Normal people can't take being at the center of a large controversy, the amount of negativity and hate you have to face is massive. That is enough to make almost anyone backtrack just to make it stop.
"Terraform raised prices, losing customers"? whatever, I never heard about it.
"ChatGPT's creators have internal disagreement, losing talent"? OH NO what if ChatGPT dies, who is going to answer my questions?? panic panic hate hate...
You can't plan for something you have never experienced. Being hated by a large group of people is a very different feeling from getting hated by an individual, you don't know if you can handle it until it happens to you.
Normal people know not to burn a $80 billion company to the ground in a weekend. Ilya was doing something unprecedented in corporate history, and astounding he wasn't prepared to face the world's fury over it.
Text doesn't convey emotions, and our empathy doesn't work well for emotions we have never experienced. You can see a guy that got kicked in the balls got hurt, but that doesn't mean you are prepared to endure the pain of getting kicked in your balls or that you even understand how painful it is.
Also watching politicians it looks like you can just brush it off, because that is what they do. But that requires a lot of experience, not anyone can do it, it is like watching a boxing match and think you can easily stand after a hard punch in your stomach.
Sure, but you do your best not to be kicked in the balls.
I mean, he didn't have a button on his desk that said, "torch the shares", but he ousted the CEO as a way to cut back on the things that might have meant profit. Did he think that everyone was going to continue to want to give them money after they signal a move away from profit motives? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to think that one through.
I think he was just preoccupied with AI safety, and didn't give a thought to the knock on effects for investors of any stripe. He's clearly smart enough to, he just didn't care enough to factor it into his plans.
If you project your personal hopes which are different from this into the hype, this is your personal problem.
So whose experiences was he supposed to read about?
I would say the answer is, demonstrably yes:
To think it would grow just as fast, or in the ways it did? Acquires are seldom left alone to do magic.
Sutskever didn't get on the board by cunning politicking and schmoozing like most businesspeople with that sort of position. He's an outstanding engineer without upper management skills. Every meet one of those?
I haven't people any reasonably intelligent person so unaware of real world that they can berate a colleague so publicly and officially and think "Hey! I am sorry man" will do the trick.
Has OpenAI been burnt to the ground?
And it's just Monday afternoon.
3 CEOs in 3 days, isn’t burny, either. There’s the guy they fired, the person they had take on the role so they have someone in the role, and then someone they hired to be CEO. I guess they could have gotten that down to 2 by jumping immediately to their intended replacement, but not having them ready to start immediately doesn’t seem odd.
And yeah, it’s just Monday afternoon. If in the next few days, a sizable chunk of those who threatened to quit do so, then that would be burny. But we ain’t there yet.
It's impressively operatic. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
This is the cheapest and most cost-effective way to run things as an authoritarian -- at least in the short term.
If one is not "made of sterner stuff" -- to the point where one is willing to endure scorn for the sake of the truth: - Then what are you doing in a startup, if working in one - One doesn't have enough integrity to be my friend