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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

#181

Post by sgift »

letmevoteplease wrote: post #21
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…

According to the paper, Anthropic's superior safety approach was deliberately delaying release in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress." OpenAI is criticized for kicking off a race for AI progress by releasing ChatGPT to the public. [1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding...

Having read the word soup of contradicting weasel words that make up Claudes "constitution", 'superior safety approach' has so many asterisks it could be a star chart. The only thing the garbage Anthropic has produced is superior is in making some people feel good about themselves.

(https://www.anthropic.com/index/claudes-constitution)

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

#182

Post by traject_ »

JCM9 wrote: post #136
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 lea…

A lot of that billions of capital is simply Azure compute credits though.

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

#183

Post by wvenable »

function_seven wrote: post #148
wvenable wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those investors were appropriately warned of this possibility: > IMPORTANT > *Investing in OpenAl Global, LLC is a high-risk investment* > *Investors could lose their capital contribution and not see any return* > *It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world* > The Compa…

High-risk investments are not rare. To argue that OpenAI can do whatever they want for whatever reason because they state that it's high-risk is not how anything works.

Investors should rightly be concerned about things like gross negligence, active sabotage, or simple infighting. These are all current human concerns and not at all that AGI will destroy the concept of money rendering all investments pointless.

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

#184

Post by Davidzheng »

foobarian wrote: post #29
PepperdineG wrote: post #3

>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. Now we know where that came from

That doesn’t even follow when taken literally. If the company is destroyed presumably they can’t create artificial intelligence, so there is nothing there to benefit all humanity in the first place.

The mission of benefiting humanity can also mean not harming

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

#185

Post by for1nner »

jacquesm wrote: post #161
danenania wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to remember that part of OpenAI's mission, apart from developing safe AGI, is to "avoid undue concentration of power". This is crucial, because safety is a convenient pretext for people whose real motivations are elitist. It's not that they want to slow down AI development; it's that they want to keep it restricted to a tight inner circle. We have at least as much to fear from elites who think only meg…

And so you strike a deal with Microsoft. That tracks.

I think their point was that openAI (the nonpro) had the right idea in re: those concerns/concentration.

The velocity of release and entwining with MSFT (by the profit side) might then be reasonably seen as a great concern for the board.

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

#186

Post by tomrod »

Seanambers wrote: post #47
renewiltord wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. This is the person who "holds comparable influence to a USAF Colonel." according to "a prominent researcher in AI safety" who "discovered prompt injection". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330566 Well, I suppose this tells us something about the AI safety community and whether it makes sense to integrate safety into one's workflow. It seems that the best AI safetyists will scuttle your company fro…

AI safety is just woke 2.0.

This is incorrect.

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

#187

Post by sumedh »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #164
ipaddr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She has a mandate not to promote Anthropic on the back of OpenAI. Very unprofessional

This is something you don’t get. What happens to the for-profit arm of OpenAI is not her problem, her loyalty lies with the non-profit arm’s charter (and not even the organization itself). She is doing her job to uphold the mission of the organization.

> What happens to the for-profit arm of OpenAI is not her problem

Who pays the bill for the non profit arm, wasnt that the for profit arm?

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

#188

Post by dboreham »

Davidzheng wrote: post #117
jltsiren wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real issue is that OpenAI was doomed to fail from the beginning. AI is commercially too valuable to be developed by an organization with a mission like them. Eventually they had to make a choice: either become a for-profit without any pretensions about the good of humanity, or stay true to the mission and abandon ambitions of being at the cutting edge of AI development. A non-profit could not have beaten…

I think it's different bc atomic bomb is pure cost and AI can have returns from products. But your overall point may stand

There's definitely (very large) returns from having atomic weapons.

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

#189

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

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…

> What this really shows us is that this "for-profit wrapper around a non-profit" shenanigans was doomed to fail in the first place.

I disagree. The for-profit arm was always meant to be subservient to the non-profit arm - the latter practically owns the former.

A proper CEO would just try to make money without running afoul of the non-profit’s goals.

Yes that would mean earning less or even not at all. But it was clearly stated to investors that profit isn’t a priority.

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

#190

Post by Davidzheng »

hintymad wrote: post #65

>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity, when many of us believe that OpenAI’s tech is p…

That's her job to decide what's good for humanity from my reading of the charter
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