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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

#541

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw »

crazygringo wrote: post #414
baking wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope that a billion in credits would not represent a billion in expenses for Microsoft.

They're giving up all the profits from whoever they would have been sold to otherwise. So it adds up the same.

Microsoft giving these credits to OpenAI doesn't mean some other customer won't buy the Azure credits they planned on buying. So I don't see how what you write makes sense.

At least assuming Microsoft hasn't run out of capacity in their data centers. I know Azure sometimes have capacity issues but those issues are intermittent and not say 5 year long (or whatever the windoe is when it comes to consuming these credit)

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

#542

Post by concinds »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #49
foobarian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t even follow when taken literally. If the company is destroyed presumably they can’t create artificial intelligence, so there is nothing there to benefit all humanity in the first place.

It follows just fine, I think, given that the possibility space is not limited to "create beneficial AGI" and "don't create AGI". It also includes "create unaligned AGI", which is obviously much worse "don't create AGI"; the board would be remiss in its duties if it didn't try to prevent that from happening.

Could we all stop entertaining these LessWrong hypotheticals? The notion that the board wants to shut down OpenAI to stop non-existent AGI is mad.

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

#543

Post by webmaven »

xigency wrote: post #506
kamranjon wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 earl…

> This […] provides an example of how the messages sent by deliberate signals can be overshadowed by actions that were not designed to reveal intent.

What a lovely turn of phrase! I'm stealing it for use later, in place of "actions speak louder than words".

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

#544

Post by ilikehurdles »

Davidzheng wrote: post #190
hintymad wrote: post #65

>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity, when many of us believe that OpenAI’s tech is p…

That's her job to decide what's good for humanity from my reading of the charter

> The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled.

How does destroying company achieve the mission of having _that very company_ create artificial intelligence that "benefits all of humanity?"

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

#545

Post by foota »

15457345234 wrote: post #491
foota wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Sam cajoled their way and talked to the employees, as I understand it Ilya talked with the staff and revealed what they claimed were the reasons for the firing.

In your opinion, was a crime committed when that person returned to the office? Either by himself or by the person that permitted him access knowing beyond any reasonable doubt that they were not authorized to be there? If systems were accessed, was another crime committed? If a person facilitated that access, has the boundary for 'conspiracy to commit...' been reached?

What? It's my understanding Sam Altman was invited back to talk to the board, and Ilya is still employed there.

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

#546

Post by dmix »

remarkEon wrote: post #538
dmix wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting the paper is selling Anthropic's approach to 'safety' as the correct approach when they just launched a new version of Claude and HN thread is littered with people saying its unusable because half the prompts they type get flagged as ethical violations. 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 toda…

Has Toner (or someone with like-minded views) filled in the blanks between "GPT-4" and "Terminator Judgement Day" in a believable way? I've read what Yudkowsky writes but it all sounds so fantastical that it's, at least to me, more like an episode of The Twilight Zone or The X-Files than something resembling reality. Is Toner really in the "nuke the datacenters" camp? If so, was her placement on the board not a mista…

I have a feeling EA[1] is like anarcho capitalist communities (or just inverse for socialism) where you have a good idea like markets==good then apply it like a hammer to everything you see in life. Any hint of gov/statism is treated as the enemy, regardless of its IRL negative impact on markets or net freedom, or whatever positive end goal they envision.

OpenAI is (hypothetically) progressing to AGI, therefore bad. Whether GPT specifically is a half a foot on a 1000km journey or potentially insignificant, it doesn't matter to them as they've pre-selected any potential for progress as all bad.

[1] if you search "Helen Toner" on YouTube it's just a collection of videos of her talking at EA conferences. So she's a believer

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

#547

Post by ah765 »

dmix wrote: post #520
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 interesting the paper is selling Anthropic's approach to 'safety' as the correct approach when they just launched a new version of Claude and HN thread is littered with people saying its unusable because half the prompts they type get flagged as ethical violations. 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 toda…

>how having a GPT store makes AGI destroying the world easier

The argument in general is that the more commercial interest there is in AI, the more money gets invested and the faster the companies will try to move to capture that market. This increases the risk for AGI by speeding up development due to competition, and safety is seen as "decel".

Helen was considering the possibility of Altman-dominated OpenAI that continued to rapidly grow the overall market for AI, and made a statement that perhaps destroying OpenAI would be better for the mission (safe development of AGI).

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

#548

Post by School-Cotton »

richk449 wrote: post #444
jafitc wrote: post #236

Sam Altman's Actions - Sam complained that Helen Toner's research paper criticized OpenAI's safety approach and praised Anthropic's, seeing it as dangerous for OpenAI - He reprimanded her for the paper, saying as a board member she should have brought concerns to him first rather than publishing something critical right when OpenAI was in a tricky spot with the FTC - He then began looking for ways to remove her from…

Is there a name for this type of analysis?

In all likelihood OP pasted the article into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize it.

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

#549

Post by cwillu »

wvenable wrote: post #526
cwillu wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OpenAI prominently states that any investment should be thought of as a donation. Literally in a bold pinkish-red box that describes its corporate structure. An investor might read that and think they don't actually mean it, but you can't claim they weren't clear about the nature of any required investment.

OpenAI explicitly created a for profit company to take these investments. It's disingenuous to reframe it as a charity.

The bold purple box is explicitly talking about “OpenAI Global, LLC”, which _is_ the “for profit” company.

See also: “OpenAI LP’s primary fiduciary obligation is to advance the aims of the OpenAI Charter, and the company is controlled by OpenAI Nonprofit’s board. All investors and employees sign agreements that OpenAI LP’s obligation to the Charter always comes first, even at the expense of some or all of their financial stake.” --https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

To emphasize, they will not take your investment money until you've signed an agreement saying that you're aware of all of this.

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

#550

Post by calf »

Aunche wrote: post #528
sarchertech wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how that works. You can argue that Ilya has a fiduciary responsibility to the investors as an officer of the company. Toner doesn’t. She is an independent board member on the board of the non-profit that owns a controlling share in the company, but she doesn’t personally own a majority share of the company. As an independent board member, she has no duty but to uphold the charter. She represents no shareho…

She joined the board of OpenAI knowing that they owned a for profit subsidiary that received billions of dollars of investment. Being independent means that she could provide a unique outsider perspective, not that she has no obligations to her organization whatsoever. If you're going to be completely independent, you shouldn't be surprised when over 90% of the organization turns against you.

Or, the organization has an obligation to respect freedom of academic inquiry, because the truth is what helps organizations grow, change, and mature, does it not? If the company cannot handle independent critique then its fragility is not the fault of the researcher who is telling the truth.
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