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.
Do you really need all 3? Is each one going to claim that they're the only ones who can develop AGI safely?
Since Sam left, now OpenAI is unsafe? But I thought they were the safe ones, and he was being reckless.
Or is Sam just going to abandon the pretense, competing Google- and Microsoft-style? e.g. doing placement deals, attracting eyeballs, and crushing the competition.
Surely that's what you need for safety?
Lots of people have been publicly suggesting that, and that, if not properly aligned, it poses an existential risk to human civilization; that group includes pretty much the entire founding team of OpenAI, including Altman.
The perception of that risk as the downside, as well as the perception that on the other side there is the promise of almost unlimited upside for humanity from properly aligned AI, is pretty much the entire motivation for the OpenAI nonprofit.
If you live in a city right now there are millions of networked computers that humans depend on in their everyday life and do not want to turn off. Many of those computers keep humans alive (grid control, traffic control, comms, hospitals etc). Some are actual robotic killing machines but most have other purposes. Hardly any are air-gapped nowadays and all our security assumes the network nodes have no agency.
A super intelligence residing in that network would be very difficult to kill and could very easily kill lots of people (destroy a dam for example), however that sort of crude threat is unlikely to be a problem. There are lots of potentially bad scenarios though many of them involving the wrong sort of dictator getting control of such an intelligence. There are legitimate concerns here IMO.