Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

Post by JetSpiegel » Sun, Nov 19, 2023, 4:30 PM UTC

sicariusnoctis wrote: post #671

devbent wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume the AGI has access to a credit card and it goes ahead and reserves itself every GPU cycle in existence so it's 1 month is turned into a day, and now we're back to being fucked. Maybe an ongoing GPU shortage is the only thing that'll save us!

How would an AGI gain access to an unlimited credit card that immediately gives it remote access to all GPUs in the world?

Post by loeber » Sun, Nov 19, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

svnt wrote: post #563

loeber wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I just wrote about this as well on my substack. There were two significant conflicts of interest on the OpenAI board. Adam D'Angelo should've resigned once he started Poe. The other conflict was that both Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner were associated with another AI governance organization.

Thanks — the history of board participation you sleuthed is interesting for sure: https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

Post by veidr » Sun, Nov 19, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #549

T-A wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario usually bandied about is AGI self-improving at an accelerating rate: once you cross the threshold to self-improvement, you quickly get superintelligence with God-like powers beyond human comprehension (a.k.a. the Singularity) as AGI v1 creates a faster AGI v2 which creates a faster AGI v3 etc. Any AI researchers still plodding along at mere human speed are then doomed: they won't be able to catch up even…

It seems to me that non-General AI would typically outcompete AGI, all else held equal. In such a scenario even a first-past-the-post AGI would have trouble becoming an overload if non-Generalized AIs were marshaled against it.

Post by startupsfail » Sun, Nov 19, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

netaustin wrote: post #696

emptysongglass wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you still hireable? If I knew you orchestrated two coups at previous companies and I was responsible for hiring, you would be radioactive to me. Especially knowing that all that effort went into putting together a successful coup over other work. Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder,…

I feel like in the parent comment coup is sort of shorthand for the painful but necessary work of building consensus that it is time for new leadership. Necessary is in the eye of the beholder. These certainly can be petty when they are bald-faced power grabs, but they equally can be noble if the leader is a despot or a criminal. I would also not call Sam Altman's ouster a coup even if the board were manipulated into…

Post by blazespin » Sun, Nov 19, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

swatcoder wrote: post #101

peter422 wrote: post #59

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…

A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory. But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's…