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It’s hard to give the misunderstanding/coincidence claim credence when Altman explicitly referenced Her in relation to the feature.

tedsanders 5d ago
Sam is not OpenAI. He's not the one who worked on voice mode, and he's not the one who worked on FrontierMath (I know both groups of people). If you believe Sam has caused OpenAI to lie about these for years, you either have to believe (a) Sam does all the work and keeps the incriminating details hidden all the employees, or (b) Sam directs everyone to lie and they all just nod along without pushing back, whistleblowing, anonymously leaking to the media, or resigning. Even if you're evil (and we are not), this is a dumb strategy, because as soon as it leaks, it will blow up in your face and kill company morale. I can't imagine a team of lawyers, comms people, and researchers who worked on these projects all sitting around nodding that we should conspire to lie to everyone, stacking lie after lie after lie. Many key people who worked on voice mode and FrontierMath have since been hired away by competitors - they'd have every incentive to expose the conspiracy if it existed, and yet none has. This is just not a realistic model of company misbehavior, imo. To me, it's not unreasonable to believe that when launching a voice AI product, the CEO of the company mentions the most famous movie about a voice AI product, and even briefly explores whether there is a marketing opportunity its star. I don't think it's evidence of a conspiracy to copy her voice and cover it up. If it's any evidence in the opposing direction, I promise to immediately resign from OpenAI if it ever comes out we lied about Johansson voice copying or FrontierMath eval cheating. I feel very safe making this promise.
- Eufrat 5d ago
  I really think you are missing the point and the frustration of why people are so hostile to OpenAI. Your defense is kinda irrelevant and very confusing. Why are you defending OpenAI so aggressively? Sam Altman represents OpenAI whether you want him to or not. The market and public perception hinges on his often questionable actions. The CEO’s job is in large part as a salesman. Him posting “her” on Twitter to try and promote GPT-4o’s voice features is hard to believe that he didn’t know what he was doing and the market and Scarlett Johansson reacted accordingly. A competent person would not have made such an inflammatory statement after she had explicitly declined to permit OpenAI the use of her voice. Your CEO is going on podcasts and going around saying that AGI is here and also AGI is not important. What blithering marketing is going on here?
  - tedsanders 5d ago
    My comments regard the hypotheses that OpenAI conspired to cover up stealing mathematicians’ private progress on Navier-Stokes, stealing Johansson’s voice, and cheating on FrontierMath. If you disapprove of someone’s tweets or podcasts, that's a different question and I have nothing to say there. Edit: Apologies for any defensiveness or aggression that came across. I think for me it can be a bummer to see us acting honestly internally, share what happened externally, and still be accused of lying a bunch of times in a row (by different people). But I get it - no one knows the truth, no one is perfectly transparent or free of bias, and it's always good to be skeptical of companies. I'll stop posting in this thread.
    - CrazyStat 5d ago
      You can claim you’re acting honestly all day long but you still have a CEO with a long-standing reputation for lying.
  - atomicthumbs 5d ago
    he's defending it because they pay his salary

tedsanders 5d ago

Sam is not OpenAI. He's not the one who worked on voice mode, and he's not the one who worked on FrontierMath (I know both groups of people). If you believe Sam has caused OpenAI to lie about these for years, you either have to believe (a) Sam does all the work and keeps the incriminating details hidden all the employees, or (b) Sam directs everyone to lie and they all just nod along without pushing back, whistleblowing, anonymously leaking to the media, or resigning. Even if you're evil (and we are not), this is a dumb strategy, because as soon as it leaks, it will blow up in your face and kill company morale. I can't imagine a team of lawyers, comms people, and researchers who worked on these projects all sitting around nodding that we should conspire to lie to everyone, stacking lie after lie after lie. Many key people who worked on voice mode and FrontierMath have since been hired away by competitors - they'd have every incentive to expose the conspiracy if it existed, and yet none has. This is just not a realistic model of company misbehavior, imo. To me, it's not unreasonable to believe that when launching a voice AI product, the CEO of the company mentions the most famous movie about a voice AI product, and even briefly explores whether there is a marketing opportunity its star. I don't think it's evidence of a conspiracy to copy her voice and cover it up. If it's any evidence in the opposing direction, I promise to immediately resign from OpenAI if it ever comes out we lied about Johansson voice copying or FrontierMath eval cheating. I feel very safe making this promise.

Eufrat 5d ago
I really think you are missing the point and the frustration of why people are so hostile to OpenAI. Your defense is kinda irrelevant and very confusing. Why are you defending OpenAI so aggressively? Sam Altman represents OpenAI whether you want him to or not. The market and public perception hinges on his often questionable actions. The CEO’s job is in large part as a salesman. Him posting “her” on Twitter to try and promote GPT-4o’s voice features is hard to believe that he didn’t know what he was doing and the market and Scarlett Johansson reacted accordingly. A competent person would not have made such an inflammatory statement after she had explicitly declined to permit OpenAI the use of her voice. Your CEO is going on podcasts and going around saying that AGI is here and also AGI is not important. What blithering marketing is going on here?
- tedsanders 5d ago
  My comments regard the hypotheses that OpenAI conspired to cover up stealing mathematicians’ private progress on Navier-Stokes, stealing Johansson’s voice, and cheating on FrontierMath. If you disapprove of someone’s tweets or podcasts, that's a different question and I have nothing to say there. Edit: Apologies for any defensiveness or aggression that came across. I think for me it can be a bummer to see us acting honestly internally, share what happened externally, and still be accused of lying a bunch of times in a row (by different people). But I get it - no one knows the truth, no one is perfectly transparent or free of bias, and it's always good to be skeptical of companies. I'll stop posting in this thread.
  - CrazyStat 5d ago
    You can claim you’re acting honestly all day long but you still have a CEO with a long-standing reputation for lying.
- atomicthumbs 5d ago
  he's defending it because they pay his salary