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Another day, another entrant into the OpenAI drama. Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI.
I don't know why it was surprising to people that Sam wouldn't come back. The company was meant to be subservient to the nonprofit's goals and I'm not sure why the attempted coup from Sam's side (you know the whole effectively false reporting that Sam Altman was to become the new CEO) was apparently "shocking" that it failed.
https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101
What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates. Like maybe this is just a bunch of technolibertarians on Twitter or HN or something who think that the ultimate goal of humanity is how many numbers on a screen you can earn, but the amazing amount of unearned reverence towards a VC to lead the company.
In any case, here's to hoping that Laundry Buddy won't win out in the rat race for AGI, lest we live in a world optimized for maximum laundry detergent. Maybe we'll avoid that future now with Sam's departure.
Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on which I found from the HN thread.
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400
How's it going my dude?
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You might want to repost this to this week's thread seeing as you posted it right as this thread went down.
Or, if you dont mind, I can just repost it for you?
ETA: Went ahead and did it.
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Nobody involved in Silicon Valley AI circles has ever really suffered. We’re talking about people who largely grew up upper-middle class in the richest and one of the most peaceful societies in human history. They’re bored. This millenarian phase is completely natural, people get bored, they want ‘happenings’. In the absence of faith, it’s Machine God Now.
Theres also the fact that many e/acc people have their differences with the prevailing political zeitgeist and are either conservative (‘we’ve been losing for so long we might as well roll the dice’) or libertarian (and thus opposed to regulation by default).
My conspiracy theory: e/acc proponents know that when AI starts automating huge numbers of jobs the west is going to have a ‘socialist moment’ that makes Occupy Wall St or even 1968 look like those three Falun Gong guys outside the Chinese embassy. And they know the only way to get ahead of that is to go balls-to-the-wall ‘bring us our machine God’ ASAP.
Beautiful theory. Yeah the eschatology within the deep circles of the E/acc movement rarely gets talked about. I think boredom from tech elites is also a huge piece.
There's nothing with stakes for them to do. Geopolitics is low status now. Most other areas where there's lots of power like government, healthcare, politics etc are super slow and bureaucratized. Tech is the new hotness where ambitious bored sons of the elite class get to play with powers beyond their control.
What does this mean? Members of Congress/foreign ambassadors don’t seem low status to me.
In the circles of younger elites. Idk this is more anecdotal than anything.
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Altman and Brockman to join Microsoft. Looks like Nadella decided to cut out the middleman and hire everyone who's willing to follow Altman out of OpenAI directly.
https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122
Good. I can't properly express my contempt for deceleration proponents. With Sam as CEO of the new group, and with all the doomers left behind at a now-irrelevant, we're going to see a level of acceleration we've never seen before.
What I want is for OpenAI to live up to its name and release GPT5 under AGPL as a "fuck you" to Altman and Microsoft.
The source in this instance is not the models. From the AGPL:
Source code would be the training data plus the source code/commands/algorithms for turning the text into a transformer model. Same thing bugs me about Facebook calling their Llama models open source. They're nothing of the sort. It'd be like me handing you a Windows 10 disk and saying since I am giving you the program, it's open source. Ridiculous. Doubly ridiculous that people accept this without noticing.
None of these companies can release the actual source, because they'll get sued to oblivion by the copyright holders.
Yes, I meant the whole training set as well. If they get sued they can all blame Sam for misleading the board.
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This is about the only thing which would make me support OpenAI again but unfortunately will never happen. I don't for a second believe Altman is supportive of free (as in speech) AI in the hands of the masses, but the AI safetyists are even worse on that regard.
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EA's are the most vehement opponents of actually opening AI.
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Push it to the limit!
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I'm a grumpy Luddite who hates the idea of AI regardless of whether it delivers on all it's promises, spells our doom, or fails to deliver on any of the hype either way and ends up just being another iterative improvement. It feels I somehow found myself in the middle of a battlefield as two religiously fanatic armies are about to clash and rip each other to shreds.
Can't you guys settle your differences in the Las Vegas Octagon, or something?
In the last 6 months I have thrown every menial dev work I could at chat gpt. For me there is no turning back for QoL improvements. For 20$ month you get a whole Bangalore team of juniors.
Yeah, but that's not what everybody is getting hyped up / scared to death about. Everybody's talking about how this is infinitely scalable and how this means doom / utopia.
I think that will LLM and the battery tech improvement we observe - eliminating manual labor in 20 years is real possibility. That is both doom and utopia for big parts of the world.
I still think most white collar stuff will go first, but certainly with LLMs applied to robotics it’s clear now that blue collar labor won’t be far behind.
At some point, maybe, but why waste GPUs on manual labor, when naked monkeys can dig for cobalt for a mere 2-3K calories of Uncle Klaus' Bugs?
Yeah obviously in parts of the world where labor is $1 a day it’ll take much longer. But at the same time there could be a textiles effect (where indigenous textiles industries in Africa were totally destroyed by cheap donated clothing made in Bangladesh for the West) where they can get donated machines from Bill Gates or second hand stuff that lets them eliminate labor all the same.
Labor prices are perfectly able to adapt to the current market situation, so I don't see why the developed world should be exempt. It's also not about absolute prices, but about the relative marginal costs/profits of investing resources into building a manual labor performing robot vs. putting those same resources into expanding SkyNet.
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Ok, so now we're back to the thing I originally complained about: vaguely mystical predictions of a massive social revolution. Is it possible at all to talk about specifics?
Another pet peeve of mine is, if people are going to predict massive revolutions reshaping our societies, can they at least do it right? The current state of AI, and the law of comparative advantage, clearly implies replacing intellectual, not manual labor.
Yes. With enough investment - I will have a robot that will be good enough cleaning lady, housekeeper and gardener. That will be also able to do some basic house/electric maintenance stuff. I was joking couple of years ago that the Qatari definition of hard labor is the act of pointing the bangladeshi what to move and where. Also nurses and whatnot.
It will start as simple things - better roombas, tile laying and painting machines etc etc. Even the blue collar work will be augmented. Eventually we will get to good enough universal laborer.
Judging by the way other household appliances adoption was done - it will become extremely affordable in just a couple of years. In the west - I don't care about the rest of the world - it will only make migration problems sharper and worse - since the people coming are literally worthless except as organ donors or sex work. It will also deprive the developing world of chances to develop - the only thing they will have worth anything - their natural resources.
If you are on the right side of the divide it will be utopian. If you are on the wrong - dystopia.
And what is it that you will be making your income from?
Donating organs and/or sex work?
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Developing and selling robots and real estate.
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It would have been a pretty big blackpill if Sam and Satya had been able to strongarm the board of OpenAI — which was specifically designed not to be strongarmed — into completely reversing their decision and resigning within 48 hours. Still, it’s going to hurt seeing that big red number in my E*trade account tomorrow, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ChatGPT gets nerfed/throttled/shutdown in the coming weeks-months. I’m very interested in what Ilya Sutskever does after this. He was apparently the driving force behind Sam’s ouster. I want to know if he has a plan, if he saw something that spooked him, or if he’s just acting on vibes.
About that... XD
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As of a few hours ago, Ilya publicly regrets his actions: https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
It appears he had no plan, or didn’t plan for this level of backlash and therefore effectively has no plan anymore.
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yeah no kidding. as an aside to all of this, i've got to say, the media reporting on this was downright shameful.
obviously there were the initial reports about the firing which were fine, but the weird concocted narrative about how it was totally confirmed that they were going to
capitulatereach a "truce" by the entire board resigning was surprising. it didn't make any sense except as a PR fluff piece.like the media on this couldn't have been more wrong about what happened if they tried.
what's notable about this is like this isn't some gossip rag that we're talking about here, I'll read the gossip rags and the TMZs but I don't expect the reporting quality to be top notch (well, TMZ is usually at least accurate, if inconsequential). it's entertainment and I know what I'm signing up for when I read it.
but this is Bloomberg we're talking about here that got immensely suckered. people pay them lots and lots of money for this high quality info. I don't expect them to be particularly favorable to OpenAI's position here which as best as I can tell does seem to be about them not wanting to sell out, but Bloomberg was unfathomably wrong.
I think what was most irritating was that it makes about 0 sense for the board to fire a CEO then in less than 24 hours go "uh well uh whoopsie," reinstall Sam as CEO, and collectively resign for no reason. I can't believe no one bothered to go through this process when fact checking.
I'm salty because I've been on the pointy end from them before, but I'll point out that Bloomberg Media also has someone paying a lot of money to formalize and present his specific viewpoint to the public.
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I haven't followed the story closely enough to tell whether Bloomberg got it shockingly wrong, or whether their initial reporting was plausible but just ended up wrong by a twist of fate, but if you're right, consider that a decent chunk of the reason for the media's existence is to shape the world, rather than just report on it's shape.
As a very strong rule, this is not the case for financial news Corps. WSJ and Bloomberg are paywalled and subscriber only because their reporting is considered financially worthwhile for their subscribers. They are very different than most media, which is primarily for entertainment.
WSJ kicked off the Adpocalypse, which I'd cite as the central example of shaping vs. reporting on reality.
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Altman has demonstrated extreme willingness to help great number of people, this isn't about numbers on screen but about demonstrated goodwill. I've yet to learn as much about Shear.
Two can play this game. «Motte: AI safety is about safeguarding humanity. Bailey: we're building our AI god to shape the light cone to our fancy.» It's remarkable how you can't conceive of a less totalizing vision.
yes, loopt was very successful. he also did great work at reddit helping to drive it into the ground as well. worldcoin isn't a totally creepy and terrible thing. very great CV there.
but more to the point: he's a investor, goodwill does not at any point enter the picture and it'd be remiss to think otherwise. that's the only thing they care about, ultimately. it seems clear to me that Sam probably hoped to sell out OpenAI and fortunately their structure made it so it didn't work.
Cynicism is a cope of dysfunctional people.
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whats the story behind the reddit comment?
he's on reddit's board and was the interim CEO after Ellen Pao left. he helped to bring Steve Huffman back as CEO. people complained about Ellen Pao ruining reddit by making it into a "SJW safe space" or whatever, but the truth of the matter is a lot of that happened not as the result of Ellen's tenure, but because of board pressure being applied after Ellen left.
Sam is a part of that and is probably also why reddit is basically forced into the "we must grow at all costs and justify our valuation" mode of operation and has been since even before interest rates started rising.
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Accelerationism is about, if a techno-god is possible (which it isn't), building it as soon as possible so we don't waste this universe's precious time with futile meandering.
Both safetyist pearl clutchers and rent seekers like Altman are ennemies of this. Both are different levels of deluded luddites who think they can stop innovation right where they like it and more damningly that they have any right to.
The twitter e/acc types are techno-optimist normies that have little understanding of theory, which is why they think Altman is on their side because he's not trying to put them in prison for owning a GPU. They don't know that you always shoot a traitor before an enemy.
Let these events be a harbinger of a return to Open AI. And not moats for managers or VCs against our changing times.
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