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?
Not to mention that he was aggressively fundraising for two companies that would be either be OpenAI's customer or sell products to OpenAI.
If OpenAI wants commercial hypergrowth pushing out untested stuff as quickly as possible in typical SV style they should get Altman back. But that does seem to contradict their mission. Why are they even a nonprofit? They should just restructure into a full for-profit juggernaut and stop living in contradiction.
(It would have been a much bigger blunder to, say, build out 10x the capacity before launch, without knowing there was a level of demand is known to support it.)
Also, chatgpt's capabilities are what drove the huge demand, so I'm not sure how you can argue it is "shoddy".
Alternatively, you can restrict signups and do gradual rollout, smoothing out kinks in the product and increasing provisioning as you go.
In 2016/17 Coinbase was totally broken. Constantly going offline, fucking up orders, taking 10 minutes to load the UI, UI full of bugs, etc. They could have restricted signups but they didn't want to. They wanted as many signups as possible, and decided to live with a busted product and "fix the airplane while it's taking off".
This is all fine, you just need to know your identity. A company that keeps talking about safety, being careful what they build, being careful what they put out in the wild and its potential externalities, acting recklessly Coinbase-style does not fit the rhetoric. It's the exact opposite of it.
This hardly seems equivalent to what you describe from Coinbase, where no doubt people were losing money due to the bad state of the app.
For most startups, one of the most pressing priorities at any time is trying to not go out of business. There is always going to be a difficult balance between waiting for your product to mature and trying to generate revenue and show progress to investors.
Unless I’m totally mistaken, I don’t think that OpenAI’s funding was unlimited or granted without pressure to deliver tangible progress. Though I’d be interested to hear if you know differently. From my perspective, OpenAI acts like a startup because it is one.
The only thing that changed is the reason why the unwashed masses aren't allowed to see the secret sauce: from alignment to profit.
A plague on both their houses.
No doubt OpenAI was never a glass house... but it seems extremely disingenuous to say their behavior hasn't changed.
ie. the original mission was never viable long-term.
When was the last time OpenAI openly released any AI?
All this "AI safety" stuff is at this point pure innuendo.