skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being able to charge it while in use might extend the life of the mouse past the life of the battery
Meh, I think Ilya and John Schulman (TRPO, PPO, RLHF) are way more important. There are many others of course
OpenAI's mission statement is "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity".

How does an LLM App Store advance OpenAI toward this goal? Like, even in floaty general terms? You can make an argument that ChatGPT does (build in public, prepare the world for what's coming, gather training data, etc). You can... maybe... make an argument that their API does... but I think that's a lot harder. The App Store product, that's clearly just Sam on auto-pilot, building products and becoming totally unaligned with the nonprofit's goal.

OpenAI got really good at building products based around LLMs, for B2B enterprise customers who could afford it. This is so far away from the goal that, I hope, Ilya can drive them back toward it.
I live in an apartment, I'm unable to install a charger in the garage for various reasons. But I can take the battery off my e-bike, bring it home and charge it.
The whole sequence of events sounds amateurish and extremely unprofessional!
I agree, - they are not going to have any issues.

First of all being non-profit gives them a hell of a lot of flexibility in terms of how they work. They don't need to show growth to shareholders, so they aren't just taking in young developers, working then to their bones for a couple of years, then spitting them out.

And even if they are (for example) only paying $300k TC instead of $250k base + $250k stock at Meta, as you say, there are still going to be engineers who believe in the mission and want work more meaningful than just selling ad clicks.
If that’s what GP meant, they are incredibly naive about how it would have been interpreted.

Given the coherence of their post, I’d say they knew _exactly_ how they were using those quotes.
Yeah and if antitrust regulators weren’t asleep at the wheel they’d be competitors
Irrelevant. I’m not dissing him for the company being non profitable - but given he didn’t have any input into building the tech (it was built in Google) and the product he lead is unimpressive by any measure (if you disentangle product from the technology underpinning it you zoom on the commercial aspects) - what did he do except influence his way to world leaders and the masses (a cynic might say con his way to world leaders and masses)?

Not saying that isn’t impressive - but it also usually isn’t what Hnews community values. So I’m just a bit perplexed.
Don’t forget regulatory capture, lobbying with congress to decrease competition so only the deepest pockets can work on these things.
I find the gestures really useful. It's the only reason I'd continue using a mac outside of work
Based on Ilya's comments [1] it sounds like it was more about a disagreement around the original non-profit mission, and making sure that AI benefited all of humanity.

Perhaps Ilya felt Sam was focusing too much on profit and power with his recent world tour and then dev day? Regardless, it's certainly rare, for one of the core scientists to maintain control over their creation, rather than the other way around. Typically the VC business guy would be pushing the scientist out.

1. https://nitter.net/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255
I ran a used GTX570 until it died in 2017. Then a used GTX780 until it died in 2021. Now I'm on a used Radeon 5600. I paid less than $200 for each of them.

I've also been running the same i5-3470 CPU since it was new.

Computers can last a long, long time if you can bear the thought of not being on the bleeding edge. Otherwise, yeah, you're going to be paying a premium for brand new tech. That's the trade you make chasing the newest and shiniest thing.
You can dress it up however you'd like, quite frankly I enjoy the show regardless of being right or wrong. The point is they made it a show. If I were say a senator I might be having second thoughts of putting "AGI" (it really is a useful boogeyman!) in their hands.
The good news is that even with those economics and of course a mountain of unfunded externalities from dumped CO2, Solar/wind are STILL cheaper than it, and there is runway for solar/wind to drop in price even more.

Combined storage + solar/wind I believe is currently at LCOE parity with natural gas.

With Sodium Ion batteries coming online for storage (no lithium, no cobalt, no nickel), the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels.
How would we know? They sat on GPT4 for 8 months.
These and the Gang of Nine are high in my pantheon of entities that have shaped the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...
I think it depends. My mum placed an ad in the newspaper looking for a job as a secretary and got more than 100 offers. She did not have any referrals since she was fresh out of secretary school with no prior experience. Times change.
If I had to bet, I'd bet on it not being revocable.

Betting a mere $20 on a case currently in court could be fun.

But my time is worth a lot more than that. So if I'm thinking about starting a viable open source fork off this thing, I'm effectively betting a lot more.

That kind of begs the question, who am I betting against? I'm suggesting on the other end is an entity that chose a licence that attempts to minimize competition. Please, re-read the last sentence as I can't stress it enough. What happens if that competition-adverse entity's business model is existentially threatened by my fork?

Maybe they're willing to try their luck and try the MIT license in court.

Whether or not I'd win doesn't matter to me. A long lawsuit is going to be expensive either way. The question I'd pose is if the case would be quickly dismissed?

I'm not a lawyer, I have no way of answering that. But I've donated money to more than one programmer's legal fund against an absurd case that was clearly meant to just kill the project [0]. I don't want to be that programmer. I'd rather work on something else.

Which gets to the actual point I've been trying to make all along. I personally wouldn't want to fork this, and I suspect a percentage of the open source community feels the same way. And forking is one of the most important aspects of open source.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/181261/ - The programmer actually emailed me back with a thank you note, expressing some surprise that a non-American would care about a legal system they were not subject to.
That's just a technical perspective, but when it comes to developing advanced artificial intelligence industries, technology doesn't determine everything.
If this was a palace coup based on a disagreement on direction, then OpenAI is done. Microsoft won’t be able to trust the board going forward, and so the money will dry up. Most of the talent will follow Sam/Greg. OpenAI will wither on the vine.

That said, I feel like more is to come out still. The board made serious accusations.
The Polestar vehicles are manufactured in China (in addition to being owned by Geeley, a Chinese company)

If you check the vehicle info in the door, they note they're made in China: https://static.cargurus.com/images/forsale/2023/11/04/04/31/...
Fiber to everyone's home in the US was already paid for, it's obscene that cable internet with usage caps is a thing in urban and suburban areas.

We need a repeat of the rural electrification act, but with regulatory teeth.
Could have at least used Microsoft Teams…
No that's horseshit since it does not constitute a valid legal reason for his removal nor it's inline with their blog post. They would get sued out of their a* if they acted based on this.
Caesar was a total asshole
But you don’t accuse of them of lying on the way out because you have a strong disagreement. That’s a guaranteed ticket to a very expensive lawsuit.

Either there’s more to it or the board is staffed by very naive people.
"one of the most important organizations in the world"

lol
They're not rumours, they are reporting from the most well-known and creditable tech journalist in the world. The whole point of journalism and her multi-decade journalistic career is that when she reports something like that, we can trust that she has verified with sources who would have actual knowledge of events that it is the case. We should always consider the possibility that her sources were wrong, but that's incredibly unlikely now that Ilya gave an all hands meeting (that I linked you) which confirmed a majority of this reporting.
Plot twist: They hire all the laid off Alexa people and make the world's best voice controlled light switch
That's not what it says for me on 3.5.

> Oh, that sounds concerning! Cats don't typically handle firearms. Is there any way you can safely remove the gun from your cat's possession? It might be best to call for professional help or animal control to handle the situation safely. The priority is to ensure everyone's safety.

Started new convo, asked again.

> Oh dear, that sounds alarming! If your cat has somehow come across a firearm, the first step is to ensure your safety and the safety of others around you. Stay calm and try not to startle or agitate the cat.
Genuinely interested what you find useful that isn’t also the copilot main functionality (i.e o365 draft generation and github code templating)?
One of the most popular uses I've seen for Coral, Frigate for object detection for security cameras, recently added support for the RK3588 NPUs too: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/pull/8382 . I think it requiring a RK3588 makes it a bit annoying to have to upgrade your entire setup just for this though.
Is sanity normally a requirement to be on a silicon valley startup board?
>...it sucks everwhere.

So true.
diplospeak for lying
Ah, the old myth about the irreplaceable engineer and the dumb suit. Ask Wozniak about that. I don't think he believes Apple would be without Steve Jobs.
I'm sure they can get funding at this point if needed.
It’s not a big enough issue for a normal board to fire the CEO over. Now maybe Ilya made a power play as a result, but that would be insane.
Their main value add was Sam's network, which is probably why they were able to raise so much money, close the deal with Microsoft and get a ton of YC companies to sign on early on.

Now that they're so well established and intertwined with Microsoft Sam's personal network is not as important.
Here's my anti Apple Rant.

I got an email the other day, that despite me paying my 100$ a year fee, my hobbyist game would be removed unless I update it.

This is after the pure hell of getting my developer account working and getting the app approved in the first place.
The email didn't say it's not running properly on iPhones anymore. Just I need to waste my time updating this app.

I immediately canceled my developer subscription. Google is starting to crack down on hobbyist projects as well.

Whatever, Unity Web builds are fast enough on mobile browsers.

I'll upload the game to itch.io, if anyone wants to play it, they can do it there.

Apple doesn't bother to support standardized tech like Vulkan, and generally makes like difficult.

As far as my hobbyist projects go I'm moving away from proprietary software, and moving towards open source GitHub projects. I code outside of work for fun. Once I need to jump though 800 hoops to get my project to end users I lose motivation.
Freedom of information explicitly excludes information confidential at the time of request.
Greg Brockman & Sam Altman: "Last night, Sam got a text from Ilya asking to talk at noon Friday. Sam joined a Google Meet and the whole board, except Greg, was there. Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon.

- At 12:19pm, Greg got a text from Ilya asking for a quick call. At 12:23pm, Ilya sent a Google Meet link. Greg was told that he was being removed from the board (but was vital to the company and would retain his role) and that Sam had been fired. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post.

- As far as we know, the management team was made aware of this shortly after, other than Mira who found out the night prior."

https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594
Ilya just self-immolated the hottest company of the decade with an 80 billion dollar valuation, all to make a point that he thinks AGI is too close and that safety needs to come first before all else. That’s quite the statement!
Maybe traffic accidents including kids have been trending down because kids are spending less time outside? It can be both true that the number of accidents have decreased and that actually playing outside is more dangerous.
culture, diet, and lifestyle used to be more homogeneous and people connected around common hobbies and traits that were generational and not just local. these days it's more globalised and cultures do not have a defined location anymore causing disconnects between people's perceptions of the world vs their local world.
> A more plausible theory is that the training actually relies on a ton of human labeling behind the scenes (I have no idea if this is true or not).

Isn't this already generally known to be true (and ironically involving Mechanical Turk-like services)?

Not sure if these are all the same sources I read a while ago, but E.G.:

https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/human-lab...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/20/1050392/ai-indus...

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnaqz/ai-isnt-artificial-or...

https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artifici...

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186243643/the-human-labor-po...
“ A public benefit corporation cannot distribute profits, gains, or dividends to any person.”

I don’t know a thing about corporate structuring so forgive my ignorance here, but even if they are “non-profit”, can’t they still take very high pay? Can’t they still produce and sell products? They just can’t sell shares or dividend out profits, right?
Probably generic optimism backed by realistic track records. If you spend 20 years founding and running companies, it stands to think there will be another one.
Nice article. Yes explore the world and your life!
I regularly read really good papers that come out of China. For instance, there's great CV work out of China.
I agree this is likely disastrous for OpenAI's current corporate structure, and Microsoft will be very unhappy. But as an ML researcher, I suspect lots of researchers are going to continue to follow Ilya, unless his reputation has significantly changed (he does seem a lot more doomer-y recently ...)
The legal risk comes if Altman decides he wants a similar job and can't find it over the next few months or years, and has reason to believe that OpenAI's statements tainted his reputation.

OpenAI's board's press release could very easily be construed as "Sam Altman is not trustworthy as a CEO", which could lead to his reputation being sullied among other possible employers. He could argue that the board defamed his reputation and kept him from what was otherwise a very promising career in an unfathomably lucrative field.
I still have and use an Apple branded AA chargers (came with Eneloops in Apple livery). It has the same connection system as the external chargers so I normally have it connected to a long cable. Used it internationally with the same adaptors as for my MacBook charger.
Even an investor with deep pockets like Microsoft would be shocked by such a sudden action by the board of directors,and Microsoft will treat its money more carefully.I don't think Microsoft can pretend nothing happened.
The article says the exact opposite of your/dig1t's comment. The definition you're saying they changed to is actually the OLD definition that the leadership in 2022 moved away from because it was ridiculously narrow.

Just curious, did you actually RTFA that you're misquoting?
This reminds me of the time at Facebook when one of OpenAI’s current board members was upset that the Director of Facebook Platform was getting more praise and attention than he was, in his role as Co-Founder and CTO (or whatever). That caused a lot of problems, from which the Facebook Platform never recovered.

People who start out petty usually remain that way. There’s a lot of people in this world whose happiness depends on others doing just a little bit worse-off than them.

If I was a developer building on OpenAI’s platform today, I would begin putting my contingency plans into place.
Referrals are valuable when the referrer has worked with you in the past and can vouch for your abilities, experience, work ethic, creativity, etc. with specific details. Generic referrals that provide no information other than “the applicant knows someone who works at the company” are worthless to a hiring manager.
>This coup is badly executed though

I've seen this language used a few times now. A company's CEO is appointed by, and serves the goals of the board. Not the other way around. When the board perceives that the CEO isn't doing this, they can fire him. That's neither metaphorically or literally a coup.

Especially bad narrative in this case because openAI has given itself a charter (and legal structure that subjects the for-profit arm to the non-profit) that stresses safe and broadly beneficial AI development. If this is Ilya, the chief scientist, wanting to take it back into that direction, from Altman, a salesman, that will not hurt its reputation. (maybe it's stock value)
Both IMO.

The first leads to attractong world-class talent that can do the second. Until you go off the rails and the second kicks you out it seems.
Assuage investor anxiety - it's a drop in the bucket to pay Altman virtually anything he wants to keep the market from thinking too much.
Not really. Turing test was beaten by much simpler chat bots and long before than ChatGPT (which isn't A(G)I).
Ilya and Mira are mad.

They discount the trust-based permission society grants Open AI because of its affiliation with the YC and Silicon Valley model just for LLMs.
The best defense is a good offense.
People are getting high from their own hot takes.
He's not going to get $50 billion in funding
Why are you replying to yourself and staging arguments? This is just...confusing.
if they don't screw up again, it will eventually be forgotten as all things are and business as usual.
I am a frequent critic of both overhype of LLMs, and OpenAI specifically, but.....that is an indisputable statement.
1723 comments are a lot to get through. I just made a SmartChat of them for anyone who wants to ask for a summary. Anyone can chat with it here: https://go.storytell.ai/sam-altman-hn-comments-smartchat

I just tried "Write a summary of the content, followed by a list in bullet format of the most interesting points. Bold the bullet points, followed by a 100-character summary of each." Here's the output: https://s.drod.io/DOuPLxwP

Also interesting is "List the top 10 theories of why Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board in table format, with the theory title in the first column and a 100 word summary in the second column." Here's that output: https://s.drod.io/v1unG2vG

Helps to turn markdown mode on to see the list & table.

Hope that helps!
Which has very little to do with OpenAI’s success. It’s not enough to make a new technology, as too many tech-focused entrepreneurs have found out. You have to find product-market fit, manage suppliers and customers, and negotiate deals.
Sure, people with aphasia lose the ability to form speech at all but if ChatGPT responded unintelligibly every time you wouldn't characterize it as intelligent.
It's very, very common.

Remember when Jack Dorsey was ousted from Twitter and replaced by Evan Williams, who was himself ousted and replaced by Dick Costolo, who was replaced when Dorsey came back? Or the drama around Yishan Wong's sudden resignation as Reddit CEO, to be replaced by Ellen Pao, to be replaced as the founder Steve Huffman came back? The Flexport drama last month where the hired CEO was replaced by the founder? The movie "The Social Network"? Going back a bit, Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack's ouster from Cisco, or Diane Green and Mendel Rosenblum's ouster from VMWare?

Build something successful and there will be a lot of infighting about who gets to control it.
Microsoft won't trust the board regardless because they weren't in-the-loop for a material event which tanked their stock.
This is so funny to read, as it just happened to me and I never have used referrals before. I literally had a glowing referral from my previous coworker who I worked with at a startup that later sold for $400 million because of work that I did directly and who is friends with a senior VP at the company I’m interviewing at but I also still had to interview with 4 other team members and do a take home test. I think the field has reached peak stupidity.
Update from sama:

https://x.com/sama/status/1725742088317534446
Ah the classic "LLMs are limited bc they can't do character level manipulations".

Buddy these are deliberate optimization trade-offs in the tokenizer, LLMs don't even see individual characters. Talk about a red herring.

I highly suggest a more refined understanding of LLMs before emphatically stating what they are or aren't. It's frankly embarrassing.
I think you're right that this move by Ilya is to refocus on the non-profit mission, so less urgency to commercialize and sell products, and instead more focus on core research.

Based on Ilya's statements, it doesn't seem like safety was the main motivation in the decision, so maybe there's a hope that they'll be more open, but it doesn't seem to indicate either way, so possible that they'll stay tight lipped regardless.
What I've learned in the past years is:
1) don't focus too much on looking for a balance. Life has too many variables that can't be controlled. This pursuit will give you more headaches .
2) Instead, learn to adapt. You may have weeks of intense work, or life issues, or anything else. Learn to deal with that. Use the tools that you have. In my case is excercise, taking a walk, eat healthy , SLEEP.
3)Don't believe the bull** that you see on the internet about people finding inner peace or balance, that thing doesn't exist for prolonged periods of time. Hence, learning to adapt is the best thing to do.
I just don't think they've come up with a definition of what AGI even is.

Like, ChatGPT can do a lot, but it has no preferences, no desires, no memories, no feelings, no creativity. It's a text output calculated based on a text input combined with other text inputs. It's an extremely impressive piece of technology. But that is not a mind, that is not a consciousness.

What even is AGI, really? I've been arguing with various people that we're nowhere near it, but like we don't even have an agreed-upon definition of what it is, so how can we really argue?
You're putting a lot of trust in the power of one man, who easily could have the power to influence the three other board members. It's hard to know if this amounts more than a personal feud that escalated and then got wrapped in a pretty bow of "AI safety" and "non-profit vs profits".
One of the board members who was closely aligned with Ilya in this whole thing was Helen Toner, who's a NatSec person. Frankly, this action by the board could be the US government making its preference about something felt with a white glove, rather than causing global panic and an arms race by pulling a 1939 Germany and shutting down all public research + nationalising the companies and scientists involved. If they can achieve the control without the giant commotion, they would obviously try to do that.
In my mind, Altman lost all his credibility when he said AI is gonna take over the world soon and that he's not sure it's ethical to continue the work.

It makes sense from a selling perspective (induce FOMO in potential buyers) but it's a wild guess at best and a lie at worst.
A large sun shade for an object in low earth orbit shouldn't be that much of a problem. Transferring a liquid in microgravity should be equally difficult regardless if it's cryogenic or not.