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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

#551

Post by ah765 »

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 think the middle ground where several of the OpenAI board members were trying for is to "responsibly develop AGI", which means developing at a moderate pace while trying to avoid kicking off an investment gold rush through making heavily commercial use cases, and spending a substantial amount of resources on promising safety research (such as Ilya's work).

In my opinion, it was not a very strong position because the allure of money and trying to be the biggest is too strong (as we're seeing now), but I think it was at least coherent.

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

#552

Post by jacquesm »

ah765 wrote: post #547
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…

>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 co…

If true they should have never started in the first place because there was no way she was not going to press that button.

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

#553

Post by remarkEon »

ah765 wrote: post #551
remarkEon wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think the middle ground where several of the OpenAI board members were trying for is to "responsibly develop AGI", which means developing at a moderate pace while trying to avoid kicking off an investment gold rush through making heavily commercial use cases, and spending a substantial amount of resources on promising safety research (such as Ilya's work). In my opinion, it was not a very strong position because th…

So, no, the blanks have not been filled in then. Because, for those in Toner's camp, that middle ground is just "progress from GPT to T-1000, but slowly", right? Yudkowsky talks about AIs 3D printing themselves into biological entities and killing us all because humans are an inefficient use of matter. It's not a strong position to me because it sounds ridiculous, not because there's greed involved.

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

#554

Post by Sol- »

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…

No idea if the concerns are realistic, but dismissing them because they are fantastical surely is a fallacy, no?

We currently almost have scifi-level AI we can talk to on our smartphones, which would have been fantastical only a few years ago.

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

#556

Post by LASR »

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…

What’s surprising to me is that top-level executives think that self-destructing the current leader in LLMs is the way to ensure safety.

Aren’t you simply making space for smaller, more aggressive, and less safety-minded competitors to grab a seat on the money train to do whatever they want to do?

Pandora’s box is already open. You have to guard it. You have to use your power and influence to enforce other competitors to also do that with their own boxes.

Self-destructing is the worst way to ensure AI safety.

Isn’t this just basic logic? Even chatGPT might have able to point out how stupid this is.

My only explanation is that something deeper happened that we’re not aware of. Us or them board fight might explain it. Great. Altman is out. Now what? Nobody predicted this would happen?

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

#557

Post by dmix »

ah765 wrote: post #551
remarkEon wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think the middle ground where several of the OpenAI board members were trying for is to "responsibly develop AGI", which means developing at a moderate pace while trying to avoid kicking off an investment gold rush through making heavily commercial use cases, and spending a substantial amount of resources on promising safety research (such as Ilya's work). In my opinion, it was not a very strong position because th…

It takes some level of delusion of grandeur to think half a board of a single non profit that just happens to be the first mover can stop the full forces of American capitalism - although I kind of respect the drive/purpose.

They could easily lose any power they had to guide the industry, it was a huge gamble. I remember reading a Harvard business school study showing the first mover advantage repeatedly turned out to be ineffective in the tech industry as there is a looong series of early winners dying out to later market entrants like Friendster->FB, Google, a bunch of dotcom era Ecommerce companies predating Amazon, etc.

They need full industry/society buy in - at an ideological level - to win this battle, they won't win through backroom dealing in a boardroom while losing 90% of their own staff.

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

#558

Post by cjbprime »

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 don't know whether I have "like-minded views", but I think the risk is there, and it is not fantastical to me because the AGI doesn't need to "do" anything outside of humans assisting it -- no killer robots or nanobots. It just needs to persuade humans to kill for it, or gather resources for it, and so on. And because it's an AGI, it has superhuman abilities for persuasion.

The intuition for GPT-4 being on the way towards superhuman intelligence or persuasion abilities is that the only significant difference between it and GPT-3 appears to be the amount of compute power applied to training.

The previous US President was much less than superhuman, and he still managed to seriously threaten democracy in the US, and by extension cause a minor existential risk to civilization. Imagine what a more intelligent agent with enough attention to be personally persuasive instead of generically persuasive could achieve for itself, given a goal. (If you think that LLMs can't express goals or preferences, read some of the Bing Sydney transcripts.)

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

#559

Post by Aunche »

sarchertech wrote: post #537
Aunche wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whether people turn against her or not is irrelevant to my point. She has no personal fiduciary duty to the minority shareholders in the for-profit company. Her only duty is to the charter.

That people turned against her is relevant because it demonstrates how untenable this standard of independence is. A charter is just a collection of words. She isn't a board member to a collection of words. She's a board member to an organization of people

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

#560

Post by 15457345234 »

foota wrote: post #545
15457345234 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were the board members in the office on that day?

I just find the whole thing weird. I just think it seems unlikely that a board would decide something then about-face so rapidly as to have a meeting at the office the next day. It would be conventional for further meetings to take place at the offices of lawyers, for example.

It would also be normal for the non-fired members of staff to be instructed to have no further contact with the fired person without legal counsel present.

Sometimes it seems very much like everyone here is really playing to the cameras in a big way.

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