I’m so tired of hearing the shenanigans of billionaires.
The interesting part about this story isn’t Altman himself. It’s more about the weird decisions and inner politics of a $90bn company. A board firing their ceo without official reasoning, MS sweeping in while owning 49% of said company, 95% of the staff threatening to quit and the ceo coming back and firing the board while everybody else still tries to understand what the fuck just happened.
Like another commenter said, this could straight up be an episode of Silicon Valley.
And at the end of the day what it really boils down to is that ethics in tech is a PR byline, and the money will always win within the system that exists
Yeah, it’s actually pathetic how many people immediately sided with this clown too. Dude is another generic salesman type CEO who commercialized what was supposed to be open source software and lobbied the EU for loose regulations in AI, yet people act like it’s bad thing that they dumped him.
Just proves to me that most people involved in tech are greedy scumbags, from the top all the way down.
While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it’s been sitting in my head ever since:
Ultimately, the technology is not my concern. It is that there’s another Industrial Revolution happening, right now, you can play with it like a toy, and it will be very surprising to me if it results in a greater bargaining position for the worker. That’s just not how it goes.
Some portion of the conversation always has the sting of betrayal in it. But you like computer stuff! Yeah, I like computer stuff. Except we aren’t talking about computer stuff. We’re talking about people stuff. People are messy. I work with a lot of creative people, and I have also had the pleasure - firmly installed in quotes - of working with the kind of people who call those people “creatives.” We were at a meeting once where the person who will be advocating and using these technologies in your organization told us they hated creatives to our face. These technologies will displace workers and slash pay. That’s… I mean, that’s it.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/12/26/sockrates
From the start of this AI boom, I’ve been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and “passion” for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.
The only way to slow down this corporatization of the technology isn’t to completely shun it and demonize it. That just plays right into their hands with an “us vs them” narrative.
No, you have to push for open-sourcing the tech as hard as you can. The few open-source tools that have come out of this AI boom has the large corporations running scared that they aren’t going to be able to make money out of those sectors.
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“Pathetic” is actually a really good word to use in this situation, because its root is the greek word “pathos”, which is known today as a type of persuasion where you rely on emotion.
People only look at the headline. They see a person fired without a specified reason. It seems like it should be easy to see something happening is unfair.
But this sort of thing is rarely that simple.
I think you mean ethics in tech?
If so I agree.
Ah yeah I’m up too late, thanks for pointing that out haha, fixed
It’s putin prigozhin all over again
Okay, so can we shunt all the “tech billionaire celebrity entertainment” posts somewhere else?
It is tech news, but I get you. It’s hard to find a place with news about actual technological innovations, advances, updates etc rather than the machinations of the corporations involved. I completely understand the relevance, but it’s often not the sort of genuinely interesting read you’re looking for.
Or maybe it’s all a PR stunt, we don’t know what happens behind their closed doors.
Would you like to hear about my week? I’m a thousandaire.
What in the shit is going on. Goddamn. This has been a wild fucking weekend.
Like an episode of Silicon Valley
For every year that passes Silicon Valley slides further and further from comedy to documentary.
Mike Judge does it again!
Mike Judge is an actual prophet
I have seen no evidence to the contrary.
This would be the opening of an episode, they guys have to lose in the cliffhanger of each episode
Is it still the weekend?
At least in the US, most people will have Thursday-Sunday off, so it’s basically “Friday.”
Part of the Weekend Never Dies
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.
For fucking real. It’s like he’s God himself, because everyone want him, nevermind the consequences.
I have to believe it’s mostly hype. The man was at the helm when OpenAI suddenly “changed the world” with “AI” (note the quotes) but that seems to be almost entirely a case of luck.
Like, generative AI models aren’t really brand new. OpenAI just made them really accessible and easy to use for other applications, which is where Altman comes in. He had an ounce of foresight to see the tech was “the future” and a whole lot of luck executing on his plan to bring it to market.
As a figurehead and leader, that does count for a lot, but not the table-flipping freak outs we see happening.
There are a lot of LLMs. None hold a candle to OpenAI’s models still.
This will change in time, but right now OpenAI is still in front
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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.
Really? Why do people think that? All this news made me try it out yesterday and it completely blew my mind.
It’s degraded from what it was, and even that model had reached a ceiling as to what it could do.
Any links to the sister’s posts?
Someone will come along with them and call me names for dismissing them, but I don’t really want to get into it.
That’s fair. I’ll search a bit. Thanks!
I didn’t even know anything was going on with his sister, either. The plot thickens.
She’s accused him of sexual assault. Several years ago apparently. He has generally ignored it or said she’s off her meds.
Somehow, Altman returned.
total shitshow for everyone involved.
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.
I read something about him not being honest with the board, or keeping things from them? Didn’t see any elaboration, though.
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.
Trust the board, bro.
ClosedAI has completely fallen to capitalism as it seems.
Was is ever not completely under capitalism? As far as I’ve seen they were always fully going with hype over substance posturing
Well, it wasn’t founded like this.
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?
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.
It’s rediculous though… This guy is a sociopath
I haven’t seen that take yet, got any links?
I’m not trying to defend the guy, just actually curious
He’s a financial venture capitalist type who made open AI closed source, and tried to pressure the EU into not regulating AI.
He’s your typical shitbag tech CEO masquerading as a genius. Employees want him back because it’s better for their RSUs/stock options. Bunch of greedy assholes from top to bottom.
Have you heard of that creepy orb thing that was installed in a bunch of African developing countries that traded a shitcoin cryptocurrency that is worth nothing and constantly loses more and more value, in exchange for appropriating people’s biometric data, that additionally has never said why they want it or what they want to do with all of that information?
That’s this guy. He’s the creator and owner of that thing. Dude is a comic supervillain.
The long and short of it is, they fucked around and found out who was more important to the future of the company.
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.
They’re all money grubbers. The board are part of a rationalist cult called Effective Altruism that claims to want to save humanity, but they believe they need lots of money to do this (Sam Bankman-fried is an EA guy.)
Sam Altman is also nominally part of this group, but also hangs out with people like musk and Rishi Sunak. He’s more like your typical alt-right tech bro.
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”
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.
So why about the board then? These people seem like idiots.
From the first sentence of the article:
Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI with a new board
Are there some (paid or not, doesn’t matter) great alternatives to OpenAI based solutions like ChatGPT 4 and Copilot?
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.
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.
There’s a great alternative to chatgpt voice called bark
https://github.com/suno-ai/bark
And a fork of it that has voice cloning:
The new board screams “for the benefit of humanity” /s
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.
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
Man just taking a break and comes back with hire salary.
