Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends (opens in new tab)

There had been two incidents reported: Sutskever seeing in Slack from other OA execs that the attempt to fire Toner was not over the paper but over her EA ties, and McCauley (apparently) being told by Altman that another board member wanted to fire Toner over the paper.

This list of 20 examples is new, albeit unsurprising given that there was no reason to think that there were only 2 incidents, and I highlight it in my longer commentary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-fac...

Why are these people so sycophantic, especially to such an inexperienced person?

Not that I agree with this method but it's a pretty effective way to force something.

> they seem more skilled at producing "internal drama"

My take on it is that they have an exceptionally skilled marketing department that's good at creating the impression that they've actually created an AGI, with stories trickling out to the press about ChatGPT 'getting lazy' or 'taking a break for the holidays' and other stuff that serves to humanise what is, at least for me, a product which routinely fails to accurately answer basic questions, the answers to which are contained in hundreds of blogs and forum postings.

If others are experiencing something different that's interesting. Personally I note that the 'I got this weird answer' posts are never accompanied by screenshots or any other evidence, they're just claims which all subsequent repliers appear to take as the unvarnished truth.

I congratulate their marketing team; I suspect that Mistral will ultimately present a far superior product.

> The question that could be asked is the long term ROI here actually going to be worth it for Sam?

Don't you think most entrepreneurs would call Sam if they have a chance?

He helps business ace, not saying that he is a successful entrepreneur. We cannot say that OpenAI is unsuccessful either. We don't know if they will be as successful in the future but he helped in moving the gears.

If Sam continues to have "luck" it is not survivorship bias. As I said before he is at the center of the stage.

I don’t think you need to like the people you listed (I, for example, hate Musk). But you seem to have no curiosity around understanding the value non-technical people can bring to a project or company or innovation.

You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.

>Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever?

You should try hiring a group of really smart people and getting them to work together to create something great before you dismiss the skills of the person doing that.

You're implying that you knew how to hire and identify smart architects and provided them the right vision to build a good building.

There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic.

Money can only get you so far.

>Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building.

Each one will end up pulling in their own direction, fighting with others over minor things, and nothing will ever get done.

Managing smart people, resolving conflicts, and making sure stuff gets done is a rare and underappreciated skill.

The guy's who fund these things deserve some credit for that at least. Take the Medici's for example, bankers who:

>claimed to have funded the invention of the piano and opera, financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore, and were patrons of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Francesco Redi, among many others in the arts and sciences.

Sure they didn't do the paintings but a lot of that stuff probably wouldn't have happened without them.

Someone has to be skilled enough in fundraising to be able to raise the money to get the talent to do the thing. That alone is a difficult skill to master. It’s often harder to do than to be able to create great things. Carmack and Woz are legends for a reason.

> Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever? In the words of Urkel, "Did I do that?"

This example doesn't work, at least, since the industrial revolution. If an average person wins the lottery they would need to solve a lot (really a lot) of issues to move a business forward and most probably go bankrupt except if he/she puts the money in low risk financial instruments.

There is no "I do that" in the complex world of business. It is a nice Disney story with a few examples. Organization does the work and that includes anonymous engineers, not only CEOs and founders. The great ignition could start at a garage (e.g. Apple) but the road is long.

> As far as Altman goes, I put him firmly in the same camp as Musk. They haven't done jack shit.

What Musk did with SpaceX is in no way comparable to just paying an architect to build a building. Unless the entire biography from Isaacson was fabricated, he was extremely hands on in design decisions, company direction, and hiring.

If you think none of those were relevant to the success of spacex, you’re completely delusional.

The reddit fatfire sub is full of middle managers at FAANG who are pulling a few hundred k to a mil in W2 income for the foreseeable future. Their eyes are set on riding off into the sunset at the earliest opportunity. They would probably have more fun working harder if the results benefited them directly but I'm sure many aren't serious risk takers. For those who are, I think they are already off doing their own thing.

right now, I get a lot more use out of my iPhone, GMail, and Netflix than I do ChatGPT. Could change soon, but something to note.

This is a fallacy. You can't say "this other CEO did something" if you're trying to make a point about Sam. If you have a problem with Sam doing something illegal, say it.

I'm not saying Sam has never done anything illegal, but most of the outrage seems to be that he doesn't follow social/business norms (not that he doesn't follow rules/regulations/laws).

> A lot can be accomplished by skirting pesky rules and regulations. It isn't something commendable.

Well that depends.

Is the thing that is being accomplished very good and are the regulations bad?

For example, what if there is a law that was passed for the sole purpose of protecting a well connected monopoly, so that consumers have to pay more money, only so that this one monopoly could profit.

I'd say that such a law would be bad and should be under minded.

Some rules are stupid and reek of cronyism, enshrining established players at the expense of innovation. Those deserve to be challenged.

Yes, this is why economists recommend against too many rules and regulations.

Whatever his issues, I think it's clear that humanity absolutely cannot afford people like him to control the emergence of AGI.

I don't like victim blaming, so I will tread carefully here. What makes you believe Annie Altman? If her accusations were sound, she should be working with a district attorney to file charges, or at least sue Sam in civil court. From some light Googling, I don't see either in progress.

Seriously?

It feels like he just wants to do 10 things at the same time.

If he was brilliant and high agency, rather than a sociopath, what would be doing differently right now? The phrase "wheeler and dealer" rarely applies to people who have genuinely changed the world forever; why do you put him in that category when he clearly has had tangible results?

Hey, if you don't like Sam, that's fine. But that doesn't make him a sociopath.

What laws are you accusing him of breaking?

Nope, those are very different. Fundamentally the reason that LLMs hallucinate is because they are predicting the next most likely word. It would be expensive to find a way to remove outputs where P truth is low, but it's not completely implausible like removing software bugs.

So more expressive type systems? Rust has made entire classes of bugs impossible, and you can do even better in Idris or some other dependent type theory. People don't do it because it's expensive and they're not trained it.

No it never eliminated all bugs, but if we're conflating the two problems you don't need to eliminate all hallucinations either, you just need to make them very unlikely, or a consequence of your bad specifications.

I think that's a fair statement. Manipulative leader bends reality to achieve results, perpetuating a culture where we have self fulfilling prophecies.

I appreciate the response, thanks.

The idea is that steve jobs built something. And those promoting altman try to somehow make him look like steve. But altman built nothing, has no plan whatsoever, and is an impostor. I think even he knows it, which explains his attempts at making something stick - be it dodgy crypto, corrupt business deals, an ai that fails to live to its hype, and so on.

No, but he sure stinky feeted quite a few.

I’m with you. I think the point here is that he _is_ like Steve Jobs, and everything that goes with that comparison.

Steve Jobs was a human being. No human should be worshipped.

Like all human beings, he wasn't a one-dimensional character from a crappy sitcom. He had negative and positive traits. Whatever one feels about him personally, it is absolutely a mistake to dismiss him. What he achieved -- multiple times -- puts him in extremely rarified air in the business world.

if apple had gone bankrupt he'd have started his own company. his best accomplishment was with UI and actually giving a fuck about the end user. thats not brilliant or genius. Actually having empathy for the user was such a novel concept in computing that it drove him to the top, even though he lacked empathy for anyone around him. His other notable accomplishments were negotiating with the record companies to license iTunes music. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for those conversations. Without a critical mass of licensing, iPod would have never happened. his glory for iPhone is nonsense, it would have happened within a year or 2 anyway as electronics matured.

> [elite’s HR issues]

We share this thought.

My pet theory regarding the recruitment efforts of this class: two broad fronts, one to drive the herd and the other to pick candidates.

The first front permeates our head space in form of content in the full spectrum of the bandwidth of this class: entertainment, news, organizations. Here the message is insistently that “Only suckers play straight”, “crime pays”, “winners and losers”. This is a consistent message.

The second front is more selective and here I am speculating (unlike the former which one gets to experience first hand, whether one likes it or not.) Here I suspect a more ‘direct’ sales pitch is used, and likely references the former.

Imagine you are a bright young thing from ‘not money’ raised in that “cultural” environment just mentioned. Now you open your favorite “journal of record”. You read barely disguised lies, note how these lies lead designated demographics by the NOSE with them not even aware of this fact, and finally your mentor has a conversation with you:

“Do you really think that the general population, these same people we were discussing being led by the nose with lies, are actually capable of self-governance and should have a say in “important” matters?”

Remember to use code words next time, this is getting flagged.

Sounds like he is their golden goose (for both the company and the employees).

He should be making investors money. That's his #1 job.

Aside from that, who cares about loyalty to the CEO of a tech company. He's a replaceable employee and OpenAI should be able to continue without him.

What were his actual crimes. It's not clear from the previous board nor anyone who's spoken about the matter what those were.

So did you tell your friend who killed JFK?

Sounds like you are you saying the employee signatures were manufactured and we shouldn't trust anything OpenAI says. If so, maybe you should provide the evidence for these claims.

I may not personally like it, but it's the pragmatist thing to do if you're leading openai. The gov will eventually get involved, better to get in front of it.

However, there won't be a monopoly or anything of the sort that will form, our society's institutions wouldn't be able to properly enforce it and it's too easy for weights to leak, too much alpha for people to not fight back against it. Not worried.

The ai safety crowd's problem is that they're focused on a hypothetical entity that will take over humanity, imagining all sorts of scenarios in lalaland which are ridiculous (some of their "thought leaders" even advocating for strikes on datacenters to save humanity???), where the real risk is criminals/terros being empowered by the ai's cognitive ability. For that, we'll need the gov involved one way or another.