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Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

nytimes.com

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Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#371

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

jxi wrote: post #334
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would prefer that $billions be managed by the same snakes in suits who destroy the environment, market products that give people lung cancer, etc.?

Is that worse than people who defraud and steal from users and hold entire companies hostage for their own motives? In EA, the ends always justify the means, so that includes doing any or all of the things you mention if it achieves some ideological goal.

SBF was roundly criticized in EA. The most upvoted post of all time on the EA forum is a post denouncing him: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts?timeframe=allTi...

The only person I've seen advocate "ends justify the means" in this discussion is someone criticizing Toner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38373319

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#372

Post by jph00 »

Aunche wrote: post #296
jph00 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought a non-profit board that puts the growth and success of their organization above the mission in their charter, even if they view the organization as going against their mission, sounds like the worst kind of board. How could that possibly be a good idea? Isn't the whole reason we have non-profit boards and charters is so that they can make just this kind of call? (I'm not saying that this is what…

>Isn't the whole reason we have non-profit boards and charters is so that they can make just this kind of call? Yes. From the board. That's why we typically don't see boards air their dirty laundry out in the open even when in retrospect, they obviously had a problem with leadership.

The board seems to be getting an awful lot of crap for not saying enough, and also getting crap because their initial letter was too direct rather than being the usual corporate mealy-mouth BS.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#374

Post by baking »

next_xibalba wrote: post #194
traject_ wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that billions of capital is simply Azure compute credits though.

Those credits equate to billions of $ in real compute expense for MSFT.

I would hope that a billion in credits would not represent a billion in expenses for Microsoft.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#375

Post by db-interface »

reducesuffering wrote: post #303
db-interface wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said he was "sympathetic to NRx views" and linked emails from him stating certain views widely held by Moldbug et. al. that he is sympathetic to. Do you disagree that "HBD" is an NRx view, or that the leaked emails express sympathy for it?

NRx views SSC as a useful blog to read in 2013-2017. Oh looks like you did too. Can't believe you're "sympathetic to NRx views."

This is obtuse. I didn't make any argument about SA reading the same stuff NRx read, or even reading NRx stuff. I linked SA's own writing that "Many of their insights seem important" and that their views have "nuggets of absolute gold".

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#376

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #329
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a ton of criticism of Helen here in this thread and elsewhere, but I haven't seen anyone clearly articulate what Helen should have done. Everyone says she did the wrong thing, but no one has said what the right thing actually was. Here's my guess: I think OpenAI should have prioritized character more in its hiring. Ending up with an organization full of employees who cared more about making money than up…

> I think OpenAI should have prioritized character more in its hiring. I think OpenAI should have prioritized sanity more in its board member selection.

Toner is unpopular on Twitter because a lot of people in Silicon Valley have a financial stake in OpenAI. For example, employees with equity have a strong financial incentive to discredit the board: https://nitter.net/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410#m

Just because you're unpopular doesn't mean you're insane.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#377

Post by sackfield »

verall wrote: post #369
sackfield wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This charter doesn't have a sole interpretation, and shame on Helen for strong arming her view and ruining the lives of so many people. If there is something completely clear, its that OpenAI cannot uphold its charter without labour. She has ruined that, and thus failed in upholding the charter. There were many different paths to take, she took the worst one.

Who's life has been ruined? Did I miss something?

Ask the labour class at OpenAI. They are not in the privileged position the capital class on the board find themselves in.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#378

Post by skygazer »

gizmo wrote: post #350
gwern wrote: post #203

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…

Okay, let's stipulate that Sam was maneuvering to get full board control. Then the independent directors were probably worried that -- sooner or later -- Sam would succeed. With Sam fully in charge the non-profit goals would be completely secondary to the commercial goals. This was unacceptable to the independent directors and Ilya and so they ousted Sam before he could oust them? That's a clear motive. Sam and the i…

Besides explaining the haphazardness, that would also nicely explain why they didn't want to elaborate publicly on why they "had" to let him go -- "it was either him or us" wouldn't have been popular given his seeming popularity.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#379

Post by breadwinner »

jjulius wrote: post #298
breadwinner wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't think Elon Musk was one of the founders either then?

It's not a matter of what I think, it's a matter of fact. I quoted Wikipedia, and the paragraph that discussed this in your link looks essentially the same as my quote. Let's take a peek at the one from your link - the first sentence is... >The group’s other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, a…

Since you quoted Wikipedia, why don't you take a look at Elon Musks's Wikipedia page, it says he is a founder. It is well known that he is a founder. And Altman's Wikipedia page says he is a funder of the company. The problem may be your interpretation of their announcement. As in, if you are a co-chair at founding then it is understood that you're a founder.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#380

Post by jacquesm »

sudosysgen wrote: post #324
1024core wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm much more interested in how Helen managed to get on this board at all. My gut says that she is the central figure in how this all went down. She and D'Angelo are the central figures, if my gut is right. It looks like Helen Toner was OK with destroying the company to make a point. FTA: > Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of h…

That seems reasonable? The charter of the company could reasonably be furthered even if that means the end of the organization. If at some point the existence of the organization becomes antithetical to the charter, the board members have a responsibility to destroy it.

But they didn't destroy it. And they handed the keys of the kingdom to Microsoft.

So as a break-the-glass move it was about as ineffective as throwing a can of gasoline on a fire.

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