Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya:
‘He freaked the hell out of people there. And we’re talking about AI professionals who work in the biggest AI labs in the Bay area. They were leaving the room, saying, “Holy shit.”
The point is that Ilya Sutskever took what you see in the media, the “AGI utopia vs. potential apocalypse” ideology, to the next level. It was traumatizing.’
Was the original launch of ChatGPT "safe?" Of course not, but it moved the industry forward immensely.
Swisher's follow up is even more eyebrow raising: "The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday."
What exactly from the demo day was "pushing too far?" We got a dall-e api, a larger context window and some cool stuff to fine tune GPT. I don't really see anything there that is too crazy... I also don't get the sense that Sam was cavalier about AI safety. That's why I am so surprised that the apparent reason for his ousting appears to be a boring, old, political turf war.
My sense is that there is either more to the story, or Sam is absolutely about to have his Steve Jobs moment. He's also likely got a large percentage of the OpenAI researcher's on his side.