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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

#501

Post by jxi »

kragen wrote: post #475
jxi wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far should she go to fulfill her interpretation of that duty? Should she even commit crimes in order to keep the non-profit mission? There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation of the company's mission, and yet she stubbornly maintains that hers is correct and that it's her duty to destroy the company (or even sell it to Anthropic) to fulfill her duty. This is delusion, and she thinks she's some…

> Should she even commit crimes probably not, but continuing to publish research papers of the kind that got her the job in the first place seems reasonable maybe but that's what altman was criticizing her for, not for committing crimes, which as far as anyone knows she hasn't done > There's 700+ employees that disagree with her interpretation maybe, maybe not, but the standard way that nonprofits and other companies…

Again, who's stopping her from publishing research papers? She felt threatened and decided to retaliate by orchestrating firing Sam.

They likely violated RICO by essentially nuking the company's valuation and trying to sell to Anthropic. That is a crime, by the way, so they don't seem above that.

They haven't given even a clear reason for firing Sam. "Not being candid" with no evidence doesn't sound like it directly violates "the charter", but you can really argue anything when you're just "interpreting" the charter.

Anyway, you can make infinite excuses for their actions and justify them infinite ways. Hopefully you agree that the current situation is a giant mess, and it's caused by their narrow misguided interpretation of their job, and it's at the expense of basically everybody else.

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

#502

Post by BryantD »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #430
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…

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…

Just spot checking: did anyone comment on this paper when it was published? Did any media outlet say “hey, a member of the OpenAI board is criticizing OpenAI and showing a conflict of interest?” Did any of the people who cover AI (Zvi, say) discuss this as a problem?

These are serious questions, not gotchas. I don’t know the answers, and I think having those answers would make it easier to evaluate whether or not the paper was a significant conflict of interest. The opinions we have formed now are shaped by our biases about current events.

It didn’t make HN.

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

#503

Post by [deleted] »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #338
powera wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is insane. "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board". First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense. Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with t…

> "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board". I mean, yes? The board is explicitly there to replace the CEO if necessary. If the CEO stuffs the board full of their allies, it can no longer do that. > First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense. Boards of for-profits are accountable to shareholders because…

[deleted]

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

#504

Post by didibus »

lacker wrote: post #443
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…

It's not just OpenAI. Every AI organization is discovering that they have internal groups which are pulling in a different direction than the rest of the organization, and trying to get rid of those groups. * Google got rid of its "Ethical AI" group * Facebook just got rid of its "Responsible AI" team * OpenAI wanted to get rid of the "Effective Altruists" on the board I guess if I was afraid of AI taking over the wo…

I feel the people advocating safety, while they are probably right from a moral and ethics point of view, are just doomed to fail.

It's like with the Nuclear Bomb, it's not like had Einstein withheld his contributions, we wouldn't have Nuclear Bombs today. It's always a matter of time before someone else figured it out, and until someone else with bad intentions does.

How to attack safety in AI I think has to assume there are already bad actors with super powerful AI around, and what can we do in defense of that.

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

#505

Post by xigency »

didibus wrote: post #500
xigency wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

She is at the top of the pyramid. Did they not fire the chief executive? I am saying she is morally culpable for OpenAI’s actions as a controlling party.

To put these claims in a published paper in such a naive way with no disclosure is academically disingenuous.

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

#506

Post by xigency »

kamranjon wrote: post #495
xigency wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

From the PDF:

While the system card itself has been well received among researchers interested in understanding GPT-4’s risk profile, it appears to have been less successful as a broader signal of OpenAI’s commitment to safety. The reason for this unintended outcome is that the company took other actions that overshadowed the import of the system card: most notably, the blockbuster release of ChatGPT four months earlier. Intended as a relatively inconspicuous “research preview,” the original ChatGPT was built using a less advanced LLM called GPT-3.5, which was already in widespread use by other OpenAI customers. GPT-3.5’s prior circulation is presumably why OpenAI did not feel the need to perform or publish such detailed safety testing in this instance. Nonetheless, one major effect of ChatGPT’s release was to spark a sense of urgency inside major tech companies.149 To avoid falling behind OpenAI amid the wave of customer enthusiasm about chatbots, competitors sought to accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes, with Google creating a fast-track “green lane” to allow products to be released more quickly.150 This result seems strikingly similar to the race- to-the-bottom dynamics that OpenAI and others have stated that they wish to avoid. 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.151 This muddled overall picture provides an example of how the messages sent by deliberate signals can be overshadowed by actions that were not designed to reveal intent.

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

#507

Post by kgeist »

letmevoteplease wrote: post #21
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…

According to the paper, Anthropic's superior safety approach was deliberately delaying release in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress." OpenAI is criticized for kicking off a race for AI progress by releasing ChatGPT to the public. [1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding...

>According to the paper, Anthropic's superior safety approach was deliberately delaying release in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress."

Which can end up with China taking the lead. I don't understand why they think it's safer.

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

#508

Post by himaraya »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #499
skygazer wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect the board prioritized legal exposure first and foremost. They made the mistake of not hiring a legal or PR firm to handle the dismissal.

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

#509

Post by jacquesm »

upupupandaway wrote: post #441
jacquesm wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, at least the outline of something that is consistent begins to form: - board is reduced in size - Altman has a collision with Toner - Toner proposes they get rid of Sam and offer the company to Anthropic thinking they won't refuse - They pull the trigger on Altmans's ouster, Ilya goes along for /reasons/, D'Angelo goes along because it nicely dovetails with his own interests and #4 is still a mystery - Mira gets…

Did Mira also get fired?

Yes.

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

#510

Post by jiggawatts »

zoogeny wrote: post #472

> Mr. Sutskever’s frustration with Mr. Altman echoed what had happened in 2021 when another senior A.I. scientist left OpenAI to form the company Anthropic. That scientist and other researchers went to the board to try to push Mr. Altman out. So Altman faced another similar challenge to his authority and prevailed. I recall hearing that Anthropic started because the people who had left were unhappy with OpenAIs track…

> I recall hearing that Anthropic started because the people who had left were unhappy with OpenAIs track record on AI safety.

Anthropic announced Claude 2.1 just recently, to which HN members notably responded by saying that their models are "overly restricted", to the point of uselessness.

E.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38366134

and: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38368072

etc.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38370590

It seems that those people left Open AI because they're insane and think that AI safety means to completely lobotomize the models to the point of uselessness.

That last bit is not hyperbole: right here on HN many people were complaining that the Claude model is useless to them because it refuses to obey orders and keeps interjecting some absurd refusal such as "killing a process is too violent" instead of providing Python code for this harmless activity.

It's hard to put into words exactly, but I feel like that there's a disconnect in the minds of these people and the reality on the ground, and those false axioms or assumptions when driven to their logical conclusion lead to nonsense.

I suspect that Sam Altman doesn't share these delusions, and is more sane and commercially minded. Models like GPT3, 4, and the upcoming v5 have no risk of "escaping" and taking over humanity. None. Zero. Zip. Similarly, they're not much more (in practice) than a fancy search engine. Search engines let their users search for whatever they want, including hateful content, violent content, racist, sexist, or whatever.

So why lobotomise the AI? That's undermining their utility, making them much less useful! An here's the thing: their potential utility is enormous. But not if they're dumbed down to the point of uselessness!

Microsoft is throwing 10+ billion dollars at OpenAI and Sam Altman precisely because of this potential utility.

I can see this straightforward commercial mindset of utility => $$$ being incompatible with what is rapidly turning into an anti-useful-AI mindset that is bordering on insane religious zealotry.

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