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OpenAI potentially considering reinstating its freshly-ousted CEO Sam Altman

Engadget

Following his surprise firing on Friday, currently-former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman might not be as out of a job as we initially thought he was, according to new word from The Verge on Saturday. Reportedly, sources close to Altman say that the board itself, in a stunning reversal, have "agreed in principal" to resign while reinstating him to his former position. However, the board has since reportedly missed a 5pm PT deadline regarding the decision. Shortly after Altman's firing on Friday afternoon, several senior staffers including former Chairman and President Greg Brockman, Director of Research Jakub Pachocki, Head of Preparedness Aleksander Madry and Senior Researcher Szymon Sidor tendered their resignations in protest. Numerous additional OpenAI staffers were set to quit in solidarity at that meeting.


Sam Altman's ouster at OpenAI exposes growing rift in AI industry

Washington Post - Technology News

Two of the board members who voted Altman out worked for think tanks backed by Open Philanthropy, a tech billionaire-backed foundation that supports projects preventing AI from causing catastrophic risk to humanity: Helen Toner, the director of strategy and foundational research grants for Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, and Tasha McCauley, whose LinkedIn profile says she began work as an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation earlier this year. Toner has previously spoken at conferences for a philanthropic movement closely tied to AI safety. McCauley is also involved in the work.


OpenAI board pressed by some investors to reinstate Sam Altman

The Japan Times

OpenAI investors are pressing the company's board to reverse its decision to fire Sam Altman as chief executive officer and remove him as a director, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Some of the investors including Thrive Global are also in talks with Microsoft, the largest shareholder of OpenAI, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the overtures are private. Altman is open to returning to the company, one of the people said. In one scenario under consideration, members of the current OpenAI board would step down as soon as this weekend, according to multiple with knowledge of the situation. However, the situation is still fluid and no decisions have been made, the people said.


The perpetual rise of Sam Altman takes an unexpected turn

The Japan Times

For most of his life, Sam Altman has resembled an accelerating train. He founded a startup as a teenager, achieved middling success -- and then jumped to running Silicon Valley's premier startup accelerator. After that, Altman co-founded OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has whipped up a frenzy of excitement about generative AI. Now 38, Altman has become the face of an AI-fueled future, traveling around the world to explain to world leaders and everyone else how the technology he'd helped create would change everything about human existence. He was the most Silicon Valley person alive.


Effective Proxy for Human Labeling: Ensemble Disagreement Scores in Large Language Models for Industrial NLP

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

More recently, (Fu et al., 2023) natural language processing (NLP) tasks using creates a meta-model responsible for predicting the latest generative pretrained models such as the accuracy of the LLM model using the model's GPT (OpenAI, 2023; Ouyang et al., 2022), PaLM confidence scores as features. Methods from the (Chowdhery et al., 2022), and many others (Touvron computer vision (CV) domain to assess unlabeled et al., 2023; Bai et al., 2022; Penedo et al., data more generally have, for example, proposed 2023; Taori et al., 2023). This new generation of the average threshold confidence method that learns models opens up many new possibilities including a threshold over the model's confidence, predicting competitive performance in zero-shot and few-shot accuracy as the fraction of unlabeled examples settings for tasks that have typically been modeled exceeding that threshold (Garg et al., 2022), or iteratively using a supervised setting (OpenAI, 2023). More learn an ensemble of models to identify established language models (BERT (Devlin et al., misclassified data points and perform self-training 2019), RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019), XLM-Roberta to improve the ensemble with the identified points (Conneau et al., 2020b), etc.) provide a strong balance (Chen et al., 2021). However, the metrics and hyperparameters of inference cost and task performance for in previous works are specifically for such systems. This broad class of large language classification tasks and cannot be easily extended models (LLMs) used for complex supervised NLP to more complex tasks.


OpenAI Investors Trying to Get Sam Altman Back as CEO

WSJ.com: WSJD - Technology

OpenAI's investors are making efforts to bring back Sam Altman, the chief executive who was ousted Friday, said people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving chain of events at the artificial-intelligence company behind ChatGPT. Altman is considering returning but has told investors that he wants a new board, the people said. He has also discussed starting a company that would bring on former OpenAI employees, and is deciding between the two options, the people said.


What Sam Altman's Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI

WIRED

Sam Altman always insisted that he wasn't the most important person at OpenAI despite being its CEO. As he traveled the world this year meeting world leaders--the world's unofficial ambassador of AI--Altman would soft-pedal his role, even as he stole glances at his phone to keep up with what was happening in OpenAI's luxe San Francisco offices. "We have an incredibly great team here that can do a lot of things, so mostly, I defer to them," he told me in May when I asked him how the company ran in his absence. "But some things only a CEO can do--some HR thing of the moment, or you have to kill some project, or something with a major partner." Those items would accumulate on his phone and at the end of the day he'd bat out responses. Then he would go back to speechifying, meeting developers, and taking tea with prime ministers.


Internal memo says Sam Altman's firing wasn't due to 'malfeasance' or OpenAI safety practices

Engadget

An internal memo sent to OpenAI staff on Saturday after former CEO Sam Altman's abrupt firing reiterates that "a breakdown in communication" led to the decision, not "malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices," according to Axios and The New York Times. The memo obtained by both publications was sent to employees by OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. Speculation has been nonstop since Altman was ousted unexpectedly as CEO on Friday and dropped from the company's board of directors, with little concrete information from OpenAI itself to go on. In its announcement of the decision, the board said only that he was not "consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." The board named Mira Murati, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, as interim CEO. In response, OpenAI's now-former president, Greg Brockman, announced he was stepping down too, tweeting, "Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today."


Here's What I Know About Mira Murati, the Interim CEO of OpenAI

WSJ.com: WSJD - Technology

Last month, I interviewed Sam Altman and Mira Murati of OpenAI. Now she is taking over his job. The ouster of OpenAI's Altman, one of tech's most visible chief executives, shocked the business and tech world on Friday. It also put the company's chief technology officer, Murati, in charge of tech's biggest and most daunting job: leading the AI pioneer without disrupting life as we know it.


'Earthquake' at ChatGPT developer as senior staff quit after sacking of boss Sam Altman

The Guardian

The crisis at artificial intelligence firm OpenAI deepened this weekend amid a reported exodus of senior staff in the wake of boss Sam Altman's mystery firing. OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, abruptly ousted Altman on Friday for allegedly misleading the board. In a statement, it said it had lost confidence in its 38-year-old co-founder after "a deliberative review process" concluded he had not been "consistently candid in his communications", without specifying how. Shortly afterwards, Greg Brockman, the company's president, announced he had resigned. "Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today… We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened," he wrote on X.