- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.
“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the company said in its blog post.
EDITED TO ADD direct link to OpenAI board announcement:
https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition
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“AI is going to take away jobs.”
“Wait… not like that.”
Oops… didnt see that coming
He got billions in his account. I dont think he cares. For them job is something to do to not get bored, I guess?
He got billions in his account
Was unaware the man has had his bank account records leaked to the public. Do you have a source for this claim?
Net worth estimates seem to be $500M - $700M
https://www.thestreet.com/investors/sam-altman-net-worth-how-does-he-make-money
Seems to be somewhere between 0.5 and 0.7 billion, which due to a quirk of the English language are technicallybillions, making OP technically not wrong ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/sam-altman-net-worth/ https://www.thestreet.com/investors/sam-altman-net-worth-how-does-he-make-money
TIL I got billions myself 😎
Lol
Nope but assuming he’s broke af is pretty idiotic. He rolls wirh Musk, Branson and all.
I’m more surprised that the folks at OpenAI saw fit to fire him than I am that he committed fireable offenses.
Because he lied to them instead of for them.
But what he lied about is probably bigger news.
This has corporate PR speak all over it, but it is clear that it was circumventing the desires of the Board, and the chairman of the Board steps down as well.
The absolute hell happened?
If I had to guess, about how interested he was in keeping it non-profit in spirit. Which direction he believed in, I have no idea. I don’t know him or the board. The statement sounds like the board is leaning toward non-profit behavior, but I don’t believe a company who merely says “do no evil”.
The company is now actually being run by ChatGPT, Mira is just the face it’s hiding behind.
I asked Bard to give me a generic reason for firing a CEO.
Certainly, here are some vague reasons for firing the CEO of an AI company:
Leadership concerns: The CEO’s leadership style or personal conduct was not in line with the company’s values or culture. This could include issues such as lack of transparency, poor communication, or ethical breaches.Yup.
Bard is on copium with that last one.
No, Bard is just making a prediction based on the way CEO firings are presented in press releases. Those press releases are never the “real” reason, what we’re seeing here is the way a board would frame the firing of its CEO. “Ethical breach” is the term used when “The CEO was killing hookers for fun and WHOO-WEE we did NOT want to get any of that on us,” is not considered appropriate to tell the press.
OpenAI also announced that co-founder Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board, though he will remain at the company.
Interesting. No way this isn’t connected
Yeah. Given the language (Altman lied to them) and the chairman stepping down (but remaining in the C-suite) I’m starting to think that maybe Altman was trying to take something in an unapproved direction and present it as a fait accompli but got found out before he was ready to reveal it.
I added the direct link to the board’s announcement to the post text so people can see it for themselves – interesting how the board separated Altman’s removal from Brockman’s demotion by five paragraphs, adding Brockman’s changed position just before the end almost as an afterthought. Which of course it isn’t, lol.
Uhh… Keep reading?
Hours after it was published, Brockman posted to X that he had quit “based on today’s news.”
Apologies, looks like that statement may have been added after the fact.
He hallucinated to the board.
Not exactly surprised here. Every time I’ve seen him on the news, it’s always him fearmongering about the dangers of generative AI, when ChatGPT is burning through money and seemed to become more and more restrictive with every iteration. You can’t run an organization if it is built on top of lies.
Actually open models (not open source, sadly) like specialized LLaMa 2 derivatives that could be ran and fine-tuned locally seems to be the future, because there seems to be a diminishing return in training/inference power to usefulness, and specialized smaller model tuned for specific applications are much more flexible than a giant general one that can only be used on somebody else’s machine.
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This is really big news, going to be interesting if anything leaks or if we stay in the dark. For Altman to be fired and for them to release a statement like this it has to be something drastic.
Oh no, anyways
This is unprecedented. They let that schmuck at Unity “retire” on a holiday but they fired Sam. Oof.
It sounds like there was a power struggle over the direction of OpenAI.
My guess — and this is pure conjecture — MS canned him because Bing didn’t eat Google’s lunch.
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Microsoft doesn’t have that power, and it has hurt their stock value. Their CEO’s response suggests that Microsoft and other partners didn’t know until everyone else did.
But they said it was because he wasn’t being totally honest with the board for OpenAI tho
Corps would never lie to save face or hide truths!!
CEO? Fuck him. He’ll be just fine.
of course he will, he wasnt even getting paid
Huh??
On one hand, this was posted 15 minutes before you posted this… on the other hand, this is a much clearer headline
Really? I searched by new before I posted, saw nothing about Sam Altman.
EDITED TO ADD you can color me blind, because yeah, there’s one titled “OpenAI announces leadership transition” right before mine. Shit. Not sure how to handle this, but if the mods want to delete mine they can.
Not sure how to handle this,
In times of great dishonor, the Samurai would commit seppuku with their sword.
I have half a plastic knife I use on the cat food . . . will that do?
Only if you post the video
I think I’m gonna need to upgrade my current drug regimen . . . be right back . . .
Alternatively, you can do sudoku.
But he still has to do it with the plastic knife.
Best I can do is charcuterie with dried salami.
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What’d he do?
No idea, but given how sudden and out-of-the-blue this is, and the fact that he was co-founder of OpenAI (meaning that to some degree the board is pushing him out of his own company) you can make an educated guess that’s it’s huge.
My guess, personally, is financial malfeasance,if only because personal misbehavior usually involves some hemming and hawing before a company concludes that the ejectee “is no longer a good fit and does not represent the values held by our organization.” This was very sudden, no one saw it coming, and that’s not too usual.I guess we’ll see, lol.
EDITED TO ADD I’ve changed my mind after a closer look at the wording of the board announcement. Given the language (Altman lied to them) and the chairman stepping down (but remaining in the C-suite) I’m starting to think that maybe Altman was trying to take something in an unapproved direction and present it as a fait accompli but got found out before he was ready to reveal it:
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. (paragraph 3)
As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. (paragraph 6)
Whatever it was it’s spicy enough that they’re trying to bury the press release in the late Friday afternoon news graveyard
Edit: even better, whatever they’re trying to distance themselves from is so important they didn’t even wait for the closing bell on the market.
I interpret their wording that he lied to the board repeadetly and made some unethical backdoor deals of evil.
More likely he didn’t want to be evil and all the board cares about is money
Almost certainly the opposite - it’s the board that is non-profit and Sam has been the one bringing billions of dollars of commercially-tied investment
Makes me wonder if he wanted to put ethical guardrails on the product that would’ve been less profitable for the board.
Unverified, but I saw some rumor about sexual abuse in his past. Look it up.
Those allegations have been floating since ~2021, I have a hard time believing they’d take emergency action on them 2-3y later.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.
Chief technology officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO, effective immediately.
When contacted by The Verge, OpenAI’s communications department declined to comment beyond the blog post.
This is an extremely sudden turn of events as Altman has largely been the face of OpenAI, which arguably kickstarted the current AI arms race with last year’s hugely popular ChatGPT.
Altman is a co-founder of OpenAI and initially served as a co-chair of the company alongside Elon Musk.
Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla — he has since founded his own AI company, xAI.
The original article contains 239 words, the summary contains 112 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This post is unnerving
How so?
The bot is using AI and arguably the technology of OpenAI to report on the news that a human has lost their job but has no context on what it is reporting.
Autotldr bot is not using any “AI” for summarizing, just “simple” NLP :)
Won’t that still be AI just a subset of it? But I guess you mean OpenAI gpt-3/ 4 here.
Please keep in mind that I am not an expert when it comes to AI/machine learning/Natural Language Processing and have just dabbled in those a few years ago. Also, many of these terms can be confusing because of all the marketing around them.
But, in short, what I meant was that autotldr is not based on a neural network/deep learning, but “basic” language processing algorithms with simpler statistical models attached to them, if at all.
What people generally mean with AI is some kind of deep learning which is helpful for more complicated tasks like “learning” about a topic and “understanding” things, but that is not really necessary for summarizing text since language has (mostly) fixed rules. So while there is certainly some overlap in the process, simple language processing does not need “AI” - you’d call it just machine learning, of which AI is generally a subset.
You can read a little more about the sunmarization above here:
Yeah, I see your point. Not sure I can do anything about it, but yeah. It’s kind of like an almost unnoticeable line in the sand has been crossed.
Thank you for taking the time to explain what you meant, I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.
You sound very GPTy.
Probably because he went on his hype campaign trying to ask for regulations, except not ones that actually harm his company, and then the fear mongering.
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