skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So who governs the board? Or who "owns" the company?
Square... roots
I think Microsoft is behind all of this. The “kumbaya let’s work together for humanity” Microsoft has been swapped out for the old Microsoft. Too much is at stake for them.
PayPal had an exit, but it absolutely did not succeed in the financial revolution it was attempting. People forget now that OG PayPal was attempting the digital financial revolution that later would be bitcoin’s raison d'être.
> But Altman is just another employee

Except he is not. He was a cofounder of the company and was on the board. Your metaphor doesn't make any sense -- this is like if your boss fired you but also you were part of your boss and your cofounder who is on your side was the chair of your boss.
Lools like the monetization to move away from relying on ads was the right one all along
Swimmer witnesses surprise fight between octopus and sea lion
AGI is IMO the biggest pipe dream (scam may be too strong a term) in computing. It’s perpetually “10 years away.” I remember when a group working on “AGI” spoke at my university (oof, 21 years ago at this point) and all the talk then was “yep, we’ve totally cracked the code on this thing, it’s just that computers are too slow at the moment. But in 5-10 years, watch out.”

I’ve always felt fundamentally that if you don’t understand how human thought works to such a degree that you can distill it down into an algorithm, you certainly can’t make a computer do it. Which I know is pretty obvious, but apparently a lot of people haven’t gotten the memo. What ChatGPT can do is really cool, and incredibly useful, but it’s nowhere near a model of the human thought process.
The nature of power relationships at this level is not strictly hierarchical and there's a vast wealth differential here, and Sam is a lot more powerful than any of the board members in many many ways. Everybody who has large amounts of money at stake in this enterprise is going to back Altman. The board has no one.
That's increasingly turning out to be the case.
If you strike at the king, you must kill him.

I am always curious how these conversations go in corporate America. I've seen them in the street and with blue collar jobs.

Loads of feelings get hurt and people generally don't heal or forgive.
The new management has declared that their primary goal in all this was to stop the gravy track.
That's an unreasonable standard. Things can be interesting without them being a full-blown rolled out product.
Everywhere the `goto` touches, is your kingdom.
Why Revel Shut Down Its Moped Service in New York
What exactly isn’t right about “theory of relativity”? Like the general theory?
The last compiler I wrote needed to be translated to another implementation language. The translator found one bug in it. It was effectively bug free. I am a good coder. I recognize most of these feelings though. Struggling through them is part of my process. I also have lots of ways of working that help me -- I take copious notes for example. Sketch a lot. Talk to others. Staying isolated is a way of staying stuck. Good luck.
This whole thing is gross. The sycophantic worship of Sam is gross and the paranoid AI safety people are insane. The singularity cultists are also insane.

What happened? I remember when most of the people in this industry were at least okay. A little weird but okay.

Of course judging by social media it’s a microcosm of the rest of society. People are utterly losing their minds everywhere. It’s both scary and amusing.
Are engineers compensated with cash? I wonder if the Sam Altman version of OpenAI is more lucrative for employees than the alternative OpenAI. So as a result of the recent changes, there is an employee exodus to places with greater compensation
It's only a matter of time until you get ads even if you pay.
Who is the writer? Do your own research and don't trust some idiot on the Internet to give you ideas
Sure, I suppose not, but they aren’t losing everyone en masse. Simply Altman supporters so far.

I think a wait and see approach is better. I think we had some inner politics spill public because Altman needs to the public pressure to get his job back, if I was speculating
That would require it actually being sufficient to pay the bills, which at present it is very far from.
In a 501.3c I think the board is the top. From what I understand they’re usually funded through grants that have requirements that need to be met for each disbursement. If you fail then the money stops but there’s no “firing” the board they just stop getting funds.
> The board was Altmans boss - this is pretty much their only job.

Not at all. Ilya and George are on the board. Ilya is the chief scientist, George resigned with Sam and supposedly works like 80-100hrs a week
What machine was this?
If you're an engineer at open ai, you just saw probably millions of dollars of personal wealth get potentially evaporated on friday. You're going to quit and go wherever Altman goes next.
If only OpenAI open-sourced its models.....
Not really. IIRC they already used signed URLs. They just need to add a not-before field to the URL.
Most of the employees will resign anyway if they are told open AI is non profit
Been reading up on the insight offered up on this site. Seems like a lot of these board members have deep ties around various organizations, governmental bodies, etc. and that seems entirely normal and probable. However, prior to chatgpt and dalle we, the public , had only been allowed brief glimpses into the current state of AI (eg Look this robot can sound like a human and book a reservation for you at the restaurant -Google ; look this robot can help you consume media better -many). As a member of the public it went from “oh cool Star Trek idea, maybe we’ll see it one day with flying cars” to “holy crap, I just felt a spark of human connection with a chat program.”

So here’s my question, what are the chances that openAI is controlled opposition and Sam never really was supposed to be releasing all this stuff to the public? I remember he was on his Lex podcast appearance and said paraphrasing “so what do you think, should I do it? Should I open source and release it? Tell me to do it and I will.”

Ultimately, this is what “the board is focused on trust and safety” mean right? As in safety is SV techno HR PR dribble for go slow, wear a helmet and seatbelt and elbow protectors , never go above 55, give everyone else the right of way because we are in the for the good humanity and we know what’s best. (vs the Altman style of: go fast, double dog dare smart podcast dude to make unprecedented historical decision to open source, be “wild” and let people / fate figure some of it out along the way.”)
Google added our web pages to their index without paying us. and probably trained AI on our content without paying us. Just returning the favor.
Any perovskite article is utterly worthless without some discussion of lifetime/endurance in the wild.
Probably the same. Even with an abort system, aborting isn't an option throughout the whole flight.
Yeah more than HLS. It would need to handle authentication and authorization such as is the user subscribed and what content is available them that they may have purchased a la carte. It would need listing of available content for search and indexing by the client. Presumably the major forms of content are standalone (ie movies), series which are a collection of content broken up into seasons, and potentially live streams. Finally it needs a way to purchase new content.

The industry is standardized enough to agree on distribution formats (VHS, DVD, etc) and to have awards for different established categories and video rental companies used to be able to organize their collections well enough. I want studios to handle distribution, that is operating a streaming farm for their content, and get out of owning the storefront. I want a digital Blockbuster type experience with everyone's content commingled. No having to go to the Disney store, and the HBO store, and the Paramount store and oh last month this content was on Netflix and now I can't find it because it's on Amazon this month.
I mean, you have to do something in an expensive fashion before you can do it cheaply.

Has this solved every problem? Obviously not. Not even close. Its still an important research milestone.
The "meta" here is just the probability distribution of stone densities. The only way it can process those is by monte Carlo simulation. The DNN (trained by reinforcement learning) evaluates the simulations and outputs the top move(s).
Check again.
Turns out worse isn’t better after all. Who could have guessed?
There is no no compete agreement with Altman? How is that possible?
{the entity} of which they are the board does not have shareholders and unless there's something funky in the charter: there's no mechanism to fire members of the board (other than board action). The shareholders of the llc aren't relevant in this context, as they definitely can't fire the nonprofit's board (the whole point of their weird structuring). https://openai.com/our-structure
A mutiny is when the entire boat’s crew rebels at once, a coup is only when a few high-level powerful people remove the folks at the top.
This firing very much has the feeling of the board fearfully pulling the circuit breaker on OpenAI's for-profit trajectory.

On the one hand, I actually respect their principles. OpenAI has become the company its nonprofit was formed to prevent. Proprietary systems. Strong incentive to prioritize first-to-market over safety. Dependency on an entrenched tech co with monopolistic roots.

On the other hand, this really feels like it was done hastily and out of fear. Perhaps the board realized that they were about to be sidelined and felt like this was their last chance to act. I have to imagine that they knew there would be major backlash to their actions.

In the end, I think Sam creating his own company would be better for competition. It's more consistent with OpenAI's original charter to exist as the Mozilla (though hopefully more effective) of AI than as the Stripe of AI.
What if OAI's entire research organization follows him? Surely it's one of the best teams working today.
> If you lost all of the code today, with the right understanding you could build it again relatively quickly

Yes, but it has nothing to do with the codebase. There are 10,000 ways of building the same product with entirely different codebases.
First, the for-profit subsidiary is fully controlled by the OpenAI Nonprofit. We enacted this by having the Nonprofit wholly own and control a manager entity (OpenAI GP LLC) that has the power to control and govern the for-profit subsidiary.

Second, because the board is still the board of a Nonprofit, each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to make and distribute profit, it is subject to this mission. The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors.

Third, the board remains majority independent. Independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, does not hold equity directly. His only interest is indirectly through a Y Combinator investment fund that made a small investment in OpenAI before he was full-time.

https://openai.com/our-structure
Not that I’m agreeing with whatever was mentioned in the original comment, but as a semi outsider I feel we are indeed being disingenuous about this - what are quantum fields if not ether? I see no difference philosophically.

Like the fundamental original reasons why we went to quantum theory itself seems like we made some leaps in hypothesis (charged electron can’t orbit without losing energy, if the universe is filled with an ether then everything will slow down, etc) only to never actually solve that original conundrum ever.
Are you using SwiftFin? It is much better than the standard Jellyfin iOS app, I’ve never had any problems with it.

Shoutout to the FinAmp app for music, too.
HN commenters believe all kinds of nonsense.
x/Twitter is definitively going to overshadow everything else he’s done. Especially with where this is going.

Howard Hughes is way more famous for the spruce goose and being a hypochondriac shut in with the general public than anything else!
Be even easier if they provided an MRSS feed! I wonder if a popular channel on YT started making their content available in an easy to parse format like MRSS if they'd notice a significant loss in YT viewers in favor of it. Of course, they'd then lose the ad share, so probably not a thing that will happen.

How fast would YT issue a C&D if someone created an app that did this for you so that you just entered in the channels you follow, and then it would just check every so often for new content?
> Microsoft has said they'll withhold cloud computing credits.

source please?
It’s from the opening credits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79TVMn_d_Pk
From what I understand, the for-profit OpenAI is owned and governed by the non-profit OpenAI. The board of the latter are the ones who fired him.
If you object to my terminology replace Python script with "Python interpreter" written by someone else. The point is using someone else's work can be interpreted as not solving the problem yourself.
They almost certainly consulted both lawyers and chatGPT and still proceeded with the dismissal. So, in a way, this could be a test of the alignment of chatGPT (and corporate lawyers).

One scenario where both parties are fallible humans and their hands are forced: Increased interest has to close down plus signups, because compute can't scale. Sam goes to Brockman and they decide to use compute meant for GPT-5 to try to scale for new users, without informing board. Can perfectly fine break that rule with GPT-4, but what if Sam does this again in the future when they have AGI on their hands?
What rule is this?
Either way, even before the firing, Ilya and Altman was not gonna be in the same office working much longer. Altman seem to be the irreplacable one because of his status/connections/leadership. Which is also good, as where ever Ilya goes, it will only heat up the competition for OpenAI. Competition is good for tech.
Audio compression algorithms are not trying to be 99.9999999% efficient.
> It's far more common for teams to succeed despite (or even in spite) of executive leadership.

People say this like it's some kind of truism but I've never seen it happened and when questioned everyone I've known who's claimed it ends up admitting they were measuring their "success" by a different metric then the company.
Nonprofits don't have investors, their problem is too many of their employees are going to leave.
My bet is this is all ginned up by Microsoft and Altman to put media pressure on the board, but with very little actual valid basis. It is a bluff.

Microsoft is in a very very rough position here. They bet big on believing in Sam's wink wink cough "non-profit" cough wink wink only to run into some true believers.
I personally really hope Altman doesn't return if he's really the one who pushed OpenAI away from its non-profit roots.
The word "theory" is used because an essential aspect of this particular kind of understanding is that it lets you reason about the domain and the code's behavior. It's an apt term in that context.
> What happened?

Money. Hype + the greedy and credulous = huge payday.
I mean a film director and I disagree with your assessment that they have to be savvy in many fields. Many of the directors whose projects I’ve worked on are very much not savvy outside their narrow needs of directing talent and relying on others like the DoP or VFX Supervisor , editors etc to do their job.

In fact most movie productions don’t even have the director involved with story. Many are just directors for hire and assigned by the studio to scripts.

Of course there are exceptions but they are the rarities.

And the big reason directors don’t hit their big strides till later is movies take a long time to make and it’s hard to work your way up there unless you start as an indie darling. But even as an indie, let’s say you start at 20, your film would likely come out by the time you’re 22-24 based on average production times. You’d only be able to do 2 or 3 films by 30, and in many cases would be put on studio assignments till you get enough clout to do what you want. And with that clout comes the ability to hire better people to manage the other aspects of your shoot.

Again, I think this is people prescribing to auteur theory. It takes a huge number of people to pull off a film, and the film director is rarely well versed in most. Much like a CEO, they delegate and give their opinion but few extend beyond that.

For reference I’ve worked on multiple blockbuster films, many superhero projects, some very prestigious directors and many not. The biggest indicator that a director is versed in other domains is if they worked in it to some degree before being a director. That’s where directors like Fincher excel and many others don’t
Even after a decade, many coders make limited progress for their potential, and some make very little. Progress depends on balancing consumption of knowledge and application. If one consumes a lot (watches many YouTube videos) but does not create anything with this knowledge, it is evident that they will not progress quickly. If one constantly applies the same knowledge and never seeks to learn new things, they will likewise stagnate.
It is certainly not abstracting things.
There is no scenario here where Sam returns and OpenAI survives as a nonprofit. The board will be sacked.
It is better to remain silent and be thought an idiot than to speak and remove all doubt.
That's the thing. Lawyers can give them the letter of the law but might have no idea how popular Sam was inside and outside the company, or how badly he was needed. And that's what really matters here.
You keep doing things based on historic knowledge and suffer those ads, while the rest of us will move along with the times and not suffer those ads. Lest we forget? sure, but it's not like they'll be going back to that technique as it's ineffective for them.
To me, programming is all about designing things in such a way that the "theory" (using this particular meaning of the world) mostly already exists.

I see a lot of programmers start with an idea, and then they implement it. I prefer at least a little bit of cargo cult approach.

I don't re
I start researching what tools are already out there and what others do in similar cases before I have any more than a vague idea of what I want to do.
i feel the same way api but I did watch this entire thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTRHFaaPG8 and now I can't stop thinking about Eliezer is so smart, smarter than me, should I listen?
Archive explaining their reasoning:
https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680

CEO of Cloudflare explaining:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

I don't understand how it isn't clear to you.
It's clear you haven't read any Asimov stories. His robots are impeccably ethical due to the three laws, and the stories explore robopsychologicalb conundrums that arise when people keep putting them in situations that tax the three laws of robotics.
No I believe anyone can do AGI vapourware as well as they.
…and now you need to check for nonsense values everywhere, instead of ever being able to know through the type system that you have a meaningful value.

It’s nil pointers all over again, but for your non-pointer types too! Default zero values are yet another own goal that ought to have been thrown away at the design stage.
You need a theory in order to reason about a model. The reasoning ability is the important part.
Microdosing trend?

:-)
I’ve hired people that were involved in palace coups at unicorn startups, twice. Justified or not, those coups set the company on a downward spiral it never recovered from.

I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.

Startups die from suicide, not homicide.
> it seems that computer scientists are serious about saving humanity

How could they accomplish that without external investment? If the money tap dries up OpenAI will just be left behind.
No, they can't.

> _Most_ violent criminals will commit another crime after release

But are _most_ criminals violent? I would guess not. We were talking about "many of them from reoffending" not a small subsection. If it is the case that "many of them from reoffending" then this condtrdicts the other premis.

> Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.

There is also no eveidence that "it could still be effective at deterring youths" which seems to be socio-political and not based on age bracket.
It does. But i think youtube attempts to detect the adblock (which ublock origin continues to evade with new updates?).

This extension does not block, but instead just fast forward the ad (playback speed at 10x - tbh, it could'be been at 100x probably!) and mutes it. So from the youtube js perspective, the ad has played and wasn't blocked.
Non competes are not enforceable in California
off the top of my head:

prolonged public exchange between sama and the board _before_ any firings where they throw accusations at each other followed by microsoft pulling out, followed by people quitting and immediately resulting in a chatgpt outage. followed by the firing of the ceo
There's no way anyone should continue to use OpenAI products if Sam Altman is allowed to return. Because in that scenario there won't even be a counterweight to his point of view in the company anymore, and that counterweight was the only thing keeping his extreme untrustworthiness and sliminess from being a deal-breaker.
LLMs are very good at uncovering the mathematical relationships between words, many layers deep. Calling that understanding is a claim about what understanding is. But because we know how the LLMs we're talking about at the moment are trained, it seems to have more problems:

LLMs do not directly model the world; they train on and model what people write about the world. It is an AI model of a computed gestalt human model of the world, rather than a model of the world directly. If you ask it a question, it tells you what it models someone else (a gestalt of human writing) is most likely say. That in turn is strengthened if user interaction accepts it and corrected only if someone tells it something different.

If we were to define that as what "understanding" is, we would equivalently be saying that a human bullshit artist would have expert understanding if only they produced more believable bullshit. (They also just "try to sound like an expert".)

Likewise, I'm not convinced that we can measure its understanding just by identifying inaccuracies or measuring the difference between its answers and expert answers -
There would be no difference between bluffing your way through the interview (relying on your interviewer's limitations in how they interrogate you) and acing the interview.

There seems to be a fundamental difference in levels of indirection. Where we "map the territory", LLMs "map the maps of the territory".

It can be an arbitrarily good approximation, and practically very useful, but it's a strong ontological step to say one thing "is" another just because it can be used like it.
Because they won't have a company to "run the board for" anymore if Sam doesn't come back (since so many people have threatened to resign).
Great, now you’ve brought the pain of checking for nil to any consumer of this type too!
Sea lions try to dismember the octopus arm by arm.

Octopi try to suffocate the sea lion with its tentacles, although it's nearly swallowed up by that point. Otherwise, the octopus tries to bite with its beak. Supposedly, there are "nasty chemicals" in the bite.