OpenAI investors' race to reinstate Sam Altman makes tech expert Gary Marcus feel 'sick to his stomach'
OpenAI investors' race to reinstate Sam Altman makes tech expert Gary Marcus feel 'sick to his stomach'
"None of this bodes well," writes the NYU professor, who's worried about the nonprofit's board getting overpowered.
alternative copy without a paywall: https://archive.ph/k6qbD
The allegations from his sister aside (not discrediting them, I’m just not well informed on that atm), it’s been really strange seeing so many comments cheering for Sam Altman and dunking on the openAI board (handpicked by Altman himself btw) for this whole farce. We have no info on what’s happening inside, just 3rd party hearsay and speculation.
Not only that, the guy who allegedly led Altman’s ousting, Ilya Sutskever, signed the employee resignation letter asking to reinstate Altman as CEO.
OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly led the push to remove Altman, noted on X (formerly Twitter) that he had some regrets about the weekend of chaos inside OpenAI. “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI,” said Sutskever. “I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
And somehow Microsoft ends up the biggest winner out of this entire situation. I don’t consider myself conspiracy minded…but what the hell is going on here?
95it’s been really strange seeing so many comments cheering for Sam Altman
It's the same with Elon's cult. People probably really believe that Sam is a genius and the one who made ChatGPT (just like Elon's fanboys really believe that he's involved with Tesla's engineering), so they see him, alongside Elon, as a symbol of meritocracy and they get angry at the board for ousting someone just because they're "afraid" of a "genius".
54I was certainly a fan of early Elon. A serious push to address one of the causes of climate change, opening up some patents to allow other companies build charging networks, a disruptive can-do attitude that spurred Old Automobile to actually start innovating in response.
There were doubts, but I think the turning point for me was when he attacked the divers working to get the Thai kids out of the cave, just because they thought his submarine ideas sucked.
He’d been doubling down on being an arsehole increasingly since then. I absolutely would have considered buying a Tesla in the old days, now? Absolutely not.
36This is what I was thinking, my feed is now full of this guy. I knew him from Y combinator videos, smart guy and everything, but now terminally online stans will put him on their pedestal and simp for his AI genius - until of course all the shit he’s done reaches critical recognition, and the general sentiment will turn on him. Almost like we shouldn’t celebrate billionaire tech bros.
14Agreed. I do not know Sam, but I do know smart people who push the boundary of tech and they are all heads down deep into whatever and have little time for talk. Talk is cheap.
8
Meh, it's kind of a perverse dream that all engineers have to go toe to toe with the suits and win. Like an ex admitting that you've been right the whole time and begging you to come back but you are already fucking three of her smoking hot physicist friends.
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TL;DR: still don’t know anything. No one seems interested in saying wtf they’re doing.
17CEO/employees want money, non-profit board wants caution.
10
Gary marcus is the last person I would consider for a statement on the topic.
No offense intended, but Gary marcus is a hack and a joke. He is a very small step above the yud, and neither will contribute to the safety or development of this technology in any way.
6Don't know him, what did he do?
11marcus is a well known figure for being heavily critical of AI while also being comedically uninformed. much like the yud
i would like to have greater consideration for their opinions, but i find it difficult due to the often unfounded nature of their speculation. for marcus personally, i've seen him make arguments woefully out of touch with current information. this is why i describe him as being comedically uninformed.
wish the best for the guy, although i disagree with them both to the degree i find their reasoning childish and dangerous. the yud moreso.
and to the person assuming "yud" being racist for no reason, please get some help. he is an individual. i'm sure his harry potter fanfics are quality, and i mean no ill to the gentleman other than disagreeing strongly with his opinions on AI.
2
I remember Yudowski being a thing like a decade ago, and people were making fun of his "AI" research even then. It's scary to realize that not only did some people take him seriously, but those people are at the helm of AI companies and making decisions affecting tens of billions of investment capital. I think there was a quote by Kurt Vonnegut that "true horror is waking up one morning and realizing your high school class is running the country".
For the other poster lower down, I'd almost successfully forgotten about his Harry Potter fanfiction, people kept praising it so I actually read through a bit of it, it's painful reading. He also wrote a Superman fanfiction and that's even worse. I think they both say a lot about his internal mental state and his perception of other people though.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Friday, OpenAI’s board shocked investors and employees alike by firing CEO Sam Altman.
Marcus wrote about the situation on his Substack, sharing an analysis written by Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn earlier in the day.
In OpenAI’s unusual structure, a board “with no financial interest was supposed to look out for humanity,” Marcus wrote.
When faced with the potential financial repercussions of Altman’s removal, “the nominally subordinate for-profit (both employees and investors) quickly set to work to push out the board and to undo its decisions,” Marcus wrote.
Altman had told investors that if he did return to OpenAI, he wanted a new board and governance structure, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The tail thus appears to have wagged the dog—potentially imperiling the original mission, if there was any substance at all to the Board’s concerns,” wrote Marcus.
The original article contains 501 words, the summary contains 138 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
4Permanently Deleted
0Everyone
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Mark my words, this was a hostile poaching operation by Microsoft. Like 65% convinced this was the case. We won't know until 10 years have passed and some dumb emails end up in discovery on some unrelated lawsuit.
0- Sam wants to push for more & quicker profit with MS and VC backing, but board resists, constant conflicts
- Sam aligns with MS, hatch a plan on how to gut OpenAI for its know-how, ppl, and tech, leaving the non-profit part bleeding out in the gutter
- Sam & MS set a trap: Sam crosses some red lines, maybe taking commercial decisions without board approval. Potentially there was also some whispering in key ears (e.g, Ilya) by seemingly helpful advisors/VCs to push & pull at the same time on both sides
- Board has enough after Sam doesn’t back down, fires him & other co-founder guy
- MS and VCs go full attack to discredit board. After some info gathering, they realize they have been utterly fucked
- Some chaos, quick decision of appointing/replacing ppl, trying to manage the fire, even talking to Sam (btw this might have been a fallback option for MS, that the board reinstates him with more control and guardrails, weakening the power of the non-profit)
- Sam joins MS, masks are off
- Employees on the sinking ship revolt, even Ilya realizes he was manipulated/fucked
- OpenAI dead, key ppl join MS, tech and rest of the company bought for scraps. Non-profit part dead. Capitalist victory
Source: subjective interpretation/deduction based on the available info and my experience working as a management consultant for 10 years (dealing with lot of exec politics, though nothing this serious)
0
Probably shouldn't rehire someone you probably fired over sexually assaulting his sister...
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10I had never heard this before but googled it.
12I love the jock riders down voting me. Maybe if you kiss Sam's ass enough he'll make you rich too 🥺
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There is a post on lesswrong which compiles the accusations made by the sister. Having worked with many incest victims, family scapegoats and Cinderellas I'll say the story is familiar to what I've heard before and therefore credible.
2Please link that.
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It's hilarious that people think this had anything to do with ethics. Money. It's always about money.
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