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OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

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Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

#233
post #50

For a company that's executing so well (at least from an outside perspective), shipping so fast, growing so fast, and so ahead of the curve in arguably the hottest segment of the tech market, at this moment, to do this right now, means this must be REALLY bad.

Yeah, this is like, we are getting sued for billions of dollars and directors are going to jail bad.

So my bet is either they lied about how they are using customer data, covered up a massive data breach or something similar to that. The only thing that's a bit hard to figure there is how specific this is to Altman. A big scandal would be leaking out I would think and more people would be getting fired.

Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

#234

I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI. He's not perfect, but behind the scenes he's a genuine and upstanding person. I've met lots of wealthy smart people, and he's the only exception. He was the only person I trusted in this situation, and I'm genuinely nervous that he's no longer running OpenAI.

This sounds so naive, maybe google Worldcoin?

A person I've known all my life I could swear and trust him with anything was found out to have violated extremely young children and other stuff.

Stop pretending you know people, people don't even know themselves.

Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

#236

I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI. He's not perfect, but behind the scenes he's a genuine and upstanding person. I've met lots of wealthy smart people, and he's the only exception. He was the only person I trusted in this situation, and I'm genuinely nervous that he's no longer running OpenAI.

> I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI.

"Good" is too blurry of a description, and I don't know Sam, but one thing I've learned (the hard way) is that you don't truly know someone unless you've had conflicts of interest with them and found mutually satisfying resolutions to them. If all you've had is mutually beneficial interactions, then of course everyone's going to be nice - it's in everyone's interests. You need to see how they act on nontrivial conflicts (either handling present ones, or mitigating/averting future ones) to really know if someone is a genuinely good person or not.

While this could hypothetically happen within an hour of meeting someone, it's more likely to take years or even decades... or might never even happen.

Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

#239

It doesn't have to be that he was actually caught in a scandal. It could be that the board was investigating some serious accusation, and he was not cooperative and forthright, which they might have no patience for. I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence: "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime."

> I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence: "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime."

This concept and phrasing was common at least as early as the Watergate Scandal in 1974.

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