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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

#491

Post by 15457345234 »

foota wrote: post #485
15457345234 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In your opinion, was a crime committed when that person returned to the office?

Either by himself or by the person that permitted him access knowing beyond any reasonable doubt that they were not authorized to be there?

If systems were accessed, was another crime committed?

If a person facilitated that access, has the boundary for 'conspiracy to commit...' been reached?

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

#492

Post by didibus »

> 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 could be consistent with its mission

We're in true sci-fi land, when we're discussing it might be best to destroy SkyNet before it's too late

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

#493

Post by CSMastermind »

bigtones wrote: post #400
CSMastermind wrote: post #4

The only specific accusation made in the article is that Sam criticized Helen Toner for writing a paper: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI. Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he w…

Helen Toner through her association with Open Philanthropy donated $30 Million dollars to OpenAI early on. That's how she got on the board. https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

That's super insightful, thank you for sharing this.

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

#494

Post by BryantD »

jacquesm wrote: post #265
mcny wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Sam wanted to restrict Helen's free expression. > No, Sam wanted to be the first recipient of Helen's expression. If I get copy approval to what you write, that is by definition a restriction to your freedom of expression. How is this up for debate?

You don't normally perform you role as a board member through publications in a public forum. You do it by exercising pressure internally to get the effect you desire so you can continue to do so in the future. Going public is usually a one-shot affair.

It’s interesting that people are making the assumption Toner didn’t raise these concerns internally as well.

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

#495

Post by kamranjon »

xigency wrote: post #487
lossolo wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Did we read different things? All it said was that they had been accused of these things, which is true. If your charter involves ethical AI I’d imagine the first step is telling the truth?

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

#496

Post by sarchertech »

Aunche wrote: post #454
zucker42 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're taking the intuition from a for-profit company and wrongly applying it to a non-profit company. When a board member criticizes a for-profit company, that's bad because the goal of the company is make a profit, and bad PR is bad for profit. A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company. And if you actually read the page,…

>A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company. Even in a nonprofit, the board has an obligation to maintain a good working relationship with their organization. It's very rare for a board member to publicly criticized for their own organization. Also, this argument goes out the window because OpenAI is not just a nonprofit. When they…

That’s not how that works. You can argue that Ilya has a fiduciary responsibility to the investors as an officer of the company. Toner doesn’t. She is an independent board member on the board of the non-profit that owns a controlling share in the company, but she doesn’t personally own a majority share of the company. As an independent board member, she has no duty but to uphold the charter. She represents no shareholders.

Majority shareholders may have some fiduciary responsibility to minority shareholders, so you might be able to make the argument that the board as a whole shouldn’t write disparaging remarks about the company. But even that argument is tenuous.

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

#497

Post by ruszki »

Aunche wrote: post #454
zucker42 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're taking the intuition from a for-profit company and wrongly applying it to a non-profit company. When a board member criticizes a for-profit company, that's bad because the goal of the company is make a profit, and bad PR is bad for profit. A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company. And if you actually read the page,…

>A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company. Even in a nonprofit, the board has an obligation to maintain a good working relationship with their organization. It's very rare for a board member to publicly criticized for their own organization. Also, this argument goes out the window because OpenAI is not just a nonprofit. When they…

> accepted a fiduciary duty to their investors.

Did they?

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

#498

Post by jjulius »

siva7 wrote: post #481
jjulius wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You're still wrong.

Thing is, I don't really care if I'm wrong or right about that title. We're bickering about semantics at this point, and whether or not he was technically a founder doesn't really change the crux of my first post in this chain.

Which I guess now's as good of a time as any to answer that point about Altman having founded it - no, I don't think that founding something automatically means that you have the capability to oversee it long-term.

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

#499

Post by mupuff1234 »

skygazer wrote: post #378
gizmo wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, let's stipulate that Sam was maneuvering to get full board control. Then the independent directors were probably worried that -- sooner or later -- Sam would succeed. With Sam fully in charge the non-profit goals would be completely secondary to the commercial goals. This was unacceptable to the independent directors and Ilya and so they ousted Sam before he could oust them? That's a clear motive. Sam and the i…

Besides explaining the haphazardness, that would also nicely explain why they didn't want to elaborate publicly on why they "had" to let him go -- "it was either him or us" wouldn't have been popular given his seeming popularity.

Idk, seems like a pretty easy sell to me:

"Sam was trying to censor legitimate concerns the board had with regards to the safety of the technology and actively tried to undermine the board and replace it with his own puppets."

If that is indeed true they did a mistake by saying something vague imo.

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

#500

Post by didibus »

xigency wrote: post #487
lossolo wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> when you serve on the board of directors for that company

I'm not sure if this is the true statement, because the not-for-profit/profit arms make it more complex.

In this case, the non-for-profit board seems to act as a kind of governance over the profit arm, in a way, it's there to be a roadblock to the profit arm.

Normally a board aligns with the incentives: to maximize profit for shareholders.

Here the board has the opposite incentive, to maximize AGI safety and achievement, even at the detriment of profit and investors.

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