It’s the greed and churlishness that gets to me. The current world and culture of the advanced economies was almost designed for geeky cis-het white university graduates from upper-middle-class backgrounds (disclaimer: guys like me). This was not “revenge of the nerds” but a complete triumph: a constant stream of well-paying careers; adulation in the popular press once reserved for physical prowess; SFF movies and TV shows and videogames everywhere; access to vast libraries of information in the palm of your hand; etc. And yet somehow it’s not enough for some of them, who only want more money, status as philosopher kings, and more revenge on and dominance over those they consider their inferiors.
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I looked at the link. I also had a quick scan through the comments. Lots of chin-stroking pseuds in there doing ‘detached analysis’ on a woman’s publicly-stated trauma 
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Well, after all, isn’t that all women’s experiences are? Just an intellectual exercise! Not like we’re REAL people, after all… /s
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It upset me so, sooooooo fucking much reading that shit. I should know better, really. It still breaks my heart though that people have so little empathy, and dress it up as cleverness.
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We’re about to find out how personal. First they issue a ‘clarification’ that Sam did nothing wrong. Now, it appears Sam is in talks to return as CEO already. Somebody goofed up, clearly. Quite the soap opera.
If he is reinstated, I hope all the negative posters here might consider that the cynical take is not always the accurate one. Not everyone in SV is a SBF.
… no, getting his job back would not prove he didn’t do anything wrong, that’s not how it works
You can post unpopular opinions if you want, but complaining about your unpopularity is off topic
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He must have some serious insurance information on the company.
Regardless- it’s hard for the PR Department to spin this as an amusing faux pas.
Investors and the public will consider it either as something terrible being covered up or incredible incompetence. Not somewhere to park your money or look for a job.
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From what a friend that works there has indicated, the board is pretty much involved in a polycule and are very much in line with the TESCREAL movement / big devotees of LessWrong and crew. Dunno how true any of it is (heck, I’m ancillary and have occasionally been metamours with the Greater Seattle Polycule, so , wouldn’t shock greatly)
Microsoft: “Actually…”
They were not happy to be taken by surprise like that, and I imagine that they had a thing or two to say to the board.
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the insurance might be as simple as the rest of the staff…
Altman holding talks with the company just a day after he was ousted indicates that OpenAI is in a state of free-fall without him. Hours after he was axed, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and former board chairman, resigned, and the two have been talking to friends and investors about starting another company. A string of senior researchers also resigned on Friday, and people close to OpenAI say more departures are in the works.
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Rumours have been moving fast today: Altman and Brockman started immediately pitching a new AI start-up (something that requires planning); a group of OpenAI investors were trying to stir up a staff revolt (on the basis of share price potentially falling without him) and a lawsuit against the board to get Altman re-instated; the OpenAI board is talking to him about coming back, with Altman ambivalent and demanding governance changes (translation: Zuckerberg levels of voting power) if he does; a pissed-off Nadella contacted Altman to support whichever direction he goes in (with an implied threat to OpenAI if Altman doesn’t stay).
While it’s obvious you’re a big fan of Altman, there’s nothing to be positive about from a business POV concerning the chaos surrounding him over the past 24 hours. No-one here is saying he’s a swindler like Bankman-Fried, but the tech press’s newest whiz-kid clearly made decisions questionable enough (perhaps deliberately) that several board members voted to terminate him. That’s not cynicism, that’s an observation of facts on the ground.
However this shakes out, it’s a vignette about the dangers for tech companies (and their employees) that invest themselves entirely in a single person whose main value becomes popularity tied to fickle media coverage and fanboi popularity. We’ve seen this with outright crooks like Bankman-Fried, with unstable egomaniacs like Musk, with techno-utopian greedy guts like Andreesen, and now with Altman (who just seems like a more thoughtful and less publicly obnoxious variation on the successful SV VC who finds it useful to also be seen as a tech visionary tycoon).
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This is moving very quickly, and it sounds like the OpenAI board is going to have to resign by the end of this. Altman has offers from Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon at this point.
“ Not somewhere to park your money or look for a job.”
Right. Who’s going to hitch their wagon to a clusterfuck?
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I wonder what the non-competes and NDAs are like in that company. Altman might not be bound by one but the others who resigned or are threatening to do so…?
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Non competes are unenforceable in California.
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yeah, i’d wonder what intellectual property rights are like. if they jump ship, can they take their algorithms with them? some of the attempts at self driving cars have been caught up by that
and can any anyone replicate their success without similarly hoovering up everyone’s copyrighted data? open ai did it without asking permission by being clandestine… but now many more people are aware.
( also very curious about how much physical space that all takes up. much too large to fit in one’s pockets i’m sure. )
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New algorithms can be written.
I’m not sure the data issue is that big. All the next Chat program needs to do is digitally hoover up the same amount of text from the internet. It’s not like Google Maps, where you would need to send camera equipped cars and walkers down every street in the world. You just need plenty of bandwidth and CPU cycles.
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Weirdly the only time I can remember hearing about Less Wrong was on I Don’t Speak German.
Another special episode this time, as we welcome to the show David Gerard, author of acclaimed takedown of cryptocurrency Attack of the 50ft Blockchain, and Elizabeth Sandifer, author of acclaimed takedown of neo-reaction Neoreaction a Basilisk, to discuss Scott Alexander (or is it Siskind?) and his blog Slate Star Codex, with digressions into Less Wrong, ‘rationalism’, and why David is responsible for Grimes hooking up with Elon Musk.
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