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OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#201

Post by dralley »

FireBeyond wrote: post #74
nostrademons wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parker Conrad at Zenefits, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, Andrew Mason at Groupon (but not before cashing his shares out at IPO!), Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack at Cisco, Steve Jobs at Apple. I have a lot of confidence in Altman's ability to extricate himself before getting fired, but this is a very common Silicon Valley story.

With Adam Neumann at WeWork currently in the process of doing it again with Flow and AH giving him $350M at a $1B value months before it even commenced operations (what the actual fuck?)

Some people deserve to lose their money.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#202

Post by baking »

Jensson wrote: post #189
baking wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He went from controlling three seats on a six-member board to having one seat "as CEO" of a seven-member board looking to add even more independent members. Also, he can't pull the "the board can fire me at any time" card with a straight face anymore. He kept his job, but he didn't win by any stretch. There is a good chance he will move on to another role.

The current members are almost all from for-profit backgrounds, they are on Sams side here.

I don't think you understand the concept of governance. This is not Tesla's board.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#203

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

apantel wrote: post #149
Jensson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is greed, everyone who works for OpenAI already had a ton of money since they pay so much, demanding more at the cost of the non-profit mission is greed. I am fine with people being greedy, but don't say it isn't greed.

“Greed” is one of those words where the definition doesn’t really tell you where the line is: “intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” (Oxford via Google) Who doesn’t feel “intense and selfish desire” for money? Who doesn’t feel that going into a performance review? It’s human nature to feel this feeling, if that’s what we want to call “greed”.

Just speaking for myself but if I were getting a 500k salary, my remaining concerns would shift in the direction of worrying about the longevity of human civilization, and less about the value of my equity comp. That's because I'd have enough to put a roof over my kids heads and food on their plate, so the world they grow up in would be my next priority. That would probably have me siding with the board against Altman.

But I don't work at AI or earn that kind of money, so who knows.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#205

Post by tivert »

scop wrote: post #28

> reviewed more than 30,000 documents As somebody completely ignorant of the inner workings of the legal trade, can somebody explain what this means? Does this mean a group of informed humans reviewed 30k docs? Does this mean 30k docs were grep’d for keywords? Somewhere in between?

> As somebody completely ignorant of the inner workings of the legal trade, can somebody explain what this means? Does this mean a group of informed humans reviewed 30k docs?

At least in some cases, that means they paid a bunch of law grads from low-tier schools much less than you'd expect to read boring documents all day against some instructions to flag "interesting" things.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#206

Post by juliusdavies »

mr_toad wrote: post #183
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He pretty clearly won. There's not much to it. A huge chunk of the company went into open revolt and he got a competing offer that threatened to recruit all of them. There's nothing really underhanded or sneaky about it: the board drastically overplayed their hand, and all Altman and Brockman had to do was say "I call". To use the parlance of this community of people: people's priors here all seem to be that somethin…

I doubt there’s a precedent for a CEO of a “non-profit” effectively answerable to no-one and able to use it as their personal fiefdom. It’s basically a company without shareholders. I’m curious how this will play out legally. Certainly, no one with any sense will be “donating” any money in OpenAI without some strong and specific guarantees of what they’re going to be getting in return. So it can in no way can be cons…

Does the pope count as a precedent? Lots of donations head the pope’s way every day.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#207

Post by ji_zai »

Vecr wrote: post #197
ji_zai wrote: post #196

It's sad to see many comments here assume that Sam was at fault for something without really knowing what happened behind the scenes. Let's try not to jump to conclusions, as hard as that may be. And if you're actively wishing people to fail, then I ask you to try to understand where that stems from. If you think Openai should be run differently, and if you have the inclination, I genuinely encourage you to build a c…

I assume many people who want OpenAI to fail want to whole AGI program in general to fail, at least for a few decades longer. A competitor won't help, it'll plausibly make it worse.

Agreed. I was talking about folks that wish AI were being built differently (i.e. more transparent, etc.) as opposed to being against the rapid pace of AI development itself. I should have made myself more clear.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#208

Post by Timber-6539 »

marshray wrote: post #199
Timber-6539 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem here. Are you not able to discern different arguments/ideas and come to conclusions by yourself?

I watched some on a recommendation and used to see some of their ideas on X-Twitter. One conclusion I came to was that I didn't respect those people's ability to discern or conclude.

Who cares whether you respect their ability to discern or conclude?

Did you get the argument or not, and did it make sense to you in the situation? That's all that matters.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#209

Post by marshray »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #160
apantel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that clear-cut. “Greed” as defined this way is one of the main drives making people do things. They go out into the world and exert themselves in order to acquire wealth, power, and renown. It’s a core part of what has produced civilization from out of the darkness of total animal-like ignorance. The inventors, makers, statesmen, pioneers, explorers of history… what do you think was motivating them? What do…

I agree that greed plays a role in civilization, but I think your read on human history is overly simplistic in an important way. A great deal of what has driven civilization forward are the people who are driven by curiosity. People like Archimedes, Plato, Newton, Einstein. Not to mention the millions of curious nameless folks who improved the boat, the spear, the wheel, the book. Folks like RMS without whom I doubt…

> Without these folks, it's not clear to me that humanity ratchets forward in progress.

I think the part you're missing is all the brilliant ideas from brilliant people we missed out on over that 2,000+ year from people we never heard of due to science and art being funded only haphazardly by random wealthy patrons.

For almost all of history it was simply not an option to make a living simply by writing or researching. That's still the case in much of the world.

But once we started to systematize it properly, and governments recognized that technology was a strategic necessity, bam, within a century or two we went from playing with primitive batteries, to nuclear fission, the internet, and now AI.

Somebody was paying for Stallman to sit in an MIT lab and write a free compiler. Maybe we don't talk enough about who or why, or how to replicate that kind of success.

Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

#210

Post by KoolKat23 »

tptacek wrote: post #195
reducesuffering wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I addressed your points. You want employees to purely care about their own interests. It’s ok for the company to try to align employees to the company’s interest. I’m sure you wouldn’t care for Fly.io employees secretly self-dealing in ways that gets them promoted and more $, at the expense of your company and customers. “Real easy to say that someone else should take a pay cut to serve a mission you [Fly.i…

I don't know what you're trying to say here, but if one of our team members left because they had a better offer elsewhere, I wouldn't call them greedy.

They joined a company, owned by a not-for-profit with specific goals. They then held it hostage unless it could continue to veer off-course, all in the pursuit of more money. It is literally the definition of greed, selfish desire for money to the detriment of the foundations goals. Whether the foundation would've actually survived thereafter is besides the point. Obviously they're entitled to do that though from a different perspective, its just a job.
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