Ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly planning new AI venture | Hacker News Reader

Ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly planning new AI venture

sfchronicle.com

49 pointsmikhael50 comments

His recent tweet, 'I love the openai team so much,' followed by hundreds of retweets with a heart emoji from OpenAI staff, makes me believe that he will return back.

Possible but the board and chief scientist will need to go.

Who could make them go?

Apparently a huge number of staff members threatened to quit unless the board resigned.

Given the drama on the board, seems like it would be best to reset it. The board members that voted Sam out had conflicts of interest. With the board not being fully staffed, it seems like a few that were left suddenly had too much power, too much conflicting interest, and really shouldn't have been allowed to make such sweeping changes.

Like their should have been some board rules on filling positions before allowing firing a CEO or some other guard rails.

https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330158

Would that help much when it's the same board that elects new members to itself?

Whether it's a country, a company, or even a family, external threat forges bonds, and lets internal conflict seem trivial.

With no external threat, internal strife grows. Effectively, we're wired to search for, identify, and deal with the most current, visible threat.

OpenAI is very much far in the lead. If it was fiscally sound, but had visible competitors on its heels, I bet this little coup wouldn't have happened.

It is amusing to me, that if there is no threat, or high threat, people can fall apart. Only with some-but-not-too-much threat, is perfect harmony achieved.

Autoimmune disease, but for organizations/societies instead of individual organisms.

Reason being?

This news is before that happens: Nov 18, 2023 6:05 p.m.

I much rather he start a different venture.

the next all-lowercase tweet with minimal punctuation i have to read is going to make me lose it

Can’t tell if this is sarcasm or lacking self-awareness.

Wouldn't it be loads of self-awareness? Clearly aware of internal angst.

I meant that it was a no-punctuation HN post lacking capitalization.

Ah, heh. Missed that.

i'm working on a programming language and i made everything lowercase mandatorily.

"keyboard manufacturers hate him for this one simple trick" :-)

You'll love this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP

I believe the lowercase texts are used by some (many) public figures to indicate that the person themselves is posting and not their social media handler.

OpenAI staff in product and applied research. Didn't see any from the hardcore agi/safety research. So there is some internal division already.

Who is actually responsible for the real innovation there? I read Ilya was a co-author on the papers that made GPT and Dall-E possible in the first place. Is anybody in that weight class publicly siding with Sam, or is it all people working on APIs etc.?

Going through GPT-4 contributors list Ilya and Sam are both under additional contributors with nothing specific attached to their name. I take this to mean they didn’t contribute anything specific but OpenAI thanks them for their service. Greg brockmann is infra lead, Jacob Pachoki is overall lead of GPT4! and optimization lead, Szymon Sidor is optimization vice lead and these are all people who publicly resigned with Sam Altmans ouster.

Now going through ChatGPT contributors list, there is no mention of Ilya or Sam, but Greg, Jacob and Szymon are mentioned.

When it comes to the GPT3 paper: Ilya is thanked as an advisor, Greg sam or the rest are not mentioned. It seems like most of the leads created Anthropic.

In my own observations, Ilya stopped doing much for OpenAI since around 2019, he was mostly an advisor and gave talks here and there. He was most likely not responsible for the innovation behind OpenAI. An early codebase of GPT-3 was credited to Prafulla Dhariwal, and its lead was Tom Brown. ChatGPT seems to have been led by John Schulman. GPT-4 by Jacob Pachoki. Greg seems to be involved in setting up the infrastructure code for large GPU clusters and training. Clearly the folk with the skills to build and innovate in OpenAI prefer Sam as CEO and that says a lot about Sams leadership

I get that he didn’t work on these things day to day, but ultimately who was responsible for the innovations that made these programs possible in the first place? For example, was anyone at OpenAI involved in the creation of transformers?

Even Ilya was not involved in the creation of transformers…

Honestly by your logic, NVIDIA are the real innovators, without their hardware none of this would be possible (including the very first Deep Learning Win, known as AlexNet)

I'm not proposing any logic. I'm just trying to figure out who if anyone at open AI actually pioneered the development of this technology, rather than simply worked toward its implementation at scale.

The reason it matters is because if they are just building all this stuff based on ideas taken from other outside researchers' papers and throwing money toward making it happen, OpenAI's moat is smaller, and it's easier for a bright group of competitors with lots of funding to catch up.

OpenAI has not invented much of any new ideas. None of them worked on transformers, or diffusion or a host of other technologies that power their models. (though one of the leads at OpenAI built PPO while in his PhD). But they’ve perfected the art of training and deploying models, which I think is their moat. It still shocks me that their speech recognition model is miles ahead of Siri (that struggles heavily with my accent) and even Alexa. How is it that 2 companies that have invested billions of dollars into these products, end up with worse results than a small team in startup whose main focus isn’t speech recognition?

Almost like how Toyota didn’t invent the car, but perfected the art of building reliable cars, I see OpenAI as perfecting the art of the building ML models that just work in the real world

OK thanks, that makes sense. Who at Open AI would you say was most responsible for perfecting that training?

I’m not sure, it’s hard to say unless you’re in OpenAI. Also it’s almost likely a team, not 1 person

I wouldn't interpret missing interactions on twitter as more than people not using twitter.

Twitter peaked at 368 million users 2022. It is among various analysts expected to drop 4% of users to reach approximately 2020 level in 2023, and another 5% more users in 2024 to reach 2019 level [0]

That's not enough of a loss to motivate discarding twitter conversations.

[0] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-users-does-twitter-...

I wonder if this is going to be like the SVB situation where a bunch of people are putting out fires behind the scenes over the weekend and then somehow on Monday we go back to business as usual (whatever that would mean for this specific case).

If "putting out fires" means "descended upon by a crack team of Microsoft assassin lawyers," then yes.

You don't mess with power's money...

An offer they can't refuse...

Well, we'll see how big the moat really is. That's what I find most interesting in this.

Yeah this was what I was thinking - by its nature this research is very much out in the open. Anyone and everyone is training their own LLMs that have comparable capabilities to ChatGPT (even individuals on single nodes are able to host small models now)

What is the moat for ChatGPT and OpenAI? Apart from huge financial backing from MS (and cheaper compute?)

If he starts something new I suspect funding won't be a problem and you can bet your bottom dollar that Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter and everyone else will be sniffing around like crazy so money won't be an issue I am sure.

Time to sell any OpenAI investments I guess?

He should call it LibreAI

to ruin one more prefix?

Our mistake was expecting this situation to be a tragedy when the actors are actually performing a comedy.

FT reporting investors pushing to get him back at OpenAI

https://www.ft.com/content/466bf00a-1e76-4255-be2b-3c1d37508...

unpaywalled- https://archive.ph/zZWUy

"...One of the people, a leading investor in OpenAI, is confident that they can dispose of the board and reinstate Altman and Brockman before the weekend is out. Investors are hoping that Altman would return to a company “which has been his life’s work,” and that Mira Murati, promoted from chief technology officer to interim chief executive on Friday, would stay at the company, added the person..."

Note to the upcoming Netflix Series writers. Keep on working on those dialog pages...

Dude is morally bankrupt, abusing poverty gap to harvest biometric data via his cryptoscam

I’m disheartened by the “Open”AI employees backing him and pretty surprised at how many hn’ers think so highly of him (especially considering the anti-crypto bent this place has)

It depends what he wants to do with this data. Worldcoin was a botched launch, and one could see this from a mile away, which does speak for his "move quick, break things" attitude, which is indeed alarming. The whole idea of Worldcoin is raising eyebrows.

But is he morally bankrupt "abusing poverty", or just naive and willing to take risks is subject to debate. What do you think is the use of scanning eyeballs of poor people? Mostly to train the AI how to recognize eyeballs. Which kind of is the point of the tech.

Just consider how much worse the alternative must be.

It seems like he was already planning a new AI venture even though he always said that he's ,,rich enough''.

Microsoft is forcing him back. This whole news cycle is insane.

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