511–520 of 625 posts
Fascinating! Apparently central to the complete farce going on at OpenAI - is this paper by one of the board members: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ It's about - my favourite topic: Costly Signaling! How curious - that such a topic would be the possible catalyst for one of the most extraordinary collapses of a leading tech company. Specifically - the paper is about using costly signallin…
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 (o…
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The CEO is generally accountable to the board. A CEO trying to silence criticism and oust critical board members may be typical behaviour in the world of megalomaniacal tech startup CEOs, but it is not generally considered good corporate governance. (And usually the megalomaniacal tech startup CEOs have equity to back it up.)
He said he wished she communicated her concerns to him beforehand. How can disagreements be delt with if never communicated directly? So the CEO has to first learn of a disagreement with a fellow board member through a NY Times article?
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> 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.
Academically, did she not disclose being on the board on her paper?
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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…
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…
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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.
She's not in charge of the for-profit arm though, all she could do was fire the CEO, and she did, which would seem consistent with her criticism. I don't think she has many more power as being on the board. She also isn't at the top; in the sense she needs other board members to vote similar to her to enact any change, so it's possible she kept bringing up concerns and not getting support. Academically, did she not d…
Being at the top of the org and being present during the specific incidents that gives one qualms burdens one with moral responsibility, even if they were the one who voted against.
You shouldn’t say “they did [x]” instead of “we did [x]” when x is bad and you were part of the team.
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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…
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This is really interesting. It makes perfect sense that they weren't sitting at 6 board members for 9 months because Sam and the others didn't see the implications, but because they saw them all too well and were gridlocked. But then it gets interesting inferring things from there. Obviously sama and gdb were on one side (call it team Speed), and Helen Toner on the other (team Safety). I think McCauley is with Toner…
Maybe Sam wanted to redirect Ilya's GPUs to ChatGPT after DevDay surge. 20% of OpenAI's GPUs are allocated to Ilya's team.
If I may wear my conspiracy hat for a second. Adam D'Angelo is a billionaire or close to it so he has a war chest for a battle to hold on to the crown jewel's of AI. Sam has powerful friends but so does D'Angelo(Facebook mafia). I don't think the board anticipated the 90% potential employee turnover, so there is a small chance they leave the board because of that reason. But my guess is there is a 4 letter company that starts with an 'M' and ends with an 'a' that comes into the picture eventually.
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 pretty clear some legitimate concerns about a hypothetical future AGI, that we've barely scraped the surface of, turns into "what can we do today" and it's largely virtue signalling type behaviour crippling a non-AGI very very alpha version of LLMs just to show you care about hypothetical future risks.
Even the coorelation between commercialization and AI safety is pretty tenuous. Unless I missed some good argument about how having a GPT store makes AGI destroying the world easier.
It can probably best be summarized as Helen Toner simply wants OpenAI to die for humanity's sake. Everything else is just minor detail.
> Over the weekend, Altman’s old executive team pushed the board to reinstate him—telling directors that their actions could trigger the company’s collapse.
> “That would actually be consistent with the mission,” replied board member Helen Toner, a director at a Washington policy research organization who joined the board two years ago.