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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

#211

Post by justanotherjoe »

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…

Oh please... Can't you see how meaningless the phraes 'goodness of humanity' is? If only something like that can be so readily known!

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

#212

Post by wnoise »

breadwinner wrote: post #44

The main takeaway from this whole saga is, be careful who you allow on your board. 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. Here's Ms. Toner's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/

They are not on the board of a company. They're on the board of a non-profit that controls a company.

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

#213

Post by breadwinner »

jjulius wrote: post #191
avarun wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Not true. This page dated December 11, 2015 mentions Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

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

#214

Post by ac2u »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #150
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…

> 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). Sam didn’t forget anything. He is a brilliant Machiavellian operator. Just look at the Reddit reverse takeover as an example; Machiavelli would be in awe. > What this really shows us is that this "for-profit wrap…

> Just look at the Reddit reverse takeover as an example; Machiavelli would be in awe.

What were the details on that? (Sorry it’s not an easy story to find on Google given how much the keywords overlap with OpenAI topics)

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

#215

Post by function_seven »

wvenable wrote: post #183
function_seven wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most high-risk investments still come with an understanding that the recipient will have a duty to the investor, making decisions that they believe in good-faith will lead to a return on that investment on some time-frame.

This one is very much an explicit, "You're giving us a donation. Don't expect a return." It's in an impossible-to-miss pink box. They can't be more clear about this.

If investors are concerned about those things, then they should not give money to people who pointedly leave those things on the table. Like this one:

> The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors.

Also, Microsoft got something for their money already. They have an independent license to the tech they can run themselves and iterate on.

The OpenAI board has no duty to Microsoft to get their input. MS might have believed their investment amounted to de facto control, but they're wrong.

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

#216

Post by brigadier132 »

Intralexical wrote: post #195
brigadier132 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 770 people will be the least of our concerns if the social disruption from this stuff gets bad enough one day.

Yeah, this is the common trend among these insane utilitarians like you and Helen Toner. It's all a game of "how can I justify doing heinous shit to people". IF a superintelligent AGI is created that is as disruptive as you imagine, it also means we find cures for diseases and solve many other potentially world ending problems (such as climate change).

So since you brought up the hypothetical disruption of a technology that doesn't exist, can I now lay at your feet the blame for the millions of lives that are lost due to disease and climate change since we didn't move fast enough on AGI and advancing technology?

This is why these absurd hysterical fear mongering arguments are worthless.

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

#217

Post by db-interface »

Manuel_D wrote: post #167
db-interface wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't agree with all of the framing in the NYT story, it's worth noting that Scott Alexander was much friendlier to Moldbug et. al. than the anti-Metz camp argued at the time: https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001 I think Metz's motivation for that framing was his assumption that if SA was not at least sympathetic to NRx views, he would not allow them to be such a big voice in his comme…

This is straightforward guilt-by-association: because of the mere fact that Scott interacted with people espousing neo reactionary views, he must also be sympathetic to those views. Of course, this is completed wrong and easily known by reading Scotts writings on the topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f... There is zero way to say in good faith the Scott espouses or even agrees with neo…

I said he was "sympathetic to NRx views" and linked emails from him stating certain views widely held by Moldbug et. al. that he is sympathetic to. Do you disagree that "HBD" is an NRx view, or that the leaked emails express sympathy for it?

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

#218

Post by jart »

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…

I always thought the structure was there to pull the wool over the eyes of the world's smartest researchers, to get them to agree to help them build a doomsday sort of technology. I never expected the board would be drinking their own kool aid.

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

#219

Post by Metacelsus »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #150
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…

> 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). Sam didn’t forget anything. He is a brilliant Machiavellian operator. Just look at the Reddit reverse takeover as an example; Machiavelli would be in awe. > What this really shows us is that this "for-profit wrap…

> Just look at the Reddit reverse takeover as an example

I'm not familiar with this, what happened? Googling "Sam Altman reddit reverse takeover" is just flooded with OpenAI results.

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

#220

Post by kmlevitt »

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…

While this would be perfectly reasonable if OpenAI was for profit, it’s ostensibly a non profit. The entire reason they wanted her on the board in the first place was for her expert academic opinion on AI safety. If they see that as a liability, why did they pretend to care about those concerns in the first place?

That said, if she objects to open AI’s practices, the common sense thing to do is to resign from the board out of protest, not take actions that lead to the whole operation being burned to the ground.

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