skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do you understand why he was fired?

Do you? Because that part is way more irritating, and, honestly, starting to read your original comment I thought that was where you were going with this: Why was he fired, exactly?

The way the statement was framed basically painted him a liar, in a way, so vague, that people put forth the most insane theories about why. I can sense some animosity, but do you really think it's okay to fire anyone in a way, where to the outside the possible explanation ranges from a big data slip to molesting their sister?

Nothing has changed. That is the part that needs transparency and its lack is bewildering.
What discussion, specifically, as you're just joining in here?

If a CEO of a non-profit is raising billions of dollars from foreign companies and states to create a product that he will then sell to the non-profit he is CEO of, I view that as adding instability to the non-profit given its original mission. Because that mission wasn't to create a market for the CEO to take advantage of for personal gain.
It is particularly useful to run Transmission and download torrents .
Haha Satya won the game of chess lol
Professionals tend to value their work in the real way of assigning value to it. So I doubt it was desperation so much as having a sense of self worth and a belief that the structure of Open-AI was largely a matter of word games the lawyers came up with.

As for Altman... I don't understand what's insignificant about raising money and resources from outside groups? Even if he wasn't working directly on the product itself, that role is still valuable in that it means he knows the amounts of resources that kind of project will require while also commanding some amount of familiarity with how to allocate them effectively. And on top of that he seems understand how to monetize the existent product a lot better than the Ilya who mostly came out of this looking like a giant hazard for anyone who isn't wearing rose tinted sci-fi goggles.
There was a project to digitise the Domesday Book, the thing is it didn’t index by settlement, but by owner.

Which if memory serves made it tricky to search. Is there data in a database form that can be queried?
What am I missing here: Sam Altman has zero charisma or cool factor. Every talk I've seen him in, he comes off as lethargic and sluggish. I get zero sense of passion or rallying drive around the hype of AI from him. He's not an AI visionary. He's not a hype man. He simply "is", and just because he happens to have been the CEO he's been thrust into the spotlight, but there's literally nothing interesting about him.
What motivates Sam to join Microsoft? Could it be the proximity of achieving AGI and his desire to remain competitive without starting from scratch?
Do anti-compete clauses work when you’ve been ousted? Greg resigned, actually, but Sam was ejected.
Python does not use semantic versioning and never has.
it's funny because just yesterday I posted:

> soon as it's out, a whole bunch of extremely privileged ML people will throw their hands up and say, "oh well, cats out of the bag."

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38324742
Three chips in and Google Tensor is on life support
What scares me the most about that graph is the outlier/singularity of it compared to almost 100 years of data. Every other year on the graph, the temperature has begun declining roughly halfway through the year, but this year it just keeps climbing.

I'm not ready to call "we're doomed" (yet), and it is probably just natural variation, but it's scary none the less.
Weird. Why did not he start a new company?
My guess:

This is no research group, this is OpenAI 2.0, Sam/Greg will have enormous autonomy. It will be foolish to think Satya just recruited them to tangle them in MSFT bureaucracy
Every once in a while, and I actually do not care much about soccer, I read comment sections in a German newspaper about soccer (please don't ask why, I have actually no clue myseld). And there, you basically have the same discussion: that player / trainer is great / sucks / rightfully / wrongfully lost his job, that club will never ever win again without person A...

It is quite intrigueing to see tge same fan / cheerleading going on when it comes to comapnies and managers. But then everything is entertainment by now...
Technical debt.

Azure was already second nature for OpenAI and so there is very little friction in moving their work and infrastructure. The relationships are already there and the personnel will likely follow easily as well.

They are also likely enticed by the possibility of being heads of special projects and AI at the second largest tech company, meaning deep pockets, easy marketing and freedom to roam.

Oh, and those GPUs.
I know about the doctrine.

Yet everytime there was a "real" attack, somehow the doctrine was not followed (in US or USSR).

It seems to me that the doctrine is not actually followed because leaders understand the consequences and wait for very solid confirmation?

Soviets also had the perimeter system, which was also supposed to relieve pressure for an immediate response.
So Microsoft just won the lottery.
They need computers. I'd assume this came with a substantial budget promise.
I mean, OpenAI aren't just going to close up shop. I would very much doubt they're just going to turn off their APIs. I would just keep building and if you have to swap LLMs at some point then do so.
I wonder if they'll get bored working on Copilot in PowerPoint
That didn't age well...
This is kind of true, I think programming even codellama or gpt3.5 is more than enough and gpt-4 is very nice but what is missing is good developer experience, and copy-pasting to the chat window is not that.
Have to give it to Satya. There's a thin possibility that Microsoft would have to write-off its whole $10B (or more?) investment in OpenAI, but that isn't Satya's focus. The focus is on what he can do next. Maybe, recruit the most formidable AI team in the world, removed from the shackles of an awkward non-profit owning a for-profit company? Give enough (cash) incentives and most of OpenAI employees would have no qualms about following Sam and Greg. It will take time for sure, but Microsoft can now capture even a bigger slice of THE FUTURE than it was possible with OpenAI investment.
Very happy to see OpenTTD on this list. It's been loads of fun since the original in the 90s.
Mastodon has inbuilt rss feeds for every user, for any given hashtag on an instance, etc.

Eg https://mastodon.social/@gargron.rss
Reaching you through VDSL from a runny village next to the Alps in Provence, France.
Country side is a mess in term of professional networking and social activities.
I regret it deeply so far
They will probably run a subsidiary under the MS umbrella and profit hugely in the next few years. Also, MS could easily dump OAI in the next few months to year.
Sam had no stake in OpenAI. So, any potential deca billion value is hypothetical. He would have to do a U-turn and fight with the board to get his cut. Now he'll get his cut from MS. This AI division will have some further restructuring.

Edit: Sam is CEO of the new AI division.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires...
And if governments squeeze on AI your start up is worth pennies over night. Earning 100 MILLION per year already removes any possible financial restrictions you had. Why do you need to have 10x that? Heck even earning "just" 10 millions per year will make all of your financial concerns go away.

Greed is hell of a thing
Altman's value is in business, how does bringing him to Microsoft to lead a research team help?
you are still a kid in many ways. You can still be become anyone you want to become.
He was the face of OpenAI, MSFT is basically trying to signal: Business as usual, nothing to see here, move along and please don't tank our stock
The only way to keep AGI safe is to put it on the Zune.
Microsoft is likely betting that they can build the next GPT with a bag of money and a few food people. They control a massive amount of GPUs, this could be a major factor for Altman and Brockman here.
> Changing the env during runtime is actually quite handy for debugging and forcing the program into specific states.

Most debuggers nowadays support altering variables at runtime after hitting breakpoints. In the meantime this was the very first time I ever heard anyone even considering changing env vars at runtime, let alone use it to debug stuff. Sounds like an ass-backwards way of going about debugging.
>Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI

No, Ilya alone is like 75% of the brains and I'm fairly certain he's not going anywhere.
We will see if OpenAI team can stand on its own legs. My bet is 70% they will start to humble and lose in long term. AI satety people may not those who know how to create a feasible business. At some point, Microsoft can make a purchase offer to get the remaining OpenAI.

We have seen similar stories with Nokia, Slack, others.
Thanks for the link - we’ve been using mailhog for local smtp testing and it still works ok for basic tasks, but it’s not maintained any more.
Microsoft just hired Sam and Greg to lead a new advanced AI research team
GPT-5 is almost certainly already done. But considering they sat on 4 for 8 months with Altman as head, who knows if it'll see the light of day.
Should tell you something that he didn't. And no, I am not talking about ethics here.
> When a company is acquired those are typically the reasons to do so other than pure revenue acquisition

Large companies are primarily purchased for their moats
Yes! On average, my Orient watch runs about 15-20s fast per week when I lay it flat on its back at night. But when I position it crown down at night, it runs about 4s slow per week. I usually check it every Sunday morning, and if it's running a bit slow, then I'll put it on it's back for a couple of night to let it catch up. Haven't had to pull the crown out and adjust it for about 2 months now with this system.
According to [1], Nadella's base salary was $2.5m and stock awards and other compensation brought the total to ~$55m in 2022.

[1] https://microsoft.gcs-web.com/node/31056/html
https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

> And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.
Any AGI must at a minimum be aligned with these two values:

(1) humanity should not be subjugated

(2) humanity should not go extinct before it’s our time

Even Kim Jong Un would agree with these principles.

Currently, any AGI or ASI built based on any of the known architectures contemplated in the literature which have been invented thus far would not meet a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of being aligned with these two values.
For Cruise, manual remote takeover was more common than previously admitted.[1] "Every 4 to 5 miles".

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...
Sam already is a billionaire
There must be an insane number of non-competes though, to stop that? Especially with the amount of VC funding - that must have been included?
Idk it’s been one of the top speculations since the beginning of this drama.
> It's still not routinely possible to get computers without a preinstalled operating system from most manufacturers in the U.S., even decades later.

In brick and mortar shops yes. However online it is pretty easy nowadays to buy a computer without an OS or with a preinstalled linux distro which you aren't paying a license for.
Looking forward to reading Sam and Greg's connects.
Sam might be a good product manager.
Why do you want them to be crushed? They decided that Sam didn't represent the charter and acted accordingly. Do I think it was a boneheaded move? Sure. But maybe it was the right move for them even in spite of the optics?
To make termux-emacs touchscreen friendly, you need these

(xterm-mouse-mode 1)
(global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-5>") 'scroll-up-command)
(global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-4>") 'scroll-down-command)
Seems like a good compromise?

OpenAI continues to develop core AI offered over API. Microsoft builds the developer ecosystem around it -- that's Sam's expertise anyway. Microsoft has made a bunch of investment in the developer ecosystem in GitHub and that fits the theme. Assuming Sam sticks around.

Also, the way the tweet is worded (looking forward to working with OpenAI), seems like its a truce negotiated by Satya?
Being successful as an artist has very little to do with making good art. It's much more about getting picked up by one of the handful of major galleries that will promote you to collectors as the new "hot" artist.
Yeah, at this point the languages and OSs should (IMHO) be distancing them from the multiple craziness of the committee
Transplanting hundreds of species around the world in viable groups is probably a bad idea too.
Their alternative is to start a new AI company.

At this point in time a new AI company would be bottle-necked by lack of NVIDIA GPUs. They are sold out for the medium term future.

So if Sam and Greg were to start a new AI company, even with billions of initial capital (very likely given their street cred) they would spend at a minimum several months just acquiring the hardware needed to compete with OpenAI.

With Microsoft they have the hardware from day one and unlimited capital.

At the same time their competitor, OpenAI, gets most of the money from Microsoft (a deal negotiated by Sam, BTW).

So Microsoft decided to compete with OpenAI.

This is the worst possible outcome for OpenAI: they loose talent, pretty much loose their main source of cash (not today but medium to long term) and get cash rich and GPU-rich competitor who's now their main customer.
I'm guessing this is the end of OpenAI. People aren't going to want to work at OpenAI anymore due to the value destruction that just occurred. It's going to be hard for them to raise money now because of the bad rep they have now. It going to be hard for them to hire top talent. You have two leaders, top engineers and researchers leaving the company. Google and Facebook come in a grab up any top talent that still there because they can offer them money and equity.

The company will probably still exist, but the company isn't going to be worth what it is today.
> Do anti-compete clauses work when you’ve been ousted?

In jurisdictions where they are enforceable, yes, they generally are not limited based on the manner the working relationship terminated (since they are part of an employment contract, they might become void if there was a breach by the employer.)
> This could be the healing of the cancer that OpenAI brought to this field to make it closed as a whole.

I don’t know. The damage might be permanent. Everyone is probably going to be way more careful with what information they release and how they release it. Altman corrupted the entire community with his aggressive corporate push. The happy-go-lucky “look what we created” attitude of the community might be probably gone for good. Now every suit is going to be asking “can we make massive amount of money with this” or “can I spin up a hype train with this”.
I bet "new advanced AI research team" at Microsoft is going to be underwhelming for many, but really, it should be eye-opening. This is what startups, especially VC-backed capital-intensive AI startups, usually are.
Sam is rich, I assume being CEO of one of the worlds largest companies is a far greater award than extra money when you're at the billionaire level, especially at 38. But I do think this is probably non-compete related too.
I think that the pro-capitalist faction forgot that the opposing side are people capable of planing the development of an artificial consciousness.

Should they decide to sink to the level of VC scheming briefly, it will be like child's play for them.
Microsoft is the winner here. They will probably use Sam/Greg's technical know how to reproduce GPT4 internally, and also direct future research based on current OpenAI approaches which they are certainly aware of. This also shields Microsoft from being dependent on an external entity that they cannot control.

Anyways, Satya played very smart with the hands he was dealt, got what he needed.
I actually don't think OpenAI being a startup is beneficial for them at this moment.

OpenAI already has a very clear business model, that is selling completion/chat/agent API based on their model. What they need is to productize it.

Their roadmap is GPT4/5/6/7
10 billion was potential investment. They transfer that in tranches, so lot of it is still in MS bank. They already have access to GPT3/4/turbo + Dalle 2/3. Plus with its hordes of lawyers, it will be an uphill battle for OpenAI to make MS lose.
Who are these "sales people" you're referring to? Surely not Greg Brockman, one of the most talented engineers in the world.
I guess that’s more applicable to ordinary employees. Using trade secrets obtained from your previous employer would still be problematic
If I recall correctly, Mira Murati was actually the person responsible for productizing GPT into a Chatbot. Prior to that, OpenAI's plan was just to build models and sell API access until they reach AGI.

I know there's a lot of talk about Ilya, but if Sam poaches Mira (which seems likely at this point), I think OpenAI will struggle to build things people actually want, and will go back to being an R&D lab.
The BBC Domesday Project has some remarkable content, containing observations on life from an extraordinary range of people at the time it was made. I recently read an entry from a child of the age I would have been at the time, talking about "milk time" (if anyone remembers that) and the school day. It was fascinating.

It was brought back online for a while, but I can't seem to find it, the BBC have archived the page:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/domesday
You can spawn as many processes as you want in a container, did you not know that?

But you only need access to the /proc/pid directory to change another processes env.
Satya will probably allow them to run a startup under the MS umbrella without interference and with full MS backing.
I'll bet Microsoft offered him a very sweet deal, which for Sam means lots of autonomy.

Microsoft is happy. They get to wrap this movie before the markets open.

Edit: I also agree with bayindirh below. These things can both be true.
He can court developers he has existing relationships with.
Seems like a logical choice. Microsoft’s next big play is generative AI, and they’ve put a lot of money into that.

They need to show they’re taking steps to stabilize things now that their hype factory has come unraveled.

I don’t think they particularly need these people , because they likely already have in house talent that is competitive. But having these people on board now will allow them to paint a much more stable picture to their shareholders.
People really need to stop with this AGI bullshit. They make a glorified Markov chain and suddenly they should have AGI? Self-driving cars are barely able to stay on the road after all this time, but sure, someone's hiding conscious machines in their basement.
And still they are hiring him. Different take: You are a CEO who just spend 10 billion to bevome a minority shareholder in the latest, hotest tech start up the world has ever seen. This start-up is controlled by a non-profit so. And then this non-profit kicks out the poster child of the whole industry, and you cannot do a thing about it. Well, you have to answer to a board as well. And what do you think that board will ask you about this whole affaire?
Let's see whether Satya Nadella's bet on that risk will pay or not. Chance is a "biased random" in the real world. Let's see whether his bias is strong enough to make a difference.
Sauron declares: Saruman to join Mordor.
Worked(?) for Carmack and Luckey
Just curious what do you think is bad about the user side experience of chatgpt? It seems pretty slick to me and I use it most days.
Again "they will be aligned with us because they designed such that their motivation will be to serve us." If you got this outcome from reading I robot either you should reread them because obviously it was decades ago or you build your own safe reality to match your arguments. Usually it's the latter.
But I didn't intend 2000 to be an arbitrary cutoff. 1980 is important because it's right before Reagan- and Thatcher-style economics. And if you look at measures of wealth inequality (e.g. the share of wealth owned by billionaires), that's actually become worse especially during the pandemic.
The new models and data would stay at OpenAI. You can have thousands of researchers and compute, but if you don’t have “it”, you are behind (ask Google).

In Microsoft he still has access to the models, and that’s all he needs to execute his ideas.
I understand why this would be uniquely valuable for a startup, but why is this be uniquely valuable for MSFT? Are they planning on raising a series B next year?
Yeah, this is a huge validation of what Ilya and the Board did. If Sam and Greg had started another company with similar aims, even if it wasn't non-profit, they would probably keep arguing that what they were doing was only to get enough resources to be able to solve the problem of AGI with a broad benefit to humanity, and it probably would have turned into a big ideological schism between Sam's side insisting that a profit-seeking company was okay to pursue the goal, and OpenAI insisting on pursuing the goal and not getting distracted by greed.

Sam and Greg joining up with Microsoft settles that debate cleanly, they clearly aren't serious about developing AGI without a profit motive or military control determining the development process if they're docking with Microsoft. I don't think Ilya and the Board would have had any doubts about Sam if they fired him, but if they did this would remove them.
Satya probably offered the one resource they couldn’t buy at the scale/speed they need: GPUs. Both time on Azure’s cloud, as well as promise of some of the first Azure Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips.
And this kind of thinking seems to be the exact reason he was pushed away. “The future” as envisioned by a megacorp might not be that great.
I really don’t think that’s in the Microsoft DNA to do
if hot shot startup folks don't want to work there, why would they even go there? If you're flat broke, you need a job; they're not flat broke, they don't need a job. The deal at MS is worth it, or it's not, it's not something they need to decide over the course of a weekend... unless it's what they were already not being candid about.
Satya wins

Sam wins

Ilya and the board continue to look like fools
No. They need a lot of money and computation resources to work on. In order to continue their work, they either A). raise a massive fund B). be employed by a big corp. There's no surprise they chose the latter. After all, MS has a research department on this domain.
[This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general articles or opinions in social media.]

Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces, last few being from Sam's Camp.

msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is pretty hard. and not giving money to OpenAI is akin to killing your golden goose.

The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.” This is by far my favourite example of PR piece.

I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially. Or atleast re-evaluating after a week, how much you read was false.
He did lead together with greg at openai. Not as researchers. For that they hired the initial research team.
They could spin-off their own OpenAI competitor with Microsoft being in pole position for another sweet deal.