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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

#221

Post by mikehotel »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #69
ipaddr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promoting Anthropic and putting down OpenAI doesn't make her better at her job. Her job isn't self promotion.

Is Helen associated with Anthropic?

Apparently an indirect association. From [0]:

Fall 2021

Holden Karnofsky resigns from the Board, citing a potential conflict because his wife, Daniela Amodei, is helping start Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor, with her brother Dario Amodei. (They all live(d) together.) The exact date of Holden’s resignation is unknown; there was no contemporaneous press release.

Between October and November 2021, Holden was quietly removed from the list of Board Directors on the OpenAI website, and Helen was added (Discussion Source [1]).

0. https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

1. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fmDFytmxwX9qBgcaX/...

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

#222

Post by jjulius »

breadwinner wrote: post #213
jjulius wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Co-chairs? As in chairs on a board rather than founders? Like what my Wikipedia quote says?

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

#223

Post by HDThoreaun »

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.

Why would the board care about that?

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

#224

Post by brigadier132 »

nomel wrote: post #163
brigadier132 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing how these higher minded people always forget about the little people on the ground. All these employees losing their livelihoods for the greater good. Not surprised an ethicist thinks like this.

Given a choice between a paycheck and doing something questionable, and you have a looong history of what people will choose. I’m not saying that’s the case here, but that can’t be used as a shield.

You really need very long hysterical fear mongering arguments to claim what openai employees are doing is morally questionable.

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

#225

Post by lwneal »

The relevant passage from the paper co-written by board member Helen Toner:

"OpenAI has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of ChatGPT and GPT-4, including regarding copyright issues, labor conditions for data annotators, and the susceptibility of their products to "jailbreaks" that allow users to bypass safety controls...

A different approach to signaling in the private sector comes from Anthropic, one of OpenAI's primary competitors. Anthropic's desire to be perceived as a company that values safety shines through across its communications, beginning from its tagline: "an AI safety and research company." A careful look at the company's decision-making reveals that this commitment goes beyond words."

[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/

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

#226

Post by barnabee »

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…

Not surprising to me at all, in approximate order of real, practical importance (and power, if they all band together):

employees founder/CEO customers investors board stuff written on pieces of paper

Yes, there are certainly exceptions (a very powerful founder, highly replaceable and disorganised employees, investor or board member who wields unusual power/leverage, etc.) but it does not surprise me at all that the charter should get ignored/twisted/modified when basically everyone but the board wills it.

The only surprise is that anyone thought this approach and structure would be helpful in somehow securing AI safety.

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

#227

Post by 1024core »

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…

> I'm much more interested in how Helen managed to get on this board at all.

My gut says that she is the central figure in how this all went down. She and D'Angelo are the central figures, if my gut is right.

It looks like Helen Toner was OK with destroying the company to make a point.

FTA:

> 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 could be consistent with its mission

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

#228

Post by hutzlibu »

jacquesm wrote: post #156
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…

When Microsoft came on board the charter effectively went out the window. It's like Idefix thinking he's leading Obelix around on a leash.

"It's like Idefix thinking he's leading Obelix around on a leash."

I don't think I have seen Idefix being on a leash ever .. he just runs around free. And there are indeed many dogs on a leash, who lead their "masters" who just follow behind.

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

#229

Post by AutoDunkGPT »

justanotherjoe wrote: post #211
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

yes, and what about my needs, huh?

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

#230

Post by Fomite »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #162
jacquesm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole charter is bullshit. You don't invite Microsoft to the party if you care about ethics and you don't disable your fail-safe by giving them full access to all of your stuff. Hence my position that the charter was a fig leaf designed to throw regulators off.

Elsewhere in this thread you stated: "if OpenAI was 'the good guys' then any chance of the good guys getting a head start has just been blown out of the water" So basically we have two cases here: 1. The charter is a deceptive fig leaf, OpenAI aren't the good guys. In which case blowing up OpenAI looks reasonable 2. The charter is not a fig leaf, Helen is doing the right thing by upholding it I'd say upholding the ch…

There's a third case:

It's #1 to some, and #2 to others.

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