Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months Not necessarily, and that may speak to the part of the Board's announcement that Sam was not candid
I can’t imagine an organization where this wouldn’t have come up on some roadmap or prioritization meeting, etc. How could leadership not know what the org is working on?! They’re not that big.
Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
291–300 of 754 posts
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#292This was a very personal firing in my opinion. Unless other, really damaging behaviors emerge, no responsible board fires their CEO with such a lack of care for the corporate reputation and their partners unless the firing is a personal grievance connected to an internal power play. This should be embarrassing to everyone involved, and sama has a real grievance here. Likely legal repercussions. Of course if they real…
Altman's not going to sue. Right now he has the high ground and the board is the one that looks petty and immature. It would be dumb for him to do anything that reverses this dynamic. Altman is going to move on and announce a new venture in the coming weeks. Whether that venture is in AI or not in AI will be very revealing about what he truly believes are the prospects for the space. Brockman and the others will like…
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#293This was a very personal firing in my opinion. Unless other, really damaging behaviors emerge, no responsible board fires their CEO with such a lack of care for the corporate reputation and their partners unless the firing is a personal grievance connected to an internal power play. This should be embarrassing to everyone involved, and sama has a real grievance here. Likely legal repercussions. Of course if they real…
>responsible board The board was irresponsible and incompetent by design. There is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree and is part of some kind of cultish "singularity" spiritual/neo-religious thing. That individual has also never had a real job and is on the board of several other non-profits.
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#294> 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…
By all accounts, this split happened a while ago and led to this firing, not the other way around.
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
America did nuclear weapons research to get there before the Nazis and Japan and we were able to use them to stop Japan
Has the US ever stated or followed a policy of neutrality and openness? OpenAI positioned itself like that, much the same way Switzerland does in global politics.
Yes, most of the time from the founding until the First World War.
> and openness?
Not sure what sense of "openness" is relevant here.
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#296I've seen some discussion on HN in which people claimed that even really important engineers aren't -too- important and that Ilya is actually replaceable, using Apple's growth after Woz' departure as an example. But I don't think that's the best situation to compare this to. I think a much better one is John Carmack firing Romero from id Software after the release of Quake. Some background: During a period of about 1…
Carmack did not invent that trick; it had been around more than a decade before he used it. I remember reading a Jim Blinn column about that and other dirty tricks like it in an IEEE magazine years before Carmack "invented" it.
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
America did nuclear weapons research to get there before the Nazis and Japan and we were able to use them to stop Japan
So the first AGI is going to be used to kill other AGIs in the cradle ?
It doesn't make sense with modern AI, where improvement (be it learning or model expansion) is separated from it's normal operation, but I guess some beliefs can persevere very well.
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#298If the firing was because of a difference in "vision", then it doesn't really matter if Altman was key to making OpenAI so successful. Sutskever and co, don't want it to be successful (by market standards at least). If they get their way (past MSFT and others) then OpenAI will no longer be the cutting edge. Buy GOOGL?
It seems you are saying that anything that doesn’t put profit first can’t be successful.
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#299There is a long history of governance problems in nonprofits (see the transaction-cost economics literature on point). Their ambiguous goals induce politics. One benefit of profit-driven boards is that the goals make only well-understood risk trade-off's between growth now or later, and the board members are selected for their actual stake in that actual goal.
This is the problem with religious organizations and ideological governments: they can't be trusted, because they will be captured by their internal politics.
I think it would be much more rational to make AI/AGI an entirely for-profit enterprise, BUT reverse the liability defaults and require that they pay all external costs resulting from their products.
Transaction cost economics shows that in theory that it doesn't matter where liability is allocated so long as the transaction cost of redistributing liability is near zero (i.e., contract in advance and tort after are cheap), because then parties just work it out. Government or laws are required only to make up for the actual non-zero dispute transaction cost by establishing settled expectation.
The internet and software generally has been a domain where consumers have NO redress whatsoever for exported costs. It's grown (and disrupted) fantastically as a result.
So to control AI/AGI, make it for-profit, but flip liability to require all exported costs to be paid by the developer. That would ensure applications are incredibly narrow AND have net-positive social impact.
Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
#300Here's what I don't understand. There clearly were tensions between the for and not-for growth factions, but the Dev Day is being cited as a 'last straw'. It was a product launch. Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months. They should have at the very least been privy to the plan, if not outright sanctioned it. Seems like before launch would have been the time…
Let's look closer at the Ilya Sutskever vs Sam Altman tensions, and think of the product/profit as a cover. Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI, in that respect aligned with Geoff Hinton, his academic advisor at University of Toronto. Hinton has said "So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’…