zlacker

>>davidb+(OP)
From NYT article [1] and Greg's tweet [2]

"In a post to X Friday evening, Mr. Brockman said that he and Mr. Altman had no warning of the board’s decision. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” he wrote. “We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened.”

Mr. Altman was asked to join a video meeting with the board at noon on Friday and was immediately fired, according to Mr. Brockman. Mr. Brockman said that even though he was the chairman of the board, he was not part of this board meeting.

He said that the board informed him of Mr. Altman’s ouster minutes later. Around the same time, the board published a blog post."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/openai-sam-alt...

[2] https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594

>>gordon+LA1
So they didn't even give Altman a chance to defend himself for supposedly lying (inconsistent candour as they put it.) Wow.

>>cedws+xC1
Another source [1] claims: "A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI."

[1] - https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-b...

>>somena+HF1
So it looks like they did something good.

>>krzyk+oO1
If you want AI to fail, then yes.

>>konsch+x42
Yeah, AI will totally fail if people don't ship untested crap at breakneck speed.

Shipping untested crap is the only known way to develop technology. Your AI assistant hallucinates? Amazing. We gotta bring more chaos to the world, the world is not chaotic enough!!

>>killer+On2
You haven't been around when Web2.0 and the whole modern internet arrived, were you? You know, all the sites that you consider stable and robust now (Google, YT and everything else) shipping with a Beta sign plastered onto them.

>>kolink+qC2
I first got internet access in 1999, IIRC.

Web sites were quite stable back then. Not really much less stable than they are now. E.g. Twitter now has more issues than web sites I used often back in 2000s.

They had "beta" sign because they had much higher quality standards. They warned users that things are not perfect. Now people just accept that software is half-broken, and there's no need for beta signs - there's no expectation of quality.

Also, being down is one thing, sending random crap to a user is completely another. E.g. consider web mail, if it is down for one hour it's kinda OK. If it shows you random crap instead of your email, or sends your email to a wrong person. That would be very much not OK, and that's the sort of issues that OpenAI is having now. Nobody complains that it's down sometimes, but it returns erroneous answers.

>>killer+0Q2
But it’s not supposed to ship totally “correct” answers. It is supposed to predict which text is most likely to follow the prompt. It does that correctly, whether the answer is factually correct or not.

>>dcow+oV2
Chat-based AI like ChatGPT are marketed as an assistant. People expect that it can answer their questions, and often it can answer even complex questions correctly. Then it can fail miserably on a basic question.

GitHub Copilot is an auto-completer, and that's, perhaps, a proper use of this technology. At this stage, make auto-completion better. That's nice.

Why is it necessary to release "GPTs"? This is a rush to deliver half-baked tech, just for the sake of hype. Sam was fired for a good reason.

Example: Somebody markets GPT called "Grimoire" a "100x Engineer". I gave him a task to make a simple game, and it just gave a skeleton of code instead of an actual implementation: https://twitter.com/killerstorm/status/1723848549647925441

Nobody needs this shit. In fact, AI progress can happen faster if people do real research instead of prompting GPTs.

>>killer+PP3
Perhaps we need a better term for them then. Because they are immensely useful as is - just not as a, say, Wikipedia replacement.