Whoever thinks you can tame a 100 billion dollar company by putting a "non-profit" in charge of it, clearly doesn't understand people.
By all accounts, this split happened a while ago and led to this firing, not the other way around.
And instead of resolving this and presenting a unified strategy to the company they have instead allowed for this split to be replicated everywhere. Everyone who was committed to a pro-profit company has to ask if they are next to be treated like Sam.
It's incredibly destabilising and unnecessary.
They probably joined because it was the most awesome place to pursue their skills in AI, but they _knew_ they were joining an organization with explicitly not a profit goal. If they hoped that profit chasing would eventually win, that's their problem and, frankly, having this wakeup call is a good thing for them so they can reevaluate their choices.
Biz 101.
I don't know why people even need to be explained this, except for ignorance of basic facts of business life.
The split existed long prior to the board action, and extended up into the board itself. If anything, the board action is a turning point toward decisively ending the split and achieving unity of purpose.
From what I've read, Ilya has been pushing to slow down (less of the move fast and break things start-up attitude).
It also seems that Sam had maybe seen the writing on the wall and was planning an exit already, perhaps those rumors of him working with Jony Ive weren't overblown?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23893939/jony-ive-openai-...
Wouldn’t a likely outcome in that case be that someone else overtakes them? Or are they so confident that they think it’s not a real threat?
Didn’t Microsoft already try this experiment a few years back with an AI chatbot?
You may be thinking of Tay?
Do you think if chickens treated us better with intrinsic value we won't kill them? For AGI superhuman x risk folks that's the bigger argument.
Maybe devs are a bad example, so replace them with “retail workers” in your statement if it helps.
Is “put out of work” a good thing with no practical limits?
I think the EA movement has been broadly skeptical towards Sam for a while -- my understanding is that Anthropic was founded by EAs who used to work at OpenAI and decided they didn't trust Sam.
Note that this clause would describe any government funded research for example.
I think danger from AGI often presumes the AI has become malicious, but the AI making mistakes while in control of say, industrial machinery, or weapons, is probably the more realistic present concern.
Early adoption of these models as controllers of real world outcomes is where I could see such a disagreement becoming suddenly urgent also.
If it was so easy to go to the back of the queue and become a threat, Open AI wouldn't be in the dominant position they're in now. If any of the leavers have taken IP with them, expect court cases.
Given the language in the press release, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Sam Altman, and not the board, blindsided everyone? It was apparently his actions and no one else's that led to the consequence handed out by the board.
> Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.
From all current accounts, doesn't that seem like what Altman and his crew were already trying to do and was the reason for the dismissal in the first place?
OpenAI's dual identity as a nonprofit/for-profit business was very well known. And the concentration of power in the nonprofit side was also very well known. From the media coverage of Microsoft's investments, it sounds as if MSFT prioritized getting lots of business for its Azure cloud service -- and didn't prioritize getting a board seat or even an observer's chair.
Not to mention, after that, MSFT might be left bagholding onto a bunch of unused compute.
All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Microsoft and Softbank, while OpenAI is the orphan child with the huge estate. Microsoft isn't exactly the kingmaker here.
Most likely outcome here does seem to be that Altman/Brockman come back, Sutskever leaves and joins Google, and OpenAI becomes for all intensive purposes a commercial endeavor, with Microsoft wielding a lot more clout over them (starting with one or more board seats).
Big winner in this scenario would be Google.
And while that might hurt OpenAI as an institution more than it hurts Microsoft as an institution, the effect on Microsoft's top decision-makers personally vs. OpenAI's top decisionmakers seems likely to be the other way around.
Amateurs on hugging face are able to match OpenAI in impressively short time. The actual former-OpenAI engineers with unlimited budget ought to be able to do as good or better.
When a company experiences this level of growth over a decade, the board evolves with the company. You end up with board members that have all been there, done that, and can truly guide the management on the challenges they face.
OpenAI's hypergrowth meant it didn’t have the time to do that. So the board that was great for a $100 million, even a billion $ startup falls completely flat for 90x the size.
I don’t have faith in their ability to know what is best for OpenAI. These are uncharted waters for anyone though. This is an exceptionally big non-profit with the power to change the world - quite literally.
Not providing this kind of oversight is how we get disasters like FTX and WeWork.
I'm sure theyll have lots of boring money to be thrown at it regardless but that demand for capital is not going away. It will be persistent.
One attempt involved a battleship “accidentally” firing onto another battleship where both Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping were visiting.
https://jamestown.org/program/president-xi-suspects-politica...
Biased source, but she’s able to get a lot of unreported news from the mainland.
https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2021/9/20/deleted-repo...
I will try to find more sources but Google is just shit these days. See my other comment for more.
A big problem is that mainland China is like the hermit kingdom. It’s a black hole for any news the CCP doesn’t want to get out
Hm. That really does qualify as an assassination attempt if it wasn't an actual accident. Enough such things happen by accident that it has a name.
No guarantees about NPOV on that page.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Falun_Gong
If you want to see what makes WikiPedia tick that's a great place to start.
It's like believing the scientology center. Not trustworthy, they have an angle.
2. It makes sense given Xi’s current paranoia and constant purges
search terms site:nytimes.com
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/xi-jinpings-fi...
http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/the-impossib...
I will try to find better sources. There are more not so great articles in my other comment
Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder, Charlie Cheever. If you're not happy with the way a company is doing business, your best action is to walk away.
Comparing PayPal's success in digital finance to cryptocurrency's is an admission against interest, as they say in the law.
They absolutely would. The other thing you should take away from this is how they'd do it-- by manipulating proxies to do it with/for them, which makes it harder to see coming and impossible to defend against.
Whistleblowers are pariahs by necessity. You can't trust a known snitch won't narc on you if the opportunity presents itself. They do the right thing and make themselves untrustworthy in the process.
(This is IMO why cults start one way and devolve into child sex abuse so quickly-- MAD. You can't snitch on the leader when Polaroids of yourself exist...)
> don't take vacations!
This can get used against you either way, so you might as well take that vacation for mental health's sake.
It feels like there is an impedance mismatch here.
Like, being crosswise in organizational politics does not imply less of a devotion of organizational goals, but rather often simply different interpretation of those goals.
That strikes me as someone who is either lacks the ability to do proper due diligence or they're straight up sociopaths looking for weak willed people they can strong arm out. Part of the latter is having the ability to create a compelling narrative for future marks, to put it bluntly.
I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.
Startups die from suicide, not homicide.
So you hired coupers but you would never hire coupers? Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...
You might have missed this from GP's comment:
>>I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup
In other words, at least once these people have pulled the wool over their eyes during the hiring process.
The point in my comment was this: in retrospect, I’m not sure there’s anything that would have tipped me off to that behavior at the time of interview. But if this was something I could somehow identify, it would absolute be my #1 red flag for future hires.
Edit: The “twice” part might have made my comment ambiguous. What I meant was after I hired them, these people went on to pull two separate, successive coups, which indicates to me the first time wasn’t an aberration.
At this point I'm in danger of triggering Godwin's Law so I had better stop.
2. CEO's at fast growing startups are very different than at large tech.
I've run or defended against 'grassroots organizations transformations' (aka, a coup) at several non-profit organizations, and all of us continued to do our daily required tasks while the politicking was going on.
It's just not possible. We're limited in how much energy we can bring to daily work, that's a fact. If your brain is occupied both with dreams of king-making and your regular duties at the job, your mental bandwidth is compromised.
This makes no sense at all!
Now, that sibling director allows a culture of sexual harassment, law breaking, and toxic throat slitting behavior. HR and the Organizations leadership is aware of this. However the company is profitable, outside his department happy, and stable. They don’t want to rock the boat.
Is it still “the domain of the petty” to have a plan to replace them? To have formed relationships to work around them, and keep them in check? To have enacted policies outside their department to ensure the damage doesn’t spread?
And most importantly to enact said replacement plan when they fuck up just enough leadership gives them the side-eye, and you push the issue with your documentation of their various grievances?
Because that… is a coup. That is a coup that is atleast in my mind moral and just, leading to the betterment of the company.
“Your best action is to walk away” - Good leadership doesn’t just walk away and let the company and employees fail. Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems. Captains always evacuate all passengers before they leave the ship. Else they go down with it.
Yes, exactly. In fact, it's corruption of leadership.
If an engineer came to the leader about a critical technical problem and said, 'our best choice is to pretend it's not there', the leader would demand more of the engineer. At a place like OpenAI, they might remind the engineer that they are the world's top engineers at arguably the most cutting edge software organization in the world, and they are expected to deliver solutions to the hardest problems. Throwing your hands up and ignoring the problem is just not acceptable.
Leaders need to demand the same of themselves, and one of their jobs is to solve the leadership problems that are just as difficult as those engineering problems - to deliver leadership results to the organization just like the engineer delivers engineering results, no excuses, no doubts. Many top-level leaders don't have anyone demanding performance of them, and don't hold themselves to the same standards in their job - leadership, management - as they hold their employees.
> Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems.
Even there, I think you are going to easy on them. Only in hindsight do you maybe say, 'I don't see what could have been done.' At the moment, you say 'I don't see it yet, so I have to keep looking and innovating and finding a way'.
Work or transfer of intellectual property or good name into another venture, while not disclosing it with OpenAI is a clear breach of contract.
He is clearly instrumental in attracting investors, talent, partners and commercialization of technology developed by Google Brain and pushed further by Hinton students and the team of OpenAI. But he was just present in the room where the veil of ignorance was pushed forward. He is replaceable and another leader, less creepy and with fewer conflicts of interest may do a better job.
It it no surprise that OpenAI board had attempted to eject him. I hope that this attempt will be a success.
Focus on results, not political games.
My use of "schadenfreude", in general, can be attributed largely to Avenue Q and Death Note. Twice is coincidence.
EDIT: I just noticed "verboten." Now I'm worried.
This wasn't a change of strategy, it was a restoration of it. OpenAI was structured with a 501c3 in oversight from the beginning exactly because they wanted to prioritize using AI for the good of humanity over profits.
> restoration
Wouldn’t that mean that over the longterm they will just be outcompeted by the profit seeking entities. It’s not like OpenAI is self sustainable (or even can be if they chose the non-profit way)
massive spending is needed for any project as massive as "AI", so what are you even asking? A "feed the poor project" does not expect to make a profit, but, yes, it needs large cash infusions...
This is the biggest takeaway for me. People are building businesses around OpenAI APIs and now they want to suddenly swing the pendulum back to being a fantasy AGI foundation and de-emphasize the commercial aspect? Customers are baking OpenAI's APIs into their enterprise applications. Without funding from Microsoft their current model is unsustainable. They'll be split into two separate companies within 6 months in my opinion.
But as far as I can tell, unless you are in the exec suites at both OpenAI and at Microsoft, these are just your opinions, yet you present them as fact.
Is Microsoft a higher purpose?
It's seeming like corporate governance and market domination are exactly the kind of thing the board are trying to separate from with this move. They can't achieve this by going to investors first and talking about it - you think Microsoft isn't going to do everything in their power to prevent it from happening if they knew about it? I think their mission is laudable, and they simply did it the way it had to be done.
You can't slowly untangle yourself from one of the biggest companies in the world while it is coiling around your extremely valuable technology.
Sorry I don't see the 'how' as necessarily appalling.
The less appalling alternative could have been weeks of discussions and the board asking for Sam's resignation to preserve the decorum of the company. How would that have helped the company ? The internal rife would have spread, employees would have gotten restless, leading to reduced productivity and shipping.
Instead, isn't this a better outcome ? There is immense short term pain, but there is no ambiguity and the company has set a clear course of action.
To affirm that the board has caused a split in the company is quite preposterous, unless you have first hand information that such a split has actually happened. As far as public information is concerned 3 researchers have quit so far, and you have this from one of the EMs.
"For those wondering what’ll happen next, the answer is we’ll keep shipping. @sama & @gdb weren’t micro-managers. The comes from the many geniuses here in research product eng & design. There’s clear internal uniformity among these leaders that we’re here for the bigger mission."
This snippet in fact shows the genius of Sam and gdb, how they enabled the teams to run even in their absence. Is it unfortunate that the board fired Sam, from the engineer's and builder's perspective yes, from the long term AGI research perspective, I don't know.
Oh! So, now you got him furious? when just yesterday he made a rushed statement to standby Mira.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/17/a-statement-from...
There is why you do something. And there is how you do something.
OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance.
They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two camps and have let Sam and Greg go angry and seeking retribution. Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.
For me there is no justification for how this all happened.