclusively confirmed that OpenAI is in fact not open and that it is effectively controlled by Microsoft.

This was said loud and clear when Microsoft joined in the first place but there were no takers.

dbuser99• 3 years ago

Once again the house (the VCs) wins. I for one don’t trust openAI for one bit after this soap opera

laserlight• 3 years ago

With Sam coming back as CEO, hasn't OpenAI board proven that it has lost its function? Regardless of who is in the board, they won't be able to exercise one of the most fundamental of their rights, firing the CEO, because Sam has proven that he is unfireable. Now, Sam can do however he pleases, whether it is lying, not reporting, etc. To be clear, I don't claim that Sam did, or will, lie, or misbehave.

random_cynic2• 3 years ago

No that hasn't at all been the case. The board acted like the most incompetent group of individuals who've even handed any responsibility. If they went through due process, notified their employees and investors, and put out a statement of why they're firing the CEO instead of doing it over a 15 min Google meet and then going completely silent, none of this outrage would have taken place.

maxlin2• 3 years ago

Exactly. 3 CEO switches in a week is ridiculous

squigz• 3 years ago

The board acted like the most incompetent group of individuals who've even handed any responsibility.

This is overly dramatic, but I suppose that's par for this round.

none of this outrage would have taken place.

Yeah... I highly doubt this, personally. I'm sure the outrage would have been similar, as HN's current favorite CEO was fired.

braiamp• 3 years ago

If they went through due process, notified their employees and investors, and put out a statement of why they're firing the CEO

Did you read the bylaws? They have no responsibility to do any of that.

OnAYDIN• 3 years ago

Actually the board may not have acted in most professional way but in due process they kind of proved Sam Altman is unfireable for sure, even if they didn't intend to.

They did notify everyone. They did it after firing which is within their rights. They may also choose to stay silent if there is legitimate reason for it such as making the reasons known may harm the organization even more. This is speculation obviously.

In any case they didn't omit doing anything they need to and they didn't exercise a power they didn't have. The end result is that the board they choose will be impotent at the moment, for sure.

zerohalo8• 3 years ago

none of this outrage would have taken place.

most certainly would have still taken place; no one cares about how it was done; what they care about it being able to make $$; and it was clearly going to not be as heavily prioritized without Altman (which is why MSFT embraced him and his engineers almost immediately).

notified their employees and investors they did notify their employees; they have fiduciary duty to investors as a nonprofit.

patcon2• 3 years ago

The board acted like the most incompetent group of individuals who've eve[r been] handed any responsibility.

This whole conversation has been full of appeals to authority. Just because us tech people don't know some of these names and their accomplishments, we talk about them being "weak" members. The more I learn, the more I think this board was full of smart ppl who didn't play business politics well (and that's ok by me, as business politics isn't supposed to be something they have to deal with).

Their lack of entanglements makes them stronger members, in my perspective. Their miscalculation was in how broken the system is in which they were undermined. And you and I are part of that brokenness even in how we talk about it here

altpaddle6• 3 years ago

Time will tell. Hopefully the new board will still be mostly independent of Sam/MSFT/VC influence. I really hope they continue as an org that tries its best to uphold their charter vs just being another startup.

kmlevitt11• 3 years ago

This is a better deal for the board and a worse one for Sam than people realize. Sam and Greg and even Ilya are both off the board, D'Angelo gets to stay on despite his outrageous actions, and he gets veto power over who the new board members will be and a big say in who gets voted on to the board next.

Everybody's guard is going to be up around Sam from now on. He'll have much less leverage over this board than he did over the previous one (before the other three of nine quit). I think eventually he will prevail because he has the charm and social skills to win over the other independent members. But he will have to reign in his own behavior a lot in order to keep them on his side versus D'Angelo

JSavageOne3• 3 years ago

I'd be shocked if D'Angelo doesn't get kicked off. Even before this debacle his AI competitor app poe.com is an obvious conflict of interest with OpenAI.

jnwatson2• 3 years ago

This board's sole job is to pick the new board. The new board will have Sam.

madeofpalk3• 3 years ago

(Sam Altman was never on the board to begin with)

low_tech_love3• 3 years ago

Yes, but on the other hand, this whole thing has shown that OpenAI is not running smooth anymore, and probably never will again. You can't cut the head of the snake then attach it back later and expect it to move on slithering. Even if Sam stays, he won't be able to just do whatever he wants because in an organization as complex as OpenAI, there are thousands of unwritten rules and relationships and hidden processes that need to go smooth without the CEO's direct intervention (the CEO cannot be everywhere all the time). So, what this says to me (Sam being re-hired) is that the future OpenAI is now a watered-down, mere shadow of its former self.

I personally think it's weird if he really settles back in, especially given the other guys who resigned after the fact. There must be lots of other super exciting new things for him to do out there, and some pretty amazing leadership job offers from other companies. I'm not saying OpenAI will die out or anything, but surely it has shown a weak side.

throwuwu5• 3 years ago

This couldn’t be more wrong. The big thing we learned from this episode is that Sam and Greg have the loyalty and respect of almost every single employee at OpenAI. Morale is high and they’re ready to fight for what they believe in. They didn’t “cut the head off” and the only snake here is D’Angelo, he tried to kill OpenAI and failed miserably. Now he appears to be desperately trying to hold on to some semblance of power by agreeing to Sam and Greg coming back instead of losing all control with the whole team joining Microsoft.

lysecret3• 3 years ago

No the board is just one instance. It doesn’t and shouldn’t have absolute power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

There ist the board the investors the employees the senior management.

All other parties aligned against it and thus it couldn’t act. If only Sam would have rebelled. Or even just Sam and the investors (without the employees) nothing would have happened.

strikelaserclaw3• 3 years ago

The board can still fire sam provided they get all the key stakeholders onboard with that firing. It made no sense to fire someone doing a good job at their role without any justification, that seems to have been the key issue. Ultimately, we all know this non profit thing is for show and will never work out.

stetrain4• 3 years ago

Imagine if the board of Apple fired Tim Cook with no warning right after he went on stage and announced their new developer platform updates for the year alongside record growth and sales, refused to elaborate as to the reasons or provide any useful communications to investors over several days, and replaced their first interim CEO with another interim CEO from a completely different kind of business in that same weekend.

If you don't think there would be a shareholder revolt against the board, for simply exercising their most fundamental right to fire the CEO, I think you're missing part the picture.

hackernewds4• 3 years ago

It is prudent to recall that enhancing shareholder value and delivering record growth and sales are NOT the mission of the company or Board. But now it appears that it will have to be.

jacquesm5• 3 years ago

You forgot: and offered the company for a bag of peanuts to Microsoft.

eksapsy4• 3 years ago

no but the people like the developers, clients, government etc. have also the right to exercise their revolt against decisions they don't like as well. don't you think?

like, you get me, the board of directors is not the only actual power within a company, and that was proven by the whole scandal of Sam being discarded/fired that was made by the developers themselves. they also have the right to exercise their right to just not work at this company without the leader they may had liked.

mkagenius• 3 years ago

None of the theories by HNers on day 1 of this drama was right - not a single one and it had 1 million comments. So, lets not guess anymore and just sit back.

baby2• 3 years ago

How did you get there? The board did fire him, they exercised their right.

eksapsy4• 3 years ago

because people like the developers within the company did not like that decision and its also within their right to disagree with the board's decision and not to want to work under a different leadership. They're not slaves, they're employees who rented their time for a specific purpose under a specific leader.

As it's within the board's rights to hire or fire people like Sam or the developers.

Quentincestino2• 3 years ago

OpenAI workers has shown their plain support to their CEO by threatening to follow him wherever he wants, I personaly think their collective judgement on him is worth more than any rumors

BOOSTERHIDROGEN• 3 years ago

Money indeed is worth more, also the only thing that is easy to measure during crisis.

6gvONxR4sf7o6• 3 years ago

Looks like all the naysayers from the original “were making a for-profit but it won’t change us” post ended up correct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359928

jurgenaut23• 3 years ago

I predict this isn't the last episode of this amazing soap opera.

kumarvvr3• 3 years ago

So, the company has successfully trashed its goals and values, and is finally focused on making money?

kumarvvr3• 3 years ago

I find it worrying that Elon Musk is totally silent through this whole drama.

iamflimflam13• 3 years ago

He's been sending out the occasional tweet - to be honest I get the impression that like the rest of us, he's just been watching with a big tub of popcorn...

doyouevensunbro• 3 years ago

We’re at ~250k tech industry layoffs this year and a single CEO drama dominates the media because “AI”.

quickthrower26• 3 years ago

Because it is a scoop

justanotherjoe• 3 years ago

Yeah people should really stand up for their peer more. Who knew that would work. Sam wouldn't have been back if it not for Brockman and several scientists standing up for him.

ah76513• 3 years ago

"Context on the negotiations to bring Sam back as CEO of OpenAI:

The biggest sticking point was Sam being on the board. Ultimately, he conceded to not being on the board, at least initially, to close the deal. The hope/expectation is that he will end up on the board eventually."

(https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727216818648134101)

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

I've lost track of everything.

system25• 3 years ago

Rich people drama. For us peasants, nothing changed.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

This is a triumph of labor against management in sheep's garb. Workers united were able to force an outcome they desired to preserve an organization they loved while sweeping aside a board that would prefer to destroy it.

didip• 3 years ago

Let’s be real here. At the end of the day, what matters more is commercial success and a big payout.

AGI is still very far away and the fear mongering is nothing but PR stunt.

But the devs need their big payout now. Which explains the mutiny.

The “safety” board of directors drank their own koolaid a bit too much.

mkii3• 3 years ago

You can have unsafe AI without AGI.

CaptainFever• 3 years ago

Of course, it depends on what safety means. Currently it seems to just be a pretext for prudishness and regulation.

kuchenbecker2• 3 years ago

What will this unsafe AI do?

s-xyz• 3 years ago

All systems operational again https://status.openai.com/

tomalbrc• 3 years ago

I really don't care who the CEO/CTO/CFO of any company is. Why is this whole thing blowing up that much on ycombinator?

kaoD• 3 years ago

It's nerd(ier) Game of Thrones in real life. Pretty entertaining.

Solvency2• 3 years ago

Much more like Succession. But again. Nerdier.

meitham2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the “great man theory” is still going strong in the 21st century. Just like Steve Jobs has invented the iPhone people believe he invented GPT!

dalbasal3• 3 years ago

Is the alternative theory that the ownership, control and leadership of OpenAI is immaterial?

jazzyjackson2• 3 years ago

It wouldn't be interesting if one CEO got fired and replaced, but the fact that there's a different CEO every couple of days and no one knows what will happen next. The uncertainty is addictive, not to mention the scale of self-destruction. See also: trainwrecks.

_Algernon_4• 3 years ago

What a farce

globalise83• 3 years ago

This is our board, they provide oversight and ensure alignment with the mission. If you don't like them, we have others.

dcreater2• 3 years ago

Bit of an aside, but the rationality and moral compass shown by HN has restored my faith after having lost it thanks to r/ChatGPT

rurban2• 3 years ago

This was expected. So they booted Ilya (my main culprit), Helen Toner (expected, favoriting Anthropic) and Tasha McCauly. This seems to have been their vote majority. Not D'Angelo. Interesting

simoneblv• 3 years ago

How does Microsoft will come out from this? Satya already made a big announcement on having Sam and everyone else in.

timetraveller26• 3 years ago

Back to work I guess

dcreater2• 3 years ago

So these nutjob teenagers are going to create AGI? We are fucked if they actually succeed

upupupandaway3• 3 years ago

In a different thread I commented how surprised I was that Emmett Shear accepted the job of interim CEO, to some criticism that my opinion was “silly”. This is why he should have stayed miles away from this whole mess. There was no winning scenario for him: stay CEO and lose 95% of the employees, or get ignored by a triumphant return of Sam Altman.

houston_Euler• 3 years ago

After learning earlier about Sam Altman's long-con at Reddit, I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone suggest that Emmett Shear accepted the job in order to help get Sam back into the company.

They were both members of the inaugural class of Y-Combinator, and all of Shear's published actions since accepting the role (like demanding evidence of Sam' wrongdoing) seem to have helped Sam return to his role.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that he did win, in that he might have accomplished exactly what he wanted when he accepted the role.

stephenitis• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate on the long con?

jl2718• 3 years ago

Are the Microsoft job offers at the same compensation still on the table?

righthand2• 3 years ago

What's interesting to me is that during this time Meta and OpenAI have eliminated their AI ethics members/teams but are still preaching about how it matters. No one has given any details beyond grand statements about it's importance on what these ethical AIs do. Everyone has secured their payday though.

swatcoder2• 3 years ago

I think those changes (and this shakeup) are the start of the industry grounding its expectations for this technology. I think a lot of product and finance people, and many but not all researchers, are seeing the current batch of generative AI ideas as ripe to make do things and see the pseudo-religious safety/ethics communities as not directly relevant to that work.

So you let your product teams figure out how the brand needs to be protected and the workflow needs to be shaped, like always, and you don't defer to some outside department full of beatniks in berets or whatever.

righthand2• 3 years ago

This is the abandoning of ethics. No one moving forward is going to be thinking about it and they've clearly signaled it's about making money. People that have issues with it will just not use the products or be hypocrites about using the products. There is nothing to push up against anymore, but I don't think the recent events are initiator. People were already letting go of ethics the moment they continued using it because the tech was so cool. The parting of the ethical peoples is just the final nail. There is no reason to remove these ethical teams if they believe in ethics, downsize maybe but not dedicating a human to at least researching the ethical outcomes sure isn't very good for humanity ethics concerns.

olgias• 3 years ago

Where Ilya will go next then? I assume he won't stay at OpenAI for too long after all this poop-show.

xeckr• 3 years ago

What a ride.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Keeping Adam? I thought he’s the likely instigator

cft3• 3 years ago

Ilya won't stick around for long probably. It will be interesting what he can do independently. Probably not a lot.

personalityson• 3 years ago

Why is Altman, who has no higher education, critical for development of AI?

calmoo• 3 years ago

Is higher education really crucial for pushing something forward? Even if he isn't an AI expert, there is lots of stuff surrounding the technology that needs doing, for example massive amounts of funding, which he seems to have been pretty good at securing.

notfed3• 3 years ago

Sam was crucified, then resurrected after 3 days and 3 nights.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Satya probably isn't that happy, after the weekend efforts to eventually bring all folks into Microsoft.

stingraycharles4• 3 years ago

You say that as if that was his end goal. His end goal was to save the situation, and that happened. One can easily argue that Microsoft’s offer added huge pressure on the OpenAI board that made the new / current outcome possible. And perhaps that was the plan after all.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

When offices are already being prepared, and HR processes being put into place, we are beyond saving a situation.

ugh1234• 3 years ago

In light of this weekend's events, and the more i've learned about OpenAI's beginnings and purpose, I now believe that there isn't necessarily a "for profit" motivation of the company, but merely that the original intention to create AI that "benefits humanity" is in full play now through a commercialized ChatGPT, and possibly further leveraged through "GPTs" and their evolution.

Is this the "path" to AGI? Who knows! But it is a path to benefitting humanity as probably Sam and his camp see it. Does Ilya have a different plan? If he does, he has a lot of catching up to do while the current productization of ChatGPT and GPTs continue marching forward. Maybe he sees a great leap forward in accuracy in GPT-5 or later. Or maybe he feels LLMs aren't the answer and theres a completely new paradigm on the horizon. Regardless, they still need to answer to the fact that both research and product need funds to buy and power GPUs, and also satisfy the MSFT partnership. Commercialization is their only clear answer to that right now. Future investments will likely not stray from this approach, else they'll fund rivals who are more commercially motivated. Thats business.

Thus, i'm all in on this commercially motivated humanity benefitting GPT product. Let the market take OpenAI LLMs to where they need/want it to. Exciting things may follow!

picadores• 3 years ago

Totally agree, GPT should be trained to spout adds and develop dark pattern behaviour.

ugh1234• 3 years ago

There will always be misuse, less sexy, or downright illegal use cases leveraging any AI product these days - just as is the nature of the internet itself.

tkgally• 3 years ago

In addition to commercialization providing money for AI development, isn't there also the argument that prudent commercialization is the best way to test the models for possible dangers? I think I saw Mira Murati take that position in an interview. In other words, creating a product that people want to use so much that they are willing to pay for it is a good way to stress-test the product.

I don't know if I agree, but the argument did make me think.

kuchenbecker2• 3 years ago

Additionally, when you have a pre-release product that has largely passed small and artificial tests, you get diminishing returns on continued testing.

Eventually you need to expand, despite some risk, to push the testing forward.

Everyone has a different opinion on what level of safety AI should reach before it's released. "Makes no mistakes" and "never says something mean" are not attainable goals vs "reduce the rate of hallucinations, as defined by x, to <0.5% of total respinses" and "given a set of known and imagined scenarios, new Model continues to have a zero false-negative rate".

When it's an engineering problem we're trying to solve, we can mqke progress, but no company can avoid all forms of harm as defined by everyone.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/dr_park_phd/status/1727125936070410594

https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1727134758919151975

https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding...

https://twitter.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1727108259297837083

olivierlacan• 3 years ago

Sweetie, you might want to actually look at the photo attached to the tweet.

mkii3• 3 years ago

April Fools? If you run a monotonic stack and summation kinda algorithm on 11/21 you'd get 4/1 :-)

zx80803• 3 years ago

It was just a preparation for the upcoming IPO. Free ads in all news and TV.

wouldbecouldbe4• 3 years ago

The sane course of action for any healthy organization after last week would be to work actively on becoming more independent from Microsoft.

With Sam at the head, especially after Microsoft backing him, they will most likely do the opposite. Meaning a deeper integration with Microsoft.

If it wasn't already, OpenAI is now basically a Microsoft subsidiary. With the advantage for Microsoft of not being legally liable for any court cases.

0xDEF2• 3 years ago

Before the current drama:

Microsoft owned 49% of the for-profit part of OpenAI.
OpenAI's training, inference, and all other infrastructure were running entirely on Azure credits.
Microsoft/Azure were the only ones offering OpenAI's models/APIs with a business-friendly SLA, uptime/stability, and the option to host them in Azure data centers outside the US.

OpenAI is already Microsoft.

ensocode3• 3 years ago

a real disruptor must be brewing somewhere unnoticed, for now. Yeah, they might just be the Netscapes and AltaVistas

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

Cool, so the technically minded folks on the internet have spent a week discussing this and practically nothing has changed?

MattHeard• 3 years ago

I was hopeful for a private-industry approach to AI safety, but it looks unlikely now, and due to the slow pace of state investment in public AI R&D, all approaches to AI safety look unlikely now.

Safety research on toy models will continue to provide developments, but the industry expectation appears to be that emergent properties puts a low ceiling on what can be learned about safety without researching on cutting edge models.

Altman touted the governance structure of OpenAI as a mechanism for ensuring the organisation's prioritisation of safety, but the reports of internal reallocation away from safety towards keeping ChatGPT running under load concern me. Now the board has demonstrated that it was technically capable but insufficiently powerful to keep these interests in line, it seems unclear how any safety-oriented organisation, including Anthropic, could avoid the accelerationist influence of funders.

throwuwu5• 3 years ago

Easy, don’t be incompetent and don’t abuse your power for personal gain. People aren’t as dumb as you think they are and they will see right through that bullshit and quit rather than follow idiot tyrants.

abra0• 3 years ago

More effort spent on early commercialization like keeping ChatGPT running might mean less effort on cutting edge capabilities. Altman was never an AI safety person, so my personal hope is that Anthropic avoids this by having higher quality leadership.

mymusewww• 3 years ago

I would like to know the model that isn’t a “toy model”.

sgt1012• 3 years ago

There are no emergent properties, just a linear increase in knowledge that can be retrieved.

- It can't plan

- It can't do arithmetic

- It can't reason

- It can approximately retrieve knowledge with a natural language query (there are some issues with this, but it's very good)

- It can encode data into natural languages and other modalities

I'm not worried about it, I am worried about how badly people have misunderstood what it can do and then attempted to use it for things that matter.

But I'm not surprised.

Davidzheng4• 3 years ago

This is incorrect. For example the ability to translate between languages is emergent. Also gpt4 can do arithmetic better than the average person. Especially considering the process it arrives at the computation is via intuition basically vs algorithmic. Btw just as an aide the newer models can also write code to do certain tasks, like arithmetic.

zucker423• 3 years ago

What is your definition of reasoning? In my mind, GPT-4 has some nascent reasoning abilities.

quickthrower26• 3 years ago

I don't think AI safetyists are worried about any model they have created so far. But if we are able to go from letter-soup "ooh look that almost seems like a sentence, SOTA!" to GPT4 in 20 years, where will go in the next 20? And what is the point they are becoming powerful. Let alone all the crazy ways people are trying to augment them with RAG, function calls, get them to run on less computer power and so on.

Also being better at humans at everything is not a prerequisite for danger. Probably a scary moment is when it could look at a C (or Rust, C++, whatever) codebase, find an exploit, and then use that exploit as a worm. If it can do that on everyday hardware not top end GPUs (either because the algorithms are made more efficient, or every iPhone has a tensor unit).

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

In my opinion, MS will neuter this product too, there is no way they're just going to have the public accessing tools which make their own software and products obsolete.

They will take over the board, and then steer it in some weird dystopian direction.

Ilya knows that IMO, he was just more principled than Altman.

Uptrenda• 3 years ago

Yep, this ones going in my cringe compilation.

ecmascript• 3 years ago

All these posts about OpenAI.. are people really this interested in whatever happens inside one company?

quietpain• 3 years ago

Why is this subject giving me Silicon Valley season 2 flashbacks with every update?

seydor7• 3 years ago

The script of SV2 was given as training data to the AGI that has taken over.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

I figured if Sam came back, the board would have to go as a condition. That's obvious. And deserved. The handling of this whole thing has been a very public clownshow.

Obviously, Microsoft has some influence here. That's no different to any other large investor. But the key factors are:

1. Lack of a good narrative from the board as to why they fired Sam;

2. Failure to loop in Microsoft so they're at least prepared from a communications front and feel like they were part of the process. The board can probably give them more details why privately;

3. People leaving in protest speaks well of Sam;

4. The employee letter speaks well of Sam;

5. The interim CEO clown show and lack of an all hands immediately after speaks poorly of the board.

nickysielicki2• 3 years ago

Satya and Sam committed securities fraud with their late Sunday “funding secured” ploy to protect the MSFT stock price. This was the obvious outcome. Sam had no intentions of actually going through with that and Satya was in no position to unilaterally commit to the type of funding that he was implying.

They lied to protect the stock. That should be illegal. In fact, it is illegal.

computerex• 3 years ago

I don't think this is actionable in anyway, even if what you say was shown unequivocally to be true.

nickysielicki2• 3 years ago

What do you mean? It would be conspiring to commit bank and wire fraud, the SEC can totally act on that if they want to.

nmfisher3• 3 years ago

Yeah, I think there may well be an investigation into that. At best, he said something that was unequivocally untrue, and at worst it was an outright lie. That's blatant market manipulation.

TrackerFF2• 3 years ago

Short sellers in shambles right now.

superultra• 3 years ago

I find it interesting that for all the talk from OpenAI staff that it was all about the people, and from Satya that MS has all the rights and knowledge and can jumpstart their own branch at the turn of a dime, it seems getting control of OpenAI proper was a huge priority.

Given that Claude sucks so bad, and this week’s events, I’m guessing that the ChatGPT secret sauce is not as replicable as some might suggest.

0xDEF2• 3 years ago

Bard is better than ChatGPT-3.5.

But GPT-4 is indeed a class of its own.

wilde• 3 years ago

But “Sam Altman, Microsoft PM” would have been a much funnier outcome

corobo• 3 years ago

The thing we should all take from this is that unions work :)

martin_a• 3 years ago

What a total shitshow. Amazing.

j4yav• 3 years ago

This has been a whirlwind, I feel like I've seen every single possible wrong outcome confidently predicted here, twice.

mlindner3• 3 years ago

Well that's disappointing. They might as well disband the entire concept of the non-profit as it's clearly completely irrelevant and powerless.

gongagong• 3 years ago

Meta is looking like the Mother Teresa of large corp LLM providers which is crazy to say out loud (; ꒪ö꒪)

cbeach3• 3 years ago

Does anyone know which faction (e/acc vs decels) the new board members Bret Taylor and Larry Summers will be on?

One thing IS clear at this point - their political alignment:

* Taylor a significant donor to Joe Biden ($713,637 in 2020): https://nypost.com/2022/04/26/twitter-board-members-gave-tho...

* Summers is a former Democrat Treasury Secretary who has shifted leftwards with age: https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-interview/2023/03/w...

davidthewatson• 3 years ago

The most interesting thing here is not the cult of personality battle between board and CEO. Rather, it's that these teams have managed to ship consumer AI that has a liminal, asymptotic edge where the smart kids can manipulate it into doing emergent things that it was not designed to do. That is, many of the outcomes of in-context learning could not be predicted at design time and they are, in fact, mind-blowing, magical, and likely not safe for consumption by those who believe that the machines are anywhere near the spectrum from consciousness to sentience.

dizzydes3• 3 years ago

D'Angelo is still there... there goes that theory.

DebtDeflation5• 3 years ago

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

Is Ilya off the board then?

Why is Adam still on?

Brett and Larry are good choices, but they need to get that board up to 10 or so people representing a balance of perspectives and interests very quickly.

al_be_back• 3 years ago

Losing the CEO must not push significant number of your staff to throw hissy fits and jump ship - it doesn't instill confidence in investors, partners, and crucially customers.

as this event turned into a farce, it's evident that neither the company nor it's key investors accounted much for the "bus factor/problem" i.e loosing a key-person threatened to destroy the whole enterprise.

for me this a failure in Managing Risk 101.

causi• 3 years ago

Kicking Sam out was a bad move. Begging him back is worse. Instead of having an OpenAI whose vision you disagree with, now we have an OpenAI with no vision at all that's simply blown back and forth.

fredgrott• 3 years ago

MS and OpenAI did not win here, but one of their competitors did...whoops.

Why did I say that? Look at the product release by the competitors these past few days. 2nd, Sam pushing for AI chips implies that chatGPT's future breakthroughs are hardware bounded. Hence, the road to AGI is not through chatGPT.

roody15• 3 years ago

“The company also agreed to revamp the board of directors that had dismissed him. OpenAI named Bret Taylor, formerly co-CEO of Salesforce, as chair and also appointed Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, to the board.”

Not looking good for the “Open” part of OpenAI.

otteromkram3• 3 years ago

Could have said the same thing once Microsoft got involved.

garrison• 3 years ago

If OpenAI remains a 501(c)(3) charity, then any employee of Microsoft on the board will have a fiduciary duty to advance the mission of the charity, rather than the business needs of Microsoft. There are obvious conflicts of interest here. I don't expect the IRS to be a fan of this arrangement.

flagrant_taco2• 3 years ago

I don't expect the government to regulate any of this aggressively. AI is much to important to the government and military to allow pesky conflicts of interest to slow down any competitive advantage we may have.

dgrin91• 3 years ago

If you think that OpenAI is the Gov's only source of high quality AI research then I have a bridge to sell you.

baking9• 3 years ago

My guess is that the non-profit has never gotten this kind of scrutiny now and the new directors are going to want to get lawyers involved to cover their asses. Just imagine their positions when Sam Altman really does something worth firing.

I think it was a real mistake to create OpenAI as a public charity and I would be hesitant to step into that mess. Imagine the fun when it tips into a private foundation status.

danaris3• 3 years ago

Well, I think that's really the question, isn't it?

Was it a mistake to create OpenAI as a public charity?

Or was it a mistake to operate OpenAI as if it were a startup?

The problem isn't really either one—it's the inherent conflict between the two. IMO, the only reason to see creating it as a 501(c)(3) being a mistake is if you think cutting-edge machine learning is inherently going to be targeted by people looking to make a quick buck off of it.

qwery• 3 years ago

I think it was a real mistake to create OpenAI as a public charity

Sure, with hindsight. But it didn't require much in the way of foresight to predict that some sort of problem would arise from the not-for-profit operating a hot startup that is by definition poorly aligned with the stated goals of the parent company. The writing was on the wall.

purple_ferret• 3 years ago

Perhaps creating OpenAI as a charity is what has allowed it to become what it is, whereas other for-profit competitors are worth much less. How else do you get a guy like Elon Musk to 'donate' $100 million to your company?

Lots of ventures cut corners early on that they eventually had to pay for, but cutting the corners was crucial to their initial success and growth

Turing_Machine• 3 years ago

I think it was a real mistake to create OpenAI as a public charity and I would be hesitant to step into that mess.

I think it could have worked either as a non-profit or as a for-profit. It's this weird jackass hybrid thing that's produced most of the conflict, or so it seems to me. Neither fish nor fowl, as the saying goes.

ryukoposting• 3 years ago

Are there any similar cases of this "non-profit board overseeing a (huge) for-profit company" model? I want to like the concept behind it. Was this inevitable due to the leadership structure of OpenAI, or was it totally preventable had the right people been on the board? I wish I had the historical context to answer that question.

brookst3• 3 years ago

There’s no indication a Microsoft appointed board member would be a Microsoft employee (though the they could be of course), and large nonprofits often have board members that come from for-profit companies.

I don’t think the IRS cares much about this kind of thing. What would be the claim? They OpenAI is pushing benefits to Microsoft, a for-profit entity that pays taxes? Even if you assume the absolute worst, most nefarious meddling, it seems like an issue for SEC more than IRS.

TigeriusKirk• 3 years ago

Larry Summers is in place to effectively give the govt seal of approval on the new board, for better and worse.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 3 years ago

Isn't he a big Jeffrey Epstein fanboy? Ethical AGI is in safe hands.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/5/epstein-summers-...

mcast• 3 years ago

If you wanted to wear a foil hat, you might think this internal fighting was started from someone connected to TPTB subverting the rest of the board to gain a board seat, and thus more power and influence, over AGI.

The hush-hush nature of the board providing zero explanation for why sama was fired (and what started it) certainly doesn't pass the smell test.

paulddraper15• 3 years ago

What if I told you...Bill Gates was/is on the board of the non-profit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?

Lol HN lawyering is hilarious.

fatbird4• 3 years ago

Indeed, it is hilarious.

The Foundation has nothing to do with MS and can't possibly be considered a competitor, acquisition target, supplier, or any other entity where a decision for the Foundation might materially harm MS (or the reverse). There's no potential conflict of interest between the missions of the two.

Did you think OP meant there was some inherent conflict of interest with charities?

stikit• 3 years ago

OpenAI is not a charity. Microsoft's investment is in OpenAI Global, LLC, a for-profit company.

From https://openai.com/our-structure

- First, the for-profit subsidiary is fully controlled by the OpenAI Nonprofit. We enacted this by having the Nonprofit wholly own and control a manager entity (OpenAI GP LLC) that has the power to control and govern the for-profit subsidiary.

-Second, because the board is still the board of a Nonprofit, each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to make and distribute profit, it is subject to this mission. The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors.

-Third, the board remains majority independent. Independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, does not hold equity directly. His only interest is indirectly through a Y Combinator investment fund that made a small investment in OpenAI before he was full-time.

-Fourth, profit allocated to investors and employees, including Microsoft, is capped. All residual value created above and beyond the cap will be returned to the Nonprofit for the benefit of humanity.

-Fifth, the board determines when we've attained AGI. Again, by AGI we mean a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Such a system is excluded from IP licenses and other commercial terms with Microsoft, which only apply to pre-AGI technology.

ezfe2• 3 years ago

The board is the charity though, which is why the person you're replying to made the remark about MSFT employees being appointed to the board

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

OpenAI is not a charity.

OpenAI is a charity nonprofit, in fact.

Microsoft's investment is in OpenAI Global, LLC, a for-profit company.

OpenAI Global LLC is a subsidiary two levels down from OpenAI, which is expressly (by the operating agreement that is the LLC's foundational document) subordinated to OpenAI’s charitable purpose, and which is completely controlled (despite the charity's indirect and less-than-complete ownership) by OpenAI GP LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the charity, on behalf of the OpenAI charity.

And, particularly, the OpenAI board is. as the excerpts you quote in your post expressly state, the board of the nonprofit that is the top of the structure. It controls everything underneath because each of the subordinate organizations foundational documents give it (well, for the two entities with outside invesment, OpenAI GP LLC, the charity's wholly-owned and -controlled subsidiary) complete control.

strangesmells06• 3 years ago

First, the for-profit subsidiary is fully controlled by the OpenAI Nonprofit. We enacted this by having the Nonprofit wholly own and control a manager entity (OpenAI GP LLC) that has the power to control and govern the for-profit subsidiary.

Im not criticizing. Big fan of avoiding being taxed to fund wars....but its just funny to me it seems like theyre sort of having their cake and eating it too with this kind of structure.

Good for them.

voxic11• 3 years ago

Even if the IRS isn't a fan, what are they going to do about it? It seems like the main recourse they could pursue is they could force the OpenAI directors/Microsoft to pay an excise tax on any "excess benefit transactions".

https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

mwattsun• 3 years ago

Microsoft doesn't have to send an employee to represent them on the board. They could ask Bill Gates.

murakamiiq846• 3 years ago

Actually I think Bill would be a pretty good candidate. Smart, mature, good at first principles reasoning, deeply understands both the tech world and the nonprofit world, is a tech person who's not socially networked with the existing SF VCs, and (if the vague unsubstantiated rumors about Sam are correct) is one of the few people left with enough social cachet to knock Sam down a peg or two.

pc86• 3 years ago

Others have pointed out several reasons this isn't actually a problem (and that the premise itself is incorrect since "OpenAI" is not a charity), but one thing not mentioned: even if the MS-appointed board member is a MS employee, yes they will have a fiduciary duty to the organizations under the purview of the board, but unless they are also a board member of Microsoft (extraordinarily unlikely) they have no such fiduciary duty to Microsoft itself. So in the also unlikely scenario that there is a vote that conflicts with their Microsoft duties, and in the even more unlikely scenario that they don't abstain due to that conflict, they have a legal responsibility to err on the side of OpenAI and no legal responsibility to Microsoft. Seems like a pretty easy decision to make - and abstaining is the easiest unless it's a contentious 4-4 vote and there's pressure for them to choose a side.

But all that seems a lot more like an episode of Succession and less like real life to be honest.

throwoutway• 3 years ago

It's still a conflict of interest. One that they should avoid. Microsoft COULD appoint someone who they like and shares their values, that is not a MSFT employee. That would be a preferred approach but one that I doubt a megacorp would take

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

and that the premise itself is incorrect since "OpenAI" is not a charity

OpenAI is a 501c3 charity nonprofit, and the OpenAI board under discussion is the board of that charity nonprofit.

OpenAI Global LLC is a for-profit subsidiary of a for-profit subsidiary of OpenAI, both of which are controlled, by their foundational agreements that gie them legal existence, by a different (AFAICT not for-profit but not legally a nonprofit) LLC subsidiary of OpenAI (OpenAI GP LLC.)

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

Microsoft is going to appoint someone who benefits Microsoft. Whether a particular vote would violate fiduciary duty is subjective. There's plenty of opportunity for them to prioritize the welfare of Microsoft over OAI.

Xelynega7• 3 years ago

Whats the point of Microsoft appointing a board member if not to sway decision in ways that benefit them?

_b• 3 years ago

There are obvious conflicts of interest here.

There are almost always obvious conflicts of interest. In a normal startup, VCs have a legal responsibility to act in the interest of the common shares, but in practice, they overtly act in the interest of the preferred shares that their fund holds.

hyperhopper• 3 years ago

The more and more I see the way complex share structures are used, the more I think they should be outlawed

bradleybuda• 3 years ago

Major corporate boards are rife with "on paper" conflicts on interest - that's what happens when you want people with real management experience to sit on your board and act like responsible adults. This happens in every single industry and has nothing to do with tech or with OpenAI specifically.

In practice, board bylaws and common sense mean that individuals recuse themselves as needed and don't do stupid shit.

iandanforth2• 3 years ago

"In practice, board bylaws and common sense mean that individuals ... don't do stupid shit."

Were you watching a different show than the rest of us?

ip26• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the “revolving door” problem. Obvious risk of corruption and conflict of interest, but at the same time experts from industry are the ones with the knowledge to be effective regulators. Not unlike how many good patent attorneys were previously engineers.

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

A corporation acting (due to influence from a conflicted board member that doesn't recuse) contrary to the interests of its stockholders and in the interest of the conflicted board member or who they represent potentially creates liability of the firm to its stockholders.

A charity acting (due to the influence of a conflicted board member that doesn't recuse) contrary to its charitable mission in the interests of the conflicted board member or who they represent does something similar with regard to liability of the firm to various stakeholders with a legally-enforceable interest in the charity and its mission, but also is also a public civil violation that can lead to IRS sanctions against the firm up to and including monetary penalties and loss of tax exempt status on top of whatever private tort liability exists.

fouc• 3 years ago

OpenAI isn't a typical corporation but a 501(c)(3), so bylaws & protections that otherwise might exist appear to be lacking in this situation.

throwaway-blaze• 3 years ago

No conflict, no interest.

dizzydes3• 3 years ago

Larry Summers practically invented this stuff...

hackernewds4• 3 years ago

Not to mention, the mission of the Board cannot be "build safe AGI" anymore. Perhaps something more consistent with expanding shareholder value and capitalism, as the events of this weekend has shown.

Delivering profits and shareholder value is the sole and dominant force in capitalism. Remains to be seen whether that is consistent with humanity's survival

boh• 3 years ago

Whenever there's an obvious conflict, assume it's not enforced or difficult to litigate or has relatively irrelevant penalties. Experts/lawyers who have a material stake in getting this right have signed off on it. Many (if not most) people with enough status to be on the board of a fortune 500 company tend to also be on non-profit boards. We can go out on a limb and suppose the mission of the nonprofit is not their top priority, and yet they continue on unscathed.

hinkley3• 3 years ago

Do you remember before Bill Gates got into disease prevention he thought that “charity work” could be done by giving away free Microsoft products? I don’t know who sat him down and explained to him how full of shit he was but they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Just because someone says they agree with a mission doesn’t mean they have their heads screwed on straight. And my thesis is that the more power they have in the real world the worse the outcomes - because powerful people become progressively immune to feedback. This has been working swimmingly for me for decades, I don’t need humility in a new situation.

Xelynega7• 3 years ago

Experts/lawyers who have a material stake in getting this right have signed off on it.

How does that work when we're talking about non-profit motives? The lawyers are paid by the companies benefitting from these conflicts, so how is it at all reassuring to hear that the people who benefit from the conflict signed off on it?

We can go out on a limb and suppose the mission of the nonprofit is not their top priority, and yet they continue on unscathed.

That's the concern. They've just replaced people who "maybe" cared about the mission statement with people who you've correctly identified care more about profit growth than the nonprofit mission.

jklein11• 3 years ago

I'm a little bit confused, are you saying that the IRS would have some sort of beef with employees of Microsoft serving on the board of a 501(c)(3)?

zerohalo8• 3 years ago

OpenAI's charter is dead. I expect future boards to amend it.

dragonwriter15• 3 years ago

Its useful PR pretext for their regulatory advocacy, and subjective enough that if they are careful not to be too obvious about specifically pushing one company’s commercial interest, they can probably get away with it forever, so why would it be any deader than when Sam was CEO before and not substantively guided by it.

ric2b4• 3 years ago

People keep saying this but is there any evidence that any of this was related to the charter?

augustulus• 3 years ago

how can they not remain a charity?

6274672• 3 years ago

I don't get the drama with "conflict of interests"... Aren't board members generally (always?) in representation of major shareholders? Isn't it obvious that shareholders have interests that are likely to be in conflict with each other or even the own organization? Thats why board members are supposed to check each other, right?

Xelynega7• 3 years ago

OpenAI is a non profit and the board members are not allowed to own shares in the for profit.

That means the remaining conflicts are when the board has to make a decisions between growing the profit or furthering the mission statement. I wouldn't trust the new board appointed by investors to ever make the correct decision in these cases, and they already kicked out the "academic" board members with the power to stop them.

mattmcknight• 3 years ago

The non-profit could sell off its interest in the for-profit company and use the money for AGI research.

bvan• 3 years ago

All involved have clearly demonstrated the lack of credibility in self-governance or the ability to make big-boy decisions. All reassurances from now on will sound hollow.

NorwegianDude• 3 years ago

Why is people so interested in this? Why exactly was he fired? I did not get why when I read the news, so I find it strange that people care if they don't even know what it's about. Do we know for sure what this was/is about?

minzi• 3 years ago

I would be surprised if the original board’s reasons for caving in were not influenced by personal factors. They must’ve been receiving all kinds of threats from those involved and from random twitter extremists.

It is troubling because it shows that this “external” governance meant to make decisions for the good of humanity is unable to enforce decisions. The internal employees were obviously swayed by financial gain as well. I don’t think that I would behave differently were I in their shoes honestly. However, this does definitively mean that they are a product and profit driven group.

I think that Sam Altman is dishonest and a depressing example of what modern Americans idealize. He has all these ideals he preaches but will happily turn on if it upsets his ego. On top of that he is held up as some star innovator when in reality he built nothing himself. He just identified one potential technological advancement and threw money at it with all his billionaire friends.

Gone are the days of building things in a garage with a mission. Founders are no longer visionary engineers and designers. The path now is clear. Convince some rich folks you’re worthy of being rich too. When they adopt you into wealth you can start throwing shit at the wall until something sticks. Eventually something will and you can claim visionary status. Now your presence in the billionaire club is beyond reproach because you’re a “founder”.

InCityDreams• 3 years ago

They must’ve been receiving all kinds of threats from those involved and from random twitter extremists.

Oooh, yeah. "Must have".

dangerface5• 3 years ago

Keeping D'Angelo on the board is an obvious mistake, he has too much conflicting interest to be level headed and has demonstrated that. The only people that benefited from all this are Microsoft and D'Angelo. Give it a year and we will see part 2 of all this.

Further where is the public accountability? I thought the board was to act in the interests of the public but they haven't communicated anything. Are we all just supposed to pretend this never happend and that the board will now act in the public interest?

We need regulations to hold these boards which hold so much power accountable to the public. No reasonable AI regulations can be made until the public are included in a meaningful way, anyone that pushes for regulations without the public is just trying to control the industry and establish a monopoly.

EarthAmbassador• 3 years ago

Larry effing Summers?!

Really?

Was Henry Kissinger unavailable?

alienicecream• 3 years ago

High Street salesman takes over Frankenstein's lab. Can't wait to see what's going to happen next.

sys_64738• 3 years ago

Why have OpenAI take to poaching employees from M$ now?

nojvek• 3 years ago

What this proves is that OpenAI interests are now entrenched with profit.

I’m assuming most of the researchers there probably realize there is a loooot of money to be made and they have to optimize for that.

They are deffo pushing the frontier of AI.

However I wish OpenAI doesn’t get to AGI first.

I don’t think it will be the best for all of humanity.

I’m scared.

pimpampum• 3 years ago

So Altman started it and ended up winning it, clearly his coup. Sad how employees were duped into standing behind him.

donohoe• 3 years ago

Larry Summers!?

throwaway74852• 3 years ago

So OpenAI's board is now exclusively white men, and predominantly tech insiders? Lovely to have such a diverse group behind this technology Could this be more comical?

iteratethis4• 3 years ago

Sam's power was tested and turned out to be absolute.

Sam was doing whatever he wanted, got caught, and now can continue to do what he wants with even more backing.

nomaD_• 3 years ago

Hiring engineers at 900K salary & pretending to be non-profit does not work. Turns out, 97% of them wanted to make money.

Government should have banned big tech investment in AI companies a year ago. If they want, they can create their own AI but buying one should be off the table.

Pigalowda• 3 years ago

Shows over I guess. Feels like the ending to GoT. I’m not sure I even care what happened to begin it all anymore.

rceDia• 3 years ago

The "giveaway" is the fact that "Microsoft is happy" with the return of Mr. Altman. Can't wait for the former boards tell-all story. Bets on: how a founder of cutting edge tech company wanted world peace and no harm but outside capital forces steered him to other "unfathomable riches" option. It happens.

Mrirazak1• 3 years ago

The Steve jobs of our TikTok generation. Came back very quickly in comparison to the 12 years but still.

ChoGGi• 3 years ago

I'm sure that first meeting will be... Interesting.

lysecret3• 3 years ago

Fascinating, I see a lot of VC/Msfot has overthrown our NPO governing structure because of profit incentives narrative.

I don't think this is what really happened at all. The reason this decision was made was because 95% of employees sided with Sam on this issue, and the board didn't explain themselves in any way at all. So it was Sam + 95% of employees + All investors against the board. In which case the board should lose (since they are only governing for themselves here).

I think in the end a good and fair outcome. I still think their governing structure is decent to solve the AGI problem, this particular board was just really bad.

greenie_beans• 3 years ago

next time, can't wait to see what happens when capital is on the opposite side of the 95% of employees.

r_thambapillai• 3 years ago

Of course, the profit incentive also applies to all the employees (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, its good to align the company's goals with those of the employees). But when the executives likely have 10s of millions of dollars on the line, and many of the IC's will likely have single digit millions on the line as well, it doesn't seem exactly straightforward to view this as the employees are unbiased adjudicators of what's in the interest of the non-profit entity, which is supposed to be what's in charge.

It is sort of strange that our communal reaction is to say "well this board didn't act anything like a normal corporate board": of course it didn't, that was indeed the whole point of not having a normal corporate board in charge.

Whatever you think of Sam, Adam, Ilya etc, the one conclusion that seems safe to reach is that in the end, the profit/financial incentives ended up being far more important than the NGOs mission, no matter what legal structure was in place.

jkaplan3• 3 years ago

1. Microsoft was heavily involved in orchestrating the 95% of employees to side with Sam -- through promising them money/jobs and through PR/narrative 2. The profit incentives apply to employees too

Bigger picture, I don't think the "money/VC/MSFT/commercialization faction destroyed the safety/non-profit faction" is mutually exclusive with "the board fucked up." IMO, both are true

campbel5• 3 years ago

I don't think the board was big enough for starters. Of the folks on their, only one (Adam) had experience as a leader of a for profit venture. Helen probably lacks the leadership background to make any progress pushing her priorities.

BryantD• 3 years ago

We’re not gonna see it but I’d love to see Sam’s new contract and particularly any restraints on outside activities.

geniium• 3 years ago

This was a nice ride. Nice story to follow

theGnuMe• 3 years ago

Larry Summers is an interesting choice. Any ideas why? I know he was Sheryl Sandberg's mentor/professor which gives him a tech connection. However, I've watched him debate Paul Krugman on inflation in some economic lectures and it almost felt like Larry was out of his element as in Larry was outgunned by Paul... but maybe he was having an off day or it was a topic he is not an expert in. But I don't know the history, haven't read either of their books and I am not an economist. But it was something I noticed.. almost like he was out of touch.

That has nothing to do with AI though.

jafitc• 3 years ago

OpenAI's Future and Viability

- OpenAI has damaged their brand and lost trust, but may still become a hugely successful company if they build great products

- OpenAI looks stronger now with a more professional board, but has fundamentally transformed into a for-profit focused on commercializing LLMs

- OpenAI still retains impressive talent and technology assets and could pivot into a leading AI provider if managed well

---

Sam Altman's Leadership

- Sam emerged as an irreplaceable CEO with overwhelming employee loyalty, but may have to accept more oversight

- Sam has exceptional leadership abilities but can be manipulative; he will likely retain control but have to keep stakeholders aligned

---

Board Issues

- The board acted incompetently and destructively without clear reasons or communication

- The new board seems more reasonable but may struggle to govern given Sam's power

- There are still opposing factions on ideology and commercialization that will continue battling

---

Employee Motivations

- Employees followed the money trail and Sam to preserve their equity and careers

- Peer pressure and groupthink likely also swayed employees more than principles

- Mission-driven employees may still leave for opportunities at places like Anthropic

---

Safety vs Commercialization

- The safety faction lost this battle but still has influential leaders wanting to constrain the technology

- Rapid commercialization beat out calls for restraint but may hit snags with model issues

---

Microsoft Partnership

- Microsoft strengthened its power despite not appearing involved in the drama

- OpenAI is now clearly beholden to Microsoft's interests rather than an independent entity

qualifiedai2• 3 years ago

No structure or organization is stronger when their leader emerged as "irreplaceable".

rmbyrro2• 3 years ago

In this case, I don't see as a flaw, but really as Sam's abilities to lead a highly cohesive group and keep it highly motivated and aligned.

I don't personally like him, but I must admit he displayed a lot more leadership skills than I'd recognize before.

It's inherently hard to replace someone like that in any organization.

Take Apple, after losing Jobs. It's not that Apple was a "weak" organization, but really Jobs that was extraordinary and indeed irreplaceable.

No, I'm not comparing Jobs and Sam. Just illustrating my point.

osigurdson2• 3 years ago

Seriously, even in a small group of a few hundred people?

dimitrios12• 3 years ago

This is false, and I see the corollary as a project having a BDIF, especially if the leader is effective. Sam is unmistakably effective.

rvnx8• 3 years ago

And correlation does not imply causality.

Example: Put a loser as CEO of a rocket ship, and there is a huge chance that the company will still be successful.

Put a loser as CEO of a sinking ship, and there is a huge chance that the company will fail.

The exceptional CEOs are those who turn failures into successes.

The fact this drama has emerged is the symptom of a failure.

In a company with a great CEO this shouldn’t be happening.

Aunche2• 3 years ago

I don't think Sam is necessarily irreplaceable. It's just that Helen Toner and co were so detached from the rest of the organization they might as well been on Mars, as demonstrated by their interim CEO pick instantly turning against them.

nurumaik• 3 years ago

Gpt-generated summary?

Mistletoe2• 3 years ago

That was my first thought as well. And now it is the top comment on this post. Isn’t this brave new world OpenAI made wonderful?

fourside• 3 years ago

The content strikes me as being more an editorial on what happened vs simply a summary of events.

miohtama• 3 years ago

Employees followed the money trail and Sam to preserve their equity and careers

Would you not when the AI safety wokes decide the torch the rewards of your hard work of grinding for years? I feel there is less groupthink and everyone saw the board as it is and their inability lead, or even act rationally. OpenAI did not just become a sinking ship, but it was unnecessary sunk by someone not skin in the game and your personal wealth and success was tied to the ship.

brookst3• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is like using “groupthink” to describe people fleeing a burning building. There’s maybe some measure of literal truth, but it’s an odd way to frame it.

acjohnson55• 3 years ago

How do you know the "wokes" aren't the ones who were grinding for years?

I suspect OpenAI has an old guard that is disproportionately ideological about AI, and a much larger group of people who joined a rocket ship led by the guy who used to run YC.

seydor7• 3 years ago

who would want to work for an irreplaceable CEO long term

rvnx8• 3 years ago

Desperate people who have no choice than to wait for someone to remove their golden handcuffs.

paulddraper15• 3 years ago

Peer pressure and groupthink likely also swayed employees more than principles

What makes this "likely"?

Or is this just pure conjecture?

mrfox3214• 3 years ago

What would you do if 999 employees openly signed a letter and you are the remaining holdout.

orsenthil2• 3 years ago

- Mission-driven employees may still leave for opportunities at places like Anthropic

Which might have an oversight from AMZN instead of MSFT ?

sam0x17• 3 years ago

Peer pressure and groupthink likely also swayed employees more than principles

Chilling to hear the corporate oligarchs completely disregard the feelings of employees and deny most of the legitimacy behind these feelings in such a short and sweeping statement

DSingularity3• 3 years ago

Honestly he has a point — but the bigger point to be made is financial incentives. In this case it matters because of the expressed mission statement of OpenAI.

Let’s say there was some non-profit claiming to advance the interests of the world. Let’s say it paid very well to hire the most productive people but they were a bunch of psychopaths who by definition couldn’t care less about anybody but themselves. Should you care about their opinions? If it was a for profit company you could argue that their voice matter. For a non-profit, however, a persons opinion should only matter as far as it is aligned with the non-profit mission.

ensocode3• 3 years ago

Good points. Anyway I guess nobody will remember the drama in some months so I think the damage done is very manageable for OAI.

jxi2• 3 years ago

Was this really motivated by AI safety or was it just Helen Toner’s personal vendetta against Sam?

It doesn’t feel like anything was accomplished besides wasting 700+ people’s time, and the only thing that has changed now is Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley are off the board.

hn_throwaway_993• 3 years ago

As someone who was very critical of how the board acted, I strongly disagree. I felt like this Washington Post article gave a very good, balanced overview. I think it sounds like there were substantive issues that were brewing for a long time, though no doubt personal clashes had a huge impact on how it all went down:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt...

cbeach3• 3 years ago

Curious how a relatively unknown academic with links to China [1] attained a board seat on America's hottest and most valuable AI company.

Particularly as she openly expressed that "destroying" that company might be the best outcome. [2]

During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities. Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission was to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission.

[1] https://www.chinafile.com/contributors/helen-toner [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

jkaplan3• 3 years ago

was it just Helen Toner’s personal vendetta against Sam

I'm not defending the board's actions, but if anything, it sounds like it may have been the reverse? [1]

In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company... “I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight." Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever... later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

amalcon• 3 years ago

- Microsoft strengthened its power despite not appearing involved in the drama

Depending on what you mean by "the drama", Microsoft was very clearly involved. They don't appear to have been in the loop prior to Altman's firing, but they literally offered jobs to everyone who left in solidarity with same. Do we really think things like that were not intended to change people's minds?

FirmwareBurner• 3 years ago

but they literally offered jobs to everyone who left in solidarity with same

Offering people jobs is neither illegal nor immoral, no? And wasn't HN also firmly on the side of abolishing non-competes and non-soliciting from employment contracts to facilitate freedom of employment movement and increase industry wages in the process?

Well then, there's your freedom of employment in action. Why be unhappy about it? I don't get it.

malfist• 3 years ago

The GP looks to me like an AI summary. Which would fit with the hallucination that microsoft wasn't involved.

gcanyon4• 3 years ago

I’d go further than just saying “they were involved” —- by offering jobs to everyone who wanted to come with Altman, they were effectively offering to acquire OpenAI, which is worth ~$100B, for (checks notes) zero dollars.

RationalDino• 3 years ago

The one piece of this that I question is the employee motivations.

First, they had offers to walk to both Microsoft and Salesforce and be made good. They didn't have to stay and fight to have money and careers.

But more importantly, put yourself in the shoes of an employee and read https://web.archive.org/web/20231120233119/https://www.busin... for what they apparently heard.

I don't know about anyone else. But if I was being asked to choose sides in a he-said, she-said dispute, the board was publicly hinting at really bad stuff, and THAT was the explanation, I know what side I'd take.

Don't forget, when the news broke, people's assumption from the wording of the board statement was that Sam was doing shady stuff, and there was potential jail time involved. And they justify smearing Sam like that because two board members thought they heard different things from Sam, and he gave what looked like the same project to two people???

There were far better stories that they could have told. Heck, the Internet made up many far better narratives than the board did. But that was the board's ACTUAL story.

Put me on the side of, "I'd have signed that letter, and money would have had nothing to do with it."

TheGRS• 3 years ago

I was thinking the same. The letter symbolized a deep distrust with leadership over the mission and direction of the company. I’m sure financial motivations were involved, but the type of person working at this company can probably get a good paycheck at a lot of places. I think many work at OpenAI for some combination of opportunity, prestige, and altruism, and the weekend probably put all 3 into question.

neonbjb• 3 years ago

As an employee of OpenAI: fuck you and your condescending conclusions about my peers and my motivations.

jprete• 3 years ago

I’m curious about your perceptions of the (median) motivations of OpenAI employees - although of course I understand if you don’t feel free to say anything.

alextheparrot• 3 years ago

Users here often get the narrative and motivations deeply wrong, I wouldn’t take it too personally (Speaking as a peer)

iamflimflam13• 3 years ago

"condescending conclusions" - ask anyone outside of tech how they feel when we talk to them...

windowshopping• 3 years ago

This comment bugs me because it reads like a summary of an article, but it's just your opinions without any explanations to justify them.

scooke• 3 years ago

Many are still going to use this; few will bother to ponder and break the event down like this.

account-5• 3 years ago

Farse, plain and simple.

orsenthil2• 3 years ago

What's even the lesson learnt here?

1. Keep doing your work, and focus on building your product. 2. Ignore the noise, go back to 1.

rennsport_eth• 3 years ago

I love you, but you are not serious people.

thepasswordis• 3 years ago

Yeah I don’t know. I think you’d be kind of nuts to build anything on their APIs anymore.

Sure I’ll keep using ChatGPT in a personal capacity/as search. But no way I’d trust my business to them

campbel5• 3 years ago

Working out nicely for Msft then. You can use GPT4 via Azure already.

kibwen• 3 years ago

This will be remembered as the biggest waste of time and energy since the LK-99 fiasco.

evan_• 3 years ago

What a waste of time

bmitc• 3 years ago

What a gigantic mess. Everyone looks bad in this: Altman, Microsoft, the OpenAI board, OpenAI employees, etc.

It also has confirmed that greed and cult of personality win in the end.

voiceblue• 3 years ago

For some reason this reminds me of the Coke/New Coke fiasco, which ended up popularizing Coke Classic more than ever before.

Consumers were outraged and demanded their beloved Coke back – the taste that they knew and had grown up with. The request to bring the old product back was so loud that soon journalists suggested that the entire project was a stunt. To this accusation Coca-Cola President Don Keough replied on July 10, 1985:

    "We are not that dumb, and we are not that smart."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

freedomben7• 3 years ago

That is one of the greatest lines of all time. Classic

jdlyga• 3 years ago

I tried New Coke when it was re-released for Stranger Things. It really is a lot better than Coca Cola Classic. It's a shame that it failed.

tacocataco• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing.

I would have guessed the stunt was to hide the switch from sugar to High Fructose Corn syrup.

beepbooptheory• 3 years ago

When the first CEO appeared on the earth he got tied to cliff so the birds could eat him. It seems like that was a good call.

incahoots• 3 years ago

Cue the "it's a Christmas Miracle!"

diamondfist25• 3 years ago

Adam D’Angelo keeping everyone straight on the mission of OpenAI. What a true boss in the face of woke mob

iamleppert• 3 years ago

So dangerous on so many levels. Just let him start his own AI group, competition is good!

Instead he will come away with this untouchable. He’ll get to stack the board like he wanted to. Part of being on a board of directors is sticking to your decisions. They are weak and weren’t prepared for the backlash of one person.

melvinmelih• 3 years ago

“You could parachute Sam into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king.” - Paul Graham

rsanek• 3 years ago

http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

gsuuon2• 3 years ago

At least they'll be operating under the original charter - it sounds like the mission continues. Not sure about this new board but hard to imagine they'd make the same sort of mistake.

archsurface• 3 years ago

I'm not American - I'm unclear what all this fuss is about? From where I am it looks like some arbitrary company politics in a hyped industry with a guy whose name I've seen mentioned on this site occasionally but really comes across as just a SV or San Fran cult of personality type. Am I missing something? Is there some substance to this story or is it just this week's industry soap opera?

jcutrell• 3 years ago

I wonder what Satya will say here; will the AI CEO position there just evaporate?

carapace2• 3 years ago

So it's the Osiris myth?

hackerlight3• 3 years ago

So OpeNAI charter still in place? Once OpenAI reaches AGI, Microsoft won't be able to access the tech. Then what will happen to Microsoft when other commercial competitors catch up and also reach AGI one or two years later?

taway1874• 3 years ago

Some perspective ...

One developer (Ilya) vs. One businessman (Sam) -> Sam wins

Hundreds of developers threaten to quit vs. Board of Directors (biz) refuse to budge -> Developers win

From the outside it looks like developers held the power all along ... which is how it should be.

rexarex• 3 years ago

Money won.

jessenaser• 3 years ago

Yes, 95% agreement in any company is unprecedented but:

1. They can get equivalent position and pay at the new Microsoft startup during that time, so their jobs are not at risk.

2. Sam approved each hire in the first place.

3. OpenAI is selecting for the type of people who want to work at a non-profit with a goal in mind instead of another company that could offer higher compensation. Mission driven vs profit driven.

Either way on how they got to that conclusion of banding together to quit, it was a good idea, and it worked. And it is a check on power for a bad board of directors, when otherwise a board of directors cannot be challenged. "OpenAI is nothing without its people".

andersa• 3 years ago

OpenAI is selecting for the type of people who want to work at a non-profit with a goal in mind instead of another company that could offer higher compensation. Mission driven vs profit driven.

Maybe that was the case at some point, but clearly not anymore ever since the release of ChatGPT. Or did you not see them offer completely absurd compensation packages, i.e. to engineers leaving Google?

I'd bet more than half the people are just there for the money.

brrrrrm• 3 years ago

1. They can get equivalent position and pay at the new Microsoft startup during that time, so their jobs are not at risk.

citation?

philipwhiuk• 3 years ago

Are you sure Ilya was the root of this.

He backed it and then signed the pledge to quit if it wasn't undone.

What's the evidence he was behind it and not D'Angelo?

dr_dshiv2• 3 years ago

If we only look at the outcomes (dismantling of board), Microsoft and Sam seem to have the most motive.

__loam4• 3 years ago

I'm not sure I buy the idea that Ilya was just some hapless researcher who got unwillingly pulled into this. Any one of the board could have voted not to remove Sam and stop the board coup, including Ilya. I'd bet he only got cold feet after the story became international news and after most of the company threatened to resign because their bag was in jeopardy.

jiveturkey• 3 years ago

wake up people! (said rhetorically, not accusatory or any other way)

This is Altman's playbook. He did a similar ousting at Reddit. This was planned all along to overturn the board. Ilya was in on it.

I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist. But fool me ... you can't be fooled again. As they say in Tennessee

adverbly2• 3 years ago

There are three dragons:

Employees, customers, government.

If motivated and aligned, any of these three could end you if they want to.

Do not wake the dragons.

pdntspa3• 3 years ago

The Board is another one, if you're CEO.

bossyTeacher2• 3 years ago

Or tame the dragons. AFAIK Sam hired the employees. Hence they are loyal to him

sokoloff• 3 years ago

Is your first “-> Sam wins” different than what you intended?

hsavit1• 3 years ago

seems like the union of developers is stronger than the company itself. hence why unions are so frowned upon by big tech corporate leadership

JacobThreeThree• 3 years ago

And yet, this union was threatening to move to a company without unions.

jejeyyy772• 3 years ago

$$$ vs. Safety -> $$$ wins.

Employees who have $$$ incentive threaten to quit if that is taken away. News at 8.

baby2• 3 years ago

Why are you assuming employees are incentivized by $$$ here, and why do you think the board's reason is related to safety or that employees don't care about safety? It just looks like you're spreading FUD at this point.

dylan604• 3 years ago

It's not like this is the first:

One developer (Woz) vs One businessman (Jobs) -> Jobs wins

zerohalo8• 3 years ago

more like $$ wins.

It's clear most employees didn't care much about OpenAI's mission -- and I don't blame them since they were hired by the __for-profit__ OpenAI company and therefore aligned with __its__ goals and rewarded with equity.

In my view the board did the right thing to stand by OpenAI's original mission -- which now clearly means nothing. Too bad they lost out.

One might say the mission was pointless since Google, Meta, MSFT would develop it anyway. That's really a convenience argument that has been used in arms races (if we don't build lots of nuclear weapons, others will build lots of nuclear weapons) and leads to ... well, where we are today :(

joewferrara• 3 years ago

Where we are today is a world where people do not generally worry about nuclear bombs being dropped. So seems like a pretty good outcome in that example.

Quentincestino2• 3 years ago

OpenAI developers are redefining the state-of-the-art of AI each 6 months, if the company lose them they already can go bankrupt

m00x• 3 years ago

Ilya signed the letter saying he would resign if Sam wasn't brought back. Looks like he regretted his decision and ultimately got played by the 2 departing board members.

Ilya is also not a developer, he's a founder of OpenAI and was the CSO.

awb• 3 years ago

It’s a cost / benefit analysis.

If people are easily replaceable then they don’t hold nearly as much power, even en mass.

nikcub• 3 years ago

The employees rapidly and effectively formed a quasi-union to grant themselves a very powerful seat at the table.

dang• 3 years ago

All: there are over 1800 comments in this thread. If you want to read them all, click More at the bottom of each page, or like this: (edit: er, yes they do have to be wellformed don't they):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38375239&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38375239&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38375239&p=4 (...etc.)

macrael• 3 years ago

What a delightful shit show. I don't even personally care whether Sam Altman is running OpenAI but it brings me no end of schadenfreude to see a bunch of AI Doomers make asses of themselves. Ethical Altruism truly believes that AI could destroy all of human life on the planet which is a preposterous belief. There are so many better things to worry about, many of which are happening right now! These people are not serious and should not hold serious positions of power. It's not hard to see the dangers of AI: replacing a lot of make-work that exists in the world, giving shoddy answers with high confidence, taking humans out of the loop of responsible decision making, but I cannot believe that it will become so smart that it becomes an all powerful god. These people worship intelligence (hence why they believe that with infinite intelligence comes infinite power) but look what happens when they actually have power! Ridiculous.

rashidae• 3 years ago

Could someone do a sentiment analysis from the comments and share it with all of us who can’t read all the 1,700+ comments?

Ruq• 3 years ago

that fast huh?

daveguy2• 3 years ago

Hi dang,

Seeing a bug in your comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38382563

You reference the pages like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38375239?p=2

The second ? should be an & like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38375239&p=2

Please feel free to delete this message after you've received it.

paulddraper15• 3 years ago

Also, while we're at it:

"Nobody will be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: the one in our code—not the world) is a thing of the past" [1]

HN plans to be multi-core?!?! A bigger scoop than OpenAI governance!

Anything more you can share?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351005

saliagato• 3 years ago

Why do you (dang) always write a comment specifying that people can read more and even providing some links when it's clear that when you reach the bottom of the page you have to click "read more" to indeed read more. Isn't it a bit useless?

bartread• 3 years ago

Because people don't, that's why.

pvg2• 3 years ago

when it's clear

It isn't that clear. People missing ui elements they have to scroll to is one of the most common ways of missing ui elements.

pvg2• 3 years ago

If you want to reach the mods just email hn@ycombinator.com

daveguy2• 3 years ago

Thank you for the advice. I will do that in the future.

zerohalo8• 3 years ago

Google, Meta and now OpenAI. So long, responsible and safety AI guardrails. Hello, big money.

Disappointed by the outcome, but perhaps mission-driven AI development -- the reason OpenAI was founded -- was never possible.

Edit: I applaud the board members for (apparently, it seems) trying to stand up for the mission (aka doing the job that they were put on the board to do), even if their efforts were doomed.

risho• 3 years ago

you just don't understand how markets work. if openai slows down then they will just be driven out by competition. that's fine if that's what you think they should do, but that won't make ai any safer, it will just kill openai and have them replaced by someone else.

zerohalo8• 3 years ago

you're right about market forces, however:

1) openAI was explicitly founded to NOT develop AI based on "market forces"; it's just that they "pivoted" (aka abandoned their mission) once they struck gold in order to become driven by the market

2) this is exactly the reasoning behind nuclear arms races

WanderPanda3• 3 years ago

You can still be a force for decentralization by creating actually open ai. For now it seems like Meta AI research is the real open ai

paulddraper15• 3 years ago

I applaud the board members for (apparently, it seems) trying to stand up for the mission

What about this is apparent to you?

What statement has the board made on how they fired Altman "for the mission"?

Have I missed something?

alsetmusic4• 3 years ago

To me, commentary online and on podcasts universally leans on the idea that he appears to be very focused on money (from the outside) in seeming contradiction to the company charter:

Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.

Also, the language of the charter has watered down a stronger commitment that was in the first version. Others have quoted it and I'm sure you can find it on the internet archive.

nbzso2• 3 years ago

Stop dreaming about alignment. All bets are off. This is the start of AI arms race. Think globally for a second. Yes, everybody wants to be a millionaire or billionaire. This is the current culture we are living in. Corporations have unprecedented power waved into the governments, but governments still have a monopoly on violence. People cannot switch to the new abstraction layer (UBI, Social Rating) for two or five years. They will keep a consumer-oriented mindset before the option to have one is erased. Where you think this is going? To a better Democracy? This is the Cold War V.2 scenario unfolding.

jacquesm5• 3 years ago

49% stock (lower bound) + 90% of employees (upper bound) > board.

To be updated as more evidence rolls in.

jrflowers• 3 years ago

This here is what we call a load-bearing “in principle”

xyst2• 3 years ago

OpenAI board f’d around and found out the consequences of their poor decisions. The decision to back pedal from previous position just shows the level of disconnect between these 2 entities.

If I was an investor. I would be scared.

zerohalo8• 3 years ago

I think we now have an idea of what will happen if AGI is actually reached and efforts are made to contain or restrain it.

nbzso2• 3 years ago

Larry Summers? Microsoft? Alignment? Bye, bye humanity.

joduplessis• 3 years ago

There is so much vagueness around this whole OpenAI thing that it's difficult taking anything seriously anymore - it's almost hearsay at this point. Yesterday it was Altman's personal interests, now it's a breakthrough model, tomorrow it's something else. At the very least it's fantastic marketing (albeit at the expense of their customers).

Obscurity43402• 3 years ago

Is this the most famous post?

carapace2• 3 years ago

One of the oldest AGI jokes:

Q: What's AGI?

A: When the machine wakes up and asks, "What's in it for me?"

- - - -

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

toasted-subs• 3 years ago

Seems so strange all of this happened

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

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