Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
31–40 of 625 posts
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#32>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 mission would be fulfilled. Now we know where that came from
Interesting. This is the person who "holds comparable influence to a USAF Colonel." according to "a prominent researcher in AI safety" who "discovered prompt injection". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330566 Well, I suppose this tells us something about the AI safety community and whether it makes sense to integrate safety into one's workflow. It seems that the best AI safetyists will scuttle your company fro…
"AI safety" should be disentangled into "AI notkilleveroneism" and "AI ethics", which are substantially non-overlapping categories. I've looked at who works at Preamble, and there aren't any names there that I recognize from the side of things that's concerned with x-risk. Take their takes with a grain of salt.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#33>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 mission would be fulfilled. Now we know where that came from
Amazing how these higher minded people always forget about the little people on the ground. All these employees losing their livelihoods for the greater good. Not surprised an ethicist thinks like this.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#34keep in mind that the lead reporter on this, cade metz, is the one who wrote the character assassination piece on scott alexander repeatedly insinuating he was a neo-nazi (and de-anonymizing him, costing him his job due to some kind of weird psychiatrist ethical code) so while probably nothing in here is literally false , it's quite likely calculated to give false impressions; read with caution (well, it's literally…
wasn't that piece never published?
No, it's right here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
(See also Scott's response: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times...)
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#35Ms. Toner’s motive is now clearer for being criticized about her research. Mr. D’Angelo had a competing commercialization product with Poe. Mr. Sutskever seems easy to manipulate emotionally and is in constant ideological battles. Mrs. McCauley AKA Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s wife, what’s her motive?
Apparently she is also an "Effective Altruist" (along with Toner) so they are ideologically aligned.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#36Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#37keep in mind that the lead reporter on this, cade metz, is the one who wrote the character assassination piece on scott alexander repeatedly insinuating he was a neo-nazi (and de-anonymizing him, costing him his job due to some kind of weird psychiatrist ethical code) so while probably nothing in here is literally false , it's quite likely calculated to give false impressions; read with caution (well, it's literally…
wasn't that piece never published?
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Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#38The only specific accusation made in the article is that Sam criticized Helen Toner for writing a paper: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI. Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he w…
It's interesting but it may well be they both have a point: Helen for telling him to get lost and Sam for attempting to remove her before she would damage the company. But she could have made that point more forcefully by not comparing Anthropic to OpenAI, after all who better than her to steer OpenAI in the right direction. I noted in a comment elsewhere that all of these board members appear to have had at least on…
I think the real issue is that OpenAI was doomed to fail from the beginning. AI is commercially too valuable to be developed by an organization with a mission like them. Eventually they had to make a choice: either become a for-profit without any pretensions about the good of humanity, or stay true to the mission and abandon ambitions of being at the cutting edge of AI development.
A non-profit could not have beaten the superpowers in developing the atomic bomb, and a non-profit cannot beat commercial interests in developing AI.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're talking about the publication of a relatively milquetoast report that has some lines which can be read as mild criticisms of OpenAI's release strategy for ChatGPT & GPT-4. Why exactly is publishing such a report controversial? It's totally compatible with Helen Toner's role on the board.
I wasn't aiming that at the report per-se but at the actions on Friday. He wanted to keep that kind of report inside or at a minimum to see it beforehand, she didn't, he tried to remove her and ended up being removed himself. Both are out of line. Sorry for the confusion.
I think trying to remove Toner for being a public author of that report is actually pretty out of line. (Note: the NYT article doesn't actually seem to provide evidence that Sam tried to get her removed from the board, though it sure does try to imply it real hard by reference to other things, like the email he sent criticizing her.)
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#40The only specific accusation made in the article is that Sam criticized Helen Toner for writing a paper: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI. Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he w…
According to the paper, Anthropic's superior safety approach was deliberately delaying release in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress." OpenAI is criticized for kicking off a race for AI progress by releasing ChatGPT to the public. [1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding...
The paper reads a lot more nuanced than that. It compares the "system card" released with GPT-4 to the delay of Claude and the merits of each approach vis a vis safety.