Sam Altman gets job at Microsoft after weekend of "news" about him returning to CEO post at OpenAI

oh, you mean that bit;

In an open letter, more than 600 of OpenAI’s 700 employees demanded the resignation of the board and said they may walk out if Altman is not brought back

(sounds all pretty culty to me.)

oh, you mean that bit
:money_mouth_face:

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Calling it a “coup” is an interesting framing of the situation. The board is ultimately in charge, and the entire point of the non-profit governance was to be able to step on those incentivized too much by profit.

(Was it a good idea? Well, the two answers to that are also questions: For who? and Who the fuck knows?).

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Everybody trying to superficially recreate Steve Jobs - and succeeding. Superficially. One has to laugh.

If the stories I’m hearing, that Altman got pushed out by more hard-core “TESCREAL” board members are accurate, the people not mentioned in the story are awful, too.

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That’s not the reality, though. It takes massive malfeasance - mostly against the board themselves, not employees or the public - for boards to actually oust CEOs. After all, it is a small, incestuous club; with SV being more closely related to each other than even corporate boards overall.

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The “T” stands for transhumanism . This is the backbone of the TESCREAL bundle. Indeed, the next three letters of the acronym — Extropianism, singularitarianism, and cosmism — are just variations of transhumanism. But we’ll get to them in a moment. The core vision of transhumanism is to technologically reengineer the human species to create a superior new race of “posthumans.” These posthumans would be “superior” by virtue of possessing one or more super-human abilities: immortality, extremely high “IQs,” total control over their emotions, exceptional “rationality” and perhaps new sensory modalities like echolocation, used by bats to navigate the world

So…this is eugenics is shiny sci-fi jacket. Wonderful. I really hate this timeline.

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The board may be in “charge”, but when more than 2/3 of your workforce threatens to quit when you can the guy, and your major investor says they’ll just hire the guy themselves, what are they really in charge of?

Yes, they’ll own the IP of the current iteration of the Chat GPT AI, but will that be worth anything in a year at this rate of innovation, especially if those employees make good on their walkout?

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I’ve seen this movie before.

The original was better.

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Which pocket is it coming out of if the investors own both companies?

They put up the money for the “nonprofit” that owns a for profit. Or is it the other way around? Doesn’t that stink? And with the money controlled the board composition. This is just a reorganization by the parent company.

I’ll bet they’ll get some juicy tax deductions out of it. But nothing changes for them.

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It was really striking how Marc Andreessen’s rant on Xitter sounded exactly like it was written by the Futurists (and Marinetti co-wrote the Fascist Manifesto). These movements have some pretty obvious sentiments connecting them, in a lot of ways, and this particular strain of techno-optimism seems unavoidably connected to fascism. That is its inherent political ideology.

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nina arianda rebecca cantu GIF by Billions

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oh, micheal douglas did few years later an even “better” one;

the gimmick were cd-rom-drives. and a tiny bit fatal attraction?

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… when we quit a job, we don’t take the job with us so nobody else can have it — they still have the money they were going to pay us with, and they use it to hire somebody else :confused:

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Someone else that doesn’t have the institutional knowledge and possibly from a far more limited pool than before.

… based on Holmes and SBF, how long until Altman gets charged with a crime :thinking:

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Should we draw up a bingo card?

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Seems a tad generic.

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Comment:

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

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I thought transhumanism was about uploading human minds to computers where you could effectively overclock them with more resources. I think that came from Vernor Vinge with a side of Ray Kurzweil? The more recent usage mentioned here is just icky all around.

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Mentioning Vinge and Kurzweil, you might be thinking more of the Singularity (the “S” in TESCREAL), a related concept.

A lot of these concepts, including transhumanism, aren’t necessarily horrible in and of themselves. However, put them in the hands of tech billionaires who never got over being bullied as nerdy schoolkids and who never outgrew Ayn Rand and this is the result: less Star Trek Fully Automated Space Luxury Communism and more a cosmos ruled by immortal superhero feudal lords.

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