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Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

nytimes.com

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Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#121

Post by soderfoo »

jessenaser wrote: post #96

> Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times. > OpenAI's board of directors approached rival Anthropic's CEO about replacing chief Sam Altman and potentially merging the two AI startups, according…

And the whole time no one thought to phone Satya Nadella regarding his $10 billion investment and to get his input.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#122

Post by [deleted] »

winenbug wrote: post #74
ipaddr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promoting Anthropic and putting down OpenAI doesn't make her better at her job. Her job isn't self promotion.

Unless she has equity in Anthropic (which would be major conflict of interest), I don't see how this is self promotion...?

[deleted]

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#123

Post by nicce »

jacquesm wrote: post #93
nicce wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If she agreed with the Microsoft deal but not with what followed that too would be hopelessly naive. Microsoft + ethics? I guess the main problem here is that nobody knows properly what this deal contains and how it was made. I believe CEO has power to do such deal alone?

That depends on the mandate. He would bind the company but it is possible that his mandate specifically forbids deals that include either IP or exclusivity. But what is interesting is that until MS got involved OpenAI was struggling for funding and talent, and afterwards it took off like a rocket.

I think the talent was already there but the power of Azure servers was the critical booster. We don’t even know how much Microsoft has actually paid instead of just counting Azure credits.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#124

Post by alvah »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #115
alvah wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EA hadn’t had a good run in the corporate world, over the last year or so

First SBF gets busted for being too greedy, and now Helen Toner gets busted because she's not greedy enough. EA just can't catch a break.

People with a child’s view of the world, in charge of $billions of other people’s money, is the common theme.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#125

Post by jacquesm »

mikeryan wrote: post #110
jacquesm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed, that was uncalled for. But it is what probably a large number of CEOs would do.

I think it clearly represents the dichotomy of OpenAI’s structure. By its nature it created an adversarial position between the non-profit and for profit side with Sam and Toner representing those two poles. I, personally, have a hard time picking sides here. On its face it seems that Ms Toner is more aligned with OpenAI’s stated mission. However Sam seems much better suited to operating the company and being the “pu…

I'm seeing a somewhat larger stage where the United States and other countries are in an undeclared arms race and it just so happens that from what we know private entities (or an entity) in the United States believes that they are close enough to achieving that goal that they are actively working on things like alignment rather than just futzing around with GPUs and other multiplication hardware.

AGI is either just around the corner or it will be 50 years or more and if it is just around the corner you'd hope that parties that have at least some semblance of balance would end up in charge of the thing. Because if it is possible I expect it to be done given the amount of resources that are being thrown at this. Assuming it can be done weaponization of this tech would change the balance of power in the world dramatically. Everybody seems to be worried about the wrong thing: whether or not the AGI will be friendly to us. That doesn't really matter, what matters is who controls it.

No single individual (Altman, Toner, Nadella, or anybody else) should be taking the responsibility about what happens onto themselves, if anything the board of OpenAI has shown that this isn't a matter for junior board members because the effects range far further than just OpenAI.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#126

Post by foobarqux »

jacquesm wrote: post #88
foobarqux wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She published AI safety research as a member of a board whose mandate it is to act as a check and balance on the operation of an AI company. You are saying that she should hide information from the public out of loyalty to the company. edit: Or that the board can't actually make a difference because whatever OpenAI doesn't do someone else will. But if people actually thought that were true they wouldn't have set up t…

No, I am not saying that. I am saying that Altman has a point (he's trying to deal with the FCC and it doens't help if at the same time a board member releases a paper critical of the company and actively comparing it to another), while at the same time she has a point which is that it is very well possible (and even probable) that OpenAI's safety could be improved on. Now, what would serve the charter better: to use…

> he's trying to deal with the FCC and it doens't help if at the same time a board member releases a paper critical of the company and actively comparing it to another

Again, her mandate is not to help OpenAI deal with the FCC it's to prevent the company from building unsafe AI, one reasonable aspect of which might be to compare the methodologies of different companies.

You can justify pretty much anything with ends-justify-the-means logic and I have a hard time believing that the people who set up the charter would, a priori, have said that suppressing research comparing the safety approach of the company to a competitor in order to not make the company look bad so that the competitor wins because the company insists, without any basis, that they would be better for safety is in line with the principles of the charter. That is just trying to game the charter in order to circumvent it and is a textbook case of what the board was appointed to prevent.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#127

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

mikeryan wrote: post #110
jacquesm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed, that was uncalled for. But it is what probably a large number of CEOs would do.

I think it clearly represents the dichotomy of OpenAI’s structure. By its nature it created an adversarial position between the non-profit and for profit side with Sam and Toner representing those two poles. I, personally, have a hard time picking sides here. On its face it seems that Ms Toner is more aligned with OpenAI’s stated mission. However Sam seems much better suited to operating the company and being the “pu…

>At the end of the day the untenable spot Ms Toner is in is that the genie is out of the bottle which makes her position of allowing the company to self-destruct a bit tone deaf.

Tone-deaf basically means "unpopular", doesn't it?

I'm old enough to remember when doing the right thing, even when it's unpopular, was considered a virtue.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#128

Post by winenbug »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #103
winenbug wrote: post #99

https://openai.com/our-structure This whole thing was so, SO poorly executed, but the independent people on the board were gathered specifically to prioritize humanity & AI safety over OpenAI. It sounds like Sam forgot just that when he criticized Helen for her research (given how many people were posting ways to "get around" ChatGPT's guardrails, she probably had some firm grounds to stand on). Yes, Sam made LLMs ma…

>they're two sides of an incredibly badly thought-of charter. It's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight, but I haven't seen anyone in this discussion even suggest an alternative model that they claim would've been superior.

Agreed, I'm not saying I have a better alternative, just that this is something we all should now realize; given i'm sure we were all wondering for a long time what the whole governance structure of OpenAI really meant (capped for-profit with non-profit mission etc.)

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#129

Post by jacquesm »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #119
jacquesm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribe to capitalism, but not to that degree. I see it the same way I see democracy: flawed but I don't have anything better. > From the perspective of avoiding an AI race, conflict of interest could very well be a good thing. On the American subcontinent: yes. But the world is larger than that.

>On the American subcontinent: yes. But the world is larger than that. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at.

Fine by me.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#130

Post by dchftcs »

nicce wrote: post #106
snapwood wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the reasoning is something like this... As a CEO I'd want your concerns brought to me so they could be addressed. But if they were addressed, that is one less paper that could be published by Ms. Toner. As a member of the openai board, seeing the problem solved is more important to openai than her publishing career.

On the other hand, you create more pressure for solving the problem by publishing acknowledged paper, if your voice is not usually heard

She's a board member. Who had approximately 1/4 of the power to fire Sam, and she did eventually exert it. Why do you rather assume her voice was not heard?
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