Sam Altman likely to start company with researchers from OpenAI: Bloomberg | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman likely to start company with researchers from OpenAI: Bloomberg

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There’s an interesting detail in here about Sam trying to spin up a chip company with Middle Eastern money. That’s potentially a double point of contention: one for trying to start a company which would be a supplier for OpenAI, and one for taking Middle Eastern money. The latter of course depends on your degree of idealism.

What's the distinction between taking "middle eastern money" when according to some people's definition the U.S. is complicit in enabling a genocide? Not saying I believe this claim in its entirety, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is impossible to ignore and just chalk up to war-business-as-usual.

Depends on where your moral lines are. I have a fairly good sense of where mine are but I don’t know the board so I’m not going to make a guess there.

I don't under moral relativism I guess, it makes everything too much into either "it's okay if my tribe does it" or "there's no morality, only affinity groups". So in effect, I guess for some people the distinction between not taking middle eastern money, but taking US money is those people's affinity group.

Emily Chang from Bloomberg reports: Satya Nadella was "blindsided" and is furious. Details in paywalled article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/openai-al...

Chang does not make it clear whether the source is close to Sam Altman.

Stuff like this makes it seem like firing Sam Altman wasn't thought through. There have already been statements from Open AI that no malfeasance was involved. That makes giving Microsoft a surprise of this nature on a Friday afternoon look amateurish. There was no emergency. There was no damage to Open AI. In fact it seems like Open AI has been moving fast without breaking things.

I don't know enough about Sam Altman to have strong opinions about him, but, regardless of his qualities, the way this happened seems like a botch.

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