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OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

bloomberg.com

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Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#261

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

g42gregory wrote: post #182

From the article: "...but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation..." This is not a good sign. Microsoft the largest $10Bn investor, who is in the middle of pushing through the restructuring of the company, hasn't decided if they want board representation? The only reason you would do that if they want to keep their options open, in the future, to hit OpenAI hard (legally and/or to raid the per…

Everyone keeps saying that Microsoft made a huge mistake by not having board representation, and I couldn't disagree more.

Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI was really ideal from a speed-of-advancement perspective. That is, reams and reams have been written about how Google has to move at such a slow pace with AI productization because, essentially, they have so much to lose. Microsoft saw this first hand with their infamous Tay AI bot, which turned into a racist Hitler lover in a day.

Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI was perfect - they could realistically be seen as separate entities, and they let OpenAI take all the risk of misaligned AI, and then only pull in AI into their core services as they were comfortable. Google's lack of this sort of relationship is a direct hindrance to their speed in AI advancement and productization. Microsoft's lack of a board seat gives them a degree of "plausible deniability" if you will.

Plus, it's not like Microsoft's lack of a board seat impacts their influence that much. Basically everyone believes that the push to get Altman back has Microsoft's/Nadella's fingerprints all over it. Their billions give them plenty of leverage, and my bet going forward is that even if they don't take a board seat outright, they will demand that board membership be composed of more "professional", higher caliber board members that will likely align with them anyway.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#262

Post by jjeaff »

danenania wrote: post #225
thepasswordis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ego I can absolutely empathize with Ilya here, though. As far as I know the tech making openai function is largely his life’s work. It would be extremely frustrating to have Sam be the face of it, and be given the credit for it. Sam is clearly a very accomplished businessman and networker. Those people are super important, I wish I had a person like him on my team. I’ve had the experience of other people tacitly tak…

I think Sam has been given credit for being a good CEO and leader, which clearly is deserved. I've never heard him take credit for technical accomplishments. Ilya has been doing plenty of talks, podcasts, etc.--if anyone's the technical face of OpenAI, it's him. There's no lack of praise or credit given to him. "Just speculating on how it might feel to Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to ta…

I'm a developer and have used Open AI as a beta user from before their public launch and been interested in the structure and business side of AI and had never heard of Ilya until this recent blowup. I'm just one data point, but my guess is that the vast, vast majority of the public that knows anything about AI has also never heard of Ilya.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#263

Post by tyrfing »

jasonhansel wrote: post #180
dnissley wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly it was the other way around this time, at least to start...

This was pretty clearly an attempt by the board to reassert control, which was slowly slipping away as the company became more enmeshed with Microsoft.

"The board" isn't exactly a single entity. Even if the current board made this decision unanimously, they were a minority at the beginning of the year.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#264

Post by croes »

richardw wrote: post #204

The main question at this point should be whether Sam's model or Ilya's model is more likely to succeed in the primary goal of the teams, which is (and should be): how do we stay on the leading edge long enough to figure out safety. All the adults in the room want safety [1], it's just how to really get it. There are very wealthy competitors out there, any of which could end up beating OpenAI if they get half an edge…

>Everyone who can sign a check is dying to get in on this. All the smart talent in the world would love to be employee number 1 through 1000.

That's sound like the riad to disaster. People who can sign a check and are dying to get in on this, usually lack any moral or ethics.

Not a smart move to work for those people just because you fell for a clever salesman.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#265

Post by drakenot »

letmevoteplease wrote: post #97
bugglebeetle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’d probably be better off going to Meta or HuggingFace and working on getting open source as close to OpenAI’s offerings as possible. I expect that real innovation (vs. commercialization) is now fully dead at OpenAI, with them instead focusing on ROÍ for Microsoft.

Ilya is not a champion of open source: "We were wrong. Flat out, we were wrong. If you believe, as we do, that at some point, AI — AGI — is going to be extremely, unbelievably potent, then it just does not make sense to open-source. It is a bad idea... I fully expect that in a few years it’s going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is just not wise." https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/15/23640180…

He said in an interview 2 weeks ago that below a certain capability threshold it is beneficial and good to open source models —- but once you cross that threshold it is a bad idea.

The example he gave is a model that could independently do science.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#266

Post by takinola »

jmckib wrote: post #67
brookst wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems clear that there weren’t specific reasons, just a kind of final straw in the product announcements that made the board realize how far from the original mission the company had drifted. Turning it into an emergency and surprise coup with innuendo of wrongdoing looks to have been a huge mistake, and may result in total loss of control where a more measured course correction could have succeeded.

Does the board not have final control? Why have they agreed (in principle) to step down? I wish more of the reporting around this was specific about who has the power to do what.

Power is a fuzzy thing. You can think about power as being distributed across lots of different entities (the board, CEO, senior execs, investors, rank and file employees, etc) with some having more concentrated power (eg the board) than others (eg individual employees). However, if you create a situation (eg lots of employees decide to walk out in support of the ousted CEO) that can aggregate enough power to overcome any other single entity. That seems to be what is happening here.

It does not matter that the board has the legal power to do whatever they want eg fire the CEO. If the investors and key employees that keep the company going walk away, they end up with nothing so they might as well resign and preserve the organization rather than burn the whole thing down.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#267

Post by timeon »

mannerheim wrote: post #179
Davidzheng wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also have principles which would rather do no work than harmful work

I would not call sitting at a cubicle and collecting a paycheck while doing no work 'passion'. And probably not even collecting the paycheck.

But you are just painting one extreme vision here.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#268

Post by rrdharan »

shrimpx wrote: post #172
fidotron wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been a huge cultural shift in tech towards devaluing builders and (excessively) emphasising the roles of operations and sales. In reality you need all of them, and they are all separate talents, but things are clearly unbalanced.

It's how whole industrial sectors become enshittified.

The word enshittified has officially been enshittified.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#269

Post by tyrfing »

aunty_helen wrote: post #212
rvnx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that the move of the board was actually good for openness of AI ?

The board were literally doing their job. Anyone claiming incompetence is just mistaken about the stated goal of openai: safe available agi for all. Throw in a huge investment, a 90 billion dollar valuation and a rockstar ceo. It’s pretty clear the court of public opinion is wrong about this case.

That's not their stated goal, you're misinterpreting it by changing the wording.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#270

Post by prawn »

BryantD wrote: post #154
gizmo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. As long as Sam has total control over the board it's fine if Iiya doesn't approve of everything Sam does. Not worth losing a top AI researcher over this.

That defeats the purpose of having a board. Which is sometimes the desired outcome, of course, but if I were Microsoft I am not sure I’d want Sam in there with zero checks and balances. I also wouldn’t want Ilya in there without checks and balances, to be clear. So the challenge is identifying the right adults. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that negotiation to complete successfully in the eyes of all parties…

Is it assumed that Sam would be more aligned with Microsoft than not? From a vague awareness only, I'd guess that Microsoft wants to wield OpenAI against rivals, and SamA wouldn't find it unappealing to be bigger than Zuckerberg?
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