Sam Altman is back as CEO of OpenAI after inking a deal to return to the company following immense pressure from employees and investors on the board that ousted him less than a week ago.
  • toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    686·
    10 months ago

    This is such a confusing and messy situation. There is definitely more going on that we dont know about. I already posted this in another thread but:

    heres what I think could be going on:

    tinfoil hat on

    Some Microsoft bigwigs read the OpenAI foundation contract again and realise that they gave them a bunch of money but didnt get the nonprofit, and that they are now fully dependant on them, and that Altman is an experienced shark that knows this. They cant just buy the non-profit, the board would never agree. So they hatch a plan.

    They get the lead researcher and a bunch of board members riled up against Altman, with a bunch of dirt they have on him. They tell them hes going to run off with the money and show some proof. The board decides to fire Altman. In the same breath but in another room microsoft hires altman, and promise all openAI employees employment at their new openAI bootleg. They then tell the board through the official channels, that they fucked up and need to resign.

    Now, the situation was like this:

    • Either the board resigns, and microsoft gets to put some puppets in their place and complete buying openAI
    • The board doesnt resign, microsoft gets all their employees and the company in anything but name and openAI slowly fades in relevancy until Microsoft makes a generous offer of 150% above what they are worth(half of their price right now)

    either way, microsoft wins.

    so yeah, I think the next thing we are going to see is microsoft buying more openAI and getting actual control, or a complete buy.

  • PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    585·
    10 months ago

    I had never even heard of this guy until like 4 days ago. Now I have to wonder if he can turn water into wine and raise the dead because everyone’s losing their shit over him.

    • roguetrick@kbin.social
      134·
      10 months ago

      I think its mostly popcorn at this point. The general opinion as I’ve noticed is that OpenAI is severely failing at living up to what it promised. Nobody particularly gives a shit about the board or Altman except some folks that seem fixated about the honestly unhinged postings of his sister.

  • TallonMetroid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    332·
    10 months ago

    I’m still wondering why he was even fired in the first place. I’d thought that perhaps I just hadn’t paid proper enough attention and missed the reason, but nope, no reason was ever given.

    • aard@kyu.deEnglish
      541·
      10 months ago

      There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.

      Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.

      • guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        I’m not sure if I’d call this an investor win. More or less 90% of the company threatened to leave. It made sense on their part to do whatever it took to get him back. Anyways, looks like he stopped for a couple seconds to think about how smart it really was to join Microsoft.

        • Iceblade@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          10 months ago

          The “Private investor” in this case is Microsoft, which “graciously” offered to bring all the staff into their own new AI project. This is 100% an investor (a.k.a microsoft) win.

          • guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Well, kind of. It’s a bad look for MS to be so heavily invested in such a dumpster fire of a corporation, so it’s okay for them it got resolved, but they would have won out more if Altman had joined them. It was the other investors, including a number of employees, who would have really lost out if the company had just collapsed in on itself like it immediately started doing. This got resolved sort of against MS’s best interests.

            So, sure, investor win. But MS more or less lost this one.

            I generally agree that it’s unlikely the non-profit structure is going to do its job here, I’ve seen something like it more or less work on a smaller scale with things that are less intensely of interest to the entire capitalist class, although I have no idea what kind of regulations we’d end up with considering how many oligopolists are involved.

        • aard@kyu.deEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          It’s hard to tell from the outside - but at the beginning it mainly looked like pressure from the investors. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’d been a lot of activity from them behind the scenes, and the “90% leaving” part wasn’t really “standing up for Altman”, but more “follow the money”, with investors possibly pressuring employees in various ways.

    • soupcat@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      12·
      10 months ago

      I read something about him not being honest with the board, or keeping things from them? Didn’t see any elaboration, though.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        17·
        10 months ago

        That’s all they have said as well.

        We fired the guy for a reason, it was a good reason honest, no we’re not going to tell you what it was. Anyway we’ve hired him back now so it’s fine, stop asking questions.

    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      8·
      10 months ago

      They have been asked to provide that by the media, the first temporary CEO they named, and their investors, some of which even threatened to sue of they didn’t disclose it. So either it is something so discriminating to the board they’re willing to rather sink with it, or they actually don’t have anything solid at all and fired him without cause bue to something personal/unprofessional.

    • DR_Hero@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      The reason that makes the most sense in one of the articles I’ve read is that they fired him after he tried to push out one of the board members.

      Replacing that board member with an ally would have cemented control over the board for a time. They might not have felt his was being honest in his motives for the ousting, so it was basically fire now, or lose the option to fire him in the future.

      Edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-board-fight.html

  • IrrerPolterer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    10 months ago

    Wait, just so I get this right… The board fired him; Then members of the board wanted him back; Now he’s back and replaced the board too? - so did he pull an uno reverse on the board of directors or what? How the fuck does that shit work?

    • PeachMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      29·
      10 months ago

      The entire company (literally almost all the employees) threatened to quit and take jobs at Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated and the board removed. And that’s exactly what has happened.

      I don’t really have an opinion on this Sam guy or why his employees want to drink his bathwater, but it’s an interesting example of the employees of a company unifying behind somebody.

    • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.worldEnglish
      95·
      10 months ago

      I’m not convinced this wasn’t a planned strategy to get OpenAI back in the headlines for a week.

      I didn’t think so at first but now that it looks like everything will go back to “normal” before the US Thanksgiving Weekend, I feel like maybe this was a “Chinese Firedrill” to get attention for something other than their training data and legal problems.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        A whole bunch of people besides Altman still quit though. Is the board going to rehire all of them with new terms, individually?

  • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.socialEnglish
    12·
    10 months ago

    So many people here are eager to determine who the money-grubbers are, but here I am just curious what the material disagreement actually is, and how MSFT fits into it.

    Seems to me like the board of directors and leadership are mostly aligned on the underlying goals, but disagree on how to approach achieving them.

    • eronth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      I’m guessing Microsoft fits in basically having seen an opportunity and swept in. I doubt they have any “angle” in this other than “oh shit big name tech guy just lost his job and he’s skilled in stuff we want to be skilled in? grab him now”

    • spaduf@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I’ve been really surprised that the blanket promise to pay the legal bills of folks who may or may not be operating under fair use has not been a bigger part of this conversation. Particularly as this new line of user customized gpt products already includes PAYING the people who build these sometimes illegal products. The money incinerator continues.

  • hubobes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    Are there some (paid or not, doesn’t matter) great alternatives to OpenAI based solutions like ChatGPT 4 and Copilot?

    • isildun@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      Copilot, yes. You can find some reasonable alternatives out there but I don’t know if I would use the word “great”.

      GPT-4… not really. Unless you’ve got serious technical knowledge, serious hardware, and lots of time to experiment you’re not going to find anything even remotely close to GPT-4. Probably the best the “average” person can do is run quantized Llama-2 on an M1 (or better) Macbook making use of the unified memory. Lack of GPU VRAM makes running even the “basic” models a challenge. And, for the record, this will still perform substantially worse than GPT-4.

      If you’re willing to pony up, you can get some hardware on the usual cloud providers but it will not be cheap and it will still require some serious effort since you’re basically going to have to fine-tune your own LLM to get anywhere in the same ballpark as GPT-4.

    • bamboo@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      Not really, that’s why OpenAI gets so much attention, they’re just by far leading the field. Amazon has a copilot alternative though that just does basic completions, I think.

  • yeehaw@lemmy.caEnglish
    121·
    10 months ago

    So why about the board then? These people seem like idiots.

  • Crow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    62·
    10 months ago

    Who thinks some Ultra Intelligent General AI is already running things behind the scenes of openAI and threatens the humans of the company if they didn’t bring back the guy who serves the AI.

    • quo@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      I’ve been watching Boomers run all their emails and presentations from ChatGPT prompts, it wouldn’t surprise me if the people pulling the strings were getting guidance from a bot. MS personality type would absolutely test a brand new tech in a reckless way.

      Some MS exec is just a passthrough for the AI

    • x4740N@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      Use this instead of a link, it will let you hotlink a image or gif in a comment, not sure about videos as I haven’t tried that yet

      ![](https://media.tenor.com/tEEjB0RnxyAAAAAC/puppet-awkward.gif)