I imagine if he was doing something truly nefarious, opinions might have been different, but I have no idea what kind of cult of personality he has at that company, so I might be wrong here.
Everyone working at OpenAI wanted him back. Which only includes people who have a significant motivation to see OpenAI succeed financially.
Also, there are rumours he can be vindictive. For all I know, that might be a smear campaign. But if that were the case, and half the people at OpenAI wanted him back, the other half would have a motivation to follow so as not to get whatever punishment from Sam.
There were a number of concerns, including for-profit projects he was pursuing despite his public insistence on OpenAI being non-profit as well as generally deceptive behaviour on his part. The last part at least is consistent with what others have said about Altman previously, including what allegedly led to his exit from YC, although they have kept those stories pretty quiet. But it seems like PG himself no longer has a lot of trust in Altman after he basically made him his heir apparent, and he has known him for a while now.
What's more, the driving force behind the board's move to remove him from OpenAI was reportedly Ilya Sutskever who was one of their key people and one of the handful of original founders. So it wasn't just a bunch of external people who wanted Altman gone, but at least one high level insider who has been around for the entire thing.
Altman himself was even once asked by journalists whether we could trust him to which he outright answered "no". But then he pointed to the fact that the board could remove him for any reason. Clearly, he was suggesting that there were strong safe guards in place to keep him in check, but it is now apparent that those safe guards never really existed while his answer still stands.
What human in the world could be trusted with AI? Only delusional people could say yes to that question.
what human in the would could be trusted with it?
What human in the world could be trusted with it [roads]?
"AI" is too broad a topic to draw that conclusion.
Almost everyone can be trusted with Stockfish. Almost: https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish
Most of us can be trusted with current LLMs, despite the nefarious purposes that they can be put to by a minority. Spam and fraud are still minority actors, even though these tools increase the capabilities of those actors; and they're still "only" at the student/recent graduate level for many tasks, so using them for hazardous chemical synthesis will likely literally explode in the face of the person attempting it.
Face recognition AI (and robot control attached to it) is already more than capable enough to violate the 1980 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, and we're just lucky random lone-wolf malicious actors have not yet tried to exploit this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...
We don't yet, it seems, have an AI capable enough that a random person wishing for world peace will get a world with the peace of the grave, nor will someone asking for "as many paperclips as possible" accidentally von-Neumann the universe into nanoscale paperclip-shaped molecules — indeed, I would argue that if natural language understanding continues in the current path, we won't ever get that kind of "it did what I said but not what I meant" scenario; what I currently think most likely is as an analogy for the industrial revolution, where we knew CO2 was a greenhouse gas around the turn of the 1900s, and still have not yet stopped emitting it because most people prefer the immediate results of things that emit it over the distant benefits of not emitting it.
But even that kind of AI doesn't seem to be here just yet. It may turn out that GenAI videos, images, text, and voice is in fact as much of a risk as CO2, that it collapses any possibility of large-scale cooperation, but for the moment that's not clear.
Ilyia Sutskever who was the chief Scientist of the company and honestly irreplacable in terms of AI knowledge left after Altman returned.
The statements in the whole popcorn drama still don't add up in my mind, so from the point of view of "humanity's best interest", I'd say it's still bad.
I thought you meant at the time, not with the benefit of hindsight.
Sure. But you make the foolish assumption here that humanity even has humanity's best interests at heart. Sentiment may be negative on current LLM generative based AI, but there's still plenty of people with either potential vested interests or simply seeing missing the forest for the tree. It's pretty hard to say "everyone hates/loves AI" at this current time.
I would think final count doesn’t really matter. Self serving cowards, like me, would sign it once they see the way the wind was blowing. How many signed it before Satya at Microsoft indicated support for Altman?
I don't actually know the answer to that, but I'm suggesting that perhaps people had additional motives for the organization to preserve its current hype/investment growth strategies.
Those working for the for profit got $$$ in their eyes once MSFT started throwing billions at them and said fuck the mission and bring back Altman we’re going full Gordon Gekko now.