OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever reportedly likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company.
…ok, really, what is happening over there?!
This article is pretty clearly clickbait.
If you have a team of burners, jokingly burning an effigy of the thing you are committed to combatting isn’t a “spiritual” action as much a nod to Burning Man.
At one point I worked in an open office where the sales team would cheer and throw a Nerf football to each other when they’d make a sale.
It’d be weird as shit to write an article on that behavior claiming that the sales team at that company was suddenly adopting professional sports practices.
If you want to know what’s actually going on behind closed doors there, this The Atlantic piece is excellent and in part comes from an upcoming book by one of the authors whose been researching that very topic.
The TLDR is that rapidly growing a product that’s become an unexpected success while trying to stay committed to long term research goals is a giant mess.
OpenAI employees don’t really exist, everything that has been going on is just a rogue AI fucking with us!
what is happening over there?
The world told them that their shit don’t stink, and they believed it.
Praise the Omnissiah!
So when you eat bread which after incantations supposed to be a body of a demigod, you are a good catholic, but when you burn effigy representing “unaligned” AI, you are suddenly a nut?
Both can be nuts
the AI told him to burn effigies, is that it
It was my understanding that this is just how science people act
Behind the Bastards has a pretty good episode on him, pretty sure Aleister Crowley shows up.
Are you thinking of last podcast on the left? I see btb did the jack parson anti-christ story, but came at it from the L Ron Hubbard angle.
So you had me doubt myself, especially when the first thing I found when searching for the episode was the STDWYTK episode on him, but it looks like I’m half right. Turns out Parsons was the co-lead of one of the LRH episodes, which is the one I was thinking of: How L. Ron Hubbard Made An Antichrist Using Sex Magic
Robert is joined by DJ Danl Goodman to discuss Jack Parsons and Black Magic Scientology.
We are witnessing first hand the birth of technology god, tangible and all knowing, how could it not be a god?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In what’s arguably turning into the hottest AI story of the year, former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ousted by the rest of the company’s nonprofit board on Friday, leading to a seemingly endless drama cycle that’s included hundreds of staffers threatening to quit en masse if the board doesn’t reinstate him.
A key character in the spectacle has been OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever — who, according to The Atlantic, likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company — and appears to have been one of the main drivers behind Altman’s ousting.
“I never intended to harm OpenAI,” he tweeted Monday morning, not long after Microsoft, which owns a 49 percent stake in the company, offered Altman a CEO position.
(His frenemy Altman has long championed attaining AGI as OpenAI’s number one goal, despite warning about the possibility of an evil AI outsmarting humans and taking over the world for many years.)
The chief scientist even commissioned a wooden effigy to represent an “unaligned” AI that works against the interest of humanity, only to set it on fire.
There’s a good chance that the board members who united to boot Altman last week drank just a little too much of the AGI Koolaid and got spooked by the possibility that humanity was hurtling toward the singularity (or heck, maybe they were right to think that!)
The original article contains 581 words, the summary contains 231 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Well that was a hell of a ride.
I mean… this honestly sounds a bit too cartoonish. “Burning effigies” and “ritualistic chants” with company personnel…?
