The only thing that would make this whole saga better is if OpenAI actually had a baby machine god in its basement right now and meanwhile the entire organization is collapsing to humans being human right above it.
As of yesterday this situation has crossed into omnishambles territory.
Sunday you could still have reversed this and treated it as a blip. Now it's Tuesday—there's not really an option anymore that doesn't cause some kind of lasting damage.
I think he's not as known in the outside world but it's really difficult to understate the amount of social capital sama has in the inner circles of Silicon Valley. It sounds like he did a good job instilling loyalty as a CEO as well, but the SV thing means that the more connected someone at the company is to the SV ecosystem, the more likely they like him/want to be on his good side.
This is kind of like the leadership of the executive branch switching parties. You're not going to say "why would the staff immediately quit?" Especially since this is corporate America, and sama can have another "country" next week.
I'm hacking on some GPT-for-long-form-text stuff right now and it is _eye wateringly_ expensive once you start generating at anything close to "professional human" token outputs. $80 per month sounds already pretty optimized.
We're far more likely to pump a bunch of sulfates into the air than we are to stop driving pickup trucks everywhere. Humans aren't rational, and this is the kind of irrationality that democracy in particular cannot solve.
So there's actually a lot of academic debate on the merits of reparations, and exactly what and how much reparations should be.
A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
The oversimplified con argument: Okay, but if you come from a wealthy African American family, why should you have a leg up over a poor (or otherwise more disadvantaged) white student? What about an immigrant, who didn't benefit from slavery at all?
Fundamentally there's a huge swath of different injustices across society, and we obviously can't fix all of them at once, so a big challenge in this sort of debate is how you slice the injustices and how you prioritize fixing them.