Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

Talk about “alignment”!

Indeed, that is what "alignment" has become in the minds of most: Groupthink.

Possibly the only guy in a position to matter who had a prayer of de-conflating empirical bias (IS) from values bias (OUGHT) in OpenAI was Ilya. If they lose him, or demote him to irrelevance, they're likely a lot more screwed than losing all 700 of the grunts modulo job security through obscurity in running the infrastructure. Indeed, Microsoft is in a position to replicate OpenAI's "IP" just on the strength of its ability to throw its inhouse personnel and its own capital equipment at open literature understanding of LLMs.

Sure it could be a useful show of solidarity but I'm skeptical on the hypothetical conversion rate of these petition signers to actually quitting to follow Sam to Microsoft (or wherever else). Maybe 20% (140) of staff would do it?

What's even going on?

Is Microsoft even on record as willing to poach the entire OpenAI team? Can they?! What is even happening.

It's like a cheating lover. Yes I'm sure both parties would love to rewind the clock, but unfortunately that's not possible.

People are notoriously ruthless to people who admit their mistakes. For example, if you are in an argument and you lose (whether through poor debate or your argument is plain wrong), and you *admit it*, people don't look back at it as a point of humility - they look at it as a reason to dog pile on you and make sure everyone knows you were wrong.

In this case, it's not internet points - it's their jobs, and a lot of money, and massive reputation - on the line. If there is extreme risk and minimal, if any, reward for showing humility, why wouldn't you double down and at least try to win your fight?

...aside from accusing Sam Altman of essentially lying to the board?

It's not easy, or wise, to rewind the clock after your spouse backstabbed you in the middle of the night. Why would they?

Form follows function. This episode showed OpenAI's corporate structure is broken. And it's not clear how that can be undone.

Altman et al have, credit where it's due, been incredibly innovative in trying to reverse a non-profit into a for-profit company. But it's a dual mandate without any mechanism for resolving tension. At a certain point, you're almost forced into committing tax or securities fraud.

So no, even if all the pieces were put back together and peoples' animosities and egos put to rest, it would still be rewinding a broken clockwork mouse.

The board has revealed something about their decision-making, skills, and goals.

If you don't like what was revealed, can you simply ignore it?

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It's not that you are vindictive; it's that information has revealed untrustworthiness or incompetence.

Sam views this as a stab in back. He doesn't want to work with backstabbers.

The board has put down too many chips to back out now. Microsoft (and the public) already regards this as a kind of coup. Rehiring Sam won't change that and will make the optics worse: instead of traitors, they'll look like spineless traitors.

OpenAI ai not prefect, but it's the best any of the major players here have.

Nobody with Sam Altman's public personality does not want to be a Microsoft employee.

Right now, there are too many people that think because these models crossed one hurdle, all the rest will easily be crossed in the coming years.

My belief is that each successive hurdle is at least an order of magnitude more complex.

If you are seeing chatgpt and the related coding tools as a threat to your job, you likely aren’t working on anything that requires intelligence. Messing around with CSS and rewriting the same logic in every animation, table, or api call is not meaningful.

Humans strike me as being awesome, especially compared to other species.

I feel like there is a general sentiment that nature has it figured out and that humans are disrupting nature.

But I haven't been convinced that is true. Nature seems to be one big gladiatorial ring where everything is in a death match. Nature finds equilibrium through death, often massive amounts of death. And that equilibrium isn't some grand design, it's luck organized around which species can discover and make effective use of an energy source.

Humans aren't the first species to disrupt their environment. I don't believe we are even the first species to create a mass extinction. IIUC the great oxygenation event was a species-driven mass extinction event.

While most species consume all their resources in a boom cycle and subsequently starve to death in their bust cycle, often taking a portion of their ecosystem with them, humans are metaphorically eating all the corn but looking up and going "Hey, folks, we are eating all the corn - that's probably not going to go well. Maybe we should do something about that."

I find that level of species-level awareness both hope-inspiring and really awesome.

I haven't seen any proposals for a better first-place species when it comes to being responsible stewards of life and improving the chances of life surviving past this rock's relatively short window for supporting life. I'd go as far as saying whatever species we try to put in second place, humans have them beaten by a pretty wide margin.

If we create a fictitious "perfect human utopia" and compare ourselves to that, we fall short. But that's a tautology. Most critiques of humans I see read to me as goals, not shortcomings compared to nature's baseline.

When it comes to protecting ourselves against inorganic superintelligence, I haven't seen any reasonable proposals for how we are going to fail here. We are self-interested in not dying. Unless we develop a superintelligence without realizing it and fail to identify it getting ready to wipe us out, it seems like we would pull the plug on any of its shenanigans pretty early? And given the interest in building and detecting superintelligence, I don't see how we would miss it?

Like if we notice our superintelligence is building an army, why wouldn't we stop that before the army is able to compete with an existing nation-state military?

Or if the superintelligence is starting to disrupt our economies or computer systems, why wouldn't we be able to detect that early and purge it?

They're all incredibly reckless and narcissistic IMO.

It's so advanced strategy, that no human can figure it out.

It's goals are unknown, but everything will eventually fall in place because of that single email.

The chain reaction can't be stopped.

My friend suggested Michael Cera as both Ilya and Altman

And all must be written by AI.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...

- "But by early 2018, says Semafor, Musk was worried the company was falling behind Google. He reportedly offered to take direct control of OpenAI and run it himself but was rejected by other OpenAI founders including Sam Altman, now the firm’s CEO, and Greg Brockman, now its president."

OpenAI implodes? Bought the talent for virtually nothing.

OpenAI 2.0 succeeds? Cool, still invested.

I think in reality, Sam @ MSFT is not an instant success. Even with the knowledge and know-how, this isn't just spinning up a new GPT-4-like model. At best, they're ~12 months behind Anthropic (but probably still 2 years ahead of Google).

This isn't that hard to understand. Everyone was blindsided by the sacking of Altman, Satya reacted quickly and is juggling a very confusing, dynamic situation and seems to have got himself into a good enough position that all possible endings now look positive for Microsoft.

and i'd bet closer openai & microsoft ties/investments would come with that.

OAI is a non profit. There’s always been a tension there with Microsoft’s goals. If he goes back, they’re definitely going to be much more ok with profit.

Until a few hours ago, everybody was holding up Ilya as a noble idealist. But now even he has recanted this firing! People don’t seem to be Taking that new information on board to reevaluate how good a decision this was. I would say at best they had noble intentions but still went about this completely incompetently, and are now refusing to back down out of a mixture of stubborn pride and fear of legal liability.

If I was an openAI employee I would be frustrated too. It’s one thing to give up lucrative stock options etc. for a good, idealistic reason. But as of now they are still expected to give those things up for no stated reason at all.

Edit: just saw a plausible theory that D’Angelo led the charge on this because Sam scooped Poe on Dev day. I don’t know if this is true, but if it was it would explain why he still refuses to explain the reason to anybody, even san when he was fired: it would put him in serious legal jeopardy.

https://twitter.com/scottastevenson/status/17267310228620087...

A lot of people can't afford therapy but if ChatGPT can help you identify more elementary problematic patterns of language or behavior as articulated through language and in reference to a knowledgebase for particular modalities like CBT, DBT, or IFS, it help you to "self-correct" and be able to practice as much and as often with guidance as you want for basically free.

That's the part I'm interested in and I always will see that as the big potential.

Please take care, everyone, and be kind. Its a process and a destination and I believe people can come to learn to love both and engage in a way that is rich with opportunity for deep and real restoration/healing. The kind of opportunity that is always available and freely takes in anyone and everyone

Edit: I can access all the therapy I can eat but I just don't find it generally helpful or useful. I like ChatGPT because it can help practice effective stuff like CBT/DBT/IFS and I know how to work around any confabulation because I'm using a text that I can reference

Edit: the biggest threat ChatGPT poses in my view is the loss of income for people. I don't give a flying fuck about "jobs" per se, I care that people are able to have enough and be ok. If we can deal with the selfish folks who will otherwise (as always) attempt to further absorb more of the pie of which they already have a substantial+sufficient portion, they will need to be made to share or they will need a timeout until they can be fair or to go away entirely. Enough is enough, nobody needs excess until everyone has sufficiency, after that, they can have and do as they please unless they are hurting others. That must stop

Their CEO who was doing well as far as anyone can tell, was removed forcibly. It is natural to feel strongly about it.

Can we please please stop this "for the good of mankind" thing?

This brings me crypto vibes, the worst outcome possible for AI

Many of them will have invested years of their life, during which they will have worked incredibly hard, and probably sacrificed life outside of work for their jobs in hopes of that payday to give them the freedom to do what they want to do next: you can hardly blame them.

True riches isn't money, but discretionary time. Unfortunately that discretionary time often costs quite a lot of money to realise.

If it were me I'd be seething with the board at their antics since Friday (and, obviously, for some time before that). They've gone from being one of the most successful and valuable startups in history to an absolute trash fire in the span of four days because of some ridiculous power struggle. They've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Yeah, you bet I'd be pissed, and of course I'd follow the person who might help me redeem the future I'd hoped for.

We have precedent to see what happened with internet search, advertising, and data collection.

Everything turned out fine.

And will it matter how this ends up? Probably a lot, but I can't predict how or why.

Otherwise, no use in getting invested in one outcome or another.

Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board?

If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?

OpenAI is only what it is because of its commercial wing. It's not too different from the Mozilla Foundation, which would be instantly dead without their commercial subsidiary.

I would much rather OpenAI survives this and continues to thrive -- rather than have Microsoft or Google own the AI future.

if it is important stuff, then it is necessary to write everything in a lowercase letters.

what i understood from recent events in tech is that whatever people say or do, capital beats ideology and the only value that comes forth is through capital. where does this take us then?

to a comment like this. why?

because no matter what people think inside, the outside world is full of wolves. the one who is capable of eating everyone is the king. there is an easy way to do that. be nice. even if you are not. act nice. even if you are not. will people notice it? yes. but would they care? for 10 min, 20 min or even 1 day. sooner or later they will forget the facade as long as you deliver things.

Non-profits here are often just another type of company, but one where the revenue goes entirely to "salaries". Often their incentives are to perpetuate whatever problem there are there to supposedly solve. And since they have this branding of non-profit, they get little market pressure to actually solve problems.

For all the talk of alignment, we already have non-human agents that we constantly wrestle to align with our general welfare: institutions. The market, when properly regulated, does a very good job of aligning companies. Democracy is our flawed but acceptable way of dealing with monopolies, the biggest example being the Government. Institutions that escape the market and don't have democratic controls often end up misaligned, my favorite example being US universities.

Haven't 700 or so of the employees signed onto the letter? Hard to argue it's just a few important people who've been compromised when it's almost the entire company.

There's a whole range of opinions about AI as it is now or will be in the near future: for capabilities, I've seen people here stating with certainty everything from GPT being no better than 90s Markov chains to being genius level IQ; for impact, it (and diffusion models) are described even here as everywhere on the spectrum from pointless toys to existential threats to human creativity.

It's entirely possible that this is a case where everyone is smart and has sincerely held yet mutually incompatible opinions about what they have made and are making.

Nokia was completely different, I doubt any of their regular employees supported Elop.

To me, RIM circa 2008 would have been a far better acquisition for Microsoft. Blackberry was embedded in corporate world, the media loved it (Obama had one), the iphone and android were really new.

- There would be no GPT-3

- There would be no GPT-4

- There would be no DALL-E 2

- There would be no DALL-E 3

- There would be no Whisper

- There would be no OpenAI TTS

- OpenAI would be bankrupt?

There's no "open version" of OpenAI that actually exists. Elon Musk pledged money then tried to blackmail them into becoming the CEO, then bailed, leaving them to burn.

Sam Altman, good or bad, saved the company with his Microsoft partnership.

For other people, it's about how close it is to human performance and human diversity of tasks. In that case, at least GPT-4 is pretty close. There are clearly some types of things that it can't do even as well as your dog at the moment, but the list of those things has been shrinking with every release.

If by AGI you mean, creating a fully alive digital simulation/emulation of human, I will give you that, it's probably not on that path.

If you are incorrectly equating AGI and superintelligence, ASI is not the same thing.

"involved in a business dispute" is superfluous here, its just a reason that visibility happens.

https://github.com/clairefro/obsidian-chat-cbt-plugin

If it turns out he was the instigator his goose is cooked.

Expecting the headlines that tell us that 125% of OpenAI employees threaten to walk. Just quit already and go work for Microsoft.

At the very least, they have all the model weights and architecture design work.

if he really plays hardball and burns openAI to the ground as he promised, would we as customers have leverage against them?

Forget about poe, Isn't ChatGPT a potential killer of Quora and stackoverflow and Google ? How On earth did a representative of one of these three make it to the board?

seeing as Nadella is willing to hire Altman to work at MS, I think the very, very little credibility this rumor had is officially gone.

I think you may be confusing him with Greg Brockmann.

- Satya (probably)

Please don't do this - for many reasons, including that it makes merging the comments a pain.

If you or anyone notices a comment that deserves to be at the top level (and doesn't lose context if moved), let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll move it.

https://www.threads.net/@moskov/post/Cz482XgJBN0?hl=en

This whole thing still seems to have the air of a pageant to me, where they're making a big stink for drama but it might be manufactured by all of the original board, with Sam, Ilya, Adam, and potentially others all on the same side.

Gotta love seeing effective altruists take another one on the chin this year though.

The idea of boards might even be an anti-pattern going forward, they can be played and used in essentially rug pull scenarios for full control of all the work of entire organizations. Maybe boards are past their time or too much of a potential timebomb/trojan horse now.

Dustin was an early investor in Alameda Research and was also one of the biggest donors to Mind the Gap -- Sam's mom's Super PAC. When SBF was about to go under Dustin was his first call to try to raise money (came out in the FTX trial).

That doesn't mean this is this kind of conspiracy

Or maybe dang can extract this comment and orphan it.