Sam Altman is back as CEO of OpenAI after inking a deal to return to the company following immense pressure from employees and investors on the board that ousted him less than a week ago.
The interesting part about this story isn’t Altman himself. It’s more about the weird decisions and inner politics of a $90bn company. A board firing their ceo without official reasoning, MS sweeping in while owning 49% of said company, 95% of the staff threatening to quit and the ceo coming back and firing the board while everybody else still tries to understand what the fuck just happened.
Like another commenter said, this could straight up be an episode of Silicon Valley.
And at the end of the day what it really boils down to is that ethics in tech is a PR byline, and the money will always win within the system that exists
Yeah, it’s actually pathetic how many people immediately sided with this clown too. Dude is another generic salesman type CEO who commercialized what was supposed to be open source software and lobbied the EU for loose regulations in AI, yet people act like it’s bad thing that they dumped him.
Just proves to me that most people involved in tech are greedy scumbags, from the top all the way down.
While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it’s been sitting in my head ever since:
Ultimately, the technology is not my concern. It is that there’s another Industrial Revolution happening, right now, you can play with it like a toy, and it will be very surprising to me if it results in a greater bargaining position for the worker. That’s just not how it goes.
Some portion of the conversation always has the sting of betrayal in it. But you like computer stuff! Yeah, I like computer stuff. Except we aren’t talking about computer stuff. We’re talking about people stuff. People are messy. I work with a lot of creative people, and I have also had the pleasure - firmly installed in quotes - of working with the kind of people who call those people “creatives.” We were at a meeting once where the person who will be advocating and using these technologies in your organization told us they hated creatives to our face. These technologies will displace workers and slash pay. That’s… I mean, that’s it.
From the start of this AI boom, I’ve been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and “passion” for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.
The only way to slow down this corporatization of the technology isn’t to completely shun it and demonize it. That just plays right into their hands with an “us vs them” narrative.
No, you have to push for open-sourcing the tech as hard as you can. The few open-source tools that have come out of this AI boom has the large corporations running scared that they aren’t going to be able to make money out of those sectors.
I think people siding with him because they heard fuck all from the actual board.
If the board came out strong with a “our mission isn’t to productize chat bots, but to research and develop AGI in an open, ethical, transparent way. Altman, as CEO, was undermining our mission by putting the emphasis on profit. These decisions by Sam weren’t communicated to the board. We the board agreed that, while this may be surprising and disappointing to some, the best long term course of action is to part ways with Sam. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors and we look forward to fulfilling our mission in a responsible, open way”.
“Pathetic” is actually a really good word to use in this situation, because its root is the greek word “pathos”, which is known today as a type of persuasion where you rely on emotion.
People only look at the headline. They see a person fired without a specified reason. It seems like it should be easy to see something happening is unfair.
It is tech news, but I get you. It’s hard to find a place with news about actual technological innovations, advances, updates etc rather than the machinations of the corporations involved. I completely understand the relevance, but it’s often not the sort of genuinely interesting read you’re looking for.
I’m so tired of hearing the shenanigans of billionaires.
The interesting part about this story isn’t Altman himself. It’s more about the weird decisions and inner politics of a $90bn company. A board firing their ceo without official reasoning, MS sweeping in while owning 49% of said company, 95% of the staff threatening to quit and the ceo coming back and firing the board while everybody else still tries to understand what the fuck just happened.
Like another commenter said, this could straight up be an episode of Silicon Valley.
And at the end of the day what it really boils down to is that ethics in tech is a PR byline, and the money will always win within the system that exists
Yeah, it’s actually pathetic how many people immediately sided with this clown too. Dude is another generic salesman type CEO who commercialized what was supposed to be open source software and lobbied the EU for loose regulations in AI, yet people act like it’s bad thing that they dumped him.
Just proves to me that most people involved in tech are greedy scumbags, from the top all the way down.
While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it’s been sitting in my head ever since:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/12/26/sockrates
From the start of this AI boom, I’ve been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and “passion” for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.
The only way to slow down this corporatization of the technology isn’t to completely shun it and demonize it. That just plays right into their hands with an “us vs them” narrative.
No, you have to push for open-sourcing the tech as hard as you can. The few open-source tools that have come out of this AI boom has the large corporations running scared that they aren’t going to be able to make money out of those sectors.
I think people siding with him because they heard fuck all from the actual board.
If the board came out strong with a “our mission isn’t to productize chat bots, but to research and develop AGI in an open, ethical, transparent way. Altman, as CEO, was undermining our mission by putting the emphasis on profit. These decisions by Sam weren’t communicated to the board. We the board agreed that, while this may be surprising and disappointing to some, the best long term course of action is to part ways with Sam. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors and we look forward to fulfilling our mission in a responsible, open way”.
“Pathetic” is actually a really good word to use in this situation, because its root is the greek word “pathos”, which is known today as a type of persuasion where you rely on emotion.
People only look at the headline. They see a person fired without a specified reason. It seems like it should be easy to see something happening is unfair.
But this sort of thing is rarely that simple.
I think you mean ethics in tech?
If so I agree.
Ah yeah I’m up too late, thanks for pointing that out haha, fixed
It’s putin prigozhin all over again
Okay, so can we shunt all the “tech billionaire celebrity entertainment” posts somewhere else?
It is tech news, but I get you. It’s hard to find a place with news about actual technological innovations, advances, updates etc rather than the machinations of the corporations involved. I completely understand the relevance, but it’s often not the sort of genuinely interesting read you’re looking for.
Or maybe it’s all a PR stunt, we don’t know what happens behind their closed doors.
Would you like to hear about my week? I’m a thousandaire.