I’m so tired of hearing the shenanigans of billionaires.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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The interesting part about this story isn't Altman himself. It's more about the weird decisions and inner politics of a $90bn company. A board firing their ceo without official reasoning, MS sweeping in while owning 49% of said company, 95% of the staff threatening to quit and the ceo coming back and firing the board while everybody else still tries to understand what the fuck just happened.
Like another commenter said, this could straight up be an episode of Silicon Valley.
It’s putin prigozhin all over again
Okay, so can we shunt all the "tech billionaire celebrity entertainment" posts somewhere else?
It is tech news, but I get you. It's hard to find a place with news about actual technological innovations, advances, updates etc rather than the machinations of the corporations involved. I completely understand the relevance, but it's often not the sort of genuinely interesting read you're looking for.
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Would you like to hear about my week? I'm a thousandaire.
This is such a confusing and messy situation. There is definitely more going on that we dont know about. I already posted this in another thread but:
heres what I think could be going on:
tinfoil hat on
Some Microsoft bigwigs read the OpenAI foundation contract again and realise that they gave them a bunch of money but didnt get the nonprofit, and that they are now fully dependant on them, and that Altman is an experienced shark that knows this. They cant just buy the non-profit, the board would never agree. So they hatch a plan.
They get the lead researcher and a bunch of board members riled up against Altman, with a bunch of dirt they have on him. They tell them hes going to run off with the money and show some proof. The board decides to fire Altman. In the same breath but in another room microsoft hires altman, and promise all openAI employees employment at their new openAI bootleg. They then tell the board through the official channels, that they fucked up and need to resign.
Now, the situation was like this:
- Either the board resigns, and microsoft gets to put some puppets in their place and complete buying openAI
- The board doesnt resign, microsoft gets all their employees and the company in anything but name and openAI slowly fades in relevancy until Microsoft makes a generous offer of 150% above what they are worth(half of their price right now)
either way, microsoft wins.
so yeah, I think the next thing we are going to see is microsoft buying more openAI and getting actual control, or a complete buy.
Sadly, I think you're absolutely right. This feels orchestrated in a way that allows a select few parties to look like visionaries, while eliminating others from getting in the way.
Sadly all that crazy seems totally possible with Microsoft involved.
Well yeah, Microsoft is very much in bed with OpenAI. It's not a huge mystery to see how this is going to play out.
What in the shit is going on. Goddamn. This has been a wild fucking weekend.
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I'm still wondering why he was even fired in the first place. I'd thought that perhaps I just hadn't paid proper enough attention and missed the reason, but nope, no reason was ever given.
There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.
Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.
I read something about him not being honest with the board, or keeping things from them? Didn't see any elaboration, though.
That's all they have said as well.
We fired the guy for a reason, it was a good reason honest, no we're not going to tell you what it was. Anyway we've hired him back now so it's fine, stop asking questions.
They have been asked to provide that by the media, the first temporary CEO they named, and their investors, some of which even threatened to sue of they didn't disclose it. So either it is something so discriminating to the board they're willing to rather sink with it, or they actually don't have anything solid at all and fired him without cause bue to something personal/unprofessional.
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Wait, just so I get this right... The board fired him; Then members of the board wanted him back; Now he's back and replaced the board too? - so did he pull an uno reverse on the board of directors or what? How the fuck does that shit work?
The entire company (literally almost all the employees) threatened to quit and take jobs at Microsoft if he wasn't reinstated and the board removed. And that's exactly what has happened.
I don't really have an opinion on this Sam guy or why his employees want to drink his bathwater, but it's an interesting example of the employees of a company unifying behind somebody.
It's rediculous though.. This guy is a sociopath
I haven't seen that take yet, got any links?
I'm not trying to defend the guy, just actually curious
He's a financial venture capitalist type who made open AI closed source, and tried to pressure the EU into not regulating AI.
He's your typical shitbag tech CEO masquerading as a genius. Employees want him back because it's better for their RSUs/stock options. Bunch of greedy assholes from top to bottom.
Have you heard of that creepy orb thing that was installed in a bunch of African developing countries that traded a shitcoin cryptocurrency that is worth nothing and constantly loses more and more value, in exchange for appropriating people's biometric data, that additionally has never said why they want it or what they want to do with all of that information?
That's this guy. He's the creator and owner of that thing. Dude is a comic supervillain.
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ClosedAI has completely fallen to capitalism as it seems.
Was is ever not completely under capitalism? As far as I've seen they were always fully going with hype over substance posturing
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So many people here are eager to determine who the money-grubbers are, but here I am just curious what the material disagreement actually is, and how MSFT fits into it.
Seems to me like the board of directors and leadership are mostly aligned on the underlying goals, but disagree on how to approach achieving them.
They're all money grubbers. The board are part of a rationalist cult called Effective Altruism that claims to want to save humanity, but they believe they need lots of money to do this (Sam Bankman-fried is an EA guy.)
Sam Altman is also nominally part of this group, but also hangs out with people like musk and Rishi Sunak. He's more like your typical alt-right tech bro.
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I would like to know who were the ones that got the money from this.
I'm not convinced this wasn't a planned strategy to get OpenAI back in the headlines for a week.
I didn't think so at first but now that it looks like everything will go back to "normal" before the US Thanksgiving Weekend, I feel like maybe this was a "Chinese Firedrill" to get attention for something other than their training data and legal problems.
A whole bunch of people besides Altman still quit though. Is the board going to rehire all of them with new terms, individually?
Looks like I'm wrong, before they rehired Altman they ditched the board members responsible for his ousting so there were major changes after all.
So why about the board then? These people seem like idiots.
From the first sentence of the article:
Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI with a new board
Proof n°1093866 that being rich has nothing to do with being smart.
Being rich has everything to do with being lucky and evil.
Are there some (paid or not, doesn’t matter) great alternatives to OpenAI based solutions like ChatGPT 4 and Copilot?
Copilot, yes. You can find some reasonable alternatives out there but I don't know if I would use the word "great".
GPT-4... not really. Unless you've got serious technical knowledge, serious hardware, and lots of time to experiment you're not going to find anything even remotely close to GPT-4. Probably the best the "average" person can do is run quantized Llama-2 on an M1 (or better) Macbook making use of the unified memory. Lack of GPU VRAM makes running even the "basic" models a challenge. And, for the record, this will still perform substantially worse than GPT-4.
If you're willing to pony up, you can get some hardware on the usual cloud providers but it will not be cheap and it will still require some serious effort since you're basically going to have to fine-tune your own LLM to get anywhere in the same ballpark as GPT-4.
Not really, that’s why OpenAI gets so much attention, they’re just by far leading the field. Amazon has a copilot alternative though that just does basic completions, I think.
There's a great alternative to chatgpt voice called bark
https://github.com/suno-ai/bark
And a fork of it that has voice cloning:
The new board screams "for the benefit of humanity" /s
Who thinks some Ultra Intelligent General AI is already running things behind the scenes of openAI and threatens the humans of the company if they didn’t bring back the guy who serves the AI.
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