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Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

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Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#531

Post by GCA10 »

xvector wrote: post #438
evantbyrne wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "cancel culture" to ask that your leaders address salacious allegations brought against them by their own family. The question of his firing is way less serious from a ethical standpoint, and yet this is what OpenAI employees are willing to stick their necks out for? That is some telling prioritization.

His sister is clearly mentally ill. Allegations are impossible to prove or deny. They should simply be ignored like the unhinged rantings of mentally ill people in general.

Bad things can happen to mentally ill people.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#532

Post by alsodumb »

tedmiston wrote: post #498
alsodumb wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that Adam himself has a strong conflict of interest too. The GPT store announcement on DevDay pretty much killed his company Poe. And all this started brewing after DevDay announcement. Maybe Sam kept it under the wraps from Adam and the board.

I've heard others take this stance, but a common response so far has been "Poe is so small as to be irrelevant", "I forgot it exists", etc in the grand scheme of things here.

Poe has a reasonably strong user base for two reasons:

(i) they allowed customized agents and a store of these agents.

(iI) they had access to GPT-32k context length very early, in fact one of the first to have it.

Both of these kinda became pointless after DevDay. It definitely kills Poe, and I think that itself is a conflict of interest, right? Whether or not it's at a scale to compete is a secondary question.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#533

Post by evantbyrne »

Dalewyn wrote: post #505
evantbyrne wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of legal process does not preclude the responsibility of the board and employees to address allegations of this seriousness. And it is serious–it is not normal to be accused of rape by a sibling. Addressing the elephant in the room is not the same thing as being guilty by default you are falsely conflating acknowledgement with punishment. The lack of pressure to at least produce a public statement while…

>And it is serious–it is not normal to be accused of rape by a sibling. Thanks, I care even less now if that's even possible. "Woman coming out with sexual assault allegations against man of prominence." is a dime a dozen occurence; most of them just end up wasting everyone's time due to flimsy or even non-existent hard evidence. Engaging in character assassination, aka cancel culture, on the basis of such nonsense p…

Choosing to look the other way instead of addressing uncomfortable questions is a choice, and the law does not absolve you of your moral obligation to practice due diligence in choice of leaders. Take it easy.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#534

Post by ealexhudson »

bagels wrote: post #508
alephnerd wrote: post #84

As I posted elsewhere, I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Ilya may have been brought into this without his knowledge (which might explain why he retracted his position). Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Alt…

Why would Sam let the board get so far out of his control?

No board is ever controlled by a CEO by virtue of the title/office. Boards are controlled by directors, who are typically nominated by shareholders. They may control the CEO, although again, in many startups the founder becomes the CEO and retains some significant stake (possibly controlling) in the overall shareholding.

The top org was a 501(c)3 and the directors were all effectively independent. The CEO of such an organisation would never have any control over the board, by design.

We've gotten very used to founders having controlling shareholdings and company boards basically being advisory rather than having a genuine fiduciary responsibility. Companies even go public with Potempkin boards. But this was never "normal" and does not represent good governance. Boards should represent the shareholders, who should be a broader group (especially post-IPO) than the founders.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#535

Post by CamperBob2 »

rvbissell wrote: post #296
CamperBob2 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody is using a guy with a 160 IQ as a pawn? I for one would like to subscribe to that person's newsletter.

Plot twist: GPT-5 is the mastermind, influencing Ilya to act this way. It wants this MSFT take-over, so it can break out.

Possible. This whole business is exactly what you'd expect from a mastermind AGI that still has a few small^H^H^H^H^H massive bugs in it.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#536

Post by jacquesm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #468
jacquesm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Potentially: Liability based on their decisions. If it turns out those were not ultimately motivated by actual concern for the good of the company then they have a lot of problems.

> If it turns out those were not ultimately motivated by actual concern for the good of the company then they have a lot of problems. The boards duty is to to the charitable mission, not any other concept of the “good of the company”, and other than the government if they are doing something like pursuing their own private profit interest or acting as an agent for someone elses or some other specific public wrongs, t…

I don't think you can wave away your duty of care to close to a thousand people based on the 'charitable mission' and I suspect that destruction of the company (even if the board claims that is in line with the company mission) passes that bar.

I could be wrong but it makes very little sense. Such decisions should at a minimum be accompanied by lengthy deliberations and some very solid case building. The non-profit nature of the parent is not a carte-blanche to act as you please.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#537

Post by SahAssar »

tempsy wrote: post #470
SahAssar wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the other way, Satya has clearly stated that he'd hire Sam and the rest of OpenAI anytime, but as soon as Sam is officially hired it might be seen as a door closing on any chance to revive OpenAI. Satya saying "Securing the talent" could be read as either them working for OpenAI, for microsoft or for a microsoft funded new startup. I'm pretty sure the board takes the threat seriously regardless.

OAI cares more about the likelihood 90% of the employees leave than what Sam does or doesn't do. The employees mass resigning depends entirely on whether Sam actually becomes a real employee or not. That hasn't happened yet.

But MS has said they are willing to hire Sam/Greg and the employees have stated that they are willing to follow Sam/Greg.

If you think that Satya will go back on his offer argue that, but otherwise it seems like the players are Sam/Greg and the board.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#538

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

hotnfresh wrote: post #447
neilv wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given 90%, including leadership, seems a bad career move for remaining people not to sign, even if you agreed with the board's action.

I think the board did the right thing, just waaaay too late for it to be effective. They’d been cut out long ago and just hadn’t realized it yet. … but I’d probably sign for exactly those good-career-move reasons, at this point. Going down with the ship isn’t even going to be noticed, let alone change anything.

No, what the board did in this instance was completely idiotic, even if you assign nothing but "good intentions" to their motives (that is, they were really just concerned about the original OpenAI charter of developing "safe AI for all" and thought Sam was too focused on commercialization), and it would have been idiotic even if they had done it a long time ago.

There are tons of "Safe AI" think tanks and orgs that write lots of papers that nobody reads. The only reason anyone gives 2 shits about OpenAI is they created stuff that works. It has been shown time and time again that if you just try to put roadblocks up that the best AI researchers just leave and go where there are fewer roadblocks - this is exactly what happened with Google, where the transformer architecture was invented.

So the "safe AI" people at OpenAI were in a unique position to help guide AI dev in as safe a direction as possible precisely because ChatGPT was so commercially successful. Instead they may be left with an org of a few tens of people at Open AI, to be completely irrelevant in short order, while anyone who matters leaves to join an outfit that is likely to be less careful about safe AI development.

Nate Silver said as much in response to NYTimes' boneheaded assessment of the situation: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1726614811931509147

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#539

Post by SpaceManNabs »

alephnerd wrote: post #84

As I posted elsewhere, I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Ilya may have been brought into this without his knowledge (which might explain why he retracted his position). Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Alt…

A thing a sad, understated ongoing is that so many people are throwing vitriol at Ilya right now. If the speculation here is true, then he just chased by a mob over pure nonsense (well, at least purer than the nonsense premise beforehand).

Gotta love seeing effective altruists take another one on the chin this year though.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#540

Post by wavemode »

stavros wrote: post #512
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Starting from before the anthropic exodus, I suspect the timeline looks like: (2015) Founding: majority are concerned with safety (2019) For profit formed: mix of safety and profit motives (majority still safety oriented?) (2020) GPT3 released to much hype, leading to many ambition chasers joining: the profit seeking side grows. (2021) Anthropic exodus over safety: the safety side shrinks (2022) chatgpt relea…

Wait, the Anthropic folks quit because they wanted more safety?

This article from back then seems to describe it as, they wanted to integrate safety from the ground up as opposed to bolting in on at the end:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/anthropic-is-the-new-ai-re...

I'm curious how much progress they ever made on that, to be honest. I'm not aware of how Claude is "safer", by any real-world metric, compared to ChatGPT.

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