From the board for not anticipating a backlash and caving immediately... from Microsoft for investing into an endeavor that is purportedly chartered as non-profit and governed by nobodies who can sink it on a whim. And having 0 hard influence on the direction despite a large ownership stake
Why bother with a non-profit model that is surreptitiously for profit? The whole structure of OpenAI is largely a facade at this point.
Just form a new for profit company and be done with it. Altman's direction for profit is fine, but shouldn't have been pursued under the loose premise of a non profit.
While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama. Why keep the baggage?
It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO. OpenAI has first mover advantage, and perhaps better talent, but not by an order of magnitude. There is no special sauce here.
Altman may be charismatic and well connected, but the hero worship put forward on here is really sad and misplaced.
> OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.
My interpretation of events is the board believes that Altman's actions have worked against the interest of building an AGI that benefits all of humanity - concentrating access to the AI to businesses could be the issue, or the focus on commercialization of the existing LLMs and chatbot stuff causing conflict with assigning resources to AGI r&d, etc.
Of course no one knows for sure except the people directly involved here.
Insisting, no matter how painful, that the organization stays true to the charter could be considered a desirable trait for the board of a non-profit.
Instead of "Sam has been lying to us" it could have been "Sam had diverged too far from the original goal, when he did X."
They could have meant that Sam had 'not been candid' about his alignment with commercial interests vs. the charter.
The IRS will know soon enough if they were indeed non-profit.
This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results.
Ilja can follow Google's Bard by holding it back until they have countermodels trained to remove conflicts ("safety"), but this will not win them any compute contracts, nor keep them the existing GPU hours. It's only mass, not smarts. Ilja lost this one.
What in the world are you talking about? Internet search? I remember Inktomi. Basch's excuses otherwise, Google won because PageRank produced so much better results it wasn't even close.
It's hard to put into words, that do not seem contradictory: GPT-4 is barely good enough to provide tremendous value. For what I need, no other model is passing that bar, which makes them not slightly worse but entirely unusable. But again, it's not that GPT-4 is great, and I would most certainly go to whatever is better at the current price metrics in a heartbeat.
If Sam returns, those three have to go. He should offer Ilya the same deal Ilya offered Greg - you can stay with the company but you have to step down from the board.
Now google search has a lot of problems, much better competition. But seriously you probably dont understand how it was years ago.
Also I thought that in ML still the best algorhitms win, since all the big companies have money. If someone came and developed a "pagerank-equivalent" for AI that is better than the current algs, customerd would switch quickly since there is no loyalty.
On a side note: Microsoft is playing the game very smart by adding AI to their products what makes you stick to them.
This is an absurd retcon. Google won because they had the best search. Ask Jeeves and AltaVista and Yahoo had poor search results.
Now Google produces garbage, but not in 2004.
Google won against initially Alta Vista, because they had so much money to buy themselves into each countries interxion to produce faster results. With servers and cheap disks.
The pagerank and more bots approach kept them in front afterwards, until a few years ago when search went downhill due to SEO hacks in this monoculture.
In the initial press release, they said Sam was a liar. Doing this without offering a hint of an example or actual specifics gave Sam the clear "win" in the court of public opinion.
IF they would have said "it is clear Sam and the board will never see eye to eye on alignment, etc. etc" they probably could have made it 50/50 or even favored.
As an anegdote: before google I was asked to show the internet to my grandmother. So I asked her what she wants to search for. She asked me about some author, let's say William Shakespeare - guess what did the other search engine find for me and my grandma: porn...
Certainly not when they won.
They were better. Basic PageRank was better than anything else. And once they figured out advertisement, they kept making it better to seal their dominance.