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Greg Brockman & Sam Altman: "Last night, Sam got a text from Ilya asking to talk at noon Friday. Sam joined a Google Meet and the whole board, except Greg, was there. Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon.
- At 12:19pm, Greg got a text from Ilya asking for a quick call. At 12:23pm, Ilya sent a Google Meet link. Greg was told that he was being removed from the board (but was vital to the company and would retain his role) and that Sam had been fired. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post.
- As far as we know, the management team was made aware of this shortly after, other than Mira who found out the night prior."
Altman has always been a bit sly, I am not surprised if he has made some backroom deals that don't sit well with the board. But there is a fine line between doing the right thing and unable to do anything at all. Sometimes, it is better to have the moderately bad guy that can at least bring progress instead of a virtuous leader that can't win a fight.
I guess only time will tell. Right now though, OAI is not looking good and depend on how Microsoft was involved in all of this, someone's seat might get a bit shaky.
Related ongoing thread:
Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38314299 - Nov 2023 (252 comments)
(I mean there are a lot of related ongoing threads but it's all relative)
I want to hope this means the OpenAI non-profit is looking for more ways to give code away and to democratize and share it's wins. Rather than increasingly commercialize & sell a product.
I'm pretty afraid though this might mean instead cutting off & restricting access to this technology, under the pretension of safeguarding humanity from it's use.
There's court intrigue discussions aplenty but I want to know what the intent is here, what this signals as coming next.
I wouldn't count on it, Ilya has stated that he's against open sourcing models that might be seen as "too powerful"
I think you're right that this move by Ilya is to refocus on the non-profit mission, so less urgency to commercialize and sell products, and instead more focus on core research.
Based on Ilya's statements, it doesn't seem like safety was the main motivation in the decision, so maybe there's a hope that they'll be more open, but it doesn't seem to indicate either way, so possible that they'll stay tight lipped regardless.
I seriously doubt it. If they are so much more into the AI safety than Sam Altman is, how could they possibly entrust you with the code? :-)
The remaining leadership seems to be heavy on doomer / pro censorship ideas so good luck with that
Tinfoil? Hat time.
Everyone from Greg to Sam to Ilya keep hanging on "AGI for the benefit of humanity". According to OpenAI's constitution: AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements, including the ones with Microsoft. Nuclear.
Well apparently, the board decides what will be AGI. But 3 (everyone now left except ilya) of those board members don't even work at Open AI and are only privy to what the rest share.
Yesterday, this is what Altman said, "On a personal note, like four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten to be in the room when we pushed the veil of ignorance back"
He goes on to say, "By next year, the model capabilities will take such a leap forward that No one would have expected"
Now keep in mind, while we can all speculate on just how much the next iteration will be better, the idea that they could be sitting on something noticeably better is not far fetched at all. Open AI sat on GPT-4 for 8 months before announcing it to the public.
https://www.youtube.com/live/ZFFvqRemDv8?si=yUnLvk1gHNocxUVu
2 days ago, Sam is asked about what's left for AGI. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM
He says they can push Language Models much farther but that there are more breakthroughs required. But here's where it gets weird. He immediately starts talking about Super Intelligence and "discovering new physics" as the bar. He says, "If it can't discover new physics, I don't think it's a super intelligence". Nobody asked you about this Sam..
In No prior podcast 2 weeks ago with Ilya, he says Transformers can obviously get us to AGI. https://twitter.com/burny_tech/status/1725578088392573038
To Ilya, they built AGI internally, and Altman wanted to release/monetize it early and tried to undersell it as being far away from AGI to the rest of the board. Ilya considers it AGI, or something extremely close to it, and deserving of far more caution, and so decided to convince the board that Altman was underselling the capabilities of their newer models and was risking a premature release of AGI. If true, then it could be seen as Altman lying about something that is foundational to their mission (which is to safely and responsibly release AGI out into the world) and subsequently fired him.
Characterizing Dev Day as "too far" makes more sense in this scenario. Ultimately, the only reason SOTA LLM Agents aren't particularly dangerous is competence. If you suddenly bumped the latter up while laying the grounds for the former..
Anytime I hear someone even hypothesizing with a tin foil hat that some company has developed AGI today in 2023, I hear it the same way I hear someone speculating about UFOs. It's so absurd that all I can do is shake my head and look around the room hoping to make eye contact with someone sane who is wearing the same expression of raised eyebrows that I am.
I could write an essay on why the existence of AGI in 2023 is a comical prospect, but it just seems to be a given to me... It isn't worth the effort because if someone can't see that for themselves already, no amount of explanation from me is going to change their mind.
But in one sentence, try asking ChatGPT to reverse a string of 20+ digits, like 473936482738338373926. It can't do it. It's a super trivial task, but it can't do it. Because it doesn't really understand anything. It's just an incredibly advanced Markov chain. It isn't a mind. It can't reason. They are no closer to AGI than we were 10 years ago. Chatgpt's text generation capabilities have fooled people into thinking that OpenAI has made substantial progress on creating a reasoning consciousness. But it hasn't. It hasn't at all. And it's so easy to realize that if you interact with the thing.
>But in one sentence, try asking ChatGPT to reverse a string of 20+ digits, like 473936482738338373926.
LLMs don't see numbers or letters but tokens. Letter, digit level manipulation is intuitively a hard task. Unsurprisingly, removing that handicap resulted in much better arithmetic abilities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02989
It's pretty telling in my opinion that this is the kind of "proof" people bank hard on. For something that so obviously "does not understand", you'd think providing a task that it would fail that a chunk of humans also wouldn't would be easy.
https://chat.openai.com/share/1b004d79-0ff3-4935-b6ca-a82833...
Did you use ChatGPT 3.5 once a year ago or something? The models change often.
Edit: most people would struggle to reverse a 20+ digit number if it was listed off to them. This doesn’t make them unintelligent.
I am pretty positive on AI and LLMs and all this stuff. But even so I really doubt OAI could have made something so much better than GPT to the point that it worth sacking its CEO in such a manner.
Sam has always been a salesman, that is true and the board knows it. It would take much more than just a disagreement on the value and urgency of a deal to get rid of him. I think it has to be active sabotage and some kind of business maneuver that basically kill the company as it is right now while not telling the board about it.
That’s very weird to read, because I’ve noticed some sentiments about “new physics” in anon AI twitter as well around a month and a half ago. I thought it was just weird speculation at the time, but now hearing it from a completely different source suddenly gives this some credibility.
All of the above with tinfoil hat on, of course. Huge if true but still highly unprobable.
Hats on to you. The AGI was compellingly persausive that sam must be fired immediately.
They didn't fire him for that reason, but because it would be dangerously persuasive to release without safeguards - which is what sam planned to do without telling the board.
> Tinfoil? Hat time
Similar hat: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1725724907722752008 / https://archive.is/bvLVQ
You are reading too much into this, and falling victim to sam altman’a marketing strategy, of fud fomo and hype - tricks adopted from the crypto underworld.
What happened instead is altman and his followers took over a genuinely open initiative of building ai.
In doing so he thought he could simply monetise models built upon content that they had no right to monetise, since their so called ai doesnt actually learn, it depends on data - the more the better.
Well it turns out that some sane people at openai decided to end the pyramid scheme of data - funding - data and return to core values.
Or at least that’s my hope, as that is the only path forward to building ai, a goal they havent reached yet.
Rumors that they had a breakthrough that Sam wanted to deploy but Ilya didn’t.
Makes me wonder what sort of capability they actually have in-house but not available for us plebs.
And if they have that in-house, how reasonable is it to assume that the US government (or perhaps even other state governments) also have access to it?
Based on Ilya's comments [1] it sounds like it was more about a disagreement around the original non-profit mission, and making sure that AI benefited all of humanity.
Perhaps Ilya felt Sam was focusing too much on profit and power with his recent world tour and then dev day? Regardless, it's certainly rare, for one of the core scientists to maintain control over their creation, rather than the other way around. Typically the VC business guy would be pushing the scientist out.
It would be weird for this sort of disagreement to reach a feverpitch that would see the CEO sacked without some much better model in the background though.
Like Dev Day was characterized as "too far". How ? How is that interfering with the mission to benefit all humanity? It's all very weird.
There's no breakthrough secret AI they are hiding. The answer is always greed or incompetence.
Given this sounds like an alignment/strategy issue... OpenAI might find themselves in a big old defamation lawsuit. The press release clearly reads: "he did something really bad but we can't tell you exactly what". People have sued for less...
I don't know but Sutskever comes of like a psycho on an ego trip who wants you to believe he is the good guy.
I don't know him either but in his interviews, Ilya's always been composed, considerate, and measured. Not sure what ticked you off.
Huh?
one thing that has apparent through this saga is how many people think Sam was a driving force behind the development and engineering. His departure may impact capital raising but not model development.
Ilya is the driving force there and his commitment to the original idea l may bring OpenAI closer to the original investors aims.
This coup is badly executed though. OpenAI’s reputation is hurt irreparably
Maybe it is a good thing now other companies can finally have a window to catch up
>This coup is badly executed though
I've seen this language used a few times now. A company's CEO is appointed by, and serves the goals of the board. Not the other way around. When the board perceives that the CEO isn't doing this, they can fire him. That's neither metaphorically or literally a coup.
Especially bad narrative in this case because openAI has given itself a charter (and legal structure that subjects the for-profit arm to the non-profit) that stresses safe and broadly beneficial AI development. If this is Ilya, the chief scientist, wanting to take it back into that direction, from Altman, a salesman, that will not hurt its reputation. (maybe it's stock value)
You are misusing the word coup
I couldn't imagine a statement that would better predict company failure at the hands of its competition.
Sutskever is simply much more interested in doing research like https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment than just earning money.
I can see why, being able to give hard rules the AI can't break wouldn't just solve alignment but also solve the hallucination problem. It is the kind of breakthrough that would be worth trillions.
It's mind-blowing that a company of this significance was left in the hands of four people, two of whom are complete unknowns in the field - or at least utterly unclear what credentials got them there.
Well, that answers if we should continue to build for the GPT platform Sam introduced 11 days ago.
Sad. Thanks for posting.
The whole coup was very unprofessional. How can i trust such a leadership? It’s not clear if the path taken by sam will be discontinued regarding the GPT platform
Americans can’t understand why someone might be driven by ideas and not be driven by money.
Kara Swisher: The board members felt Altman was manipulative and headstrong.
In other words “good at being a ceo”
This is no way to run an $80B company!
This thread was detached. I was referring to https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594
When you have a board who is out of their depth and no real owner, you are going to have problems.
You’re right. It’s instead how you run a nonprofit built to further the the vision of a once-in-a-generation ML researcher, without having it stolen out from under you.
Do you imagine executives/board member dismissals have some elaborate ceremony?
"not ideal element to it" is quite the quote. This four person board wants to be in charge of the most capable artificial intelligence on the planet, but seems to be less organized than the average school board[1].
[1] https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725718391548207246
"it's interesting that someone with a 2014 bachelor's and a 2021 master's, with no experience other than a few years as a low-level employee at Open Philanthropy and then a strategy position at a Georgetown center, somehow leapfrogged onto the board of one of the most important organizations in the world."
Ilya and Mira are mad.
They discount the trust-based permission society grants Open AI because of its affiliation with the YC and Silicon Valley model just for LLMs.
Society gives some kind of trust based permission to OpenAI? What?
It looks like they’re actually got full fledged AGI and are panicking.