One of my takeaways of how the negotiations went is that it seems sama is extremely concerned with securing access to lots of compute, and that the person who ultimately got their way was the person who sat on the compute.
The “sama running Microsoft” idea seems a bit magical to me. Surely the realpolitik update here should be: power lies in the hands of those with legal voting power, and those controlling the compute. Sama has neither of those things at Microsoft. If he can be fired by a board most people have never heard of, then for sure he can get fired by the CEO of Microsoft.
People seem to think he is somehow a linchpin of building AGI. Remind me… how many of OpenAI’s key papers did he coauthor? Paul Graham says if you dropped him into an island of cannibals he would be king in 5 years. Seems plausible. Paul Graham did not say he would’ve figured out how to engineer a raft good enough to get him out of there. If there were any Manifold markets on “Sama is the linchpin to building AGI”, I would short them for sure.
We already have strong suspicion from the open letter vote counts there’s a personality cult around Sama at OpenAI (no democratic election ever ends with a vote of 97% in favor). It also makes sense people in the LessWrong sphere would view AGI as the central thing to the future of the world and on everyone’s minds, and thus fall in the trap of also viewing Sama as the most important thing at Microsoft. (Question to ask yourself about such a belief: who does it benefit? And is that beneficiary also a powerful agent deliberately attempting to shape narratives to their own benefit?)
Satya Nadella might have a very different perspective than that, on what’s important for Microsoft and who’s running it.
People seem to think he is somehow a linchpin of building AGI. Remind me… how many of OpenAI’s key papers did he coauthor?
Altman’s relevant superpowers are expertise at scaling of orgs and AI-related personal fame and connections making him an AI talent Schelling point. So wherever he ends up, he can get a world class team and then competently scale its operations. The personality cult is not specious, it’s self-fulfilling in practical application.
If he can be fired by a board most people have never heard of, then for sure he can get fired by the CEO of Microsoft.
This seems right in principle, but I think he’s way less likely to be fired by anyone at microsoft, because they can play a positive-sum political game together, which was (apparently) less true of Sam and the OpenAI board.
One of my takeaways of how the negotiations went is that it seems sama is extremely concerned with securing access to lots of compute, and that the person who ultimately got their way was the person who sat on the compute.
The “sama running Microsoft” idea seems a bit magical to me. Surely the realpolitik update here should be: power lies in the hands of those with legal voting power, and those controlling the compute. Sama has neither of those things at Microsoft. If he can be fired by a board most people have never heard of, then for sure he can get fired by the CEO of Microsoft.
People seem to think he is somehow a linchpin of building AGI. Remind me… how many of OpenAI’s key papers did he coauthor? Paul Graham says if you dropped him into an island of cannibals he would be king in 5 years. Seems plausible. Paul Graham did not say he would’ve figured out how to engineer a raft good enough to get him out of there. If there were any Manifold markets on “Sama is the linchpin to building AGI”, I would short them for sure.
We already have strong suspicion from the open letter vote counts there’s a personality cult around Sama at OpenAI (no democratic election ever ends with a vote of 97% in favor). It also makes sense people in the LessWrong sphere would view AGI as the central thing to the future of the world and on everyone’s minds, and thus fall in the trap of also viewing Sama as the most important thing at Microsoft. (Question to ask yourself about such a belief: who does it benefit? And is that beneficiary also a powerful agent deliberately attempting to shape narratives to their own benefit?)
Satya Nadella might have a very different perspective than that, on what’s important for Microsoft and who’s running it.
Altman’s relevant superpowers are expertise at scaling of orgs and AI-related personal fame and connections making him an AI talent Schelling point. So wherever he ends up, he can get a world class team and then competently scale its operations. The personality cult is not specious, it’s self-fulfilling in practical application.
This seems right in principle, but I think he’s way less likely to be fired by anyone at microsoft, because they can play a positive-sum political game together, which was (apparently) less true of Sam and the OpenAI board.
If he can lead an exodus from OpenAI to Microsoft, he can lead one from Microsoft to somewhere else.
Here’s a market, not sure how to define linchpin but we can at least predict whether he’ll be part of it.
https://manifold.markets/ErickBall/will-the-first-agi-be-built-by-sam?r=RXJpY2tCYWxs