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

businessinsider.com

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

#721

Post by jacquesm »

Zolde wrote: post #594
havercosine wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive question. In my part of the world, board meetings for such consequential decisions can never be called out on such short notice. Board meeting has to be called ahead of time by days, all the board members must be given written agenda. They have to acknowledge in writing that they've got this agenda. If the procedures such as these aren't followed, the firing cannot stand in court of law. The number of days are…

No. Apparently they had to give 48 hours notice for calling special teleconference meetings, and only Mira was notified (not a board member) and Greg was not even invited. > at least four days before any such meeting if given by first-class mail or forty-eight hours before any such meeting if given personally, [] or by electronic transmission. But the bylaws also state that a board member may be fired (or resign) at…

Haste is not something compatible with board activity unless the circumstances clearly demand it and that wasn't the case here.

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

#722

Post by achenet »

passion__desire wrote: post #596
gardenhedge wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An argument could be made that sports - and a sports organization - helps society

Fast fashion and fashion industry in general is useless to society. But rich jobless people need a place to hangout so they create an activity to justify.

useless to society...

fashion allows people to optimize their appearance so as to get more positive attention from others. Or, put more crudely, it helps people look good so they can get laid.

Not sure that it's net positive for society as a whole, but individual humans certainly benefit from the fashion industry. Ask anyone who has ever received a compliment on their outfit.

This is true for rich people as well as not so rich people - having spent some time working as a salesman at H&M, I can tell you that lower income members of society (like, for example, H&M employees making minimum wage) are very happy to spend a fair percentage of their income on clothing.

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

#723

Post by munksbeer »

sgt101 wrote: post #647
todd3834 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I should have said, it’s my opinion that it has had a positive impact. I still think it’s easy to see them as a non profit. Even with everything they announced at AI day. Can anyone make an argument against it? Or just downvote because you don’t agree.

I think ChatGPT has created some harms: - It's been used unethically for psychological and medical purposes (with insufficient testing and insufficient consent, and possible psychological and physical harms). - It has been used to distort educational attainment and undermine the current basis of some credentials as a result. - It has been used to create synthetic content that has been released unmarked into the inter…

> It has devalued and replaced the work of people who relied on that work for their incomes.

Many people (myself included) would argue that is true for almost all technological progress and adds more value to society as a whole than it takes away.

Obviously the comparisons are not exact, and have been made many times already, but you can just pick one of countless examples that devalued certain workers wages but made so many more people better off.

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

#724

Post by jacquesm »

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.

That's a supermajority in principle, but the board originally had 9 members and this is clearly a controversial decision and at least one board member is conflicted, and another has already expressed his regret about his role in the decision(s).

So the support was very thin and this being a controversial decision the board should have sought counsel on whether or not their purported reasons had enough weight to support a hasty decision. There is no 'undo' button on this and board member liability is a thing. The probably realize all that which is the reason for the radio silence, they're just waiting for the other shoe to drop (impending lawsuit) after which they can play the 'no comment because legal proceedings' game. This may well get very messy or, alternatively it can result in all parties affected settling with the board and the board riding off into the sunset to wreak havoc somewhere else (assuming anybody will still have them, they're damaged goods).

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

#725

Post by jacquesm »

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".

Based on Ilya's tweets and his name on that letter (still surprised about that, I have never sees someone calling for their own resignation) that seems to be the story.

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

#726

Post by winterplace »

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…

Your instinct was right, who advised you against that?

What happened in the days before you got the severance package?

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

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

#727

Post by VBprogrammer »

sgt101 wrote: post #647
todd3834 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I should have said, it’s my opinion that it has had a positive impact. I still think it’s easy to see them as a non profit. Even with everything they announced at AI day. Can anyone make an argument against it? Or just downvote because you don’t agree.

I think ChatGPT has created some harms: - It's been used unethically for psychological and medical purposes (with insufficient testing and insufficient consent, and possible psychological and physical harms). - It has been used to distort educational attainment and undermine the current basis of some credentials as a result. - It has been used to create synthetic content that has been released unmarked into the inter…

> - It has been used to distort educational attainment and undermine the current basis of some credentials as a result.

I'm going to go ahead and call this a positive. If the means for measuring ability in some fields is beaten by a stochastic parrot then these fields need to adapt their methods so that testing measures understanding in a variety of ways.

I'm only slightly bitter because I was always rubbish at long form essays. Thankfully in CS these were mostly an afterthought.

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

#728

Post by achenet »

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #704
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…

> you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history the second after Musk taking over Twitter

We live interesting times ^_^

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

#729

Post by doktrin »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #299
fullshark wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems most likely Sustkever wanted him fired and then realized his mistake. Ultimately the board was probably quietly seething about the direction the company was headed, got mad enough to retake the reigns with that stunt and then realized what that actually meant. Now they are trying to unring the bell but cannot.

> Now they are trying to unring the bell but cannot. Well, they can unring the bell pretty easy. They were given an easy out. Reinstate Sam (he wants to come back) and resign. However, they CONTINUE to push back and refuse to step down.

> Well, they can unring the bell pretty easy. They were given an easy out.

> Reinstate Sam (he wants to come back) and resign.

Wasn't the ultimate sticking point Altmans' demand that the board issue a written retraction absolving him of any and all wrongdoing? If so, that isn't exactly an "easy" out given that it kicks the door wide open for extremely punishing litigation. I'd even go so far as to say it's a demand Altman knew full well would not and could not be met.

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

#730

Post by mcv »

Zolde wrote: post #714
mcv wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this kind of reasoning can possible hold up. How can board members not be invited to such an important decision? You can't say they don't have to be there because they won't be a board member after this decision; they're still a board member before the decision has been made to remove them. If Ilya was on the side of Sam and Greg, the other 3 never had a majority. The only explanation is that Ilya vot…

Everyone assumes that the vote must have happened during the special meeting, but the decision to fire the CEO/or CEO stepping down may happen at any time. > if the vote happened in an illegitimate way, I'd expect Sam and Greg to immediately challenge it and ignore the decision, and that didn't happen. So perhaps the vote was legit? - Investigation concludes Sam has not been consistently candid. - Board realizes it h…

If the vote was made when no one was there to see it, did it really happen? There's a reason to make these votes in meetings, because then you've got a record that it happened. I don't see how the board as a whole can make a decision without having a board meeting.
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