Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 754 posts

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#481

Post by DebtDeflation »

cthalupa wrote: post #375
speedylight wrote: post #352

The real issue is that OpenAI is both a for profit and a non profit organization. This structure creates a very significant conflict of interest where maintaining balance between both of them is very tricky business. The non-profit board shouldn’t have been in charge of the for-profit aspect of the company.

The for-profit would not exist if the non-profit was not able to maintain control. The only reason it does exist is because they were able to structure it in such a way that the for-profit is completely beholden to the non-profit. There is no requirement in the charter for the non-profit or the operating agreement of the for-profit to maintain a balance - it explicitly is the opposite of that. The operating agreement…

>The for-profit would not exist if the non-profit was not able to maintain control.

The non-profit will not exist at all if Microsoft walks away and all the other investors follow Sam and Greg. Neither GPUs nor researchers are free.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#482

Post by stavros »

jakey_bakey wrote: post #451
stavros wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what kind of hardware store sells depleted uranium, but I'm not sure that the reason we aren't seeing these sorts of terrorist attacks is that the terrorists don't have a capable manifesto-writer at hand. I don't know, if the worst thing AGI can do is give bad people accurate, competent information, maybe it's not all that dangerous, you know?

Depleted uranium is actually the less radiative byproduct after using a centrifuge to skim the U-235 isotope. It’s 50% denser than lead and used on tanks. Dirty bombs are more likely the ultra radioactive by products of fission. They might not kill much but the radionucleotide spread can render a city center uninhabitable for centuries!

See, and we didn't even need an LLM to tell us this!

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#483

Post by eganist »

jacquesm wrote: post #437
cthalupa wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless seeing something new on dev day is exactly what they meant by Altman not being consistently candid.

If Altman was doing something that ran directly against the mission of OpenAI in a way that all of the other stuff that OpenAI has been doing so far did not then I haven't seen it. OpenAI has been off-script for a long time now (compared to what they originally said) and outwardly it seemed the board was A-Ok with that. Now we either see a belated - and somewhat erratic - response to all that went before or there is…

> then I haven't seen it

Unless I'm missing something, this stands to reason if you don't work there.

Kinda like how none of us are privy to anything else going on inside the company. We're all speculating in the end, and it's healthy to have an open mind about what's going on without preconceived notions.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#484

Post by jdthedisciple »

peter422 wrote: post #59

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…

If the CEO was not important and basically doesn't impact anything, as you say, then why would the board feel the need to oust Altman for "pushing too fast" in the first place?

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#485

Post by cthalupa »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #481
cthalupa wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The for-profit would not exist if the non-profit was not able to maintain control. The only reason it does exist is because they were able to structure it in such a way that the for-profit is completely beholden to the non-profit. There is no requirement in the charter for the non-profit or the operating agreement of the for-profit to maintain a balance - it explicitly is the opposite of that. The operating agreement…

>The for-profit would not exist if the non-profit was not able to maintain control. The non-profit will not exist at all if Microsoft walks away and all the other investors follow Sam and Greg. Neither GPUs nor researchers are free.

The non-profit is legally obligated to follow their charter. If they truly believe that allowing Altman to remain CEO is a contraindication to that, then they have to fire him. They might not survive such a firing due to the fallout, but that doesn't matter - if one option is assured movement away from their charter and the other is potential destruction while still adhering to it, the latter is still the correct choice.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#486

Post by fsckboy »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #453
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. This wasn't a change of strategy, it was a restoration of it. OpenAI was structured with a 501c3 in oversight from the beginning exactly because they wanted to prioritize using AI for the…

Yet they need massive investment from Microsoft to accomplish that? > restoration Wouldn’t that mean that over the longterm they will just be outcompeted by the profit seeking entities. It’s not like OpenAI is self sustainable (or even can be if they chose the non-profit way)

>Yet they need massive investment from Microsoft to accomplish that?

massive spending is needed for any project as massive as "AI", so what are you even asking? A "feed the poor project" does not expect to make a profit, but, yes, it needs large cash infusions...

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#487

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #474
torstenvl wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is internally inconsistent. Defining a coup as "any takeover of power" is inconsistent with saying that firing Sam Altman is a coup. CEOs do not have and should not have any power vis-à-vis the board. It's right there in the name. Executives do not have any right to their position. They are an officer, i.e., an agent of the stakeholders. The idea that the executive is the holder of the power and it's a "cou…

You're ignoring the rest of the definition I provided. I did not say it was "any takeover of power". Please read the definition I gave in full. And I am not referring to the CEO status of Altman at all. That's not the coup part. What I'm referring to is the fact that beyond his firing as CEO, he and the chairman were removed from their board seats, as a surprise planned and executed in secret . That's the coup. This…

[deleted]

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#488

Post by himaraya »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #366
cthalupa wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While technically true, in practicality, they did give money to the non-profit. The even signed an agreement stating that any investments should be considered more as donations, because the for-profit subsidiary's operating agreement is such that the charter and mission of the non-profit are the primary duty of the for-profit, not making money. This is explicitly called out in the agreement that all investors in and…

I don't dispute that they say that at all. Therein lies the tension -having multiple goals. The goal is to uphold the mission, and also to make a profit, and the mission comes first. Im not saying one party is right or wrong, just pointing out that there is bound to be conflict when you give employees a bunch of profit based stock rewards, Bring in in 11B in VC investment looking for returns, and then have external o…

100x first-round investment and lower multiples for subsequent rounds, so much less than $1T.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#489

Post by lapphi »

__loam wrote: post #404
w10-1 wrote: post #299

It's hard to believe a Board that can't control itself or its employees could responsibly manage AI. Or that anyone could manage AGI. There is a long history of governance problems in nonprofits (see the transaction-cost economics literature on point). Their ambiguous goals induce politics. One benefit of profit-driven boards is that the goals make only well-understood risk trade-off's between growth now or later, an…

I appreciate this argument, but I also think naked profit seeking is the cause of a lot of problems in our economy and there are qualities that are hard to quantify when you structure the organization around it. Blindly following the economic argument can also cause problems, and it's a big reason why American corporate culture moved away from building a good product first towards maximizing shareholder value. The Op…

On board with this. Arguing that a for-profit is somehow the moral position over a non-profit because money is tangible while the idea of doing good is not well-defined.. feels like something a Rockefeller owned newspaper from the Industrial Revolution would have printed.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#490

Post by xvector »

skywhopper wrote: post #283
xvector wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with zero experience in technology should simply not be allowed to make decisions about it. This is how you get politicians that try to ban encryption to "save the children."

Why do you assume someone with an art degree has “zero experience with technology”? I assume many artists these days are highly sophisticated users of technology.

And we know politicians use technology too. Yet here we are.
Post reply on HN