POV: you want to give someone 💐 flowers for the aesthetic + symbolism, but 💐die too quickly.
… so you diffuse a 100 flowers (easiest with @krea_ai) to arrange as numbers, and print the card deck to give so they can play & make longer lasting memories ❤️ 🤞
Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become the interim CEO of @OpenAI. After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just a few hours, I accepted. I had recently resigned from my role as CEO of Twitch due to the birth of my now 9 month old son. Spending time with him has been every bit as rewarding as I thought it would be, and I was happily avoiding full time employment. I took this job because I believe that OpenAI is one of the most important companies currently in existence. When the board shared the situation and asked me to take the role, I did not make the decision lightly. Ultimately I felt that I had a duty to help if I could.
I have spent today drinking from the firehose as much as possible, speaking with the board, a small number of major partners, and listening to employees. Our partnership with Microsoft remains strong, and my priority in the coming weeks will be to make sure we continue to serve all our customers well. OpenAI employees are extremely impressive, as you might have guessed, and mission-driven in the extreme. And it’s clear that the process and communications around Sam’s removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust.
I have a three point plan for the next 30 days:
- Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report.
- Continue to speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors, and customers as possible, take good notes, and share the key takeaways.
- Reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers.
Depending on the results everything we learn from these, I will drive changes in the organization — up to and including pushing strongly for significant governance changes if necessary. I will be rolling these out as they become clear over the 30 day period. OpenAI’s stability and success are too important to allow turmoil to disrupt them like this. I will endeavor to address the key concerns as well, although in many cases I believe it may take longer than a month to achieve true progress.
I have nothing but respect for what Sam and the entire OpenAI team have built. It’s not just an incredible research project and software product, but an incredible company. I’m here because I know that, and I want to do everything in my power to protect it and grow it further.
It's now 1am and I'll pick this up tomorrow.
PS: I am posting this here both because I think it’s in the general public interest to know in this case, but please don’t expect all future internal comms to come through a public channel.
PPS: Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.
I was laid off from OpenAI today along with my boss Sam.
I was the person in charge of putting together the presentations for our board meetings.
No one has told me why I was let go but Sam texted me “wtf” and next thing I know my Slack and Gmail were disabled.
I’m now looking for a new role, so if you’re hiring for investor relations, my DMs are open!
For generative AI to become an interesting art tool, we need much more control over the output. The slot-machine-like nature of pure text-to-image leaves too much to chance.
Using the "Real-time Latent Consistency Model" that I'm using in the example here, is the first time I truly got a glimpse of a future where we'll be able to use our artistic skills and sensibility, to get control over AI image gen.
Systems like these will never be able to match the quality or originality of a skilled artist, it won't surprise us in the same way an artist can.
Things are a mess in terms of the training data these models are based on, and the questions about copyright concerns and about a time when everything will look the same are very valid.
At some point capabilities like these will be embedded in photoshop, and anyone will be able to generate a pretty picture. But to create interesting designs, to tell original stories and to surprise us, we need creatives and artists with something on their mind. We'll be able to create immersive worlds, by making brush-strokes and sculpt marks, without needing to worry about all the dials, plugins, wires of our 3d and 2d tools today.
I love to sculpt, I love to draw, and I love to explore new mediums and new ways to create. The Gen AI tools we have today are far from perfect, and things need to be steered in a better direction. For that we need artists to help point the way. Gen AI isn't going away.. it's too powerful and has the potential to allow us to tell stories like never before. Like all other big technological shifts, tech like this will come at a cost, but it will also open up new opportunities and empower a new generation of storytellers.
I might be naive, but I believe that human ingenuity and creativity will persevere in this new world ♥️
#art #ai