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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

#241

Post by Aunche »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #95
greyface- wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This charter is doomed to be interpreted in radically different ways by people with differing AI-eschatological beliefs. It's no wonder it's led to so much conflict.

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.

> That suggests he cares more about the success of OpenAI than he does upholding the charter.

A board member should care about their organization more than their interpretation of the charter. If a Mozilla board member publicly criticized Firefox for violating their charter of a free and open internet because they're receiving money from Google, while also praising Brave for not doing so, I guarantee that they'd also be ousted.

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

#242

Post by kragen »

abi wrote: post #235
gwern wrote: post #203

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, nat…

I mean it's not cool for board members to publicly criticize the company.

it's not cool for companies to try to shut down academic freedom of inquiry in scholarly publishing in order to improve their public image

her independence from openai was the nominal reason she was asked to supervise it in the first place, wasn't it

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

#243

Post by breadwinner »

jjulius wrote: post #222
breadwinner wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So you don't think Elon Musk was one of the founders either then?

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

#244

Post by simonw »

simonw wrote: post #68
tempusalaria wrote: post #2

This claims that Anthropic founders also tried to throw Sam out before leaving. They claim three sources but not clear how strong - technically the current board could be three sources

Skilled journalists (and this piece was written by skilled journalists) would not use the three members of the board as their only three sources. A big part of this kind of journalism is taking information from sources, considering the potential bias of each source and carefully correlating it with information from other sources before publishing it. That bit specifically says: "After they failed, they gave up and de…

This inspired me to write an article about how to decipher clues like "three people familiar with the attempt": https://simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/22/deciphering-clues/

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

#245

Post by kragen »

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…

nonprofit companies with for-profit portfolio companies are hardly unusual and certainly not doomed to fail. i've worked for two such companies in my high-tech career myself; one is now called altarum, though i worked for the for-profit subsidiary that got sold to veridian

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

#246

Post by danenania »

hutzlibu wrote: post #233
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…

"OpenAI had the right idea. Keep the source closed if you must, and invest heavily on safety, but make the benefits available to all." Well, you see the result. Apart from this drama, lots of debate and speculation whether we are already in AGI territory, because it is all just a black box and no one knows what exactly was in the training data to be able to judge the quality of the output. That is way too much AI pri…

Yeah that's certainly a debate worth having.

My point is this coup against OpenAI (seemingly) wasn't started by people who want to make AI more open. They want to make it inaccessible unless you're in their club. To my reading, that is more starkly opposed to the charter than anything Sam Altman has done. Commercialization = giving wide access. Not total 100% open source access, but wide access nonetheless.

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

#247

Post by svnt »

ipaddr wrote: post #53
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…

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

> Her job isn’t self promotion

Isn’t she an academic? Getting people to pay attention to her is at least half her job.

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

#248

Post by function_seven »

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.

Good. His money came with no strings*. In fact, if they had run this past him before making their decision, that would have been a breach of their duty as outlined in their charter.

They may have made mistakes with timing (making this decision too late), or with execution (not having a replacement CEO solidly lined-up and in the loop), but the core decision—to remove Sam—is definitely not something they should ask donors about. It's not Satya's business how the board makes decisions at this level.

* Other than a capped profit return if there is any.

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

#249

Post by kragen »

barnabee wrote: post #226
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…

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…

stuff written on pieces of paper, such as history, laws, contracts, and banknote denominations, turn out to be surprisingly important when groups of people too large to all know one another try to work together

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

#250

Post by ivancho »

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.

The jobs argument has always been the least supported argument about anything. Oh, we can't shut down this chemical plant dumping toxic garbage into the river, because then all those people at the plant will lose their jobs.
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