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Notes -
OpenAI announces leadership transition
I posted this in Twitter and someone speculated that it's because Altman paused subscriptions on Tuesday, but that would alone seem like a pretty inconsequential reason for this sort of a major move.
Brian Armstrong tweeted now that $80 billion of company value has been 'evaporated'. I'm like 'what?' You realize that there is still an immensely popular product with millions of users? A few departures even of key people does not change that. i don't get it...it's like social media compels otherwise rational, smart people to make incendiary statements for attention. It's not like creating 'the next Open Ai' will be easy...look how hard Google has struggled despite unlimited resources and PR. I dunno how much valuation has been lost, but if it were public, probably a 10-20% decline in share price on Monday on this news. Bad but not critical at all. I agree he's right about wokeness, but as we've seen with the huge success of Silicon Valley tech companies, wokeness is evidently not a hindrance to success as much as he may dislike it.
I also observed how it seems like important news and events are always on Friday-Saturday, for example:
Gaza conflict
Starship launch
Open Ai board upheaval
Twitter advertisers defecting over alleged antisemitic post by Elon
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
Now that the dust seems to be settling, it looks like a coup by the more nonprofit-focused boardmembers and executives against the guys like Sam and Microsoft who wanted to build a company with real shareholder value. The talent might be there, but there's no guarantee that the will to put out products to the marketplace is still there. Microsoft's equity might be worth pennies on the dollar if OpenAI leadership refuses to ship state-of-the-art technology from now on.
EDIT: If you want proof that Microsoft is scared shitless, take a gander at this breaking report: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO.
If true, then this sounds like the board doing it's job. Even if the result of this is to entirely kill OpenAI, that would still be closer to the mission than what had been going on. That said, I'm still waiting to see what the real result will be.
Sounds like a value alignment problem. Could value alignment be a fundamentally intractable problem with intelligent actors?
Yeah. The issue with all alignment talk is that the sect of people who'd align the ASI almost certainly have a set of values that are every bit as opposed to mine as whatever random set of values that an ASI would have, if not more. Sure, at least some of the unaligned AI values would involve paperclipping me and the universe, but even that's better than "keep everyone around, but use my unlimited power to align everyone with my values for eternity."
"Make a shit ton of money by building tools that people find highly useful and economically valuable" is at least a comprehensible value and something I can work with, since it allows space to other value systems.
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