skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the board was desperate for him to come back

Who reported that?

> reneged on their decision

Who reported that?

> there would be an exodus of employees

The chairman of the board and three senior scientists resigned before the weekend was over. You'd have to be naive to think it's not a strong possibility.
White collar recession is rampant. You can hire great people 2/3 the price as 12 months ago. Not everyone will bite. But just put the job out there and you can get very experienced, high-tier talent for significantly cheaper as many of them can no longer hold out as their savings deplete and the mortgage is still due.

Entry hires will take anything, but their debt load is huge and rent is high. Tough times
Bullshit. They are not quitting
> Bad news for you, their last CEO was too.

Did anyone believe that he seriously believed in that? I thought the consensus was he was angling for a government backed monopoly with OpenAI as the “steward” of large AI models.
Also, serious investors won't touch OpenAI with a ten foot pole after these events.

There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya).

Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single largest investor and it didn't even warrant a courtesy phone call to let them know of all this fiasco (even thought some savants were saying they shouldn't have to, because they "only" owned 49% of the LLC. LMAO).

Next bit of news will be Microsoft pulling out of the deal but, unlike this board, Satya is not a manchild going through a crisis, so it will happen without it being a scandal. MS should probably just grow their own AI in-house at this point, they have all the resources in the world to do so. People who think that MS (a ~50 old company, with 200k employees, valued at almost 3 trillion) is now lost without OpenAI and the Ilya gang must have room temperature IQs.
My Tesla's SquiggleVision is emphatically disconcerting. Who thought the update speeds of these displays were a good idea?
I've done questionable things in my life. I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness. But at least I never got into cryptocurrencies.
Yes that is true of Unix time. But is it true of every implementation? Are you sure? It might look like seconds since Uinx epoch but is it?
Most medical degrees require clinical hours and demand means you can usally get a job wherever you do clinicals.
I've found it very useful to ask "what would it take for me to change this belief?" If you can't think of anything, you're almost definitely in social status territory.

The follow-up is how comfortable you'd feel sharing this with your friends - do you think they'd also change their minds, or do you think they'd ostracize you? Would you feel comfortable sharing the hypothetical, or only if those events really came to pass?

(For example, if every major university did a press release saying the moon landing was a hoax, I'd have to seriously entertain the idea that they're right. I don't think any of my friends would be upset if I shared this hypothetical with them, and I think most of them would join me if it really did happen. So my belief that the moon landing is real is probably a "real" belief and not just a social product.)
Two words: Laundry Buddy

Sam doomed himself. Laundry Buddy is the new Clippy
Middle East funding and fully self reliant seem to be at odds here.
I can't speak to the article as its paywalled, but professional artists absolutely need and utilize studio management services. I worked in the art world for years before entering the tech industry and it was common, at the professional level, to see teams of office workers working for major artists.

The usual trajectory is something like:

1. Get a studio assistant.
2. Get a couple more studio assistants.
3. Get a studio manager.
4. Get an accountant.
5. Get team of assistants.
6. Oops now we need HR.
The issue is they’ve burned a million bridges with what they’ve done. No one in SV is going to be on their side in any of this. So hard to see how they succeed if nobody wants the perception of being on their team.
> But in the backend it is UTC

Scenario 1: You have an event to schedule at 9am local at some future date. You want to convert to UTC. But you can only do that if you know the offset, and the offset for future dates can change or be unknown. How do you resolve this?

Scenario 2: Now the event is "9am every day, indefinitely". How do you represent that as UTC? Do you generate tens of thousands of separate timestamps?
This looks promising! I have been struggling with data imports, and a time-saving solution like Impler sounds great. Can't wait to try it out!
They won the purity contest. I should start calling openai's board of directors The Squad from now on.
This is actually a good thing. Hear me out. If gpt5 or gpt6 becomes as competent as most workers and we have more capable embodied robots powered by gpt5, most people would surely lose their jobs. The rich people with the capital would be able to do more with less people. Most people think that the government would take care of them but i highly doubt it. Expect social unrest.
It's always been my observation that the actual heavyweights of any hardcore engineering project are the ones that avoid snarky lightweight platforms like twitter like the plague.

I would imagine that if you based hiring and firing decisions on the metric of 'how often this employee tweets' you could quite effectively cut deadwood.

With that in mind...
> Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter

Selection bias?
"AI Town" Deep Dive: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Some learning worth sharing from our prototype ~6 months ago
Oh. Well that's a tragedy, because I loved that game and beat it twice.
It will never crash because everything is a scam. Crypto is a scam, fiat system is a scam, stock market is a scam... It's just a matter of investors deciding which scam is the safest place to keep their easy-earned money... Money which they likely obtained via a scam to begin with.
Part of the magic around format revival is the inconvenience and imperfection triggering nostalgia. Vinyl is unwieldy, fragile, non-portable, requires maintenance, and the sound has a moderate noise floor. Cassettes require vintage equipment, need to be rewound, have fragile tape, and (except in ideal situations) are significantly audibly compromised.

Compact disc is easy to handle, can withstand some abuse, has no format-induced artefacts, and compatible players are still available brand new for as low as $15. There’s about as much nostalgia to find in there as there is for a Parallel ATA hard disk.
Their whole board is a joke

The smartest white hot startup on the planet has the smallest board and most inexperienced

How did that even happen on Sam’s watch?

My take: he always thought Ilya would have his back with Greg and the 3 overrule ruled anybody , so they kept it small

Bad idea
Google is fucking popping the champagne
It's less about total cycles and more about
scheduling. You don't really want a real-time
or low latency thing like sound to get preempted
by another process.

This is true, but Windows and Mac prioritize this well at the OS level. I've been using mostly USB sound devices for the last ~15 years including gaming and never any skipping or desync issues. Not sure about Linux, I have not used it as a daily driver.
The last 48 hours have made clear that the majority of talent at OpenAI would jump ship for Sam and Greg’s new venture, and they’d have the full support of Microsoft and OpenAI’s other investors. OpenAI would be left with a husk of a company and their chief customer and investor extraditing themselves. This is very much an existential moment.

Ilya, if he is being rational, needs to choose between an OpenAI that he has some continuing involvement in, lead by Sam’s gang, or bankruptcy.

He is fooling himself if he thinks there is a third path here.
I don't know if you're misogynist but her qualifications are fine. She's not CEO anymore because she wanted Sam and Greg back not because she somehow failed her 1 day duties.
No. I mean actually building a different reality.

As in using money, to pay engineers, to solve the problems you have.

There are fine lines between "fraud", "fake it till you make it", and "projecting confidence".
You know, we are dealing with people and people think differently so they won't move altogether. Moving to a new company under Alt is not an easy choice, at least the new company:

- Does not yet have a big model (need $$$ and months to train, if code is ready)

- Does not have proprietary code OpenAI has right now

- Does not have labeled data ($$$ and time) and chatgpt logs

- Does not have ChatGpt brand...
I remember reading a guide a while back, just a web page... from someone who just seemed like they were a master at picking the right graph/chart style for different types of data. He approached it in an exhaustive way by breaking down data into categories and explaining, for each data style, exactly why each chart style and not another one should be picked. I really wish I had bookmarked that guide because it just made it seem so straightforward.
I am guessing they are super reliant on Microsoft to keep running ChatGPT... If Microsoft decides to get out and finds a way they would be in deep trouble.
And then what happened after she was hit via a hit and run?

She was hit and lodged underneath one of Cruises's robot cars on training wheels who unlike what a human would do (stop the car & help the other human being) ..it's algorithm (there's no way these robot cars can account for all the million human scenarios that a human can) executed dragging the woman to the side of the road further mangling her body.
> They quickly get the funding and the contracts with MS. OpenAI is left in the dust.

I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure OpenAI has many patents in the field and they won't be willing to share them with another company, especially with AkshuallyOpenAI.
They're either not quitting or they've outed themselves as being part of a personality cult and they'll just hinder things if they're not ejected promptly.
Survive as existing? They will.

But this is a disaster that can't be sugarcoated. Working in an AI company with a doomer as head is ridiculous. It will be like working in a tobacco company advocating for lung cancer awareness.

I don't think the new CEO can do anything to get back trust in record short amount of time. The sam loyalists will leave. The question remain, how is the new CEO going to hire new people, and will he be able to do so fast enough, and the ones who remain will accept the company that is a drastically different.
Even if you don’t believe many employees would consider leaving for Altman, I find it probable that many would consider leaving for financial reasons. What will their PPUs be worth if OpenAI is seen as a funding risk?
What about $1B/day? Surely people will take jobs at immoral companies for that much money. After a short time, they can simply take ownership of the whole company and run it in a more moral manner.
Is it true? Lot of folks have left the OpenAI board recently (Musk, Hoffman etc). For various reasons but its not that everyone in SV is happy in the direction OpenAI was going.

Plus giant competitors like Google, Facebook might step in to fill the void.
Has anything in Python been removed in 12 months? TestCase.assertEquals was deprecated in Python 3.2 (February 2011) and was finally removed in Python 3.12 (October 2023). And that was 12 years for just a simple rename from "assertEquals" to "assertEqual".
BS article. Richard Heart still not in jail.
Kicked out is a bit hyperbole. They don't have their champion anymore but the deal and their minority ownership stake are inked. They still get tech and profits. They might not have a path to owning OpenAI now but that was a problem a few years down the road. They can also invest in Altmans new thing and poach OpenAI talent to bolster their internal AI research which is probably going to get a massive funding boost.

The PR hit will be bad for a few days. Good time to buy MS stock on discount but this won't matter in a year or two.
Javier Milei has close to 0 representation in any level of government apart from the executive: can you please explain how he is going to get literally anything done, let alone “offer a quality standard of living to tens of millions of Argentineans” ?
The shearing force is often done by the cable itself, with gravity doing the work. Some USB-C cables are so thick and connector so large to support the heavy shielded cable, that it's bent at an angle when plugged in.
That would have opened them up to a lawsuit (while employment is "at will", you can still get sued for negligence or baseless slandering). A statement retracting claims for such a high profile move would be a pretty solid piece of evidence in such a case.
Surely, not being on the board you cannot just assume that you know all there is to simply assume that there is only one side to a story? Just because they aren't tweeting a storm does not mean they don't have reasons...
Is n26 an option? A newcomer should be able to get a German account pretty easily from them, and with SEPA it doesn't matter which country your IBAN is in. Or is the currency an issue?
That's not the case with AI community. Twitter is heavily used by almost every professor/researcher/PhD student who is doing learning. Ilya has one. Heck even Jitendra Malik who's probably as old as my grand father joined twitter.
Those few with million dollar salaries can start tomorrow for even much higher salaries in the current market.
Shopify does that.

Well, at least the appending .json to everything.
Adding the words "integrity" and "honesty" to the dictionary of many tech companies could do them a lot of good, really.
Yes, but data for the training, model development and other things requires a lot of time and investment, with OpenAI having a huge head start.

It is to be seen if investors will likely pour another set of billions of dollars, just to catch up to speed with OpenAI, which, by that time, would have even further evolved.

There is a ray of hope that, as it so happens in this field, that old things are quickly obsolete and new things are the cutting edge, Sam Altman can convince investors to invest in the cutting edge with him. Then investors have a choice on an almost level field, to choose between people, companies and personalities, for a given outcome.
I have never used twitter but this strikes me as a strange take at best. Many of the most brilliant and passionate engineers I've had the pleasure to work with have been massive shitposters.
Not even kidding. They gave us a tour of their enterprise datacenter in Detroit and told us that cloud infrastructure was banned. At the time they had a plan to offer a complete in-house alternative to AWS. Meanwhile getting a single outbound port opened through their corporate firewall took several months.
This saga highlights something that I found challenging when I was on the board of a startup, and which the board has completely misplayed. The difference between authority and autonomy. If you're on the board of OpenAI which is doing fantastically well etc you're a big deal. You have a great deal of authority.

You may well think that the structure of the company and how the votes on the board work etc means that any motion you can carry at the board is within the sphere of things you can achieve i.e. that you have autonomy to do anything you can secure the votes for, but that's rarely the case. In actual practise people like the investors and other stakeholders can change the rules if they need to, exercise soft pressure, bring legal suits and do other things. Your autonomy to act is effectively pretty narrow.

However this finally plays out, whether Sam comes back or not, whether openAI's board changes, the people who orchestrated this have seriously damaged themselves and they will most likely have less of both authority and autonomy in future.
Which character is Gordon Joseph Levitt gonna play when the movie comes out?
Sometimes only in looking back you can see an event that was pivotal in your development. It was 1962 and John Glenn had just orbited the earth three times. My dad's brother paid his yearly visit to Detroit around the time of my tenth birthday and he brought me a present. It was a crystal radio in the shape of Glenn's capsule.

I remember eagerly hooking up the ground to the radiator and sitting on the bottom steps to the second floor. The joy I had in bringing signals out of the air. I kept a notebook on all the different stations and their call letters.

That led pretty directly to getting my amateur radio license four years later. A dozen years later I bought a HP programmable calculator and taught it how to do tasks at the business I then managed. Storage was a magnetic strip you fed into the machine.

Still later at another business I took my new business computer and taught myself to learn Lotus 123. That led in a straight line to dBase II and quickly a host of other languages. Another ten years it led to a new career as an entrepreneur leading to present day.

Most people if they look back there was a spark that led to a lifetime interest in something whether it be a hobby or a career. I told both my nieces before they headed off to university to take advantage of your time to try different things, if only a single time. I have a friend who tried scuba diving and that led to him owning his own diving shop. A buddy joined the bicycle club and met his wife.
Can you please not post like this? It's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
D'oh. All those years I've never noticed that. Thanks for the info.
New AI startup announcement in….10 hours? Maybe they’ll take their time announcing, I dunno.
Not OP, but the choice of phrasing in a number of reports implied that the board was uncertain of their decision. Normal sensationalization if the same limited information that was publicly available at the time.
Not if it's a big sample set. There's a guy on twitter who make a list with every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter and almost all of them did react to Sams tweet in a supportive way.
I'm in a similar position - accuracy of MJ v5.2 is leagues behind DALL-E 3, and I throw a controlnet on SDXL with DALLE images and can get MJ quality. Will probably cancel MJ sub soon.
Altman has no case. Board protects their legal responsibilities of non-profit company. Same goes for investors.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

— Richard Feynman

Then, in order to not fool yourself, you have to know your own weaknesses:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cognitive...>
They might've just told her that she's now CEO without her actual approval.
Did she say specifically why the working conditions were so horrible?
A quick search turned up a registration for them in the UK? Is this them?[1] And if so..... where is any of this even documented on the matrix.org website? Lastly, use of a CIC is a horrible idea for precisely the sort of shady shit we're seeing here.

[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
Stem != Job. Ignoring software, finding a traditional stem job directly out of college is very challenging. I know many mechanical engineering, bio enginers, chemical engineers who had/have a rough start.

I really wish people would stop equating stem to a job. Unless you are willing to move, it is not the case in many job markets.
Technically if there are internships available, they usually suffice or mostly suffice as a first step.

Problem is where I went to university, most students in my graduating class either didn't know they could or should get an internship, or worse, didn't think it was necessary and they preferred to just play video games all day.

Many of them gave up and never ended up becoming SWE's, they went down other paths because they never found an appropriate junior level position.
> (The majority of the rurals are considered urban by the US census, btw.)

I wonder if there's some administrative reason the census considers huge cities and little villages both 'urban'?
What are the steps mentioned there?
This breakup is so messy, did Taylor Swift already write a song about it?
> massive shitposters

Yes, agreed, but on _twitter_?

The massive_disgruntled_engineer_rant does have a lot of precedent but I've never considered twitter to be their domain. Mailing lists, maybe.
I'm sure it's not Emmett's fault, but ChatGPT is having problems right now.

It's failing to generate Python code - first time I've seen this in months of heavy usage.
You don't need both. Named zones can do everything that offsets can, and it's still useful to know the named zone for historical timestamps in many situations.

> After all, if a zone changes offset today it shouldn't change the timestamp I recorded yesterday.

That's not how named timezones work. That behavior would be bad and it would also qualify as ambiguous.
Maybe someone from higher up called the board?
Team Sam = Team Money.

If you're an employee at OpenAI there is a huge opportunity to leave and get in early with decent equity at potentially the next giant tech company.

Pretty sure everyone at OpenAI's HQ in San Francisco remembers how many overnight millionaires Facebook's IPO created.
Most of the extinctions happened when there were less than 10m people. All the large mammals and birds got wiped out during humans hunting and gathering phase.
Embarrassing for OpenAI.
A board member's husband?
Witholding the footage was more than just a mistake. If they are being this dishonest over something that wasn't even entirely their fault, what else could they be hiding?

And no, most human drivers would easily detect a human being stuck under their vehicle within seconds.
Discredit people using twitter is a weird take, and didn't resemble critical thinking to me.
Ah yes you're either a doomer or e/acc. Pick an extreme. Everything must be polarized.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/18/23967199/breaking-openai...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/18/23967199/breaking-openai...

“The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday with no notice, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes.

Update November 18th, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled”

Do you want me to hold your hand to google anything else or is that enough?

Former-chairman*, he was removed from the board immediately after Sam’s ouster. OpenAI has 700 employees, 4 resignations do not make an exodus.
If Emmett has any say at all in the matter, Kyle's almost definitely under consideration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6USRwTHe0

the video is mindblowing because on one hand, adobe photoshop announced this as "their own next big thing" and here we have an open source software replicating this same thing, so cool.

edit:

this also means photoshop doesnt have the "moat" they seem to have built around the generative ai thing and their software.
The board said he was fired for being insufficiently candid with them. Good luck getting a US court to call that defamation.
No source provided the exact reasons why Altman was removed by his left hand. Please explain this first before going on to support any follow up actions. What exactly happened … this is beyond ridiculous