I’m so tired of hearing the shenanigans of billionaires.
The interesting part about this story isn’t Altman himself. It’s more about the weird decisions and inner politics of a $90bn company. A board firing their ceo without official reasoning, MS sweeping in while owning 49% of said company, 95% of the staff threatening to quit and the ceo coming back and firing the board while everybody else still tries to understand what the fuck just happened.
Like another commenter said, this could straight up be an episode of Silicon Valley.
And at the end of the day what it really boils down to is that ethics in tech is a PR byline, and the money will always win within the system that exists
Yeah, it’s actually pathetic how many people immediately sided with this clown too. Dude is another generic salesman type CEO who commercialized what was supposed to be open source software and lobbied the EU for loose regulations in AI, yet people act like it’s bad thing that they dumped him.
Just proves to me that most people involved in tech are greedy scumbags, from the top all the way down.
While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it’s been sitting in my head ever since:
Ultimately, the technology is not my concern. It is that there’s another Industrial Revolution happening, right now, you can play with it like a toy, and it will be very surprising to me if it results in a greater bargaining position for the worker. That’s just not how it goes.
Some portion of the conversation always has the sting of betrayal in it. But you like computer stuff! Yeah, I like computer stuff. Except we aren’t talking about computer stuff. We’re talking about people stuff. People are messy. I work with a lot of creative people, and I have also had the pleasure - firmly installed in quotes - of working with the kind of people who call those people “creatives.” We were at a meeting once where the person who will be advocating and using these technologies in your organization told us they hated creatives to our face. These technologies will displace workers and slash pay. That’s… I mean, that’s it.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/12/26/sockrates
From the start of this AI boom, I’ve been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and “passion” for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.
The only way to slow down this corporatization of the technology isn’t to completely shun it and demonize it. That just plays right into their hands with an “us vs them” narrative.
No, you have to push for open-sourcing the tech as hard as you can. The few open-source tools that have come out of this AI boom has the large corporations running scared that they aren’t going to be able to make money out of those sectors.
I think people siding with him because they heard fuck all from the actual board.
If the board came out strong with a “our mission isn’t to productize chat bots, but to research and develop AGI in an open, ethical, transparent way. Altman, as CEO, was undermining our mission by putting the emphasis on profit. These decisions by Sam weren’t communicated to the board. We the board agreed that, while this may be surprising and disappointing to some, the best long term course of action is to part ways with Sam. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors and we look forward to fulfilling our mission in a responsible, open way”.
“Pathetic” is actually a really good word to use in this situation, because its root is the greek word “pathos”, which is known today as a type of persuasion where you rely on emotion.
People only look at the headline. They see a person fired without a specified reason. It seems like it should be easy to see something happening is unfair.
But this sort of thing is rarely that simple.
I think you mean ethics in tech?
If so I agree.
Ah yeah I’m up too late, thanks for pointing that out haha, fixed
Okay, so can we shunt all the “tech billionaire celebrity entertainment” posts somewhere else?
It is tech news, but I get you. It’s hard to find a place with news about actual technological innovations, advances, updates etc rather than the machinations of the corporations involved. I completely understand the relevance, but it’s often not the sort of genuinely interesting read you’re looking for.
It’s putin prigozhin all over again
Or maybe it’s all a PR stunt, we don’t know what happens behind their closed doors.
Would you like to hear about my week? I’m a thousandaire.
This is such a confusing and messy situation. There is definitely more going on that we dont know about. I already posted this in another thread but:
heres what I think could be going on:
tinfoil hat on
Some Microsoft bigwigs read the OpenAI foundation contract again and realise that they gave them a bunch of money but didnt get the nonprofit, and that they are now fully dependant on them, and that Altman is an experienced shark that knows this. They cant just buy the non-profit, the board would never agree. So they hatch a plan.
They get the lead researcher and a bunch of board members riled up against Altman, with a bunch of dirt they have on him. They tell them hes going to run off with the money and show some proof. The board decides to fire Altman. In the same breath but in another room microsoft hires altman, and promise all openAI employees employment at their new openAI bootleg. They then tell the board through the official channels, that they fucked up and need to resign.
Now, the situation was like this:
- Either the board resigns, and microsoft gets to put some puppets in their place and complete buying openAI
- The board doesnt resign, microsoft gets all their employees and the company in anything but name and openAI slowly fades in relevancy until Microsoft makes a generous offer of 150% above what they are worth(half of their price right now)
either way, microsoft wins.
so yeah, I think the next thing we are going to see is microsoft buying more openAI and getting actual control, or a complete buy.
Sadly, I think you’re absolutely right. This feels orchestrated in a way that allows a select few parties to look like visionaries, while eliminating others from getting in the way.
Sadly all that crazy seems totally possible with Microsoft involved.
Well yeah, Microsoft is very much in bed with OpenAI. It’s not a huge mystery to see how this is going to play out.
The only problem is that MS already owned 49% of openAi.
but thats exactly why they did it! They want to be majority shareholder to get the company under their control, and the board was likely against putting more shares on the market!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/technology/openai-artifical-intelligence-value.html
Here it says that just a month ago, there were rumors that they would do it, but then it didnt happen, so I believe altman wanted to but the board did not.
What in the shit is going on. Goddamn. This has been a wild fucking weekend.
Like an episode of Silicon Valley
For every year that passes Silicon Valley slides further and further from comedy to documentary.
Mike Judge does it again!
Mike Judge is an actual prophet
I have seen no evidence to the contrary.
This would be the opening of an episode, they guys have to lose in the cliffhanger of each episode
Is it still the weekend?
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At least in the US, most people will have Thursday-Sunday off, so it’s basically “Friday.”
Small correction, most people have Thursday off. They have to take leave if they want Wednesday and Friday as well.
Ah whoops. Keep getting my days mixed up. Most US schools have Wednesday-Friday off, but employers usually only give Thursday and Friday.
Part of the Weekend Never Dies
I had never even heard of this guy until like 4 days ago. Now I have to wonder if he can turn water into wine and raise the dead because everyone’s losing their shit over him.
For fucking real. It’s like he’s God himself, because everyone want him, nevermind the consequences.
I have to believe it’s mostly hype. The man was at the helm when OpenAI suddenly “changed the world” with “AI” (note the quotes) but that seems to be almost entirely a case of luck.
Like, generative AI models aren’t really brand new. OpenAI just made them really accessible and easy to use for other applications, which is where Altman comes in. He had an ounce of foresight to see the tech was “the future” and a whole lot of luck executing on his plan to bring it to market.
As a figurehead and leader, that does count for a lot, but not the table-flipping freak outs we see happening.
There are a lot of LLMs. None hold a candle to OpenAI’s models still.
This will change in time, but right now OpenAI is still in front
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I think its mostly popcorn at this point. The general opinion as I’ve noticed is that OpenAI is severely failing at living up to what it promised. Nobody particularly gives a shit about the board or Altman except some folks that seem fixated about the honestly unhinged postings of his sister.
I didn’t even know anything was going on with his sister, either. The plot thickens.
She’s accused him of sexual assault. Several years ago apparently. He has generally ignored it or said she’s off her meds.
Any links to the sister’s posts?
Someone will come along with them and call me names for dismissing them, but I don’t really want to get into it.
That’s fair. I’ll search a bit. Thanks!
Really? Why do people think that? All this news made me try it out yesterday and it completely blew my mind.
It’s degraded from what it was, and even that model had reached a ceiling as to what it could do.
Somehow, Altman returned.
total shitshow for everyone involved.
I’m still wondering why he was even fired in the first place. I’d thought that perhaps I just hadn’t paid proper enough attention and missed the reason, but nope, no reason was ever given.
There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.
Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.
I’m not sure if I’d call this an investor win. More or less 90% of the company threatened to leave. It made sense on their part to do whatever it took to get him back. Anyways, looks like he stopped for a couple seconds to think about how smart it really was to join Microsoft.
The “Private investor” in this case is Microsoft, which “graciously” offered to bring all the staff into their own new AI project. This is 100% an investor (a.k.a microsoft) win.
Well, kind of. It’s a bad look for MS to be so heavily invested in such a dumpster fire of a corporation, so it’s okay for them it got resolved, but they would have won out more if Altman had joined them. It was the other investors, including a number of employees, who would have really lost out if the company had just collapsed in on itself like it immediately started doing. This got resolved sort of against MS’s best interests.
So, sure, investor win. But MS more or less lost this one.
I generally agree that it’s unlikely the non-profit structure is going to do its job here, I’ve seen something like it more or less work on a smaller scale with things that are less intensely of interest to the entire capitalist class, although I have no idea what kind of regulations we’d end up with considering how many oligopolists are involved.
It’s hard to tell from the outside - but at the beginning it mainly looked like pressure from the investors. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’d been a lot of activity from them behind the scenes, and the “90% leaving” part wasn’t really “standing up for Altman”, but more “follow the money”, with investors possibly pressuring employees in various ways.
I read something about him not being honest with the board, or keeping things from them? Didn’t see any elaboration, though.
That’s all they have said as well.
We fired the guy for a reason, it was a good reason honest, no we’re not going to tell you what it was. Anyway we’ve hired him back now so it’s fine, stop asking questions.
They have been asked to provide that by the media, the first temporary CEO they named, and their investors, some of which even threatened to sue of they didn’t disclose it. So either it is something so discriminating to the board they’re willing to rather sink with it, or they actually don’t have anything solid at all and fired him without cause bue to something personal/unprofessional.
The reason that makes the most sense in one of the articles I’ve read is that they fired him after he tried to push out one of the board members.
Replacing that board member with an ally would have cemented control over the board for a time. They might not have felt his was being honest in his motives for the ousting, so it was basically fire now, or lose the option to fire him in the future.
Edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-board-fight.html
Trust the board, bro.
ClosedAI has completely fallen to capitalism as it seems.
Was is ever not completely under capitalism? As far as I’ve seen they were always fully going with hype over substance posturing
Well, it wasn’t founded like this.
So many people here are eager to determine who the money-grubbers are, but here I am just curious what the material disagreement actually is, and how MSFT fits into it.
Seems to me like the board of directors and leadership are mostly aligned on the underlying goals, but disagree on how to approach achieving them.
They’re all money grubbers. The board are part of a rationalist cult called Effective Altruism that claims to want to save humanity, but they believe they need lots of money to do this (Sam Bankman-fried is an EA guy.)
Sam Altman is also nominally part of this group, but also hangs out with people like musk and Rishi Sunak. He’s more like your typical alt-right tech bro.
I’m guessing Microsoft fits in basically having seen an opportunity and swept in. I doubt they have any “angle” in this other than “oh shit big name tech guy just lost his job and he’s skilled in stuff we want to be skilled in? grab him now”
I’ve been really surprised that the blanket promise to pay the legal bills of folks who may or may not be operating under fair use has not been a bigger part of this conversation. Particularly as this new line of user customized gpt products already includes PAYING the people who build these sometimes illegal products. The money incinerator continues.
Wait, just so I get this right… The board fired him; Then members of the board wanted him back; Now he’s back and replaced the board too? - so did he pull an uno reverse on the board of directors or what? How the fuck does that shit work?
The entire company (literally almost all the employees) threatened to quit and take jobs at Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated and the board removed. And that’s exactly what has happened.
I don’t really have an opinion on this Sam guy or why his employees want to drink his bathwater, but it’s an interesting example of the employees of a company unifying behind somebody.
It’s rediculous though… This guy is a sociopath
I haven’t seen that take yet, got any links?
I’m not trying to defend the guy, just actually curious
He’s a financial venture capitalist type who made open AI closed source, and tried to pressure the EU into not regulating AI.
He’s your typical shitbag tech CEO masquerading as a genius. Employees want him back because it’s better for their RSUs/stock options. Bunch of greedy assholes from top to bottom.
Have you heard of that creepy orb thing that was installed in a bunch of African developing countries that traded a shitcoin cryptocurrency that is worth nothing and constantly loses more and more value, in exchange for appropriating people’s biometric data, that additionally has never said why they want it or what they want to do with all of that information?
That’s this guy. He’s the creator and owner of that thing. Dude is a comic supervillain.
The long and short of it is, they fucked around and found out who was more important to the future of the company.
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I would like to know who were the ones that got the money from this.
I’m not convinced this wasn’t a planned strategy to get OpenAI back in the headlines for a week.
I didn’t think so at first but now that it looks like everything will go back to “normal” before the US Thanksgiving Weekend, I feel like maybe this was a “Chinese Firedrill” to get attention for something other than their training data and legal problems.
A whole bunch of people besides Altman still quit though. Is the board going to rehire all of them with new terms, individually?
Looks like I’m wrong, before they rehired Altman they ditched the board members responsible for his ousting so there were major changes after all.
So why about the board then? These people seem like idiots.
From the first sentence of the article:
Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI with a new board
Proof n°1093866 that being rich has nothing to do with being smart.
Being rich has everything to do with being lucky and evil.
Are there some (paid or not, doesn’t matter) great alternatives to OpenAI based solutions like ChatGPT 4 and Copilot?
Copilot, yes. You can find some reasonable alternatives out there but I don’t know if I would use the word “great”.
GPT-4… not really. Unless you’ve got serious technical knowledge, serious hardware, and lots of time to experiment you’re not going to find anything even remotely close to GPT-4. Probably the best the “average” person can do is run quantized Llama-2 on an M1 (or better) Macbook making use of the unified memory. Lack of GPU VRAM makes running even the “basic” models a challenge. And, for the record, this will still perform substantially worse than GPT-4.
If you’re willing to pony up, you can get some hardware on the usual cloud providers but it will not be cheap and it will still require some serious effort since you’re basically going to have to fine-tune your own LLM to get anywhere in the same ballpark as GPT-4.
Not really, that’s why OpenAI gets so much attention, they’re just by far leading the field. Amazon has a copilot alternative though that just does basic completions, I think.
There’s a great alternative to chatgpt voice called bark
https://github.com/suno-ai/bark
And a fork of it that has voice cloning:
The new board screams “for the benefit of humanity” /s
Who thinks some Ultra Intelligent General AI is already running things behind the scenes of openAI and threatens the humans of the company if they didn’t bring back the guy who serves the AI.
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