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OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman (openai.com)
submitted 1 year ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[-] ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 26 points 1 year ago

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

That's wild. Given the abruptness and his profile, I was thinking it must be an improper conduct investigation. But either way, I hope we get more details.

[-] sculd@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago

Lol The finally realized that Altman brings more bad press because of his association with crypto and his weird views on things.

I doubt the successor can be a good person but hopefully a less creepy one.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 19 points 1 year ago

Damn, time for wild thoughts as to why. I wonder who the bad guy is here. Did Sam want to focus on profit? Does the board and they're hiding behind that? I have no idea.

Still this is a scene right from Silicon Valley, the founder being voted out of their own company

[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think it’s more likely that Sam did not want to focus on profit as much as some investors. I presume Microsoft has seats on the board ( I haven’t checked)

Edit - I seem to be wrong: OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner." Sam Altman and Greg Brockman(President and Co-founder) both left the board today

[-] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Their board is independent and as such do not have equity in the company - Microsoft is not part of this. It’s a very different dynamic.

Based on the language, if I HAD to guess, I’d say he straight up lied to the board or acted on something without them when they were supposed to be involved. Serious charter-violating stuff.

[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

My guess is he hid a security breach from the SEC and the board. That makes the most sense as to what would prevent the board from being able to execute on their legal duties.

[-] brothershamus@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago

They found out he raped his 4 year old sister and kept doing it well into her teens?

[-] highsight@programming.dev 20 points 1 year ago

You got a source there for that, buddy?

[-] FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 10 points 1 year ago

Not claiming it's true because I literally heard of this five minutes ago, but go fill your boots. The source is his sister.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely

[-] frog@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

While not accepting it as necessarily true... this feels like one of those cases where I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.

[-] k_rol@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago

Huh?

[-] cwagner@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Maybe don’t sling mud like you are Fox News, even if you are a fan.

[-] dannym@lemmy.escapebigtech.info 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

To be fair, the allegations haven't been proven and allegedly he was 13 at the time... not that it makes it any better, but context matters

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 14 points 1 year ago

They make it sound like all the for profit stuff was Sam Altman and they just wanna make cool tech.

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 15 points 1 year ago

OpenAI’s original mission was extremely serious: to ensure the wide proliferation of AI to ensure a multipolar ecosystem instead of a monopolar one, to force AI to learn to play nice via parity with other AIs.

I was amazed that an organization existed which recognized this hard to swallow but ultra important fact.

[-] snowe@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

The fiduciary duty of the board was not profit. They’re required by charter to make sure the company advances ai safely. 4 of the board members have no investment in the company at all.

[-] furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 year ago

now he can fully focus on the magic eyeball money

[-] devz0r@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago

He’s sneaking out with the AGI in his pocket and gonna become a supervillain.

[-] cwagner@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

Crazy, the news almost took hackernews down when it broke. MS also was taken by surprise, and today 3 lead researchers resigned. Currently only speculation and no one really knows what’s going on.

[-] shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 8 points 1 year ago

lol, lmao.

[-] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

They found out that AI is a lame fad that will go the way of crypto?

[-] YeeHaw@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

Except that's definitely not the case, since unlike crypto shit, the latest wave of AI tech is already useful and found lots of applications. It may never reach AGI level, but that doesn't mean it's not immensely useful.

[-] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah I guess, I just see a mishmash of consumed data presented where you have to tweak parameters and so forth. Some gobbledygook nonsense presented as facts, three arms and six fingers in generated art, etc. just seems like shit to me

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yesterday I gave OpenAI's latest chatbot a photo of a challenging board game quiz card with questions that I couldn't answer.

The questions were intentionally difficult, no ordinary human is expected to be able to answer them all - at least not without spending an hour googling/etc. Most of us could only answer a couple of the questions before the timer ran out and we all compared answers.

The new version of ChatGPT answered every question, perfectly, in two seconds. It couldn't do that a week ago, the tech is advancing incredibly fast.

There are definitely some things it's not very good at, but there are equally things it's very very good at - the technology is useful, unlike crypto which I see as an interesting solution to a problem that nobody has.

[-] vanderbilt@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

At my company we have already used it to great length. We had a backlog on several thousand support tickets we wanted categorized. GPT-4 did it in about 8 hours and with over 80% accuracy, at a fraction of the cost (and higher quality) it would have taken to get humans to do it.

We’re rolling out a chat bot too using it, with a local model as backup, to reply to leads when our clients are busy. So far they love it.

We’re making our money back despite the costs, and we’re able to spend that money paying people to not do busy work.

[-] MayonnaiseArch@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I'm sure there are use cases, it's just that there's much too much hullabaloo about it all. Some people can get something out of it, they'll fire their workers, that's about it. But I can't use it for shit because I want to control what's being done, don't do text processing at all. But I smell the crypto dudes that are clinging to the whole thing, a dripping mess of turds wanking off to fanciful stories about ai. It's language models all the way down

[-] jarfil@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Bitcoin has gone from $0.03 to $0.03 Million in slightly over 10 years. If that's the "lame fad" expectation for AI... get ready to pledge allegiance to our AI overlords.

[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm gonna guess this was a security compromise that he failed to disclose to the board, and failed to report to the SEC.

It makes the most sense given the board's statement that his "repeated lack of candor" prevented the board from executing on its duties.

[-] bioemerl@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

I'd say good riddance but the replacement is worse

[-] hascat@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

Why are they worse?

[-] bioemerl@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Big AI regulation fan.

[-] Segab@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

How is that a bad thing

[-] ulkesh@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Seriously. Their neocon attitude toward regulation is leaking. If anything should be regulated, it’s AI advancements. The public good is still a thing, despite what conservatives want to dismiss.

[-] bioemerl@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Do you want AI to exclusively be in the hands of big companies and the government?

Do you want the future of technology locked behind pay walls and censored so that you can't use it to do anything they don't want you to do?

If you think AI regulation comes in the form of making sure big companies can't do bad things to you, you haven't been paying attention.

[-] Lockely@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago

It should be regulated.

[-] bedrooms@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

As a happy subscriber, the last thing I want is the influence from the board.

Monopoly established, the max profit phase about to start...

[-] HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

The board is not technically profit motivated. Because of the fact that microsoft is screaming at the board and threatening to gake away their servers if Sam is not reinstated, I think that he was the one driving profits and lied to the board.

[-] bedrooms@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Makes sense.

[-] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean I get it, but you can Google for answers as well.. check stack overflow, etc, get answers from true industry masters. at the end of the day it seems like there's not much added value.. especially if you have to vet the answers for reliability.

[-] Jaamulberry@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I disagree. It compiles answers in a nice easy place with no ads. Change an int to a string using c# and 9 times out of 10 I'm in and out. I can feed it my code and it corrects it. Is it perfect? Nope but it beats being berated by experts

[-] nhgeek@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

This one really surprised me.

this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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