"None of this bodes well," writes the NYU professor, who's worried about the nonprofit's board getting overpowered.
  • sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    851·
    9 months ago

    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?

    • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6110·
      9 months ago

      it’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”.

      • HeartyBeast@kbin.social
        342·
        9 months ago

        I 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.

        • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          They innovated first. GM and BMW and so on put out electric cars in the 90’s they just didn’t market them well and the battery tech wasn’t as good then meaning range was limited. Not to mention the lack of infrastructure for charging which I will admit that Tesla (not Elon) did push for and develop.

          The Roadster was an ice breaker vehicle and I will fully admit that. Musk was involved but he wasn’t the one who made those fears feats of battery engineering possible. He really does take credit for a lot of stuff just because he happened to be in the vicinity. I can understand being a Tesla fan. I can’t really understand being an Elon Musk fan.

        • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          9 months ago

          Yeah the Twitter nonsense has been such an absolute shitshow that it’s easy to forget he had in fact turned for the worse prior to it. I didn’t flag it at the time, consciously, but The Boring Company was another early signal. Rich guy is stuck in traffic, says: “screw this I’m digging tunnels, bitches!” And then they made and sold branded flamethrowers to raise seed money…? I mean WTF kind of college dorm antics are these?

          He used to be so much more grounded, back in the days of talking about our carbon emissions as the dumbest experiment of all time, and how he started SpaceX to make our species interplanetary and better able to survive major disasters. I was all for that Elon. Then he had a kid with a musician and mashed his ass cheek into a keyboard to come up with a name. I think he’s deeply personally broken. I don’t know what hopes he had for his marriage and family or how badly that situation is fucked for him post-divorce but it seems like it could be pretty bad and fueling a lot of pain and malice not to mention likely substance abuse.

      • slaacaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        141·
        9 months ago

        This 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.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        11·
        9 months ago

        I doubt over 2/3 (around 600) of the employees under Musk would sign a letter demanding that the board resign over their firing of Musk, though. Seems most of the employees actually liked Altman.

        • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          41·
          9 months ago

          When you point out that figure, it’s also important to provide more context and take into account the fact that Satya Nadella promised to hire every single OpenAI employee and not just Sam Altman, and the high likelihood that the board will not resign. It’s not hard to imagine that for many, going to Microsoft and working in a for-profit environment with potentially higher bonuses (as they’d be more encouraged to seek much higher profits than under OpenAI) is a significant career upgrade (good for them, but the point here is to not let the headlines make you think that there’s some warm & fuzzy “we love Sam” moment happening).

          The OpenAI salaries are pretty low (https://archive.ph/jPbYR ) compared to what Microsoft offers (https://archive.ph/nonSV ), and as I said all of that doesn’t include the potential bonuses that would result from those teams aggressively pursuing profit at Microsoft.

      • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        9 months ago

        Agreed. 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.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      33·
      9 months ago

      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.

  • tsonfeir@lemm.eeEnglish
    242·
    9 months ago

    So, the board, with no financial gain, kicks him out and now investors want to fire the board. Money wins again.

        • Zima@kbin.social
          1·
          9 months ago

          they wanted him back but he had the condition that they made an apology letter and cleared him of any wrongdoing. that’s when they changed their minds. if this is about not apologizing to save the company they do seem incompetent.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    151·
    9 months ago

    TL;DR: still don’t know anything. No one seems interested in saying wtf they’re doing.

  • Peanut@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    83·
    9 months ago

    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.

      • Peanut@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        21·
        9 months ago

        marcus 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.

        • fsmacolyte@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          what in particular shows that Gary Marcus is uniformed? I dislike him because he’s dogmatic and petty but I haven’t seen a specific thing he’s been wrong about, but I’d love examples.

          • Peanut@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            hard to remember which videos specifically, because it was a comparison to things that were known when the video released. he’s been around a good while. listening to marcus often leaves me confused and baffled. not really in the mood to marathon marcus videos for examples, so feel free to disregard my opinions. but i’m definitely not alone in finding humour in the fact

    • rastilin@kbin.social
      3·
      9 months ago

      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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    51·
    9 months ago

    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!

  • blindbunny@lemmy.mlEnglish
    915·
    9 months ago

    Probably shouldn’t rehire someone you probably fired over sexually assaulting his sister…

    • VubDapple@lemmy.worldEnglish
      86·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • Zima@kbin.social
        01·
        9 months ago

        Is it usual that all the family and even therapists side against alleged victim? I think it’s not impossible if the person is so traumatized and troubled to the point that the family rejects her but I struggle to believe that is the usual case.

        • VubDapple@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          Yes it is unfortunately common. The family members align in their identification of the scapegoat and their cohesion influences the involved therapists who do not realize the larger picture. The victims are themselves both traumatized and also inculcated family members so it is fairly common that the scapegoats do not realize how fucked up things are until they’re older. Incest families are often highly invested in a family ideal that both hides the ugliness and also enables it to flourish (because our golden boy would never do anything like that!). When the scapegoat finally figures it out and tries to tell the truth they are shut down by the defenders of the family ideal. It is easier to shun the truth teller than to accept that the family system is rotten and work to reform it. Also those who are privileged within the family frequently see nothing to gain by admitting wrongdoing and so don’t. It is as it is with any sort of privilege at the societal level. Those who have it tend not to see it and then resist giving it up even when the weight of evidence is large.

        • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          31·
          9 months ago

          Is it usual that all the family and even therapists side against alleged victim?

          On the family conspiring against a single member part, you might want to look up Harrison Post or watch the “Britney vs Spears” documentary (though that’s a bit different and doesn’t have to do with rape, Britney was the rich person and her family conspired against her to take over her wealth, had a psychiatrist, James Spar, fabricate a report against her that subsequently just miraculously disappeared from the court files and even picked a lawyer for her who would side with them).

          Going back to this story, the “shht, let’s not ruin the future of our child prodigy, so even if Sam did something bad to you you will keep your mouth shut” is not that rare among families. Conspiracies by families to cover up rape done by one of them do happen:

          Another very important point that makes Annie Altman’s story highly believable is that since 2020 she’s been resorting to sex work (and also begged on Instagram one day) just to survive, while Sam has a net worth of over half a billion. As I said in another comment, if one of your siblings needs to do sex work to survive while you have hundreds of millions of $s at your disposal, then no matter whether the accusations are true or not, you’re the bad person and there’s something fundamentally evil about you. Going back to the sex work part, here’s what the statistics say (translated from German: https://www.rheinmaasklinikum.de/Inhalt/Patienten/_doc/Evangelische/Hintergrundinformationen_zur_psychischen_Situation_von_maennlichen_und_weiblichen_Prostituierten.pdf ):

          In Hamburg, 98% of sex-workers examined were diagnosed with at least one traumatic event. 83% had already experienced trauma in childhood (family violence 70%, physical abuse 65%, sexual abuse 48%). Trauma experienced during prostitution was found in 83% (physical attack 61%, rape 61%, threat with a weapon 52%). Here, 53% achieved an illness score in the sense of post-traumatic stress disorder. Abuse and dependence on illegal drugs at 74%. Similar alarming findings can be found in international comparative studies.

          And also (https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12905-017-0491-y ):

          Intimate partner violence was experienced by 21.2% of sex workers, and 23.4% reported client physical or sexual violence. The majority of sex workers (71.2%) reported childhood (i.e., when age <18 years) physical or sexual abuse.

          • Zima@kbin.social
            1·
            9 months ago

            I think you clearly can show that it’s possble but that doesn’t mean it’s likely the articles suggest it but they don’t have any statistics to back it up. there is no equivalence between being poor and conspiring to get someone’s money and cutting out someone from their inheritance.

            I completely disgree with your view that if you have money you have to help family even if they are radioactive to you. in some cases it’s best to take distance. especially if the other person is so troubled that whenever you help it just backfires because they can’t stop the drama.

            I don’t doubt that most sex workers have trauma issues or even childhood issues, the part I’m not finding easy to accept is that it’s likely that the family would usually side with the accuser.

    • The Assman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      9 months ago

      It’s hilarious that people think this had anything to do with ethics. Money. It’s always about money.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      54·
      9 months ago

      You’ve been downvoted, but the posts from his sister definitely don’t look great, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was why the board kicked him out.