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To bring up another post from last week, I'm going to go ahead and repost @justcool393's piece on the Sam Altman/OpenAI/Microsoft situation, since she posted it a few hours ago and right before the last thread went down.
Here's her writing:
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
I'm reposting here because I'm convinced, like many other residents, that the ongoing drama of who controls AI development has far reaching implications, likely on the scale of major power geopolitical events. If not ultimately even greater.
To add a bit to the discussion to justify reposting - I think many of these discussions around AI Safety versus Accelerationism are extremely murky because so many people in secular, rationalistic circles are extremely averse to claiming religious belief. It's clear to me that both AI Safety and Accelerationism have strong themes of classical religion, and seem to be two different sects of a religion battling it out over the ultimate ideology. Potentially similar to early Orthodox Christians versus Gnostics.
Alternatively, @2rafa has argued that many of the E/Acc (effective accelerationism) crowd comes from bored technocrats who just want to see something exciting happen. I tend to agree with that argument as well, given how devoid of purpose most of the technocratic social world is. Religion and religious-style movements tend to provide that purpose, but when you are explicitly secular I suppose you have to get your motivation elsewhere.
We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.
Anyway, clearly the technological battle for the future of our civilization continues to heat up. The luddites seem out, but may have a surprising last hour comeback. The woke/political left leaning folks seem to be strongly in charge, though the OpenAI scandal points to trouble in the Olympian heights of Silicon Valley AI decision makers.
Will the Grey Tribe use AGI to come back and finally recover the face and ground it has lost to the advancing SJW waves? Who knows. I'm just here for the tea.
Here's a summary by Zvi Mowshowitz of publicly-known facts regarding the firing of Sam Altman, as of Monday morning. The board has not yet made known the reasons for the firing besides the vague and broad claim that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and it seems that they are not making an effort to stand by their reasons.
The situation is ripe for some juicy conspiracy theories, and I would love to hear some. Why would a group of (I assume) intelligent and competent people on the board make such a drastic and dramatic firing that was sure to cause an excrement storm, and then not be able or willing to defend their actions to the public? Would disclosing their actual reasons cause the very thing they were trying to avoid? Did their actions prevent an untested AGI escaping into the wild? Inquiring minds want to know!
I think they got caught up in the "AI pause" discourse and tried the first thing they could think of to slow things down. They've been stewing around in their own bubble and didn't realize how much the engineers and coders on the production line hate that shit.
I have no better hypothesis, but I do note that if that's true, I'm confused by the statement about Sam Altman specifically being "not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and that "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI". If they were just trying to do a pause, I see no reason that they would have made that specific claim instead of saying something vague and inoffensive along the lines of "the board has concluded that the company's long-term strategy and core values require a different kind of leadership moving forward".
The former kind of statement is the kind of statement you only make if someone has royally fucked up and you're trying to avoid getting any of their liability on you.
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I can't see the AGI connection part, mostly because it doesn't seem to relate much to executive reshuffling. If anything along those lines happened serious enough to justify moving executives around, surely they would need to do something far more significant than that. Probably they would be best positioned to deal with any such thing with the current team in place. So I doubt it has anything to do with that.
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Non-profit boards tend to attract a certain sort of personality, so it's always possible that their heads just did that (aka e/acc v LW), but I don't really see a clear way for there to be an obvious e/acc v LW trigger point to cause the doorslam so quickly, and the new CEO claims it wasn't over a specific (presumably AI) safety concern. Some alternative possibilities:
Backroom geopolitics. Altman had been a big name and leader for non-nVidia non-Taiwan silicon development and cooperation with other countries to develop that, including the Saudis and China. There are a lot of reasons that might be Against <Domain> Interest here, including domains that can leverage extreme threats to OpenAI/MSFT that can't be discussed publicly without those threats activating, eg ITAR declarations or EU regulations specifically fucking your company over. Short of that, there's also just a lot of sub-LW concerns about these specific countries having unfetterable access to NMUs; I'll point to the Saga Of YOLOv1 as the prototype for that.
Corporate 'bad behavior', regardless of its legal or moral valence. Someone gave an offer the company 'couldn't' refuse, and Altman either didn't present discuss it with the board or didn't accept it (some overlap here with the above: eg a gov said to enforce certain RLHF into the GPTs or they'll encourage copyright lawsuits). Training data came from a source that wasn't disclosed or technically legally-available (eg, Google Books data dump). Employees have been allowed to cart home copies of the newest models on thumb drive, which sometimes gets lost. Basically just some variant of 'CEO did something that could fuck over the bottom line, without permission'.
Just as keku. OpenAI-the-business and OpenAI-the-non-profit are at (intentionally) cross purposes: the business wants to sell services for money, the non-profit wants to limit specific services sold. While most of that disagreement is mutualishly compatible, since Altman doesn't want to sell ClippyGod, there's an unavoidable disagreement where the business wants to sell its own control and the non-profit would rather burn it down than do so. And there's further the CEO (who wants to get paid a lot to do nothing and maybe present a Vision) and the employees (who want to be paid, and in this sorta field paid in a giant IPO-stock-mess). If Altman presented or pushed for a deal with Microsoft that benefited the CEOs, employees, and business at the cost of the board's interests, I don't think he's complain if they took it. But if he got fired in a way that had most of OpenAI's employee assets moved to MSFT directly, he'd cry all the way to the bank.
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