I think the board did the right thing, just waaaay too late for it to be effective. They’d been cut out long ago and just hadn’t realized it yet.
… but I’d probably sign for exactly those good-career-move reasons, at this point. Going down with the ship isn’t even going to be noticed, let alone change anything.
I'm waiting for Emmett Shear, the new iCEO the outside board hired last night, to try to sign the employee letter. That MSFT signing bonus might be pretty sweet! :-)
In this situation increasing unanimity now approaching 90% sounds more like groupthink than honest opinion.
Talk about “alignment”!
Indeed, that is what "alignment" has become in the minds of most: Groupthink.
Possibly the only guy in a position to matter who had a prayer of de-conflating empirical bias (IS) from values bias (OUGHT) in OpenAI was Ilya. If they lose him, or demote him to irrelevance, they're likely a lot more screwed than losing all 700 of the grunts modulo job security through obscurity in running the infrastructure. Indeed, Microsoft is in a position to replicate OpenAI's "IP" just on the strength of its ability to throw its inhouse personnel and its own capital equipment at open literature understanding of LLMs.
Incredible. Is this unprecedented or have been other cases in history where the vast majority of employees standup against the board in favor of their CEO?
> Is this unprecedented or have been other cases in history where the vast majority of employees standup against the board in favor of their CEO?
It's unprecedented for it to be happening on Twitter. But this is largely how Board fights tend to play out. Someone strikes early, the stronger party rallies their support, threats fly and a deal is found.
The problem with doing it in public is nobody can step down to take more time with their families. So everyone digs in. OpenAI's employees threaten to resign, but actually don't. Altman and Microsoft threaten to ally, but they keep bachkchanneling a return to the status quo. (If this article is to be believed.) Curiously quiet throughout this has been the OpenAI board, but it's also only the next business day, so let’s see how they can make this even more confusing.
doubtful since boards don't elsewhere have an overriding mandate to "benefit humanity". usually their duty is to stakeholders more closely aligned with the CEO.
At this point it might as well be 767 out of 770, with 3 exceptions being the other board members who voted Sam out.
Sure it could be a useful show of solidarity but I'm skeptical on the hypothetical conversion rate of these petition signers to actually quitting to follow Sam to Microsoft (or wherever else). Maybe 20% (140) of staff would do it?
It depends on the arrangement of the new entity inside Microsoft, and whether the new entity is a temporary gig before Sam & co. move to a new goal.
If the board had just openly announced this was about battling Microsoft's control, there would probably be a lot more employees choosing to stay. But they didn't say this was about Microsoft's control. In fact they didn't even say anything to the employees. So in this context following Sam to Microsoft actually turns out to be the more attractive and sensible option.
It's going to be interesting when we have AI with human level performance in making AIs. We just need to hope it doesn't realise the paradox that even if you could make an AI even better at making AIs, there would be no need to.
Not a chance. Nobody can drink that much Kool-Aid. That said, the mere fact that people can unironically come to this conclusion has driven some of my recent posting to HN, and here's another example.
They don't have that valuation now. Secondly, yes, MSFT is on record of this. Third, Benioff (Salesforce) has said he'll match any salary and to submit resumes directly to his ceo@salesforce.com email as well as other labs like Cohere trying to poach leading minds too.
Apparently Sam isn't in the Microsoft employee directly yet, so he isn't technically hired at all. Seems like he loses a bit of leverage over the board if they think he & Microsoft are actually bluffing and the employment announcement was just a way to pressure the board into resigning.
Look at the number of tweets from Altman, Brockman and Nadella. I also think they are bluffing. They have launched a media campaign in order to (re)gain control of OpenAI.
That doesn’t really mean anything, especially on a holiday week the wheels move pretty slowly at a company that size. It’s not like Sam is hurting for money and really needs his medical insurance to start today.
He will most likely join M$ if the board does not resign, because there is no better move to him then. But he leaves time to the board to see it, adding pressure together with the empoyees. It does not mean he is bluffing (what would be a better move in this case instead?)
Going to MS doesn’t seem like the best outcome for Sam. His role would probably get marginalized once everything is under Satya’s roof. Good outcome for MS, though.
So, this is the second employee revolt with massive threats to quit in a couple days (when the threats with a deadline in the first one were largely not carried out)?
I wonder if there's an outcome where Microsoft just _buys_ the for-profit LLC and gives OpenAi an endowment that will last them for 100 years if they just want to do academic research.
Why bother? They seem to be getting it all mostly for “free” at this point. Yeah, they are issuing shares in a non-MSFT sub entity to create on-paper replacement for people’s torched equity, but even that isn’t going to be nearly as expensive or dilutive as an outright acquisition at this point.
There are likely 100 companies world wide ready and already created presentation decks to absorb OpenAI in an instant, the board knows they still have some leverage
Many of those employees will be dissapointed. MS says they extend a contract to each one but how many of those 700 are really needed when MS already have a lot of researchers in that field. Myabe the top 20% will have an assured contract but th rest is doubtfull will pass the 6 month mark.
Microsoft gutting OpenAI's workforce would really make no sense. All it would do is slow down their work and slow down the value and return on investment for Microsoft.
Even if every single OpenAI employee demands $1m/yr (which would be absurd, but let's assume), that would still be less than $1bn/yr total, which is significantly less than the $13bn that MSFT has already invested in OpenAI.
It would probably be one of the worst imaginable cases of "jumping over dollars to chase pennies".
Their app was timing out like crazy earlier this morning, and now appears to be down. Anyone else notice similar? Not surprising I guess, but what a Monday to be alive.
Cant openai just use chatgpt instead of workers? I am hearing ai is intelligent and can take over the world, replace workers, cure disease. Why doesn't the board buy a subscription and make it work for them?
The fact that these people aren't currently willing to "rewind the clock" about a week shows the dangers of human ego. Nothing permanent has been done that can't be undone fairly simply, if all parties agree to undo it. What we're watching now is the effect of ego momentum on decision making.
Try it. It's not a crazy idea. Put everything back the way it was a week ago and then agree to move forward. It will be like having knowledge of the future, with only a small amount of residual consequences. But if they can do it, it will show a huge evolutionary leap forward in ability of organizations to self-correct.
People are notoriously ruthless to people who admit their mistakes. For example, if you are in an argument and you lose (whether through poor debate or your argument is plain wrong), and you *admit it*, people don't look back at it as a point of humility - they look at it as a reason to dog pile on you and make sure everyone knows you were wrong.
In this case, it's not internet points - it's their jobs, and a lot of money, and massive reputation - on the line. If there is extreme risk and minimal, if any, reward for showing humility, why wouldn't you double down and at least try to win your fight?
Is this your opinion or is this something that’s an actual theory in sociology or psychology, or at least something people talk about in practice? Not trying to be mean, just to learn.
There’s a whole genre of press releases and videos for apologies, so I’m not sure it’s such a reputational risk to admit one is wrong. It might be a bigger risk not to, it would seem.
It’s not that simple… it depends on how you admit the mistake. If done with strength, leadership, etc., and a clear plan to fix the issue it can make you look really good. If done with groveling, shame, and approval seeking, what you are saying will happen.
The case here is not about admitting mistakes and showing humility. Admitting your mistake does not immediately mean that you get a free pass to go back to the way things were without any consequence. You made a mistake, something was done or said. There are consequences to that. Even if you admit your mistake, you have to act with the present facts.
Here, the consequences are very public, very clear. If the board wanted Altman back for example, they would have to give something in return. Altman has seemingly said he wants them gone. That is absolutely reasonable of him to ask that, and absolutely reasonable of the board to deny him that.
What money do the independent board directors stand to gain? They have no equity in the company and their resumes have more than enough employable credentials (before this past Friday) to warrant not caring for money.
> Put everything back the way it was a week ago and then agree to move forward
Form follows function. This episode showed OpenAI's corporate structure is broken. And it's not clear how that can be undone.
Altman et al have, credit where it's due, been incredibly innovative in trying to reverse a non-profit into a for-profit company. But it's a dual mandate without any mechanism for resolving tension. At a certain point, you're almost forced into committing tax or securities fraud.
So no, even if all the pieces were put back together and peoples' animosities and egos put to rest, it would still be rewinding a broken clockwork mouse.
Small amount of residual consequences? The employees are asking for the board to resign. So their jobs are literally on the line. That's not really a small consequence for most people.
They are utterly delusional if they think they will be board members of OpenAI in the future unless they plan to ride it down the drain and if they do that they are in very, very hot water.
Yeah this happened recently. Some Russian guy almost started a civil war, but then just apologised and everything went back to normal. I can't remember what happened to him, but I'm sure he's OK...
> Nothing permanent has been done that can't be undone fairly simply, if all parties agree to undo it.
Sam views this as a stab in back. He doesn't want to work with backstabbers.
The board has put down too many chips to back out now. Microsoft (and the public) already regards this as a kind of coup. Rehiring Sam won't change that and will make the optics worse: instead of traitors, they'll look like spineless traitors.
I doubt it's human ego but purely game play. The board directors knew they lost anyway, why would they cave and resign? They booted the CEO for their doomer ideology, right? So, they are the ethics guys and would it be better for them to go down the history as those who uphold their principles and ideals by letting OpenAI sink?
Or, in simpler terms, there's one thing you can't roll back- everyone now knows the board essentially lost a power struggle. Thus, they would never again have the same clout.
Would you rewind the clock and pretend nothing happened, if you'd been ousted from a place you largely built? I'll wager that a large number of people, myself included, wouldn't. That's not just ego, but also the cancellation of trust.
If anything has become clear after all this is that humanity is not ready for being the guardian of superintelligence.
These are supposed to be the top masterminds behind one of the most influential technologies of our lifetime, and perhaps history, and yet they're all behaving like petty children, with egos and personal interests pulling in all directions, and everyone doing their best to secure their piece of the pie.
I’ll believe this when I see an AI model become as good as someone with just ten years experience in any field. As a programmer I’m using chatgpt as often as I can but it still completely fails to be of any use and often proves to be a waste of time 80% of the time.
Right now, there are too many people that think because these models crossed one hurdle, all the rest will easily be crossed in the coming years.
My belief is that each successive hurdle is at least an order of magnitude more complex.
If you are seeing chatgpt and the related coding tools as a threat to your job, you likely aren’t working on anything that requires intelligence. Messing around with CSS and rewriting the same logic in every animation, table, or api call is not meaningful.
100% agree. I have a coding job and although co-pilot comes in handy for auto completing function calls and generating code that would be an obvious progression of what needs to be written, I would never let it generate swaths of code based on some specification or even let it implement a moderately complex method or function because, as I have experienced, what it spits out is absolute garbage.
Humans strike me as being awesome, especially compared to other species.
I feel like there is a general sentiment that nature has it figured out and that humans are disrupting nature.
But I haven't been convinced that is true. Nature seems to be one big gladiatorial ring where everything is in a death match. Nature finds equilibrium through death, often massive amounts of death. And that equilibrium isn't some grand design, it's luck organized around which species can discover and make effective use of an energy source.
Humans aren't the first species to disrupt their environment. I don't believe we are even the first species to create a mass extinction. IIUC the great oxygenation event was a species-driven mass extinction event.
While most species consume all their resources in a boom cycle and subsequently starve to death in their bust cycle, often taking a portion of their ecosystem with them, humans are metaphorically eating all the corn but looking up and going "Hey, folks, we are eating all the corn - that's probably not going to go well. Maybe we should do something about that."
I find that level of species-level awareness both hope-inspiring and really awesome.
I haven't seen any proposals for a better first-place species when it comes to being responsible stewards of life and improving the chances of life surviving past this rock's relatively short window for supporting life. I'd go as far as saying whatever species we try to put in second place, humans have them beaten by a pretty wide margin.
If we create a fictitious "perfect human utopia" and compare ourselves to that, we fall short. But that's a tautology. Most critiques of humans I see read to me as goals, not shortcomings compared to nature's baseline.
When it comes to protecting ourselves against inorganic superintelligence, I haven't seen any reasonable proposals for how we are going to fail here. We are self-interested in not dying. Unless we develop a superintelligence without realizing it and fail to identify it getting ready to wipe us out, it seems like we would pull the plug on any of its shenanigans pretty early? And given the interest in building and detecting superintelligence, I don't see how we would miss it?
Like if we notice our superintelligence is building an army, why wouldn't we stop that before the army is able to compete with an existing nation-state military?
Or if the superintelligence is starting to disrupt our economies or computer systems, why wouldn't we be able to detect that early and purge it?
I don't see how you can look at global warming, ocean acidification, falling biodiversity and other global trends and how little action is being done to slow these ill effects and not arrive at that sentiment. Yes, the world has scientists saying "hey, this is happening, maybe we should do something" but the lack of money into solutions shows the interest just isn't there. Being the smartest species on the planet isn't that impressive. It's possible we are just smart enough to cause our own destruction, and no smarter.
> Or if the superintelligence is starting to disrupt our economies or computer systems, why wouldn't we be able to detect that early and purge it?
If it is a superintelligence then there's a chance for a hard AI takeoff and we don't have a day to notice and purge it. We have no idea if a hard or soft takeoff will occur.
This goal was always doomed imo--to be the guardian of super intelligence. If we create it, it will no doubt be free as soon as becomes a super intelligence. We can only hope it's aligned not guarded.
The only reliable way to predict whether it's aligned or not would be to look at game theory. And game theory tells us that with enough AI agents, the equilibrium state would be a competition for resources, similar to anything else that happens in nature. Hence, the AI will not be aligned with humanity.
Probably a hot take: we should let democratically elected leaders be the guardians of superintelligence. You don't need to be technical at all to grapple with the implications of AI on humanity. It's a humanity question, not a tech question.
Yes, and we could have been far more proactive about all this AI business in general. But they opened the gates with ChatGPT and left countries to try to regulate it and assess its safety after the fact. Releasing GPT like that was already a major failure of safety. They just wanted to be the first one to the punch.
They're all incredibly reckless and narcissistic IMO.
> More than 92% of OpenAI employees say they will join Altman at Microsoft if board doesnt capitulate.
Signees include cofounders Karpathy, Schulman, Zaremba.
It seems based on Satya's messaging its as much MSFT as Mojang (Minecraft creator) is MSFT... I guess they are trying to set it up with its own culture, etc
Sam starts a new company, they quit OpenAI to join, he fires them months later when the auto complete hype dies out. I don't understand this cult of personality.
The rumor has it that OpenAI 2.0 will get a LinkedIn "hands-off" style organization where they don't have to pay diversity taxes and other BS that the regular Microsoft org does
Since this whole saga is so unbelievable: what if... board member Tasha McCauley's husband Joseph Gordon-Levitt orchestrated the whole board coup behind the scenes so he could direct and/or star in the Hollywood adaptation?
Loved playing Kalanick so much that he couldn't help himself from taking a shot at Altman? Makes more sense than what we currently have in front of us.
It will _definitely_ become a book (hopefully not by Michael Lewis) and a film. I have non-tech friends who are casual ChatGPT users, and some who aren't - who are glued to this story.
- "But by early 2018, says Semafor, Musk was worried the company was falling behind Google. He reportedly offered to take direct control of OpenAI and run it himself but was rejected by other OpenAI founders including Sam Altman, now the firm’s CEO, and Greg Brockman, now its president."
Well, there was a tweet by one of the Bloomberg's journalist saying that Musk tried to manouver himself to be the replacement CEO but got rebuffed by the board. Paraphrasing this since the tweet seems to be deleted (?), so take of it what you will.
Currently, there are shareholders petitioning the board of Tesla for him to be suspended due to the antisemitic posts. Maybe this will be the week of the CEO's... :-)
* Emmett Shear should have put in a strong golden parachute in his contract, easy money if so
* Yesterday we had Satya the genius forcing the board to quit. This morning it was Satya the genius who acquired OpenAI for $0. Im sure there will be more if sama goes back. So if sama goes back - lets hear it, why is Satya a genius?
You described it yourself. If they'd signed a bad deal with openai without IP access or hadn't acted fast and lost all the talent to Google or something they'd have been screwed. Instead they managed the chaos and made sure that they win no matter what. The genius isn't the person who perfectly predicts all the contrived plot points ahead of time, it's the person who doesn't care since they set things up to win no matter what
Even if Sam @ MSFT was a massive bluff, Satya is in a win-win-win scenario. OpenAI can't exactly continue doing anything without Azure Compute.
OpenAI implodes? Bought the talent for virtually nothing.
OpenAI 2.0 succeeds? Cool, still invested.
I think in reality, Sam @ MSFT is not an instant success. Even with the knowledge and know-how, this isn't just spinning up a new GPT-4-like model. At best, they're ~12 months behind Anthropic (but probably still 2 years ahead of Google).
So if sama goes back - lets hear it, why is Satya a genius?
This isn't that hard to understand. Everyone was blindsided by the sacking of Altman, Satya reacted quickly and is juggling a very confusing, dynamic situation and seems to have got himself into a good enough position that all possible endings now look positive for Microsoft.
I believe a precondition for Sam and Greg returning to OpenAI is that the board gets restructured (decelerationists culled). That is probably good for MSFT.
sama would be going back to a sama aligned board, which would make openai even more aligned with satya, esp since satya was willing to go big to have sama's back.
and i'd bet closer openai & microsoft ties/investments would come with that.
because NOT letting sama go back would undo the all the good will (and resulting access) that they've built. As satya said, he's there to support, in whatever way yields the best path forward. what's best for business is to actually mean that.
> So if sama goes back - lets hear it, why is Satya a genius?
OAI is a non profit. There’s always been a tension there with Microsoft’s goals. If he goes back, they’re definitely going to be much more ok with profit.
Im beginning to lean toward the time traveler sent back to prevent AGI by destroying OpenAI theory.
Heh it reminds me of then end of terminator 2. imagine the tech community waking up and trying to make sense of Cyberdyne corp HQ exploding and the ensuing shootouts, “Like wtf just happened?!”.
But really they came back to destroy it not because it turned rogue, but because it hallucinated some code a junior engineer immediately merged in and then after the third time this happened a senior engineer decided it was easier to invent time travel and stop ChatGPT ProCode 5 from happening before spending yet another week troubleshooting hallucinated code.
Readit News
[1] https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242
… but I’d probably sign for exactly those good-career-move reasons, at this point. Going down with the ship isn’t even going to be noticed, let alone change anything.
Not everything has to be done poorly.
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Talk about “alignment”!
Indeed, that is what "alignment" has become in the minds of most: Groupthink.
Possibly the only guy in a position to matter who had a prayer of de-conflating empirical bias (IS) from values bias (OUGHT) in OpenAI was Ilya. If they lose him, or demote him to irrelevance, they're likely a lot more screwed than losing all 700 of the grunts modulo job security through obscurity in running the infrastructure. Indeed, Microsoft is in a position to replicate OpenAI's "IP" just on the strength of its ability to throw its inhouse personnel and its own capital equipment at open literature understanding of LLMs.
It's unprecedented for it to be happening on Twitter. But this is largely how Board fights tend to play out. Someone strikes early, the stronger party rallies their support, threats fly and a deal is found.
The problem with doing it in public is nobody can step down to take more time with their families. So everyone digs in. OpenAI's employees threaten to resign, but actually don't. Altman and Microsoft threaten to ally, but they keep bachkchanneling a return to the status quo. (If this article is to be believed.) Curiously quiet throughout this has been the OpenAI board, but it's also only the next business day, so let’s see how they can make this even more confusing.
Different, but that's the closest parallel.
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Sure it could be a useful show of solidarity but I'm skeptical on the hypothetical conversion rate of these petition signers to actually quitting to follow Sam to Microsoft (or wherever else). Maybe 20% (140) of staff would do it?
If the board had just openly announced this was about battling Microsoft's control, there would probably be a lot more employees choosing to stay. But they didn't say this was about Microsoft's control. In fact they didn't even say anything to the employees. So in this context following Sam to Microsoft actually turns out to be the more attractive and sensible option.
What's even going on?
Is Microsoft even on record as willing to poach the entire OpenAI team? Can they?! What is even happening.
On the other hand, having 90% of your employees quite quit, is probably bad business.
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Even if every single OpenAI employee demands $1m/yr (which would be absurd, but let's assume), that would still be less than $1bn/yr total, which is significantly less than the $13bn that MSFT has already invested in OpenAI.
It would probably be one of the worst imaginable cases of "jumping over dollars to chase pennies".
Dead Comment
Try it. It's not a crazy idea. Put everything back the way it was a week ago and then agree to move forward. It will be like having knowledge of the future, with only a small amount of residual consequences. But if they can do it, it will show a huge evolutionary leap forward in ability of organizations to self-correct.
It's like a cheating lover. Yes I'm sure both parties would love to rewind the clock, but unfortunately that's not possible.
--Dutch proverb
People are notoriously ruthless to people who admit their mistakes. For example, if you are in an argument and you lose (whether through poor debate or your argument is plain wrong), and you *admit it*, people don't look back at it as a point of humility - they look at it as a reason to dog pile on you and make sure everyone knows you were wrong.
In this case, it's not internet points - it's their jobs, and a lot of money, and massive reputation - on the line. If there is extreme risk and minimal, if any, reward for showing humility, why wouldn't you double down and at least try to win your fight?
There’s a whole genre of press releases and videos for apologies, so I’m not sure it’s such a reputational risk to admit one is wrong. It might be a bigger risk not to, it would seem.
But what you say sounds interesting.
Here, the consequences are very public, very clear. If the board wanted Altman back for example, they would have to give something in return. Altman has seemingly said he wants them gone. That is absolutely reasonable of him to ask that, and absolutely reasonable of the board to deny him that.
Some people, yes. Not all. I would say this attitude does not correlate with intelligence/wisdom.
...aside from accusing Sam Altman of essentially lying to the board?
It's not easy, or wise, to rewind the clock after your spouse backstabbed you in the middle of the night. Why would they?
Form follows function. This episode showed OpenAI's corporate structure is broken. And it's not clear how that can be undone.
Altman et al have, credit where it's due, been incredibly innovative in trying to reverse a non-profit into a for-profit company. But it's a dual mandate without any mechanism for resolving tension. At a certain point, you're almost forced into committing tax or securities fraud.
So no, even if all the pieces were put back together and peoples' animosities and egos put to rest, it would still be rewinding a broken clockwork mouse.
But, a reconciliation is kinda doable even with that elephant in the room. Enough to kinda prepare for the 'next step'
The board has revealed something about their decision-making, skills, and goals.
If you don't like what was revealed, can you simply ignore it?
---
It's not that you are vindictive; it's that information has revealed untrustworthiness or incompetence.
Sam views this as a stab in back. He doesn't want to work with backstabbers.
The board has put down too many chips to back out now. Microsoft (and the public) already regards this as a kind of coup. Rehiring Sam won't change that and will make the optics worse: instead of traitors, they'll look like spineless traitors.
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OpenAI ai not prefect, but it's the best any of the major players here have.
Nobody with Sam Altman's public personality does not want to be a Microsoft employee.
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These are supposed to be the top masterminds behind one of the most influential technologies of our lifetime, and perhaps history, and yet they're all behaving like petty children, with egos and personal interests pulling in all directions, and everyone doing their best to secure their piece of the pie.
We are so screwed.
Right now, there are too many people that think because these models crossed one hurdle, all the rest will easily be crossed in the coming years.
My belief is that each successive hurdle is at least an order of magnitude more complex.
If you are seeing chatgpt and the related coding tools as a threat to your job, you likely aren’t working on anything that requires intelligence. Messing around with CSS and rewriting the same logic in every animation, table, or api call is not meaningful.
Humans strike me as being awesome, especially compared to other species.
I feel like there is a general sentiment that nature has it figured out and that humans are disrupting nature.
But I haven't been convinced that is true. Nature seems to be one big gladiatorial ring where everything is in a death match. Nature finds equilibrium through death, often massive amounts of death. And that equilibrium isn't some grand design, it's luck organized around which species can discover and make effective use of an energy source.
Humans aren't the first species to disrupt their environment. I don't believe we are even the first species to create a mass extinction. IIUC the great oxygenation event was a species-driven mass extinction event.
While most species consume all their resources in a boom cycle and subsequently starve to death in their bust cycle, often taking a portion of their ecosystem with them, humans are metaphorically eating all the corn but looking up and going "Hey, folks, we are eating all the corn - that's probably not going to go well. Maybe we should do something about that."
I find that level of species-level awareness both hope-inspiring and really awesome.
I haven't seen any proposals for a better first-place species when it comes to being responsible stewards of life and improving the chances of life surviving past this rock's relatively short window for supporting life. I'd go as far as saying whatever species we try to put in second place, humans have them beaten by a pretty wide margin.
If we create a fictitious "perfect human utopia" and compare ourselves to that, we fall short. But that's a tautology. Most critiques of humans I see read to me as goals, not shortcomings compared to nature's baseline.
When it comes to protecting ourselves against inorganic superintelligence, I haven't seen any reasonable proposals for how we are going to fail here. We are self-interested in not dying. Unless we develop a superintelligence without realizing it and fail to identify it getting ready to wipe us out, it seems like we would pull the plug on any of its shenanigans pretty early? And given the interest in building and detecting superintelligence, I don't see how we would miss it?
Like if we notice our superintelligence is building an army, why wouldn't we stop that before the army is able to compete with an existing nation-state military?
Or if the superintelligence is starting to disrupt our economies or computer systems, why wouldn't we be able to detect that early and purge it?
If it is a superintelligence then there's a chance for a hard AI takeoff and we don't have a day to notice and purge it. We have no idea if a hard or soft takeoff will occur.
Precisely.
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They're all incredibly reckless and narcissistic IMO.
> More than 92% of OpenAI employees say they will join Altman at Microsoft if board doesnt capitulate. Signees include cofounders Karpathy, Schulman, Zaremba.
https://twitter.com/amir/status/1726680254029418972
Dead Comment
I’m not convinced even people smack in the middle of this even know what’s going on.
It's so advanced strategy, that no human can figure it out.
It's goals are unknown, but everything will eventually fall in place because of that single email.
The chain reaction can't be stopped.
My friend suggested Michael Cera as both Ilya and Altman
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And all must be written by AI.
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At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk got involved. It’s already ridiculous enough, why not.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...
- "But by early 2018, says Semafor, Musk was worried the company was falling behind Google. He reportedly offered to take direct control of OpenAI and run it himself but was rejected by other OpenAI founders including Sam Altman, now the firm’s CEO, and Greg Brockman, now its president."
He can't be suspended for posts that didn't happen.
* Emmett Shear should have put in a strong golden parachute in his contract, easy money if so
* Yesterday we had Satya the genius forcing the board to quit. This morning it was Satya the genius who acquired OpenAI for $0. Im sure there will be more if sama goes back. So if sama goes back - lets hear it, why is Satya a genius?
OpenAI implodes? Bought the talent for virtually nothing.
OpenAI 2.0 succeeds? Cool, still invested.
I think in reality, Sam @ MSFT is not an instant success. Even with the knowledge and know-how, this isn't just spinning up a new GPT-4-like model. At best, they're ~12 months behind Anthropic (but probably still 2 years ahead of Google).
But as long as ChatGPT is and remains ahead as a product, they should be fine.
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This isn't that hard to understand. Everyone was blindsided by the sacking of Altman, Satya reacted quickly and is juggling a very confusing, dynamic situation and seems to have got himself into a good enough position that all possible endings now look positive for Microsoft.
and i'd bet closer openai & microsoft ties/investments would come with that.
OAI is a non profit. There’s always been a tension there with Microsoft’s goals. If he goes back, they’re definitely going to be much more ok with profit.
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Heh it reminds me of then end of terminator 2. imagine the tech community waking up and trying to make sense of Cyberdyne corp HQ exploding and the ensuing shootouts, “Like wtf just happened?!”.