#AI

Yesterday, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was suddenly fired by the board of directors, and Greg Brockman, co-founder and president, quit in solidarity. Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, defended the decision in a company all-hands meeting. The only thing we know is that the company says Mr. Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications” with the board.

Ilya Sutskever has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto, where he studied under Geoffrey Hinton (the so-called “Godfather of AI”) and is one of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence. The new temporary CEO, Mira Murati, was the former CTO of OpenAI.

Our first dog was a border collie. Border collies are canine Einsteins. She usually knew what I was going to do before I did. All I had to do was think about going for a walk and she’d jump up from where she was studying calculus or quantum physics or something, and grab her leash.

But she was slow to learn that fingers pointed at things. To be fair, hands often contain treats or toys, so it pays to keep an eye on them. It took me a long time to teach her to look where I was pointing, and I don’t think she was ever really comfortable with the idea.