Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 854 posts

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#621

Post by sudosysgen »

WalterBright wrote: post #437
bergen wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mesopothemia was based on morals as far as we know, and they lay the foundation for many technical and scientific advances. And your rights are based on religious and ideological morals. Why do you believe the debate about Roe v. Wade exists? Why do we consider infidelity so bad it can break a contract of marriage? What is marriage? Those are not laws of nature.

Your right to not be attacked, robbed, or defrauded by others is inherent, not something conferred by religion or morality. As for abortion, the debate there rests on a conflict of the rights of two people, and there isn't any clear answer to it based on rights. Marriage is tangled up with the rights of children. Children are not fully formed humans and we allot them a subset of the rights of adults. Marriage without…

> Your right to not be attacked, robbed, or defrauded by others is inherent, not something conferred by religion or morality.

It most certainly isn't. Inherent from where or what? In nature, I have no right not to be attacked by a lion or a pack of wolves, so surely this right cannot exist outside society, and then how can it derive from something outside society? Without a God, man in nature has no rights, though you can follow Hobbes and assert some principles from an idea of universal morality. I'm not aware of any serious philosopher who pretends to be able to derive any right at all without religion or morality.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#622

Post by doktrin »

jfoster wrote: post #601
doktrin wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He might not be a super technical software engineer, but is he "non-technical" in that he can't even write some simple python or something equivalent? 1. that's a very low bar, almost to the point of making any distinction meaningless 2. imho, "technical" and "non-technical" are context dependent, and not intrinsic human qualities. Speaking for myself : I'm a technical individual contributor on my current team, but…

OK, so what's the bar by which Altman would be considered "non-technical"?

You tell me. Did he make meaningful technical contributions to OAI?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#623

Post by selimthegrim »

gmerc wrote: post #391

Technology has replaced religion but fills the same purpose now. It’s of course heresy to blaspheme against the prophets proclaiming the new AI church in one of the largest digital temples, but it’s true. We gather in these halls to HN Show the miracles delivered through the marvels of our digital lord at our mortal hands, we furiously discus the deep philosophical questions such as Microservice vs Monolith, spread l…

Oh my God, I finally found something that beat Spammers in the hands of an Angry Mod.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#624

Post by mindslight »

jfoster wrote: post #278
protastus wrote: post #65

Telling almost no one in advance was intended to protect the board from Altman's interference but put them in an indefensible situation. Alone against very rich, well connected people, without even a narrative to offer.

It feels like one press release may have changed the outcome entirely. Shouldn't the board be capable of agreeing on a press release among themselves?

Bingo. I think the public conversation would have gone much differently if the board had laid out how Altman's behavior was essentially making OpenAI LLC ungovernable per OpenAI-the-nonprofit's charter. Presumably that public understanding was leading much of the thoughts around employees signing the open letter demanding reinstatement of Altman.

I'd guess the board relied on some generally-bad legal advice from their attorneys about how they could get personally sued for libel for airing dirty laundry etc. Not having huge financial stakes, and seemingly having been picked for being conservative rather than risk takers, they followed this to their detriment. Staying quiet let Altman build a following and lead the whole situation, something Altman is seemingly fantastic at doing.

So ultimately what was a pivotal moment in governance of following the nonprofit charter, played quite poorly, ended up being a coup by Altman to escape that one layer of "boxing". Which given how poorly we've done so far at "aligning" centralized capitalism to the needs of most individuals (of which this seems to be a subproblem) wasn't terribly surprising!

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#625

Post by karma_pharmer »

benreesman wrote: post #224
snowwrestler wrote: post #52

Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.

It’s utterly mundane, completely common knowledge for those who have been around long enough to have watched both the start and end on Loopt that Altman is a dark-triad sociopath with one marketable skill: (in pg’s words) “becoming powerful”. Guy can’t code, can’t design, can’t publish, can’t climb a traditional corporate ladder with even modest guardrails against fraud, can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Can…

I just want to say I love this comment and the way it's written, I wish more news articles had such creative verbiage! But could somebody please translate the following into something my helplessly-uncool brain can grok?

> I’ve been short this nonsense for a decade,

...this nonsense = deep learning? I mean the current research wave is only just barely 10 years old and its financial/investable effects definitely less than 10 years old....

Or is "this nonsense" something else? Can you short Sam Altman the individual? takemymoney.jpeg I will chug that ice-nine kool-aid.

> LeCun woke up the other day and chose violence on X.

maybe just a link?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#626

Post by Log_out_ »

azinman2 wrote: post #412
bergen wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Musk builds nothing. There is a huge team he leads, consisting of engineers and scientists and they develop technology that Musk then sells. He's a glorified cars salesman. Maybe he was essential to get the rockets built, but neither did he build them, nor contribute essential technical details, so that it would be uniquely him who could do it given same financial backing.

Meanwhile the competitors are failing. He’s doing something right that’s beyond just car salesman.

In the realm of invisible monopolies and quasi-state owned the privately owned individual is only half blind.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#627

Post by ativzzz »

Fanmade wrote: post #460
thefounder wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invention is one thing, a product to sell is almost an entirely different thing. The more I see the more I realise that being technical is almost all the time the least important part. You need to get people around you to succeed. In practice that means investors so that you can hire and people with the right connections so you can get sweet deals. You need people skills not inventions. And a bit more fake it until y…

I think that this is true, and I hate it. In a previous job, I had to work with the worst (shop)-framework I have ever seen. It is very expensive, over-engineered in the worst ways, very slow and awful to use. The blatant misunderstanding of software architecture principles in that software is hard to put into words. For example: It took an experienced developer two weeks and more than 2000 LoC in more than 40 files…

> I know a lot of good developers and people who can sell themselves really well. Sadly, these two groups hardly overlap.

Because the best marketers and salespeople are plainly people who lie. People who lie about the capability of the product they are selling to get their customer to buy more of it. Good marketers and salespeople cripple their financial gain by being truthful. So liars get more money, so they get more customers, so they get more power. So it goes.

Software development, being somewhere between a craft, an art, and a science, is fundamentally grounded in truth. You can't bullshit your way to quality software. You can't lie to the computer like you can to a human (maybe with AI you can). So "success" in these two fields is diametrically different.

Though I bet you'll get the opposite answer on a sales/marketing forum.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#628

Post by unclebucknasty »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #619
unclebucknasty wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft... But, what kind of Wild West is this? It's all so unhinged and strange. There are no NDAs, non-competes or other impediments? MS just guts OpenAI at its whim? > there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over. ...If MS can do this, then there's a…

The beauty of California is that there are no non competes, for anyone, ever. It is a very pro employee policy, hence attractive to the best and brightest.

Good to see someone positive about California, given all of the politically-motivated negativity. It's a great state for many reasons.

I mentioned non-competes as one of a universe of things that makes this unusual; including its original non-profit status becoming substantially for-profit, and the apparent ease with which MS can now gut the supposedly controlling non-profit and walk away with everything.

And, I'm guessing even the CA policy on non-competes wasn't conceived with the idea of one company simply "taking" another company at-will, even if that scenario is technically covered.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#629

Post by karma_pharmer »

ocodo wrote: post #485
lll-o-lll wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dammit, why are monsters lurking under all my cool tech rocks?

Because a purely competitive operating environment favors the sociopath.

Oh right that's why there are zero sociopaths at NGOs...

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#630

Post by JeremyNT »

tibbar wrote: post #128
bmitc wrote: post #86

What is still bizarre is how the board brought him back. I just don't understand that from any angle. It is very clear that he lied and schemed. So why was there any issue? He had no power once fired. If another company wants to hire him, fine. If he wants to make platitudes on Twitter, who cares? Employees threatened to leave? Let them. I imagine many of them wouldn't, and if they did, you could just rehire and find…

You had the answer there before you dismissed it -- the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft (which has OpenAI's IP rights) offering to hire them all immediately. This included the company's key leadership. The organization was unraveling overnight. This was far past the tipping point of "a few…

> This was far past the tipping point of "a few disgruntled employees might leave" - there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.

But if they had the moral conviction, it seems like this would have been the right choice to make, because it would have diluted Altman's power (unless they trust Nadella even less than they trust Altman?)

Post reply on HN