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

OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 946 posts

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#661

Post by laurels-marts »

arthur_sav wrote: post #628
kmlevitt wrote: post #81

Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…

> Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. You mean to tell me that the 3-member board told Sutskever that Sama was being bad and he was like "ok, I believe you".

Two possibilities when it comes to Ilya:

1. He’s the actual ringleader behind the coup. He got everyone on board, provided reassurances and personally orchestrated and executed the firing. Most likely possibly and the one that’s most consistent with all the reporting and evidence so far (including this article).

2. Others on the board (e.g. Adam) masterminded the coup and saw Ilya as a fellow traveler useful idiot that could be deceived into voting against Sam and destroy the company he and his 700 colleagues spent so hard to build. He then also puppeteer Ilya to do the actual firing over Google Meet.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#662

Post by blackoil »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #487

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…

> money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators

Was this for OpenAI or independent venture. If OpenAI than a red flag but an independent venture than seems like a non-issue. There is a demand for AI accelerators, and he wants to enter that business. Unless he is using OpenAI money to buy inferior products or OpenAI wants to work on something competing there is no conflict of interest and OpenAI board shouldn't care.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#663

Post by selestify »

rjzzleep wrote: post #526
shandor wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused how the board is still keeping their radio silence 100%. Where I’m from, with a shitstorm this big raging, and the board doing nothing, they might very easily be personally held responsible for all kinds of utterly nasty legal action. Is it just different because they’re a nonprofit? Or how on earth the board is thinking they can get away with this anymore?

This isn't unlike the radio silence Brendan Eich kept, when the Mozilla sh* hit the fan. This is in my opinion the outcome of when really technical and scientific people have been given decades of advice of not talking to the public. I have seen this play out many times in different locations for different people. A lot of technical folks like myself were given the advice that actions speak louder than words. I was o…

Wow, I have nothing to say, other than that’s some major BS!

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#664

Post by 698969 »

pavlov wrote: post #521
23B1 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.

OpenAI is a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary. The controlling board is at the non-profit and immune to shareholder concerns. Investors in OpenAI-the-business were literally told they should think of it as a donation. There’s not much grounds for a shareholder lawsuit when you signed away everything to a non-profit.

I guess big in-person investors were told as much, but if it's about that big purple banner on their site, that seems to be an image with no alt-text. I wonder if an investor with impaired vision may be able to sue them for failing to communicate that part.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#665

Post by blackoil »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #487

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…

> There has to be a bigger story to this.

On assumption that board is making a sound decision, it could be simply that board acted stupid and egoistic. Unless they can give better reasons that is a logical inference.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#666

Post by seanhunter »

fastball wrote: post #588
dwd wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we even have an idea of how the vote went? Greg was not invited (losing Sam one vote), and Sam may have been asked to sit out the vote, so the 3 had a majority. Ilya who is at least on "Team Sam" now; may have voted no. Or simply went along thinking he could be next out the door at that point; we just don't know. It's probably fair to say not letting Greg know the board was getting together (and letting it proceed…

I don't understand how you only need 4 people for quorum on a 6-person board.

It depends entirely on how the votes are structured, the issue at hand and what the articles of the company say about the particular type of issue.

On the board that I was on we had normal matters which required a simple majority except that some members had 2 votes and some got 1. Then there were "Supermajority matters" which had a different threshold and "special supermajority matters" which had a third threshold.

Generally unless the articles say otherwise I think a quorum means a majority of votes are present[1], so 4 out of 6 would count if the articles didn't say you needed say 5 out of 6 for some reason.

It's a little different if some people have to recuse themselves for an issue. So say the issue is "Should we fire CEO Sam Altman", the people trying to fire Sam would likely try to say he should recuse himself and therefore wouldn't get a vote so his vote wouldn't also count in deciding whether or not there's a quorum. That's obviously all BS but it is the sort of tactic someone might pull. It wouldn't make any difference if the vote was a simple majority matter and they already had a majority without him though.

[1] There are often other requirements to make the meeting valid though eg notice requirements so you can't just pull a fast one with your buddies, hold the meeting without telling some of the members and then claim it was quorate so everyone else just have to suck it up. This would depend on the articles of the company and the not for profit though.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#667

Post by mcv »

aravindgp wrote: post #523
chucke1992 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fascinating considering that D'Angelo had a history with coup (in Quora he did the same, didn't he?)

Wow this is significant, he did this to Charlie cheever the best guy at Facebook and quora. He got Matt on board and fired Charlie without informing investors. Only difference this time 100 billion company is at stake at openai. Process is similar. This going very wrong for Adam D'Angelo. With this I hope other board members get to the bottom get Sam back and vote out D'Angelo from board. This school level immaturity…

People keep talking about an inexperienced board, but this sounds like this D'Angelo might be a bit too experienced, especially in this kind of boardroom maneuvering.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#668

Post by tempaway511751 »

"Two explanations" isn't accurate, its more like Ilya gave two examples of Sam not being candid with the board. "Two explanations" makes it sound like two competing explanations. What Ilya gave was two examples of the same problem.

I can't help thinking that Sam Altmans universal popularitity with OpenAI staff might be because they all get $10million each if he comes back and resets everything back to how it was last week.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#669

Post by katastofik »

kmlevitt wrote: post #640
Wronnay wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Issue with these two explanations from the board is that this is normally nothing which would result into firing the CEO. In my eyes these two explanations are simple errors which can occur to everybody and in a normal situation you would talk about these Issues and you could resolve them in 5min without firing anybody.

I agree with you. But that leads me to believe that they did not, in fact, have a good reason to fire their CEO. I'll change my mind about that if or when they provide better reasons. Look at all the speculation on here. There are dozens of different theories about why they did what they did running so rampant people are starting to accept each of them as fact, when in fact probably all of them are going to turn out…

> Why are we not taking them at their word?

Ignoring the lack of credibility in the given explanations, people are, perhaps, also wary that taking boards/execs at their word hasn't always worked out so well in the past.

Until an explanation that at least passes the sniff test for truthiness comes out, people will keep speculating.

And so they should.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#670

Post by bryanrasmussen »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #487

There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…

>Combine that with a totally inexperienced board, and D'Angelo's maneuvering, and you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history

do we have a ranking of shitshows in tech history though - how does this really compare to Jobs' ouster at Apple.

Cambridge Analytics and The Facebook we must do better greatest hits?

Post reply on HN