official announcement here: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition
image transcription:
announcement's title "openai announces leadership transition" is at the top, with surprised pikachu face at bottom. on top of pikachu, text reads, "not even Sam could prevent losing his job to AI."
comment taken from this video
For what its worth, it seems like the board is claiming that Altman's constant wheeling and dealing of the technology, including giving Microsoft a minority stake in the LLC, rubbed them the wrong way, and they felt that his increasingly transparent desire for profits was antithetical to the original purpose of the OpenAI Non-Profit, which was to safeguard AGI, not to market and sell it.
Honestly, I felt that way too, so I'm on the boards side with this one. It felt pretty clear that Altman had tossed out the "beneficial for humanity" goal in favor of "beneficial to me and my wallet."
Double edged sword, them firing him will probably release him from his contracts so he can pursue that money train.
my theory: Microsoft will hire him and make him as their face of AI stuff.
Microsoft
Will their new project at least not be racist and xenophobic this time?
I highly doubt it. They are one of the largest investors in OpenAI. If the board ousted him for ethical reasons and they hire him, they could very easily destroy their relationship with OpenAI, and they want to stay ahead to make sure they can capitalize on AI money
Congrats on getting this right!
True, but he’s a CEO, not a scientist. OpenAI’s head scientist, Ilya was part of the reason behind him being ousted, and he has spoken about the importance of AI ethics in the past.
https://ecorner.stanford.edu/clips/ethical-ai-regulation/
Sam will just go run another company somewhere
What money train? Sure, he's famous now, reasonably understands ai, and has a reputation around it...
He doesn't actually have the ability to advance AI tech. He's a figurehead chosen to represent engineers and handle the logistics for people who do have the ability to advance this miracle technology
What's his money train? Joining the circuit of short time CEOs?
For better or for worse he's got a lot of friends within openai. Sounds like many of them have threatened to resign if he's gone. If he goes and starts a competing company without the ethical guardrails, I think it's likely a lot of folks will follow him. He also has very tight ties to the investing community so he would likely be able to raise funds quickly. I think there's a solid chance he could make a credible competitor to openai within the next 5 years, especially if they lose talent/money over this.
If he doesn't have an offer yet ... I bet there's a line of companies knocking on his door offering him CEO positions
Here's to hoping for an actually open OpenAI in the future.
I highly doubt that'd happen.
Why?
At its current level of capability, an unaligned GPT-4/5 could cause harm to humanity
Current open models are closing in on GPT-4. The real magic is in models fine-tuned in a specific field, not generalist models.
does it have to do with the name? first Sam Bankman-Fried, and now him lol. seeing his interviews makes me think he's more of a wannabe cult-head guy, just like most of silicon-valley bros.
PS: seen his worldcoin thing? it's whole another level of privacy nightmare.
Yeah, that's a good way of looking at this.... I didn't understand the Microsoft move at all. Why would an "open" non profit want to build business relationships with tech monoliths. It seemed antithetical, but I honestly had assumed that was more of a board/share holder decision... Sounds like that probably wasn't the case.
I thought the board was on board too... But it came when Musk pulled promised funding on the run up to gpt4. It was a shit bird move, but it seemed like it was just picking the best of bad options to keep the lights on in a critical time
I mean, no arguing that he sold their souls to Microsoft though... They've made openai products part of every service they run, and seem to have nudged their trajectory significantly
How did you make these conclusions about reasoning for firing him from the statement the board gave?
If you’re gonna replace a worker with an AI, replacing the CEO gives you the most return on investment.