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Realistically, this reflects more poorly on Sutskever. No one wants to work with a backstabber. It's one thing to be like 'well we had disagreements so we decided to move on.' However the board claimed Altman lied. If it turns out the firing was due to strategic direction, no one would ever want to work with Sutskever again. I certainly would not. That's an incredibly defamatory statement about a man who did nothing wrong, other than have a professional disagreement.
So basically a confirmation, but with a slight disagreement on the vocabulary used to describe it.
I read it as Ilya Sutskever thinking the move is good non-profit governance grounds and that does not match what coup often means, unlawful seizure of power or maybe unprincipled/unreasonable seizure of power.

Ilya Sutskever seems to think this is a reasonable principled move to seize power that is in line with the non-profits goals and governance, but does not seem to care too much if you call it a coup.

That's just spin. Which coup hasn't been a "reasonable and principled move to seize power" according to it's orchestrator?

Do you think Napoleon or Pinochet made speeches to the effect of "Yes, it was a completely unprincipled power-grab, but what are you going to do about it, lol?"

Some insider details that seem to agree with this: https://www.reddit.com/user/Anxious_Bandicoot126/
We cant trust what we read. But last year's "Altman World Tour" where he met so many world leaders around the world felt a bit over the top, and maybe it got into his head
Based on the amount of comments in that time period that is probably a fake insider.
Altman risking his role as CEO of the new industrial revolution for a book deal is implausible.
> This was about stopping a runaway train before it flew off a cliff with all of us on board. Believe me, the board and I gave him tons of chances to self-correct. But his ego was out of control.

> Don't let the media hype fool you. Sam wasn't some genius visionary. He was a glory-hungry narcissist cutting every corner in some deluded quest to be the next Musk.

That does align with Ilya’s tweet about ego being in the way of great achievements.

And it does align with Sam’s statements on Lex’s podcast about his disagreements with Musk. He compared himself to Elon’s SpaceX being bullied by Elon’s childhood heroes. But he didn’t seem sad about it - just combative. Elon’s response to the NASA astronauts distrusting his company’s work was “They should come visit and see what we’re doing”. Sam’s reaction was very different. Like, “If he says bad things about us, I can say bad things about him too. It’s not my style. But maybe I will, one day”. Same sentiment as he is showing now (“if I go off the board can come after me for the value of my shares”).

All of that does paint a picture where it really isn’t about doing something necessary for humanity and future generations, and more about being considered great. The odd thing is that this should get you fired, especially in SF, of all places.

Who is u/Anxious_Bandicoot126? Is there any reason to think this is actually a person at OpenAI and not some random idiot on the internet? They have no comment history except on this issue. Seems like BS.
No comment history except on this issue...

That's either 100% fishy or 100% insider.

Either BS or person is insider, no in-between.

Is this sarcasm? The burden is on the person with the supposed claim to show they are trustworthy and reputable. What you're saying is basically "coin shows heads 50% of the time, therefore it's 50% chance they're an insider".
Wow, all the comments and responses to that person's comments are a gold mine. Not saying anything should be taken as gospel, either from that poster or the people replying. But certainly a lot of food for thought.
Reads like lesswrong fan-fiction
Is that someone RP'ing as an OpenAI insider? There is no evidence to suggest they're a reliable source. What am I missing?
Very unprofessional way to approach this disagreement.
How so? It's just another firing and being escorted out the door.
The wording is very clearly hostile and aggressive, especially for a formal statement, and the wording, again, makes it very clear that they are burning all bridges with Sam Altman, and it is very clear that 1. it was done extremely suddenly, 2. with very little notice or discussion with any other stakeholder (e.g. Microsoft being completely blindsided, not even waiting 30 minutes for the stock market to close, doing this shortly before Thanksgiving break, etc).

You don't really see any of this in most professional settings.

It is quite gauche for a company to burn bridges with their upper management. This bodes poorly for ever hoping to attract executives in the future. Even Bobby Kotick got a more graceful farewell from Activision Blizzard, where they tried to clear his name. It is only prudent business.

Certainly, this is very immature. It wouldn't be out of context in HBO's Succession.

Whether what happened is right or just in some sense is a different conversation. We could speculate on what is going on in the company and why, but the tactlessness is evident.

boards give reasons for transparency, and they said he had not been fully candid.

You are interpreting that as hostile and aggressive because you are reading into it what other boards have said in other disputes and whatever you are imagining, but if the board learned some things not from Altman that it felt they should have learned from Altman, less than candid is a completely neutral way to describe it, and voting him out is not an indication of hostility.

Would you like to propose some other candid wording the board could have chosen, a wording that does not lack candor?

>The wording is very clearly hostile and aggressive

At least we can be sure that ChatGPT didn't write the statement, then.

Otherwise the last paragraph would have equivocated that both sides have a point.

It's not "just another firing," the statement accused Altman of lying to the board. Either he did and it's a justified extraordinary firing, or he didn't and it's hugely unprofessional to insinuate he did.
If you know anything about Ilya, it's definitely not out of character.
Having read up on some background not sure I want this guy in charge of any kind of superintelligence.
what are you referring to
It was actually a great move. Unusual, but it goes with the mission and nonprofit idea. I think it was designed to draw attention and stir controversy on purpose.
Is it a winning move though? The biggest loser in this seems to be the company that was bankrolling their endeavor, Microsoft.
Not if the AGI was making the decision. A bit demanding to think the Professionalism LLM module isn't a bit hallucinatory in this age. Give it a few more years.
When two people have different ideologies and neither is willing to backdown or compromise, one person must "go".
There’s no indication that any sort of discussion took place. Major stakeholders like Microsoft appear uninformed.
You've summed AI X-risk in a single sentence.

(I.e. an AGI would be one of the two people here.)

There's more graceful ways to do this though.
Or you introduce an authoritative third party that mediates their interactions. This feels like it wouldn't be a problem if so many high-ranking employees didn't feel so radically different about the same technology.
The funny thing is that so far OpenAI has made zero demonstrable progress toward building a true AGI. ChatGPT is an extraordinary technical accomplishment and useful for many things, but there is no evidence that scaling up that approach will get to AGI. At least a few more major breakthroughs will probably be needed.
AGI is about definitions. By many definitions, it’s already here. Hence MSR’s “sparks of AGI” paper and Eric Schmidt’s article in Noema. But by the definition “as good or better than humans at all things”, it fails.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

On operationalizing definitions of AGI

That "Sparks of AI" paper was total garbage, just complete nonsense and confirmation bias.

Defining AGI is more than just semantics. The generally accepted definition is that it must be able to complete most cognitive tasks as well as an average human. Otherwise we could as well claim that ELIZA was AGI, which would obviously be ridiculous.

> The funny thing is that so far OpenAI has made zero demonstrable progress toward building a true AGI. ChatGPT is an extraordinary technical accomplishment and useful for many things, but there is no evidence that scaling up that approach will get to AGI.

How can you honestly say things like this? ChatGPT shows the ability to sometimes solve problems it's never explicitly been presented with. I know this. I have a very little known Haskell library. I have asked ChatGPT to do various things with my own library, that I have never written about online, and that I have never seen before. I regularly ask it to answer questions others send to me. It gets it basically right. This is completely novel.

It seems pretty obvious to me that scaling this approach will lead to the development of computer systems that can solve problems that it's never seen before. Especially since it was not at all obvious from smaller transformer models that these emergent properties would come about by scaling parameter sizes... at all.

What is AGI if not problem solving in novel domains?

It’s impossible to predict.

No one predicted feeding LLMs more GPUs would be as incredibly useful as it is.

No-one knows, which makes this a classical scientific problem. Which is what Ilya wants to focus on, which I think is fair, give this alligns with the original mission of OpenAi.

I think it’s also fair Sam starts something new with a for profit focus of the get-go.

No one in this company is "consistently candid" about anything.
Yes, but Ilya is on the Board of Directors; and Sam is currently unemployed (although: not for long).
Huge scoop.