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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

#121

Post by juped »

nullspace wrote: post #100
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…

100% agree. I don’t care about OpenAI or the members of its board at all, one bit. What I did see was so much incompetence at the one thing I expect a board to be at least okay at. Hiring and firing. For that alone, I think the board reshuffle was good. Regardless of who you support in all of this.

It clearly wasn't good; the Altman-control system failed, and was replaced with not even the pretense of an Altman-control system.

Sure, the rectification of names is an improvement in a sense; what is actually needed is a working Altman-control system.

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

#122

Post by threeseed »

EA-3167 wrote: post #55
hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #46

This telling by Toner has the ring of truth to it over the reason for Sam's ouster. It matches. Whatever I think of Sam personally, I would likely have done the same thing in her shoes. The CEO lying to and deceiving the board multiple times is a pretty serious red line.

It's also a similar reason that Sam was fired from Y Combinator. None of this should be new, it's just when there's money on the line people's memories get as fuzzy as their morals.

And let's not forget the OpenAI investors include YC itself as well as Paul Graham's wife, Jessica Livingston.

Sam may have been fired from YC but it does look like they believed in him.

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

#123

Post by hipadev23 »

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....

Yes. Ilya is as useful as Google’s AI folks. Smart yes, cannot deliver a useful product to save his life.

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

#124

Post by mewpmewp2 »

m3kw9 wrote: post #119
snowwrestler wrote: post #52

Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.

Also ironic people jumping to attack Altman from every negative article about him without knowing all the details and the contexts

All of it is only as ironic as Alanis Morissette

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

#125

Post by AlbertCory »

phs318u wrote: post #76
AlbertCory wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They may suck at many things Exactly. I gave examples of actual tech projects undertaken by governments, so an abstract discussion of "government vs. private industry" is not really on point here.

You're attacking a straw man. Where governments do well is establishing a regulatory framework. They don't deliver the clean water. They (should) ensure that the water that's delivered meets a standard.

No, you're attacking something without even reading it.

The "bipartisan coalition" in the Senate is determined to spend $32 billion (just a downpayment, for sure) is not planning to do what you want. They want to hand out money to a lot of universities, NGO's, and bureaucrats. In your terms, they want to deliver the clean water.

A "regulatory framework" would be something like the Dodd-Frank bill, or Sarbanes-Oxley. Maybe that's what you want, but it's not what Schumer is pushing.

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

#126

Post by slg »

m3kw9 wrote: post #113
qp11 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I would not mindlessly think you know how everything went down just by a few articles.

That argument flows in both directions. Why defend the guy if you don't know "how everything went down"?

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

#127

Post by tsunamifury »

threeseed wrote: post #110
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…

And now it looks like they will fold under Sam and Microsoft still will be able to scoop up the talent and tech.

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

#128

Post by tibbar »

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…

You had the answer there before you dismissed it -- the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft (which has OpenAI's IP rights) offering to hire them all immediately. This included the company's key leadership. The organization was unraveling overnight. This was far past the tipping point of "a few disgruntled employees might leave" - there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.

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

#129

Post by AlbertCory »

XorNot wrote: post #106
AlbertCory wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

are you asking me? I'm not the one with the government program.

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

#130

Post by kazinator »

> Sam didn't inform the board that he owned the OpenAI startup fund, even though he constantly was claiming to be an independent board member with no financial interest in the company

That seems exactly like the kind of thing you would keep to yourself just to see the looks on their faces when they try to kick you out.

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