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OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

businessinsider.com

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Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#501

Post by bambax »

seanhunter wrote: post #432
1024core wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features. Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that.

What’s interesting to me is that someone looked at Quora and thought “I want the guy behind that on my board”.

Agreed! Yet in 2014 Sam Altman accepted Quora into one of YC's batches, saying [0]

> Adam D’Angelo is awesome, and we’re big Quora fans

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#502

Post by singularity2001 »

shandor wrote: post #424
adastra22 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well obviously that wouldn't be the explanation given to other board members. But it would be the reason he instigated this after dev day, and the reason he won't back down (OpenAI imploding? All the better).

But it’s still surprising the other three then haven’t sacked D’Angelo, then. You’d think with the shitstorm raging and the underlying reasoning seemingly so…inadequate, they would start seeing that D’Angelo was just playing them.

maybe they have their own 'good' reasons to sabotage openAI

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#503

Post by eastern »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #172

1) Where is Emmett? He's the CEO now. It's his job to be the public face of the company. The company is in an existential crisis and there have been no public statements after his 1AM tweet. 2) Where is the board? At a bare minimum, issue a public statement that you have full faith in the new CEO and the leadership team, are taking decisive action to stabilize the situation, and have a plan to move the company forwar…

That's what a board of a for-profit company which has a fiduciary duty towards shareholders should do.

However, the OpenAI board has no such obligation. Their duty is to ensure that the human race stays safe from AI. They've done their best to do that ;-)

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#504

Post by singularity2001 »

seanhunter wrote: post #432
1024core wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features. Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that.

What’s interesting to me is that someone looked at Quora and thought “I want the guy behind that on my board”.

it's probably more like they thought "I want Quoras money" and D'angelo wanted their control

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#507

Post by gorgoiler »

chucke1992 wrote: post #453
kmlevitt wrote: post #81

Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…

It is fascinating considering that D'Angelo had a history with coup (in Quora he did the same, didn't he?)

Remember Facebook Questions? While it lives on as light hearted polls and quizzes it was originally launched by D’Angelo when he was an FB employee. It was designed to compete with expert Q&A websites and was basically Quora v0.

When D’Angelo didn’t get any traction with it he jumped ship and launched his own competitor instead. Kind of a live wire imho.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#Face...

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#508

Post by mcmcmc »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #487

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…

This feels like a lot of very one sided PR moves from the side with significantly more money to spend on that kind of thing

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#509

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

JimDabell wrote: post #344
hal009 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned by another person in this thread [0], it is likely that it was Ilya's work that was getting replicated by another "secret" team, and the "different opinions on the same person" was Sam's opinions of Ilya. Perhaps Sam saw him as an unstable element and a single point of failure in the company, and wanted to make sure that OpenAI would be able to continue without Ilya? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/repl…

Since a lot of the board’s responsibilities are tied to capabilities of the platform, it’s possible that Altman asked for Ilya to determine the capabilities, didn’t like the answer, then got somebody else to give the “right” answer, which he presented to the board. A simple dual-track project shouldn’t be a problem, but this kind of thing would be seen as dishonesty by the board.

> it’s possible that Altman asked for Ilya to determine the capabilities, didn’t like the answer, then got somebody else to give the “right” answer, which he presented to the board.

This makes no sense given that Ilya is on the board.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#510

Post by lolinder »

shandor wrote: post #486
kmlevitt wrote: post #81

Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…

I’m confused how the board is still keeping their radio silence 100%. Where I’m from, with a shitstorm this big raging, and the board doing nothing, they might very easily be personally held responsible for all kinds of utterly nasty legal action. Is it just different because they’re a nonprofit? Or how on earth the board is thinking they can get away with this anymore?

What specific legal action could be pursued against them where you're from? Who would have a cause for action?

(I'm genuinely curious—in the US I'm not aware of any action that could be taken here by anyone besides possibly Sam Altman for libel.)

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