the OpenAI board was in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO, just a day after he was ousted.
He must be laughing so hard now... :-)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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That hasn’t been confirmed at all. No one from the board has commented even anonymously as far as I’ve seen. This is a play by Altman and his supporters to try and influence public opinion and make the board seem incompetent.
Maybe. Allegedly MS is throwing their weight around to try to force it, which does seem plausible.
Though I hope the board stands firm.
Ilya is much more valuable long term to the company than Altman, and frankly the latter leaving is the first time in about a year I've been bullish about OpenAI's prospects.
They really walked their core product back in the past few months despite expanding their productization of it towards low hanging short-term fruit.
Ilya's vision is spot on with where transformers are headed as complexity increases, and is one of the only scientists I've seen that really sees that horizon.
If Altman was standing in the way of getting there, it's better that he's gone.
I agree with you overall though I will say that MS throwing their weight around is really just a lot of hot air at the end of the day. They don’t have a board seat and they were told from the start that their invest should be seen as more of an investment. The non-profit is in control and MS can’t change that.
No, but they are allegedly threatening to bar OpenAI from Azure, and you can't be a leading AI company these days without access to supercomputers.
What is ilyas vision?
Also, being right about the tech doesn't mean you will be successful. You have to balance short term wins with long term gains. Often engineers and technical folks struggle with that process because it often means compromising theor utopian ideals in the short term.
I think it's short sighted to dismiss Sam's contribution to their success and amplify Ilyas.
Ilya had seemed to be more of the closed corporate yes man, more interested in profit paths than open ethical development, as evidenced by his various appearances when unfiltereed questions have been allowed. That's not an improvement over Altman.
Nothing new here, just rehashing all the previous talking points.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
OpenAI staff were later told by the chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, in an internal company memo his sacking was over a “breakdown in communication between Sam and the board”, and not “malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices”.
Last year, it launched ChatGPT, a text-based AI-powered tool that allows users to enter prompts and receive human-like responses and is now used by millions.
Earlier in November, he was one of 100 delegates who travelled to Bletchley Park for the UK’s AI summit, where he met Rishi Sunak.
This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the non-profit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI [artificial general intelligence] that benefits all of humanity,” he said, according to The Information.
The changes at OpenAI have shocked the wider sector, with one investment advisory firm describing them as an “earthquake”, a “soap opera” and a “Netflix documentary in the making”.
The original article contains 860 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So what I've gleaned is: Altman was grooming people to start a new, proprietary company and wasn't telling the board of the non-profit, so they fired him, predictably enough. Some of the people he was prepping to jump ship are now going to follow him. The board is seeing the potential exodus of key people and is willing to let him make OpenAI into the for-profit outfit he wants so now they're talking to him in that direction because they'll probably have nothing left if they don't.
If you already joined 'em, beat 'em!