We like to think that big execs and leaders are some super smart geniuses when we're not disparaging them (and they may be, but only in specific areas), but they're still just people, and they are afflicted with jealousy and envy and spite and lack of forethought just like the rest of us, and they make mistakes accordingly. They particularly make mistakes when you're trying to organize a big group of people.
This needs to be amplified + defensive caveat regarding subscription to any “youtube” theories. That said, a member of a large organization, such as the US military, will have many stories to tell and phrase “FUBAR” iirc came out of the US Army. In fact, even being in smaller commercial enterprises, one sometimes wonders that anything gets done at all!
But things get done. The military can plan, provision, conduct, and win wars. Systems tools and state-spaces are the tools of top level control mechanisms. So, yes, things can be chaotic when viewed from a narrow perspective, but from another top level perspective, there is order.
It's really hard to turn back on the "but realistically, conspiracies are uncommon" brain when exposed to the fact that actually decades-long conspiracies do actually occur and produce results.
As you said, you don't send people into the street to yell at other people how the soviets are evil and we need to arm up. You rather plant ideas into the heads of a few influential people in hollywood, then give them cool toys and props for the movie, and let it roll downhill from there.
This is similar to work - and we're not large with ~150 techies in the company. But it has grown impossible to directly steer all different teams. Instead, you have to see that the right trailblazing teams are going into the right directions and possibly make sure that service requests moving into the right direction are quick, and service requests moving in the wrong direction.. well either roughly stay in the SLA or get blocked.
After living for a few more decades you get a lot better at power plays.
Bingo. I think there is also a factor of this being a non-profit board, where the board is not beholden to shareholders in the same way. For example, you presumably have no standing to sue a NP BOD for breach of fiduciary duty vs. a corporate BOD. I don't know the intricacies of the laws surrounding this, but I expect that the none-Microsoft investors in OpenAI who are seeing their investments dissolve in real time are probably asking their lawyers that right now.
Adam D'Angelo seems like someone acting in their own self-interest and that of his company, Quora. The move to bring in Emmett Shear at the 11th hour seems like a move right out of his playbook. What exactly does Adam stand to gain from a weakened or destroyed OpenAI?
It's not about Quora, which is a shit show either way, but it's about his AI chat company, Poe. Poe started customizable AI agents and also started their own store for AI agents - they were the first to do this. And Poe uses OpenAI API for this, they are essentially a wrapper company.
When OpenAI announced custom agents and store on DevDay, it was a fundamental threat to Poe, and a very strong conflict of interest for Adam. You also hear from everyone that things started getting sour after DevDay. I'm pretty sure Adam played his part in the shit show with his own motives.
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...
Makes it sound like they fired the wrong board-member. But it feels to this complete outsider like that board was totally disfunctional, even before the departure of Altman and Brockman.
I'm an LLM sceptic; I don't think these models are a route to intelligence, artifical or otherwise. I think that means I'm at odds with the four board-members that did the deed. But as far as I can see, there wasn't one member of that board, Altman and Brockman included, that was fit to run a whelk-stall, let alone a big company.
Before this, they were able to make things work - until someone said the quiet things out loud, and now they’re clearly going their separate ways while going ‘wtf just happened’.
But yeah, morale is going to be pretty much in flux for a while. This has clearly disrupted OpenAI's ability to function and therefore contribute more to either research and/or productization. Sam and Greg going to M$FT only matter if their influence and leadership can bring the right people together. OpenAI had the right people to create GPT-3+, but now, seems like they won't. M$ST probably won't either.
Now each entity is actually weakened for a number of months I would presume. M$FT will try to push forward whatever productization of the current AI products it has access to. OpenAI will struggle to figure out if it's a pure research entity now or what.
But Ilya Sutskever is on the Time 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023 list, assuming that's the one you're referring to.
Is there any evidence that Altman's firing was even related to AI alignment? All I've seen is people speculating about it.
Microsoft just saw chaos and made a very smart move before someone else could.
Interesting comment, given this: https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907
Do you mean [1]? Sam, Greg and Ilya are all in there, the first two under Leaders, and Ilya under Thinkers.
nVidia, and others as well. But they'd rather use it for something more worthwhile than a dumb hallucinating parrot.
One thing is for certain, Google is clearly a major loser here. They completely blew the lead in AI.
Google will be quietly smiling and catching up.
Short term it is going to slow Microsoft down because it will take a while to get a while to get software development back on course.
Long term it will speed thing up because OpenAI is concerned by safety issues and will thus be more cautious about software release, while Microsoft has no such inhibitions.
So I think there's an internal divide, both sides have good intentions. They want the best for the people they think they're protecting. In the case of UAP, it was to protect US national security. In the case of OpenAI, I think it's to attempt a slow transition of the global economy. But on the opposite side, that has to be balanced with the potential widespread benefits of opening it up.
In the case of AI, we could open it up, but what if the Chinese, or a malevolent capitalist entity uses the technology to go full speed ahead, and accumulates the entire economy under their sole control.
This weekend, there was an event by a group called the SOL foundation for UAP. They revealed something called the "Slow Disclosure" [1], a process to avert what they call "Catastrophic Disclosure". I see AI falling into similar power dynamics. Keep it all to yourself because you trust yourself, and let it out only after you've fully mastered it... or take a risk of letting the world start mastering it with you, but start to realize the world changing benefits immediately.
Both sides have good points, nobody is wrong. People just have different risk tolerance. OpenAI looks a lot like our government today, internally divided, a few people with the power to choose which path we go in history. That's a lot of power, you better believe things are going to look weird on the outside.
[1] https://twitter.com/tinyklaus/status/1726061116730609692
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment...
doesn't facebook (i.e. Meta) have their own infrastructure???
my "high level" view of this: the letter M (microsoft xOr meta) fighting for the ONE spot in the literal "alphabet" (google)
but I play with words, so take it as you are able
i'm saying something closer to: if microsoft merges with facebook, then they really are both trying to get bought by google's parent entity
So you said “literal alphabet”, because you weren’t talking about Alphabet, you were instead referring to Google’s parent entity, which is Alphabet? I’m a big fan of wordplay, but I prefer to use it to reveal truths, not obscure them.
Either way I don’t think that what you’re talking about is going to happen.
and I'm being quick and lose with the use of words. facebook cannot merge with microsoft because facebook is a subsidiary of meta corporation.
but on the level of analysis i'm trying to think in, google's antitrust case agaisnt their government (which is done), microsoft's recent purchase of activision blizzard (which was almost undone but got through in the end) all have a hand in this.
who will win more out of this? microsoft? or google/alphabet??
facebook does seem like a smaller player, microsoft OWNS gaming now (specially after blizzard-activision).
but Meta is very insterested in gaming technology. so maybe they can also "poach" some talent now that openAI is all but publically bankrupt??
how long ago did Meta try to do their own crypto "Libra"? fact of the matter LLMs are chinese tech. else tiktok would have been successfully stopped. why did all this happen after chinese visit due to a trade union in south asia?
finally, I know of 3 giant corporations that have repeated the re-structuring which from my viewpoint was pioneered by google/alphabet. one is facebook/meta, and the other is a chinese company (alibaba?) I don't even know this which is ok because I am ranting on the internet in a buried discussion in a public forum
- At least two members of the board probably were genuinely more concerned about AI alignment
- Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego, Altman being the public face
- Microsoft had leverage: license to the models and code, and providing the compute. It expected profit incentives would keep people aligned.
- Sam needs compute hardware to stay in the space. Outside Amazon, Google and MS, who actually has the hardware, even if you have the money?
There's a bunch of people behaving with their own goals, and probably a misunderstanding of other people's motivations. People like Sam and Satya expect people to be self-interested and not tear everything down.
Sometimes people want a change in direction, but they don't have the power and end up decapitating instead.