I thought Ronan Farrow's investigate essay answered that pretty satisfactorily? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
They were outmaneuvered, panicked, and folded.
Did they have to? No. But in the moment they thought they were on the precipice of nuking a deca-billion dollar company, their life’s greatest work, and a generational company.
It’s hard to stand against what they did. Unsurprising they couldn’t.
And why did Ilya become Sam lover after 2 days?
Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was insider baseball of computer companies.
I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or Deborah...?
This was a very large apeshit $$ amount back in IBM vs Microsoft but the scale of it now in the era of e.g. OpenAI etc is beyond imagination.
There's a whole generation of people whose association with the engineering/technology side of things only happened because of their interest in the other side of things.
I too miss old Byte magazine days.
I feel myself going insane when I think about it too much.
Then inevitably, tech news turned into business news.
OpenAI will IPO soon AI probably more like a trillion.
Crazy.
Whereas self-supervised, allows learning without explicit annotation of data ; but it doesn't matter if the models already trained on the entire Internet, and it's not like a game where it can come up with effectively new training data for itself?
Unsupervised is something where there is no intrinsic reward signal. In pre training, predicting the next token and seeing that it matches is a reward signal, hence it is self supervised.
What happens if you go tomorrow, downtown San Francisco, and leave a bookstore with one book without paying?
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime"
- Honoré de BalzacWho's missing the books? 12 million books is a rather large warehouse!
I thought HN was in the "information wants to be free" camp...
What do you think copyright does. Human culture is owned by humanity, not Disney or the New York Times.
By that token it would be illegal to go into a library, read a book, and actually remember what was in it. Except in this case the reader is a robot.
LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't really make sense. Wait! Put the pitchfork down! I know, I know, stealing is stealing, and OpenAI founders are slimy. But what about derivative works? Why is a human making a hip-hop track allowed to sample, and a robot is not? Again, LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't really make sense.
It's actually surprising in retrospect that nobody did this sooner. Even back in the 80s books about computers would gush about how a computer has enough memory to store an entire library's worth of books. It's just that someone finally figured out how to put an index on it.
Where I agree: given that this is basically the sum of all humanity's knowledge, the company should have been a non-profit. It was a non-profit. And then greed won.
and that murderee's mom is publically resentful against and tweets anti-sam Altman content regularly. It tells me that founder Altman has clearly not demonstrated proper empathy, sympathy or repaired what should be an emotional easy case of delivering to the mom whatever she needs for her peace (or maybe he's actually guilty of complicit in crimes).
Also, his entire diary was not in fact made public. The attorneys only quoted the parts that were relevant to the case, which pertained to OpenAI's transition from non-profit.
But it is not the point. The point is, when you take high moral ground and talk about bug problems to help humanity, and then your own diary exposes you as avaricious simpleton, the whole high moral ground crumbles. And you expose yourself as another grifter.
That’s what happened to Brockman. Although smart people could see these qualities in altman, brockman etcetera way before that happened
It’s also difficult to take people seriously if they only care about money or, in Altman’s case, power. Single minded obsessiveness about these sorts of things tends to render people intellectually dishonest by definition.
The board didnt have the maturity to fix that.
I think the Chinese labs have a fundamentally different viewpoint: they’re building infrastructure, and looking at it more like how a US corporation might like having some of its employees making core contributions to compiler ecosystems like LLVM/clang and so on. The payoff is down the road, partially reputational, but also having a great compiler is good for everyone in the computational business world. The rentier-finance capitalist instead wants to privatize the compiler and extract rents for access.
The thing about infrastructure is this: you don’t get a direct financial return on investment in infrastructure (think roads, which make other economic activity possible) unless you have some ridiculously corrupt system controlled by rent-collectors (which is how the US electricity grid and fiber optic backbone works). That’s all the major US LLM providers are doing: trying to collect rents on systems that were built using the global human knowledge base as inputs.
At the very least OpenAI should be releasing their older models on a steady timetable. Sure it might reduce some revenue streams but it would be good for their reputation.
I still wonder how much peer pressure was behind that. Like, what if you think Sam is a scumbag and you're glad he's gone, but people are waving this petition in your face. What would you do? It would be really bad for you if the emperor returned and you were one of the few who didn't sign it.
Also, going by this video, the first order of business for an AGI should be finding a cure for hair loss.
The founders of OpenAI naively^ thought "this will make sure that we don't have too much power if we succeed"
But it didn't work. What lesson should we learn?^^
^ please grant this for the sake of argument
^^ I have other models that I prefer to explain what happened, but I think this one is the most interesting
the market has spoken, for coding they are the best.
I’m willing to discount what they did almost a decade ago (“Attention is All You Need” was 2017) in an industry that moves this quickly. The execution of an Anthropic matters more now.
From my point of view they are yet another big tech bros company.
Or do I forget that this guy sleeps with an Ayn Rand doll tucked under his arms?
> Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure
What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?
"1. Solve reinforcement learning
2. Solve unsupervised learning
3. Gradually learn more complicated 'things'"
That three point list is verbatim the extent of the technical plan mentioned.
> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?
Paraphrasing, "we needed more money for compute and didn't think we could get enough as a non-profit". Brockman's diary might be a stronger indicator of the real real reason, though.
I imagine if they stayed nonprofit, they would’ve survived, but not convinced investors to give them enough $$$ and datacenters to stay the most popular (above Google).
I think the non-profit has around 25% ownership of something that is around a trillion dollars of on-paper money.
I guess we will see what things are still worth when the crazy days come to an end.
And one things started to become real, they realized the financing potential of the thing, that they were seated on a gold mine and would be stupid of them to create that and not profit much more of it.
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI
00:02:40 Building the Founding Team
00:04:25 DeepMind's Lead Over OpenAI
00:04:54 The Change from a Pure Non-Profit
00:06:05 Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI
00:08:22 What Dota 2 Meant for OpenAI
00:10:04 Reasoning Versus Prediction
00:11:59 Tensions Grow at OpenAI
00:15:44 Sam Altman's Firing
00:17:49 Greg Quits OpenAI
00:19:56 Sam Explores Deal with Microsoft's Satya
00:20:28 OpenAI Employees Sign Petition for Altman's Return
00:23:43 Ilya Sutskever Leaves OpenAI
00:24:59 Lessons Learned in Leadership after Sam Ousting
00:28:22 The Thing Ilya Said that Greg Can't Forget
00:32:22 Is AI Going Parabolic?
00:33:24 How Much of OpenAI's Code is Written by AI?
00:36:21 Are AI Chatbots Just Telling Us What We Want to Hear?
00:38:06 The Global AI Race to Reach AGI
00:38:40 What Happens if US Doesn't Reach AGI First?
00:39:49 Are Competing Countries Stealing AI Advancements from U.S?
00:40:38 Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning
00:41:47 The Finite Constraints of Compute
00:43:38 On Investing Early in Data Centers
00:46:31 The Future of Data Center Specialization
00:47:52 How OpenAI Will Decide Whose Queries to Serve
00:49:08 OpenAI on Consumer vs Enterprise Models
00:53:05 Data Centers in Space?
01:00:56 What Should AI Regulation Look Like?
01:04:33 The Future of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship
01:04:44 AI and Job Loss
01:07:15 The Skills Young People Should Invest In
01:11:30 What Does Success Look Like For You?Because they were still downloading from Anna's Archive and the lawyers were in panic?
2. solve unsupervised learning.
3. gradually tackle more complicated things.
> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?
I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.
> I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.
Ugh, that was more boring than even I expected, thanks a lot for saving me the time though, seems avoiding watching the full thing was worth it.
isn't it still an odd choice for a nonprofit? it's hard to imagine a world without OpenAI and ChatGPT now, but at some point they decided being the best is most important. and presumably most profitable, since why just need a little more money?
I know HN is built around mostly not reading the articles linked but how about you click on the link and surprise, there is already exactly another link providing what you're asking for.
Whatever AGI is, it "AGI" is not glueing a load of text prediction machines together.
K don't think it would be that simple either, but for now we simply don't know.
I would like to think that what I consider my intelligence will always be distinguishable from a cleverly built harness wrapped around text prediction, but I can't say for sure that's guaranteed.
The latest efforts like agents are clearly showing the limitations and are nowhere near AGI.
We’ve now reached the buzzwords and bullshit stage of the bubble where they cast around for problems shaped like the solution.
https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/shannon-got-ai-this-far-kolm...
This article explains what's missing in terms of two kinds of complexity that oppose: Shannon complexity vs. Kolmogorov complexity.
It introduces the opposition by an example of driving the value of pi as decimal number, which has no pattern and high complexity, and a formula for deriving pi that does have a pattern with low complexity, then observing that mind can work from the patternless high-complexity back to the patterned low-complexity without prior examples, while AI can't.
LLMs encode and retrieve patterns in the training data, and doing so can connect data to the terminology of known principle, but mind can observe inconsistencies in data and to reason from first principles to resolve the inconsistency.
The distinction between these two modes can seem blurry as AI can traverse the patterns of the known in ways that are extraordinarily revealing, but it's not structured to reason about the unknown.
Inference is not sufficient for reason.
For example, a conventional algorithm can search for patterns in text at a scale many orders of magnitude beyond a mind's capacity, and this can be very revealing, but to do so this algorithm need not read the text with comprehension.
Regarding the question: can genAI be enhanced to reason? The answer is assumed to be "no", due to the categorical opposition of the two kinds of complexity and the lack of understanding of structures within genAI to handle the reasoning.
Read the article, which includes other examples including a jump from Newtonian to Einstein physics in the history of astronomy, and a noodling on how to talk about the edge of the unknowable in AI.