Article from The Atlantic, archive link: https://archive.ph/Vqjpr
Some important quotes:
The tensions boiled over at the top. As Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman encouraged more commercialization, the company’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, grew more concerned about whether OpenAI was upholding the governing nonprofit’s mission to create beneficial AGI.
The release of GPT-4 also frustrated the alignment team, which was focused on further-upstream AI-safety challenges, such as developing various techniques to get the model to follow user instructions and prevent it from spewing toxic speech or “hallucinating”—confidently presenting misinformation as fact. Many members of the team, including a growing contingent fearful of the existential risk of more-advanced AI models, felt uncomfortable with how quickly GPT-4 had been launched and integrated widely into other products. They believed that the AI safety work they had done was insufficient.
Employees from an already small trust-and-safety staff were reassigned from other abuse areas to focus on this issue. Under the increasing strain, some employees struggled with mental-health issues. Communication was poor. Co-workers would find out that colleagues had been fired only after noticing them disappear on Slack.
Summary: Tech bros want money, tech bros want speed, tech bros want products.
Scientists want safety, researchers want to research…
I expected as much, I had this feeling about Altman, too. The draw of profit became too much for him, and the board called him on it and let him go.
Which makes it even worse that now they’re groveling at his feet to return.
Ugh.
I just saw a headline that he’s going to work for Microsoft now.
My employer heavily uses Microsoft, and I’m in IT.
Since June, Microsoft eliminated all their training staff - the folks who show others how to use their software, reclassified their customer experience staff to eliminate the role - these folks met with customers to solicit product feedback and find out what people actually want, made unilateral and poorly communicated changes to security policies that impact hundreds of our users, turned on beta (preview) features for end users without testing - in some cases rendering software inoperable in our environment, and is disabling or limiting features that work(ed) in software covered under our enterprise license end is encouraging people to purchase entirely new software systems from Microsoft to regain the lost functionality.
Honestly, if he was fired for pursuing profits over quality, then he’ll fit right in.
Well the idea to ask for him to return came from MS and not from the board themselves. At least that plan failed according to media report.
His return deal totally capsized, he’s out as CEO still. The old CEO of Twitter, Emmet Shear, is now in charge.