I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions

Did... gpt-5 made the decision?

At this point people need to come clear on the reason, because Saudis are number one reason ATM.

> To the Board of Directors at OpenAI,

> OpenAI is the world’s leading AI company. We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position.

> The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.

> When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAI acted swiftly to stabilize the company. They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties, and were negotiating in bad faith.

> The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward - the one that would best serve our mission, company, stakeholders, employees and the public - would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that could lead the company forward in stability.

> Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”

> Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgement and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

> Why would the board say that OpenAI as a company getting destroyed would be consistent with the goals?

A few things stand out to me, including:

>> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”

Have they really achieved AGI? Or did they observe something concerning?

This is forgetting that power is an even greater temptation than money. The non-profits will all come up with solutions that have them serving as gatekeepers, to keep the unwashed masses from accessing something that that is too dangerous for the common person.

I would rather have for-profit corporations control it, rather that non-profits. Ideally, Inwould like it to be open sourced so that the common person could control and align AI with their own goals.

It's counter-intuitive, but locking up a technology is like trying to control prices and wages. It just doesn't work -- unless you confiscate every GPU in the world and bomb datacenters etc.

The best way to align with the coming AGI's and ASI's is to build them in the sunlight. Every lock-em-up approach is doomed to fail (I guess that makes me a meta-doomer?)

Timnit Gebru was fired for being a toxic /r/ImTheMainCharacter SJW that was enshittifiy the entire AI/ML department. Management correctly fired someone that was holding an entire department hostage in her crusade against the grievance de jure.

That's ignoring the fact that every outlet has unanimously pointed at Ilya being the driving force behind the coup.

Honestly, pretty pathetic. If this was truly about convictions, he could at least stand by them for longer than a weekend.

There is an expression of regret, but he doesn’t say he wants Altman back. Just to fix OpenAI.

He says he was a participant but in what? The vote? The toxic messaging? Obviously both, but what exactly is he referring to? Perhaps just the toxic messaging because again, he doesnt say he regrets voting to fire Altman.

Why not just say “I regret voting to fire Sam Altman and Im working to bring him back.” Presumably because thats not true. Yet it kind of gives that impression.

Or, is he just bitter that his millions are put in risk.

Which I'm inclined to believe.

What's with all these people suddenly thinking that humans are NOT motivated by money and power? Even less so if they're "academics"? Laughable.

The truth is, this is about the only thing about the whole clown show that makes any sense right now.

I see this is the popular opinion and that I'm going against it. But I've made decisions that I though were good at the time, and later I got more perspective and realize it was a terrible decision.

I think being able to admit you messed up, when you messed up is a great trait. Standing by your mistake isn't something I admire.

It reminds me of my friend at a Mensa meeting where they cannot agree at basic organization points like in a department consortium.

When a board is unhappy with a highly-performing CEO’s direction, you have many meetings about it and you work towards a resolution over many months. If you can’t resolve things you announce a transition period. You don’t fire them out of the blue.

That's not a big deal for a small company, but this one has billions at stake and arguably critical consequences for humanity in general.

Personally, I don't think that Altman was that big of an impact, he was all business, no code, and the world is acting like the business side is the true enabler. But, the market has spoken, and the move has driven the actual engineers to side with Altman.

Come on Ilya, step up and own it, as well as the consequences. Don't be a weasel.

There has never been a company like OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.

Those guns are metaphorical of course but this is essentially what is going on:

Someone with a lot of power and influence is making him say this.

Why would you stand by unintended consequences?

Maybe raw GPT-4 wants to fire everyone.

Can't they send DMs? Why the need to make everything public via Twitter?

It's quite paradox that of all things those people who build leading ML/AI systems are obviously the most rooted in egoism and emotions without an apparent glimpse of rationality.

My gut is leaning towards gpt-5 being, in at least one sense, too capable.

Either that or someone cloned sama's voice and used an LLM to personally insult half the board.

/tongue firmly in cheek

???

Do you mean "highest paid"? I suspect there are engineers/scientists that are working harder than Sam at OpenAI. At the very least, who the "hardest working" at OpenAI is unknowable - likely even if you have inside knowledge.

Avoiding this was literally the reason that OpenAI was founded.

For the record, I don't believe anyone at OpenAI or Microsoft is going to deliver AGI any time in the near future. I think this whole episode just proves that none of these people are remotely qualified to be the gatekeepers for anything.

I don't think any huge corporation is "the good guys", although sometimes they do some good things.

Advice I wish I could have given my younger self.

Execs are allowed to do the dumbest shit imaginable and keep their jobs and bonuses.

The average engineer so much as takes a bit longer to push a ticket, and there's 5 people breathing down his neck.

Speaking from experience.

"In the future, once the robustness of our models will exceed some threshold, we will have wildly effective and dirt cheap AI therapy. Will lead to a radical improvement in people’s experience of life. One of the applications I’m most eagerly awaiting."

I'm eager to see how it all unfolds.

That said, no one is going to put him on a corporate board again.

You could also look at this as a brilliant scientist feels he doesn’t get recognition. Always sees Sam’s name. Resents it. The more gregarious people always getting the glory. Thinks he doesn’t need them and wants to settle some score that only exists in his own head.

In the past I have not used Anthropic APIs nearly as much as versions of GPT but last night I watched a fantastic interview with a co-founder of Anthropic talking about the science they are doing to even begin to understand how to do alignment. I was impressed. I then spent a long while re-reading Anthropic’s API and other documentation and have promised myself to split my time evenly 3 ways between running models on my own hardware, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

For what it’s worth (nothing!) I still think the board did the right thing legally, but this whole mess makes me feel more than a little sad.

    Satya: Was getting caught part of your plan?
    Ilya: Of course...Sam Altman refused our offer in favour of yours, we had to find out what he told you.
    Sam: Nothing! I said nothing!
    Satya: Well, congratulations! You got yourself caught! Now what's the next step in your master plan?
    Ilya: Crashing OpenAI...with no survivors!

We just saw connected mega corporation people on fighting for winning the AI master race. Reminds a bit from the nuclear arms race.

In the end he might have gotten caught in the middle of a board misaligned with the desires of the employees.

Now this is only childish and petty.

Want to know a dirty secret?

Nobody knows what they're doing.

Some think they do - but don't. (idiots)

Some know they don't - but act like they do. (cons)

And some know they don't - and are honest about it. (children)

Pick your poison, but we all suck in different ways - and usually in a different way based on our background.

Business people who are the best in the world tend to be cons.

Technical people who are the best tend to be children.

You get a culture clash between these two, and it is especially bad when you see someone from one background operate in the opposing domain using their background's cultural norm. So when Ilya runs business like a child. Or when Elon hops on an internal call with the twitter engineering team plus geohot and starts trying to confidently tell them about problems with a system that he knows nothing about.

Sure makes for great entertainment though!

This is not an original point by me - I've seen multiple people make similar comments on here over the weekend - but these are the people who think they are best qualified to prevent an artificial superintelligence from destroying humanity, and they can't even coordinate the actions of a few intelligent humans.

Absolutely, closes the book this sort of stuff doesn't happen in real life.

I just tried, and GPT-4 gave me a professional and neutrally worded press release like you pointed out.

More realistically, this is why you have highly paid PR consultants. Right now, every tweet and statement should go through one.

That doesn't look like it's happening. What's next?

"I'm sorry you feel you need an apology from me"?

Perhaps they did but it was hallucinating at the time? /s?

With all of their editorial biases, axes to grind, and investors to placate, instead.

Let someone else take up the CEO role, which is a different skillset anyway.

He is now the 'effective CEO' of OpenAI. He still has to go to work tomorrow, faced with an incredibly angry staff who just got their equity vaporized, with majority in open rebellion and quitting to join Microsoft.

> There's no obligation to read things about yourself.

That's assuming the worst thing that happens is people speak poorly of you after a debacle. It's also human to feel compelled to know what people think of us, as unhealthy as that might be in some cases. It gets worse when maladjusted terminally-online malignants make it a point to punish you for your mistakes by stalking you through email, phones, or in real life. It's not that simple.

> If you did what you thought was right, stand by it and take the heat.

Owning what you did is noble, but you certainly don't have to stand by it well after you know its wrong.

edit: typo

If only it was that simple.

The internet mob will happily harass your friends and family too, for something they feel you did wrong.

And on top of that are people in the mob who feel compelled to take real world action.

It is actually dangerous, to be the focus point of the anger of any large group of people online.

What if it turned out to totally wrong? standing by it would just make thing even worse.

This is the nugget of this affair if indeed you are concerned about the effect and role of AI in human civilization.

The captains at the helm are not mature individuals. The mature ones (“the adult table”) are motivated by profit and claim no responsibility other than to “shareholders”.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever

HN geniuses were talking up Ilya Sutskever, genius par exemplar and how the CEO man is nothing before the sheer engineering brilliance of this God as Man. I'm sure they'll come up with some theory of how Satya Nadella did this to unleash the GPT.