341–350 of 625 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a non-profit, not a for profit company. Nominally, she's on the board precisely to criticize.
[flagged]
Criticism (especially valid criticism) is not sabotage, and in any case the board's responsibility is to advance the charter, not to support the (non-profit) company regardless of what it's doing.
Things do not go well if everyone keeps poking each other with sticks and cannot let their own frame of reference go for the sake of the bigger picture.
Ultimately, I don’t think Altman doesn’t believe ethics and safety is important. And I don’t think Toner fails to realize that OpenAI is only in a place to dictate what AI will be due to its commercial principles. And they probably both agree that there is a conflict there. But what tactful leadership would have done is found a solution behind closed doors. Yet from their communication, it doesn’t even look like they defined the problem statement — everyone offers a different idea of the problem that they had to face together. It looks more like it was more like immature people shouting past each other for a year (not saying it was that, but it looks that way).
Moral of the story: tact, grace, and diplomacy are important. So is speaking one’s truth, but there is a tactful time, place, and manner. And also, no matter how brilliant someone is, if they can’t develop these traits, they end up rocking the boat a lot.
None of the comments thus far seem to clearly explain why this matters. Let me summarize the implications: Sam Altman expelling Toner with the pretext of an inoffensive page ( https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding... ) in a paper no one read* would have given him a temporary majority with which to appoint a replacement director, and then further replacement directors. These directors would, nat…
This is insane. "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board". First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense. Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of s…
it’s completely irrelevant language because nobody is anywhere close to actual AGI
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's her job to decide what's good for humanity from my reading of the charter
It's not her job to overrule the people running the actual organization, 95% of the employees, and all of OpenAI's stakeholders without a good fucking reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a nonprofit board & it's absolutely the role of advisory board members to continue their work in the sector they're specialized in without bias.
OpenAI does not have an advisory board. She is on the board of directors and has fiduciary responsibilities. It does not matter that the parent organization is a non-profit. The duty remains.
The 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…
This is not any other company though? It's a non-profit with charter to make AI to benefit all of humanity Helen believed she was doing her job according to the non-profit charter, obviously this hurts the for-profit side of things but that is not her mandate. That is the reason OpenAI is structured the way it is, with the intention of preventing capitalist forces from swaying them away from the non-profit charter, i…
Exactly. This is a battle between altruistic principles and some of the most heavyweight greedy money in the world. The board messed up the execution, but so did OpenAI leadership when they offered million dollar pay packages to people in a non-profit that is supposed to be guided by selfless principles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm seeing a somewhat larger stage where the United States and other countries are in an undeclared arms race and it just so happens that from what we know private entities (or an entity) in the United States believes that they are close enough to achieving that goal that they are actively working on things like alignment rather than just futzing around with GPUs and other multiplication hardware. AGI is either just…
Practically all of the most relevant experts in this domain, leadership in OpenAI, think it's right around the corner. > Assuming it can be done weaponization of this tech would change the balance of power in the world dramatically. Yes it would, but it wouldn't be as bad as everyone dying. > Everybody seems to be worried about the wrong thing: whether or not the AGI will be friendly to us. That doesn't really matter…
Oh, ok. That makes it alright then. So, let's see those minutes of that meeting where this was decided with all of the pomp and gravitas required rather than that it was a petty act of revenge or to see who could oust who first from OpenAI. Because that's what it looks like to me based on what is now visible.
> Yes it would, but it wouldn't be as bad as everyone dying.
Not much is as bad as everyone dying. But for now that hasn't happened. It also seems a bit like a larger version of the 'think of the children' argument, you can justify any action with that reason.
> No, "who controls it" is a problem best tackled after "will it kill everyone." You say "That doesn't really matter," but again, Sam Altman himself thinks "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
Then why the fuck is he trying to bring it into the world? Seriously, they should spend all of their talent on trying to sabotage those efforts then, infiltrate research groups and set up a massive campaign to divert resources away from the development of AGI. Instead they are trying as hard as they can to create the genie in the sure conviction that they can keep it bottled up.
It's delusional on so many fronts at once that it is isn't even funny, their position is so horribly inconsistent that you have to wonder if they're all right in the head.
EA is becoming a massive red flag in my book.
They seem to miss the fact that every weapon that humanity has so far produced has been used, and that those that haven't been used hang over us like shadows, and have been doing that for the last 70 some years. Those are weapons whose use you will notice. AGI is a weapon whose use you will not notice until you realize you are living in a stable dictatorship. The chances of that happening are far larger than the chances of everybody dying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In them he says "HBD is probably partially correct" -- do you think that's not a NRx view (I agree others also hold it, but I would argue that it's a core view of NRx -- it doesn't need to be exclusive to them, e.g. Islam considers Jesus a prophet too), or that he publicly held that position previously?
You can agree that people are different, and, simultaneously, don't agree that, say, the less useful ones should be stripped of some of their rights.
None of the comments thus far seem to clearly explain why this matters. Let me summarize the implications: Sam Altman expelling Toner with the pretext of an inoffensive page ( https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding... ) in a paper no one read* would have given him a temporary majority with which to appoint a replacement director, and then further replacement directors. These directors would, nat…
That's a clear motive. Sam and the independent directors were each angling to get rid of the other. The independent directors got to a majority before Sam did. This at least explains why they fired Sam in such a haphazard way. They had to strike immediately before one of the board members got cold feet.