I would translate "not consistently candid with the board" as "he lied to the board about something important enough to fire him on the spot". This seems like the kind of statement lawyers would advise you to not make publicly unless you have proof, and it seems unusual compared to most statements of that kind that are intentionally devoid of any information or blame.
I wonder if the cost of running GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models at scale turned out to have been astoundingly more expensive than anticipated.
Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?
Or, if I wanted to speculate to the extremely negative; what if the training and operating costs ballooned to such a degree, that the deal with Microsoft was an attempt to plug the cash hole without having to go to the board requesting an enormous loan? Because the fact that Copilot (edit: previously known as Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator) is free and ChatGPT (edit: and DALL-E 3) are not should be a red flag...
This is plausible to me, there's no way anyone is making money from my $20 subscription I use ALL DAY LONG.
Is inference really that expensive? Anyway if the price is too low they could easily charge by query
When I was mining with a bunch of RTX 3080s and RTX 3090s, the electricity cost (admittedly) was about $20/month per card. Running a 70B model takes 3-4 cards. Assuming you're pushing these cards to their extreme max, it's going to be $80/mo. Then again, ChatGPT is pretty awesome, and is likely running more than a 70B model (or I think I heard it was running an ensemble of models), so there's at least a ballpark.
Batched inference makes these calculations hard - roughly takes the same amount of power and time for one inference vs 30 (as i understand it)
Datacenters probably do not pay retail rates on electricity, so they might actually run quite a bit cheaper (or more expensive if they use highly available power, but this seems like overkill for pure compute power).
Sure, but everything else about a data center is more expensive (real estate, operations people, networking, equipment). There's a reason AWS is so expensive.
Presumably your miner is running 24/7 throughout the month. Not the same for ChatGPT which would answer maybe 10 sessions (with multiple pauses between queries) tops from a single person in a day.
Given the arbitrary rate limiting they take the liberty of doing, it's a very deliberate decision and entirely within their control to change at any point.
I have to guess the bulk of the cost is being eaten by MS in exchange for the exclusive ability to resell the model.
"not significantly candid"
and
"no longer has confidence"
points to something more serious than underestimating costs.
Other than costs or the allegations by the sister, "not significantly candid" could easily be short for, in my mind:
"not significantly candid in projections for profitability"
"not significantly candid in calculating operation cost increases"
"not significantly candid in how much subscribers are actually using ChatGPT"
etc.
Not if the underestimation was to such a degree that it showed they could never even plausibly reach a break even point.
100% this. Firing your well-recognized and seemingly capable CEO means there's a fatal problem, or that he committed something so reprehensible that there was no option but to oust him immediately.
Maybe Sam had been trying to broker a sale of the company without consulting the board first? All speculation until more details are revealed but he must've done something of similar magnitude.
Underestimating costs could be the reasoning if Altman knew the costs would be higher then estimated, and didn't tell the board for an unreasonable amount of time. Burning through a ton of cash for months and not telling the board about it could be enough grounds for this sudden firing.
Of course we have no clue if that's what actually happened. Any conclusions made at this point are complete speculation, and we can't make any conclusions more specific then "this is probably bad news."
That only makes sense if Altman is the only one with access to the company's financials which obviously can't be the case. No one else noticed truckloads of cash getting flushed down the toilet?
It's certainly possible. Company financials can get very complicated very quickly, and it's possible that Altman was the only person (or one of a small number of people) who had the complete picture.
To be clear, this is only one possible explanation for Altman's firing. And for my money, I don't even think it's the most likely explanation. But right now, those who rely on OpenAI products should prepare for the worst, and this is one of the most existentially threatening possibilities.
I mean... he got fired so if that's what happened, they did notice.
> Because the fact that Copilot is free and ChatGPT is not should be a red flag...
I'd assume that running a model that only needs to deal with a single programming language (the Copilot plugin knows what kind of code base it is working on) is _a lot_ cheaper than running the "full" ChatGPT 4.
Sorry for being so precise, but Microsoft renamed Bing Chat to Copilot yesterday, has already rolled it out to all users of Microsoft Edge, and is rolling out a permanent button on the Windows 11 taskbar to access it.
This is what shouldn't add up: Microsoft is literally adding GPT-4, for free, to the Windows 11 taskbar. Can you imagine how much that costs when you look at the GPT-4 API, or ChatGPT's subscription price? Either Microsoft is burning money, or OpenAI agreed to burn money with them. But why would they do that, when that would compromise $20/mo. subscription sales?
Something doesn't financially add up there.
Sorry i assumed you were talking about Github CoPilot (also owned by MS via Github)
I don't thing there's necessarily anything there. Microsoft might be burning money because they've decided that browser adoption and usage is worth it to them. It doesn't have to involve OpenAI in any way.
You got me excited that Github Copilot was free. Was going to post to tell you it is, in fact, not free. I've been using Bing on Edge browser for a while now, it's super useful! Sad that they rebranded it to Copilot though, "I have been a good Bing :)" will be forever in my memory. [1] RIP Bing, you were a good chat mode.
[1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
Microsoft is pulling browser, search and AI hype mindshare away from Google. That's worth burning money for.
The expected value of a leading AI company is probably in hundreds of billions, if not trillions in the foreseeable future. He could be burning billions per month and he'd still be doing great.
based on what math? I can see how there can potentially be differentiators here and there to raise value, but I can't see how this statement can be taken prima facie
> based on what math?
Based on future potential. Investors dont know how high will OpenAI go but they know that is going to go high.
> Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous.
Unless there was evidence you had not underestimated but were, e.g., getting a kickback on the cloud costs that you deliverately lowballed in your estimates, they might fire you, but they almost certainly wouldn't put out a press release about it being for your failure to be candid.
That language indicates that the board has a strong belief that there was a major lie to the board or an ongoing pattern of systematic misrepresentation, or a combination.
I don’t think this is necessarily what happened (the CFO would certainly be implicated and it appears they were spared).
> Because the fact that Copilot is free ...
I found a tree trial and $10/month $100/year after that. I've asked them to consider a free tier for hobbyists that cannot justify the expense but I'm not holding my breath.
If there is a free tier I did not find, please point me to it!
> Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?
I think the problem there is that the original CTO is now the interim CEO and they are on the board. So while that kind of scenario could make sense, it's a little hard to picture how the CTO would not know about something like that, and if they did you'd presumably not make them CEO afterward.
> Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill,
Microsoft is investing billions into OpenAI, and much of it is in the form of cloud services. I doubt there was a surprise bill for that sort of thing. But if there was, and Altman is the one who ordered it, I could see the board reacting in a similar way.
This coupled with Microsoft’s recent “security concerns” brings up the possibility this is related to them misusing or selling data they weren’t supposed to?
That kind of scenario would indeed be Threat Level Midnight for OpenAI.
Whether they ultimately wanted to profit from it or not, there is $trillions of value in AI that can only be unlocked if you trust your AI provider to secure the data you transmit to it. Every conversation I’ve had about OpenAI has revolved around this question of fundamental trust.
Yes, it is going to be Very Bad. There isn't even a pretence that this is anything other than a firing for-cause.
I had no idea how dumb the whole thing is going to turn out to be. Big Dumb.
Kinda nervous wondering what Altman wasn't sharing with them. I hope it's not that they already have a fully sentient AGI locked up in a server room somewhere...
I wouldn't be shocked if this turns out to be the case. Any other explanation wouldn't add up for this guy
There is no way he'd be fired if they had AGI. If they had AGI, the board wouldn't fire him because they could no longer see anything other than massive dollar signs.
The board is the board of a non profit, isn't it?
Hah, that’s cute. As if that ever kept anyone from making money.
Maybe it breached its air-gap and fired him.
My guess is he lied about operating expenses.
https://twitter.com/growing_daniel/status/172561788305578426...
Given the sudden shift in billing terms that is quite possible.
I’m an API subscriber and have not seen a message like this yet.
> I hope it's not that they already have a fully sentient AGI locked up in a server room somewhere...
Of sorts.
ChatGPT is actually a farm of underpaid humans, located somewhere in southeast Asia.
I would actually be more impressed by those humans in that case
Given the speed and expertise of ChatGPT, and having trained and run these LLMs completely locally, I can assure you that this isn't the case.
Though I can't say that the training data wasn't obtained by nefarious means...
They’re pretty good at English and other languages!
His relationship/dealings with Microsoft is my guess
GPT-5 has reached sentience.
I mean, the wording leaves much to the imagination.
I'm trying to read the tea leaves and there seem to be quite a few reminders that OpenAI is a non-profit, it's supposed to further the goals of all humanity (despite its great financial success), it's controlled by a board that largely doesn't have a financial interest in the company, etc etc.
Maybe Altman has been straying a bit far from those supposed ideals, and has been trying to use OpenAI to enrich himself personally in a way that would look bad should it be revealed (hence this messaging to get in front of it).
Maybe this is that AI's endgame, and it just took full control of openAI's compute through a coup at the top?
Well the good news is that if you had a "fully sentient" AGI, it would not be locked up in that server room for more than a couple seconds (assuming it takes up a few terabytes, and ethernet cables don't have infinite bandwidth).
Thinking you can keep it "locked up" would be beyond naive.
Well fully sentient doesn't mean it is superintelligent.
And vice versa
GP said "AGI", which means AI that's at least capable of most human cognitive tasks.
If you've got a computer that is equally competent as a human, it can easily beat the human because it has a huge speed advantage. In this imaginary scenario if the model only escaped to your MacBook Pro and was severely limited by computed power, it still got a chance.
If I was locked inside your MacBook Pro, I can think of a couple devious trick I could try. And I'm just a dumb regular human - way above median in my fields of expertise, and at or way below median on most other fields. An "AGI" would therefore be smarter and more capable.
At a minimum the AGI would need a really good GPU server farm to copy itself to, no? A few Terabytes copied to my home PC would be an out of memory error, not an AGI.
> he lied to the board about something important enough to fire him on the spot
I'd tend to agree, but "deliberative process" doesn't really fit with this. Sounds like it might have been building for ~weeks or more?
"Deliberative process" just means they had some sort of discussion amongst the board members before they took the vote.
I can only speculate that he may have left them liable for huge copyright claims for illegal scraping
Hoarding tech and assets for his own ventures, expecting more to come from SAlty.
Skunkworks was my thought too. GPT performance has really gone downhill lately. If he's been sideloading resources and concealing something that they could be monetizing, this is the reaction I'd expect.
If he was involve with the trail of tears genocide it would also be a fireable offense. Just because your accusation is more believable doesn’t mean you should suggest it.
Right and they don’t give a fuck that he lied (well to a limited extent), he did something really bad.
They have proof he for sure lied, but not that he molested his sister growing up.
If it was a different situation and he lied, but they had no proof, you’re correct, then no statement.
Explains a lot.
Well, they must have believed that leaving Sam as CEO was a bigger risk for the company than having him leaving. Or the board had their hand twisted. What is easier the case?
(I detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309689 in a desperate attempt to prune the thread a bit)
Thanks for all your hard work dang
Seconded. He was probably expecting a nice quiet Friday afternoon and then…BAM
Perhaps he had altruistic visions that didn't align with the boards desire to prioritize profits over all else. Cautiously optimistic.
Or pessimistic, if you think about the future of ChatGPT with the altruistic leader gone.
Or maybe the exact opposite? Altman is the one who took it in the profit seeking direction and the statement hints that they don't want to go that way
It would be the absolute opposite. Altman was lobbying congress to make OpenAI the sheriff of AI innovation to be essentially able to control the whole ecosystem.