There's no obligation to read things about yourself.
If you did what you thought was right, stand by it and take the heat.
Disconnect. Go to work. Do the work. Read a book or watch some TV after work. Go to bed. Wait a few weeks. $&#@ the world.
He is now the 'effective CEO' of OpenAI. He still has to go to work tomorrow, faced with an incredibly angry staff who just got their equity vaporized, with majority in open rebellion and quitting to join Microsoft.
Did anyone have equity though? I thought they (at least some) had some profit sharing agreements which I assume would only be worth something if OpenAI was ever profitable?
Now its guaranteed to generate 0 profits, so all that 'profit share/pseudoequity' is worth nothing.
Was it though? I'd agree that it was almost guaranteed to have a very high valuation. However profitability is a slightly different matter.
Depending on their arrangements/licensing agreements/etc much of those potential profits could've just went to MS/Azure directly.
Literal fan fiction
You've just pointed out the big issue with a non-profit. There is no equity to vaporize, so no one is kept in check with their fantastical whims. You and I can say 'safe AI' and mean completely different things, but profitable next quarter has a single meaning.
It's difficult to see how that would have been a surprise.
At least Microsoft thought it bought something for $13B.
Just as wealthy donors to medical research don't get to own the results of the research their money funded.
Just as Microsoft doesn't get to own a part of Linux, for donating to The Linux Foundation.
Etc...
> There's no obligation to read things about yourself.
That's assuming the worst thing that happens is people speak poorly of you after a debacle. It's also human to feel compelled to know what people think of us, as unhealthy as that might be in some cases. It gets worse when maladjusted terminally-online malignants make it a point to punish you for your mistakes by stalking you through email, phones, or in real life. It's not that simple.
> If you did what you thought was right, stand by it and take the heat.
Owning what you did is noble, but you certainly don't have to stand by it well after you know its wrong.
edit: typo
What if it turned out to totally wrong? standing by it would just make thing even worse.
If only it was that simple.
The internet mob will happily harass your friends and family too, for something they feel you did wrong.
And on top of that are people in the mob who feel compelled to take real world action.
It is actually dangerous, to be the focus point of the anger of any large group of people online.
Some people change their minds, maybe they made a mistake, nobody knows. It’s like fog of war, and everyone just makes speculations without any evidence.
You can't plan for something you have never experienced. Being hated by a large group of people is a very different feeling from getting hated by an individual, you don't know if you can handle it until it happens to you.
Normal people know not to burn a $80 billion company to the ground in a weekend. Ilya was doing something unprecedented in corporate history, and astounding he wasn't prepared to face the world's fury over it.
Text doesn't convey emotions, and our empathy doesn't work well for emotions we have never experienced. You can see a guy that got kicked in the balls got hurt, but that doesn't mean you are prepared to endure the pain of getting kicked in your balls or that you even understand how painful it is.
Also watching politicians it looks like you can just brush it off, because that is what they do. But that requires a lot of experience, not anyone can do it, it is like watching a boxing match and think you can easily stand after a hard punch in your stomach.
Sure, but you do your best not to be kicked in the balls.
I mean, he didn't have a button on his desk that said, "torch the shares", but he ousted the CEO as a way to cut back on the things that might have meant profit. Did he think that everyone was going to continue to want to give them money after they signal a move away from profit motives? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to think that one through.
I think he was just preoccupied with AI safety, and didn't give a thought to the knock on effects for investors of any stripe. He's clearly smart enough to, he just didn't care enough to factor it into his plans.
If you project your personal hopes which are different from this into the hype, this is your personal problem.
So whose experiences was he supposed to read about?
I would say the answer is, demonstrably yes:
To think it would grow just as fast, or in the ways it did? Acquires are seldom left alone to do magic.
Sutskever didn't get on the board by cunning politicking and schmoozing like most businesspeople with that sort of position. He's an outstanding engineer without upper management skills. Every meet one of those?
I haven't people any reasonably intelligent person so unaware of real world that they can berate a colleague so publicly and officially and think "Hey! I am sorry man" will do the trick.
Has OpenAI been burnt to the ground?
And it's just Monday afternoon.
3 CEOs in 3 days, isn’t burny, either. There’s the guy they fired, the person they had take on the role so they have someone in the role, and then someone they hired to be CEO. I guess they could have gotten that down to 2 by jumping immediately to their intended replacement, but not having them ready to start immediately doesn’t seem odd.
And yeah, it’s just Monday afternoon. If in the next few days, a sizable chunk of those who threatened to quit do so, then that would be burny. But we ain’t there yet.
It's impressively operatic. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
"Terraform raised prices, losing customers"? whatever, I never heard about it.
"ChatGPT's creators have internal disagreement, losing talent"? OH NO what if ChatGPT dies, who is going to answer my questions?? panic panic hate hate...
This is the cheapest and most cost-effective way to run things as an authoritarian -- at least in the short term.
If one is not "made of sterner stuff" -- to the point where one is willing to endure scorn for the sake of the truth: - Then what are you doing in a startup, if working in one - One doesn't have enough integrity to be my friend
The truth is, this is about the only thing about the whole clown show that makes any sense right now.
Wait what? Did Murati get booted?
What odds would you have had to offer at the beginning of last week on a bet that this is where we'd be on Monday?
It reminds me of my friend at a Mensa meeting where they cannot agree at basic organization points like in a department consortium.
Being smart and/or being a great researcher does not mean that the respective person is a good "politician". Quite some great researchers are bad at company politics, and quite some people who do great research leave academia because they became crushed by academic politics.
Book smarts versus street smarts.
It’s extremely boring and mundane and political and insulting to anyone’s humanity. People who haven’t dedicated their life to economics, such as researchers and idealists, will have a hard time.
It felt the same as certain big German supermarket chain that publishes it's own internal magazine with articles from employees, company updates etc
"regret my participation" sounds much more like "going along with it".
Wouldn't that make this a conflict of interest, sitting on the board while running a competing product - and making a decision at the company he is on the board of to destroy said company and benefit his own product?
Personally, I don't think that Altman was that big of an impact, he was all business, no code, and the world is acting like the business side is the true enabler. But, the market has spoken, and the move has driven the actual engineers to side with Altman.
If anyone is speaking up it's the OpenAI team.
I'm just not familiar enough to understand, is it really destroyed or is this just a minor bump in OpenAI's reputation? They still have GPT 3.5/4 and ChatGPT which is very popular. They can still attract talent to work there. They should be good if they just proceed with business as usual?
Why would you stand by unintended consequences?
There has never been a company like OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.
That's not a big deal for a small company, but this one has billions at stake and arguably critical consequences for humanity in general.
I see this is the popular opinion and that I'm going against it. But I've made decisions that I though were good at the time, and later I got more perspective and realize it was a terrible decision.
I think being able to admit you messed up, when you messed up is a great trait. Standing by your mistake isn't something I admire.
Such a short vague statement isn't characteristic of a normal human who is genuinely remorseful of his prior decisions.
This statement is more characteristic of a person with a gun to his head getting forced to say something.
This is more likely what is going on. Powerful people are forcing this situation to occur.
Those guns are metaphorical of course but this is essentially what is going on:
Someone with a lot of power and influence is making him say this.
When a board is unhappy with a highly-performing CEO’s direction, you have many meetings about it and you work towards a resolution over many months. If you can’t resolve things you announce a transition period. You don’t fire them out of the blue.
Aaah that just explained a lot of departures I've seen at the past at some of my partner companies. There's always a bit of fluffy talk around them leaving. That makes a lot more sense.
I doubt this is what happened, but the reporting that Brockman was ousted from his board seat after Altman, and wasn't present in the board meeting that ousted Altman, doesn't make much sense either.
So far, I underestood the chaos as a matter of principle - yes it was messy but necessary to fix the company culture that Ilya's camp envisioned.
If you're going to make a move, at least stand by it. This tweet somehow makes the context of the situation 10x worse.