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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don’t understand the situation here. Why would Sam sit down for an interview and then request it be removed? Did he accidentally let slip something he didn’t mean to? Isn’t controlling the message supposed to be one of his best skills? I find it hard to believe anything said was really not intended for release. Also, does anyone at OpenAI really think removing the blog post will remove it from the internet? The top comment here is already a link to an archive of the content.

I am interested in hearing the rationale for this action as I really don’t see why they requested the removal.

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> Quite a few developers said they were nervous about building with the OpenAI APIs when OpenAI might end up releasing products that are competitive to them. Sam said that OpenAI would not release more products beyond ChatGPT.

I bet this isn't true and he wasn't supposed to say it.

Any lawyers know if this opens them up for legal action if they kill a business in this manner after a public statement like this? It must, if this is the reason they requested the removal, otherwise why would they tip their hand about what they intend to do in the future? And not to mention it makes developers even more concerned. They could have just let the lie alone, instead of drawing attention to it.

I'm not a lawyer but deal with legal stuff - they are not open to legal action.

Hey but that hearsay seems like it is a solid foundation to build a case on!

“Your honor, the defendant said some things in an interview that they don’t agree with anymore and I want to sue!”

“Sue for what?”

“Sue to make them believe the thing they said!!!”

Lol.

Now, now. They are open to legal action…

…just not anything that would survive a motion to dismiss.

I guess it depends on your definition of "open".

Crazy person can pro se file a suit on a napkin. :D

Also no a lawyer, but... my understanding was that you're always open to legal action from anybody. They might not have a very good case and they might just get laughed out of court, but they can still sue you. Is that not the case?

Edit: Or I guess as you said in a reply to a sibling comment, you might only count it as "open to legal action" if you have a decent chance of losing.

You don't have an agreement with them, and they changed their mind because they had no contract barring them from doing so. No liability.

I hope it isn't true! I'd expect them and other LLM orgs to support some plugins where it isn't worth them building the functionality internally but also replacing the ones that they can do better or with less or little effort. Hard to be upfront and honest about what the future looks like this early in the applied statistics arena. Maybe OpenAI should be deferring more to their Head of PR?

This is the usual "Netflix attempting to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix" [1] and a critical eye to where the work is being done and the value being delivered.

EDIT: btown mentions "Just because ChatGPT+Plugins isn't going to be the center of people's lives" in their comment, and I think this is somewhat the point folks are concerned about. ChatGPT (LLM interfaces in general, broadly speaking) might be the IDE of the white collar future, versus an API you call. And maybe that is okay if they can deliver a superior experience to where people live today (Excel, email client, word processor, other SaaS tools, a development environment). Half joking, maybe they should acquire Superhuman [2] and rebrand to that versus "ChatGPT", because that is the ability consumers and enterprises are paying for: to give people doing work superhuman ability.

(disclosure: paying OpenAI customer, no other relation to any org mentioned in this comment)

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3930560/netflix-wants-at-...

[2] https://superhuman.com/

Setting aside the legalities for a moment, a nontrivial part of OpenAI's advantage in the LLM space has been its ability to incentivize feedback mechanisms - to own the interface in which generated text is presented, own the widget where someone gives it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and re-integrate that feedback at scale into its fine-tuning.

Of course they'd want to leave the door open to building their own products, in order to continue to be able to present those widgets and have exclusive access to the resulting data.

Just because ChatGPT+Plugins isn't going to be the center of people's lives (did anyone truly think it would?) doesn't mean that when they have another product idea that they have unique insight into, they won't want to bring it to the world directly.

“Satya holding on line 1 for you Sam”

Still poor decision to pull the article altogether. Why not just tell the public? What's the big deal.

I was in that meeting. It was an invite-only developers round table. The aim was to discuss the platform from the developers point of view, receive feedback to improve the API and other discussions in general.

This was followed by a public fireside chat hosted by Azeem Azhar and QA session.

From the context, I would believe that OpenAI didn’t want some of the points discussed in a closed room to go to public.

Is Raza's summary basically accurate?

If OpenAI didn't explicitly state that it was not to be shared, that's on them.

What about the roadmap itself? Can we look forward to these goodies?

Sam Altman sits down for a detailed interview with an included product roadmap. Microsoft is like "bro, why did you do that?" and want it redacted.

That’s part of what I find hard to believe. I would have figured Sam would be aware of the strategic messaging goals not only of OpenAI but also of MS, their biggest investor.

To be fair, Sam is human and is doing a LOT right now. In addition to leading OpenAI and partnerships, he's having to do a parade lap around the world to console politicians and communities.

This seems like the moment you split the top-most exec position into, say, President and CEO. One deals externally, one internally.

Agreed. But it's also a small mistake, if it was one at all.

plain and simple - it wasnt an interview, and humanloop screwed up publishing details of a private conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179213

"A lot of developers are interested in getting access to ChatGPT plugins via the API but Sam said he didn’t think they’d be released any time soon. The usage of plugins, other than browsing, suggests that they don’t have PMF yet."

There might also be some concern related to the comments on the approach to plugins. Plugins not having a product market fit reflects slightly negatively, on the companies powering the plugin and OpenAI. It becomes harder to get companies to invest time in creating plugins. I am not sure if the there was an option to remove just the issue sections of the post.

Also, why remove it even if requested? If you knowingly sit down for an interview, I don’t believe you have any power, legally speaking, to force that.

It’s hardly bad journalism to say no to such a request.

Maybe you want another interview sometime.

sometimes requests come with flowers. or dump trucks full of money. or lawyers.

Send me: Lawyers, Guns, & Money.

I bet open ai could twist my arm too.

If anything it's bad journalism to remove it.

The author knows that it's easily available. It doesn't matter if the original site retracted it. The author was also YC20 Humanloop. So they have a loyalty to Altman that most reporters wouldn't.

Access. If you don't play ball, you don't get invited to events like the one the article was based on. It's the same reason journalists adhere to embargoes.

plain and simple - it wasnt an interview, and humanloop screwed up publishing details of a private conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179213

Ok, that makes sense then. If Altman didn’t expect it to be public then this is all reasonable.

Maybe they are actually aiming for the Streisand effect on purpose

Create an interesting and speculative situation out of nothing

Heck this article is top 3 on HNs front page right now

Oooh maybe they tried to avoid this situation but GPT4 saw an opportunity. ;)

They do that a lot, like what with GPT-2 being too dangerous to release. Anyone remember that. How many years ago was that?

This could possibly be a pr move / marketing strategy to attract attention. Kind of Streisand effect — I have no idea what he said in the interview, but seeing it being removed ignites my interest

OpenAI is Microsoft now.

Good thing to remember.

FTFY: OpenAI is AI.com now.

It could be for some legal reason.

In that case it doesn't matter that the content it's still on the internet, it only matters that you took action and fixed the "error".

He obviously doesn't want to deal with all the filtering and AI re-education stuff, wants to just sell pure AI, but business people say hey ...

They're basically new age crypto with actual content but that same need to handwaved.

Guessing Sam was high when he mentioned a possible 1m token count this year.

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