Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, describes the immediate aftermath of the November 2023 board crisis when Sam Altman was fired.
Assertion Supported
Brockman: Elon, Sam, Ilya, and I Agreed OpenAI Needed For-Profit Structure
“Elon, Sam, Ilya, and I all agreed. That the only path forward for OpenAI, the only path to achieve the mission, was to create a for-profit entity associated with OpenAI of some form. And so we were committed to that direction, and that is something that we kne…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brockman: OpenAI board gave zero explanation when firing Altman and removing Brockman
“I was told that the board has decided That Sam would be removed, and effectively the message that I got was the same messaging that was in the public post, and I asked if I could have any more information. I was told no, not right now, and I pressed on that ma…”
Insight
Brockman: Predicting Einstein's Next Words Requires Intelligence Equal to Einstein
“On the one hand, just predicting what comes next sounds like a pedestrian task, but if you really can predict the next word out of Einstein's mouth, you are at least as smart as Einstein.”
Assertion Supported
Brockman: OpenAI models recently resolved an open quantum physics problem
“If you look at math and physics, we now are solving open math problems. We're solving Open physics problems and actually have resolved this particular physics problem recently in quantum physics in the opposite way that the community expected.”
Disclosure
Brockman: OpenAI hides chain of thought to preserve faithfulness and prevent distillation
“So there's two reasons. One is to think about distillation, but the second, in some ways more important, is that we had this insight when we first developed the reasoning paradigm that it gives us a interpretability mechanism we had not been anticipating, beca…”
Opinion
Brockman: OpenAI competitors are struggling with compute availability
“I mean, I think our competitors are not having a good time on compute, let me put it that way.”