Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO?
This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.
This makes no sense given that Ilya is on the board.
It’s just speculation, anyway. There isn’t really anything I’ve heard that isn’t contradicted by the evidence, so it’s likely at least one thing “known” by the public isn’t actually true.
[1] https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141...
The "Sam is actually a psychopath that has managed to swindle his way into everyone liking him, and Ilya has grave ethical concerns about that kind of person leading a company seeking AGI, but he can't out him publicly because so many people are hypnotized by him" theory is definitely a new, interesting one; there has been literally no moment in the past three days where I could have predicted the next turn this would take.
Meanwhile the Google AI folks have a long track record of making very misleading statements in public. I remember before Altman came along and made their models available to all, Google was fond of responding to any OpenAI blog post by claiming they had the same tech but way better, they just weren't releasing it because it was so amazing it just wasn't "safe" enough to do so yet. Then ChatGPT called their bluff and we discovered that in reality they were way behind and apparently unable to catch up, also, there were no actual safety problems and it was fine to let everyone use even relatively unconditioned models.
So this Geoffrey guy might be right but if Altman was really such a systematic liar, why would his employees be so loyal? And why is it only AI doomers who make this allegation? Maybe Altman "lied" to them by claiming key people were just as doomerist as those guys, and when they found out it wasn't true they wailed?
As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct.
So yes, it’s absolutely a valid strategy.
Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.
I get the feeling Ilya might be a bit naive about how people work, and may have been taken advantage of (by for example spinning this as a safety issue when it's just a good old fashioned power struggle)
1. stick with DOS
2. go with OS/2
3. go with Windows
Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.
For a company selling licenses for installations, wouldn't having support for all available and upcoming platforms a good thing? Especially when the distribution costs are essentially 0?
I'm also pretty sure cross-platform code was a thing in 1983. Maybe not to the same extent and ease as now, but still a thing.
From what I've seen of code developed in the 80s, however, asm code was not written to be divided into general and os specific parts. Writing cross-platform code is a skill that gets learned over time, usually the hard way.
It was a thing.
Keep in mind this predates basically ANY kind of source control. It would have been nearly 3x the work.
It might be before they were ported to DOS or OS/2, but it definitely wasn't before source control existed (SCCS and RCS were both definitely earlier.)
If architectured properly (big if) you can split up the project appropriately so there is a common core and individual parts for specific OS.
Is it extra effort? Sure. Impossible? Definitely not.
(Nobody else wanted the job, but I thought it was fun.)
SCCS was created in 1973. We're talking about over a decade later.
Also primitive forking, diffing and merging could be (painfully) done even with crude tools, which did exist.
Under them - an organization in partnership with Microsoft, together filled with exceptional software engineers and scientists - experts in their field. All under management by kindergarteners.
I wonder if this is what the staff are thinking right now. It must feel awful if they are.
Teams of people at Google work on the same features, only to find out near launch that they lost to another team who had been working on the same thing without their knowledge.
PMs/TPMs/POs may not know as they're on different teams. Often it's just a VP game and decided on preference or a power play and not on work quality/outcome.
If the case is that the will of the board is not being fulfilled, then the reasoning is simple. The CEO was told to do something and he has not done it. So, he is ousted. Plain and simple.
This talk about projects given to two teams and what not is nonsense. The board should care if its work is done, not how the work is done. That is the job of the CEO.
And I agree the board should care if the work is actually done and that's where if the CEO seems to be bluffing that the work is being done or blowing it off and humoring them then it becomes a problem about the CEO not respecting the board's direction.