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Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

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Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#331

Post by benreesman »

viking123 wrote: post #316
benreesman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s utterly mundane, completely common knowledge for those who have been around long enough to have watched both the start and end on Loopt that Altman is a dark-triad sociopath with one marketable skill: (in pg’s words) “becoming powerful”. Guy can’t code, can’t design, can’t publish, can’t climb a traditional corporate ladder with even modest guardrails against fraud, can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Can…

I always get the Sam Bankman-Fried vibes from him

SBF is dramatically less scary than Altman. Which is why he’s doing 30+ for being likewise a crook but dramatically less dangerous to Enlightenment civilization in the large.

SBF was trying to pocket the difference on a regionally lax regulatory climate. Felon? Sure thing. By all means, hand down a sentence. It’s fraud.

Altman has blown straight past the “personal financial gain” fraud line multiple times and has amassed enough fear of retribution to now be at the “manipulate both potential executive orders and plausible legislation to arrogate de facto regulator status to myself” stage of the conquest of Arrakis.

Both bad. One far scarier.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#332

Post by phs318u »

Hizonner wrote: post #91
phs318u wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're attacking a straw man. Where governments do well is establishing a regulatory framework. They don't deliver the clean water. They (should) ensure that the water that's delivered meets a standard.

In every single city I've ever lived in or paid attention to, the water system has been directly operated by employees of the municipal government, not private companies and not even contractors. And the regional projects they buy from tend to be pure government, too. Oh, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization#Prevalence But, hey, never let facts interfere with your deeply held religious beliefs, eh?

Not where I live friend. Water, electricity and gas are all privatised.

EDITED: to make the point - please don't assume everyone here lives in the US.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#333

Post by thaumaturgy »

benreesman wrote: post #318
thaumaturgy wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general reaction was "...who?" 2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without the…

I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a…

[flagged]

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#334

Post by unclebucknasty »

tibbar wrote: post #128
bmitc wrote: post #86

What is still bizarre is how the board brought him back. I just don't understand that from any angle. It is very clear that he lied and schemed. So why was there any issue? He had no power once fired. If another company wants to hire him, fine. If he wants to make platitudes on Twitter, who cares? Employees threatened to leave? Let them. I imagine many of them wouldn't, and if they did, you could just rehire and find…

You had the answer there before you dismissed it -- the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft (which has OpenAI's IP rights) offering to hire them all immediately. This included the company's key leadership. The organization was unraveling overnight. This was far past the tipping point of "a few…

>the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft...

But, what kind of Wild West is this? It's all so unhinged and strange.

There are no NDAs, non-competes or other impediments? MS just guts OpenAI at its whim?

>there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.

...If MS can do this, then there's already no OpenAI left to preside over.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#335

Post by Teever »

Teever wrote: post #77
snowwrestler wrote: post #52

Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.

Did that stuff with his sister ever get resolved?

How come my comment is autofolded?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#336

Post by phs318u »

AlbertCory wrote: post #125
phs318u wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're attacking a straw man. Where governments do well is establishing a regulatory framework. They don't deliver the clean water. They (should) ensure that the water that's delivered meets a standard.

No, you're attacking something without even reading it. The "bipartisan coalition" in the Senate is determined to spend $32 billion (just a downpayment, for sure) is not planning to do what you want. They want to hand out money to a lot of universities, NGO's, and bureaucrats. In your terms, they want to deliver the clean water. A "regulatory framework" would be something like the Dodd-Frank bill, or Sarbanes-Oxley.…

Yes, something like SOX (although one can argue that SOX, which was born of Enron, didn't stop the GFC or Maddoff).

I think there's also a place for government to perhaps 'accelerate' the market to encourage certain behaviours by either creating financial incentives/disincentives. This can be in the form of grants etc. In that case, giving money to researchers in the domain would make sense - on the basis that they are more likely to understand what's technically required than a government public servant.

And to your point regarding beauracrats: someone has to manage and oversee regulatory frameworks. Voluntary frameworks with no oversight at all are a figleaf. We can argue about the number/cost but we shouldn't be arguing about the need, assuming we agree on the need for regulatory frameworks in the first place.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#337

Post by throw-the-towel »

komali2 wrote: post #255
bayareabadboy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putin, a former officer in the KGB, is a product of the planned Soviet economy. Read red state by bill browder, the Russian economy was never a free market even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I always think I've found the limit of people's ability to blame communism for every problem on earth, and I'm always surprised. Was the current genocide in Palestine the fault of Communism also? Was 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, communism?

> Was the current genocide in Palestine the fault of Communism also?

Stalin had a crucial role in creating Israel, so, yes?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#338

Post by jfoster »

mikeryan wrote: post #299
jfoster wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the board had shared something equivalent to this article at the time, perhaps there wouldn't have been such an intense internal pressure campaign. Instead, they did not even attempt to communicate any rationale behind their actions.

It’s not good form to bad mouth someone you’ve fired. They did, in fact, release a statement which aligns (in PR speak) with what Toner is claiming now. Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his abil…

> It’s not good form to bad mouth someone you’ve fired.

Instead, it's good form to wait 6 months and then do a Business Insider interview on the topic?

Also, "bad mouthing" suggests putting a spin on it. Based on the article, they should have been able to list out several objective facts that supported their decision. Instead, they opened it all up to intense speculation by providing a vague justification and by remaining tight lipped even once it became clear that a lot of clarification was needed.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#339

Post by benreesman »

avarun wrote: post #319
benreesman wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt... There are other sources.

Unsourced legacy media does not qualify as proof.

This isn’t a court and neither of us is a jury. This is an Internet forum where ideally we base our speculations at best on the testimony of credible-ish primary sources rather than any personal agenda even more random.

Altman will see his day in court if I have to win a Senate seat to see it happen.

That determination will be binding.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#340

Post by neilv »

unholiness wrote: post #325
neilv wrote: post #276

> Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting Critiquing an oops in the headline, on principle, not defending anyone... In the headline, they say "reveals", but I think journalism convention is to be clear that this is only an uncorroborated claim. The body of the article, OTOH, does a good job of attributing claims. Though it looks like the one person was their only source, and the article…

I read "what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting" as "What the board was thinking". It's been pretty ambiguous where the motivations of the board's sudden actions were coming from, and this Helen Toner saying more than she's said before. It's not a trial of Sam, it's an autopsy of the board.

Good point, but interpreted that way, isn't it still a whole lot of claims by a board member, of what they and other board members were thinking, claims about their perceptions of alleged facts, and claims about their reasons for doing what they did? (People don't always tell the truth about such things.)

Although an individual reader's gut and other information might conceivably lead one to take all those claims at face value, I don't think it meets a journalism standard of evidence for "reveals" in a headline.

IIUC, headlines and soundbites have a lot of influence on our understanding of the world.

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