Scoop: theinformation.com
You don't really see any of this in most professional settings.
You are interpreting that as hostile and aggressive because you are reading into it what other boards have said in other disputes and whatever you are imagining, but if the board learned some things not from Altman that it felt they should have learned from Altman, less than candid is a completely neutral way to describe it, and voting him out is not an indication of hostility.
Would you like to propose some other candid wording the board could have chosen, a wording that does not lack candor?
Uhh no, I'm seeing it as hostile and aggressive because the actual verbiage was hostile and aggressive, doubly so in the context of this being a formal corporate statement. You can pass the text into NLP sentiment analyzer and it too will come to the same conclusion.
It is also very telling that you are being very sarcastic and demeaning in your remarks as well to someone who wasn't even replying to you, which might explain why you might have seen the PR statement differently.
Certainly, this is very immature. It wouldn't be out of context in HBO's Succession.
Whether what happened is right or just in some sense is a different conversation. We could speculate on what is going on in the company and why, but the tactlessness is evident.
The board may very well have met for this very reason, or perhaps it was at this meeting that the lack of candor was found or discussed, but to hold a board meeting there is overhead, and if the board is already in agreement at the meeting, they vote.
It only seems sudden to outsiders, and that suddenness does not mean a "night of the long knives".
MS owns a non controlling share of a business controlled by a nonprofit. MS should have prepared for the possibility that their interests aren’t adequately represented. I’m guessing Altman is very persuasive and they were in a rush to make a deal.
The same conversation if it's "mature", surely? I'm failing to see how one thinks turning a blind eye to like, decades of sexual impropriety and major internal culture issues to the point the state takes action against your company is "mature". Like, under what definition?
No one predicted feeding LLMs more GPUs would be as incredibly useful as it is.
So what was there to gain from the company speaking ill of their past employee? What was even left to say? Nothing. No one wants to work in an organization that vilifies its own people. It was prudent.
I will emphasize again that the morality of these situations is a separate matter from tact. It is very well possible that doing what is good for business does not always align with what is moral. But does this come as a surprise to anyone?
We can recognize that the situation is not one dimensional and not reduce it to such. The same applies to the press release from Open AI - it is graceless, that much can be observed. But we do not yet know whether it is reprehensible, exemplary, or somewhere in between in the sense of morality and justice. It will come out, in other channels rather than official press releases, like in Bobby's case.
I think it’s also fair Sam starts something new with a for profit focus of the get-go.
Ilya Sutskever seems to think this is a reasonable principled move to seize power that is in line with the non-profits goals and governance, but does not seem to care too much if you call it a coup.
Defining AGI is more than just semantics. The generally accepted definition is that it must be able to complete most cognitive tasks as well as an average human. Otherwise we could as well claim that ELIZA was AGI, which would obviously be ridiculous.
How can you honestly say things like this? ChatGPT shows the ability to sometimes solve problems it's never explicitly been presented with. I know this. I have a very little known Haskell library. I have asked ChatGPT to do various things with my own library, that I have never written about online, and that I have never seen before. I regularly ask it to answer questions others send to me. It gets it basically right. This is completely novel.
It seems pretty obvious to me that scaling this approach will lead to the development of computer systems that can solve problems that it's never seen before. Especially since it was not at all obvious from smaller transformer models that these emergent properties would come about by scaling parameter sizes... at all.
What is AGI if not problem solving in novel domains?
At least we can be sure that ChatGPT didn't write the statement, then.
Otherwise the last paragraph would have equivocated that both sides have a point.
Microsoft is bankrolling them but OpenAI probably can replace Microsoft easier than Microsoft can replace OpenAI.
(I.e. an AGI would be one of the two people here.)
> Don't let the media hype fool you. Sam wasn't some genius visionary. He was a glory-hungry narcissist cutting every corner in some deluded quest to be the next Musk.
That does align with Ilya’s tweet about ego being in the way of great achievements.
And it does align with Sam’s statements on Lex’s podcast about his disagreements with Musk. He compared himself to Elon’s SpaceX being bullied by Elon’s childhood heroes. But he didn’t seem sad about it - just combative. Elon’s response to the NASA astronauts distrusting his company’s work was “They should come visit and see what we’re doing”. Sam’s reaction was very different. Like, “If he says bad things about us, I can say bad things about him too. It’s not my style. But maybe I will, one day”. Same sentiment as he is showing now (“if I go off the board can come after me for the value of my shares”).
All of that does paint a picture where it really isn’t about doing something necessary for humanity and future generations, and more about being considered great. The odd thing is that this should get you fired, especially in SF, of all places.
Do you think Napoleon or Pinochet made speeches to the effect of "Yes, it was a completely unprincipled power-grab, but what are you going to do about it, lol?"
To tell it in an exaggerated way, maturity should not imply sociopathy or completely disregard for everything.
Obviously I am referring here to Kottick situation. But, the definition where it is immature to tell the truth and mature to enable powerful bad players is wrong definition of maturity.
It’s questionable how much power Microsoft has as a shareholder. Obviously they have a staked interest in OpenAI. What is up in question is how much interest the new leaders have in Microsoft.
If I had a business relationship with OpenAI that didn’t align with their mission I would be very worried.
It sucks, but that's the world we live in, unfortunately.
Injustices are made to executives all the time. But airing dirty laundry is not sagacious.
But, when people use "maturity" as argument for why someone must be enabler, should not do the morally or ethically right thing, then it gets irritating. Conversely, calling people "immature" because they did not acted in the most self serving but sleazy way is ridiculous.
How do you compare Eliza to GPT4?
This isn't about being better at all.
That's either 100% fishy or 100% insider.
Either BS or person is insider, no in-between.
That is a definition. It is not a generally accepted definition.
> "a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."
> The provided text is not explicitly aggressive; however, it conveys a critical tone regarding the individual's communication, emphasizing hindrance to the board's responsibilities.
Did you actually run this through GPT...or did you poll Reddit?
Obviously it's not aggressive by the standards of everyday political drama or Internet forum arguments.
It's fair to say that usually if the board isn't obfuscating or outright lying in their announcements, that itself is an indicator of acrimony.
But usually, the board can financially incentivize a CEO to "step down" or even help them find a soft landing at another company to make it look like a mutually agreed on transition. Since they know this oustered CEO isn't interested in making nice in public, they really had no choice but to try to get in front of the story.
Given the fallout which is still spreading, I think they would've rather cut him a fat check for an explicit or implicit NDA and thanked him for his amazing contributions while wishing him well on his future endeavors if that option had been on the table.
1. Are they useful?
2. Are they going to become more useful in the forseeable future?
On 1, I would say, maybe? Like, somewhere between Microsoft Word and Excel? On 2, I would say, sure - an 'AGI' would be tremendously useful. But it's also tremendously unlikely to grow somehow out of the current state of the art. People disagree on that point, but I don't think there are even compelling reasons to believe that LLMs can evolve beyond their current status as bullshit generators.