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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

#131

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

alvah wrote: post #124
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's been a ton of criticism of Helen here in this thread and elsewhere, but I haven't seen anyone clearly articulate what Helen should have done. Everyone says she did the wrong thing, but no one has said what the right thing actually was.

Here's my guess: I think OpenAI should have prioritized character more in its hiring. Ending up with an organization full of employees who cared more about making money than upholding the charter was a mistake. Ultimately it's not enough for the people on the board to have character. The CEO and employees need to have character too.

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

#132

Post by cwillu »

wvenable wrote: post #107
tapoxi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors wanted to have a commercial enterprise while pretending it was a nonprofit acting for the good of humanity. This helps market something as scary and potentially destructive as AI. "It can't be that bad, they're a nonprofit with altruistic goals!" Then the investors get mad when the board they intended to be figureheads actually try to uphold some principles. Best to rip the band-aid off and stop pretending.

I think you have it backwards. OpenAI specifically sought out investors because they couldn't fulfill their mission without the infrastructure to do it. Investors don't just give money away -- it's in the name itself -- they're investing . The point is for the commercial enterprise to provide a return on their investment. OpenAI is a non-profit running this commercial enterprise but they are seemingly at odds with th…

The OpenAI prominently states that any investment should be thought of as a donation. Literally in a bold pinkish-red box that describes its corporate structure.

An investor might read that and think they don't actually mean it, but you can't claim they weren't clear about the nature of any required investment.

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

#133

Post by jacquesm »

nicce wrote: post #123
jacquesm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, Nadella has a point: without MS OpenAI wouldn't be where it is today, but the reverse is also true: without OpenAI MS wouldn't be where it is today.

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

#134

Post by eigenvalue »

CSMastermind wrote: post #4

The only specific accusation made in the article is that Sam criticized Helen Toner for writing a paper: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI. Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he w…

I strongly suspect this whole thing is caused by an overinflated ego and a desire to feel like she is the main character and the chief “resistance” saving the world. The EA philosophy is truly poisonous. It leads people to betray those close to them in honor of abstract ideals that they are most likely wrong about anyway. Such people should be avoided like the plague if you’re building a team of any kind.

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

#135

Post by winenbug »

nicce wrote: post #87
tapoxi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors wanted to have a commercial enterprise while pretending it was a nonprofit acting for the good of humanity. This helps market something as scary and potentially destructive as AI. "It can't be that bad, they're a nonprofit with altruistic goals!" Then the investors get mad when the board they intended to be figureheads actually try to uphold some principles. Best to rip the band-aid off and stop pretending.

Let’s assume this happened. Then everyone would make everything in their power to get their old CEO back which made this possible. Oh wait.

Ya which is why Sam should just start a new company, maybe spend a few months to catch back up but then it won't be tied down to any of this shenanigans. It's the best solution imo.

I have a feeling that's exactly what he's doing at Microsoft; at some point their "AI lab" will be spun off into a new company.

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

#136

Post by JCM9 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #4

The only specific accusation made in the article is that Sam criticized Helen Toner for writing a paper: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI. Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he w…

The challenge of all this is that while everything going on looks totally bonkers from any normal sense of business, it’s hard to argue that the board isn’t following their charter. IMHO the mistake was setting up the structure the way it is and expecting that to go well. Even with MSFT they are obviously annoyed but also they have shareholders too and one reasonable question here is what the heck was Microsoft’s leadership doing putting billions of capital at risk with this entity that has such a wacky structure and ultimately governed by this non-profit board with a bizarre doomsdayish charter. Seriously if you haven’t read it, read it.

This whole thing has been wildly mishandled but there’s an angle here where the nonprofit is doing exactly what they always said they would do and the ones that potentially look like fools are Microsoft and other investors that put their shareholder capital into this equation thinking that would go well.

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

#137

Post by kragen »

db-interface wrote: post #114
kragen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alexander is the guy who wrote the 30,000 word anti-reactionary faq about why moldbug was wrong, though; those screenshots explain in detail why he was unsympathetic to their neoreactionary views, rather than demonstrating that he was sympathetic to them he does say some things there that are entirely outside the pale and that he should have known better than, but sad to say, those particular beliefs aren't limited t…

I don't mean to say that he was a closet NRx -- and IMO neither did Metz imply that -- just that he agreed with a much larger subset of their controversial views than he or his allies admitted publicly. I would consider that being "sympathetic" to NRx.

i don't think the leaked screenshots support those conclusions; i don't have any idea where you're getting those conclusions from

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

#138

Post by nicce »

interlocutor wrote: post #109
jjulius wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nearly everyone on OpenAI board is young, inexperienced and unqualified to be on the board of one of the most important companies on the planet. Jumping off of that, I'm genuinely curious what, in Sam's resume, suggests he should be in charge of "one of the most important companies on the planet".

Wasn't he president of some kind of startup incubator? Some "combinator" company.

Well, obviously quite against the goal of non-profit, safe the humanity company. President of some “combinator” is the money maker.

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

#139

Post by comp_throw7 »

jacquesm wrote: post #105
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe that aligned AGI will create a post-scarcity society, there's no reason for its creator to hoard the benefits for themselves. The main thing is to ensure that post-scarcity society actually comes into being. Edit: Note also the "value-aligned, safety-conscious" caveat.

I don't believe that. What I believe is that the first party to create an AGI will likely end up being nationalized and that that AI will be weaponized the next day to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

That's fine, but the OpenAI founders (including Sam Altman![1]) explicitly had in mind "AI kills everyone" as one of the main problems they were attempting to tackle when they started the organization. (Obviously starting OpenAI as a solution to this problem was a terrible mistake, but given that they did so, having a board charged with pulling the plug is better than not having that.)

[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

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

#140

Post by jacquesm »

foobarqux wrote: post #126
jacquesm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> 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.

This isn't a theoretical exercise where we get to do it all over again next week to see if we can do better, this is for keeps.

The point could have been made much more forceful by not releasing the report but holding it over Altman's head to get him to play ball.

> You can justify pretty much anything with ends-justify-the-means logic

Indeed. That's my point: the ends justify the means. This isn't some kind of silly game this is to all intents and purposes and arms race and those that don't understand that should really wake up: whoever gets this thing first is going to change the face of the world, it won't be the AGI that is your enemy it is whoever controls the AGI that could well be your enemy. Think Manhattan project, not penicillin.

> 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.

That charter is and always was a fig leaf, I am probably too old and cynical to believe that it was sincere, it was in my opinion nothing but a way to keep regulators at bay. Just like I never bought SBF's 'Altruism' nonsense.

The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions comes to mind.

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