hack: do a startup only after you already have living money assured (savings from earlier corporate jobs, now invested & producing). you have time & energy, and no obligations.
pure speculation: ChatGPT training dataset contains massive amounts of copyrighted material, and he told the board it didn't. now there's a big looming liability.
Not possible. It’s well known that the training data was not public domain. OpenAI was in the process of securing private agreements for more training data. They likely trained GPT-4 on every word ever written in a book, newspaper, website or social media network.
Given the wording and the apparent stepping down of the board chair, this is very likely a conflict between the grow at all costs startup folks and the AGI true believers. Sam was likely going to fully sell out and make himself filthy rich. The AGI cultists wanted to retain control over their Frankenstein’s monster.
The statement doesn't read like it was a financial problem. If it were, they’d name a CFO or raise the inexplicably cheap subscription, for one.
My money is on a MilTech contract. Same got it approved in secrecy without telling the others; Greg had to know for signature and didn’t tell others. Neither could speak about it, hence the lack of candor, uncharacteristic from fairly straight-shooter Sam. Explains why Eric Schmidt knew to congratulate him immediately and why he’s not ashamed.
Alternatively, Google keeps showing a non-existent tweet of Sam announcing a presidential run in 2024. Maybe the board didn’t like that he didn’t tell them. Also explains why Eric would know more.
The CTO would have to go in this case too, not be promoted to interim CEO... unless they didn't know it was going on - in which case they shouldn't be made interim CEO either
spending $4B for ironsource ads and $1B for weta authoring stuff was expensive and took lots of their more indie-friendly choices off the table. maybe the ipo path they took made these things inevitable. anyways, their choices are behind them now. godot and elsewhere are where the parade will move on to
I remember getting a Lafayette 3-pickup electric guitar and building a Heathkit guitar amplifier. That thing had a dual-spring reverb too. I got a 4x12" speaker cabinet with Celstion speakers from the newspaper classifieds for $75. That thing was loud, and had a super high-frequency squeal when you turned it up. I think they just used a high-bandwidth amp design from their scopes rather than design a ground-up audio amp. But it taught me about oscillations, shocks from ungrounded chassis voltages, and electronics in general.
used their soaps for years. dilute it with water and use in foaming pump dispensers for hand soap - super economical. use it to wash dishes versus using name-brand detergents (soap is soap). love their camp at burningman. their heart's in the right place. what's not to like?
There's putting in tons of hours of effort to uncover an answer. There's knowing all the ways that didn't work before and why, and then knowing where to look for an answer. Certainly depends on the field, but choose which way you want to go.
