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Irving on Helen, Ilya, and Sam

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Re: Irving on Helen, Ilya, and Sam

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro. Literally We do not have an honest statement about the details of WHY he's fired. We are all in the dark. The logical answer is to be neutral. But everyone is exploding and thinking the board is full of mentally retarded simpletons. Like seriously. Tell me which is more likely? That the board is mentally retarded or that there's some reasoning here that we don't know about? HN is a mob. And I like the mobs take:…

You're inferring a lot from my comment, a lot that isn't there and wouldn't be there. You're also straw-manning rationalize your position: that you've been right for 2+ days that Sam Altman is an evil "clout chasing" tech bro who was going to oust the board but thankfully the ethical good people got to him first, because the only alternative everyone else is proposing is that the board is... "ALL mentally retarded",…

>You're inferring a lot from my comment, a lot that isn't there and wouldn't be there. You're also straw-manning rationalize your position: that you've been right for 2+ days that Sam Altman is an evil "clout chasing" tech bro who was going to oust the board but thankfully the ethical good people got to him first

First you say I'm inferring then you infer what my position is.

I told you my position. I'm speculative on anything except for the board being mentally retarded. You agree with me but you proceed to say this:

>My take comes from a background of not thinking boards are all that special compared to company leaders, and they're at their best when they don't interfere with extraordinary CEOs/Founders. Further, my general belief is that inexperienced boards are common, detrimental, and don't really understand this. I'm also biased against nonprofit boards, mostly from personal experience though obviously with smaller orgs.

This up above is essentially YOU saying the board is mentally retarded but dressing it up in nicer clothes. Literally you don't even mention a reason here. You just say, inexperience and detrimental which is "stupid" but dressed up.

>My current take on this situation is not so much that the board was mentally retarded, but that the org structure allowed people with strong competing interests and very little "skin in the game" in the org to serve on the board, creating stronger incentives for an activist board than incentives for long-term success, which (as I alluded to) leads to poor outcomes.

An "activist" board? That's just another synonym for being a dumbass. When someone gets fired it's usually because of incompetence, hatred, dislike, public pressure or power.

>Strong incentives here to slow down OpenAI in favor of their own external, competing missions.

This is valid IF you have the evidence of the incentive. State the competing interests and Emmet Shears motive for slowing down OpenAI by 90%.

Re: Irving on Helen, Ilya, and Sam

#33

I can't read this because I'm not log in to X. How can I access this?

He says that everyone is nice but Sam Altman, who, though always nice to the author, was mean to friends of the author in ways that are not described.

You missed perhaps the most important part, where Irving says that Altman lied to him on various occasions.

Re: Irving on Helen, Ilya, and Sam

#34

[flagged]

I do think a lot of OpenAI comments on Hacker News are from people who have a financial interest in it

e.g. startup founders building on OpenAI and so forth

Usually Hacker News isn't so one-sided

Also the PR around this is absolutely incredible

---

Just saw this

The Long Shadow of Steve Jobs Looms Over the Turmoil at OpenAI

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/sam-altman-ste...

Steve Jobs, driven by his genius and his gut, invented the iPhone and built Apple into the world’s most valuable company ...

Sam Altman spent the last year taking on the mantle of Mr. Jobs as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur in charge of tomorrow. It is the biggest job in Silicon Valley, and now the most difficult.

Huhhhh???

What a ridiculously partisan PR piece. Borders on disinformation

The NYTimes is often fairly critical of tech, and even AI -- I can't believe they would publish this without a favor being called in.

Re: Irving on Helen, Ilya, and Sam

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So at the end of the day at the highest levels it's still just about they were nice/mean to me.

That's really good data. Better than all the data from people who never met him or don't even know what's going on. I still can't answer the question why was he fired, but we have 400 pages of speculation on HN. This twitter post is literally better information then anything I've seen for the past weekend.

Here’s another datapoint https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1727108699804823656?s=20
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