Source: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition

Today, it was announced that Sam Altman will no longer be CEO or affiliated with OpenAI due to a lack of “candidness” with the board. This is extremely unexpected as Sam Altman is arguably the most recognizable face of state of the art AI (of course, wouldn’t be possible without great team at OpenAI). Lots of speculation is in the air, but there clearly must have been some good reason to make such a drastic decision.

This may or may not materially affect ML research, but it is plausible that the lack of “candidness” is related to copyright data, or usage of data sources that could land OpenAI in hot water with regulatory scrutiny. Recent lawsuits (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/writers-suing-openai-fire-back-companys-copyright-defense-2023-09-28/) have raised questions about both the morality and legality of how OpenAI and other research groups train LLMs.

Of course we may never know the true reasons behind this action, but what does this mean for the future of AI?

  • solresol@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Normally in most companies, the responsibility of the board is around representing the interests of the shareholders; for example, ensuring that the financial statements are a genuine representation of the value of the business. And usually, a statement about a lack of candidness from the CEO is corporate speak for “the CEO is using company money for personal gaiin”, which again is corporate speak for “we found the CEO is guilty of embezzlement, but we don’t want to ruin the prosecution’s case and risk defamation by saying that out loud”.

    But, it could also be anything that materially affects shareholder value that the CEO isn’t being honest about. For example, if Sam Altman knew that November’s GPT-4 was disastrously worse at programming than previous releases, but told the board that everything was fine, and that it had all checked out as being perfect… that could also count as “lack of candidness”. He would have to have done this repeatedly for the board to swoop in; some sort of “this is the final straw” after last week’s announcements.

    That all said, OpenAI’s board does have a wider remit: they are also have a reponsibility around safe-guarding the use of AI and a few other things like that. So if OpenAI had actually built an AGI and Sam Altman was lying about it, they would also have a responsibility to fire him.

    In every example I can think of, this announcement means that Sam Altman has been lying about something. In my experience, dishonest executive leadership almost always slows research and development down; so OpenAI has been succeeded despite Sam Altman’s leadership, rather than because of it. So I predict that AI research speeds up even more now. (Uh oh.)

    • fordat1@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      That is going to look so stupid later. Because of how high profile OpenAI news will dig in and write about the sister stuff even if it isn’t really the sole reason Sam got fired. It will be perceived as a weird choice to also quit with that context

    • currentscurrents@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      This seems pretty sketchy. Lots of angry words, but few details.

      Most of this has nothing to do with sexual abuse, but is rather family drama over their dad’s will. She says that Sam and his lawyer were able to delay or withhold money she was supposed to inherit, but doesn’t really provide details. There’s not enough information here to judge the accuracy of her claims.

      The sexual abuse allegedly happened when she was 4 and he was 13, but she didn’t remember it until some kind of flashback in 2020.

      Technological abuse - {I experienced} Shadowbanning across all platforms except onlyfans and pornhub."

      Sam is certainly well-connected within the tech industry, but I’m doubtful that he could get that many platforms to ban her. Also, her posts seem to be up and visible right now.

      • fordat1@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It all seems vague as hell until some NYTimes/Wapo/WSJ journalist helps parse it all out and writes a clear coherent article about that, also the editor at those papers may not think such a story is newsworthy enough to put resources on that for month for a VC/Startup founders program head but for the CEO of the “hottest” company right now its a no brainer

  • ChinCoin@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The way this was done, without concern for optics or consequences is very strange. It feels almost personal.

  • LtCmdrData@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    Normally the board would fire the CEO for dishonesty with just “lost confidence”. It would not cause reputational damage, and it would not be legally consequential.

    Board must think it’s legally important to fire CEO with language that might indicate that Altman has violated his fiduciary duty and they were not aware. Potentially serious reputational or financial damage that Altman should take with him.

  • fromnighttilldawn@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    People are busting their ass to publish papers in NeurIPS before graduating from undergrad just to have a chance to work in ML.

    Here we have a CEO of the world’s most major AI company with a degree…*check notes* bachelor of mechanical engineering from Colby college.

  • onfallen@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    it is obvious that Sam Altman got in their way to fully commercialize OpenAI models. Sam doesnt want to print money, the board does

    • LtCmdrData@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Schmidhuber was fired first in 1993. There is fail to credit the pioneers of the field.