zlacker

Can't say I saw this coming. This is deeply sad to me. OpenAI did so much life changing work so quickly. It has totally changed my life in terms of enabling an absolutely unprecedented increase in my own personal productivity and how ambitious I can be with my projects. And even though I know Sam didn't personally code the key things, I believe that it never would have happened the way it did without his instincts and talents. And I fear that without him at the helm, all the magic is going to quickly dissipate and OpenAI will be just another lumbering tech company without a rudder. The default state of things is stasis and dysfunction. Just look at how Google can't do anything anymore, and how bad Siri and Alexa are-- all despite having so much manpower, money, and market share at their disposal.

I also find it maddening how boards of directors rush to insulate themselves from any possible issue and are so quick to throw overboard the very people who enabled the success that they get to participate in. I'm thinking particularly of Travis at Uber and how he was thrown out of the thing that he built from scratch, which never would have worked without his extreme efforts. If I were on the OpenAI board, the bar for firing Sam would be so ridiculously high that he would have to have done something so outrageous, so illegal, etc., that I struggle to believe what he actually did could even remotely approach that standard.

>>eigenv+(OP)
I cannot even begin to understand what makes you think that this technology arose from Sam altman and not from all the other people working there. By saying you doubt they can do anything without him, you're putting one person on a pedestal and giving them all the credit for this. This is the same phenomenon has happens with Elon musk getting all the credit for his tech companies.

>>eigenv+(OP)
"...that I struggle to believe what he actually did could even remotely approach that standard."

Which is exactly why you need something like OpenAI to further your personal projects.

Those who don't would be qualified to be on the board.

>>window+x2
It's not just raw technology. It's a vision for what the product should be, what overall strategy to take, how to fund it, how to introduce it to the world, how to scale it, what order to do things in, what approach to take with 3rd party developers, when things are good enough to launch, who to hire, who to promote, etc. There are a million little decisions that go into a runaway success like this. And a million opportunities to make the slightly sub-optimal or wrong decision. And it doesn't take many of those to kill everything that made the place special, and that's actually my new base case for OpenAI-- that's the base case for any company/organization. The default state is chaos and entropy, and it's a miracle when you can escape that fate for even a few years of hypergrowth.

>>eigenv+(OP)
The dude is just a businessman through and through. Stop idol worshiping these businessman. We'll have another rogue Elon Musk. At least Elon Musk is exposing himself now for what he is, but he has so much money at this point it has no effect on him to do random weird nonsense. Sam Altman seemed quite slimy to me, with his actions, garnering support by talking about UBI and advocating for it, but then going to talk to US Congress to talk about regulations (because it benefits himself).

The man was starting to seem like a huge con and people just seem to not see through that.

>>eigenv+(OP)
>I also find it maddening how boards of directors rush to insulate themselves from any possible issue and are so quick to throw overboard the very people who enabled the success that they get to participate in. I'm thinking particularly of Travis at Uber and how he was thrown out of the thing that he built from scratch...

This is an egregiously generous way of framing Travis Kalanick, and what happened to him.

>>eigenv+d4
And what past accomplishments from Sam Altman led you to believe that it's him bringing in the magic and vision? This really isn't someone with a stunning track record of bringing incredible products to market.

>>eigenv+(OP)
Ilya Sutskever has been running the show (technologically) at OpenAI since the beginning, and he is going nowhere. I trust his judgement in voting to get rid of Sam Altman over anything else.

>>eigenv+d4
> It's a vision for what the product should be

Have you actually used it?

It's the most basic possible website, API, and app for a language model AI. It's barely functional. For example, the iOS app couldn't even display images until the other day.

> There are a million little decisions that go into a runaway success like this.

I agree that GPT-4 is amazing and probably the best. But there are several other competing implementations of language model AIs right now, some are even developed as open source.

>>paxys+Rd
Isn't it possible Sutskever and Brockman voted with Altman, but since Altman had to recuse himself they lost 3-2?

>>window+x2
> all the other people working there

Or, the people working at Google.

>>eigenv+(OP)
what a bizarre pov about sam altman.

what accomplishment of his has impressed you so much? his entire career has been:

1. start a dumb startup that goes nowhere

2. get a job at YC handing out other people's money

3. a very dumb and creepy crypto currency project

4. be CEO of openai, which means having no direct influence on the product or engineering at all

>>eigenv+(OP)
Look at all his other leadership jobs. The only other company of note is YCombinator, which was running well before and after his time there. So what makes him so great? Seems more likely that he was not as essential to OpenAI’s success as you give him credit for. Honestly, giving Microsoft a 49% stake for $10B seemed really short-sighted to me and will hamstring the company in the future.

>>banana+nk
I'm impressed by how good he is at failing upwards.

>>sebzim+xh
Greg has now publically announced that he quit. What would motivate Ilya to stay if he didn't agree with the rest of the board? If they are still a 3-person team, they could announce a different company tomorrow and have the entire technical staff jump ship.

>>ssnist+kC
That's exactly what they should do.

>>eigenv+DF
Only if Ilya also quits, but for now there's only radio silence from him.

>>eigenv+(OP)
Especially given how people regarded AI when OpenAI started. This was right after the chat bot boom when nobody could get a decent text response right and trying for AGI was seen as a waste of time. People were laughing at Sam. To his face. And he kept going. OpenAI has changed the trajectory of humanity and consciousness. OpenAI needs to explain what is going on immediately.

>>window+x2
The CEO is the one that recruits that talent, raises money to make sure they are paid and retained, and guides creating vision and culture to get them to be effective in working together. Talent is orders of magnitude less important than culture. Bad culture will squander talent. Good culture will elevate everyone to their best level of effectiveness and pull talent from a team.

>>eigenv+(OP)
actually no, openai first did chess then dota, than chatgpt, it's years of effort and progression that didn't come overnight. It's probably you who first heard of them trough chatgpt