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Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

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Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#471

Post by telltruth »

While most of the interview is boring and nothing new has been said by Toner, to me, it feels like huge political fight where sama tried to overthrow her first and then Toner went in attack mode trying to overthrow him. It's clear she was the lead instigator and accidently found Illya as sympathetic co-conspirator. Board was obviously ok and took no action when they weren't informed about release of ChatGPT. It also didn't took action when sama didn't told them about startup fund. Only after Toner's paper and sama's move, all these became important.

Overall, I genuinely believe that the board needs to get out of way. They are not the founder, they are not even technical. They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings but politics and brewing up secret coups is not their job.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#472

Post by raverbashing »

smackay wrote: post #419
benreesman wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a…

It's Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, who makes the rockets fly.

I hadn't noticed that particular nominative determinism before, interesting

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#474

Post by MicolashKyoka »

she deservedly got the boot, along with the other that had no business sitting on the board of a tech company on the frontier. this is just sour grapes after the coup failed.

the ai safety apparatchiks huffing and puffing about an ai takeover are nothing but status grifters and hopefully all the rest follow leike to anthropic so we can forge ahead faster without having to pay lip service to how much we're doing for "superalignment".

and thank fuck sam released chatgpt. if it were up to the apparatchiks, we'd have them sitting on it like the geniuses at google who couldn't figure out they had a gold mine under them even if you pointed it to them with a thousand spotlights.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#475

Post by benreesman »

WalterBright wrote: post #420
benreesman wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walter, as you know I respect your point of view on the merits of the market in this business: God knows you’ve got about double my experience in it (and the multiple on impact is some larger coefficient I can’t even eyeball) and your opinion is logically robust, as we’ve debated before. You’ve previously argued for the merits of e.g. the Gates fortune, and as someone who went head-to-head with MSFT in the springtime…

Thank you for the kind words! I do appreciate them. I'm sorry to say I don't know enough about Altman to form any kind of opinion on him.

Ultimately it’s pg who owes this community locally and humanity globally for inflicting Altman on the world, but as much as I likewise respect pg on 99/100 things, he seems to be digging his heels in on this one, so I’m not holding my breath.

I gather anoxia is a bad way to go.

Absent that, a few other recognized OG legends like yourself looking into the matter and rendering an opinion might represent the daylight between the status quo and disaster.

Certainly he’s nothing to do with your honestly-held convictions about merit prevailing in efficient markets oriented to novel contribution.

I know you believe in markets, but I think we agree there’s nothing capitalist or meritocratic about failing up repeatedly until manifestly unqualified and ill-intentioned people wield arbitrary power off an unbroken litany of failures punctuated by the occasional success in taking credit for the efforts and achievements of others via PR and powerful friends.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#477

Post by slg »

telltruth wrote: post #471

While most of the interview is boring and nothing new has been said by Toner, to me, it feels like huge political fight where sama tried to overthrow her first and then Toner went in attack mode trying to overthrow him. It's clear she was the lead instigator and accidently found Illya as sympathetic co-conspirator. Board was obviously ok and took no action when they weren't informed about release of ChatGPT. It also…

> They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings

Would lying to the board not count as "intentional and significant wrong doings"?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#478

Post by sage76 »

telltruth wrote: post #471

While most of the interview is boring and nothing new has been said by Toner, to me, it feels like huge political fight where sama tried to overthrow her first and then Toner went in attack mode trying to overthrow him. It's clear she was the lead instigator and accidently found Illya as sympathetic co-conspirator. Board was obviously ok and took no action when they weren't informed about release of ChatGPT. It also…

> they are not even technical

Sama is also not technical.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#479

Post by rkachowski »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #277
benreesman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s utterly mundane, completely common knowledge for those who have been around long enough to have watched both the start and end on Loopt that Altman is a dark-triad sociopath with one marketable skill: (in pg’s words) “becoming powerful”. Guy can’t code, can’t design, can’t publish, can’t climb a traditional corporate ladder with even modest guardrails against fraud, can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Can…

I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general reaction was "...who?" 2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without the…

at the very least I would appreciate the sincerity of this approach. We can start having the real discussions without cosplaying as fungible hyper competent leetcode machines, and start asking which of these problems would benefit from having a weaponised sociopath at the helm.

Are we working too hard on the wrong yet interesting problems or do we just need a sufficiently amoral person to manipulate, harass and cheat their way into partnerships, sales and general interest? Do we accept such behaviour is noble if we make enough success and money from it?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#480

Post by torginus »

bergen wrote: post #403
WalterBright wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> amoral wealth-hoarders They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested , i.e. put to work creating things that people want. > moralists ... capitalists History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must h…

Mesopothemia was based on morals as far as we know, and they lay the foundation for many technical and scientific advances. And your rights are based on religious and ideological morals. Why do you believe the debate about Roe v. Wade exists? Why do we consider infidelity so bad it can break a contract of marriage? What is marriage? Those are not laws of nature.

Que? First of all, Mesopothamia is a geographical region, not a culture or society.

Second, places like Babylon had a very sophisticated legal, financial and administrative system, with tons of written evidence preserved in the form of clay tables surviving.

The Code of Hammurabi being cited as one of the most important pieces of written evidence of a code of laws in ancient times.

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