OpenAI was working on advanced model so powerful it alarmed staff::Reports say new model Q* fuelled safety fears, with workers airing their concerns to the board before CEO Sam Altman’s sacking
So staff requested the board take action, then those same staff threatened to quit because the board took action?
That doesn’t add up.
The whole thing sounds like some cockamamie plot derived from chatgpt itself. Corporate America is completely detached from the real world.
That’s exactly what it is. A ploy for free attention and it’s working.
There’s no way this was a “ploy”.
ploy
/ploi/
noun
a cunning plan or action designed to turn a situation to one’s own advantage.Except for the cunning part it seems to be a pretty good description.
There’s no way the board members tarnished their reputations and lost their jobs so they could get attention for a company they no longer work for and don’t have a stake in. That’s just silly.
I don’t think the firing was a ploy, but I do think the retroactive justification of ‘we were building a model so powerful it scared us’ is a ploy to drum up hype. Just like all the other times they’ve said the same thing.
Ah ok. I agree with that.
That’s an appealing ‘conspiracy’ angle, and I understand why it might seem juicy and tantalising to onlookers, but that idea doesn’t hold up to any real scrutiny whatsoever.
Why would the Board willingly trash their reputation? Why would they drag the former Twitch CEO through the mud and make him look weak and powerless? Why would they not warn Microsoft and risk damaging that relationship? Why would they let MS strike a tentative agreement with the OpenAI employees that upsets their own staff, only to then undo it?
None of that makes any sense whatsoever from a strategic, corporate “planned” perspective. They are all actions of people who are reacting to things in the heat of the moment and are panicking because they don’t know how it will end.
Why would the Board willingly trash their reputation?
What reputation?
Why would they drag the former Twitch CEO through the mud and make him look weak and powerless?
Why would they care about that?
Why would they not warn Microsoft and risk damaging that relationship? Why would they let MS strike a tentative agreement with the OpenAI employees that upsets their own staff, only to then undo it?
Microsoft has put their entire sack in OpenAI’s purse. They could literally do or say anything to Microsoft.
Are you telling me you really think it’s outlandish to think the same people who push a glorified nested ‘if’ statement as AI would do what it said to do? Those people are goofy, if they thought they were being given a convoluted real life quest by a digital DM they’d be all about it.
Why would they want attention not a publicly traded company?
What’s that got to do with anything? They sell a thing, they want the thing to sell more.
I think pretty much the entire world knows about chat GPT so clearly advertising isn’t an issue for them. Firing your CEO is not really a good look unless you’ve got a very very good reason in which case you should announce it.
Which they didn’t because it’s fake grandstanding bullshit.
OpenAI loves to “leak” stories about how they’ve developed an AI so good that it is scaring engineers because it makes people believe they’ve made a massive new technological breakthrough.
Meanwhile anyone who works tech immediately thinks “some csuite dickhead just greenlit ED-209”
More like:
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They get a breakthrough called Q* (Q star) which is just combining 2 things we already knew about.
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Chief scientist dude tells the board Sam has plans for it already
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Board says Sam is going too fast with his “breakthroughs” and fires him.
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Original scientist who raised the flag realized his mistake and started supporting Sam but damage was done
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Microsoft
My bet is the board freaked out at how “powerful” they heard it was (which is still unfounded and from what they explain in various articles, Q* is not very groundbreaking) and jumped the gun. So now everyone wants them to resign because they’ve shown they’ll take drastic actions without asking on things they don’t understand.
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There’s clearly a good amount fog around this. But something that is clearly true is that at least some OpenAI people have behaved poorly. Altman, the board, some employees, the mainstream of the employees or maybe all of them in some way or another.
What we know about the employees was the petition which had ~90% sign it. Many were quick to point out the weird peer pressure that was likely around that petition. Amongst all that, some employees being alarmed about the new AI to the board or other higher ups is perfectly plausible. Either they were also unhappy with the poorly managed Altman sacking, never signed the petition or did so while really not wanting Altman back that much.
I’m so burnt out on OpenAI ‘news’. Can we get something substantial at some point?
AI, Twatter, Tesla - there’s hardly anything else in this community… :(
It’s just such a relief that you’re doing your daily best to post the content we all so clearly need from this community. I’ve been meaning to thank you for your hard work.
Trump 🙄
There’s a huge discrepency between the scary warnings about Q* calling it the lead-up to artificial superintelligence, and the actual discussion of the capabilities of Q* (it is good-enough at logic to solve some math problems).
My theory: the actual capabilities of Q* are perfectly nice and useful and unfrightening… but somebody pointed out the obvious: Q* can write code.
Either
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“Q* is gonna take my job!”
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“As we enhance Q*, it’s going to get better at writing code… and we’ll use Q* to write our AI code. This thing might not be our hypothetical digital God, but it might make it.”
Did they really have to name it Q?
It’s going to create a super intelligent AI that’s more irritating than anything else.
It’s possible it’s related to the Q* function from Q-learning, a strategy used in deep reinforcement learning!
… or this is the origin of the Q and we’re all fucked. I find my hypothesis much more plausible.
plausible: check
testable: TBD
falsifiable: TBD
still, 1 out of 3. not bad!
It’s apparently Q* (pronounced Q star).
At least they didn’t name it AM?
Nah. Programming is… really hard to automate, and machine learning more so. The actual programming for it is pretty straightforward, but to make anything useful you need to get training data, clean it, and design a structure, which is much too general for an LLM.
Programming is like 10% writing code and 90% managing client expectations in my small experience.
Programming is 10% writing code, 80% being up at 3 in the morning wondering whY THE FUCKING CODE WON’T RUN CORRECTLY (it was a typo that you missed despite looking at it over 10 times), and 10% managing expectations
Typos in programming aren’t really a thing, unless you’re using the shittiest tools possible.
But a lot of the crap you have to do only exists because projects are large enough to require multiple separate teams, so you get all the overhead of communication between the teams, etc.
If the task gets simple enough that a single person can manage it, a lot of the coordination overhead will disappear too.
In the end though, people may find out that the entire product, that they are trying to develop using automation, is no longer relevant anyway.
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The sensationalized headline aside, I wish people would stop being so dismissive about reports of advancement here. Nobody but those at the fringes are freaking out about sentience, and there are plenty of domains where small improvements in the models can fuck up big parts of our defense/privacy/infrastructure if they end up being successful. It really doesn’t matter if computers have subjective experience, if that computer is able to decrypt AES-192 or identify keystrokes from an audio recording.
We need to be talking about what happens after AI becomes competent at even a handful of tasks, and it really doesn’t inspire confidence if every bit of news is received with a “LOL computers aren’t conscious GTFO”.
That’s why I hate when people retort “GPT isn’t even that smart, it’s just an LLM.” Like yeah, the machines being malevolent is not what I’m worried about, it’s the incompetent and malicious humans behind them. Everything from scam mail to propaganda to law enforcement is testing the water with these “not so smart” models and getting incredible (for them) results. Misinformation is going to be an even bigger problem when it’s so hard to know what to believe.
I’m even more afraid of the competent evil people
Also “Yeah what are people’s minds really?”. The fact that we cannot really categorize our own minds doesn’t really mean that we’re forever superior to any categorized AI model. The mere fact that right now that bleeding edge is called an LLM doesn’t mean that it cannot fuck with us - especially if it is an even more powerful one in the future.
Allegedly. And no proof was presented. The letter cited was nowhere to be found.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
OpenAI was reportedly working on an advanced system before Sam Altman’s sacking that was so powerful it caused safety concerns among staff at the company.
The artificial intelligence model triggered such alarm with some OpenAI researchers that they wrote to the board of directors before Altman’s dismissal warning it could threaten humanity, Reuters reported.
The model, called Q* – and pronounced as “Q-Star” – was able to solve basic maths problems it had not seen before, according to the tech news site the Information, which added that the pace of development behind the system had alarmed some safety researchers.
The reports followed days of turmoil at San Francisco-based OpenAI, whose board sacked Altman last Friday but then reinstated him on Tuesday night after nearly all the company’s 750 staff threatened to resign if he was not brought back.
As part of the agreement in principle for Altman’s return, OpenAI will have a new board chaired by Bret Taylor, a former co-chief executive of software company Salesforce.
However, his brief successor as interim chief executive, Emmett Shear, wrote this week that the board “did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety”.
The original article contains 504 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
My name’s gpt. Chat gpt. M, what are my orders? Ok I’ll go see Q.
So did anyone interview the sister? No? Hm.
I read that blog post about her. I thought it all sounded pretty wild - perhaps credible and perhaps not. If she really believes what she says, she needs to hire a lawyer and file charges if she thinks there’s a crime.
Instead she’s making these periodic accusatory posts containing big claims without evidence, which serves more as an antagonizer/libelous effort than one to achieve justice. It doesn’t rise to the standard we expect to find guilt.
