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

businessinsider.com

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

#101

Post by preommr »

Gimpei wrote: post #39
philsquared_ wrote: post #21

Justified or not doesn't really matter. If your entire company threatens to quit then you made the wrong choice. Hopefully many of the old board is gone because a blunder of that magnitude shows extreme disconnect.

Sounds more to me like they were naive when it came to the inevitable PR war that would follow. They should have come out guns blazing with all the dirt they had. Instead they said very little and it just appeared nonsensical.

Except that I don't think it was for PR reasons that almost the entire company sided with Altman. I'd say it has much more to do with the profitability and the goal of continuing to work on interesting problems with the best resources.

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

#102

Post by Tyr42 »

bmitc wrote: post #86

What is still bizarre is how the board brought him back. I just don't understand that from any angle. It is very clear that he lied and schemed. So why was there any issue? He had no power once fired. If another company wants to hire him, fine. If he wants to make platitudes on Twitter, who cares? Employees threatened to leave? Let them. I imagine many of them wouldn't, and if they did, you could just rehire and find…

Better at OpenAi then a private team at Microsoft??? I don't know what they were thinking either

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

#103

Post by valicord »

tky wrote: post #17
Teever wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with the recent attacks on Business Insider of all publications?

Possibly clickbaity fluff pieces like this: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-glue-pizza-i-tried... Stuff like this really doesn’t serve them well as a “serious” outlet. I follow the author of the fluff on social and I found the Altman article interesting, but I’m less and less amused with filler pieces and suspect others are too.

Lest anyone thinks this is a recent trend, here's an amazing piece of journalism they published 10 years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-cars-in-facebook-park...

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

#104

Post by rst »

Aunche wrote: post #75

I think there is a very good chance this is true, but it also paints the picture of the board being incompetent and incapable of confrontation. They could have filed formal complaints, mandated increased scrutiny, handed off Sam's responsibilities to other people, or threatened legal action. Instead, they attempted a secret coup, which of course makes Sam look like the underdog

"Filed a formal complaint" with whom? The board itself is the final authority, empowered to investigate and act. If its members have concerns, they either do something or don't. There's nowhere else to pass the buck.

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

#106

Post by XorNot »

AlbertCory wrote: post #61
XorNot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with those things is we actually know how to measure success for most of them, and they notably work best when the politicians stay the hell out of the process other then setting broad directions. There's no equivalent for AI research, and a lot of temptation to try and find simple metrics which mean safe - and it's appealing. Water should be below X ppm contaminant is "easy" to establish. AI should be to b…

I don't get the feeling you read the link. But thanks.

What is your definition of what makes an AI system dangerous or safe? How would this be measured or standardized? Not vagueries, not "well superintelligence should be regulated". A company owns a 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. What are you implementing? What physical actions are the people enforcing this policy going to take? Someone, somewhere will be at a computer entering commands, or writing code, or looking at data. What will it be?

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

#107

Post by boringg »

bmitc wrote: post #94
sixQuarks wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t know he was fired from y combinator, what were the details?

Explicit details were never released because for some reason people seem to like watching Altman fall his way up the ladder.

Its crazy that you can be fired from that role and make sure everyone covers their tracks so you can go do it again elsewhere.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

apsec112 wrote: post #50
hipadev23 wrote: post #34

I’m gonna side with sama here. Toner and others who voted to fire are type of people who spend their entire career in meetings and political maneuvering and not a single day actually delivering results.

So the idea is that what Ilya Sutskever does is "meetings and political maneuvering", while what Sam Altman does is "delivering results"? That sounds rather strange....

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by drewbug01 »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #83
pdonis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case all Sam did was step on a few toes and hurt the egos of a few board members. No, he lied to other board members, multiple times.

Sounds like he outsmarted them and they were holding back the organization.

Lying to the board, if true, is radically unethical. If you equate lying with “outsmarting,” that’s rather concerning.

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

#110

Post by threeseed »

stubish wrote: post #62

Now I'm curious as to the reasoning Sam got back in. The board is there for a purpose and has legal duties. Did they have some duty to cave in when the company was threatened, overriding their oversight duties that caused them to sack Sam in the first place? Did they decide they just got it wrong? It seems pretty wobbly, and makes me question if boards are useful at all for many companies in today's world (and what o…

It's because of Satya.

He offered to move Sam and whoever supported him under the Microsoft wing with an independent for-profit company with the same access to unlimited compute that they needed to train their models.

With this looming over their heads the employees/shareholders ultimately had to choose between (a) staying at OpenAI without Sam, having the company lose their deal with Microsoft and likely folding, (b) moving to Microsoft with Sam or (c) allowing Sam to come back.

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