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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

#481

Post by siva7 »

jjulius wrote: post #191
avarun wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that he's a founder and the one that made it "one of the most important companies on the planet"?

Not quite true - OpenAI's Wikipedia article says... >The organization was founded in December 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members. Altman didn't join as CEO until 2019. Edit: All those names and we're going to say st…

You’re still wrong. This has been debunked many times over the last days on HN. The wiki is badly phrased leaving ambiguous interpretations open. Sam was along with Greg (and Musk as a financier) the initial co-founder in 2015, recruiting later in 2015 people like Ilya. Keep in mind that chair and co-founder aren’t mutually exclusive roles.

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

#482

Post by marquisdepolis »

jprete wrote: post #465
marquisdepolis wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this instance, "Sam is trying to take over the Board on a flimsy basis" is an reasonable reason to remove him. Started leading discussions about whether she should be removed, is also very very far from actively working to remove her. This is amateur hour and considering what happened she probably should have been removed.

Leading discussions on whether someone should be removed is literally actively working to remove them.

It's quite literally not. After she wrote that it would be silly if you didn't even have discussions considering this.

Actively working would require active efforts to make this happen.

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

#483

Post by ruszki »

usehand wrote: post #457
negandnek wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

then the argument that altman would be able to easily stuff the board doesnt hold -- he didnt even have majority. either you claim (1) that there was a risk of altman having majority and stuffing the board and hence concede that majority allows stuffing the board, in which case you concede the actual majority which was anti-altman could have done that or (2) you concede that having majority is not enough to stuff the…

You should read the article, because it’s clearly stated how Altman could get a majority. For your other concern, a simple vote change (like Ilya’s) can explain it.

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

#484

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

murakamiiq84 wrote: post #462
lwneal wrote: post #225

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…

I think this is heavily editoralized. if you look at the 3 pages in question that the quotes are pulled from (28-30 in doc, 29-31 in pdf), they appear to be given as examples in pretty boring academic discussions explicating the theories of costly signaling in the context of AI.It also has lines like: "The system card provides evidence of several kinds of costs that OpenAI was willing to bear in order to release GPT-…

> I think this is heavily editoralized.

"Editorialized"?? It's a direct quote from the paper, and additional context doesn't alter its perceived meaning.

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

#485

Post by foota »

15457345234 wrote: post #479
foota wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but this was obviously done in a sloppy manner 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…

I don't think Sam cajoled their way and talked to the employees, as I understand it Ilya talked with the staff and revealed what they claimed were the reasons for the firing.

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

#486

Post by nmfisher »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #164
ipaddr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She has a mandate not to promote Anthropic on the back of OpenAI. Very unprofessional

This is something you don’t get. What happens to the for-profit arm of OpenAI is not her problem, her loyalty lies with the non-profit arm’s charter (and not even the organization itself). She is doing her job to uphold the mission of the organization.

This is exactly correct and so many people just don’t get it. The non-profit owns the for-profit, not the other way around. When the goals of the for-profit clash with the goals of the non-profit, the for-profit has to yield.

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

#487

Post by xigency »

lossolo wrote: post #469
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, here is a relevant passage from the paper, linked in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38373684 If I were the CEO of OpenAI, I'd be pretty pissed if a member of my own board was shitting on the organization she was a member of while puffing up a competitor. But the tone of that paper makes me think that the schism must go back much earlier (other reporting said things really started to spl…

> If I were the CEO of OpenAI, I'd be pretty pissed if a member of my own board was shitting on the organization she was a member of while puffing up a competitor. Considering what's in the charter, it seems like she didn't do anything wrong? > We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. >We commit to use any…

> Considering what's in the charter, it seems like she didn't do anything wrong?

It’s incredibly disingenuous to slap your name on an ethics paper claiming a company is doing malfeasance such as triggering a race-to-the-bottom for AI ethics when you have an active hand in steering the company.

It’s shameful. Either she should have resigned from the company, for ethical reasons, or recused herself from the paper, for conflict of interest.

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

#488

Post by superultra »

jdprgm wrote: post #257

I really don't understand why the three board members have just been completely silent online since things hit the fan with no activity or privating profiles. You would think if this was some sort of ideological based coup and pre-meditated you would have a full PR plan in place and pushing your message aggressively. This whole thing has just been bizarre and it still feels like there has to be some big key piece mis…

I think anyone that has worked in academia or the non-profit world is familiar with how this board appears to be operating and certainly its speed, or lack thereof. Compared to tech, it’s glacial. Altman et al has media training, the full weight of Microsoft PR/comms. What do the three board members have? Barely anyone even really knew some of their names until this weekend.

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

#489

Post by ruszki »

powera wrote: post #439
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down... Isn't that the pro-Altman argument? The pro-Altman side is saying "let's shut the company down if we don't get our way." The anti-Altman side is saying "let's get rid of Sam Altman and keep going."

No. No it isn't. The board-aligned argument seems to be "destroying the company is the right thing to do if it helps the cause of AI alignment". Whereas the pro-Altman side seems to be "if you have the most successful startup since Google/Facebook, you shouldn't blow it up merely because of vague arguments about > ".

Your pro-Altman means that the argument should be won by Altman side, just because it’s a successful startup, while in reality, it’s a non-profit with a mission, which contradicts Altman’s position (according to the article).

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

#490

Post by ah765 »

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…

This sounds convincing, especially considering this story where Sam Altman was involved in a "long con" to seize board control of Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/c...).

I think Sam may have been angling to get control of the board for a long time, perhaps years, manipulating the board departures and signing deals with Microsoft. The board finally realized this when it was 3 v 3 (or perhaps 2 v 3 with 1 neutral). But Sam was still working on more funding deals and getting employee loyalty, and the board knew it was only a matter of time until he could force their hand.

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