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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

#281

Post by fnordpiglet »

“””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.”””

This is remarkable and unhinged. I gave the board the benefit of the doubt at first, but as this unfolds, it becomes clear that the board is held hostage by ideological zealots who can’t compromise. The story also seems to paint Ilya as a manipulated figure, being bent against his beliefs by crazies like Toner exploiting his concerns about AI safety. What an absolute shame. I am entirely ambivalent about Altman overall, but he becomes more sympathetic as the days go by.

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

#282

Post by Aunche »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #254
Aunche wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is exactly backwards. The reason we create organizations like this is not for the benefit of the organization itself, but to accomplish specific goals. Those goals are outlined in the charter. If the organization starts doing things that conflict with the charter, the responsibility of the board is to course-correct.

The place to course correct is from the board room, not in public. If she had enough power to oust the CEO, she should have enough power to pressure him to make changes.

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

#283

Post by comp_throw7 »

TheOsiris wrote: post #255
hollerith wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity, when many of us believe that OpenAI’s tech is perfectly safe and amazingly beneficial? Yeah, well, hate to burst your nice warm Silicon-Valley bubble, but most Americans believe that continuing to create smarter and smarter AIs is dangerous, so who's playing g…

> but most Americans believe that continuing to create smarter and smarter AIs is dangerous, so who's playing god now? Aren't you just making this up? I haven't seen any surveys on what "most Americans believe" re AI. I know a lot of people that are concerned. But I'll bet good money that "most Americans" don't give a crap

Googling "americans AI polling" produces this as the first result: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/21/what-the-...

I don't put much stock into polls like this, when it comes to actually deciding whether things are dangerous, but I think you should spend five seconds doing an incredibly trivial sanity-check before accusing people of making things up.

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

#284

Post by jacquesm »

jafitc wrote: post #236

Sam Altman's Actions - Sam complained that Helen Toner's research paper criticized OpenAI's safety approach and praised Anthropic's, seeing it as dangerous for OpenAI - He reprimanded her for the paper, saying as a board member she should have brought concerns to him first rather than publishing something critical right when OpenAI was in a tricky spot with the FTC - He then began looking for ways to remove her from…

Nice summary.

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

#285

Post by dchftcs »

nicce wrote: post #153
dchftcs wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's a board member. Who had approximately 1/4 of the power to fire Sam, and she did eventually exert it. Why do you rather assume her voice was not heard?

You should assume that most of this happened before the firings. Then it was 1/6 about the voting. But voting is totally different thing than speaking about concerns and then getting actually them into the list, which will we voted further if they decide to do something about it. In theory that is 1/6 * 1/6 power if you are alone with it for the decision to happen.

I still see no justification for assuming that the board member's voice was not heard before the publication. There's zero evidence for it, while the priors ought to be favoring the contrary because she does wield a fairly material form of power. If more evidence does emerge, then we could revisit the premise.

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

#286

Post by jxi »

kragen wrote: post #242
abi wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He wasn't shutting down her academic freedom. However, if you're going to diss what your own company is doing and praise competitors, you probably shouldn't be on the board.

>During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.

>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.

This person is too far gone. Life isn't a movie.

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

#287

Post by ecshafer »

kragen wrote: post #242
abi wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is a difference between independent from an organization, and someone that takes a public stand against a company. Reading that paper, which I am not really impressed with, they are taking a stance that openai's current trajectory is not as good as a competitor. I bet that if a Microsoft board member wrote a paper how Google search is better than Bing / AWS Better than Azure / OSX better than Windows they would be reprimanded also.

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

#288

Post by rmathew »

atombender wrote: post #240
ac2u wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Yishan Wong's comment here [1] explains it. (He's the unnamed "young up-and-coming" CEO of the story.) In short, the plan was to reduce Condé Nast's ownership of Reddit by hiring a new CEO, and convincing that person to demand, as a condition for their hiring, that CN reduce their ownership share. Further VC funding and back-room machinations let them further reduce CN's share of the company, thus eventually wresting…

Corrected URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

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

#289

Post by jacquesm »

sackfield wrote: post #151
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…

This charter doesn't have a sole interpretation, and shame on Helen for strong arming her view and ruining the lives of so many people. If there is something completely clear, its that OpenAI cannot uphold its charter without labour. She has ruined that, and thus failed in upholding the charter. There were many different paths to take, she took the worst one.

It all smacks of someone given the power to do something who then has to do that something, even if it is on a pretext. Power is best exercised by restraint, not by action, until there is no other way.

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

#290

Post by comp_throw7 »

Aunche wrote: post #282
comp_throw7 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly backwards. The reason we create organizations like this is not for the benefit of the organization itself, but to accomplish specific goals. Those goals are outlined in the charter. If the organization starts doing things that conflict with the charter, the responsibility of the board is to course-correct.

The place to course correct is from the board room, not in public. If she had enough power to oust the CEO, she should have enough power to pressure him to make changes.

The board can't compel the CEO to do specific things, only replace them.
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