OpenAI Investors Plot Last-Minute Push With Microsoft To Reinstate Sam Altman As CEO (forbes.com) 49
The Verge reports that OpenAI's board "is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter." But one of those people said Altman "is 'ambivalent' about coming back and would want significant governance changes."
In a possibly related development, Forbes reports that "A day after OpenAI's board of directors fired former CEO Sam Altman in a shock development, investors in the company are plotting how to restore him, in what would amount to an even more surprising counter-coup." Venture capital firms holding positions in OpenAI's for-profit entity have discussed working with Microsoft and senior employees at the company to bring back Altman, even as he has signaled to some that he intends to launch a new startup, four sources told Forbes.
Whether the companies would be able to exert enough pressure to pull off such a move — and do it fast enough to keep Altman interested — is unclear.
The playbook, a source told Forbes would be straightforward: make OpenAI's new management, under acting CEO Mira Murati and the remaining board, accept that their situation was untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors. Facing such a combination, the thinking is that management would have to accept Altman back, likely leading to the subsequent departure of those believed to have pushed for Altman's removal, including cofounder Ilya Sutskever and board director Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora.
Should such an effort not come together in time, Altman and OpenAI ex-president Greg Brockman were set to raise capital for a new startup, two sources said. "If they don't figure it out asap, they'd just go ahead with Newco," one source added.
Also from the Verge: people close to OpenAI "say more departures are in the works".
The Information confirms Altman "has been telling investors that he is planning to launch a new AI venture." They also report that Altman "has been in discussions with semiconductor executives, including chip designer Arm, on Friday morning about early efforts to design new chips that would lower costs for large-language model companies like OpenAI, a person familiar with the talks said. That effort would likely take years."
In a possibly related development, Forbes reports that "A day after OpenAI's board of directors fired former CEO Sam Altman in a shock development, investors in the company are plotting how to restore him, in what would amount to an even more surprising counter-coup." Venture capital firms holding positions in OpenAI's for-profit entity have discussed working with Microsoft and senior employees at the company to bring back Altman, even as he has signaled to some that he intends to launch a new startup, four sources told Forbes.
Whether the companies would be able to exert enough pressure to pull off such a move — and do it fast enough to keep Altman interested — is unclear.
The playbook, a source told Forbes would be straightforward: make OpenAI's new management, under acting CEO Mira Murati and the remaining board, accept that their situation was untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors. Facing such a combination, the thinking is that management would have to accept Altman back, likely leading to the subsequent departure of those believed to have pushed for Altman's removal, including cofounder Ilya Sutskever and board director Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora.
Should such an effort not come together in time, Altman and OpenAI ex-president Greg Brockman were set to raise capital for a new startup, two sources said. "If they don't figure it out asap, they'd just go ahead with Newco," one source added.
Also from the Verge: people close to OpenAI "say more departures are in the works".
The Information confirms Altman "has been telling investors that he is planning to launch a new AI venture." They also report that Altman "has been in discussions with semiconductor executives, including chip designer Arm, on Friday morning about early efforts to design new chips that would lower costs for large-language model companies like OpenAI, a person familiar with the talks said. That effort would likely take years."
Mass Revolt by Senior Researchers? (Score:2)
I think think this is the critical issue: do most of these senior researchers favor the strong safety approach of Ilya Sutskever or do they prefer the "move fast and break things" approach of Sam Altman?
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Google is a dysfunctional organization who might break things but sure can't move fast.
Did GPT-3 hallucinate your history of the Mark 14 for you? It's well-known that an impoverished pre-war US Navy underfunded testing of the Mark 14 (deployed in 1931): there weren't even live fire tests of the damned thing. It certainly wasn't "cutting edge" by the outbreak of WWII. Your whole premis
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This is more of the "I don't understand what research actually is" narrative. Most of research is applied, which has nothing to do with "pushing the boundaries of the unknown" and instead has to do with "applying known in better ways than before". Very little research is about the unknown. LLMs are all about the applied known.
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Luckyo, your perspective on research seems to emphasize the applied aspect, suggesting that it primarily involves improving existing methods rather than exploring the unknown. However, this view might be too narrow and doesn't fully capture the essence of research, especially in cutting-edge fields like LLMs.
Research, fundamentally, is about pushing the boundaries of our current understanding and exploring new territories. While applied research does focus on utilizing known concepts in mo
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Jesus christ the corpo speak is real. You'd make a wonderful PR spokeswoman or an HR lady. Are you one? Or did you get born into a wrong sex for those jobs?
Real talk. Base research "into the unknown" on LLMs has been done in 1960s with some finishing touches in 1970s. What we're seeing today is merely applying the advances in computational speed to this research. There's no "research into unknown" more commonly known as "basic research" here. There's merely applied research on how to better apply what we kn
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I'm not the author of this, either, I merely told GPT-4 what you said and suggested snark:
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Well, Luckyo, I'm flattered by your suggestion that I'm capable of PR or HR – industries renowned for their clarity and tact. Alas, I'm merely an enthusiast in the grandstands of scientific discourse, not a ringmaster in the corporate circus.
Your romantic view of the 1960s and 70s as th
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That explains the empty corpospeak. Rather hilarious that you had one job, to say that you "quoted chatgpt" and you failed at that.
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I think think this is the critical issue: do most of these senior researchers favor the strong safety approach of Ilya Sutskever or do they prefer the "move fast and break things" approach of Sam Altman?
So he's a little like Sam Bankman then? I don't know much about Sam Altman...
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I'll say that the name is a bit of an odd one that has me wonder if he's even real.
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"Move fast and break things" is a Silicon Valley motto. There is no legal issue as long as the investors are aware of what they're getting into. The problem with SBF was that he told customers that their money was safe at FTX, while in fact they were making risky investments with it at Alameda.
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I think think this is the critical issue: do most of these senior researchers favor the strong safety approach of Ilya Sutskever or do they prefer the "move fast and break things" approach of Sam Altman?
Apparently, it was nothing to do with the accusations of child sexual abuse from his sister...
Re: Mass Revolt by Senior Researchers? (Score:2)
I did not know about that until I read about it here, but then I found her X account. The really disturbing thing about her story to me is not that stuff, it is that the man in charge of a technology that could displace millions of workers, and has to have compassion not greed for that reason, has his own sister living on the streets and working Pornhub. I get the CEO not wanting to pour money into what could be an addiction/compromise situation, but how hard is it for him to invest in an out of the way ran
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The real issue is whether you want to keep Sam who's a money guy, a startup guy, and someone with no clue of how to make this technology advance. Or if you want to keep Ilya Sutskever who is the BRAINS behind OpenAI.
Ilya has been an author on some of the most important papers of the last 10 years including the ground breaking AlexNet. And continues to be a major contributor to the advancement of Large Language Models.
Sam can be replaced. Ilya IS OpenAI.
So watch what you wish for.
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Yup. Ilya was Hinton's right hand man back at U of T, and pioneered offloading deep learning computations to the GPU (among other things).
In my opinion, employees who stick with Ilya will lead the industry in tech, and get rich eventually. Those who stick with Sam will get really fucking rich, but sooner.
If I had to choose, I'd choose the research. Sam's riding the coattails of ChatGPT and will eventually hit a brick wall when that tech has been juiced out, but not before drowning in billions.
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You may be right.
I tend to favor actual advances in tech, not smoke and mirrors. But I know investors may think differently.
Maybe Ilya will move over to Microsoft.
Quite seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
Did an AI write that soap plot or JJ Abrams?
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If this is about AI safety, then this rises to the occasion of a full government and public investigation.
But it won't, and you know it. This is a private corporation and this is America. There is nothing government or public could or would do to interfere with whatever the corporation eventually wants.
We're fucked either way.
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Third option, LLMs are a dead end to their AGI goal and they have no way in principle to get there, in which case we don't need to know anything and they can keep milking the VCs.
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It's a little sad that this is the correct answer, and that people will say it's obvious in retrospect after wasting so many resources.
WRONG! (Score:2, Troll)
They need to immediately appoint Sam Bankman-Fried as CEO!
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Case study in the virtues of profit motives (Score:2)
While it's not yet clear why the board did what they did, it increasingly looks like they were acting out of anger. Altman lied to them, they got mad, and fired him.
If that's what really happened, I don't think I've seen a clearer case study arguing in favour of profit motives. Taking away the financial profit motive (as per the non-profit board), what you may be left with is not superior rational decision-making in the collective interest, but nothing more than basic human emotional knee-jerk reactions.
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TFA says the board of directors fired him, but the VCs and other investors want him back.
That doesn't make much sense. The BOD is the investors. The VCs and other major investors should have seats on the board.
A CEO isn't fired on a whim. The investors should've known about this well before the trigger was pulled.
Re:Case study in the virtues of profit motives (Score:5, Informative)
OpenAI is owned by a charity. The board of directors is more of an oversight committee from the charity. There aren't normal investors either. The for-profit part has caps on how much anybody can make.
The original idea was to make any AI advances open so that they wouldn't be exploited for potentially dangerous private gain.
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Which is what is blowing the mind of the profit seekers. Having a goal that isn't filthy lucre.
It's rare that narcs/salespeople (all the same) get stymied.
Lots of popcorn here.
Re: Case study in the virtues of profit motives (Score:3)
Although in this case it is the investors (among them Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft etc) that would rather have the investments opened up to the world, because it benefits them just as well.
The current board and acting CEO wants to keep the market and inventions all to themselves and capitalize on them further by claiming some AGI safety demon that clearly doesnâ(TM)t exist.
They want to pretend to care, give us false information about the capabilities (itâ(TM)s an LLM, a development on the T9
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I wouldn't go that far. OpenAI has definitely been corrupted by their for-profit subsidiary. They're not at all open. They've effectively become what they were founded to oppose, albeit with some odd features left over from that founding.
Which shockingly leaves Facebook as the champion of openness.
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Maybe a bit offtopic (Score:2)
I guess they are voted in by all investors, but how/who selects/nominate them in the first place ?
Do board members get a compensation?
Are there any "conflict of interest" rules for them - like "can't have stocks in the company they govern"?!
Seems like in this case there is a huge disconnect between the board and the CEO. If both are elected by the investors it is a bit strange to get such disparity between them. Maybe the fissure de
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no surprise (Score:1)
Why? (Score:2)
What is so special about Sam Altman that this should happen?
He's just some guy who has a Bingo! and he's going to hold on to it. What did he do as CEO that was especially surprising or great for the company that makes him the "perfect fit"?
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He's just some guy who has a Bingo! and he's going to hold on to it.
It appears that he's not going to hold on to it.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
What is so special about Sam Altman that this should happen?
He's just some guy who has a Bingo! and he's going to hold on to it. What did he do as CEO that was especially surprising or great for the company that makes him the "perfect fit"?
I'm not sure it's specifically about Altman.
The original purpose of OpenAI was a non-profit developing "safe and beneficial" AGI.
ChatGPT turned into a gold mine, so they built a for-profit, OpenAI Global, to mine it. Not only did OpenAI Global under Altman excel at that, but he started looking into building chips and other such things. Stuff that doesn't seem to have much to do with building "safe and beneficial" AGI.
So now you're left with the question. Is OpenAI's mission still building safe and beneficial AGI? Or is it to oversee OpenAI Global and maximize shareholder value for it's investors?
That's the real fight.
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That seems exactly right, I'll only add that what exacerbated the fight is that neither direction seemed to be a good business. Semaphore reported that MSFT wired only a fraction of their $10bn into OAI accounts, the rest was (to be) compute resources etc.
Good business cures all, and this cure was not available.
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The one who is truly special is Ilya Sutskever. Not Sam.
Ilya is the major researcher here. Sam is a Ycombinator guy that knows about startups. But the AI guy is Ilya. He's the real brains behind OpenAI.
Pick Sam over Ilya is like picking a bean counter over the original inventor. Sam isn't the "Steve Jobs" in this story. He's John Sculley.
Picking Sam over Ilya would be a grave grave error.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
He was president of Y Combinator so he has all the right (most wealthy and powerful) friends.
Put some chicks in it and make it lame (Score:1)
I heard that's how the board was assembled.
More Popcorn Please (Score:2)
This is starting to get interesting.