The board could have easily said they removed Sam for generic reasons: "deep misalignment about goals," "fundamental incompatibility," etc. Instead they painted him as the at-fault party ("not consistently candid", "no longer has confidence"). This could mean that he was fired with cause [0], or it could be an intended as misdirection. If it's the latter, then it's the board who has been "not consistently candid." Their subsequent silence, as well as their lack of coordination with strategic partners, definitely makes it looks like they are the inconsistently candid party.
Ilya expressing regret now has the flavor of "I'm embarrassed that I got caught" -- in this case, at having no plan to handle the fallout of maligning and orchestrating a coup against a charismatic public figure.
Yes, totally fair to say they painted as a casual firing and this seems pretty irresponsible without some misbehavior, or new/re-emerging concerns about his past.
> OpenAI is the world’s leading AI company. We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position.
> The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.
> When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAI acted swiftly to stabilize the company. They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties, and were negotiating in bad faith.
> The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward - the one that would best serve our mission, company, stakeholders, employees and the public - would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that could lead the company forward in stability.
> Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
> Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgement and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
> Why would the board say that OpenAI as a company getting destroyed would be consistent with the goals?
A few things stand out to me, including:
>> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
Have they really achieved AGI? Or did they observe something concerning?
I don't know what the risk of AI is, but having a nonprofit investigate solutions to prevent them is a worthwhile pursuit, as for-profit corporations will not do it (as shown by the firing of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell by Google). If they really believe in that mission, they should develop guardrails technology and open-source it so the companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon et al who are certainly not investing in AI safety but won't mind using others' work for free can inegrate it. But that's not going to be lucrative and that's why most OpenAI employees will leave for greener pastures.
> but having a nonprofit investigate solutions to prevent them is a worthwhile pursuit,
This is forgetting that power is an even greater temptation than money. The non-profits will all come up with solutions that have them serving as gatekeepers, to keep the unwashed masses from accessing something that that is too dangerous for the common person.
I would rather have for-profit corporations control it, rather that non-profits. Ideally, Inwould like it to be open sourced so that the common person could control and align AI with their own goals.
There is no profit in AI safety, just as cars did not have seat belts until Ralph Nader effectively forced them to by publishing Unsafe at any Speed. For-profit corporations have zero interest in controlling something that is not profitable, unless in conjunction with captured regulation it helps them keep challengers out. If it's open-sourced, it doesn't matter who wrote it as long as they are economically sustainable.
I'm guessing the issues will lie in cases where it appears to be doing what it's told, but it would only pretend to be doing so (with no obvious way to tell)
AI safety is barely even a tangible thing to measure like that. It's mostly just fears and a lose set of ideas for a hypothetical future AGI that we're not even close to.
So far OpenAI's "controls" it's just increasingly expanding the list of no-no things topics and some philosophy work around iRobot type rules. They also slow walked the release of GPT because of fears of misinformation, spam, and deepfakey stuff that never really materialized.
Most proposals for safety is just "slowing development" of mostly LLMs, calls for vague gov regulation, or hand wringing over commercialization. The commercialization thing is most controversial because OpenAI claimed to be open and non-profit. But even with that the correlation between less-commercialization == more safety is not clear, other than prioritizing what OpenAI's team spends their time doing. Which again is hard to tangibly measure what that realistically means for 'safety' in the near term.
> I would rather have for-profit corporations control it, rather that non-profits.
The problem isn't the profit model, the problem is the ability to unilaterally exercise power, which is just as much of a risk with the way that most for-profit companies are structured as top-down dictatorships. There's no reason to trust for-profit companies to do anything other than attempt to maximize profit, even if that destroys everything around them in the process.
Agreed. This discussion around safety reminds me of the early days of cybersecurity, when security by obscurity was the norm.
It's counter-intuitive, but locking up a technology is like trying to control prices and wages. It just doesn't work -- unless you confiscate every GPU in the world and bomb datacenters etc.
The best way to align with the coming AGI's and ASI's is to build them in the sunlight. Every lock-em-up approach is doomed to fail (I guess that makes me a meta-doomer?)
Timnit Gebru was fired for being a toxic /r/ImTheMainCharacter SJW that was enshittifiy the entire AI/ML department. Management correctly fired someone that was holding an entire department hostage in her crusade against the grievance de jure.
I'm at Google, I 100% agree with this. Also her paper was garbage. You can maybe get away with being a self righteous prick or an outright asshole if you are brilliant, but it's clear by reading her work she didn't fall into that category.
I wish more of them did that. She gave them the excuse they were looking for. She thought she was being smart, instead she self-owned herself in the most spectacular fashion.
I'm starting to think that Christmas came early for Microsoft. What looked like a terrible situation surrounding their $10bn investment turned into a hire of key players in the area, and OpenAI might even need to go so far as to get acquired my Microsoft to survive.
(My assumption being that given the absolute chaos displayed over the past 72 hours, interest in building something with OpenAI ChatGPT could have plummeted, as opposed to, say, building something with Azure OpenAI, or Claude 2.)
For Microsoft -- probably great, as they can now also get the people driving this.
This would have been a hostile move prior to the events that unfolded, but thanks to OpenAI's blunder, not only is this not a hostile move, it is a very prudent move from a risk management perspective. Forced Microsoft's hand, and what not.
"Participation in"? That makes it sound like he was a.......well......participant rather than the one orchestrating it. I have no idea whether or not that's true, but it's an interesting choice of words.
There is an expression of regret, but he doesn’t say he wants Altman back. Just to fix OpenAI.
He says he was a participant but in what? The vote? The toxic messaging? Obviously both, but what exactly is he referring to? Perhaps just the toxic messaging because again, he doesnt say he regrets voting to fire Altman.
Why not just say “I regret voting to fire Sam Altman and Im working to bring him back.” Presumably because thats not true. Yet it kind of gives that impression.
Makes it more possible the ouster was led by the Poe guy, and this has little to do with actual ideological differences, and more to do with him taking out a competitor from the inside.
I would event go as far as say that the main reason behind the tweet is not to show regret, but to plant the idea that he didn't orchestrate but only participate.
It indeed suggests that. So far speculation has been that Ilya was behind it, but that is only speculation. AFAIK we have no confirmation of whose idea this was.
The value was based on e direction Altman was taking the company (and with him being in control). It's silly to think just replacing the CEO would somehow keep the valuation
Unless he thinks that all the LLMs and ChatGPT app store are unnecessary distractions, and others will overtake them on the bend while they are busy post-training ChatGPT to say nice things.
On Friday, the overwhelming take on HN was that Ilya was “the good guy” and was concerned about principal. Now, it’s kinda obvious that all the claims made about Sam — like “he’s in it for fame and money” — might apply more to Ilya.
Normal people can't take being at the center of a large controversy, the amount of negativity and hate you have to face is massive. That is enough to make almost anyone backtrack just to make it stop.
I think they underestimated the hate of an internet crowd post crypto and meme stocks, now completely blindsided by the investment angle especially in the current AI hype. Like why do people now care so much about Microsoft seriously? Or Altman? I can see why Ilya only focused on the real mission could miss how the crowd could perceive a threat to their future investment opportunities, or worse threatening the whole AI hype.
I think you’re right about all of this, but this was doomed from the start. Everybody wants to invest in OpenAI because they see the rocket and want to ride, but the company is fundamentally structured to disallow typical frothy investment mentality.
I think the interest is because ChatGPT is so famous, even in non-tech circles.
"Terraform raised prices, losing customers"? whatever, I never heard about it.
"ChatGPT's creators have internal disagreement, losing talent"? OH NO what if ChatGPT dies, who is going to answer my questions?? panic panic hate hate...
You can't plan for something you have never experienced. Being hated by a large group of people is a very different feeling from getting hated by an individual, you don't know if you can handle it until it happens to you.
You can plan for something you've never experienced. You read, or learn from other people's experiences.
Normal people know not to burn a $80 billion company to the ground in a weekend. Ilya was doing something unprecedented in corporate history, and astounding he wasn't prepared to face the world's fury over it.
> You can plan for something you've never experienced. You read, or learn from other people's experiences.
Text doesn't convey emotions, and our empathy doesn't work well for emotions we have never experienced. You can see a guy that got kicked in the balls got hurt, but that doesn't mean you are prepared to endure the pain of getting kicked in your balls or that you even understand how painful it is.
Also watching politicians it looks like you can just brush it off, because that is what they do. But that requires a lot of experience, not anyone can do it, it is like watching a boxing match and think you can easily stand after a hard punch in your stomach.
Ilya torched peoples' retirements by signaling that it would be very hard to cash out in OpenAI as it is now. You don't have to be emotional to understand the consequence of that action, just logical. You have to think beyond your own narrow perspective for a minute.
The board vote did it! They had a tender offer in the works that would have made employees millionaires. The board clearly signaled that they viewed the money-making aspects of the company as something to dial back, which in turn either severely lessens the value of that tender offer or prevents it from happening.
I mean, he didn't have a button on his desk that said, "torch the shares", but he ousted the CEO as a way to cut back on the things that might have meant profit. Did he think that everyone was going to continue to want to give them money after they signal a move away from profit motives? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to think that one through.
I think he was just preoccupied with AI safety, and didn't give a thought to the knock on effects for investors of any stripe. He's clearly smart enough to, he just didn't care enough to factor it into his plans.
I do believe OpenAI clearly signalled from the very beginning what the (complicated) company structure is about and what risks this means for any potential investor (or employee hoping to become rich).
If you project your personal hopes which are different from this into the hype, this is your personal problem.
Well, with the hollowing out of OpenAI, it seems that someone else will easily take the lead! They're not my personal hopes - this move destroyed OpenAI's best chance at retaining control over cutting edge AI as well. They destroyed their own hopes.
> You can see a guy that got kicked in the balls got hurt, but that doesn't mean you are prepared to endure the pain of getting kicked in your balls or that you even understand how painful it is.
Sure, but you do your best not to be kicked in the balls.
Yep. Or, if you're running an immense, well-funded organization that is gauging the consequences of a plan that involves being kicked in the balls, you take a tiny sliver of those funds and get some advisors to appraise you of what to expect when being kicked in the balls, not just wing it/"fake it till you make it". (As it turns out, faking not being in severe pain is tricky.)
Is it possible that someone in Ilya's position can be unaware of just how staggeringly enormous a phenomenon he is sitting on top of ( and thus have no idea how to evaluate the scale of the backlash that would result?)
Have you ever had a bad day? The consequences for people in power is about 1 million times bigger and more public.
Sutskever didn't get on the board by cunning politicking and schmoozing like most businesspeople with that sort of position. He's an outstanding engineer without upper management skills. Every meet one of those?
I haven't people any reasonably intelligent person so unaware of real world that they can berate a colleague so publicly and officially and think "Hey! I am sorry man" will do the trick.
Clueless is a word to use... I think Ilya got screwed over by corporate swindling and made a mistake that's all. As a smart idiot I can resonate with the guy - you don't make that mistake twice. I like to believe the push for prosperity is still a mutual goal and the board drama is an unfortunate setback to overcome.
600 employees quitting would be burny. 600 employees signing a letter saying they’re going to quit isn’t quite there.
3 CEOs in 3 days, isn’t burny, either. There’s the guy they fired, the person they had take on the role so they have someone in the role, and then someone they hired to be CEO. I guess they could have gotten that down to 2 by jumping immediately to their intended replacement, but not having them ready to start immediately doesn’t seem odd.
And yeah, it’s just Monday afternoon. If in the next few days, a sizable chunk of those who threatened to quit do so, then that would be burny. But we ain’t there yet.
Normal people can't take being at the center of a large controversy, the amount of negativity and hate you have to face is massive. That is enough to make almost anyone backtrack just to make it stop.
This is the cheapest and most cost-effective way to run things as an authoritarian -- at least in the short term.
If one is not "made of sterner stuff" -- to the point where one is willing to endure scorn for the sake of the truth:
- Then what are you doing in a startup, if working in one
- One doesn't have enough integrity to be my friend
It's pretty simple, isn't it? He made a move. It went bad. Now he's trying to dodge the blast. He just doesn't understand that if he just shut the fuck up, after everything else that's gone on (seriously, 2 interim CEOs in 2 days?), nobody would be talking about him today.
The truth is, this is about the only thing about the whole clown show that makes any sense right now.
Supposedly she was "scheming" to get Altman back. Which I guess could possibly mean that she wasn't aware of the whole "plan" and they just assumed she'll get in line? Or that she had second thoughts maybe... Either way pretty fascinating.
Hard to know what is really going on, but I think one possibility is that the entire narrative around Ilyas "camp" was not what actually went down, and was just what the social media hive mind hallucinated to make sense of things based on very little evidence.
Yes, I think there are a lot of assumptions based on the fact that Ilya was the one that contacted Sam and Greg but he may have just done that as the person on the board who worked closely with them. He for sure voted for whatever idiot plan got this ball rolling but we don't know what promises were made to him to get his backing.
> If you're going to make a move, at least stand by it.
I see this is the popular opinion and that I'm going against it. But I've made decisions that I though were good at the time, and later I got more perspective and realize it was a terrible decision.
I think being able to admit you messed up, when you messed up is a great trait. Standing by your mistake isn't something I admire.
No this isn't what's going on. Even when you admit your mistakes it's good to elucidate the reasoning behind why and what led up to the mistake in the first place.
Such a short vague statement isn't characteristic of a normal human who is genuinely remorseful of his prior decisions.
This statement is more characteristic of a person with a gun to his head getting forced to say something.
This is more likely what is going on. Powerful people are forcing this situation to occur.
> Yes, I cannot believe smart people of that caliber is sending too much Noise.
Being smart and/or being a great researcher does not mean that the respective person is a good "politician". Quite some great researchers are bad at company politics, and quite some people who do great research leave academia because they became crushed by academic politics.
Managing a large org requires a lot of mundane techniques, and probably a personal-brand manager and personal advisers.
It’s extremely boring and mundane and political and insulting to anyone’s humanity. People who haven’t dedicated their life to economics, such as researchers and idealists, will have a hard time.
Ha I remember joining that when I was 16, I just wanted the card. They gave a sub to the magazine and it was just people talking about what it was like to be in Mensa.
It felt the same as certain big German supermarket chain that publishes it's own internal magazine with articles from employees, company updates etc
Are you talking about Aldi's? Cause if so maybe they got something figured out, their store locations that I've been in the states are great (only exposure to them though). Only check out I've seen where the employees have chairs
I don’t believe it was ever about principles for Ilya. It sure seems like it was always his ego and a power grab, even if he's not aware of that himself.
When a board is unhappy with a highly-performing CEO’s direction, you have many meetings about it and you work towards a resolution over many months. If you can’t resolve things you announce a transition period. You don’t fire them out of the blue.
Aaah that just explained a lot of departures I've seen at the past at some of my partner companies. There's always a bit of fluffy talk around them leaving. That makes a lot more sense.
The board destroyed the company in one fell swoop. He's right to feel regret.
Personally, I don't think that Altman was that big of an impact, he was all business, no code, and the world is acting like the business side is the true enabler. But, the market has spoken, and the move has driven the actual engineers to side with Altman.
> The board destroyed the company in one fell swoop.
I'm just not familiar enough to understand, is it really destroyed or is this just a minor bump in OpenAI's reputation? They still have GPT 3.5/4 and ChatGPT which is very popular. They can still attract talent to work there. They should be good if they just proceed with business as usual?
They have ~770 employees and so far ~500 of them have promised to quit. It's a lot less appealing if you're not going to make millions, or have billions in donated Azure credits.
So when C level acts like a robot you don't like it and when they act like human beings you don't like it either. It's difficult to be a C-level I guess.
I'm going to get downvoted for this, but I do wonder if Sam's firing wasn't Ilya's doing, hence the failure to take responsibility. OpenAI's board has been surprisingly quiet, aside from the first press release. So it's possible (although unlikely) that this wasn't driven by Ilya.
My point is that it's possible that Ilya was not the driving force behind Sam's firing, even if he ultimately voted for it. If this is the case, it makes Ilya's non-apology apology a lot less weird.
It's possible, although contradicted by Brockman's statement, that Ilya voted merely to remove Brockman's board seat, and then was in the minority on the Altman vote.
I doubt this is what happened, but the reporting that Brockman was ousted from his board seat after Altman, and wasn't present in the board meeting that ousted Altman, doesn't make much sense either.
I think it means that the Twitterverse got it wrong from the beginning. It wasn’t Ilya and his safety faction that did in OpenAI, it was Quora’s Adam D'Angelo and his competing Poe app. Ilya must have been successfully pressured and assured by Microsoft, but Adam must have held his ground.
Dang I completely forgot that D'Angelo and Quora have a product that directly competes with ChatGPT in the form of Poe.
Wouldn't that make this a conflict of interest, sitting on the board while running a competing product - and making a decision at the company he is on the board of to destroy said company and benefit his own product?
That certainly seems to be the scenario and explains his willingness to go scorched earth. I wonder what the motivations of the other 2 board members are. Could they just be burn it down AI Doomers?
He doesn't say that, but to me he does use a little weasel wording, the whole passive voice "regret my participation in", when to all accounts so far, it seems that he was one of the instigators, and quite possibly the actual instigator of all this.
"regret my participation" sounds much more like "going along with it".
Is this learning from your mistakes though? "Deeply regret" is one of those statements that does not really mean much. There are what something like 6 board members? Three of which are employees, two of those that got removed from the board. He was the only voting board member who is also an employee and part of the original founding team if you will. These are assumptions on my part but I don't really suspect the other board members orchestrated this event. Its possible and I may be wrong but it is improbable. So lets work off the narrative that he orchestrated the event. He now "Deeply regret" its, not a "I made a mistake" and I am sorry. But he regrets the participation and how it plays out.
The weasely part is when he appears to be defecting the blame to the board rather than accepting that he made a mistake. Even if the coup wasn't Ilya's idea in the first place, he was the lynchpin that made it possible.
When you watch Survivor (yes, the tv show), sometimes a player does a bad play, gets publicly caught, and has to go on a "I'm sorry" tour the next days. Came to mind after reading this tweet.
He is not sorry for what he's done. He is sorry for getting caught.
Watching this all unfold in the public is unprecedented (I think).
There has never been a company like OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.
recently, we've seen the 3D gaming engine company fall flat on its face and back pedal. We've seen Apple be wishy washy about CSAM scanning. We saw a major bank collapse in real time. I just wish there was a virtual popcorn company to invest in using some crypto.
My favorite take from another HN comment, sadly I didnt save the UN for attribution:
> Since this whole saga is so unbelievable: what if... board member Tasha McCauley's husband Joseph Gordon-Levitt orchestrated the whole board coup behind the scenes so he could direct and/or star in the Hollywood adaptation?
Honestly, since a couple of days I have the feeling that nearly half of HN submissions are about this soap opera.
Can't they send DMs? Why the need to make everything public via Twitter?
It's quite paradox that of all things those people who build leading ML/AI systems are obviously the most rooted in egoism and emotions without an apparent glimpse of rationality.
The kind of people that are born on third base and think they hit a triple are at the top of basically every american institution right now. Of course they think the world is a better place if they share every stupid little thought that enters their brain because they are "special" and "super smart".
The AI field especially has always been grifters. They have promised AGI with every method including the ones that we don't even remember. This is not a paradox.
Also don't forget the Open part in the name that they seemingly dropped as soon as there was actual money to be made, giving reasons why they couldn't open source GPT3 which they themselves threw under the bus by later releasing ChatGPT
Or maybe they created an evil-AGI-GPT by mistake, and now they have to act randomly and in the most unexpected ways to confuse evil-AGI-GPT’s predictive powers.
It all seems to go a bit quick. The Twitter saga took longer, but was equally dramatic. And seemingly surreal. Then there's Trump. Putin's war. I'm not sure anymore about anything being reality. Perhaps I'm stuck in some Philip K. Dick book.
Speaking of Netflix, are they working on the movie yet? Perhaps ChatGPT can help with the script with just the right amount of hallucinating to make it interesting.
Of course he deeply regrets it, but it's a little late for that now.
The good news as anyone who has used twitch over the years will tell him is that with Emmett Shear at the helm, he's not going to be frightened by the speed that OpenAI rolls out new features any more.
I’m shocked. But it is possible that Helen or Adam hatched this inept plan and somehow got Ilya to join along.
It was terrifyingly incompetent. The lack of thought by these randos, that they could fire the two hardest working people at the company so that they could run one of the most valuable companies in the world is mind boggling.
Do you mean "highest paid"? I suspect there are engineers/scientists that are working harder than Sam at OpenAI. At the very least, who the "hardest working" at OpenAI is unknowable - likely even if you have inside knowledge.
It now seems inevitable that the first* AGI will fall into the hands of Microsoft rather than OpenAI.
OpenAI won't keep their favorable Azure cloud compute pricing now MS have their own in-house AI function. That will set OpenAI back considerably, aside from the potential loss of their CEO and up to 490 other employees.
All of this seems to have worked out remarkably well for Microsoft. Nadella could barely have engineered a better outcome...
If Bill Gates (of Borg - I miss SlashDot) was still at the helm, a lot of people would be frightened by what's about to come (MS AGI etc). How does Nadella's ethical record compare? Are Microsoft the good guys now? Or are they still the bad guys, but after being downtrodden by Apple and Google, bad guys without the means to be truly evil?
> It now seems inevitable that the first* AGI will fall into the hands of Microsoft rather than OpenAI.
Avoiding this was literally the reason that OpenAI was founded.
For the record, I don't believe anyone at OpenAI or Microsoft is going to deliver AGI any time in the near future. I think this whole episode just proves that none of these people are remotely qualified to be the gatekeepers for anything.
lol, the more i go through life i feel like it's just blind leading the blind at times w/ the "winners" escaping through a bizarre length of time and survivorship bias.
if you've ever doubted your ability to govern a company just look at exhibit A here.
really amazing to see people this smart fuck up so badly.
The big winner in this episode of Silicon Valley is the open-source approach to LLMs. If you haven't seen this short clip of Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever looking like deer in the headlights when directly asked about it:
Strange.. A vote was taken, the result incurred public consternation, and now a board member is contrite. This seems like ineffectual leadership at best. Board members should stand by their votes and the process, otherwise leave the board.
"In the future, once the robustness of our models will exceed some threshold, we will have wildly effective and dirt cheap AI therapy. Will lead to a radical improvement in people’s experience of life. One of the applications I’m most eagerly awaiting."
Ilya doesn't regret firing Sam, he regrets "harm to OpenAI". He didn't expect this level of backlash and the fact 90% of the company would leave. He has no choice but to backtrack to try and save OpenAI, even if he looks like an even bigger fool
I've been on multiple boards. This was the dumbest move I've ever seen. The OpenAI board must be truly incompetent and this Ilya person clearly had no business being on it.
This has been a rather apt demonstration of the way that auctoritas/authority/prestige/charisma can carry the day regardless of where the formal authority might be.
I sure would hire a guy like Ilya after that shit show. His petty title tweets before the event and now whatever this is. Turns out he is just another "Sunny".
State-side counterintelligence must stop meddling in AI startups in such blatant ways, it's simply too inefficient, and at times when we most need transparency in the industry...
This feels like it could be real remorse, and a true lapse of judgement based on good intentions. So, in the end: a story of Ilya, a truly principled but possibly naive scientist, and a board fixated on its charter. But in their haste, nothing happened as expected. Nobody foresaw the public and private support for Sam and Greg. An inevitability after months of brewing divergence between shareholder interests and an irreconcilably idealistic 503c charter.
I think we really need to see that Ilya demonstrates those principles and it wasn’t just a power grab.
You could also look at this as a brilliant scientist feels he doesn’t get recognition. Always sees Sam’s name. Resents it. The more gregarious people always getting the glory. Thinks he doesn’t need them and wants to settle some score that only exists in his own head.
I'm going to offer a surprising "devil's advocate" thought here and suggest it would be a brilliant strategic move for Sam and Satya to hire Ilya anyway. Ilya likely made a major blunder, but if he can learn from the mistake (and it seems like he may be in the process of doing so) then he could potentially come out of this wiser and more effective in a leadership role that he was previously unprepared for.
I don’t think his career is over, I’m sure he will take on another leadership role. Just not a Microsoft. It’s important that screwing people over has negative consequences or people will do it all the time.
I have found this whole thing unpleasant personally because I am a huge fan of OpenAI (and I have been an AI practitioner since 1982) and when I explore the edges of how GPT-4 can be creative and has built a representation of the world just from text, it makes me happy.
In the past I have not used Anthropic APIs nearly as much as versions of GPT but last night I watched a fantastic interview with a co-founder of Anthropic talking about the science they are doing to even begin to understand how to do alignment. I was impressed. I then spent a long while re-reading Anthropic’s API and other documentation and have promised myself to split my time evenly 3 ways between running models on my own hardware, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
For what it’s worth (nothing!) I still think the board did the right thing legally, but this whole mess makes me feel more than a little sad.
Isn't what Mira and Ilya did was a classical "sitting on the fence" movement, which would be hated by both sides of any power struggle? It's kinda similar to Prigozhin stopped his coup right at the outskirt of Moscow.
This seems to be the corporate version of Prigozhin driving to Moscow (not comparing anyone to Putin here, just the situation). If you're gonna have a coup, have a coup. If you back down, don't hang around.
This is becoming a farce. How did they not know what level of support they had within the company? How had they not asked Microsoft? How have they elevated the CTO to CEO, who then promptly says she sides with Sam?
I've chucked a few times over the last few days about the Wikipedia definition of the technological singularity, which opens:
"The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization."
Obviously one might have expected that to happen on the other side of a superhuman intelligence, not with us just falling over ourselves to control who gets to try and build one.
It's interesting that people speak whatever comes to mind and think it has no impact on other's people lives ($$$). They are some how protected, but shouldn't.
It's interesting how people here seem to think that concerns about shareholder value and the like should override every other concern. Many serious things are going wrong in the world, but when the cornucopia of cash is threatened it seems like 3x as many people come out of the woodwork to voice their disbelief and displeasure.
Sounds like he acted brashly on an ideological impulse and now regrets that he didn't have more self control. If so, I can empathize and I feel bad for him.
Satya: Was getting caught part of your plan?
Ilya: Of course...Sam Altman refused our offer in favour of yours, we had to find out what he told you.
Sam: Nothing! I said nothing!
Satya: Well, congratulations! You got yourself caught! Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Ilya: Crashing OpenAI...with no survivors!
1. Sam Altman announces a competing product to poe (gpt store).
2. D'Angelo sees it and want to stop it.
3. D'Angelo accuses Sam Altman of trying to go against the non-profit mission by making for-profit products without telling the board, saying that Sam Altman can no longer be trusted.
4. The remaining board sees that Sam Altman didn't talk to them about this feature beforehand so agree with D'Angelo.
Much more likely that he was trying to read the tealeaves and be on the majority side in order to keep a leadership position at a company doing important work. He probably assumed the company would fall in line after the board decision and when they didn’t, regretted his decision.
In the end he might have gotten caught in the middle of a board misaligned with the desires of the employees.
It's possible, but that would have to be some pretty sloppy bylaw writing. Normally there are specifications about board size, minimum required for a quorum and timing as well as notification and legal review. Of course if you stock your board with amateurs then how well your bylaws are written doesn't really matter any more.
Sounds desperate, no? Kind of escaping the Titanic before the people in the third deck get into the boats (not that they will have a problem finding enough boats in this analogy)
This whole thing is like some board members watched the first few episodes of _Succession_ and thought "What a great idea!" without watching the rest of season one
Apologies for the unproductive comment, but this is a clown show and the damage can’t be undone. Sam going to Microsoft is likely the end of open ai as an entity.
“Deeply” regretting a decision he made 72 hours ago? And this is the guy who is supposed to have the forethought to bring us into the next frontier of AI?
> This entire thing is absolutely inane. This tweet is confirmation these people have no idea what they’re doing. Incredible.
Want to know a dirty secret?
Nobody knows what they're doing.
Some think they do - but don't. (idiots)
Some know they don't - but act like they do. (cons)
And some know they don't - and are honest about it. (children)
Pick your poison, but we all suck in different ways - and usually in a different way based on our background.
Business people who are the best in the world tend to be cons.
Technical people who are the best tend to be children.
You get a culture clash between these two, and it is especially bad when you see someone from one background operate in the opposing domain using their background's cultural norm. So when Ilya runs business like a child. Or when Elon hops on an internal call with the twitter engineering team plus geohot and starts trying to confidently tell them about problems with a system that he knows nothing about.
> Want to know a dirty secret?
> Nobody knows what they're doing.
There is a famous quote from the 1600s:
"An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur"
"Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
The context is that the son was preparing to participate in high level diplomacy and worried about being out of his league, and the quote is from his father, an elder statesman.
I love this quote, and suspect the lack of wisdom was referring to wisdom to be a good steward of the public resources rather than their infinite wisdom in finding cunning and deceptive ways to plunder it.
No, even this is just a darkly comforting illusion.
We like to feel that we as a species are still in control. That yes, we are gutting and destroying natural earth, complicit with modern slavery and war, and that's all terrible and we should do our best to stop it. BUT - at the very least, those bastards at the top know what they're doing when it comes to making money, so at least we'll have a stellar economy and rapid technological advancement, despite all that.
The painful truth here being that no, there's no cunning. There's no brutal optimization. Any value created and technological progress made is mostly incidental, mostly down to people at the bottom working hard just to survive, and a few good ideas here and there. The ones at the top are mostly just lucky and along for the ride, just as bumbling and lost as the rest of us when it comes to global happenings or even just successfully interacting with others.
> Some know they don't - but act like they do. (cons)
The "Grease"
> And some know they don't - and are honest about it. (children)
Dreamers
To finish out your square, I think the best extrapolation would fit a "Home Team" that maintains the energy needed by the other three to do their thing :)
The author here is talking about mindset and confidence - not "understanding" persay. Source:
> For me, it was extremely humbling to work together with far more competent engineers at Apple.
Having a mindset that "some people are way more competent than me" is talking about humility and growth mindsets - different concept than mental models. I fully agree with the author here - a growth mindset is useful! But that's a different thing from saying that some people actually have accurate mental models of the important complex systems underpinning the world.
> This tweet is confirmation these people have no idea what they’re doing.
This is not an original point by me - I've seen multiple people make similar comments on here over the weekend - but these are the people who think they are best qualified to prevent an artificial superintelligence from destroying humanity, and they can't even coordinate the actions of a few intelligent humans.
>these are the people who think they are best qualified to prevent an artificial superintelligence from destroying humanity
do they believe that?
they happen to be the ones who can pull the brakes in order to allow someone on earth the chance to prevent it.
if they don't pull the brakes and if humankind is unlucky that superintelligence emerges quickly, then it doesn't matter whether or not anyone on earth can figure out alignment, nobody has the chance to try.
It's a bit scary that there are people who think they can align a super intelligence but couldn't forecast the outcome of their own actions 3 days into the future.
they're not sure whether they can align super intelligence, they're sure that somebody needs to figure out how to align super intelligence before it emerges.
I still can't believe there's a computer program with more logic and restraint that the majority of humanity and even worse it can call the right shots a non-negligible percent of the time.
I think the dust is way more in the air than we think. But now that Satya has already publicly said Sam is joining Microsoft I would be surprised if "unity" in OpenAI is possible at this juncture.
But wow, if Satya is able to pull all that talent into Microsoft without paying a dime then chaos is surely a ladder and Satya is a grandmaster.
If it wasn't for X we'd be hearing some flavour of the news in 24 hours time, from mainstream media, with all their editorial biases, axes to grind and advertisers to placate.
It's fascinating to hear realtime news directly from the people making it.
Now we’ll have to be critically thinking adults and judge primary sources for ourselves, rather than trusting secondary sources to do the thinking for us.
the best and brightest at making a brain out of bits are no less susceptible to drama than any other humans on the planet. they really are just like the rest of us.
This all really only made sense to me in context of Ilya being a True Believer and really thinking that Sam was antithetical to the non-profit's charter.
Him changing sides really does bring us into 'This whole thing is nonsense' territory. I give up.
To be honest, their charter describes some all-loving evenly distributed cosmic utopia after making everyone lose their jobs. This never made sense in the first place, and Ilya confirmed that he has no actual intention to "evenly distribute" it, because of the safety. So him being a true believer sounds pretty much like a politician being one.
This will be a shit Netflix movie in a few years. Not one you'd watch, but you might read the plot on wikipedia and then feel relieved you didn't waste 100 mins of your life actually watching it.
It would work better as a 2-season series. Season 1 introduces the characters and backstory and needlessly stretches things out with childhood/college flashbacks but ends on a riveting cliff hanger with the board showdown. Season 2 is canceled.
LOL, you speak as if he's some gamer who just got screamed at on Call of Duty.
He is now the 'effective CEO' of OpenAI. He still has to go to work tomorrow, faced with an incredibly angry staff who just got their equity vaporized, with majority in open rebellion and quitting to join Microsoft.
Did anyone have equity though? I thought they (at least some) had some profit sharing agreements which I assume would only be worth something if OpenAI was ever profitable?
There was a tender offer for employee shares valuing the company at $87b that was pulled because of this. Those would’ve been secondary share purchases by Thrive but gave employees a liquidity event. Now that’s off the table.
Developing, training, and running AI models is not cheap, and it's very much an open question of whether the money users are willing to pay covers the cost.
You've just pointed out the big issue with a non-profit. There is no equity to vaporize, so no one is kept in check with their fantastical whims. You and I can say 'safe AI' and mean completely different things, but profitable next quarter has a single meaning.
All of the employees work for (and many have equity in ) for a for-profit organization which is owned partially by the non-profit who controls everything and Microsoft. The non-profit is effectively a shell to overview the actual operations and that's it.
> It's depressing how few people are able to not look at the internet and turn off their phone.
> There's no obligation to read things about yourself.
That's assuming the worst thing that happens is people speak poorly of you after a debacle. It's also human to feel compelled to know what people think of us, as unhealthy as that might be in some cases. It gets worse when maladjusted terminally-online malignants make it a point to punish you for your mistakes by stalking you through email, phones, or in real life. It's not that simple.
> If you did what you thought was right, stand by it and take the heat.
Owning what you did is noble, but you certainly don't have to stand by it well after you know its wrong.
I’m a bit confused with these comments, as if he is some low level engineer. He is on the board, he obviously talks to other people in the upper levels. It’s not just online mob whatsoever, you literally will be facing the people who aren’t supporting your actions. Every day.
Some people change their minds, maybe they made a mistake, nobody knows. It’s like fog of war, and everyone just makes speculations without any evidence.
This is the nugget of this affair if indeed you are concerned about the effect and role of AI in human civilization.
The captains at the helm are not mature individuals. The mature ones (“the adult table”) are motivated by profit and claim no responsibility other than to “shareholders”.
If the guy is more of a engineer/scientist stereotype than a people person, this shouldn't be that surprising. He probably made a decision that he thought was for the right reasons, without thinking at all about how other people would react. Look up "social defeat." It's real, and it's one of the worst things you can experience. Imagine having strangers online mocking your hairline and everyone upvoting that comment. Imagine going around town and having people frown at you.
Member of the OpenAI board, chief scientist at OpenAI and later head of their Superalignment project. Lots of other things, too[0], but the key here is that he was involved in (and maybe main driving force of) the decision to remove Sam Altman as CEO.
That's why Hitler was an American plant. Cui Bono? De facto US hegemony for almost a century. Obviously, Hitler was a way for the US to destroy Europe and put them under the boot. What an operation!
HN geniuses were talking up Ilya Sutskever, genius par exemplar and how the CEO man is nothing before the sheer engineering brilliance of this God as Man. I'm sure they'll come up with some theory of how Satya Nadella did this to unleash the GPT.
What GP is suggesting is that 'cui bono' isn't a good explanation in most cases. It's always good to ask the question of whom benefits. But using it as an explanation for anything and everything is intellectually dishonest.
The more cynical side of me views this as a an act orchestrated by the demons... Err, "people" over at Micro$oft in order to avoid all those pesky questions about safety and morality in AI by getting the ponzi-scheme-aka-Worldcoin guy to join ranks and rile the media up.
The board could have easily said they removed Sam for generic reasons: "deep misalignment about goals," "fundamental incompatibility," etc. Instead they painted him as the at-fault party ("not consistently candid", "no longer has confidence"). This could mean that he was fired with cause [0], or it could be an intended as misdirection. If it's the latter, then it's the board who has been "not consistently candid." Their subsequent silence, as well as their lack of coordination with strategic partners, definitely makes it looks like they are the inconsistently candid party.
Ilya expressing regret now has the flavor of "I'm embarrassed that I got caught" -- in this case, at having no plan to handle the fallout of maligning and orchestrating a coup against a charismatic public figure.
[0] https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the