721–730 of 754 posts
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Your post is internally inconsistent. Defining a coup as "any takeover of power" is inconsistent with saying that firing Sam Altman is a coup. CEOs do not have and should not have any power vis-à-vis the board. It's right there in the name. Executives do not have any right to their position. They are an officer, i.e., an agent of the stakeholders. The idea that the executive is the holder of the power and it's a "cou…
Okay, so a CEO doesn't have any power to seize.... Does the chairman of the board have any power?
Specifically: In the case of OpenAI, I don't know if the chairman is elected separately or is chosen by the board from among themselves.
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That's true, but Sutskever and Co still have the head start. On the models, the training data, the GPT4 licenses, etc. Their Achilles heel is the compute which Microsoft will pull out. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia may sell their Open AI stakes at a discount, but I'm sure either Google or Amazon will snap it up. All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Mic…
It doesn’t sound like Sutskever is running anything. OpenAI reportedly put out a memo saying they’re trying to get Sam and Greg back: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-optimistic-it...
Most likely outcome here does seem to be that Altman/Brockman come back, Sutskever leaves and joins Google, and OpenAI becomes for all intensive purposes a commercial endeavor, with Microsoft wielding a lot more clout over them (starting with one or more board seats).
Big winner in this scenario would be Google.
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D’Angelo had to have voted in favor because otherwise they don’t get a four vote majority.
You only need 4 votes to have a majority if Sam and Greg were present for the vote, which neither were. Ilya + the 2 stooges voting in favor and D'Angelo voting against would be a 3-1 majority.
Everyone I speak to who have have been building on top of OpenAI - and I don’t mean just stupid chat apps - feel like the rug has just been pulled out from under them. If as it seems, dev day was the last straw, what does that say to all the devs?
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D’Angelo had to have voted in favor because otherwise they don’t get a four vote majority.
You only need 4 votes to have a majority if Sam and Greg were present for the vote, which neither were. Ilya + the 2 stooges voting in favor and D'Angelo voting against would be a 3-1 majority.
It does not seem reasonable that only some members of a board could get together and vote things without others present. This would be chaos.
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Max Levchin was an organizer of two coups while at PayPal. Both times, he believed it was necessary for the success of the company. Whether that was correct or not, they eventually succeeded and I don’t think the coups really hurt his later career.
This example seems to be survivorship bias. Personally, if someone approached me to suggest backstabbing someone else, I wouldn't trust that they wouldn't eventually backstab me as well. @bear141 said "People should oppose openly or leave." [1] and I agree completely. That said, don't take vacations! (when Elon Musk was ousted from PayPal in the parent example, etc.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326443
They absolutely would. The other thing you should take away from this is how they'd do it-- by manipulating proxies to do it with/for them, which makes it harder to see coming and impossible to defend against.
Whistleblowers are pariahs by necessity. You can't trust a known snitch won't narc on you if the opportunity presents itself. They do the right thing and make themselves untrustworthy in the process.
(This is IMO why cults start one way and devolve into child sex abuse so quickly-- MAD. You can't snitch on the leader when Polaroids of yourself exist...)
> don't take vacations!
This can get used against you either way, so you might as well take that vacation for mental health's sake.
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What is Falun Gong exactly? I never understood what they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong No guarantees about NPOV on that page. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Falun_Gong If you want to see what makes WikiPedia tick that's a great place to start.
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> The board's job is not to do right There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…
As someone who has orchestrated two coups in different organizations, where the leadership did not align with the organization's interests and missions, I can assure you that the final stage of such a coup is not something that can be executed after just an hour of preparation or thought. It requires months of planning. The trigger is only pulled when there is sufficient evidence or justification for such action. Bui…