We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.
Seems like the person running the simulation had enough and loaded the earlier quicksave.
I think most people don't realize how unusual their company structure is. It feels like it's set up to let them do exactly that. As far as I can tell, once you look past the smoke and mirrors, the board effectively controls both the non-profit and the for-profit.
I think the outcome of the last few days is that the nonprofit board controls nothing and serves at the pleasure of the for-profit company’s investors.
Microsoft gave them some money in return for IP rights… and they will potentially one day get their money back (and more) if OpenAI is ever able to pay them, but they’re not real investors. The amount of money Microsoft might get back is limited.
The speculation I heard in the Ars Technica article is that the board was unhappy with how quickly he was pushing to commercialize OpenAI, and they were wary about all the AI side hustles he was starting, including an AI chip company to compete with nvidia.
Who even knows? For whatever reason the board decided to keep quiet, didn’t elaborate on its reasoning, let Altman and his allies control the narrative, and rolled over when the employees inevitably revolted. All we have is speculation and unnamed “sources close to the matter,” which you may or may not find credible.
Even if the actual reasoning was absolutely justified–and knowing how much of a techbro Altman is (especially with his insanely creepy project to combine cryptocurrency with retina scans), I absolutely believe the speculation that the board felt Altman wasn’t trustworthy–they didn’t bother to actually tell anyone that reasoning, and clearly felt they could just weather the firestorm up until they realized it was too late and they’d already shot themselves in the foot.
Ya, it’s strange, isn’t it? The more I hear about things like the retina scan thing for crypto thing you’re talking about or the complaints of his increased push for profitization over safety, the more he seems like a standard sucky tech bro CEO and I lean towards the canning being deserved. But I wish they’d have made it more clear.
But Microsoft never actually signed an employment contract with Sam and it doesn’t look like they ever will. Just because someone says they plan to do something doesn’t mean it will happen.
I believe they did but were of the understanding he’d go back to OpenAI if the board changed their mind (like what happened). It was basically his golden parachute.
I was really hooked. But part of me believes they are the closest thing to AGI we have right now. Also, I use chatgpt premium a ton and would hate to see it die.
What indications do you see of “too much AI safety?” I am struggling to see any meaningful, legally robust, or otherwise cohesive AI safety whatsoever.
If it helps even more: The AI in question is a 46 cm long, 300 g heavy, blue, plushie penis named after Australia’s “biggest walking dick” Scott Morrison: Scomo, and active in an Aussie cooking stream.
No, it’s “the user is able to control what the AI does”, the fish is just a very clear and easy example of that. And the big corporations are all moving away from user control, there was even a big article about how I think the MS AI was broken because… you could circumvent the built-in guardrails. Maybe you and the others here want to live in an Apple walled garden corporate controlled world of AI. I don’t.
Edit: Maybe this is not clear for everyone, but if you think a bit further, imagine you have an AI in your RPG, like Tyranny, where you play a bad guy. You can’t use the AI for anything slavery related, because Slavery bad, mmkay? And AI safety says there’s no such thing as fantasy.
AI safety is currently, in all articles I read, used as “guard rails that heavily limit what the AI can do, no matter what kind of system prompt you use”. What are you thinking of?
He’s a democratic swamp creature. He’s a Rubinite economist who’s been slinking around Washington since the Clinton administration. He was also the president of Harvard for a while and got a cameo in The Social Network.
Does it really matter? It's the usual corporate intrigues/power struggle/backstabbing/whatever. Just for some reason leaked into public view instead of being behind the scenes like it's normally done, probably because someone is stupid.
These article titles need different headlines and they need to date them. We’ve seen this same headline 3 or 4 times now within the last week and yet nobody knows which point is what unless we cross-reference the dates in the articles. Which coincidentally are always in ^^small text hidden by the title^^ and could simply be solved by having a date in the title.
There’s been no talk of anything changing. Just different people in charge of deciding how to get to the goal which is to create safe state of the art AI tech that will benefit all of humanity.
It could take centuries to get there and cost trillions of dollars, figuring out how to raise that money is where things get controversial.
No need. Politics, businesses, war planners, don’t need OpenAI, they can build (have been building) their own AIs to follow their own goals. Now that OpenAI has shown how far one can get, the genie is out of the bottle. In a sense, OpenAI has already failed its goal.
Actually, everybody is trying and failing to reach the quality of ChatGPT so far because OpenAI doesn't release the details. Add to that websites like Reddit and Xwitter, the source of the training data for AIs, have started charging money for that. The governments are also starting to obstruct AI advancement.
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