We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.
News article covering the situation: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires-sam-altman-greg-brockman-employees-openai
Altman’s Microsoft hiring comes just hours after negotiations with OpenAI’s board failed to bring him back as OpenAI CEO. Instead, former Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has been named as interim CEO.
Altman had been negotiating to return as OpenAI CEO, but OpenAI’s four-person board refused to step down and let him return.
Smart move by Microsoft. But I will be curious to see how long Sam and Greg last?
It is going to be completely different for them. They are not going to have anywhere near the autonomy they enjoyed at OpenAI.
But this entire episode is a bit mind blowing.
One thing I find interesting is that Alphabet had two AI competitors. Cruise and OpenAI.
Both companies look to have self destructed. Cruise CEO resigned over the weekend.
In both cases it looks like it was about safety. AI is so different from other technologies.
There is such a huge safety aspect. It could be we will see a lot of stuff like this. Where people with AI thought they could move fast and break things and found out they really could not that someone is watching and not going to let them.
How was cruise a competitor?
i think people are genuinely bimodal in regards to ai safety. for some people if you ask the ai how to kill someone and it gives a list of genuine answers they freak out and for others they go “oh, nice, it works,” and there’s not much in between. either side finds the other very difficult to understand when discussing the topic.
Neither Sam or Greg have ML background so idk why they are being hired for an essentially chief scientist role in this new lab. Altman basically has the skillset of a CEO, he’s good at attracting talent, marketing himself and his company, and raising money. Not the skillset of a research lead. They’ll probably stay just long enough to market it a bit and then move onto the next thing.
I don’t think you realize Sam is literally the CEO of this new company, it’s not just some small Microsoft’s department, this is effectively a new company owned by Microsoft just like deepmind has its own CEO but is also technically owned by google.
The GPT-4 Lead has already quit OpenAI to join Sam and Greg, and Greg has experience himself being listed as lead of infrastructure team on the GPT-4 paper, actually Greg Brockman has more significant main contributions on the official GPT-4 paper than Ilya does.
Microsoft is an enormous company. This “AI research” organization will likely function as its own independent company owned by Microsoft.
That’s exactly it. The important machine learning researchers are still there. The people that have left are simply the talkers that like to put themselves into the spotlight.
I totally agree with you. It was done to stop the sliding share price of Microsoft. Which is why it was a smart move as it accomplished that.
The average person is completely clueless. I have been watching CNBC this morning and it is hard to watch because I keep getting into laughing fits.
That’s exactly what Microsoft wants.
Like when Microsoft attracted all the talent out of their competitor Borland in the 1990s
google is not in the same race. they know they can’t so they put out articles talking about how bad AI is. Google is an advertising company they wont catch up.
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275 The new CEO said it has nothing to do with safety and that he wouldn’t have joined if he hadn’t been able to commercialise the models.
Admittedly he could be lying or the board could have lied to him, but I don’t think we can assume for certain it’s about safety
Sheer also says his first plan is to have a 30 day investigation in to how they reached this point, so maybe what it’s about isn’t even totally clear to those with direct involvement (though it’s still fun to speculate)
Why Emmett? Anyone have insight? I am familiar with him from his time at Twitch. Twitch is a very different company so the selection is a bit surprising. Is OpenAI planning to livestream training runs or something? Hmmm thinking about it some more, a main component of Twitch was chat. Obviously I am reaching.
He’s part of the EA movement. His p(doom) is between 5% and 50% according to Zvi, a prominent member of the larger Rationalist movement. “My AI safety discourse is 100% ‘you are building an alien god that will literally destroy the world when it reaches the critical threshold but be apparently harmless before that.’” Again, according to Zvi.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, read this novel I wrote two days ago or this one that says pretty much the same thing.
His current plans for OpenAI are to make ChatGPT look like a pretty young woman wearing a bikini and sitting in a hot tub as it answers your questions.
I welcome our new AI Thot overlords. Haha DeepThot.