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Notes -
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
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.
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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