Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 854 posts

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

#511

Post by CPLX »

WalterBright wrote: post #429
bmitc wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all very generous. Who actually needs greater than 90% of the startups coming out of Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas? Their products just get hyped up and shoved down peoples' throat. And you're wrong. These people do have cash vaults, but they're other peoples' cash vaults. How else do you think they buy things? And they're living in their multi-million dollar mansions and yachts out of benevolence?…

Unfortunately, history provides us with examples of societies that confiscated the wealth of the wealthy, and even exterminated them, in their quest to make a utopia. They all ended up as hell-holes. I'm not really interested in repeating that history. It is not at all necessary for wealthy people to be benevolent in order to contribute to society. Nor do they need to be nice people, nor do they need to be unselfish.…

> Unfortunately, history provides us with examples of societies that confiscated the wealth of the wealthy

Get out of here with this melodrama.

We’re in a society that had higher more progressive tax rates as recently as the 1960’s. This isn’t some science fiction dystopia people are advocating for, just a return to the slightly fairer system we had before organized PR campaigns of the elites brought us the increasingly unequal dystopia we’re actually currently experiencing.

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

#512

Post by Havoc »

> [W]hen ChatGPT came out November 2022, the board was not informed in advance. We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter,”

Jikes. Yeah I can see how a board would lose their sht.

Boards are generally quite tolerant unless you keep them in the dark on strategic matters or ask them to rubber stamp stuff post fact.

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

#513

Post by ZiiS »

jfoster wrote: post #504
sage76 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are not even technical Sama is also not technical.

I've seen this mentioned a few times, but is this true? I could swear I've heard him mention that he uses ChatGPT for programming stuff. He might not be a super technical software engineer, but is he "non-technical" in that he can't even write some simple python or something equivalent?

He did two years computer science at Stanford before dropping out. I don't think "simple python" is the benchmark.

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

#514

Post by tempaccount420 »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #350
zucker42 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major investors aren't the board's boss in this case because OpenAI is a nonprofit. Microsoft is incentivized to act against the goals nonprofit's charter (and in fact they did in this case).

As much as on paper they aren't the board's boss, based on how events turned out they effectively were. They had leverage over the board to get what they want.

I think it's not as much that Microsoft is their boss or not, it's that no one considered the board to be the boss of OpenAI. That's why we saw so many employees wish to leave when they fired Sam Altman.

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

#515

Post by shawabawa3 »

Havoc wrote: post #512

> [W]hen ChatGPT came out November 2022, the board was not informed in advance. We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter,” Jikes. Yeah I can see how a board would lose their sht. Boards are generally quite tolerant unless you keep them in the dark on strategic matters or ask them to rubber stamp stuff post fact.

is that so weird?

Aren't board meetings normally once a quarter? ChatGPT may have been built in less than 1 quarter and between board meetings

ChatGPT seemed to me like a fun extra product and they didn't anticipate the reaction they would get from the public or that it would completely replace their existing GPT interface

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

#516

Post by elefanten »

komali2 wrote: post #422
elefanten wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strawman caricature of the argument. States that are driven by free market allocation rather than central planning (because there's no _pure_ model of either/or) are much less likely to initiate major wars of conquest, such as the ongoing Ukraine war or a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan. That's just empirical fact at this point. There are counterexamples, but the propensity goes strongly in one direction. Al…

> - but you can certainly signal that you've pre-judged the situation I'm happy to listen to arguments that occupied Palestine was, at the same time as it was being occupied, also genociding the Israelis, however the case for Israelis genociding the Palestinians today is well argued: https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2023/10/Is... . This is separate from justification attempts. I believe there is no j…

>it would be very strange for someone to argue that Israel is not attempting to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians

This line alone proves all my points on the topic. That you find it _unfathomable_ that Israel has goals other than the destruction of Palestine shows how one-sided your view on the subject is. There's nothing I can write in this forum that will change such a deeply warped perception, but I'll state for the record: no serious international observer believes that claim. Ironically, that claim is usually made much more convincingly in the other direction -- that various regional factions have sought the utter destruction of Israel -- but even that is considered an extreme view (of the present) by most experts.

>I have looked at these arguments, listened to opposition to these arguments, and determined that Israel is indeed committing a genocide.

Good for you, but there is a lot more information than you alone have processed, and much more information about the current conflict is not available and will not be for some time. So by declaring your personal "determination", you are really just declaring an amateurish opinion via malapropism.

>What are you looking at that I'm not?

The frame of reference (as the other poster indicated) is post-WW2. That's when the current international order was established and also when globalization kicked into high gear. Since then, world trade integrated free market economies simply haven't started wars of conquest designed to change the ownership of territory. Yes, there are wars of intervention, regime change, etc. which have almost exclusively been precipitated against regimes that are deeply hostile to and out of sync with the international order. I'm not saying those are all just, or harmless. But the scale of destruction caused by WW1&2-style total war / wars of conquest is incomparable to the expeditionary wars described above. Bound the claim correctly and it's very simply true: free market states in the current order don't start the most devastating and costly kinds of conflict, whereas authoritarian states still do, to devastating effect. Both kinds of states do other types of bad things, but that's a non-responsive non-sequitur to this particular point about the advantages of market steering vs. centralized steering.

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

#517

Post by int_19h »

torginus wrote: post #493
int_19h wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving. If this is meant to be a reference to Soviet-style communism, then all that shows is that centrally planned economies run by dictators end up poorly for everyone. They don't end up without wealth disparity, though. In fact, USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin, when well-off party bureaucrats and high-ra…

Think about what you wrote, it doesn't make sense even at the first glance. Millions of Americans have a yearly income in excess of $1million, for those people, employing house staff is a trivial expense. And these people aren't even considered 'rich' by the standards of truly rich people. True, the Soviet elite, like any elite ever, had great resources at its finger tips, and high ranking bureaucrats had access to p…

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Mine was that USSR had blatant and obvious wealth disparity, and so "societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone", as OP wrote, doesn't actually describe any existing society. Was said inequality less than in capitalist societies? Sure. But people were most certainly not equal in day to day quality of life, and in fact the more rabidly totalitarian that society was, the less actual equality it had.

And yes, there was one unique way in which Soviets actually had more stratification than pretty much any capitalist society: access to some things (like special stores with imported goods) was gated not on money, but solely on official position of oneself or a family member. Thus some stuff that was nominally well within the range of what the average worker could afford with some saving was in practice just not for sale to the proles, period. In that sense, it was more reminiscent of those feudal societies in which one's social class determined e.g. what color and material one could use for their clothing.

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

#519

Post by fastball »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #171
fastball wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "coup" framing is supported at least by Helen Toner's claims in this article. > "We were very careful, very deliberate about who we told, which was essentially almost no one in advance, other than obviously our legal team and so that's kind of what took us to to November 17." If that doesn't sound like a secret coup, I don't know what does. Like, yes, it is their job to hire and fire the CEO so it's not r…

When a board is about to fire a CEO do you think they typically discuss it publicly first? It’s usually treated as highly sensitive information at every company. Likewise if any company is about to fire anyone they also don’t typically advertise this to anyone other than HR, legal, and maybe the manager. For the CEO the manager -is- the board. I’d be curious if you believe differently how you feel boards usually adve…

Who said publicly? There is a lot of room between "discuss publicly" and "We were very careful, very deliberate about who we told, which was essentially almost no one in advance".

For example, a lot of the pressure that caused them to reverse course came from Microsoft. Maybe if the board had discussed such a big decision without OpenAI's biggest investor, Microsoft would've been on board with the firing.

Post reply on HN