471–480 of 625 posts
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if thats the case why didnt they just stuff the board when they had the chance?
I think it’s also mentioned the article that they have failed to add new members to the board due to the disagreement between the board members.
So Altman faced another similar challenge to his authority and prevailed. I recall hearing that Anthropic started because the people who had left were unhappy with OpenAIs track record on AI safety.
> In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company,
> Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe
> Senior OpenAI leaders [...] later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed
That paints a pretty bleak picture that isn't favorable to Altman. Two times he was challenged about OpenAIs safety and both times he worked to purge those who opposed him.
I can't tell if this is a contention between accelerationism and deccelerationism or if it is a contention between safety and recklessness. Is Altman ignoring the warnings his employees/peers are giving him and retaliating against them? Or is he facing insubordination?
I wish OpenAI would split neatly into two. But based on the heightened emotions caused by the insane amount of PR I only see two outcomes. Altman returns and OpenAI stays unified vs. Altman stays at MS and OpenAI is obliterated. I am guessing Altman is hoping that senior management will choose a unified OpenAI at all costs, including ignoring the red flags above. He has engineered a situation where the only way OpenAI remains unified is if he returns.
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> This person is too far gone. Life isn't a movie. This comment is a credibility killer. "This person", as a member of the board of a non-profit, has a duty to keep the non-profit on mission, and even to call for its dissolution if that isn't possible.
How far should she go to fulfill her interpretation of that duty? Should she even commit crimes in order to keep the non-profit mission? There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation of the company's mission, and yet she stubbornly maintains that hers is correct and that it's her duty to destroy the company (or even sell it to Anthropic) to fulfill her duty. This is delusion, and she thinks she's some…
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I would hope that a billion in credits would not represent a billion in expenses for Microsoft.
They're giving up all the profits from whoever they would have been sold to otherwise. So it adds up the same.
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> This person is too far gone. Life isn't a movie. This comment is a credibility killer. "This person", as a member of the board of a non-profit, has a duty to keep the non-profit on mission, and even to call for its dissolution if that isn't possible.
How far should she go to fulfill her interpretation of that duty? Should she even commit crimes in order to keep the non-profit mission? There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation of the company's mission, and yet she stubbornly maintains that hers is correct and that it's her duty to destroy the company (or even sell it to Anthropic) to fulfill her duty. This is delusion, and she thinks she's some…
probably not, but continuing to publish research papers of the kind that got her the job in the first place seems reasonable maybe
but that's what altman was criticizing her for, not for committing crimes, which as far as anyone knows she hasn't done
> There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation
maybe, maybe not, but the standard way that nonprofits and other companies work is that the employees do what the management tells them, the management does what the board tells them, and the board does what the shareholders or the charter tells them, and in all cases, if they refuse, they get fired
if you're an employee at the american cancer society and you decide that malaria in africa is a more important cause, you probably shouldn't expect to be able to continue using the acs's assets to fight malaria in africa. it might happen, but you shouldn't be at all surprised if you get fired
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…
I mean it's not cool for board members to publicly criticize the company.
>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. Now we know where that came from
That doesn’t even follow when taken literally. If the company is destroyed presumably they can’t create artificial intelligence, so there is nothing there to benefit all humanity in the first place.
The relevant passage from the paper co-written by board member Helen Toner: "OpenAI has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of ChatGPT and GPT-4, including regarding copyright issues, labor conditions for data annotators, and the susceptibility of their products to "jailbreaks" that allow users to bypass safety controls... A different approach to signaling in the priva…
Note that the quote about Anthropic is about Anthropic's desire to be perceived as a company that values safety , not a direct claim that Anthropic actually is safe, or even that it desires to value safety.
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You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the role of non-executive board members. In many cases they're industry experts / academics and in many cases those academics continue to publish papers that look objectively at the actions of all companies in their sphere of influence, including the one they're on the board of. It's _expected_ for them to publish this type of material. It's literally their job. Cheerlead…
They've admitted that they think it would be better to destroy open AI than to continue on its path, but how can an organization uphold its goals if it doesn't exist? Imo you have to commit to working within an organization if you're on its board, you can't burn it down from within. I think it's less of an issue to try to remove the CEO if you don't agree with the direction they're taking, but this was obviously done…
I don't think it was done in a sloppy manner, I think there's a huge amount of spin and froth being generated to make it _look_ like it was done in a sloppy manner, but the reality is that the board took an executive action, released a discreet and concisely worded press release and then fell silent, which is 100% professional behaviour.
To me it's the other side that are acting sloppily, they're thrashing around like maniacs, they're obviously calling in favours behind the scenes as supportive articles are popping up all over the place, apparently employees were calling other employees in the middle of the night urging them to sign the 'I'll quit unless' letter, employees have been fed a misleading narrative (two of them, actually) about why the action was taken in the first place which riled them up...
I have to assume here that the board - as they're the ones acting professionally - similarly acted professionally before the firing and discussed the matter at great length and only resorted to this last minute firing because of exigent circumstances. The fact that a fired employee was able to cajole/bluff/whatever his way back into the office to prove some sort of point suggests that the board's action may have been necessary. What exactly was done during that time in the office, one might ask? Were systems accessed? Surely it was an unauthorised entry and a major security violation.
You do see that that action (re-entering the office after being fired) gives off lunatic vibes, don't you? Maybe it really did come down to 'yeah you're technically my boss but I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want and there's nothing you can do about it because everyone loves me' to which the board's only possible course of action is to fire immediately.
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It's pretty heavily implied by OpenAI's charter: https://openai.com/charter It's weird to me that Helen is getting so much crap for upholding the charter. No one objected to the charter at the time it was published. The charter was always available for employees, investors, and customers to read. Did everyone expect it to be ignored when push came to shove? There's a lot of pressure on Helen right now from people who…
Investors wanted to have a commercial enterprise while pretending it was a nonprofit acting for the good of humanity. This helps market something as scary and potentially destructive as AI. "It can't be that bad, they're a nonprofit with altruistic goals!" Then the investors get mad when the board they intended to be figureheads actually try to uphold some principles. Best to rip the band-aid off and stop pretending.
Similarly, Microsoft is coming across as blameless here, but there’s a reason Satya went on a full court press. They committed tremendous resources and money to an unpredictable business structure that is fundamentally not aligned with the profit motive - in its very charter.
The thing is doing exactly what the thing was supposed to do. The only reason it’s surprising to anyone is because people assume OpenAI is a for profit entity.