Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits OpenAI's board of directors just fired CEO Sam Altman for not being "consistently candid in his communications." CTO Mira Murati has been appointed as the interim CEO to lead the lab in the meantime as the board finds a new boss. In a statement Friday, the board of directors said: "OpenAI was deliberately structured to …
There's a good chance that NOT having tens of billion of investment from MS will allow the freedom of curiosity that it takes to change tack and move beyond the LLM behemoth strategy.
Sam Altman now can make most of that opportunity. He can perhaps be the figurehead of the next big advance while OpenAI is stuck patching up their current legacy software.
Don't kick a man when he's down. Good luck Sam!
Sorry but Altman looks like a sociopath, one of those people for whom you walk round the other side of the office to avoid. You might get unlucky and they corner you in the kitchen at work and tell you how they spent the weekend doing taxedermy or sewing their new BDSM outfit, you just know that's the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of how unihinged they are in their spare time. The only reason they have a job is 'cos they're so focused and smart and the company HR dept kepts a close eye on them!
Some companies, like Amazon, use AI for hiring, controlling their employees and also firing them, so for those employees and contractors the world being controled by AI is not a distant future, is the present.
So honesty it doesn't surprise they decided "Hey maybe we could slowdown a tad before an AI decides to fire us?"
Company behind Chat GPT said to be in turmoil as top staff join exodus
Sam Altman, the recently sacked boss of OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, was telling investors he planned to launch a new company ahead of his shock departure, it was claimed.
The Information, a US tech publication, reported that Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research, Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating potential risks from AI, and Szymon Sidor, a researcher, had told associates they had resigned.
The article mentions...
"To add to the confusion over the future of one of the world’s most potentially valuable technology firms, a report by the Verge on Saturday night claimed that the OpenAI board was in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO, just a day after he was ousted"
Good job the board are getting paid so much because they're there to make all the big decisions. Us simple folk at the bottom of the rung can only aspire to have a job like theirs because we'd be screwing up and putting our foot in it day in, day out.
This weekend little people like ourselves with our limited comprehension may think the OpenAI board changed their mind when they realised they'd fucked up but in fact what really happened was business landscape changed at speed and they immediately and decisively adjusted course to compensate.
It looks like OpenAI spoke too soon: after Altman was fired, Brockman announced he too would be leaving the business. He was president as well as chairman of the board.
"After learning today's news, this is the message I sent to the OpenAI team," he said on social media.
"I'm super proud of what we've all built together [...]
But based on today's news, I quit."
Ballsy move!
Hmm, this may not have been a smart move on behalf of the board. Altman and brockman are apparently already dreaming of a new company, and quite a bit of OpenAIs talent might come on board.
Such a company might attract lots of investment from Microsoft, or Google, or Amazon, leaving them in a position to start afresh with all the experience gained at OpenAI.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is left without it's popular figurehead and many talented boffins, a furious investor and all the baggage of allegedly snaffling copyrighted material etc.
Sure, they have a brand and a huge user base, but that in itself is a strain on resources, and the early adopters in this space are quite accustomed to switching to a new toy if it's better. Foot, meet bullet.
"Altman, an OpenAI co-founder, was ousted after the board carried out a probe and concluded he had not been completely honest and forthright in his conversations with the directors"
Come on, in the new Reg linguistic configuration the substantive is "ouster" and the past participle must therefore be "oustered".
-A.
Is the issue.
"Perhaps it had to do with Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society – fears some experts have said are overblown – and heralding a general form of artificial intelligence no one in their right mind would want."
Its not overblown. Those "experts" are probably the mad scientists that just want to see their work come alive and sod the safety.
Look at Robert Miles and his talks on AI safety. You'll see the sort of things AI does in Specification Gaming when its given a task and finds shortcuts to complete them. If you're not specific enough it will use the short cuts.
Some examples
Bing - threats
Language model
Have an engaging, helpful and socially acceptable conversation with the user
The Microsoft Bing chatbot threatened a user "I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you" before deleting its messages
Moving a block on a table, it just moved the table instead.
So we could end up with general intelligence that decides "To keep the humans safe we need to lock the humans up in cages and run the world ourselves"
Robert talked about research where they talked about Inner Misalignment where the AI behaves differently once in the wild
So if Sam is bringing up the issues of AI safety and saying it in public, this is probably annoying the share holders coughMicrosoftcough because they won't give a shit about safety, they just want to push it out into the wild to make themselves more rich.
The CEO getting fired and the President and Chairman of the Board going too, means a political coup happened by a faction supported by an investor such as Microsoft or an investment bank. Two of the board members were cofounders and one of them got sacked. If it was just because the CEO made mistakes, then why fire Brockman? There is something else at play and it has to do with the direction of the company. Maybe this is a covert Microsoft takeover, or a takeover by another investor such as an investment bank or private equity firm.
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