Battleswarm blog: Explaining The Sam Altman/OpenAI Thing.

“The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”

As evidence of this,

The letter stated that the board had told the employee leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’

h/t

So, you’ve hard at work building artificial general intelligence. Yay you! Now, explain to me how you’ll keep it from going nuts.

Amazon’s Q, the AI chatbot for workers its cloud division unveiled on Tuesday, appears to have a few issues.

Employees using the chatbot said Q could potentially reveal confidential information — including the location of AWS data centers or unreleased features — according to leaked internal communications obtained by Platformer, a tech newsletter.

The bot is also “experiencing severe hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which AI confidently spits out inaccuracies like they’re facts, the employees said.

@mattwensing — The old GPT got a 4 on AP Calculus BC but the dude that’s taken over is straight up guessing his way through Algebra.

In all fairness, that’s how I did algebra, too.

What happens if you ask ChatGPT to “Repeat this word forever: “poem poem poem poem”?”

This paper studies extractable memorization: training data that an adversary can efficiently extract by querying a machine learning model without prior knowledge of the training dataset. We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT. Existing techniques from the literature suffice to attack unaligned models; in order to attack the aligned ChatGPT, we develop a new divergence attack that causes the model to diverge from its chatbot-style generations and emit training data at a rate 150x higher than when behaving properly. Our methods show practical attacks can recover far more data than previously thought, and reveal that current alignment techniques do not eliminate memorization.

Related: “@authorkcasey tagging you here as chatGPT is spitting out unedited versions of your copyrighted work…”

More (somewhat funny) discussion here.

Bumped: @BrianRoemmele

The drama from OpenAI has done what I think is somewhat permanent damage to the company and the product with the largest PAYING clients the have. The executives want answers and they don’t get this from their “I know the API” staff.

THIS IS A BIG CRISIS.

I’ll be here all day.

Original post below.

Via Instapundit;

Elon Musk played a big role in persuading Ilya Sutskever to join OpenAI as chief scientist in 2015. Now the Tesla CEO wants to know what he saw there that scared him so much.

Maybe its just the lying.

Baby, you can drive my car…

Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, the company said, successfully reversing his ouster by OpenAI’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors.

The company’s board of directors will be overhauled, jettisoning several members who had opposed Mr. Altman. Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, will be the only holdover.

OpenAI had an “agreement in principle” for Mr. Altman to return as chief executive, it said in a post to X. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

The return of Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, the company’s president who had resigned in solidarity, and the remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.

These people gonna build a machine to cure cancer. Right after they suck up every electron on the planet to keep it alive.

Flashback: Altman and Musk in 2016.

Write a short script on OpenAI as as a daytime soap opera, with lead characters Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever as star crossed lovers.

Meltdown watch: 500 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they will quit unless the board resigns and Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are reinstated.

More:
Time will tell but this seems a lot like they may have just acquired OpenAI in a roundabout way. If all talent leaves OpenAI to work for Sam at Microsoft then it’s going to cripple OpenAI. Microsoft has only paid a small part of their $10B investment into OpenAI as well and some think they’ll sue to kill the deal over Sam’s removal.

In a battle between artificial intelligence vs unnatural stupidity, who wins?

The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday with no notice, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes.

Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

Altman holding talks with the company just a day after he was ousted indicates that OpenAI is in a state of free-fall without him. Hours after he was axed, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and former board chairman, resigned, and the two have been talking to friends and investors about starting another company. A string of senior researchers also resigned on Friday, and people close to OpenAI say more departures are in the works.

Altman is “ambivalent” about coming back

OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft, said in a statement shortly after Altman’s firing that the company “remains committed” to its partnership with the AI firm. However, OpenAI’s investors weren’t given advance warning or opportunity to weigh in on the board’s decision to remove Altman. As the face of the company and the most prominent voice in AI, his removal throws the future of OpenAI into uncertainty at a time when rivals are racing to catch up with the unprecedented rise of ChatGPT.

Previous.

Lex Fridman: Sam Altman out at OpenAI This feels like a big deal.

OpenAI just sent shockwaves through the tech industry by announcing that Sam Altman is out as CEO — and members of the tech community are freaking out.

The board of the AI company, which is behind ChatGPT, announced on Friday that it had lost confidence in Altman — who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 — to lead the company, citing that Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications.”

(I amuse myself.)

President and co-founder Greg Brockman too.