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[return to "Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down"]
1. Techni+02[view] [source] 2023-11-20 05:31:05
>>andsoi+(OP)
I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend.

If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this?

Will be super interesting when all the details come out regarding the board’s decision making. I’m especially curious how the (former) CEO of Twitch gets nominated as interim CEO.

Finally, if Altman goes his own way, it’s clear the fervent support he’s getting will lead to massive funding. Combined with the reporting that he’s trying to create his own AI chips with Middle East funding, Altman has big ambitions for being fully self reliant to own the stack completely.

No idea what the future holds for any of the players here. Reality truly is stranger than fiction.

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2. altdat+c3[view] [source] 2023-11-20 05:36:55
>>Techni+02
OpenAI has hundreds more employees, all of whom are incredibly smart. While they will definitely lose the leadership and talent of those two, it’s not as if a nuclear bomb dropped on their HQ and wiped out all their engineers!

So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me

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3. alsodu+a4[view] [source] 2023-11-20 05:42:18
>>altdat+c3
Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message.

I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of them) who joined OpenAI recently with pure financial incentives. They'll jump to Sam's new company cause of course that's where they'd make real money.

This coupled with investors like Microsoft backing off definitely makes it fair to question the survival of OpenAI in the form we see today.

And this is exactly what makes me question Adam D'Angelo's motives as a board member. Maybe he wanted OpenAI to slow down or stop existing, to keep his Poe by Quora (and their custom assistants) relevant. GPT Agents pretty much did what Poe was doing overnight, and you can have as many as them with your existing 20$ ChatGPT Plus subscription. But who knows I'm just speculating here like everyone else.

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4. halduj+d5[view] [source] 2023-11-20 05:48:00
>>alsodu+a4
> Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter

Selection bias?

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5. alsodu+X5[view] [source] 2023-11-20 05:52:52
>>halduj+d5
Not if it's a big sample set. There's a guy on twitter who make a list with every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter and almost all of them did react to Sams tweet in a supportive way.
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6. 154573+l8[view] [source] 2023-11-20 06:07:33
>>alsodu+X5
> every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter

Literally the literal definition of 'selection bias' dude, like, the pure unadulterated definition of it.

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7. alsodu+f9[view] [source] 2023-11-20 06:11:43
>>154573+l8
Like I said, if the subset of OpenAI researchers who are on twitter is very small, sure.

But people in AI/learning community are very active on twitter. I don't know every AI researcher on OpenAIs payroll. But the fact that most active researchers (looking at the list of OpenAI paper authors, and tbh the people I know, as a researcher in this space) are on twitter.

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8. halduj+5g[view] [source] 2023-11-20 06:57:14
>>alsodu+f9
It seems like you're misunderstanding selection bias.

It doesn't matter if it's large, unless the "very active on twitter" group is large enough to be the majority.

The point is that there may be (arguably very likely) a trait AI researchers active on Twitter have in common which differentiates them from the population therefore introducing bias.

It could be that the 30% (made up) of OpenAI researchers who are active on Twitter are startup/business/financially oriented and therefore align with Sam Altman. This doesn't say as much about the other 70% as you think.

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9. 154573+cj[view] [source] 2023-11-20 07:17:08
>>halduj+5g
You reckon 30% (made up) of staff having a personal 'alignment' with (or, put another way, 'having sworn an oath of fealty to') a CEO is something investors would like?

Seems like a bit of a commercial risk there if the CEO can 'make' a third of the company down tools.

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10. halduj+0o[view] [source] 2023-11-20 07:50:22
>>154573+cj
I randomly chose 30% to represent a seemingly large non majority sample which may not be representative of the underlying population.

I have no idea what the actual proportion is, nor how investors feel about this right now.

The true proportion of researchers who actively voice their political positions on twitter is probably much smaller and almost certainly a biased sample.

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