Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by nsagent » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:02 PM UTC

letmevoteplease wrote: post #21

CSMastermind wrote: post #4

The only specific accusation made in the article is that Sam criticized Helen Toner for writing a paper: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI. Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he w…

According to the paper, Anthropic's superior safety approach was deliberately delaying release in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress." OpenAI is criticized for kicking off a race for AI progress by releasing ChatGPT to the public. [1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding...

There are even more gems in the paper, like this one:

> Suppose a leader pledges during a campaign to provide humanitarian aid to a stricken nation or the CEO of a company commits publicly to register its algorithms or guarantee its customers' data privacy. In both cases, the leader has issued a public statement before an audience who can hold them accountable if they fail to live up to their commitments. The political leader may be punished at the polls or subjected to a congressional investigation; the CEO may face disciplinary actions from the board of directors or reputational costs to the company's brand that can result in lost market share.

I wonder if she had Sam Altman in mind while writing this.

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

#602

Post by gizmo385 » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:41 PM UTC

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 feel like the “Terminator Judgement Day” scenario is a strawman more often than not. There are reasons to push for the safe and responsible development of AI that aren’t based on the belief that AI is literally going to launch the nukes.

The biggest risks I see from AI over the next 2 decades are:

1. A complete devolution in what is true (because creating convincing fakes will be trivial). From politics to the way that people interact with each other on a daily basis, this seems like it has the potential to sew division

2. the societal turmoil/upheaval arising from the mass unemployment (and subsequent unemployability) of millions of people without the social safety nets in place to handle that. When people are suddenly unable to work and support their families and those who have consolidated the power have no interest in sharing the wealth, there will inevitably be pushback.

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

#603

Post by nvm0n2 » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #405

abi wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's not cool for board members to publicly criticize the company.

What do you mean? Schmidt was on Apple's board for 3 years while he was CEO of Google. Do you think Google did not criticise Apple during that whole time (remember that the CEO is ultimately responsible for the company communications)? Even more in the case of OpenAI, the board member is on the board of a non-profit, those are typical much more independent and very often more critical of the decisions made by other b…

FWIW that was a pretty strained relationship and iirc Eric had to frequently recuse himself during any discussion of the iPhone which eventually made his membership untenable.

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

#604

Post by crazygringo » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #541

crazygringo wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> doesn't mean some other customer won't buy the Azure credits they planned on buying

Yes it does, because we're taking about GPU availability that is absolutely highly constrained across the economy.

If we were talking about CPU credits instead, then you're right that Microsoft would be paying/losing merely cost.

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

#605

Post by sarchertech » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #559

sarchertech wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s not relevant to my point that she has no fiduciary duty to anything but the charter.

Her only personal fiduciary responsibility is to the mission defined in that collection of words, not to the employees of the for-profit.

That’s how this works whether you think it should or not.

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

#606

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:33 PM UTC

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?

[deleted]

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

#607

Post by Aunche » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #605

Aunche wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s not relevant to my point that she has no fiduciary duty to anything but the charter. Her only personal fiduciary responsibility is to the mission defined in that collection of words, not to the employees of the for-profit. That’s how this works whether you think it should or not.

Are you going to engage with anything I say or are you just going repeat yourself again? Is there a divine stone tablet that commands a nonprofit board member is solely responsible for the nonprofit's charter that I'm missing?

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

#608

Post by himaraya » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 3:10 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #593

himaraya wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the board prioritized legal exposure first and foremost. They made the mistake of not hiring a legal or PR firm to handle the dismissal.

If they prioritized legal exposure, they would not have made disparaging remarks in their initial press release.

Vague disparaging remarks, fine. Specific allegations, not so much.

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

#609

Post by Rastonbury » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

traject_ wrote: post #433

reducesuffering wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The board has all my respect for standing up to the capitalists of Altman, the VCs, Microsoft. Big feathers to ruffle - even though the execution was misjudged, turns out most of its employees are pretty capitalistic too Exactly. This is a battle between altruistic principles and some of the most heavyweight greedy money in the world. The board messed up the execution, but so did OpenAI leadership when they offered…

One man's altruist is another man's fanatic. I, for one, would prefer an evil bandit over an evil fanatic because at least a bandit sleeps once in a while as that C.S Lewis quote goes.

I don't see why we have to paint these people with vagaries and reduction to analogy

For the board, their job is to keep the mandate of the non-profit. The org is structured to prevent "bandits" from influencing their goals. Hence, I cannot fault non-profit directors for rejecting bandits, that is the reason they are there.

It is like criticising a charity's directors for not bowing to the pressure of large donors to change their focus or mandate. Do we want to live in a world where the rich entrench control and enrich themselves and allies, and we just justify it as bandits being bandits? And anyone who stands up against them gets labelled a fanatic or pejorative altruist?

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

#610

Post by coffeeshopgoth » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

Having served on boards, the one thing I have not seen that would be really key (and maybe I just have not been lucky in my searches), is something that answers the question of what is the language around releasing information regarding the company to the press or in a research capacity? Typically there are rules that are set up to give the board notice of anything going out to the public, be it an article or research paper, that allows for a heads up or gives time to discuss the implications of such a thing. While whistleblowers are necessary, was there a need to be a sort of whistleblower in this case? Was there adequate board discussion around the subject and the paper before the release? If not, nobody needs a rogue board member like that and it was definitely not in the interest of the company - she is the one at fault here. If that process did happen, she definitely did the right thing and shame on the board for not getting out in front of it.