A lot of his current external activities could worry the board - and if he wasn't candid about future plans I can see why they might sack him.

Even a lowly new grad engineer has to sign a lot of stuff when they take a job that forces essentially exclusivity to your work there. I cannot dabble in outside businesses within the same industry or adjacent industries.

CEOs argue that their job is tough and many hours and life consuming and that's why they get the pay, and yet there is a whole genre of tech CEOs who try to CEO 5 companies at a time..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38316870

Meanwhile you have CEOs front running their own company or treating staff from different companies as interchangeable. It's funny governors have been thrown in prison for example taking free renovations on their home in exchange for contract work with the state.

Not in California. Only company executives can be bound by such agreements. Direct competition is of course prohibited.

The original vision is pretty clear, and a compelling reason to not screw around and get sidetracked, even if that has massive commercialisation upside.

Thankfully M$ didn't have control of the board.

You never know. Remember Nokia?

Really really. You have two so-frigging-stereotypical samples of management ineptitude in running a strong commercial brand AND leadership (Osbourne:’guys our phones suck’ ; ’change management 101’: burning raft is literally the most commmon and mundane turn of phraze meant to imply you need to act fast. Using this specific phraze is a clear beacon you are out of way out of your depth by paraphrazing 101 material to your company). If the phones had been a strong product, none of this would have mattered. But they weren’t and this was as clear way to signal ”emperor has no clothes” as possible.

The N9 etc demonstrated there was enough talent for a plausible pivot. Was it business wise obvious this would have been the only and right choice?

The dialect of C++ was pure hell, and the wanton diversity of products meant that there was no chance to get consistent UI over a chock-full of models whose selling potential was unknown in advance. Theoretically, there were standards such as Series 60. Practically, those were full of compatibility breaks and just weird idiosyncrasies.

Screen dimensions, available APIs, everything varied as if designed by a team of competing drunk sailors, and you could always plunge a week of work into fine-tuning your app for a platform that flopped. Unlike Apple, there just wasn't any software consistency. Some of the products were great, some were terrible, and all were subtly incompatible with one another.

Only money and profit makes the mountains move. Not moral stature. I don't believe that optimistic take for a second.

None with a moral stance to take such action stays quiet so long, without alternate motives.

(pleb who would invest [1], no other association)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306929

If he was really doing it behind the boards back, the accusation is entirely accurate even if his motivations was an expectations of losing the internal factional struggle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

A fundamental inability to align on what, on a fundamental level, the mission set out in the charter of a 501(c)(3) charity means in real world terms is not "a simple strategy disagreement"; moreover, the existence of a factional dispute over that doesn't mean that there weren't serious specific conduct that occurred in the context of that dispute over goals.

Either there’s more to it or the board is staffed by very naive people.

You do if part of the way that they attempted to win the internal power struggle resulting from the disagreemtn was lying to the board to avoid having their actions which lacked majority support from being thwarted.

https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255

They started as a non-profit ffs.

My question is: what was stopping both parties here from pursuing parallel paths? — have the non-profit/research oriented arm continue to focus on solving AGI, backed by the funds raised on from their LLM offerings? Were potential roadmaps really that divergent?

I had always assumed this was their internal understanding up until now, since at least the introduction of ChatGPT subscriptions.

I think personally think it's a shame because this is all totally inevitable at this point, and if the US loses its leading position here because of this kind intentional hitting of the brakes, then I certainly don't think it makes the world any safer to have China in control of the best AI technology.

So the volume of Chinese AI papers says little to nothing about their advancements in the field.

It's like how historical American medical data collected by universities has been misapplied to pharmaceutical and medical practice because of demographic bias. Research participants largely matched the demographics of the university: healthy white males.

Or more broadly, whenever you see a "last name" requirement on a form, you know it's software made by people who think it's normal for people to have "last names", and that everyone should know what that means.

Researchers are vastly more likely to read, and therefore cite, papers in languages that they understand fluently.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byYlC2cagLw

Altman answers questions like he is a ChatGPT. Freedom to bullshit.

Personally, in this interview I sensed a disconnect between Altman and Murati, possibly others working at OpenAI. Usually Altman is by himself in these interviews; there's no one else from OpenAI. It led me to suspect Altman was telling interviewers what they wanted to hear.

Scoop: theinformation.com

https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255

Ilya Sutskever seems to think this is a reasonable principled move to seize power that is in line with the non-profits goals and governance, but does not seem to care too much if you call it a coup.

Do you think Napoleon or Pinochet made speeches to the effect of "Yes, it was a completely unprincipled power-grab, but what are you going to do about it, lol?"

> Don't let the media hype fool you. Sam wasn't some genius visionary. He was a glory-hungry narcissist cutting every corner in some deluded quest to be the next Musk.

That does align with Ilya’s tweet about ego being in the way of great achievements.

And it does align with Sam’s statements on Lex’s podcast about his disagreements with Musk. He compared himself to Elon’s SpaceX being bullied by Elon’s childhood heroes. But he didn’t seem sad about it - just combative. Elon’s response to the NASA astronauts distrusting his company’s work was “They should come visit and see what we’re doing”. Sam’s reaction was very different. Like, “If he says bad things about us, I can say bad things about him too. It’s not my style. But maybe I will, one day”. Same sentiment as he is showing now (“if I go off the board can come after me for the value of my shares”).

All of that does paint a picture where it really isn’t about doing something necessary for humanity and future generations, and more about being considered great. The odd thing is that this should get you fired, especially in SF, of all places.

That's either 100% fishy or 100% insider.

Either BS or person is insider, no in-between.

You don't really see any of this in most professional settings.

Certainly, this is very immature. It wouldn't be out of context in HBO's Succession.

Whether what happened is right or just in some sense is a different conversation. We could speculate on what is going on in the company and why, but the tactlessness is evident.

It sucks, but that's the world we live in, unfortunately.

This isn't about being better at all.

Injustices are made to executives all the time. But airing dirty laundry is not sagacious.

The same conversation if it's "mature", surely? I'm failing to see how one thinks turning a blind eye to like, decades of sexual impropriety and major internal culture issues to the point the state takes action against your company is "mature". Like, under what definition?

So what was there to gain from the company speaking ill of their past employee? What was even left to say? Nothing. No one wants to work in an organization that vilifies its own people. It was prudent.

I will emphasize again that the morality of these situations is a separate matter from tact. It is very well possible that doing what is good for business does not always align with what is moral. But does this come as a surprise to anyone?

We can recognize that the situation is not one dimensional and not reduce it to such. The same applies to the press release from Open AI - it is graceless, that much can be observed. But we do not yet know whether it is reprehensible, exemplary, or somewhere in between in the sense of morality and justice. It will come out, in other channels rather than official press releases, like in Bobby's case.

To tell it in an exaggerated way, maturity should not imply sociopathy or completely disregard for everything.

Obviously I am referring here to Kottick situation. But, the definition where it is immature to tell the truth and mature to enable powerful bad players is wrong definition of maturity.

But, when people use "maturity" as argument for why someone must be enabler, should not do the morally or ethically right thing, then it gets irritating. Conversely, calling people "immature" because they did not acted in the most self serving but sleazy way is ridiculous.

You are interpreting that as hostile and aggressive because you are reading into it what other boards have said in other disputes and whatever you are imagining, but if the board learned some things not from Altman that it felt they should have learned from Altman, less than candid is a completely neutral way to describe it, and voting him out is not an indication of hostility.

Would you like to propose some other candid wording the board could have chosen, a wording that does not lack candor?

Uhh no, I'm seeing it as hostile and aggressive because the actual verbiage was hostile and aggressive, doubly so in the context of this being a formal corporate statement. You can pass the text into NLP sentiment analyzer and it too will come to the same conclusion.

It is also very telling that you are being very sarcastic and demeaning in your remarks as well to someone who wasn't even replying to you, which might explain why you might have seen the PR statement differently.

> "a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

> The provided text is not explicitly aggressive; however, it conveys a critical tone regarding the individual's communication, emphasizing hindrance to the board's responsibilities.

Did you actually run this through GPT...or did you poll Reddit?

Obviously it's not aggressive by the standards of everyday political drama or Internet forum arguments.

At least we can be sure that ChatGPT didn't write the statement, then.

Otherwise the last paragraph would have equivocated that both sides have a point.

Microsoft is bankrolling them but OpenAI probably can replace Microsoft easier than Microsoft can replace OpenAI.

MS owns a non controlling share of a business controlled by a nonprofit. MS should have prepared for the possibility that their interests aren’t adequately represented. I’m guessing Altman is very persuasive and they were in a rush to make a deal.

It’s questionable how much power Microsoft has as a shareholder. Obviously they have a staked interest in OpenAI. What is up in question is how much interest the new leaders have in Microsoft.

If I had a business relationship with OpenAI that didn’t align with their mission I would be very worried.

The board may very well have met for this very reason, or perhaps it was at this meeting that the lack of candor was found or discussed, but to hold a board meeting there is overhead, and if the board is already in agreement at the meeting, they vote.

It only seems sudden to outsiders, and that suddenness does not mean a "night of the long knives".

(I.e. an AGI would be one of the two people here.)

On operationalizing definitions of AGI

Defining AGI is more than just semantics. The generally accepted definition is that it must be able to complete most cognitive tasks as well as an average human. Otherwise we could as well claim that ELIZA was AGI, which would obviously be ridiculous.

How do you compare Eliza to GPT4?

That is a definition. It is not a generally accepted definition.

No one predicted feeding LLMs more GPUs would be as incredibly useful as it is.

I think it’s also fair Sam starts something new with a for profit focus of the get-go.

How can you honestly say things like this? ChatGPT shows the ability to sometimes solve problems it's never explicitly been presented with. I know this. I have a very little known Haskell library. I have asked ChatGPT to do various things with my own library, that I have never written about online, and that I have never seen before. I regularly ask it to answer questions others send to me. It gets it basically right. This is completely novel.

It seems pretty obvious to me that scaling this approach will lead to the development of computer systems that can solve problems that it's never seen before. Especially since it was not at all obvious from smaller transformer models that these emergent properties would come about by scaling parameter sizes... at all.

What is AGI if not problem solving in novel domains?

If true value is monetary value, perhaps it’s true. If true value is scientific value or societal value, well, maybe seeking monetary profits doesn’t align with that.

Disclaimer: I currently work for a not for profit research organisation and I couldn’t care less about making some shareholders more wealthy. If the rumours are true, OpenAI going back to non-profit values and remembering the Open in their name is a good change.

https://archive.is/tCG3q

Bloomberg: "OpenAI CEO’s Ouster Followed Debates Between Altman, Board"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A

No clear clues about today’s drama, at least as far as I could tell, but still an interesting listen.

https://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/genbank/

I mean, none of this would be possible without insane amounts of capital and world class talent, and they probably just made it a lot harder to acquire both.

But what do I know? If you can convince yourself that you're actually building AGI by making an insanely large LLM, then you can also probably convince yourself of a lot of other dumb ideas too.

Here's something to ponder on: The human brain is about the size of an A100, and consumes: 12 watts of power, on average. Its capable of general intelligence and conscious thought.

One problem that companies have is: they're momentum based. Once they realize something is working, and generating profit, they become increasingly calcified toward trying fundamentally new and different things. The best case scenario for a company is to calcify at a local maxima. A few companies try to structure themselves toward avoiding this, like Google; and it turns out, they just lose the ability to execute on anything. Some will stay small, remain nimble, and accomplish little of note. The rest die. That's the destiny for every profit-focused company.

Here's three things I expect to be true: AGI/ASI won't be achieved with LLMs. A sufficiently powerful LLM may be a component of a larger AGI/ASI system, but GPT-4 is already pretty dang sufficiently powerful. And: OpenAI was becoming an extremely effective and successful B2B SaaS Big Tech LLM company. Outing Sam is a gambit; the company could implode, and with no one left AGI/ASI probably won't happen at OpenAI. But the alternative, it seems from the outside, had a higher probability of failure; because the company would become so successful and good at making LLMs that the non-profit's mission is put to the side.

Ilya's superalignment efforts were given 20% of OpenAI's compute capacity. If the foundation's goal is to produce safe AGI; and ideally, you want progress on safety before something unsafe is made; it seems to me that 51% is the totally symbolic but meaningful minimum he should be working with. That's just one example.

I think the next AGI startup should perhaps try the communist revolution route, since the capitalist-based one didn't pan out. After all, Lenin was a pioneer in effective altruism. /s

By seemingly siding with staff over the CEO's desire go way too fast and break a lot of things? I'd think that world class talent hearing they might be able to go home at night because the CEO isn't intent on having Cybernet deployed tomorrow but next week instead is more appealing than not.

A young guy who is suddenly very rich, possibly powerful, and talking to the most powerful government on the planet on national TV? And people are surprised to hear this person might have let it go a little bit to their head, forget what their job was, and suddenly think THEY were OpenAI, not all the people who worked there? And comes to learn reality the hard way.

What’s to be surprised about? It’s the goddamned most stereotypically human, utterly unsurprising thing about this and it happens all. the. time.

A lot of people here really struggle with the idea that smart people are not inherently special and that being smart doesn’t magically absolve you from making mistakes or acting like a shithead.

I can only hope this doesn’t turn into OpenAI trying to gatekeep multimodal models or conversely everyone else leaving them in the dust.

Sam was the VC guy pushing gatekeeping of models and building closed products and revenue streams. Ilya is the AI researcher who believes strongly in the nonprofit mission and open source.

Perhaps, if OpenAI can survive those, then they will actually be more open in the future.

When did Microsoft’s stock price tank?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ

I wouldn't call it 'tanking' either, but it's definitely not run of the mill, did make them rush out a statement on their commitment to investment and working with OpenAI.

All kinds of changes are possible that would not, in net, be more open or more closed, either because there primary change would not be about openness, or because it would be more open in some ways and less in others.

So, no, there are more than two options.

Ilya was recruited by Elon under the original OpenAI. But basically Elon and the original people got scammed by Sam since what they gave money for got reversed, almost none of their models now are open and they became for-profit instead of non-profit. You'd think aspects like closed models are defendable due to safety but in reality there are just slightly weaker models that are fully open.

But in all seriousness, the transformer architecture was born at Google, but they were too arrogant and stupid to capitalize on it. Sutskever needed Altman to commercialize and make a product. He no longer needs Sam Altman. A bit OT but true.

Hell yeah.

It's not safetyism vs accelerationism.

It's commercialization vs innovation.

How does an LLM App Store advance OpenAI toward this goal? Like, even in floaty general terms? You can make an argument that ChatGPT does (build in public, prepare the world for what's coming, gather training data, etc). You can... maybe... make an argument that their API does... but I think that's a lot harder. The App Store product, that's clearly just Sam on auto-pilot, building products and becoming totally unaligned with the nonprofit's goal.

OpenAI got really good at building products based around LLMs, for B2B enterprise customers who could afford it. This is so far away from the goal that, I hope, Ilya can drive them back toward it.

Well an app store let's people... use it.

Look at UNIX. UNIX systems are great. They have produced great benefit to the world. Linux, as the most common Unix-like OS, also does. However, most people do not run any of the academic 'innovative' distros. Most people run the most commercialized version you can possibly think of Android and iOS (Unix variant from Apple). It takes commercializing something to actually make it useful.