skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty sure only OpenAI (the non-profit) holds the IP. I don't see why they'd give Microsoft a transferable license.
OpenAI is a non-profit focused on developing safe AGI and Steve Jobs was pivotal in the success of Apple - not sure if Jobs' firing is a good comparison for Sam's firing.
That is a secondary and huge problem, but the larger initial problem is making sure the AI aligns with values that nearly all humans have (e.g. don't kill all humans)
They accept payments in a USD/EUR or other FIAT pegged token, such as USDC, USDT, EURe, etc.
> No idea what the future holds for any of the players here. Reality truly is stranger than fiction.

Is it though? "No outcome where [OpenAI] is one of the big five technology companies. My hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big." -Adam D'Angelo
I think Ilya is getting what he wanted. Although, that may yet have disastrous consequences for the company if employees follow through on mass quitting, thus freeing him up. But if they can quickly prevent people leaving in the short term, maybe urgent discontent will pass.
You’re suggesting college used to provide job training? The trend is reversed actually - fewer humanities, more stem. So this does not explain why job access has grown more challenging
Very true. And to be fair Microsoft does have a great reputation for research.

It really is a massive change in direction and a lost opportunity to set their own course.
Not a word from Ilya. I can’t wrap my mind around his motivation. Did he really fire Sam over “AI safety” concerns? How is that remotely rational.
I think it's still pretty early to know how lasting these ARRs are. We are still early on the hype cycle here. Chat based language models have definitely found good uses, so I don't think we'll ever see them go away, but I'm just cautious about how much net revenue these will really generate (particularly when the expense of the cards needed to train/run them is so high).
On one hand, I worry that it doesn't represent anything more than following the herd. For a long time, and not long ago, the herd followed people like Musk, Bankman-Fried, etc., and other cults of personality. I think a lot had to do with Trump - even people who say they hated him have followed his model (he was the President, after all) of behavior, business, and personal character, even non-famous people I know personally.

As best I can say regarding such a broad, poorly defined topic: Due to the brazen, distasteful, dangerous megalomania and seeing real consequences at Twitter and FTX, and others (Theranos, etc.), that brazen megalomania seems to have re-acquired the bad reputation that common sense has eternally given it, in every place and time.

Obviously, it's a ridiculous, self-destructive, dangerous idea. Whatever the cause, I'm glad people seem to be regaining their senses - but will they do it quickly and completely enough, will they be manipulated into blaming someone else (a massive risk in the post-truth world that accepts dis/misinformation), and will the megalomaniacs retain their attitudes and power, and then use it to suppress others.
>As a contractor, I singlehandedly migrated 4 different codebases from 2 to 3; a total of just under a million lines of code, and none of these codebases took more than 40 hours. This was not some horrific burden for most companies using Python. The people who flamed Python for these breaking changes were either extreme outliers or the sort of people who would be happy with the language never making breaking changes, ever, no matter how bad of mistakes in design were discovered.

Imagine I just randomly came up to you and demanded a few thousand dollars, you probably wouldn't be too happy about it. That's essentially what the python maintainers did: collectively demand tens of thousands of hours worth of labor from developers, labor that could have been spent doing something enjoyable or profitable, but instead was wasted on menial work because the Python developers thought some minor changes were worth breaking things for everyone. I.e. they put a much higher value on their own subjective ideas of cleanliness than on the time of all Python users.
I find it kind of funny that Altman got into this kind of trouble when presumably he is an expert on startup structure after having advised startups for so many years at YC.
People here seem to love cities; I lived in some of the biggest and smallest ones and I never liked them; noise, pollution, nasty people. Can’t see what the attraction is. So I live rural for most of my life. The easiest plus thing is the talk of people how expensive urban housing and life is ; not here; it’s cheap. If you work in IT you can retire in your 20s/early 30s if you want. Cannot see how the ‘comforts’ of a city can ever beat that freedom.
If you count hyperthreads as cores, AMD 9754 dual socket is 512 in one node.
God. I remember for a while there in the 90s, Dell was kinda the "gold standard" for mainstream consumer PCs.

They often came with nice (Dell rebranded) Trinitron monitors although I think that was usually an upgrade over some base monitor.
Isn't that the problem though? No outside feedback? Just whatever the current board thinks?
What's an old and boring trope is "uses computers therefore it's a tech company".
> were meant to ...

Many inventions "were meant to" to do one thing, but wound up doing something else far more valuable.

The value of a tool has little to do with the original intent of its inventor.
But a number of those other employees have said they'll leave if Altman isn't rehired.
It’s all rumors and innuendos at this point.
Would be pretty weird to step in Sam’s replacement if he was philosophically aligned with him?
What will be the dilution in value of Microsoft's stake if Altman has funding for a competitor?
> not sure if Jobs' firing is a good comparison

Because they are different products?

Or because Altman wasn't pivotal in the success of OpenAI?
Emmett's just a placeholder after Murati turned. I suspect he won't stay in his position for long.
> But I hope they can maintain their Silicon Valley culture and not succumb to becoming a complete GM outpost.

Silicon valley has not shipped a successful product in the space that Cruise is in, and its quite possible no company ever will, so maybe "succumbing" to a different culture could be a good thing.
Unforuntately hardwalled but https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23967515/sam-altman-open... has a bit more.

Edit: comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342643.
This is the guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw_ckNH-tT8
At this point, is there any reason to think this arrangement will last longer than 24-48 hours?
Microsoft owns the GPUs and has rights to continue operating current models. The only value OpenAI had was cohesion of engineering talent as it relates to model development velocity.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/openai-azure-s...

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/18/2023/openai-has-receiv...

> Only a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI has been wired to the startup, while a significant portion of the funding, divided into tranches, is in the form of cloud compute purchases instead of cash, according to people familiar with their agreement.

> That gives the software giant significant leverage as it sorts through the fallout from the ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The firm’s board said on Friday that it had lost confidence in his ability to lead, without giving additional details.

> One person familiar with the matter said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes OpenAI’s directors mishandled Altman’s firing and the action has destabilized a key partner for the company. It’s unclear if OpenAI, which has been racking up expenses as it goes on a hiring spree and pours resources into technological developments, violated its contract with Microsoft by suddenly ousting Altman.

> Microsoft has certain rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property so if their relationship were to break down, Microsoft would still be able to run OpenAI’s current models on its servers.
Should apps orchestrate a super-global lock of a foreign namespace?

An environment variable's value, for a running process, is just what it is: an initial value from outside.

Adding complexity around it smells like an attempt to control a distributed mutex, like checking an API for real-time value changes in a while loop across several instances of the same app.

I thought there would be alternatives to this, like pubsub, Kafka, or other asynchronous event handling.

Imagine having to test an app for its ability to handle safe read-write of OS-level state. It's definitionally bankrupt: not really a unit, not easy to set up quickly, and not isolated.
I used to drive the Case to the Rural King every so often. While it was fun trolling the suburbanites heading to work during rush hour by going 25 mph in a large piece of farm machinery that they couldn't run off the road, I ultimately got a city job, so I gave the rural life up and haven't really looked back.

Miss carding my own wool and spinning my own yarn though. That was nice and meditative.

I think the major reason why you don't see support for rural living as often (or, as you noted, at all) is, well, the people who want walkable cities and bicycle infrastructure are the folks for whom economic opportunity is predicated on being close to the city. As it turns out, that's where the majority of industry happens to be.

It also turns out that cars are annoying when going slow and steady to get someplace (and enjoy the moment all the while) is just as fine.

(Is that truly why I used to abuse my old Case that way? Maybe!)
What I think is funny is how the whole "we're just doing this to make sure AI is safe" meme breaks down, if you have OpenAI, Anthropic, and Altman AI all competing, which seems likely now.

Do you really need all 3? Is each one going to claim that they're the only ones who can develop AGI safely?

Since Sam left, now OpenAI is unsafe? But I thought they were the safe ones, and he was being reckless.

Or is Sam just going to abandon the pretense, competing Google- and Microsoft-style? e.g. doing placement deals, attracting eyeballs, and crushing the competition.

Surely that's what you need for safety?
Well the employees have their stock in OpenAI and needed their saviour back to get it realized and it looks like they are now have choice.

Follow their dear saviour into a new venture or stay on a ship with their shares that will begin to sink at markets open.

Microsoft maybe holding a very huge bag. Probably will sue.
Adam solved the issue very “elegantly” and Ilya can finally continue allocating more compute for his research interests. A dream of a board as you can see by the reactions of the investors ;)
Her move makes even less sense than what the board did. The board told her the day before that they're firing Sam, so she obviously accepted it. But, one day later she caves and sides with Sam (that's what the heart tweet means)? That's weak leadership and resolve.
That's not Emmett?
It's good because Sam was pushing for regulatory capture to harm startups and open-source efforts.
ChatGPT Plus was never intended to be OpenAI's main revenue stream. The real cash is in the GPT API, which they're currently making good money on, but which also directly competes with a GPT API offered by Azure.

OP might have a point: if OpenAI declines, devs might prefer the Azure API over the OpenAI API for factors like stability, quality, response time, better integration with existing Azure stack, etc.
The perception right now is that the board doesn't care about investors, this will kill this company that is burning money at an insane rate. Employees will run for the exits unless they are convinced that there is a future exit.
Your $20/mo isn’t covering their costs. They sought additional financing.
Such a course will just give the people who want to commit fraud the tools they need to get away with it more successfully.
:s Am I getting up early to sell my MSFT at the bell?

What a ridiculous end to this chapter of the story.
I believe those are investor the in for-profit organization while the board is responsible for the non-profit org, and I believe the for-profit is bound to the mission of the non profit but not the other way around.

But I'm sure someone here knows the legal structure better than I do, I just quickly skimmed over

https://openai.com/our-structure
MS doesn't own GPT4
Ideology is often used both in the sense of "A well organized philosophy shared by numerous people" and "one's own personal philosophy".

For instance, from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ideology, "the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual (...)"
I can’t what to see how these backstabbing stewards of AGI align our future overlords.
Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message.

I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of them) who joined OpenAI recently with pure financial incentives. They'll jump to Sam's new company cause of course that's where they'd make real money.

This coupled with investors like Microsoft backing off definitely makes it fair to question the survival of OpenAI in the form we see today.

And this is exactly what makes me question Adam D'Angelo's motives as a board member. Maybe he wanted OpenAI to slow down or stop existing, to keep his Poe by Quora (and their custom assistants) relevant. GPT Agents pretty much did what Poe was doing overnight, and you can have as many as them with your existing 20$ ChatGPT Plus subscription. But who knows I'm just speculating here like everyone else.
Contrarian prediction: OpenAI will be just fine.

The board will bring in an adult CEO who can balance the nonprofit charter with Microsoft and the commercial business, and who doesn't have a million side projects taking his or her focus away. Some employees will leave but the vast majority will stay for the usual reasons (i.e. inertia), the business will keep growing because ChatGPT is already a worldwide brand at this point and the vast majority of users don't give a hoot about any of this palace intrigue as long as the product works.

And the board will ultimately be vindicated for acting as fiduciaries for the nonprofit's mission and bylaws -- and not for the financial interests of Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, and the like.
Stop inflating some people's bank accounts by squeezing everyone else to death.
They won't be able to catch up to and surpass OpenAI. At least not for a few years. I'm in the camp that we ought to solve alignment before we get to AGI and also of the camp that this is unlikely. Therefore, the pace of AI progress slowing and a point won by the safety side is a good thing based on my assumptions.
I think in the long run, the board doing (even though somewhat clumsily) what it's supposed to do, which is to ensure the Charter, will emerge as the prevailing view. Apart from that, OpenAI was becoming too dominant, and a new entrant led by Altman would be a gift thing in the long run.
Why wouldn't I trust someone who took action to uphold their organizational charter, knowing there would be intense pressure to do otherwise?

Investment is only partially about trust. I agree Sam's a pretty investable guy. I expect Sam to pursue growth through fundraising, product commercialization, corporate partnerships, etc in exactly the YC mode. He's also clearly ok with letting the momentum of that growth overwhelm the original stated aims of OpenAI, especially given what the original firing press release said about Sam not being entirely forthright. I suspect Microsoft made their investment knowing that something like this might happen. It's not trustworthy that he tried to overwhelm nonprofit aims under for-profit momentum, but if you're an investor do you care?
> Power naps started working for me nicely once I removed the stressful requirement of actually having to sleep.

This is a lesson I keep having to relearn, that rest without sleep is still beneficial. And of course there's always a reward for 'failing' to fall asleep - then I get to do something interesting!

Lately I've had some success in making a game of cultivating enjoyable, productive thoughts while I lie there unable to fall asleep, rather than indulging in the usual anxious worry / regret cycle.
The reporting on this in the last two days has been bizarre and of such shoddy quality, particularly from The Verge.

So many articles with no real sources saying the board was desperate for him to come back, or reneged on their decision, or that there would be an exodus of employees!

I’m glad the board wasn’t browbeaten by Sam and his cohort of VC friends.

I am also incredibly doubtful this will have any meaningful impact in terms of engineers/researchers who will choose to leave. Most of the core group of researchers and engineers joined OpenAI the non-profit, not OpenAI the LLC, that is to say I assume many have strong feelings about safety around AI, which judging by the employee testimonies in the recent Atlantic article Sam acted negligently towards.
It amazes me that more don't follow the example of the most successful company in the world, maybe in the history of the world (hard to make comparisons across eras).
https://archive.vn/OOOag
Even funnier is someone (in a now flagged and dead'd post) accused me of being a misogynist for daring to even think of questioning her experience or capability as CEO.

If you are CEO for a day do you get to wear a paper crown like at Burger King?
> It is just as impossible as for a triangle to have more than 180 degree angles in total.

Hmmm.
SHOW HN:A New 34B Open Source LLM, Astonishing 78 Score in MMLU (GPT-4 MMLU:83)
Don't forget Tasha McCauley's husband, Joseph Gordon Levitt, has been vocally anti-AI during the SAG-AFTRA strike, an event for which AI was a huge point of contention. It's a poisoned board.
Same! What a great set of projects they were. Clever as well with the board where you would screw down wires over a paper template. You needed literally no tools other than a screw driver, perfect for the younger kid. Great memories!
Been looking for a speech to text that can work in real time and run locally, anyone know which are the best options available?
I specifically did not use the word shareholder.

This has not do with beneficial ownership of the underlying asset alone. Principals sometimes do not have that relationship. Asset ownership is a common way to benefit from a entity, but not the only way.

Specifically here Sam Altman does not own shares in the for-profit entity and non profit entities do not have shares.

I don't have direct knowledge on how OpenAI handles it, however it is not uncommon to do revenue sharing, or lease an underlying asset like a brand name (WeWork did this) from the Principal directly, or pay for perks like housing, planes etc, or pay lot of money in Salary/Cash compensation, there are myriad ways to benefit from control without share ownership.
I agree; I found this to be true even 15 years ago during my college years. I went to a well-known regional university (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) and noticed that the job outcomes out of college were different for those who did summer internships with major companies versus those who did not. Everyone I know who got an offer to work at a prestigious company fresh out of college interned at a prestigious company for at least a summer. Even in the computer science department, the students who got offers at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other top companies all did internships at similar companies for at least one summer. The computer science students who did not intern at large companies either ended up at smaller, lesser-known companies or they pursued non-software engineering careers. Now, I know a few CS graduates who didn't start at large software companies but got hired there later in their careers. In general, though, being a Cal Poly student with a good GPA wasn't enough to get a job offer, especially at highly sought-after companies.
Because that's not the actual reason. It looks like a hostile takeover. The "king" of, arguably, the most important company in the world, got kicked out with very little effort. It's pretty extraordinary, and the power shift is extraordinary too.
A pyrrhic victory.
Unless there is one ultra genius who holds all the knowledge to create AGI staying at OpenAI - there will be no “safe AI” built by OpenAI that saves the world. They are likely to lose all the key talent left, over the next month as they cluster around Sam and his Newco or go out and start their own.
OpenAI never found a true identity under Sam. Sam treated pursued hyper growth (treating it like a YC startup) and many in the company, including Ilya, wanted it to be a research company emphasizing AI safety.

Whether you're Team Sutzkaver or team Altman, you can't deny it's been interesting to see extremely talented people fundamentally disagree what to do with godlike technology.
how thick would they need to be
If you mean they is Google and Larry, sure. But in that clip Elon was recruiting for OpenAI
The battle, yes. The war, no.
With a PR damage such this one, if they survive it will be a miracle.
at a consumer level, the only people that ever
knew or cared were people trying to run linux
or a bsd

Lots of tech support stories in the HN replies here, and the linked Anandtech discussion, that contradict that.

Yeah, winmodems were "good enough" for most. But tended to perform worse with noisy phone lines. Which were really common. Which is what the linked article talks about.

Also remember that DOS online gaming was a thing for a few years. If you played Quake online in the early days, you were generally not doing it through Windows.

Also I think Warcraft and all them were dos. Battle net? Kali? I dunno, that was my friend's department.
Thanks for that story. While reading the article I always wondered what the value of the inaccuracy they where talking about really is. I guess it varies for different manufacturers. But seeing this shows me that even in the past it was only a matter of a few seconds.
I would think that the board would have tried to (or is still continuing to try to) pick someone to try to placate Microsoft, other than Altman.
I’ve heard Emmet speak before at Startup School nearly a decade ago. He is very technically minded and a good leader. They could do a lot worse, at the very least I think he will keep an open mind.
Maybe they can. Maybe they can't. We don't even know if "the talks" to return Sama were just investors writing angry emails to Ilya and him replying "nuh-ah".
he liked the tweet
The only other asset class whose value is greater than it's practical use is gold. Even silver is losing that status. In the last 10,000 years many things have been used as a store of value, but the only one that's maintained it is gold. Wars, famine, and whole civilizations falling have not dented humanity's faith in gold's value.

Will bitcoin and ethereum be the next gold? I don't know, but seems like a big assumption and more a question of mass psychology than finance.

Ironically, I suspect the worst thing for crypto is not being in the news at all.
If they don't get Altman back, Altman starts a new company AkshuallyOpenAI and most talent moves there. They quickly get the funding and the contracts with MS. OpenAI is left in the dust.
I'm expecting lawsuits in the next day or two from Altman for libel and defamation. I'd be surprised if OpenAI investors don't go to the courts also ASAP.
Can’t wait to see how many staffers who said they would quit sheep their way into the office tomorrow to collect their million dollar salaries

Thanks Sam we bluffed but no way we quiting
Hopefully this leads to a lot of internal dissent and someone leaks the models