People are jumping on this narrative that the openAI board is a force of good working against the evils of profit, but the truth is none of us really know why they fired him because they still refuse to say. There’s a non-trivial chance D’Angelo just fired him because of a conflict of interest with Poe or some nonsense like that.

Until a few hours ago, everybody was holding up Ilya as a noble idealist. But now even he has recanted this firing! People don’t seem to be Taking that new information on board to reevaluate how good a decision this was. I would say at best they had noble intentions but still went about this completely incompetently, and are now refusing to back down out of a mixture of stubborn pride and fear of legal liability.

If I was an openAI employee I would be frustrated too. It’s one thing to give up lucrative stock options etc. for a good, idealistic reason. But as of now they are still expected to give those things up for no stated reason at all.

Edit: just saw a plausible theory that D’Angelo led the charge on this because Sam scooped Poe on Dev day. I don’t know if this is true, but if it was it would explain why he still refuses to explain the reason to anybody, even san when he was fired: it would put him in serious legal jeopardy.

https://twitter.com/scottastevenson/status/17267310228620087...

I genuinely believe, based on my experiences with ChatGPT, that it doesn't seem all that threatening or dangerous. I get we're in the part of the movie at the start before shit goes down but I just don't see all the fuss. I feel like it has enormous potential in terms of therapy and having "someone" to talk to that you can bounce ideas off and maybe can help gently correct you or prod you in the right direction.

A lot of people can't afford therapy but if ChatGPT can help you identify more elementary problematic patterns of language or behavior as articulated through language and in reference to a knowledgebase for particular modalities like CBT, DBT, or IFS, it help you to "self-correct" and be able to practice as much and as often with guidance as you want for basically free.

That's the part I'm interested in and I always will see that as the big potential.

Please take care, everyone, and be kind. Its a process and a destination and I believe people can come to learn to love both and engage in a way that is rich with opportunity for deep and real restoration/healing. The kind of opportunity that is always available and freely takes in anyone and everyone

Edit: I can access all the therapy I can eat but I just don't find it generally helpful or useful. I like ChatGPT because it can help practice effective stuff like CBT/DBT/IFS and I know how to work around any confabulation because I'm using a text that I can reference

Edit: the biggest threat ChatGPT poses in my view is the loss of income for people. I don't give a flying fuck about "jobs" per se, I care that people are able to have enough and be ok. If we can deal with the selfish folks who will otherwise (as always) attempt to further absorb more of the pie of which they already have a substantial+sufficient portion, they will need to be made to share or they will need a timeout until they can be fair or to go away entirely. Enough is enough, nobody needs excess until everyone has sufficiency, after that, they can have and do as they please unless they are hurting others. That must stop

@Obscurity4340 Interested in bouncing off ideas for therapy? Email is in my about box :)

Can you give me a little hint about it? Not that I wouldn't be happy to chat, just preliminarily curious before I reach out :)

@yonom Whatever you feel comfortably publicly sharing and then if I feel like I have anything of value in turn, I'll reach out privately :)

(taking care to avoid doxxing myself)

I wouldn't attribute to greed for something sufficiently explained by emotions and loyalty.

Their CEO who was doing well as far as anyone can tell, was removed forcibly. It is natural to feel strongly about it.

I think the dispute hinges on what it means to be "doing well". In most companies, you can at least all point to the same thing, even if you disagree on how you get there: creating shareholder value.

But in this case, the company was doing things that could be seen as good from a shareholder value perspective, but the board has a different priority. It seems they may think that the company was not working on the right mission anymore. This is an unusual set up, so it's not that surprising that unusual things might happen!

I've worked for two companies with a board and a CEO. I think generally employees listen to and interact with CEO more than the board.

Some of them probably don't know who's on the board before Saturday, like the rest of us.

Why should we trust them to “align” their chatbots if they couldn’t even align themselves?

Loyalty? I could believe closest colleagues, that were in constant contact. But 500… is a bit too much to hold any warmy feelly bonds. Greed is simpler explanation.

I wouldn't attribute to emotions and loyalty that which is sufficiently explained by greed.

who in their right mind has "emotions" and even "loyalty" for a CEO? and so much to the point that they'd quit their jobs over the CEO's departure? the reality is that people didn't join OpenAI because of sam altman. they joined the company because they got paid (handsomely) to do some interesting work.

It’s just an anecdote but I quit a job because the CEO fired an extremely good manager that I worked with. If a company has issues, a good person getting fired can lead to a mass exodus. In my case about half of the developers followed closely after me.

in that case you were losing your immediate manager so your personal circumstances were about to change significantly.

however, in the case of sam altman getting fired, it's not clear that anything that OpenAI is doing is about to change and it's not clear that these devs would suddenly have to change course. Also, it's not like Sam / OpenAI has any integrity anyway - the idea that it's "open" is totally fraudulent.

So in every possible scenario it’s wrong to have emotions and loyalty for a CEO, who’s also a human, and may have had a profound, even life-changing effect on you?

Seeing your CEO as a deified subject is a serious crisis in the tech industry

Possibly so, but every single CEO in the world is not some evil automaton.

I think if this was all rational self-interest, a lot of this would never have happened. It's precisely because OpenAI isn't governed by a board appointed by investors that we have such consequences.

Not sure that I quite follow. Are you arguing that we should ensure that boards are always aligned with the exact same financial motivations as the investors themselves for fear of a disagreement of direction, morals, etc?

It was a comment on the overall situation, and addressing the point that it's "greed all the way down". If OpenAI was a traditional C Corp, a highly successful CEO would not have been fired. It's precisely because OpenAI is governed by a non-profit board that they care about things other than profits.

This is such an honest and based take - a take not a lot of people are willing to put forward.

Can we please please stop this "for the good of mankind" thing?

> The employees want to get their big payday

Many of them will have invested years of their life, during which they will have worked incredibly hard, and probably sacrificed life outside of work for their jobs in hopes of that payday to give them the freedom to do what they want to do next: you can hardly blame them.

True riches isn't money, but discretionary time. Unfortunately that discretionary time often costs quite a lot of money to realise.

If it were me I'd be seething with the board at their antics since Friday (and, obviously, for some time before that). They've gone from being one of the most successful and valuable startups in history to an absolute trash fire in the span of four days because of some ridiculous power struggle. They've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Yeah, you bet I'd be pissed, and of course I'd follow the person who might help me redeem the future I'd hoped for.

So they're mad that they decided to work for a company that was ultimately controlled by a non-profit that wasn't aligned with their interests?

Not to "victim blame", but they could have googled what a "non-profit" was and read the mission statement before accepting the job offer.

> Unfortunately that discretionary time often costs quite a lot of money to realise.

take a look at my cousin... he's broke and don't do shit

> The public discourse in which Sam is the hero is further cemented by the tech ecosystem, which nowadays is circling around AI. Those in the "OpenAI wrapper" game.

This brings me crypto vibes, the worst outcome possible for AI

You're absolutely wrong here.

We have precedent to see what happened with internet search, advertising, and data collection.

Everything turned out fine.

For a value of "fine" that includes search being fundamentally broken and every website that includes Google Tag Manager being significantly slower than it really should be, presumably.

Not to mention the entire internet became a giant billboard in which most content only serves the purpose of getting more views to it.

Not sure how some view this as a win for humanity. Improvements to our lives are mostly incidental, not the objective of any of this. It's always greed.

For the sake of Poe's law, is this sarcasm? I genuinely don't know, none of those things brought down humankind or anything but you could write a library about the issues with these.