OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by pavlov » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:47 AM UTC

23B1 wrote: post #515

lolinder wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Shareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.

OpenAI is a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary. The controlling board is at the non-profit and immune to shareholder concerns.

Investors in OpenAI-the-business were literally told they should think of it as a donation. There’s not much grounds for a shareholder lawsuit when you signed away everything to a non-profit.

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

#522

Post by drusepth » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:49 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #255

PheonixPharts wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes these people should all be doing more to feed internet drama! If they don't act soon, HN will have all sorts of wild opinions about what's going on and we can't have that! Even worse, if we don't have near constant updates, we might realize this is not all that important in the end and move on to other news items! I know, I know, I shouldn't jest when this could have grave consequences like changing which uri you…

My favorite hypothesis: Ilya et al suspected emergent AGI ( e.g. saw the software doing things unprompted or dangerous and unexpected) and realized the Worldcoin shill is probably not the one you want calling the shots on it. For the record, I don't think it's true. I think it was a power play, and a failed coup at that. But it's about as substantiated as the "serious" hypotheses being mooted in the media. And it's m…

My favorite hypothesis (based on absolutely nothing but observing people use LLMs over the years):

* Current-gen AI is really good at tricking laypeople into believing it could be sentient

* "Next-gen" AI (which, theoretically, Ilya et al may have previewed if they've begun training GPT-5, etc) will be really good at tricking experts into believing it could be sentient

* Next-next-gen AI may as well be sentient for all intents and purposes (if it quacks like a duck)

(NB, to "trick" here ascribes a mechanical result from people using technology, not an intent from said technology)

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

#523

Post by aravindgp » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:52 AM UTC

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?)

Wow this is significant, he did this to Charlie cheever the best guy at Facebook and quora. He got Matt on board and fired Charlie without informing investors. Only difference this time 100 billion company is at stake at openai. Process is similar. This going very wrong for Adam D'Angelo. With this I hope other board members get to the bottom get Sam back and vote out D'Angelo from board.

This school level immaturity.

Old story

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-o...

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

#524

Post by Moto7451 » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:52 AM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #469

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.

> 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. If that were the case, can't he get sued by the Alliance (Sam, Greg, rest)? If he has conflict of interest then his decisions as member of the board would be invalid, right?

I don’t think that’s how it would work out since his conflict was very public knowledge before this point. He plausibly disclosed this to the board at some point before Poe launched and they kept him on.

Large private VC backed companies also don’t always fall under the same rules as public entities. Generally there are shareholder thresholds (where insider/private shareholders count towards) that in turn cause some of the general Securities/board regulations to kick in.

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

#525

Post by LMYahooTFY » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:55 AM UTC

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…

>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.

What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? What type of politicking and deception is involved in creating a for profit subsidiary which is granted license to OpenAIs research in order to generate wealth? The entire purpose of this legal structure is to keep non-profit owners focused on their mission rather than shareholder value, which in this case is attempting to ethically create an AGI.

Edit: to add that this framework was not invented by Sam Altman, nor OpenAI.

>Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society.

Thus the legal structure I described, although this argument is entirely theoretical and assumes such a thing can actually be guarded that well at all, or that model performance and compute will remain correlated.

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

#526

Post by rjzzleep » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:55 AM UTC

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?

This isn't unlike the radio silence Brendan Eich kept, when the Mozilla sh* hit the fan. This is in my opinion the outcome of when really technical and scientific people have been given decades of advice of not talking to the public.

I have seen this play out many times in different locations for different people. A lot of technical folks like myself were given the advice that actions speak louder than words.

I was once scouted at a silicon valley selenium browser testing company. I migrated their cloud offering from VMWare to KVM, which depended on code I wrote and then defied my middle manager by improving their entire infrastructure performance by 40%. My instinct was to communicate this to the leadership, but I was advised not to skip my middle manager.

The next time I went the office I got a severance package and later found out that 2 hours later during the all hands they presented my work as their own. The middle manage went on to become the CTO of several companies.

I doubt we will ever find out what really happened or at least not in the next 5-10 years. OpenAI let Sam Altman be the public face of the company and got burned by it.

Personally I had no idea Ilya was the main guy in this company until the drama that happened. I also didn't know that Sam Altman was basically only there to bring in the cash. I assume that most people will actually never know that part of OpenAI.

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

#527

Post by JimDabell » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:56 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #509

JimDabell wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it just means that in that scenario Sam would think he could convince the rest of the board that Ilya was wrong because he could find somebody else to give him a preferable answer.

It’s just speculation, anyway. There isn’t really anything I’ve heard that isn’t contradicted by the evidence, so it’s likely at least one thing “known” by the public isn’t actually true.

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

#528

Post by shandor » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:56 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #518

23B1 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.

Right, but my understanding is that the nonprofit structure eliminates most (if not all) possible shareholder suits.

As I mentioned in my comment, I'm unaware of the effect of the nonprofit status on this. But like the parent commenter mentioned I mostly was thinking of laws prohibiting destruction of shareholder value (edit: whatever that may mean considering a nonprofit).

It just seems ludicrous that the board could run a company into the ground like this and just shrug "nah we're nonprofit so you can't touch us and BTW we don't even need to make any statements whatsoever".

There have been many comments that the initial firing of Altman was in a way completely according to the nonprofit charter, at least if it could prove that Altman had been executing in a way as to jeopardize the Charter.

But even then, how could the board say they are working in the best interest of even the nonprofit itself, if their company is just disintegrating while they willfully refuse to give any information to public?

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

#529

Post by agitator » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

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…

As much as I'd love to hear about the details of the drama as the next person, they really don't have to say anything publicly. We are all going to continue using the product. They don't have public investors. The only concern about perception they may have is if they intend to raise more money anytime soon.

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

#530

Post by hooande » Tue, Nov 21, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

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…

Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. They voted on it and one side won.

There isn't a bigger, more interesting story here. This is in fact a very common story that plays out at many software companies. The board of openai ended up making a decision that destroyed billions of dollars worth of brand value and good will. That's all there is to it.