skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real reason could be something most people would find incredibly stupid. Mira coup attempt or something similar.
Can a super smart business-y person educate this engineer on how this even happens.

So, if there's 6 board members and they're looking to "take down" 2... that means those 2 can't really participate, right? Or at the very least, they have to "recuse" themselves on votes regarding them?

Do the 4 members have to organize and communicate "in secret"? Is there any reason 3 members can't hold a vote to oust 1, making it a 3/5 to reach majority, and then from there, just start voting _everyone_ out? Probably stupid questions but I'm curious enough to ask, lol.
Sure; but its still weird that Microsoft agreed to the deal with the board in the state that it was; not just no board seat, but three absolute outsiders, two of them extremely unqualified. We may look back on their decision to buy 49% of OpenAI as a big misstep.
Showing it wasn't written by ChatGPT? (While one can easily ask ChatGPT to use lower case only ...)
She asked her instagram followers for money via Venmo.. hm.
The same way you profit without the news, buy VTSAX and wait 10 years.
Yeah, I strongly suspect there’s some kind of self-dealing/conflict of interest going on here. It’s one of the few things that would explain an immediate, public ouster. Undisclosed contracts that violate some kind of board prohibition would also qualify (e.g. military, as some others have speculated).
Ok what’s with the weird punctuation and lack of capital letters in their tweets?

Both seem like they are horribly rushed and no auto complete?
The source code to the fixed versions is still available in those cases, and there's essentially no chance that even verbatim copies of the patches for most security fixes would pass the threshold of creativity to be copyrightable. Worst case scenario, you have to work with another person to have them study the fixes that upstream publishes and then explain the vulnerability to you so you can write a fix of your own.
To restructure a non-profit, that solicited donations, into a for-profit entity? Abso-fucking-lutely.
I know what it means and I agree it's probably an exec. The issue is that the premise - "Microsoft Corporation didn't know thing X at point in time Y" - is essentially unverifiable gossip, yet is presented here as fact
I think that if there were a lack of truth to him being less-than-candid with the board, they would have left that part out. You don’t basically say that an employee (particularly a c-suiter with lots of money for lawyers) lied unless you think that you could reasonably defend that statement in court. Otherwise, it’s defamation.
HEV suit design is still one of the most slick sets of armor in any game ever. Just enough practical touch to look feasible.
My impression of Ilya is that it would be far more likely to be a safety related issue than a business/profits related issue
Elon Musk is responsible for the "OpenAI" name and regularly agrees with you that the current form of the company makes a mockery of the name.

He divested in 2018 due to conflict-of-interest with Tesla and while I'm sure Musk would have made equally commercial bad decisions, your analysis of the name situation is as close as can be to factually correct.
We are working on it. If you have Windows Pro machine, see https://borg.games/setup

It is currently tailored to gaming, but ML workloads are coming shortly. Everything runs in an invisible ephemeral VM.
They sort of did one before ChatGPT (and after InstructGPT) with Galactica, but didn't have the nerve to keep it up.
this entire thread is a fascinating treatise on AI philosophy mixed with business conspiracy.
People responding really don't know the state of Chinese electric right now.

For 2023, China's BYD has globally outsold Telsa by over 50% and 8 out of the top 10 brands for global electric car sales for Oct 2023 are from China.

The BYD qin plus, for instance, is about $20k, the Wuling Mini-ev is about ~$10k, Aion Y is $20k. They're eating everyone's lunch and expanding into Central America, Africa and Europe.

Cars like the Cherry QQ, which are $5,000 aren't meant to be compete with new cars but instead, to the vast majority of price-sensitive buyers who normally purchase used cars. Introduce a used-price new car, however ...

They're poised to do to the American auto market what Japan did 40 years ago and just like then, American auto seems to be asleep at the wheel.

This is a classic Clayton Christensen innovators dilemma formula.

Edit: Apparently factual statements are unpopular once again. The internet is so cool.
Doesn't justify the hostile language and the urgent last minute timing. (partners were notified just minutes before press release). They didn't wait even 30 min for the market to close causing MSFT to drop billions in that time.

A mere direction disagrement would have been handled with "Sam is retiring after 3 months to spend more time with his Family, We thank him for all his work". And surely would be taken months in advance of being announced.
It is more like someone from one of the poorest countries in EU going straight to pretty good private schools and pretty good companies weird.

Not going to say it's impossible, but she is doing so good but left so few footprints on the Internet.

Again just my personal early night conspiracy drink. Don't take it seriously.
Self-dealing like that really is, not saying I see any reason to suspect its that and not something else, but, yeah, doing that and cocncealing it absolutely would be a reason for both firing him and making the statement made.

Unless Brockman was involved, though, firing Brockman doesn't really make sense.
Moreover.
Yes. Actually that was my motivation to check things up.
substantive evidence might have cropped up.
I’m not saying there is lack of truth. I’m saying that’s not the real reason. It could be there’s a scandal to be found, but my guess is the hostility from OpenAI is just preemptive.

There’s really no nice way to tell someone to fuck off from the biggest thing. Ever.
Oh neat, thanks! I followed standard insertion procedures and everything turned out fine!
I grew up 15 miles away from a large natural gas power plant, but could rarely see it. Now that it is long since closed I can see its smokestacks almost every day, and now I also can see the mountain range that used to be perpetually hidden that is 30 miles away. To me those smokestacks serve as a monument to the progress that has been made over the past few decades.
Easy enough to return the donations.
Verifying phone number is one of the last things which is still effective when fighting against bot registrations. Alternative is to ask money for registration.

Here is idea for hacker news crowd: make service which is a proxy for phone number validation: user needs to validate his phone number once in that app and any other 3rd-party service can ask this app for security code which confirms phone number ownership. We use something similar by offloading phone number confirmation via Telegram bot. Also this proxy service could optionally offload management of "bad" phone numbers used by spammers and add other protections
I think if he didn't know why, he would wait to find out what the story was.

Instead he knew enough to make is call immediately, knew what he was going to do.
Yes it’s generally better to not spin the title and let readers make up their own mind as to bias.
Why? Do they seem shiftless?
He didn't have equity in OpenAI either, he seemed to be running it for fun. Of course, he can get cash payments.
It's not just "restructuring" a business that's a 501(c)3... to make it a golden goose for MSFT. The whole thing was created to avoid one of Big Tech having a monopoly on AI, and it turns into Big Tech having a monopoly.

Perhaps it's all legal but I think it's very understandable to look at it and think it's a travesty.
There should be pretty reliable data on electrification costs for a freight railway and how the operational costs add up. If it were a substantial business advantage over diesel-electric, why aren't the privately owned rail companies doing it already?
I've had two bikes stolen and one car stolen. I've had other attempts at stealing my bike. I've been in both bike accidents and car accidents over the years as well.

Anyway, your quote was "it feels like 50/50 it’ll get stolen". It just seems problematic mixing what you feel and some objective probability - it's easy to give people the impression the chance of bike theft is actually that. I mean, say "I'm afraid - here are the actual odds..."
> In my (early) twenties, I could do that without consequence

I mean, maybe for you, anecdotally. Anecdotally, I had a friend at 23 who almost died due to his unhealthy drinking and his body basically shutting down. Doctors told him he couldn't drink anymore. And studies have shown that any amount of binge drinking/eating is bad for health outcomes long-term.

You're actually proving my point... people just hand-waive away warnings about future problems, using cherry-picked "evidence" like "hey my friend binge-drank for 30 years and he's fine", or "my father smoked two packs a day for 50 years and he's still around".

Similarly, (ab)use of technology for the wrong thing sets you up for problems later on. Don't do that and you avoid the problems later on.

But nobody wants to listen to the doctor telling them to drink less or give up smoking. Just like nobody wants to listen to good advice from experienced technologists. Sigh.
Fish rots from the head, as they say.

In my opinion, the technical know-how of Zuck was perfectly valid to build Facebook, but not this. VR/AR/anything with real-time world simulation and rendering is completely different from the web tech stack and could be considered to be a different world, with a different mindset.

Carmack obviously had the appropriate mindset, but AFAIK not the power to act. So Suck and his appointed staff probably took critical technical decisions regarding the software architecture of this project.

Given that we know that part of plan was to buy Unity back in 2015 and build their Metaverse on top of this engine, I seriously doubt this team really understood what they were doing.
The buyer agents are useless in nearly all cases. The useful ones are called real estate attorneys, and only when it's the buyer's market. A standard buyer agent is a kid who finished a 2 week course on how to fool the buyer. His or her core competencies include: subscribing your email to an automated mls search that spams you with irrelevant listings every week, actually reviewing the listings according to your criteria is beneath them because it's real work; on the showings the agent persuades you to write an offer for the listed price, and never bothers to look for possible defects that may ruin the deal, such as foundation cracks; the agent has a inspector buddy who can write a stellar inspection report, after having inspected its lawn only; the agents are gravely offended by the idea of reducing their commission to something more sensible; they show a great resolve at pushing you to sign an exclusive contract for a very long term, and insist on bearing no responsibility.
And Sam was the face of AI to the general public, which makes these moves all the more perplexing.
>Current fullstack solutions (Next, Nuxt, SvelteKit, etc) in JS are trying to kludge front end components into the server which IMO is a mistake.

why?
Thanks, love the insight.
GPT and transformer code has been open sourced many times over by different companies. The weights and the operational model is where the IP really is. This will include the architecture for distributing training and inference at this scale. That said m, any developer and scientist worth their salt will be able to replicate it from memory - without having to copy stuff over 1:1.

So unless any of the necessary bits are patented, I highly doubt an argument against them starting a new company will hold in the courts.

Sometimes the contracts can include a cool-down period before a person can seek employment in the same industry/niche, I don’t think that will apply in Sam’s case - as he was a founder.

Also - the wanting to get himself fired intentionally argument doesn’t have any substance. What will he gain from that? If anything, him leaving on his own terms sounds like a much stronger argument. I don’t buy the getting-fired-and-having-no-choice-but-to-start-an-AGI-company argument.

An interesting twist would be if he joins Elon in his pursuit. Pure speculation, sharing it just for amusement. I don’t think they’ll ever work together. Can’t have two people calling the shots at the top. Leaves employees confused and rarely ever works. Probably not very good for their own mental health either.
Speculation means: the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.

It's just a fun theory, which I think is plausible. It's based on my personal view of how Sam Altman operates, i.e. very smart, very calculative, makes big gambles for the "greater purpose".
This sounds more plausible than the other explanations, but doesn't explain why the board couldn't proceed more slowly and why did it have to accuse Altman of lying.
OpenAI fires Sam Altman for allegedly lying to company board – OpenAI
I'm gonna hope that power users will be able to get those builds wherever they live ;)
Interesting take. What is your current secure messenger of choice?
Let's suppose all that stuff is absolutely true, that when Sam Altman was a 13 year old kid he assaulted his 4 year old sister, that she's troubled because of it, and he made some attempts to buy her off, perhaps money in exchange for silence. Why would the board decide to suddenly fire him because of that, after all this time? He was a minor who would not understand the consequences.

No, I'm confident that it has nothing to do with that. It must have to do with the current business. Maybe there's a financial conflict of interest. Maybe he's been hiding the severity of losses from the board. Maybe something else. But you don't fire a CEO because you discover that he committed a crime at age 13.
Her allegations were not new information and were made as far back as 2021. So it makes little sense for the board to suddenly react to it now. Plus with Greg now posting his announcement of quitting OpenAI makes it seem unlikely to be about the sexual assault allegations.
Mira... interim CEO? What's Nat Friedman up to these days?

I can't help but think he might be someone that fits the profile of the company from both sides of the partners involved.
You probably could have included that information in the original comment, as it’s super useful anyone not intimately familiar with the twitter-sphere around openAI.
The license for that version is irrevocable. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t publish a newer version with a different license, if I am the copyright holder. The existence of a newer version with a different license does not revoke your ability to use, modify, etc. the prior-released version. That’s what irrevocable means here, AFAIK.
Governments don't need to "take control" of things, they get tax payments and can pass laws.

The US has never spent less on its military than it does now, and the military industrial complex has never been less important, because the rest of the economy has grown so much larger. So it's funny to see people still using Cold War-era conspiracy theories from when it actually mattered.
LMAX Disruptor – High Performance Inter-Thread Messaging Library
are any of these points supposed to be convincing?

why would I want my identity managed by a shitcoin run by a private company?
Just for once I’d like to see such a statement look like, “You sheep probably want a comment on today’s news. We’re not doing that. We’re just content to buy up all the shares you’re panic-dumping. Looking forward to flipping them back to you next week when you panic in the other direction.”

(Assuming they have some plan that gives them the flexibility to trade shares directly on the market like that. I think $GME had something like this?)

Edit: And, of course, actually mean it, unlike Caroline Ellison and the $22 FTT: https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/15892874579753041...
>I'd argue this is signaling they have the IP / source code / models / etc.

I think that just signals that they have a firm business agreement with OAI regardless of what Altman might be doing.

with a product like chatGPT, especially given the nature of how it has been presented thus far (our servers, our API, your account on those servers) , it seems extraordinarily dangerous to treat it like a common partnership agreement.
How much did they pay for that 49% stake?
You can opt out of training and keep your history turned on in the privacy center. You fill out a form and indicate your country of residence.
> Not everyone that you don't like is a fraudster.

Sam Altman in particular has precedent, with Worldcoin, that should make you wary of defending him on that particular point.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
He was also against the creation of Chrome to the point where it had to be done in secret, according to him.

From a total outsider/uninformed pov, he really seems like a fail upward story.
Are there any right now? PG&E has done a pretty poor job, burned down half the state and then went bankrupt. Partially despite/because of heavy regulations. Why not nationalize them altogether and remove the profit seeking middlemen and just let the state run it?
Probably depends on what the code is and how material it is to AT&T’s business and what agreements are in place. IANAL. Youre not gonna get sued for routine stuff.
I had the same questions, and have learnt now that non profit governance is like this and that is why is a bad idea for something like OpenAI. In a for profit the shareholders can just replace the board.
You have it backwards, the not for profit entity owns the for profit entity. From Wikipedia:

> OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization consisting of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc.[4] registered in Delaware and its for-profit subsidiary corporation OpenAI Global, LLC.[5]

IKEA [0] and Rolex [1] are structured in a similar manner, although different since they’re not US based.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Wilsdorf#Hans_Wilsdorf_...
I have to say, I had HL - bought it, and a few other games - moved to Steam, moved the games there, then in the end, few years later, bailed on Steam. Customer service was appalling. I lost everything.

I love HL, and if I could get hold of it without Steam, I'd have it, but I don't know of a way to do that, and I've lost the copy I originally bought because leaving Steam meant loosing everything.
Sam and Ilya have recently made public statements about AGI that appear to highlight a fundamental disagreement between them.

Sam claims LLMs aren't sufficient for AGI (rightfully so).

Ilya claims the transformer architecture, with some modification for efficiency, is actually sufficient for AGI.

Obviously transformers are the core component of LLMs today, and the devil is in the details (a future model may resemble the transformers of today, while also being dynamic in terms of training data/experience), but the jury is still out.

In either case, publicly disagreeing on the future direction of OpenAI may be indicative of deeper problems internally.
Even better, almost all modern "half ton" pickups have an actual payload capacity between 3/4 and 1 ton. Or even higher.
I was being snarky, but I am a little impressed they did more than the usual nothing. Kudos to whomever fought for that.
i predict because it's hip to talk that (this) way nowadays
Or it could just be.
It's hard. I'm instinctively inclined to believe this story, but from first principles, why should I trust that Axios has adequately vetted this source? All I know about them is that lots of people in my circles send me their articles, I've never seen or conducted a review of their journalistic practices.

Obviously thinking about it this way would cause me to miss or disbelieve a lot of true stories, but it doesn't seem right to say I should trust every outlet I see widely posted either.
Diesel electric drive are only around 80% efficient while a mechanical transmission is 95%+. It is a misconception that trains use them for efficiency, trains get their efficiency from low rolling resistance from steel wheels on steel tracks and aero efficiency from all the cars drafting together. The electric drive is needed for simplicity of routing power to wheels and for the precise traction control needed to get the train moving without slipping the wheels.
>Can a super smart business-y person educate this engineer on how this even happens.

There is nothing business-y about this. As a non-profit OpenAI can do whatever they want.
What is confusing here is Why would Greg have agreed to the language in the press release (that he would be staying in the company and report to the CEO) only to resign 1 hour later. Surely the press release would not have contained that information without the his agreement that he would be staying.
No experience as a builder really
It's not if it's not literal. You can easily reimplement the same ML architecture which you have written before. Also, it's not really OpenAIs IP, if they kept it secret.
From a comment on reddit that someone linked here, it seems it's because of AI safety principles of the non-profit? This can't be true. I refuse to believe they're booting one of the best entrepreneurs of the today for this.
Why would Altman be trying to move to for profit if he doesn’t own equity?
Are people going to start throwing around the term "AGI" now that "AI" has become diluted? Eventually we are going to have to start using "RAGI" to indicate that we are talking about real artificial general intelligence.
Guess OpenAI is about to lose a good chunk of their research team in the next 48 hours
The hand tracking has seen continuous improvement and the depth correct passthrough is pretty good and I'm sure quite a feat to accomplish.

Its worth noting that much of that 10 Billion wasn't just spent on Horizon Worlds as critics off-handedly suggest, but has been sunk in to lots of acquisitions (hardware and software companies) and research, much of which has yet to be seen in released products.

I'm very impressed with the ambition of what they are trying to do and their committment to a longer term vision which is something that often is lacking in many companies. As an example Nvidia were working on AI tooling and hardware for a decade before it really started to pay off big.
This is probably a dumb question, but what are some specific scenarios of financial malfeasance that could’ve taken place? Like Altman stealing money from OpenAI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34471720
No, he does not seem surprised as he had his mind made up about an important life decision and a carefully crafted resignation letter ready in a matter of hours.
Kara Swisher: a “misalignment” of the profit versus nonprofit adherents at the company
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028

She also says that there will be many more top employees leaving.
Even when I started 12 years ago in Java/JSF/Oracle stack there seemed to be way more focus on durability and longevity. The system I started on was architected in a way that made it easy to modify and integrate with other system. It worked well. Eventually it's scope creeped, which would necessitate modernization. But it was very maintainable and lasted years.

Now the systems I work on are hot garbage because the tech is constantly needing upgraded versions, changes to the code are onerous because of the way the system was designed, we are constantly having data issues for various reasons, and people jump teams every 2 years so there's no continuity.

I'm convinced it's a leadership issue. Push for speed and you'll get it. It will cost you in other areas.