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Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

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Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#251

Post by g42gregory »

croes wrote: post #227
g42gregory wrote: post #182

My feeling is the the commercial side of the OpenAI brand is gone. How could OpenAI customers depend on the company, when the non-profit board goes against their interests (by slowing down the development and giving them inferior product)? On the other hand, the AGI side of the OpenAI brand is just fine. They will continue the responsible AGI development, spearheaded by Ilya Sutskever. My best wishes for them to succ…

It's a bad idea to make yourself dependent on a new service from the outset. They could have gone bankrupt, been sued into the ground, taken over by Microsoft... Just look at the just because they fired their CEO. Was the success based on GPT or the CEO? The former is still their and didn't get inferior. Slower growth doesn't mean shrinking

As an AI professional, I am very interested to hear about OpenAI's ideas, directions, safety programs, etc...

As a commercial customer, the only things I am interested in is the quality of the commercial product they provide to me. Will they have my interests in mind going forward? Will they devote all their energy in delivering the best, most advanced product to me? Will robust support and availability be there in the future? Given the board's publicly stated priorities (which I was not aware of before!), I am not so sure anymore.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#252

Post by simonjgreen »

mise_en_place wrote: post #236
threeseed wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

Keep in mind that the rest of the board members have ties to US intelligence. Something isn't right here.

Do you have citations for that? That’s interesting if true

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#253

Post by cthalupa »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #172
sangnoir wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They lead with the fact that it was shocking and irresponsible. I can see where the misalignment (ha!) may be: someone deep in the VC world would reflexively think that "value destruction" of any kind is irresponsible. However, a non-profit board has a primary responsibility to its charter and mission - which doesn't compute for those with fiduciary-duty-instincts. Without getting into the specifics of this case: a…

>However, a non-profit board has a primary responsibility to its charter and mission - which doesn't compute for those with fiduciary-duty-instincts Exactly. The tricky part is that board started a second for profit company with VC investors who are co-owners. This has potential for messy conflicts of interest if there is disagreement about how to run the co-venture, and each party has contractual obligations to each…

> Exactly. The tricky part is that board started a second for profit company with VC investors who are co-owners. This has potential for messy conflicts of interest if there is disagreement about how to run the co-venture, and each party has contractual obligations to each other.

Anyone investing in or working for the for-profit LLC has to sign an operating agreement that states the LLC is not obligated to make a profit, all investments should be treated as donations, and that the charter and mission of the non-profit is the primary responsibility of the for-profit LLC as well.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#254

Post by cmrdporcupine »

38321003thrw wrote: post #237
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Knew the right people, had the right funds, and said and did and thought the things compatible with getting investment from people with even more influence than them. Unless you're saying my only option is to pick and choose between different sets of people like that?

There is a political economy as well as a technical aspect to this that present inherent issues. Even if we can address the former by say regime change, the latter issue remains: the domain is technical and cognitively demanding. Thus the practitioners will generally sound sane and rational (they are smart people but that is no guarantee of anything other than technical abilities) and non-technical policy types (like…

In the end my concern comes down to that those who rise to power in our society are those who are best at playing the capitalist game. That's mostly, I guess, fine if what they're doing is being most efficient making cars or phones or grocery store chains or whatever.

Making intelligent machines? Colour me disturbed.

Let me ask you this re: "the domain is technical and cognitively demanding" -- do you think Sam Altman (or a Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, etc.) would pass a software engineer technical interview at e.g. Google? (Not saying those interviews are perfect, they suck, but we'll use that as a gatekeeper for now.). I'm betting the answer is quite strongly "no."

So the selection criterion here is not the ability to perform technically. Unless we're redefining technical. Which leaves us with "intellectually demanding" and "smart", which, well, frankly also applies to lawyers, politicians, etc.

My worry is right now that the farther you go up at any of these organizations, the more the kind of intelligence and skills trends towards the "is good at manipulating and convincing others" kind of spectrum vs the "is good at manipulating and convincing machines" kind of spectrum. And it is into the former that we're concentrating more and more power.

(All that said, it does seem like Sutskever would definitely pass said interview, and he's likely much smarter than I am. But I remain unconvined that that kind of smarts is the kind of smarts that should be making governance-of-humanity decisions)

As terrible as politicians and various "abstract model" applying folks might be, at least they are nominally subject to being voted out of power.

Democracy isn't a great system for producing excellence.

But as a citizen I'll take it over a "meritocracy" which is almost always run by bullshitters.

What we need is accountability and legitimacy and the only way we've found to produce on a mass society level is through democratic institutions.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#255

Post by varelse »

threeseed wrote: post #216
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…

> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

[dead]

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#257

Post by nyssos »

stavros wrote: post #193
huytersd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very constrained imagination. You could wreak havoc with a truly unconstrained, good enough LLM.

Do feel free to give some examples of a less constrained imagination.

The biggest near-term threat is probably bioterrorism. You can get arbitrary DNA sequences synthesized and delivered by mail, right now, for about $1 per base pair. You'll be stopped if you try to order some known dangerous viral genome, but it's much harder to tell the difference between a novel synthetic virus that kills people and one with legitimate research applications.

This is already an uncomfortably risky situation, but fortunately virology experts seem to be mostly uninterested in killing people. Give everyone with an internet connection access to a GPT-N model that can teach a layman how to engineer a virus, and things get very dangerous very fast.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#258

Post by dragonwriter »

wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…

> The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI.

The board's job is specifically to do right by the charitable mission of the nonprofit of which they are the board. Investors in the downstream for-profit entity (OpenAI Global LLC) are warned explicitly that such investments should be treated as if they were donations and that returning profits to them is not the objective of the firm, serving the charitable function of the nonprofit is, though profits may be returned.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#259

Post by svaha1728 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #208
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's clearly not really true, there's a huge "means of production" aspect to this which comes down to being able to afford the datastructure infrastructure. The cost of the computing machinery and the energy costs to run it are actually massive .

Yup it's quite literally the world's most expensive parrot. (Mind you, a plain old parrot is not cheap either. But OpenAI is a whole other order of magnitude.)

Parrots may live 50 years. H100s probably won’t last half that long.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#260

Post by duped »

Draiken wrote: post #86
peter422 wrote: post #59

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…

Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird. It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses. Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens. They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.

The primary job of an early stage tech CEO is to convince people to give you those billions of dollars, one doesn't come without the other.
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