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Comment by mirzap | Hacker News Reader

We witnessed the insane value destruction over the weekend. Every OpenAI employee is aware that everything they have and what is promised to them is whipped out. Their best chance is that Sam brings them to that new company within MS. They will get the same or better deals as they had. And they will probably deliver within 6m what OAI has now, and what spooked Ilya to launch this coup.

This was a brilliant power move by Satya. I don't see any hope for OpenAI after this brain drainage.

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Yeah, just like reuters mentioned

"The OpenAI for-profit subsidiary was about to conduct a secondary at a $80 billion+ valuation. These 'Profit Participation Units' were going to be worth $10 million+ for key employees. Suffice it to say this is not going to happen now," chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis said."

Insane self own by OpenAI

That sounds like exactly the kind of thing the board of a non-profit should be preventing.

As an employee of a company, I trade my time and effort for some amount of rewards. I enter deals with the expectation of stability from the other party.

My unfounded Internet opinion: OpenAI just removed or reduced a large source of reward and have shown fundamental instability. OpenAIs success is very much tied to Employees and Compute.

Yeah I mean, who cares if ASI kills us all as long as a couple hundred of the most well-paid people on the planet get even more rich.

It's insane to see all these takes when we don't even know what caused the loss of trust in the first place.

> Yeah I mean, who cares if ASI kills us all as long as a couple hundred of the most well-paid people on the planet get even more rich.

creating ASI for money seems particularly asinine as the machine overlords won't care terribly much about dollars

How do you know what ASI will value?

No one sincerely believes they have, or will soon achieve, AGI. Neither can they believe that the CEO can push them to achieve it and forcefully release it, whereas they would responsibly develop it (whatever that may mean) without him around.

Great summary.

We are very complicated creatures and things get out of control, both internally and externally. My armchair opinion is that they started to believe that all of it is so advanced and important, that they lost a bit of a grip on reality. Sutskever imagining planet covered with data centers and solar panels shows me that [0]. Every single person is limited in his/her view - I get a strange feeling when listening to him in this video. Also, they are not the only people left on this planet. Fortunately, this task of creating AI/AGI is not a task for a pack of ten, trying to save us from harm. Still, it may and probably will get rough. /rant

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c

Your second paragraph is pretty ironic given your first.

If your goal is to work for a profit-sharing company, then don't work for a non-profit.

Plenty of non-profits give a lot of money to employees. There is nothing stopping non-profits from paying exorbitant sums to their employees, and executives often do get paid exorbitant. Non-profits mean they don't pay out to investors, but they are usually used as a grift to get people to work for less so the top people make more money and do fundraising on their pet projects.

The employees work for the for-profit part of OpenAI.

That is owned by a non-profit organization. It seems like a lot of the employees are chasing money, and forgetting that it's fundamentally not trying to maximize profit. Of course, Sam seems to have perverted its mission to be the latter (serving as the latest high-priest of mammon, like Elias served Lillith)

As an employee of a bay area tech company, presumably, in which a mid-level IC can make as much money as a C-suite executive in some less prominent industry*

Well, they're almost certainly 'not profiting' right now.

I agree, Satya is an operator. He translated a mess into a historic opportunity for Microsoft. They'll get some significant chunk of some of the best AI talent on the planet. All the heatseakers will go there. That, plus the IP they already have, will turbocharge Microsoft.

OpenAI, in contrast, will become more like an academic research unit at some university. Those who prefer life slow and steady, will select to stay there, making tech for effective altruists.

they make nothing open source, so I'm not sure why effective altruits would join it.

if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their own actions, how can they predict and contain their so claimed future AGI.

they make nothing open source, so I'm not sure why effective altruists would join it.

if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their own actions, how can they predict and contain their so claimed future "AGI".

Is there any reason to assume open source is a prerequisite for effective altruism?

Open source doesn’t necessarily imply good for humanity, for example distributing open source designs for nukes would probably be a net negative.

And even if it did, effective altruists wouldn’t need to prioritize the benefit provided by openness over all other possibilities.

I don't think relying on a proprietary license to make sure enemies can't get AI for nukes is a sane security model. Something else needs to give.

Operator?

Operator in this context refers to someone who successfully runs a business that someone else founded. Often the visionary founder is not good at the nuts and bolts of running and growing a business so they hand off the reins to someone who is. Think Steve Jobs vs Tim Cook.

It doesn’t mean that at all, it’s slang

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=operator

It has a meaning in a business context apart from a slang term

For a decade, "operator" in Silicon Valley as has been used exactly as the commentator above describes it.

Which creates separation from "investor" or "engineer" or "founder" or "PM" or "sales" or "finance". Somebody has to make stuff happen in organizations. And the people who are good at it (Satya is excellent) set their organizations up for unique success.

And yes, ex-special forces people roll their eyes at it. Which is appropriate! But the usage is now totally distinct.

It seems like underselling the successful part and overselling the part about not being the founder, but I can see it's a slang term. Thanks.

And yeah I'm wrong about it being the same term, though I did imagine a different use, I was also thinking of smooth operator, apparently I was unfamiliar with the term in tech.

I learned the business context before the spec ops context and honestly the former makes way more sense to me than the latter.

A business operator is like a machine operator. You're pulling levers on a machine that someone else built while optimizing and tweaking to get the best performance out of that machine as possible.

I was quite wrong about this, but I still don't think it's especially relevant that someone else built it. You would never call Zuckerberg an operator? Or when someone else built it does that not mean that you had no role in building it? That would be the exception, but it would be analogous to owner/operator in general business parlance.

I think now, having tried to fill in my missing knowledge, that it comes from the same root as DevOps, which I erroneously thought was related to SpecOps. DevOps comes from IT Operations which comes from Operations Management, which yes, is like a machine operator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_management

Edit: here's a post with "Founder Operators". Which seems like maybe if you just heard "Operator" you would assume they're not a founder, but also that the term can be applied for those running businesses they founded: https://startupceo.com/2023/01/5-things-successful-founder-o...

> And they will probably deliver within 6m what OAI has now, and what spooked Ilya to launch this coup.

Do you realize how hard it is to make something like GPT4? I think all the non-AI people posting about this all over X/HN have this idea that if you move everyone over you just "remake the AI" as if this were a traditional API.

There is no way MS catches up to OAI in a short period of time. During that time the rest of the market will be pressing the accelerator as hard as possible.

I think MS is in a really, really shit spot right now.

They have access to the weights as per their agreement with open ai; idk if that allows them to use it as a starting point. They also will have access to several of the people who did it. It’s insanely hard to do the first time, but probably just hard to do the second time after you already know what worked before.

I wonder if that agreement also has an insurrection clause saying that if you benefit from this, you must wipe your memories clean of any of that shared IP.

sure but what does "hard to do" entail in terms of timeline? in my experience nothing complex can launch in 3 months at a big corp. 6 months would be aggressive. a year seems the most likely. but where will competitors be in a year?

I mean, if MS literally gets:

- all the code that created GPT-4

- all the weights for GPT-4

- all the people who created both of those things

then, y'know, I like their odds.

They have access to the first two already, per their licensing agreement with OAI; by the end of the week, they may very well have the third.

Value as in money or value as in values? There are people who value also other than the former in the deal. Like people who are trying to keep OpenAI at least somewhat non-profit.

granted, now MSFT basically has another research arm like Google Brain/FAIR, but whether or not their "brain trust" can equal Yann Lecun's or whatnot who knows. Altman and Brockman are on the MBA side of things. The ML magic was Ilya's. If they can recruit a bunch of mini Ilya's over from Open AI, maybe they have a chance at regaining the momentum.

Ilya has backtracked and signed the letter saying he would also leave to Microsoft if the board doesn't resign.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351494

Wtf? Isn't he on the board?

Ilya signed a letter asking 4 members of the board to resign, including Ilya himself. He even posted a public apology for his actions on X https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028

Yes, this is probably the biggest self-own in corporate history.

In one fell move he demonstrated he had neither conviction nor any foresight, ouch. I'm starting to believe this was just a unthought out ego emotional reaction by Ilya. Dude is like Walter White, he just "had to be the man"

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