Here you go: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
I moved your comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372541 to here, where it seems like it can help more readers. I hope that's ok!
Thank you.
Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
81–90 of 625 posts
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#82The only specific accusation made in the article is that Sam criticized Helen Toner for writing a paper: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/ That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI. Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he w…
It's interesting but it may well be they both have a point: Helen for telling him to get lost and Sam for attempting to remove her before she would damage the company. But she could have made that point more forcefully by not comparing Anthropic to OpenAI, after all who better than her to steer OpenAI in the right direction. I noted in a comment elsewhere that all of these board members appear to have had at least on…
> The open question then is: does she really believe that no other entity has the resources to match OpenAI and does she believe that if such an entity does exist that it too will self destruct rather than to go through with the development?
People at "top" companies fall into this fallacy very readily. FAANG (especially Google and Facebook engineers) think this way on all sorts of things.
The reality is that for any software project, your competition is rarely more than 1 year behind you if what you're doing is obviously useful. OpenAI made ChatGPT, and that revealed that this sort of thing was obviously useful, kicking off the arms race. Now they are bleeding money running a model that nobody could run profitably in order to keep their market position.
I have tried to explain this to xooglers several times, and it often goes in one ear and out the other until they get complacent and the competition swipes them about a year later.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#83>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. Now we know where that came from
Non-profit or not, steering the company towards non-existence isnt in the interest of the company.
But that's the problem, the board's mission was doomed from the get-go. Their mission isn't to be "in the interest of the company" but "in the interest of humanity" i.e. if they believe OpenAI at its pace would destroy humanity, then their mission is literally to destroy OpenAI itself.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The paper reads a lot more nuanced than that. It compares the "system card" released with GPT-4 to the delay of Claude and the merits of each approach vis a vis safety.
Not really, and your own description is little different from the person you're responding to anyway?
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Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, he signed up for exactly that outcome with full knowledge it could happen. Outing a psychiatrist's internet ramblings to his patients is not high on my list of journalistic crimes.
The same can be said for any other instance of deanonymization, and yet we do not thereby (by default) absolve everyone who deanonymizes someone else against their will. Was Scott perfectly careful? No. Was this something that harmed him in straightforward and predictable ways, and done against his wishes? Yes. Was there a trade-off that made it worth it? Not a question that Cade Metz has seen fit to answer publicly.
There's a whole section at the bottom of the published piece where Metz explains his motivations.
But yeah- we've deviated too far from the main topic, so let's just agree to agree.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#86>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity, when many of us believe that OpenAI’s tech is p…
>Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity, when many of us believe that OpenAI’s tech is perfectly safe and amazingly beneficial?
Yeah, well, hate to burst your nice warm Silicon-Valley bubble, but most Americans believe that continuing to create smarter and smarter AIs is dangerous, so who's playing god now?
(No one I know thinks it is dangerous to fine-tune GPT-4 or to integrate GPT-4 deeply into the economy: the danger is the plans for the creation of much bigger models and algorithmic improvements.)
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty heavily implied by OpenAI's charter: https://openai.com/charter It's weird to me that Helen is getting so much crap for upholding the charter. No one objected to the charter at the time it was published. The charter was always available for employees, investors, and customers to read. Did everyone expect it to be ignored when push came to shove? There's a lot of pressure on Helen right now from people who…
Investors wanted to have a commercial enterprise while pretending it was a nonprofit acting for the good of humanity. This helps market something as scary and potentially destructive as AI. "It can't be that bad, they're a nonprofit with altruistic goals!" Then the investors get mad when the board they intended to be figureheads actually try to uphold some principles. Best to rip the band-aid off and stop pretending.
Let’s assume this happened. Then everyone would make everything in their power to get their old CEO back which made this possible.
Oh wait.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how did this improve society? I only see negatives. Other entities with less of a brake on their ethics are gaining ground. Microsoft of all parties is strengthening their position and has full access to the core tech.
She published AI safety research as a member of a board whose mandate it is to act as a check and balance on the operation of an AI company. You are saying that she should hide information from the public out of loyalty to the company. edit: Or that the board can't actually make a difference because whatever OpenAI doesn't do someone else will. But if people actually thought that were true they wouldn't have set up t…
No, I am not saying that. I am saying that Altman has a point (he's trying to deal with the FCC and it doens't help if at the same time a board member releases a paper critical of the company and actively comparing it to another), while at the same time she has a point which is that it is very well possible (and even probable) that OpenAI's safety could be improved on. Now, what would serve the charter better: to use that stick to get OpenAI to improve or to blow up OpenAI under the assumption that other leadership is going to be at least as ethical as they are with as a major chance of the subsequent fall-out that Microsoft will end up holding even more of the cards?
It's amateur behavior. I'm sympathetic to her goals, less impressed by the execution.
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But you do operate on a larger stage and sticking your head in the sand and pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist is also not going to work. I'm sure that's how tobacco and oil executives justify their paycheck: "If I wasn't doing it, someone else would". Probably lots of criminals justify their crimes using similar reasoning too. Ultimately it's not quite true. If you quit your job at that tobacco or oil c…
I can see a number of points in time where that goal could have been achieved much better than in the way it happened. For instance: instead of a single deal with a large tech company it should have been a financial deal shared between a syndicate. That would have been a lot safer than to give MS the keys to the kingdom. But she was on the board when that happened and presumably agreed to the deal or she could have r…
That's not obvious to me. Suppose OpenAI deliberately partners with a number of different infra providers. That creates a bunch of drag because they have to create a compatibility layer for staying agnostic to the underlying infra. And the outcome in a situation like this would probably be fairly similar: Since big tech companies are focused on making a buck, they would probably pressure the board to do whatever they think will be most profitable, just like Microsoft.
Additionally, the role of the board is to supervise the CEO, not make strategic decisions, no? If the MS partnership was a mistake, Sam is the primary person to blame here.
I'm seeing a lot of "Monday morning quarterback" in this thread
Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
#90The main takeaway from this whole saga is, be careful who you allow on your board. Nearly everyone on OpenAI board is young, inexperienced and unqualified to be on the board of one of the most important companies on the planet. Here's Ms. Toner's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/
>Nearly everyone on OpenAI board is young, inexperienced and unqualified to be on the board of one of the most important companies on the planet.
Jumping off of that, I'm genuinely curious what, in Sam's resume, suggests he should be in charge of "one of the most important companies on the planet".