Technology

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?

So what is their board here if they aren't investors?

Because he lied to them instead of for them.

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.

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.

He just resigned like 30m ago.

because there seems to be a diminishing return in training/inference power to usefulness

Be careful not to be caught up in the application of Goodhart's Law going on in the field right now.

There's plenty of things GPT-4 trounces everything else on, they just tend to be things outside the now standardized body of tests, which suggests the tests have become the target and are no longer effective measurements.

This is perhaps most apparent in things like Orca, where we directly use the tests as the target, have GPT-4 generate synthetic data that improves Llama performance on the target, and then see large gains in smaller models on the tests.

But those new models don't necessarily have the same capabilities on more abstract capabilities, such as the recent approach of using analogy to solve problems.

We are arguably becoming too myopic in how we are measuring the success of new models.

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.

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.