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Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

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Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#711

Post by cthalupa »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #513
logicchains wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of planning an assassination is not the same thing as the cost (and risk) of carrying out an assassination, what a stupid take.

There's been a fair amount of research into hooking up LLMs with the ability to call APIs, browse the web, and even control robots, no? The barrier between planning and doing is not a hard one. As for cost and risk -- ask GPT-5 how to minimize it. As Nathan said in his thread, it's not about this generation, it's about the next generation of models. A key question is whether the control problem gets more difficult as…

The image is OCR'ed and that data is fed back into the context. This is no more interesting or indicative of it passing the mirror test than if you had copy and pasted the previous conversation and asked it what the deal was.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#712

Post by pms »

sanderjd wrote: post #329
drooby wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just so strange. This is such a clearly justifiable reason that the fact that they didn't argue it... or argue.. anything, makes me very suspicious that it is correct.

Yeah, I totally agree! Like, this is such an obviously true and valid reason to fire him, but they never came out and said it! So ... is this not what it actually was? Or ... what? It truly is mystifying.

I think they didn't anticipate sucha a large backlash, especially from investors. They felt the backlash threatens OpenAI, both its non-profit and for-profit arms, so they reverted their decision, which in my opinion was a mistake, but time will tell.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#713

Post by sanderjd »

paulddraper wrote: post #479
sanderjd wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to run a non profit when you promised all your employees you'd make them millionaires.

I'm pretty sure all the employees are employed by a for-profit.

I don't know if that's true of all of them, but it certainly seems to be true of most, and that's entirely my point: the structure just doesn't work. All (or at least the vast majority) of the employees have for-profit incentives, which - as we've now seen - makes it impossible for the non-profit board to act in accordance with their mission, when those actions conflict with the for-profit incentives, as they inevitably will. It was doomed from the start.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#714

Post by sanderjd »

Aperocky wrote: post #482
sanderjd wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This episode taught us the very obvious lesson that if you hire people incentivized by equity growth, it is not possible to take steps that detrimentally impact equity growth, without losing all those people. The board had already lost the moment it allowed hundreds of fat compensation packages to be signed.

> lost the moment it allowed hundreds of fat compensation packages to be signed. There will be no OpenAI to begin with had that not been the case.

Maybe maybe not. There certainly wouldn't have been the version of OpenAI that runs a massively successful and profitable AI product company. But reading the OpenAI charter, it's pretty clear that running a massively successful AI product company was never a necessary component of the organization; and indeed, as we just saw, is actually a conflict of interest with the organization's charter.

I don't really care much about the demise of OpenAI-the-nonprofit - I don't think it was ever a very promising approach to accomplishing its own goals, so I don't lament its failure all that much - but I feel like there is a kind of gaslighting going on, where people are trying to erase the history of the organization as a mission-oriented non-profit, and claim that it was always intended to be a wildly profitable product company, and that just isn't the case.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#715

Post by freeopinion »

bayindirh wrote: post #633
int_19h wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In both of your examples, the result of "immoral inputs" is immediate tangible harm. In case of GPT-4 or any other LLM, it's merely "immoral output" - i.e. text. It does not harm anyone by itself.

> In case of GPT-4 or any other LLM, it's merely "immoral output" - i.e. text. It does not harm anyone by itself. Assuming that you're not running this query over an API and relaying these answers to another control system or a gullible operator. An aircraft control computer or reactor controller won't run my commands regardless of its actuators connected or not. Same for weapon systems. Hall pass given to AI systems…

We give hall passes to more than AI. We give passes to humans. We could have a detailed discussion of how to blow up the U.S. Capitol building during the State of the Union address. It is allowed to be a best selling novel or movie. But we freak out if an AI joins the discussion?

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#716

Post by sanderjd »

bmitc wrote: post #514
sanderjd wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how it will all play out, but I will be shocked if there is no government investigation coming out of all this.

Yea, it seems really weird that he and others can just form a non-profit and then later have it own a for-profit with the full intention of turning everything into a for-profit enterprise. Seems like tax evasion and a few other violations of what a non-profit is supposed to be.

Yep, if this is an acceptable fact pattern, it seems to create a bunch of loopholes in the legal treatment of non-profits vs for-profits. I think the simpler conclusion is that it actually isn't an acceptable fact pattern, and we'll be seeing fines or other legal action.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#717

Post by sanderjd »

pms wrote: post #712
sanderjd wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I totally agree! Like, this is such an obviously true and valid reason to fire him, but they never came out and said it! So ... is this not what it actually was? Or ... what? It truly is mystifying.

I think they didn't anticipate sucha a large backlash, especially from investors. They felt the backlash threatens OpenAI, both its non-profit and for-profit arms, so they reverted their decision, which in my opinion was a mistake, but time will tell.

Yeah, I guess so. I keep waffling between thinking it's some 4d chess thing, and thinking it's just normal human fallibility, where the board just made a massive mistake in predicting how it would go. But I just struggle so much to imagine that, because everyone I know in the industry, regardless of their level of expertise or distance from OpenAI, immediately knew how big a deal it was going to be, when we heard he was hired. But supposedly the people on the board had no idea? I think this might be the right conclusion, but I nevertheless struggle to fathom it.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#718

Post by sanderjd »

staunton wrote: post #626
octacat wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they gave a reasonable reason to the public, they could get away with it. Shady CEO vs equally shady board.

My take is that the board probably never had a chance no matter what they said or did. The company already "belonged" to Altman and Microsoft. The board was just there for virtue signaling and for quite a while already had no real power anymore beyond a small threat of creating bad publicity.

I think they could have actually blown up the whole thing and remained in charge of a greatly-diminished but also re-aligned non-profit organization. A lot of people (like me) would have thought, holy crap, that was insanely bold and unprecedented, I can't believe they actually did that, but it was admirably principled.

Instead it was a confusing shambles that just left them looking like idiots with no plan.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#719

Post by sanderjd »

timeon wrote: post #655
octacat wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they gave a reasonable reason to the public, they could get away with it. Shady CEO vs equally shady board.

How is public relevant here?

For one thing, we vote for the governments who are now definitely going to heavily regulate them after this fiasco.

But more generally, public perception just is important to any large and broadly targeted enterprise, because "the public" approaches "our customer base" as such an enterprise scales up. Think of companies like Google or Microsoft or Meta or Amazon; essentially everyone (in the US) uses their services in some form or another, so the perception of "the public" is indistinguishable from the perception of "the people who use our services". ChatGPT isn't quite at that point yet, but it's close enough.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#720

Post by sanderjd »

bhpm wrote: post #685
sanderjd wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the public, and to employees.

To what end? The public and the employees don’t have a say in the corporate governance. That is the function of the board. As far as I can tell, the board had no obligation to consult the public or their shareholders or their employees on any of this.

To the public: For the normal PR reasons that every large enterprise is subject to caring about. To employees: I suspect substantially less than the like 95% of employees who came down against the board would have done so if the board had explained what they were thinking. There are probably at least a few people there who are not comfortable viewing themselves as rank mercenaries in service to a profit-and-power-motivated game-player, and actually joined OpenAI with some belief in its mission. But maybe not! I dunno.
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