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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

#371

Post by licebmi__at__ »

bayareabadboy wrote: post #168
jameshart wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You… have heard of Ukraine haven’t you?

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.

Putin is also a product of the forced liberalization of Rusia. I guess somebody would also argue that since Pinochet was also a general within Allende’s government, he’s also a product of communism.

Anyway, no war in Europe, but it’s kinda curious that the countries that go around with free market capitalism in modern history, are the ones who have invaded the most countries. By just this fact alone, I would consider the modern era of prosperity in the so called “Western countries” through cheap energy as more responsible of peace between them than free market. We will see what happens with more constrained resources. As a world inhabitant, I hope you are right.

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

#372

Post by Aunche »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #303
Aunche wrote: post #75

I think there is a very good chance this is true, but it also paints the picture of the board being incompetent and incapable of confrontation. They could have filed formal complaints, mandated increased scrutiny, handed off Sam's responsibilities to other people, or threatened legal action. Instead, they attempted a secret coup, which of course makes Sam look like the underdog

> They could have filed formal complaints, mandated increased scrutiny, handed off Sam's responsibilities to other people, or threatened legal action. I think you fundamentally misunderstand the role of the board of directors. It's often been said that the board (of any company) has basically one job: to hire (and fire) the CEO. While that may be a slight exaggeration, the wisdom behind that quote is that things turn…

> the board (of any company) has basically one job: to hire (and fire) the CEO

Yes. In a formal board meeting, not in an secretive one behind Altman and Brockman's back. That's what makes it seem more like a coup.

> They're the board, who else would they file formal complaints to?

Like I said in other comments. It's always useful to have a paper trail.

> "Hand off Sam's responsibilities to other people"?? Again, any corporate governance expert would say that's a recipe for disaster, never mind not even feasible the way corporate hierarchies work.

If Altman is neglecting and being opaque about AI safety, as Toner claims, then the board should appoint someone to lead this effort and be fully transparent with them. I don't see how this is so far fetched.

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

#373

Post by dcow »

djbusby wrote: post #296
cjbgkagh wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep thinking HN has become Reddit, but as Reddit keeps declining it’s possible that both are declining proportionally at the same rate for the same reasons.

September all over again.

I’m not sure NH is being flooded by anybody though. Sometimes the mood is just… right to let down your guard a little and digress into message board thread comics. And if it’s not, the newcomer learns quick.

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

#374

Post by latentsea »

freehorse wrote: post #33
latentsea wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a resilient, hyperscale distributed system. Just like humanity.

Nobody has seen any AGI so far. As far as I am concerned, right now it is just a scarecrow used by sociopaths like Altman et al to promote their self-interests.

No one had ever seen nuclear weapons when they had only been theorized.

I'm just assuming that since networked computers are everywhere, models seem to be proliferating and natural general intelligence seems to function as a resilient, distributed system, it's not unthinkable to me that things eventually trend in that direction.

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

#375

Post by int_19h »

WalterBright wrote: post #346
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…

> amoral wealth-hoarders They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested , i.e. put to work creating things that people want. > moralists ... capitalists History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must h…

A lot of the time it does feel like the only rights that actually matter in a capitalist society are property rights of capital owners. The rest is more like "eh I suppose we could also do that if we're not too busy".

You're correct that for a large and prosperous society you need some large organizations, but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs.

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

#376

Post by kazinator »

rurban wrote: post #366

So it's only some time when he will be fired by the board again. Fun times. I see the 2nd AI winter already. The first saw the end of lisp, my favorite language. And I just joined an AI company, because it's a good product.

This wave of AI will not freeze over that easily.

1. Some of it is open source.

2. It's in the hands of ordinary people who are now depending on it to cheat on homework, or work. People have new hobbies based around AI, like image generation and editing.

3. Porn.

4. Turning down countless insurance claims by poor, disabled people, without lifting a finger, man! ... and other business applications.

At this point you'd have to pry it out of some people's hands to instigate a winter which makes no sense.

The old AI winter was due to not not being able to get the stuff into people's hands, because they wanted it on a PC, not a $25,000 workstation.

Hardware is not a problem any more: SaaS. Users vendor locked to something they can't even install locally is now a feature.

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

#377

Post by margalabargala »

ryukoposting wrote: post #295
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…

> Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?

"Cool technology" here means things like dishwashers, or MRI machines, which pretty much strictly improve people's lives, not slightly better advertisement algorithms.

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

#378

Post by int_19h »

jdross wrote: post #352
juped wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The null CEO has a lot of value. If you could guarantee someone would be the null CEO, they'd be an instant hire for many enterprises. What you have to avoid is someone worse than the null CEO holding the position. I think Altman is worse than the null CEO; others may draw their own conclusions, but the bar for CEO quality isn't "much better than the null CEO".

Would it be fair to say you’ve never been a CEO of 20+ person organization and don’t have much of an idea of what that job entails, as a “craft” in its own right? You’re talking about someone who led an organization from 0 to tens of billions in valuation, billions in revenue, recruited many unknown but now famous talent as well as famous talent which almost all mutinied when the board fired him, and bet on a technol…

You kinda ignore the fact that said board also had some famous talent. So famous, in fact, that he is considered one of the key figures that actually made that whole ChatGPT thing possible in the first place.

That aside, Altman literally hijacked the organization that was created by other people to fulfill certain goals, and now we find out that he did so by outright lies.

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

#379

Post by [deleted] »

jdminhbg wrote: post #328
light_triad wrote: post #191

The whole saga is an interesting case study for theoretical versus real power. On paper the board has the power and it’s their job to monitor and hire/fire the execs. But they’re dependent on the execs for info. Also having one investor own half, plus the founders guiding the roadmap and having sway over key hires leaving is where the real power is…

> On paper the board has the power and it’s their job to monitor and hire/fire the execs. But they’re dependent on the execs for info. It's way worse for the OpenAI board position in this case, because the company is basically just an assemblage of researchers, engineers, and Microsoft Azure credits. They can replace the CEO if they want, but all the value of the company can walk away if they don't like it.

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by thelastgallon »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #277
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 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 more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system.

One of them doesn't belong on the list. Fossil fuel and legacy automobile companies killed EVs[1][2], bought all the battery patents and made sure there were no EVs made. Until Tesla made them possible, by building gigafactories so battery is not a constraint and supercharger network.

Why is the list restricted to only a few tech billionaires? Where are the fossil fuel billionaires who actively do harm? 10 million people die every year from air pollution, and fossil fuels are only possible because of $7 trillion subsidies/year.

Why isn't Gates on the list?[3] Koch brothers? Hundreds of middle-eastern fossil fuel princes? Warren Buffett who owns Coke (39 grams of sugar/can) fast food chains, cookies, candy, ice cream companies, fossil fuel companies, utilities that actively lobby against solar/wind.

Dan and Farris Wilks, Oil billionaires who are making policy changes on many issues? [4][5][6]

Where are the financial billionaires, real estate, healthcare, insurance, fast fashion, chemicals?

[1] A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...

[3] That's why Gates personally intervened to scuttle the Oxford team's plan to make its publicly funded vaccine research free to all, coercing them into doing an exclusive license deal with Astrazeneca: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/

[4] https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fr...

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-poli...

[6] https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billion...

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