OpenAI drama

[ls99]

Am running out of popcorn. still have some beer left.

 

[aja8888]

Am running out of popcorn. still have some beer left.

Save it for Monday night football in an hour or so.

 

[cathy63]

The reason the board gave for firing Altman was that he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Whatever that means. I doubt if the public will get anything more than that, no matter what kind of investigation is done.

I also find it quite funny that 700 out of 770 people who work for Open AI think they can just decide on their own to go work for Microsoft. It seems pretty unlikely that MS is going to let Altman create 700 new jobs, especially since some of these people are from non-engineering depts and MS presumably already has those roles covered.

 

[Qs Laptop]

The reason the board gave for firing Altman was that he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Whatever that means. I doubt if the public will get anything more than that, no matter what kind of investigation is done.

I think it had something to do with Altman's involvement with crypto currency and his lack of transparency regarding it.

 

[FiveDriver]

Last night, PBS Newshour had a good segment on this whole Kerfuffle. The Host interviewed Mike Isaac, a NY Times writer who follows the High Tech world.

OpenAI has a small Board of Directors, ideologues all of them. They fear the 'Terminator' scenario where GPT takes over the world.
Sam Altman and his Merry Band want to accelerate the development of Generative Pre-trained Transformers. If Sam goes to MSFT....the brains of OpenAI will follow him (taking the Intellectual Property with them).

https://www.pbs.org/video/the-future-of-a-i-1700520792/

 

[2017ish]

Wow. It appears to be over: All but one board member resigns.
Altman and Brockman are back. And among the new initial board members is... Larry Summers?! https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahe...ired-ceo-sam-altman-to-return-to-the-company/

 

[MichaelB]

What a story. This will be a Harvard case study and a Hollywood movie.

 

[Aerides]

What a story. This will be a Harvard case study and a Hollywood movie.

Except the ending will be an epilogue in 5-50 years time where the machines have won, and made the movie for themselves.

 

[Gumby]

It's hard not to feel that none of these people, confident as they are, has a clue about what they are doing or why they are doing it. Hubris always begets Nemesis.

 

[FiveDriver]

Except the ending will be an epilogue in 5-50 years time where the machines have won, and made the movie for themselves.

Aerides -- now that's funny. And 'enlightening' to boot.

The curious thing to me is.....why didn't MSFT get a seat on the Board ? That would have avoided all of this drama playing out in the open.

You give a small startup a cool Billion.....and you don't ask for a seat on the BOD?

 

[2017ish]

The board in question was/is a self-perpetuating non-profit. MS "only" invested in the for profit subsidiary....

The following link was in my email inbox this morning (GMT, so it was fresh off the press). Detailed and very interesting analysis, presumably well informed, by Mike Solana, a VP at Founders Fund (i.e., he knows of what he speaks for the inside baseball stuff). https://www.piratewires.com/p/openai-the-complete-story-corporate

N.B.--it is Solana's blog, so the occasional obscenity springs up.