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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

#191

Post by jjulius »

avarun wrote: post #118
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".

The fact that he's a founder and the one that made it "one of the most important companies on the planet"?

Not quite true - OpenAI's Wikipedia article says...

>The organization was founded in December 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.

Altman didn't join as CEO until 2019.

Edit: All those names and we're going to say stuff like Altman was "the one" who made the company so important?

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

#192

Post by vasilipupkin »

senectus1 wrote: post #173
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. >... >We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power. >Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. >... >We are concern…

>We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of s…

it’s completely irrelevant language because nobody is anywhere close to actual AGI

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

#193

Post by adolph »

jltsiren wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting but it may well be they both have a point: Helen for telling him to get lost and Sam for attempting to remove her before she would damage the company. But she could have made that point more forcefully by not comparing Anthropic to OpenAI, after all who better than her to steer OpenAI in the right direction. I noted in a comment elsewhere that all of these board members appear to have had at least on…

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…

> either become a for-profit without any pretensions about the good of humanity

Not a day passes that I don't hear from some company that has pretensions about the good of humanity and how they are leading the way to it. Plenty of non-profits and government orgs have the same pretensions.

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

#194

Post by next_xibalba »

traject_ wrote: post #182
JCM9 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those credits equate to billions of $ in real compute expense for MSFT.

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

#195

Post by Intralexical »

brigadier132 wrote: post #71
tokai wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly educated AI specialists are the little people now? They can all find employment in an instant.

Do you think every single person in OpenAI is an AI Phd? We are talking about 770 people, most of which are not rich and likely do not even own their own home. So yes, they are the little people. If you are going to potentially ruin the lives of 770 people you should have a better reason than being afraid of a chatbot and laundry buddy.

Aside from those individuals being in-demand professionals with specialized experience from a big famous company, 770 people will be the least of our concerns if the social disruption from this stuff gets bad enough one day.

Not surprised Hacker News identifies and sympathizes more with the software folks than with everyone else who has to live with the systems they build/disrupt, though.

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

#196

Post by glitchc »

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…

>... yet based on this account I think he reacted the exact same way any CEO would.

Say what? The CEO serves at the behest of the board, not the other way around. For Sam to tell a board member that they should bring their concerns to him suggests that Sam thinks he's higher than the board. No wonder she told him to go fly a kite.

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

#197

Post by danenania »

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.

Advancing AI requires massive amounts of capital and compute. There's no way around this. It can only be done either within or in partnership with huge organizations.

The default, in the absence of an OpenAI, is that it gets developed secretly by these organizations, and they get to decide who can use it (hint: it's not you, typical HN reader).

OpenAI were the only ones at least trying to walk this tightrope, and I think they were doing a pretty good job. So what were the real motivations of these three wealthy/elite board members who are taking it upon themselves to decide this issue for the rest of humanity? It's looking less and less likely that safety was the reason.

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

#198

Post by TecoAndJix »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #23
jacquesm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means that you go outside only after you've exhausted all avenues inside. It's similar to a whistle blower situation, only most whistleblowers don't have their fingers on the self-destruct button. So to press that button before exhausting all other options seems a bit hasty. There is no 'undo' on that button.

We're talking about the publication of a relatively milquetoast report that has some lines which can be read as mild criticisms of OpenAI's release strategy for ChatGPT & GPT-4. Why exactly is publishing such a report controversial? It's totally compatible with Helen Toner's role on the board.

Off topic - this is the first time I have seen the word milquetoast (pronounced "milk toast"?). What an interesting word!

NORTH AMERICAN

noun

a timid or feeble person. "Jennings plays him as something of a milquetoast"

adjective

feeble, insipid, or bland. "a soppy, milquetoast composer"

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

#199

Post by Davidzheng »

throw20away wrote: post #15

Ms. Toner’s motive is now clearer for being criticized about her research. Mr. D’Angelo had a competing commercialization product with Poe. Mr. Sutskever seems easy to manipulate emotionally and is in constant ideological battles. Mrs. McCauley AKA Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s wife, what’s her motive?

Why do we have to assume these people are so temperamental. All this competing product, criticized for research. Can't they be acting in less selfish reasons?

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

#200

Post by mcny »

paulddraper wrote: post #157
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam wanted to restrict Helen's free expression on the topic of beneficial AI in order to boost OpenAI's position. That suggests he cares more about the success of OpenAI than he does upholding the charter.

No, Sam wanted to be the first recipient of Helen's expression. So -- if appropriate -- he could make changes. Or he could not change, and she publishes anyway.

>> Sam wanted to restrict Helen's free expression.

> No, Sam wanted to be the first recipient of Helen's expression.

If I get copy approval to what you write, that is by definition a restriction to your freedom of expression. How is this up for debate?

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