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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

#201

Post by wnoise »

jacquesm wrote: post #56
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The charter states that OpenAI should allow another company to win the race under certain circumstances: >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 specific…

> we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project That bit I never understood. It doesn't even have a qualification as to who is stewarding the project as if any AI should be assisted no matter who ends up owning it. The whole thing is just so utterly disconnected from the real world.

Did you miss the part where it says "value-aligned"? One's that aren't value-aligned are not subject to that clause.

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

#202

Post by chubot »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #42
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

It's pretty heavily implied by OpenAI's charter: https://openai.com/charter It's weird to me that Helen is getting so much crap for upholding the charter. No one objected to the charter at the time it was published. The charter was always available for employees, investors, and customers to read. Did everyone expect it to be ignored when push came to shove? There's a lot of pressure on Helen right now from people who…

Also, Sam himself repeatedly used the charter as marketing, and as a recruiting tool for AI researchers that could have gone anywhere they wanted (e.g. Ilya)

He was basically making the argument that AGI is better under OpenAI than Google.

Now they're implicitly making the argument that it's better under Microsoft, which is difficult for me to believe.

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

#203

Post by gwern »

None of the comments thus far seem to clearly explain why this matters. Let me summarize the implications:

Sam Altman expelling Toner with the pretext of an inoffensive page (https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding...) in a paper no one read* would have given him a temporary majority with which to appoint a replacement director, and then further replacement directors. These directors would, naturally, agree with Sam Altman, and he would have a full, perpetual board majority - the board, which is the only oversight on the OA CEO. Obviously, as an extremely experienced VC and CEO, he knew all this and how many votes he (thought he) had on the board, and the board members knew this as well - which is why they had been unable to agree on replacement board members all this time.

So when he 'reprimanded' her for her 'dangerous' misconduct and started talking seriously about how 'inappropriate' it was for a 'board member' to write anything which was not cheerleading, and started leading discussions about "whether Ms Toner should be removed"...

* I actually read CSET papers, and I still hadn't bothered to read this one, nor would I have found anything remarkable about that page, which Altman says was so bad that she needed to be expelled immediately from the board.

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

#204

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by Davidzheng »

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.

Can't tell if this is a joke lol

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

#206

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

sumedh wrote: post #187
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

The important thing for the non-profit arm is the mission, its own existence is secondary.

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

#207

Post by [deleted] »

danenania wrote: post #158
letmevoteplease wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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…

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by obmelvin »

mcny wrote: post #200
paulddraper wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My interpretation of that was that Sam felt Helen's duty as a board member is to come to the company with her complaints, and work to improve the safety measures.

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

#209

Post by wnoise »

soderfoo wrote: post #121
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.

That's literally not the job of this board.

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

#210

Post by db-interface »

kragen wrote: post #137
db-interface wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In them he says "HBD is probably partially correct" -- do you think that's not a NRx view (I agree others also hold it, but I would argue that it's a core view of NRx -- it doesn't need to be exclusive to them, e.g. Islam considers Jesus a prophet too), or that he publicly held that position previously?
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