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

businessinsider.com

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

#481

Post by [deleted] »

viking123 wrote: post #316
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 always get the Sam Bankman-Fried vibes from him

[deleted]

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

#483

Post by tim333 »

chipdart wrote: post #464
benreesman wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 est…

>He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it.

Apart from Zip2 which he started from scratch and wrote the early code for, SpaceX which he stated from scratch, Neuralink likewise, OpenAI which he co founded and was the biggest early funder for and probably some others.

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

#484

Post by tim333 »

portaouflop wrote: post #431
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…

Damn sounds like he will take over the world any day now

Just wait for the AGI robots!

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

#485

Post by ocodo »

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?

Because a purely competitive operating environment favors the sociopath.

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

#486

Post by gorbypark »

tptacek wrote: post #271
jcranmer wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about Sam Altman led such a huge number of employees to threaten to follow him out the door? My understanding is that a fair amount of it was essentially peer pressure. If you're an employee whose CEO has just been fired for unclear reasons, and someone hands you a chain letter saying "restate him or everyone will quit" and you're told everyone's signing that letter and there's already someone who promised to…

My understanding is that it was not so much peer pressure so much as an explicitly coordinated worker action, based on a rational assessment of what their comp packages would look like if the board's plan played out completely.

In my opinion this is most likely.

Scenario A, Sam Altman continues as CEO and the for profit arm of OpenAI continues to call the shots, growth and market share continue to be priority number one.

Scenario B, Sam Altman is fired, OpenAI non-profit board (re?)-asserts more control. Safety, alignment and other things like that take priority over growth and market share.

x% of Employees are Sam believers, and when the remaining x% of ambiguous/non-Sam believers realize the first x% might leave, their PSUs would be worth significantly less, so they sign the letter as well. There is also the peer pressure / fear of retribution factor as well once it becomes likely there is even a chance of Sam being reinstated.

Many employees choose scenario A because it is likely their "profit sharing units" will be worth more than with scenario B. There's a non-zero chance that OpenAI (the for profit arm) eventually joins the ranks of the "FAANG" companies. Those PSUs might be worth millions today, but in the future could be worth "fuck you" levels of money.

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

#487

Post by benreesman »

wuschel wrote: post #469
benreesman wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mechanism design is broadly the study (with a practical as opposed to theoretical emphasis) of the way that incentives shape human behavior.

For better or worse Mark was/is able to see some deep minimal structure that allows what used to be a web page and is now a mobile app to elicit responses that bear an uncanny resemblance to the way human beings behave and interact in a setting unmediated by either a priest or a protocol. On the properties he runs people act a hell of a lot like they do in a bar or any other place where sapiens mix and match.

I’m not sure that turbocharging spinal-reflex humanity via computer networks is going all that well, which is one of the main reasons I parted ways with the endeavor once the true scope for mechanical advantage became clear, but he clearly sees things about what motivates people that Freud was throwing darts at.

I might have been one of the few true assassins he sent after people like Vic Gunderotta or Evan Spiegel and certainly he knows how to delegate the mechanics of leaving would-be adversaries on the scrap heap of history, but he knew who to send the hitters after and when.

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

#488

Post by tim333 »

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?

Has Sam actually caused any cool technology? It seems Loopt was kind of meh, he's just an investor in Helion. OpenAI was largely funded by Musk and would have happened without Sam and it may have actually lived up to the Open bit if he hadn't been there which would have been cooler. Now it's just another corporate.

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

#489

Post by contrarian1234 »

From interviews it sounds like Altman is personally very involved in all hires. So it's not surprising that employees are incredibly loyal

He's also presenting the openai missions as a holy crusade. The alternatives for a cutting edge AI guru (who wants a disgustingly huge salary) is working for anemic bureaucratic advertising companies (Facebook and Google). While openai has a sexy new business model that nobody quite understands.. It's "not for profit" and "working for the good of humanity". Employees eat that up, while getting a fat paycheck - and I think very sensibly convince themselves it's true

Add on top of that, you're part of an exclusive club working on some Manhattan project-like cutting edge stuff. You wanna miss out on all the fun ?

They allegedly have tons of secret stuff in the pipeline, it must be exciting to be on the inside

From the point of view the lies and manipulations are all small potatoes in the grand scheme of things and just look like Altman trying to get shit done in the face of stupid layer of bureaucracy in his way (ie. The board)

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

#490

Post by ben_w »

snowwrestler wrote: post #52

Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.

My own opinion on Altman is the same as with GPT-2 getting a slow roll-out for safety: regardless of the reality, it is best to have a system and process which assumes the worst and can cope with that possibility being a reality.
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