OpenAI fires Altman

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dada_dave

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Cmaier said:
It appears more and more likely that the issue was that the board wanted to focus on the original non-profit mission of the company, and wasn’t happy with Altman’s focus on the for-profit subsidiary.
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Then all I can say is that whatever dollar store imitation of a palace coup this is, is the worst possible way they could have affected any kind of positive change. And as you said Altman and Nadella not exactly covering themselves in glory either. They are almost all guilty of vague statements to justify extreme actions, reversals, backtracking of the reversals, and just a dizzying array of incompetence all around. They say too little when a detailed explanation is needed and too much when they should shut up. This would be mildly amusing if it were some podunk startup, but OpenAI and MS? Yikes. Doesn’t spark confidence.
 
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ArgoDuck

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Altman is back "in principle" according to reports in the last hour. There’s a partly changed board as well. And Brockman returns too

I think this means the faction in favor of aggressive development has ‘won’, if that’s what this was all about
 
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dada_dave

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ArgoDuck said:
And now there’s this from reuters, suggesting the board’s firing of Altman followed a letter to the board from researchers at OpenAI about a breakthrough in artificial general intelligence. Interesting…
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Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for what's known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
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That’s an “interesting” definition of AGI and it doesn’t sound like their sources actually have personal knowledge of the project in question. I mean if I’m wrong, I’m wrong but press “X” to doubt.
 
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ArgoDuck

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Just a note concerning what @dada_dave highlighted, that the ‘AGI‘ breakthrough is apparently called “Q* (pronounced Q-Star)”

I speculate Q-star might be a thinly veiled play on ’Questor’, from an old Gene Roddenberry movie “The Questor Tapes” (1974) which concerns a newly constructed and not quite finished android

The android awakens to find it has large gaps in its information and no idea of its purpose. In the course of the movie it starts absorbing large quantities of information about humans, and ultimately discovers its purpose is to (invisibly) guide humanity

All of which sounds a lot like OpenAI‘s original (declared) mission to develop an AGI for human benefit and to ‘solve all our problems’

I have no idea whether that’s still the mission given Microsoft’s buy-in and influence and all the recent changes. One scenario i guess is that Altman truly believes their AGI is close and wants to make sure it happens. Another is that it’s all still decades away if it happens at all, and that some in the AI space believe too much of their own hype
 
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dada_dave

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Musk is suing Altman for breach of contract to “only develop AI for the good of humanity”

arstechnica.com

Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing them of chasing profits

OpenAI is now a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft, says lawsuit.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Musk’s lawsuit alleges that OpenAI’s latest AI model, GPT4, released in March last year, breached the threshold for artificial general intelligence (AGI), at which computers function at or above the level of human intelligence.
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Uh huh

The legal fight escalates a long-running dispute between Musk, who has founded his own AI company, known as xAI, and OpenAI, which has received a $13 billion investment from Microsoft.
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Musk has his own company developing AI now? What a coincidence

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