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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

#461

Post by blitzar »

rst wrote: post #104
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

"Filed a formal complaint" with whom? The board itself is the final authority, empowered to investigate and act. If its members have concerns, they either do something or don't. There's nowhere else to pass the buck.

Documenting their actions is a duty of board members

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

#462

Post by bryanrasmussen »

WalterBright wrote: post #413
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every society is based on a set of morals, the rights societies are ones that have rights in that set, it seems somewhat to be skipping a wide inductive gap to blithely say that free markets need be a part of rights based societies (assuming that by "free market" something like the modern American conception of that term is meant)

Morals and rights are different things, though they are often conflated. The Constitution, for example, enumerates a series of rights, not morals. Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property). A morality based system could be, for example, you do not have the right to the fruits of your labor, you automatically owe those fruits to others. I'm sad that our K-12 sch…

>Morals and rights are different things,

I guess you didn't understand the point, I did not say that rights and morals were the same things, I said that a rights society would still have the moral opinion that its rights were morally good to have, and that respecting those rights was the moral thing to do.

You can, I'm sure, recall many discussions on HN where people who come from a society with the right to free speech discussing this as a moral good and castigating other societies that are rights based, but without that particular right, as being bad for not having it.

>Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).

I seldom hear that particular basis given for free markets however, the basis seems tenuous.

>I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.

there may be differences of opinion as to what a free market is/requires, and as to whether the free market was really fundamental to the founding of your country. It might be that your country could not really sustain too close a focus on those questions in its K-12 system of education though, best to leave it for later.

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

#463

Post by lll-o-lll »

benreesman wrote: post #331
viking123 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ama…

Dammit, why are monsters lurking under all my cool tech rocks?

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

#464

Post by chipdart »

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…

> And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work.

Being fed the tour guide's summary and high-level overview of an event is not the same thing as knowing how they work.

Elon Musk's virtues start and stop at the way projects were funded. He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. It's well established that his takes are merely performative and with a substance of a pre-pubrescent edgy rant.

If there was any value in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the hot mess that his tenure has been, is to put the spotlight on how incidental the success of companies like SpaceX is regarding Elon Musk's influence. You're talking about the guy behind stunts like the "pedo guy" incident and yanking live servers out of their sockets as a cost-cutting measure.

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

#465

Post by immibis »

WalterBright wrote: post #416
nickpp wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose morals though? In my life time I've seen being gay or smoking weed (for example) turn from immoral to widely accepted. Kind of hard to consider these shifting sentiments as a solid foundation for anything.

Morals do indeed change with the times. Our rights, however, are immutable (inalienable).

So you still have the right to an abortion in Texas?

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

#466

Post by narrator »

bmitc wrote: post #353
WalterBright wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's all very generous. Who actually needs greater than 90% of the startups coming out of Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas? Their products just get hyped up and shoved down peoples' throat. And you're wrong. These people do have cash vaults, but they're other peoples' cash vaults. How else do you think they buy things? And they're living in their multi-million dollar mansions and yachts out of benevolence?…

If you can figure out which 90% we need when they are in seed stage you can become a billionaire venture capitalist. It's like someone spent their whole life searching a thousand volume library of where's Waldo books for a picture of Waldo and found him and told you where to find him and then you said, the guy is an idiot, I found Waldo right here and so could just about anyone!

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

#467

Post by pas »

Fanmade wrote: post #460
thefounder wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invention is one thing, a product to sell is almost an entirely different thing. The more I see the more I realise that being technical is almost all the time the least important part. You need to get people around you to succeed. In practice that means investors so that you can hire and people with the right connections so you can get sweet deals. You need people skills not inventions. And a bit more fake it until y…

I think that this is true, and I hate it. In a previous job, I had to work with the worst (shop)-framework I have ever seen. It is very expensive, over-engineered in the worst ways, very slow and awful to use. The blatant misunderstanding of software architecture principles in that software is hard to put into words. For example: It took an experienced developer two weeks and more than 2000 LoC in more than 40 files…

that's not a manager, that's an internal client from hell.

and yes, the world is full of these dysfunctional groups flush with money. (you might euphemistically call it this or that VC/startup scene)

on one hand it's great that there's plenty of room for technical improvement, on the other it needs the right socioeconomic circumstances. sometimes FOSS helps with this. (developers who spend their career working on products based on FOSS stuff at least have some chance of knowing that their efforts can might be valuable for a wider audience.)

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

#468

Post by benreesman »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #463
benreesman wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ama…

Dammit, why are monsters lurking under all my cool tech rocks?

It comes and goes. This is the twilight of this era of mediocre technologists known by sight by the bouncers at the Battery.

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

#469

Post by wuschel »

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…

> mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy

Could you please elaborate what you mean by that?

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

#470

Post by bergen »

WalterBright wrote: post #448
bergen wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Marriage without children is an issue of morality, not rights. It was historically an issue of rights And children rights are a fairly new thing. And no, you are wrong - your right not be attacked is based on morality, you say "attacking someone is wrong" - there is no law in nature preventing this. But you made no point for your argument - just stepping through mine with comments.

> your right not be attacked is based on morality The very first thing a group does when organized is to protect themselves from attack. They do this because it works. We've evolved that way, which makes it a law of nature for humans. Communist rights, however, are not laws of nature because they do not work with humans. Humans are not beehives. But the most compelling argument for "natural rights" is observing how w…

Of course you defend yourself and your kind from harm. But that is completely separate from the fact if it is allowed. There is no law in nature preventing this. Sometimes internal conflict is solved by violence and accepted.

Your first paragraph describes a group sharing a common will and organisation based on natural instinct (like a hive of bees), your second paragraph disputes this organisation as a group for humans, decide for one it can’t be both ways.

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