Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327520
The article of the submission is updated as well so this is effectively a dupe.
Microsoft is in a very very rough position here. They bet big on believing in Sam's wink wink cough "non-profit" cough wink wink only to run into some true believers.
Additionally, investors have threatened a lawsuit and Microsoft has said they'll withhold cloud computing credits.
Even when this story is mostly over we're going to have journo thinkpieces out of our ears.
source please?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...
"Venture capital firms holding positions in OpenAI’s for-profit entity have discussed working with Microsoft and senior employees at the company to bring back Altman"
"The playbook, a source told Forbes would be straightforward: make OpenAI’s new management, under acting CEO Mira Murati and the remaining board, accept that their situation was untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors"
This is not saying that Microsoft has threatened to withhold the compute credits. It is saying that VC firms are hoping to use that as a strategy for force their hand. Microsoft may or may not agree to this.
Sam was a hired CEO, board is within its power to fire him. I would imagine that Ilya is a more valuable person than Sam.
I don't believe this is true, especially given OpenAI's weird corporate structure with non-profit and for-profit entities. I could be wrong.
> Meanwhile OpenAI staff pretty much consider Altman as their chieftain....
> If Altman going out, near entire OpenAI staff (especially the key personnel) will follow Altman.
Again, not saying you're wrong since I have no first hand info. But do you have first hand info on this, or is this speculation based on various reports. Genuinely curious..
The only thing I can assume is that there's nothing particularly proprietary about anything OpenAI has done, its just an issue of scale. But if that's the case, it would make them not that valuable, as anyone willing to invest enough to reach that same scale using the same non proprietary techniques would be just as good.
or am I missing something?
None of the open models available to these local tools benchmark as well as the closed OpenAI model but the benchmarks are weird. In my own poking around, some models are definitely less coherent or more detailed for some specific prompts but it’s mostly the same.
This technology is more dangerous than the hydrogen bomb, more dangerous than smallpox, and they’re just throwing it out there for everyone to play with. Calling this irresponsible is like calling the ocean a puddle.
They sacked him because as head of a for-profit corporation, he tried to develop products that would (gasp!) make money? Seriously? Investor returns are already limited in their corporate structure, which is supposed to serve as the check on the profit motive. If they don't think that's sufficient anymore, then they should amend their corporate charter and renegotiate with their investor, not fire the CEO out of nowhere. Unless the whole point was to get investors to withdraw money, in which case... um well done.
I'm not some Sam Altman cultist, and I don't particularly care what happens to OpenAI. But this smells like a garden-variety Silicon Valley board coup. The board are trying to present this as them standing between The World and Armageddon, and they're doing a very bad job.
What happened? I remember when most of the people in this industry were at least okay. A little weird but okay.
Of course judging by social media it’s a microcosm of the rest of society. People are utterly losing their minds everywhere. It’s both scary and amusing.
Money. Hype + the greedy and credulous = huge payday.
He’s smart, but smart is like having a big engine in the car. Says nothing about the driving. Big engine plus bad driver just means a worse accident.
Eliezer is filling the traditional doomsday prophet archetype, of which there have been thousands in history. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but should immediately raise questions.
A deeper analysis of his ideas shows there are fundamental problems in his reasoning.
First, He’s been consistently wrong about the future development and results in AI research so his understanding of AI is proven to be superficial.
Second, His doomsday scenarios are based on a fundamental fallacy; that a GAI smarter than humans would be insanely stupid, unable to self reflect or solve moral quandaries. That’s not to say AI cannot be dangerous, but the types of doomsday scenarios he presents are unlikely. For instance because of acausal trade, Rokos Basilisk is a serious risk that should be treated properly, but Elizer denies it.
(/s since this is the internet)
:-)
maybe, but are they right?
by definition we are already doing the Skynet. as software ate the world we kinda forgot to add QA to the mix (economic necessity just means endless dark backlogs are where the exploding complexity goes to die)
and now we are doing it with even more klunky jury rigged crazy probabilistic shit. the chances of systemic ooppsiies are increasing.
yes, I agree, LLMs with this small contexts are very unlikely to move the needle, but we are working day and night on amplifying whatever effects it can and will have on our future. (not to mention that the AI-powered corporate hellscape achievement is already out of Pandora's box since everyone and their dog started using "data driven" fraud detection shit.
I don't think the support for Altman has much to do with that. There are a lot of people building companies and investing a lot of time of money into OpenAI products. They want to work with a company that they can do business with over the long term and isn't going to rug pull them.
Just because something works for a while does not mean its a good long term situation, unless you were saying something else which I failed to decipher.
Absurd money decouples people from consequences of reality. With no negative feedback to stabilize the control loop, it eventually goes haywire.
Are you dismissing everyone that has concerns about unleashing the genie, or are you specifically referring to cult-like behaviour (I'm not familiar with any, but presumably it exists) around this subject?
The rest of your post included some emotive and dismissive language, so I suspect it's the former - a general disregard for the precautionary principle, which in this instance should be first and foremost given the decidedly one-way nature of that particular threshold.
Obviously, anything that Altman does that would compete with OpenAI will have OpenAI lawyers circling around looking for indicia of use of trade secrets or other IP, but non-competes aren't an issue.
Is there any reason to think Ilya used Google technologies (other than what was publicly published without any legal protection against use that Google just did a poor job productizing) after leaving?
I know a good number of OpenAI people, and every single person I know is supportive of Sam. (This may be selection bias, of course, but there are a large number of people who are on Sam's side in all of this)
Even if this wasn't the case, this debacle kneecapped the $80Bn tender offer from Thrive, meaning a large number of employees will not receive the money they believed they would be getting.
That's a bit flippant but its no surprise to me that that there are people who know Sam personally and are supportive of him, that's pretty much how people work. Especially when working and living in SV bubble and Sam is a person who had seemingly mastered that world, as someone who can raise billions of dollars etc. Even if they don't consciously associate him with monetary success, they certainly would associate him with success generally.
From my very outside and mostly uninformed perspective, Sam just seems like a very good salesman (some would say grifter) and is far from infallible.
FWIW: I spend an insane amount of money with OpenAI each month, more than the average income in the US. I'm not a Fortune 500 or anything, but I emailed my OpenAI enterprise account rep and let them know if this ends with Altman _not_ the CEO I'm terminating our account.
I had always had "alternatives" on my list of to-dos, and now I'm losing my whole weekend to this garbage thanks to the morons on the OpenAI board.
Just focus on the enterprise chat bot business
That’s clearly what they’re doing. The AGI thing is just fancy marketing.
Not that they couldn’t be lying, but I’m not sure Occam’s razor would suggest that given their long history of public statements on the topic.
I’ve always felt fundamentally that if you don’t understand how human thought works to such a degree that you can distill it down into an algorithm, you certainly can’t make a computer do it. Which I know is pretty obvious, but apparently a lot of people haven’t gotten the memo. What ChatGPT can do is really cool, and incredibly useful, but it’s nowhere near a model of the human thought process.
1. It takes longer than you think
2. It is much more iterative than you think
We're not going to all wake up one day and see a robot simulating human thought. We'll just inch closer and closer until we're there, and we won't even realize we got there until we've been there for 5 years.
AGI is not an iPhone launch. It's more like the evolution of humans, which took place over millions of years, without anyone being able to identify the first "real" human.
People were saying things like trucking was a dead profession within a handful of years, etc.
They were wrong as hell, clearly.
Point being: Moore's law is for transistors, not just any tech, and not everything in tech gets on an exponential growth/improvement path.
And commercially available, but only in "easy" places with mild climate and easy roads. When I see them effortlessly driving around here in 4" of fresh snow with no visible lane markings and cars sliding all over the place, I'll be impressed.
I just got back from Scottsdale, AZ and saw a few Waymo taxis around (crossed the street in front of one), but, like... that's easy... wide, even surfaced roads, no real weather. Barely a pedestrian or cyclist in sight.
And, finally, none of this looks anywhere like the predictions from 5, 6, 7 years ago. We're almost a decade on from when I first started hearing people saying things like "no point in becoming a truck driver, that's a dead career now that trucks will be automated" and, yeah... that was wrong as hell.
This community has a strong tendency for cult following and tunnel vision. Seems like contrarian thinking, the hacker mindset, and as of recently entrepreneurship are not particularly popular anymore. Instead we have people demanding ip theft and the destruction of entire industries just to satisfy a cult leader’s vision. A little disappointing particularly since it damages and otherwise interesting technology such as ai, and it pushes the hundreds of legitimate ml startups away.
Did any of them mention how to build it?
that's the best sell to the investors who are rushing with billions because afraid to miss the opportunity of millennia.
Heck, we're split on whether current GPT is a glorified autocomplete, a friend, or an alien intelligence, or a half-dozen other theories. It's a black box.
Most people can't handle uncertainty, so they're in some camp, and all the camps are crazy and stupid.
Ditto for covid, for that matter. In early 2020, it could have been anything from a glorified flu to a civilization-ending plague. Ditto for global warming, for that matter. All the models are speculation and extrapolation from limited data. Ditto for a half-dozen other things.
Personally, I think we should play it safe for all of those, but reasonable people can differ. What reasonable people can't do is argue for certainty before we have data coming in or a reasonable understanding of the underlying threat.
Edit: If people could handle uncertainty (and understand value differences are okay), we'd also have a lot less political polarization. A lot of this is simply about believing the other side _might_ be right. If I believe something with 10% odds, and you with 90%, it's often possible to compromise, where with a categorical split, it's not.
— OpenAI/Wall Street, definitely
Here's the full quote:
"A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him."
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/18/23967199/breaking-openai...