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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Technology
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So a Board member wrote a paper about focusing on safety above profit in AI development. Sam Altman did not take kindly to this concept and started pushing to fire her (to which end he may or may not have lied to other Board members to split them up). Sam gets fired for trying to fire someone for putting safety over profit. Everything exploded and now profit is firmly at the head of the table.
I like nothing about this version of events either.
Wasn’t that evident from the very first few days, when we learned the board stood for the non profit, safety first mother org while the booted ceo stands for reckless monetization?
Now he’s back, the safety concerns got silenced, money can be made, people can get fucked. A good day for capitalists
That's why I was so confused that all the workers stood behind the CEO and threatened to go to Microsoft.
My guess is that they want the company to grow fast so that their salaries and stock options grow as well.
That's what a personality cult gets you. The amount of idiots willing to die for another man's ego is why we have some of the shittiest things in society. “Daddy told me so” is a powerful force when the people who believe it cannot see that their vision has absolutely no rational support. Jobs, Musk, Gates, Trump, they all thrive by telling people that their irrational beliefs are true and if they follow them they will make their dreams realities. The talk and narrative around Altman has always struck me similar to Musk's cult of personality in the late 2010s.
Stock options help. If they make enough off of OpenAI, they won't need to find a job after this.
This is tech, they have no protections. I bet there's some clause with a time lock that they can only sell the stock in 10 years time and they lose them if they leave OpenAI before that time window for any reason. In 5 years or before they'll get hit by some mass layoffs and lose everything. This has happened so many times before with so many companies that it is laughable. Stock options in tech are a fairy tale.
Especially in a company that's a non-profit, lmao.
Sheep gonna sheep.
U.S. Military has entered the chat
I'm not sure Gates ever had a "personality cult". In the 90s during his heyday he was pretty much reviled even by Windows users. He built his empire by swallowing everyone else around him that was doing anything even a little bit innovative. He wasn't really the "visionary artist/engineer" type like those others. Just a random rich nerd who won the technology monopoly game.
Like @Zak, I would like to point out that - as much as I despised Bill Gates back then - he was actually competent. And - despite me never liking Microsoft - they have a legitimate business model built on selling products, not user data (like all social media and google). So of all the evil dipshits out there, Microsoft and Apple are the lesser ones. (I am a Linux user since 2004 or so)
Early accounts are that Bill Gates was absolutely a talented coder, at least in the 1970s. Of course that was't what made him rich - a series of business decisions that were some combination of lucky and prescient were.
The company gave the companies a large amount of equity. That was the work of Sam Altman. The employees are voting their wallet my sticking up for him.
That was some classic business pressure tactics. The sort of thing a massive multinational corporation would have a lot of experience in. The sort of thing a massive multinational corporation suddenly blindsided by this with a lot of financial interest in the situation would be interested in doing....while at the same time mitigating risk by trying to pull those same employees into the parent company if things don't go their way.
Edit: Now that I think about it, they also managed to get the vast majority of employees to 'join together' on the issue making it (psychologically) easier for them to 'join together' in choosing where to jump ship to. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it's just a really clever move on Microsoft's part.
Using a playbook isn't clever, writing it was.
I feel like this isn't surprising knowing about all the other stuff altman has done. Seems like yet another loss for the greater good in the name of profit.
What other stuff has he done? Genuinely curious.
Now what would the company do if the AI model started putting safety above profit (i.e. refusing to lie to profit the user (aka reducing market value))? How fucked are we if they create an AGI that puts profit above safety?
Entirely. We all die. The light cone is turned into the maximum amount of "profit" possible.
This is still better than a torment maximizer, which may come as some comfort to the tiny dollar bills made of the atoms that used to be you.
You get paperclip maximizer
https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/
So basically it's exactly what I expected and I'm not surprised in the slightest. Amazing how that works.
It's not too surprising considering they don't even have basic essential security features in 2023 like two-factor authentication. Absolutely pitiful.