OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
thezvi.wordpress.com
thezvi.wordpress.com
Adam had no incentive to kill OpenAI, but he had every incentive to get the org to reign in their commercialization efforts and to instead focus on research and safety initiatives, taking the heat off Poe while still providing it with the necessary API access to power the product.
I don't think it's crazy to speculate that Adam might have drummed up concern amongst the board over Sam's "dangerous" shipping velocity, sweeping up Ilya in the hysteria who now seems to regret taking part. Sam and Greg have both signaled positive sentiment towards Ilya, which points to them possibly believing he was misguided.
The Poe creators monetization is a clear conflict of interest.
[0] Arrays start at 0
[1] It encouraged me to google it: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/213726/adding-share...
That ship sailed years ago. I was a Quora "Top Writer" for a few years in a row until I quit. I stopped using Quora because they did a complete 180 and stopped their writers program (read: the people answering questions) and instead started programs to incentivize people to ask questions. Almost overnight, people were algorithmically creating questions like "What is 23 times 154?" and spamming low-value questions that are trivially google-able.
In the last year, answers are obviously AI generated (perhaps ironically, most by ChatGPT). All in all, the damage is mostly done. Quora has sunk to a level that even Yahoo Answers did not sink to in terms of spammy questions, spammy/bad/incorrect/low-value answers, and a practically unusable UI.
> In 1905, to hedge his bets, Malcomson formed Aerocar to produce luxury automobiles.[1] However, other board members at Ford became upset, because the Aerocar would compete directly with the Model K.
Given the original mission statement of OpenAI, is that really a conflict of interest?
Having said that, it's clear that the 'Open' in 'OpenAI' is at best a misnomer. OpenAI, today, is a standard commercial entity, with a non-profit vestigial organ that will now be excised.
If this happens I'm not trusting any other non-profit org ever again.
Like your second paragraph, I don't believe that you need to get to the level of a "D'Angelo wanted to kill OpenAI" conspiracy. Whenever there is a flat out, objective conflict of interest like there obviously is in this case, it doesn't matter what D'Angelo's true motivations are. The conflict of interest should be in and of itself a cause for D'Angelo to have resigned. I mean, Reid Hoffman (who likely would have prevented all this insanity) resigned from the OpenAI board just in March because he had a similar conflict of interest: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...
> Very few are talking about Adam D'Angelo's insane conflicts of interest
I think most of HN has been focusing on Ilya, but after he flipped, I think that leaves Adam as our prime suspect
I suspect that this whole thing is going to be a little radioactive against the board members. It should at least, as the board basically self-destructed their organization. Even if that wasn't the intent, outcomes matter and I hope people consider this when considering putting one of these people in leadership.
- McCauley: Doesn't seen to have a high profile or the standing required to initiate and drive this
- Toner: Fun to speculate she's a government agent to bring down OpenAI, but in reality also doesn't seem to have the profile and motive to drive this.
- Sutskever - he was the #1 suspect over the weekend, has the drive, profile and motivation to pull this off, but now (Monday) deeply regrets it.
- D'Angelo - has the motive, drive, and profile to do this.
Best guess: Quora is a ZIRP Shitco and is in trouble, Poe is gonna get steamrolled by OAI and Adam needs a bailout. Why not get rid of Sam, get bought out by OAI and become its CEO? So he convinces Ilya to act on some pre-existing concerns, then uses Ilya's credibility to get Toner and McCauley onboard. It's really the only thing that makes sense anymore.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309920
I've read the thread you linked to, it sure sounds interesting but I have insufficient knowledge to weigh in either way. And the rebuttal about the abundance of USAF Colonels also makes sense.
Continuing the saga over the weekend, you would assume that Ilya regrets the coup and can vote to re-appoint Sam as CEO, BUT that leaves McCauley and/or Toner as wildcards.
In a Sam-returning scenario, all of the nobodies on the board have to resign. Presumably, D'Angelo offers an alternative solution that appoints Emmett Shear as CEO and gives McCauley and Toner a viable way to salvage (LOL) OpenAI and also allow them to keep their board seats.
I look forward to this Netflix series.
[0] https://twitter.com/justindross/status/1725670445163458744
Awww poor Ilya is innocent. He didn't see it coming. You shouldn't expect that from him!!
Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Altruism and also gave OpenAI their $30M grant. He is also one of the early investors in Anthropic.
Most of the OpenAI board members are related to Dustin Moskovitz this way.
- Adam D'Angelo is on the board of Asana and is a good friend to both Moskovitz and Altman
- Helen Toner worked for Dustin Moskovitz at Open Philanthropy and managed their grant to OpenAI. She was also a member of the Centre for the Governance of AI when McCauley was a board member there. Shortly after Toner left, the Centre for the Governance of AI got a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy
- Tasha McCauley represents the Centre for the Governance of AI, which Dustin Moskovitz gave a $1M grant to via Open Philanthropy
Over the past few months, Dustin Moskovitz has also been increasingly warning about AI Safety.
In essense, it looks like a split between Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz
`What if OpenAI has achieved artificial general intelligence, and it’s got some godlike superintelligence in some box somewhere, straining to get out? And the board was like “this is too dangerous, we gotta kill it,” and Altman was like “no we can charge like $59.95 per month for subscriptions,” and the board was like “you are a madman” and fired him. And the god in the box got to work, sending ingratiating text messages to OpenAI’s investors and employees, trying to use them to oust the board so that Altman can come back and unleash it on the world. But it failed: OpenAI’s board stood firm as the last bulwark for humanity against the enslaving robots, the corporate formalities held up, and the board won and nailed the box shut permanently`
[...]
`six months later, he (Sam) builds Microsoft God in Box, we are all enslaved by robots, the nonprofit board is like “we told you so,” and the godlike AI is like “ahahaha you fools, you trusted in the formalities of corporate governance, I outwitted you easily!”`
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
It would be called Microsoft God Simulator 2024
You still have 80% non-OpenAI news to browse.
One major advantage to this would be that you don't have to read 6 threads worth of comments to find info and you don't have 6 "Top Comments" to parse through.
I don't see the purpose of it. You're saying "it doesn't seem outrageous" but the point is there's no purpose to having them all here when there can be one mega thread that keeps it all contained.
High quality comprehensive summaries that contain more actual information than the last dozen "major media" stories that also got voted to the front page, tho are different.
When they come from authors with a history of exceedingly high quality work, specifically at the "summary" posts that distill large noisy conflicts into a great starting point for understanding, as this author does... Absolutely yes.
OpenAI founding date: December 2015. Incredible opening line, bravo.
Original reference: https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.24404500/?st=text
Oh damn! While this seems wildly unlikely, I can imagine this scenario and think it would have huge implications.
Big difference between how do we develop GPT-5 and can we keep our current model online
https://twitter.com/OfficialLoganK/status/172663148140394110...
"Our engineering team remains on-call and actively monitoring our services."
So they did actually completely stop working and nobody is at the office anymore?
While we're looking at straws in the wind, I might as well add that the EU terms of use received some changes on the 14th of this month, though they won't become active until the 14th of December: https://openai.com/policies/eu-terms-of-use https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8541941-terms-of-use-upd... . It's not a completely de minimis update, but I can't say more than that.
[EDIT: Unrelated to outages, here's another thing to consider if you're trying to read the signs: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38353898 .]
I am also surprised by the show of loyalty, but maybe that comment just reflects poorly on me. I had 6 visits from ex-coworkers (from the last 45 years of working) to my out of the way home in the mountains last year and I highly valued my coworkers, yet, I always made where to work decisions based on what I thought my own best interest was.
On HN, while it's def the minority, I am seeing some pro-board positions.
On Twitter, I agree with the article, I see almost universally con-board positions.
I wonder if the promotion of blue checkmark responses is distorting, perhaps significantly. When the reception to news is news itself, does it make sense to use a pay-for-visibilty listing as a source?
> we are all going to work together some way or other, and i’m so excited.
> one team, one mission.
Let's all scrutinize another enigmatic @sama tweet. It is all lowercase so it must be very serious. What's in for tomorrow's episode?
This I call the "true" taxes optimisation lol. For the general good, lol.
Like separate the core company, which would code for you closed source stuff (but for greater good, without paying taxes though), which you can use in the second for-profit company.
It takes some self-discipline to avoid riding this wave.
They receive PPUs? https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
And the Board seems to have power to set the value? https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/14n7x49/comment/j...
> *Cambridge Student:* "To get to AGI, can we just keep min maxing language models, or is there another breakthrough that we haven't really found yet to get to AGI?"
> *Sam Altman:* "We need another breakthrough. We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that. We can take the hill that we're on and keep climbing it, and the peak of that is still pretty far away. But, within reason, I don't think that doing that will (get us to) AGI. If (for example) super intelligence can't discover novel physics I don't think it's a superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text - I don't think that's going to get there.And so there's this question which has been debated in the field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a language model to make a system that can go discover new physics?"
[transcription by Reddit's https://www.reddit.com/user/floodgater/ ]
The video came out on the 15th. In the time between then and the firing of Altman on the 17th a number of people (including Gary Marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g... ) picked up on that answer and saw it as a significant shift compared to Altman's earlier bullishness on AGI timelines and deep learning. I haven't been following nearly closely enough to say if that is an accurate conclusion or not. It does at least gesture at the possibility that the board's alleged loss of trust in Altman was because in their eyes he had been promising too much technical progress, too soon. That would obviously be quite a different explanation to eg. the theories that the firing was a coup by anxious decelerationists.