I’m so tired of hearing the shenanigans of billionaires.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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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.
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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".
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It’s putin prigozhin all over again
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Somehow, Altman returned.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The new board screams "for the benefit of humanity" /s
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