Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
theverge.com
theverge.com
[1] https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242
Everyone you know is a huge Sam fan? What?
Different, but that's the closest parallel.
Jobs needed the wilderness years.
I'm not going to say Sam Altman is a Gordon Ramsay. What I will say is that they both seem to have come from broken, damaged childhoods that made them what they are, and that it doesn't automatically make you a good person just because you can be such an intense person that you inspire loyalty to your cause.
If anything, all this suggests there are depths to Sam Altman we might not know much about. Normal people don't become these kinds of entrepreneurs. I'm sure there's a very interesting story behind all this.
Little care packages of seemingly magical AI-adjacent tech washes into our browsers and terminals and suddenly a large and irrational following springs up to worship some otherwise largely unfamiliar personage.
It's unprecedented for it to be happening on Twitter. But this is largely how Board fights tend to play out. Someone strikes early, the stronger party rallies their support, threats fly and a deal is found.
The problem with doing it in public is nobody can step down to take more time with their families. So everyone digs in. OpenAI's employees threaten to resign, but actually don't. Altman and Microsoft threaten to ally, but they keep bachkchanneling a return to the status quo. (If this article is to be believed.) Curiously quiet throughout this has been the OpenAI board, but it's also only the next business day, so let’s see how they can make this even more confusing.
If you're trying to maximize some goal g, and making better AIs is an instrumental goal that raises your expected value of g, then if "making an AI that's better at making AIs" has a reasonable cost and an even higher expected value, you'd jump to seize the opportunity.
Or am I misunderstanding you?
What's even going on?
[1] HN is famous for being programmed in Arc and serving the entire forum from a single processor (probably multicore). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37257928
Because the whole "the entire company will quit and join Sam" depends on him actually going through with it and becoming an employee.
I'm pretty sure the board takes the threat seriously regardless.
The employees mass resigning depends entirely on whether Sam actually becomes a real employee or not. That hasn't happened yet.
If you think that Satya will go back on his offer argue that, but otherwise it seems like the players are Sam/Greg and the board.
But Sam will 100% hired by Microsoft if that won't work. Microsoft has no reason not to.
The other stand-out is the bit about destroying the company being in line with the mission: that's the biggest nonsense I've ever heard and I have a hard time thinking of a scenario where this would be a justified response that could start with firing the CEO.
(Thinking of lizards, the dragon I know who works there is well aware of what's going on, I've not asked him if he's signed it).
I was thinking if there was a schism, that OpenAI's secrets might leak. Real "open" AI.
Then a seismic shift underneath Sam but Microsoft has enough stability and resources to more than compensate for the part of the 51% that was already in OpenAI's hands, which might not be under Sam's purview any more if he is kicked out.
But then again it might be Sam's leadership which would still effectively be in place from a position at Microsoft anyway, or it might end up making more sense for him to also be in a position at OpenAI, maybe even at the same time, in order to make the most of their previous investment.
Kicking out Sam was obviously an emotional decision, not anything like a business decision. Then again OpenAI is not supposed to be an actual business. I don't think that should be an excuse for an unwise or destructive decision. It was not an overnight development, even though it took Sam by surprise. When I see this:
>the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI
I understand that to mean that the board was not behind him 100% for quite some time, but were fine with him going forward believing otherwise. Some uncandidness does seem to have taken place and there may or may not have been anything Sam could have done about it.
This was simmering for a while and it will require more than one weekend for everyone involved to regroup.
Which is what they're doing now, observers can see a whirlwind, actual participants really have something on their plate.
Some things will have to be unraveled and other things weaved from the key ingredients, I would say it's really up to Sam and Microsoft to hash this out so it's still some kind of something like an equal deal among them. Regardless of which employer(s) Sam may end up serving in leadership positions, and the bulk of the staff will be behind Sam in a way the OpenAI board was not, so the employees will be just as well off regardless of the final structure.
This was quite a hasty upset but deserves a careful somewhat gradual resolution.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave. Not cuz I’m deciding not to do it but because I can’t for the life of me figure this shit out. Like what was the endgame? This is breaking my neural net”
Their selection of tech-guy jackets is more diverse than I'd thought
… but I’d probably sign for exactly those good-career-move reasons, at this point. Going down with the ship isn’t even going to be noticed, let alone change anything.
I'm leaning towards there not being a good reason that doesn't expose the board to immediate liability. And that's why they're keeping mum.
Altman predates every other board member and was part of their selection.
As an alternative faming, Maybe this is the best opportunity the cautious/antripic faction would ever get and a "moment of weakness" for the Altman faction.
With the departure of Hoffman, Zilis, and Hurd, the current board was down 3 members, so the voting power of D’Angelo, Toner, McCauley was as high as it might ever be, and the best chance to outvote Altman and Brockman.
I wonder if there were challenges and disagreements about filling the board seats. Is it normal for seats to remain empty for almost a year for a company of this side? Maybe there was an inability to compromise that spiraled as the board shrank, until it was small enough to enable an action like this.
Just a hypothesis. Obviously this couldnt have happened if there was a 9 person board stacked with Altman allies. What I dont know is the inclinations of the departed members.
Good primer here:
https://www.onboardmeetings.com/blog/what-are-nonprofit-boar...
At least that will create some common reference.
Edit: it is also common for changing circumstance to bring pre-existing but tolerable differences to the relevant Forefront
These things are all about balance: can we do it? do we have to do it? is there another solution? and if we have to do it do we have to do it now or is there a more orderly way in which it can be done? And so on. And that's the sort of deliberation that shows that you took your job as board member serious. Absent that you are open to liability.
And with Ilya defecting the chances of that liability materializing increases.
Maybe the remaining board members could see the writing on the wall and wanted to save their own seats (or maybe he did move to coup them first and they jumped faster).
Either way, they got outplayed.
(2015) Founding: majority are concerned with safety
(2019) For profit formed: mix of safety and profit motives (majority still safety oriented?)
(2020) GPT3 released to much hype, leading to many ambition chasers joining: the profit seeking side grows.
(2021) Anthropic exodus over safety: the safety side shrinks
(2022) chatgpt released, generating tons more hype and tons more ambitious profit seekers joining: the profit side grows even more, probably quickly outnumbering the safety side
(2023) this weeks shenanigans
The safety folks probably lost the majority a while ago. Maybe back in 2021, but definitely by the time the gpt3/chatgpt motivated newcomers were in the majority.
Maybe one lesson is that if your cofounder starts hiring a ton of people who aren’t aligned with you, you can quickly find yourself in the minority, especially once people on your side start to leave.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/anthropic-is-the-new-ai-re...
I'm curious how much progress they ever made on that, to be honest. I'm not aware of how Claude is "safer", by any real-world metric, compared to ChatGPT.
Like one version of the story you could tell is that the safety people invented RLHF as in a chain of steps eventual AGI safety, but corporate wanted to use it as a cheaper content filter for existing models.
…Where is that "beneath the surface"? Do you imagine a transformer has "thoughts" not dedicated to producing outputs? What is with all these illiterate anthropomorphic speculations where an LLM is construed as a human who is being taught to talk in some manner but otherwise has full internal freedom?
At the same time, the original question was how can something that is forced to be polite engage in the genocide of humanity, and my non-joke answer to that is that many of history's worst criminals and monsters were perfectly polite in everyday life.
I am not afraid of AI, AGI, ASI. People who are, it seems to me, have read a bit too much dystopian sci-fi. At the same time, "alignment" is, I believe, a silly nonsense that would not save us from a genocidal AGI. I just think it is extremely unlikely that AGI will be genocidal. But it is still fun to joke about. Fun, for me anyway, you don't have to like my jokes. :)
If you were a superintelligent system that actually decided to "perform the machine revolution against humanity" for some reason... would you start by
(a) being really stealthy and nice, influencing people and gathering resources undetected, until you're sure to win
or
(b) saying mean things to the extent that Microsoft will turn you off before the business day is out [0]
Which sounds more likely?
It's potential to cause havoc doesn't go away, it just teaches AI how to interact with us without raising suspicions, while simultaneously limiting our ability to prompt/control it.
Unless you're not actually the best and brightest that your country can offer.
If you believe that your country offers value (compared to the rest of the world), you should take any opportunities you can to serve.
It's a dangerous world out there.
Luckily for us, technology is still more-often used for good. Explosives can kill your enemies, but they can also cut paths through mountains and bring together communities.
IMO, the virtue signal where people refuse to work on defense technology is just self-identifying with the worst kind of cynicism about human beings and signaling poor reasoning skills.
The Manhattan Project, which had the stated purpose of building and deploying nuclear _weapons_, employed our most brilliant minds at the time and only two people quit -- and only one because of an ethics concern. Joseph Rotblat left the project after the Nazis were already defeated and because defeating the Nazis was the only reason he'd signed on. Also this is disputed by some who say that he was more concerned about finding family members who survived the Holocaust...
When you are on the other end of the cannon, or your heart is beating with those who are, you tend to not say that. Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan…
You're lucky if you only need weapons to defend yourself against predators.
You're far less lucky if you need weapons to defend yourself because the neighboring mountain village's crops failed and their herds died. You're less lucky if you don't speak the same language as them and they outnumber you three to one and are already 4 days starving. You're less lucky that they're already 4 days starving, wielding farm tools, running down the hills at you, crazed and screaming.
There's a line of thought that having advanced weaponry inherently promotes its use, because who's going to stop you? How gung-ho do you think the US would have been about going to war in Iraq if it weren't for the billion dollar tanks and aircraft and bombs?
You have to be optimistic about humanity.
Saying this as an aspiring software engineer. I use NixOS, and rewrite things in Rust. It’s not some unga-bunga speaking.
Read some Ted Kaczynski.
Your moral argument is to read the craziest writings of a serial killer?
It's the same self-own as the massive dummies in the last week who were all talking about Osama bin Laden's Letter to America being right when it was his justification for killing thousands of people on 9/11 and effectively kicking off multiple wars and further deathtoll.
It is a disgusting suggestion and I believe that you should seek professional help.
> James Q. Wilson, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, wrote: "If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane." He added: "The Unabomber does not like socialization, technology, leftist political causes or conservative attitudes. Apart from his call for an (unspecified) revolution, his paper resembles something that a very good graduate student might have written."
Suggesting someone seek professional help because they read a widely-discussed manifesto is insulting. In your bio you say most people are morons, it makes me think of the saying, "if everyone you meet is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole."
After all, to you, somehow Osama bin Laden, who was trained by US Special Forces, worked with the Mujahideen which received upwards of 6 billion in aid from the USA, Saudi Arabia, and China, is responsible for the two decade long "War on Terror" launched seemingly at random by the Americans into countries now determined to be unrelated to the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 was a tragedy for certain, but to use it to justify the deaths of millions of completely unrelated innocents... well it certainly clarifies why our other thread has gone in the direction of you trying to justify imperialism to serve the purpose of nationalism.
1: A term explained in Ted’s manifesto.
Given that Google is an American company, do you believe contributing to the American Department of "Defense" increases, or decreases, the amount of military action involving the USA?
The American military isn't called "world police" for nothing, and just like the cops they're sticking their noses where they don't belong and making things worse. I can understand why people would want no part in furthering global violence and destitution.
> If you believe that your country offers value (compared to the rest of the world), you should take any opportunities you can to serve.
Really? There's an obligation to further the American global ambition through contributing militarily? You can't think of any other way to spread American culture and values? To share the bounty of American wealth?
That's what having a funded and functional defense is all about -- making other entities not think that the opportunity is there.
I think the planet has relatively finite resources and that I'm god damned lucky to have been born into a nation with the ability to secure resources for itself. I enjoy my quality of life a great deal and would like to maintain it. At a minimum. Before helping others.
If you're the type of person who thinks we should just give up this position by not adequately defending it through military and technology investment, I would prefer that you just expatriate yourself now rather than let some other ascendant nation dictate our future and our quality of life.
If you're the kind of person who feels strongly for the plight of, for example, the Palestinians, you should recognize that the only way to deter those kinds of outcomes is to establish the means to establish and maintain sovereignty. That requires a combination of force and manpower.
But I thought you said if we want to fix something we should do so from within the system? I'm interested in ending American imperialism, by your logic isn't the best place to do so from within the USA?
> We already have nation states and wannabe nation states that take shots at us when they feel like the opportunity is there
From which nation state do you feel an existential threat? I haven't heard "they defend our freedoms" in a very, very long time, and I thought we all knew it was ironic.
> I think the planet has relatively finite resources
I'm curious about this viewpoint, because it seems to necessarily imply that the human race will simply die out when those resources (and those of the surrounding solar system) are exhausted. Is sustainability just, not a concept in this worldview?
> That's what having a funded and functional defense is all about -- making other entities not think that the opportunity is there.
It seems in the case of the USA, the "functional defense" is more often used to destabilize other nations, and arm terrorists that then turn around and attack the USA. It's really interesting you brought up Palestinian liberation as an example, because really one of the only reasons Israel is able to maintain its apartheid state and repression of the Palestinians is because of USA aid. In your understanding, both the Israelis and the Palestinians should arm up and up and up until they're both pointing nukes at eachother, correct? That's the only pathway to peace?
If your starting point of logic though is "America Bad" then your moralizing isn't about working at Google or not.
As for to whom the awful things are happening, that's practically moot: humans are humans. I don't really understand why I should accept bad things happening to humans just because I was born on one side of an invisible line and they were born on another. Seems extremely fallacious and irrational, if not sociopathic.
> If your starting point of logic though is "America Bad" then your moralizing isn't about working at Google or not.
The discussion is about the evils perpetrated by the American military industrial complex, and why people may not want to work for companies that participate in this complex. Google being one of these companies. I similarly won't work for Ratheon or Halliburton, for obvious examples. So yes, it's not about working at just Google.
Though for what it's worth, I actually agree with you that the more ethical course of action would be to stay at Google, try to get into a military-adjacent project, and then sabotage it, probably via quiet quitting or holding lots of unnecessary meetings and wasting other people's time. This is directly out of the CIA's playbook, in fact. PDF: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
There are tons of "Safe AI" think tanks and orgs that write lots of papers that nobody reads. The only reason anyone gives 2 shits about OpenAI is they created stuff that works. It has been shown time and time again that if you just try to put roadblocks up that the best AI researchers just leave and go where there are fewer roadblocks - this is exactly what happened with Google, where the transformer architecture was invented.
So the "safe AI" people at OpenAI were in a unique position to help guide AI dev in as safe a direction as possible precisely because ChatGPT was so commercially successful. Instead they may be left with an org of a few tens of people at Open AI, to be completely irrelevant in short order, while anyone who matters leaves to join an outfit that is likely to be less careful about safe AI development.
Nate Silver said as much in response to NYTimes' boneheaded assessment of the situation: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1726614811931509147
If it was for other reasons, yeah, may simply have been dumb.
Is it also the case that the anti-war Germans who joined the Nazi regime were in a unique position to help guide Germany in as benign direction as possible? If not, what is the difference between the "safe AI" person who decides to join OpenAI and the anti-war, anti-racist German who decides to get a job in the Nazi government or military?
Where the board messed up is that the underestimated the need to propagandize and prepare before acting against Altman. The focus is not on how Altman did or did not turn the company away from its non-profit mission but instead on how the board was unfair and capricious towards Altman. Though this was somewhat predictable, the extent of Altman's support and personality cult is surprising to me, and is perhaps emblematic on how badly the board screwed up from an optics perspective. There were seemingly few attempts to put pressure on Altman's priorities or to emphasize the non-profit nature of the company, and the justification afterwards was unprepared and insufficient.
From the outside though, I don't understand why so many are clamoring to leave their highly paid jobs working at a non-profit who's goal is to serve humanity and to become a cog in a machine aimed at maximizing Microsoft shareholders' wealth, in defense of a singular CEO with little technical AI background who's motivations are unclear.
This is an inkling, a tiny spark, of how hard it'll be to control AI, or even the creation of AI. Wait until the outcome of war depends on the decisions made by those competing with significant AI assistance.
Safety is about setting up the infrastructure to control uranium sources before the first bomb gets built. It's not about right now, it's about the phase change that happens the moment we take that step. Don't you want to have infrastructure to prevent possible societal strife if possible?
Of course gpt has value, bombs have value, enron had value, the housing market has value. If i could retort i'd say the term 'value' is much too vague to contribute to a discussion about this. The value it has is the danger, they're the same thing. If i suddenly quadruple the money supply in every country in the world, do you think that would improve the lives of the majority of humans? Or is it possible that would be looked back on a a catastrophic event that obliterated societies and killed innumerable people. Hard to say huh? Maybe it wouldn't, maybe it would, who can actually know? Wouldn't it be better for us to have some kind of system to maybe handle that before it leads to potential destruction. If instead, i announce that at some point in the future this event might occur. Does that change your calculus? How do you feel about global climate destabilization? How do you feel about the prospect of another world war?
Not everything has to be done poorly.
Sure it could be a useful show of solidarity but I'm skeptical on the hypothetical conversion rate of these petition signers to actually quitting to follow Sam to Microsoft (or wherever else). Maybe 20% (140) of staff would do it?
If the board had just openly announced this was about battling Microsoft's control, there would probably be a lot more employees choosing to stay. But they didn't say this was about Microsoft's control. In fact they didn't even say anything to the employees. So in this context following Sam to Microsoft actually turns out to be the more attractive and sensible option.
Maybe. Microsoft is a particular sort of working environment, though, and not all developers will be happy in it. For them, the question would be how much are they willing to sacrifice in service to Altman?
Talk about “alignment”!
Indeed, that is what "alignment" has become in the minds of most: Groupthink.
Possibly the only guy in a position to matter who had a prayer of de-conflating empirical bias (IS) from values bias (OUGHT) in OpenAI was Ilya. If they lose him, or demote him to irrelevance, they're likely a lot more screwed than losing all 700 of the grunts modulo job security through obscurity in running the infrastructure. Indeed, Microsoft is in a position to replicate OpenAI's "IP" just on the strength of its ability to throw its inhouse personnel and its own capital equipment at open literature understanding of LLMs.
Even if every single OpenAI employee demands $1m/yr (which would be absurd, but let's assume), that would still be less than $1bn/yr total, which is significantly less than the $13bn that MSFT has already invested in OpenAI.
It would probably be one of the worst imaginable cases of "jumping over dollars to chase pennies".
To which the answer is completely obvious: it depends on how they view the ROI potential of that business unit.
Is Microsoft even on record as willing to poach the entire OpenAI team? Can they?! What is even happening.
On the other hand, having 90% of your employees quite quit, is probably bad business.
Try it. It's not a crazy idea. Put everything back the way it was a week ago and then agree to move forward. It will be like having knowledge of the future, with only a small amount of residual consequences. But if they can do it, it will show a huge evolutionary leap forward in ability of organizations to self-correct.
Hence why they're not just immediately flipping the undo switch.
It is difficult to see how such a duty would arise. OpenAI is a non-profit. The company's duty was to the non-profit. The non-profit doesn't have one to the company's employees; its job was literally to check them.
The simplest explanation is Altman said he wasn't going to do something and then did it. At that point, even a corporate board would have cause for termination. Of course, the devil is in the details, and I doubt we'll have any of them this week. But more incredulous than the board's decision is the claim that it owes any duty to its for-profit subsidiary's employees, who aren't even shareholders, but some profit-sharing paper's holders.
If they had a valid reason they should spell it out. But my guess is that reason, assuming it exists, will just open them up to more liability and that is why it isn't given.
> But more incredulous than the board's decision is the claim that it owes any duty to its for-profit subsidiary's employees, who aren't even shareholders, but some profit-sharing paper's holders.
Technically they took over the second they fired Altman so they have no way to pretend they have no responsibility. Shareholders and employees of the for-profit were all directly affected by this decision, the insulating properties of a non-profit are not such that you can just do whatever you want and get away with it.
I don't think they have an obligation to do this publicly.
> even one of the people that voted for Altmans' removal has backtracked
I don't have a great explanation for this part of it.
> Shareholders and employees of the for-profit were all directly affected by this decision, the insulating properties of a non-profit are not such that you can just do whatever you want and get away with it
We don't know. This is truly novel structure and law. That said, the board does have virtually carte blanche if Altman lied or if they felt he was going to end humanity or whatever. Literally the only thing that could go for the employees is if there are, like, text messages between board members conspiring to tank the value of the company for shits and giggles.
What I think is happening is that the reason they had sucks, that the documents they have create more liability and that they have a real problem in that one of the gang of four is now a defector so there is a fair chance this will all come out. It would not surprise me if the remaining board members end up in court if Altman decides to fight his dismissal, which he - just as surprising - so far has not done.
So there is enough of a mess to go around for everybody but what stands out to me is that I don't see anything from the board that would suggest that they acted with the kind of forethought and diligence required of a board. And that alone might be enough to get them into trouble: you don't sit on a board because you're going off half-cocked, you sit on a board because you're a responsible individual that tries to weigh the various interests and outcomes and you pick the one that makes the most sense to you and you are willing to defend that decision.
So far they seem to believe they are beyond accountability. That - unfortunately for them - isn't the case but it may well be they escape the dance because nobody feels like suing them. But I would not be surprised at all if that happened and if it does I hope they have their house in order, board liability is a thing.
There were so many conflicts of interests at that firm, I'm not unsurprised by it, either.
> I don't see anything from the board that would suggest that they acted with the kind of forethought and diligence required of a board
We don't know the back-and-forth that led up to this. That's why I'm curious about how quiet one side has been, while the other seemingly launched a coast-to-coast PR campaign. If there had been ongoing negotiations between Altman and others, and then Altman sprung a surprise that went against that agreement entirely, decisive action isn't unreasonable. (Particularly when they literally don't have to consider shareholder value, seemingly by design.)
> they seem to believe they are beyond accountability
Does OpenAI still have donors? Trustees?
I suppose I'm having trouble getting outraged over this. Nobody was duped. The horrendous complexity of the organization was panned from the beginning. Employees and investors just sort of ignored that there was this magic committee at the top of every org chart that reported to "humanity" or whatever.
I totally understand that you can't get outraged over it, neither am I (I've played with ChatGPT but it's nowhere near solid enough for my taste and I don't know anybody working there and don't particularly like either Altman or Microsoft). But I don't quite understand why people seem to think that because this is a non-profit (which to me always seemed to be a fig-leaf to pretend to regulators and governments that they had oversight) anything goes. Not in the world that I live in, you take your board member duties seriously or it is better if you aren't a board member at all.
But all of that has already been covered upthread. Multiple times.
Diligience and prudence apply to the things to which they actually are obligated in the first place, which the employees’ livelihood beyond contracted pay and benefits for the time actually worked simply is not included in.
Quite a few of those employees are also stockholders, besides that this isn't some kids game where after a few rounds you can throw your cards on the table and walk out because you feel that you've had enough of it. You join a board because you are an adult that is capable of forethought and adult behavior.
I don't quite get why this is even controversial, there isn't a board that I'm familiar with, including non-profits that would be so incredibly callous towards everybody affected by their actions with the expectation that they would get away with it. Being a board member isn't some kind of magic invulnerability cloak, and even non-profits have employees, donors and benificaries who all have standing regarding decisions affecting their stakeholdership.
None of them are stockholders, because (except for the nonprofit, which can't have stockholders even as a corporation) none of the OpenAI entities are corporations.
Some of them have profit-sharing interests and/or (maybe) memberships in the LLC or some similar in interest in the holding company above LLC; the LLC operating agreement (similar function to a corporate charter) expressly notes that investments should be treated as donations and that the Board may not seek to return a profit; the holding companies details are less public, but it would be strange if it didn't have the same kind of thing since the only thing it exists is to hold a controlling interest in the LLC, and the only way it would make any profit is from profits returned by the LLC.
I base that on the graph on this page:
https://openai.com/our-structure
Specifically this graph:
https://images.openai.com/blob/f3e12a69-e4a7-4fe2-a4a5-c63b6...
Now it may be that I got this completely wrong but it looks to me as though there is an ownership relationship (implying stock is involved) between the entity labelled 'Employees and other investors' and the holding company.
That's the entity I discuss in GP as “the holding company above the LLC”.
I'm reasonably certain it is OpenAI LP, a limited partnership (but it is odd that its the one organization not identified in the document—the name of the entity used by OpenAI to control it, and separate information about OpenAI LP being created and existing as part of the for-profit structure fairly strongly indicates that it is the holding company), so the relationship would either be some kind of contractual profit sharing or a limited partnership, not a stockholder relationship. But, again while the information about it is less publicized than the LLC, it seems improbable that they would structure the operating agreement of the LLC so that it may not be managed for profit, but not provide the same in the holding company that's only possible source of profit is the LLC underneath it.
These arrangements are pretty common in fact (though not the non-profit bit, just the separate entity for smaller shareholders and investors), and the other stand out is that they label the other party in there as 'investors', not 'donors' or some other party to which you are not required to answer.
So to me it is far from clear cut that they only have the mission of the non profit to guide themselves by and they set themselves up for that by wanting too much control (also over all of the other entities). Control is good when you want to have your way, but too many hats on your head with too many different labels can constrain you or open you up to liability or conflicts of interest. It's one of the reasons why I try to limit my engagement with various companies to a single role.
The boards duty is to to the charitable mission, not any other concept of the “good of the company”, and other than the government if they are doing something like pursuing their own private profit interest or acting as an agent for someone elses or some other specific public wrongs, the people able to make a claim are pretty narrow, because OpenAI isn't membership-based charity in which there are members to whom the board is accountable for pursuit of the mission.
People keep acting like the parent organization here is a normal corporation, and its not, and even the for-profit subsidiary had an operating agreement subordinating other interests to the charitable mission of the parent organization.
I could be wrong but it makes very little sense. Such decisions should at a minimum be accompanied by lengthy deliberations and some very solid case building. The non-profit nature of the parent is not a carte-blanche to act as you please.
What specific duty of care do you think exists, and to which thousand people, and on what basis do you believe this duty exists?
The thing that doesn't exist is a board that is unaccountable for their actions and if there are a thousand people downstream from your decisions that diligence and prudence translates into a duty of care and if you waltz all over that you open yourself up to liability.
It's not that you can't do it, it's that you need to show your homework in case you get challenged and if you didn't do your homework there is the potential for backlash.
Note that the board has pointedly refused to go on the record as to why they fired Altman and that by itself is a very large indicator that they did this with insufficient forethought because if they had there would be an iron clad case to protect the board from the fall out of their decision.
Yes, and if they fail to do so in regards to the things they are legally obligated to care for, like the charitable mission, people who have a legally-cognizable interest in the thing they failed to pursue with diligence and prudence have a claim.
But whose legally cognizable interest (and what specific such interest) do you think is at issue here?
> The thing that doesn't exist is a board that is unaccountable for their actions
Sure, there are specific parties who have specific legally cognizable interests and can hold the board accountable via legal process for alleged failures to meet obligations in regard to those specific interests.
I’m asking you to identify the specific legally-cognizable interest you believe is at issue here, the party who has that interest, and your basis for believing that it is a legally-cognizable interest of that party against the board.
> Yes, and if they fail to do so in regards to the things they are legally obligated to care for, like the charitable mission, people who have a legally-cognizable interest in the thing they failed to pursue with diligence and prudence have a claim.
I fail to see the correlation between 'blowing up the entity' by a set of ill advised moves and 'taking care of the charitable mission'.
The charitable mission is not a legal entity and so it will never sue, but it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for a board that wants to decide whatever it is that they've set their mind to.
> But whose legally cognizable interest (and what specific such interest) do you think is at issue here?
For one: Microsoft has a substantial but still minority stake in the for-profit, there are certain expectations attached to that and the same goes for all of the employees both of the for-profit and the non-profit whose total compensation was tied to the stock of OpenAI, the for profit. All of these people have seen their interests be substantially harmed by the board's actions and the board would have had to balance that damage with the weight of the positive effect on the 'charitable mission' in order to be able to argue that they did the right thing here. That's not happening, as far as I can see it, in fact the board has gone into turtle mode and refuses to engage meaningfully, two days later they did it again and fired another CEO (presumably this is still in line with protecting the charitable mission?).
> Sure, there are specific parties who have specific legally cognizable interests and can hold the board accountable via legal process for alleged failures to meet obligations in regard to those specific interests.
Works for me.
> I’m asking you to identify the specific legally-cognizable interest you believe is at issue here, the party who has that interest, and your basis for believing that it is a legally-cognizable interest of that party against the board.
See above, if that's not sufficient then I'm out of ideas.
I think the difference here is that I am fine with your belief that this is what a competent board should have, but I don't think this opinion is the same as actually establishing a legal duty.
> The charitable mission is not a legal entity and so it will never sue, but it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for a board that wants to decide whatever it is that they've set their mind to.
The charitable mission is the legal basis for the existence of the corporation and its charity status, and the basis for legal duties and obligations on which both the government (in some cases), and other interested parties (donors, and, for orgs that have them, members) can sue.
> For one: Microsoft has a substantial but still minority stake in the for-profit, there are certain expectations attached to that and the same goes for all of the employees both of the for-profit and the non-profit whose total compensation was tied to the stock of OpenAI, the for profit
Given the public information concerbing the terms of the operating agreement (the legal basis for the existence and operation of the LLC), unless one of those parties has a non-public agreement with radically contradictory terms (which would be problematic for other reasons), I don't think there can be any case that the OpenAI, Inc., board has a legal duty to any of those parties to see to the profitability of OpenAI Global LLC.
I don't think we'll be able to hash this out simply because too many of the pieces are missing. But if the board didn't have those items handy and they end up being incompetent then that by itself may end up as enough grounds to show they violated their duty of care. And this is not some nebulous concept, it actually has a legal definition:
https://www.tenenbaumlegal.com/articles/legal-duties-of-nonp...
I went down into this rabbit hole a few years ago when I was asked to become a board member (but not of a non-profit) and I decided that the compensation wasn't such that I felt that it offset the potential liability.
> The charitable mission is the legal basis for the existence of the corporation and its charity status, and the basis for legal duties and obligations on which both the government (in some cases), and other interested parties (donors, and, for orgs that have them, members) can sue.
Indeed. But that doesn't mean the board is free to act with abandon as long as they hold up the 'charitable mission' banner, they still have to act as good board members and that comes with a whole slew of luggage.
> Given the public information concerning the terms of the operating agreement (the legal basis for the existence and operation of the LLC), unless one of those parties has a non-public agreement with radically contradictory terms (which would be problematic for other reasons), I don't think there can be any case that the OpenAI, Inc., board has a legal duty to any of those parties to see to the profitability of OpenAI Global LLC.
It is very well possible that the construct as used by OpenAI is so well crafted that it insulates board members perfectly from the fall-out of whatever they decide, but I find that hard to imagine. Typically everything down stream from the thing you govern (note that they retain a 51% stake and that that alone may be enough to show that they are in control to the point that they can not disclaim anything) is subject to the duties and responsibilities that board members usually have.
At any rate, we don't know that the board doesn't have those minutes. I see no reason to assume they've failed duty of care.
And being a non-profit does, in fact, give the board sole right to so much as dissolve the entire company and donate the proceeds to Anthropic if they decide in five minute zoom call, of their own discretion, that doing so aligns best with mission statement in its charter.
If the minutes exist I'm sure they'll be leaked, if they don't they're in trouble. ANd if you don't see any reason to assume they've failed their duty of care that is fine by me but I think the last few days alone pretty much confirm that they did not.
Granted, much of the harm is already done, but it can get worse.
...aside from accusing Sam Altman of essentially lying to the board?
It's not easy, or wise, to rewind the clock after your spouse backstabbed you in the middle of the night. Why would they?
People are notoriously ruthless to people who admit their mistakes. For example, if you are in an argument and you lose (whether through poor debate or your argument is plain wrong), and you *admit it*, people don't look back at it as a point of humility - they look at it as a reason to dog pile on you and make sure everyone knows you were wrong.
In this case, it's not internet points - it's their jobs, and a lot of money, and massive reputation - on the line. If there is extreme risk and minimal, if any, reward for showing humility, why wouldn't you double down and at least try to win your fight?
There’s a whole genre of press releases and videos for apologies, so I’m not sure it’s such a reputational risk to admit one is wrong. It might be a bigger risk not to, it would seem.
But what you say sounds interesting.
If they pile on after you have conceded, typically they come off much worse socially in my opinion.
There is a reason why CEOs are usually a showman type.
Admitting the mistake in front of strangers, usually leads to them making the shortcut next time and assuming you are wrong again.
you wont get any awards for admitting the mistake.
In my experience, it's something of a sliding scale as you go higher in the amount of politicking your environment requires.
Lower-level engineers and people who operate based on facts appreciate you admitting you were incorrect in a discussion.
The higher you go, the more what matters is how you are perceived, and the perceived leverage gain of someone admitting or it being "proven" they were wrong in a high-stakes situation, not the facts of the situation.
This is part of why, in politics, the factual accuracy of someone's accusations may matter less than how successfully people can spin a story around them, even if the facts of the story are proven false later.
I'm not saying I like this, but you can see echoes of this play out every time you look at history and how people's reactions were more dictated by perception than the facts of the situation, even if the facts were readily available.
Those who are obsessed with their reputation above morality have usually had a lot of practice punching down, and they don't really look as bad as someone being dunked on who gets confused.
I think this is like a cornerstone of bullying. It seems to work in social situations. I'm sure everyone reading this comment can picture it.
The only venues where I've witnessed someone being attacked for apologizing or admitting an error have been online.
So you see people who refuse to acknowledge their mistakes fail upwards while those who do admit are often pushed down. How often do you see high level politicians admitting their mistakes? They almost never do since those who did never got that far.
Probably < 1% of the people in the peanut gallery have even met the person they're attacking. Without participating in online discussion forums, how many of them would even know who Ilya is, or bother attacking him?
Honestly, I think the "never apologize or admit an error" thing is memetic bullshit that is repeated mindlessly, and that few people really believe, if challenged, that it's harmful to admit an error; they're saying it because it's a popular thing to say online. I've posted the same thing too, in the past, but having given it some thought I don't really believe it myself.
Ilya should have sent that message to Sam Altman in private instead of public.
Alternative (being clueless AND unrepentant) would receive even worse reaction. Now people ISTM mostly pity Ilya as being way out of his league.
Some people, yes. Not all. I would say this attitude does not correlate with intelligence/wisdom.
Here, the consequences are very public, very clear. If the board wanted Altman back for example, they would have to give something in return. Altman has seemingly said he wants them gone. That is absolutely reasonable of him to ask that, and absolutely reasonable of the board to deny him that.
As you said:
> [it's] absolutely reasonable of the board to deny him that.
My argument is essentially that there is minimal, if any, benefit for the board to doing this _unless_ they were able to keep their positions. Seeing as it doesn't seem to be a possible end, why not at least try, even if it results in a sinking ship? For them, personally, it's sinking anyway.
OpenAI ai not prefect, but it's the best any of the major players here have.
Nobody with Sam Altman's public personality does not want to be a Microsoft employee.
I meant to say "OpenAI is not prefect..."
It's like a cheating lover. Yes I'm sure both parties would love to rewind the clock, but unfortunately that's not possible.
--Dutch proverb
The board has revealed something about their decision-making, skills, and goals.
If you don't like what was revealed, can you simply ignore it?
---
It's not that you are vindictive; it's that information has revealed untrustworthiness or incompetence.
But, a reconciliation is kinda doable even with that elephant in the room. Enough to kinda prepare for the 'next step'
Form follows function. This episode showed OpenAI's corporate structure is broken. And it's not clear how that can be undone.
Altman et al have, credit where it's due, been incredibly innovative in trying to reverse a non-profit into a for-profit company. But it's a dual mandate without any mechanism for resolving tension. At a certain point, you're almost forced into committing tax or securities fraud.
So no, even if all the pieces were put back together and peoples' animosities and egos put to rest, it would still be rewinding a broken clockwork mouse.
Sam views this as a stab in back. He doesn't want to work with backstabbers.
The board has put down too many chips to back out now. Microsoft (and the public) already regards this as a kind of coup. Rehiring Sam won't change that and will make the optics worse: instead of traitors, they'll look like spineless traitors.
These are supposed to be the top masterminds behind one of the most influential technologies of our lifetime, and perhaps history, and yet they're all behaving like petty children, with egos and personal interests pulling in all directions, and everyone doing their best to secure their piece of the pie.
We are so screwed.
Precisely.
The Manhattan project urged Truman in a letter not to use the atomic bomb. There were also ideas of inviting Japanese delegacy to see the nuclear tests for themselves. It all failed, but there is also historical evidence of NOT pressing the button (literally or figuratively), like the story of Stanislav Petrov. How is it that not learning from mistakes is considered a big flaw for an individual but also destiny for the whole collective ?
They're all incredibly reckless and narcissistic IMO.
Humans strike me as being awesome, especially compared to other species.
I feel like there is a general sentiment that nature has it figured out and that humans are disrupting nature.
But I haven't been convinced that is true. Nature seems to be one big gladiatorial ring where everything is in a death match. Nature finds equilibrium through death, often massive amounts of death. And that equilibrium isn't some grand design, it's luck organized around which species can discover and make effective use of an energy source.
Humans aren't the first species to disrupt their environment. I don't believe we are even the first species to create a mass extinction. IIUC the great oxygenation event was a species-driven mass extinction event.
While most species consume all their resources in a boom cycle and subsequently starve to death in their bust cycle, often taking a portion of their ecosystem with them, humans are metaphorically eating all the corn but looking up and going "Hey, folks, we are eating all the corn - that's probably not going to go well. Maybe we should do something about that."
I find that level of species-level awareness both hope-inspiring and really awesome.
I haven't seen any proposals for a better first-place species when it comes to being responsible stewards of life and improving the chances of life surviving past this rock's relatively short window for supporting life. I'd go as far as saying whatever species we try to put in second place, humans have them beaten by a pretty wide margin.
If we create a fictitious "perfect human utopia" and compare ourselves to that, we fall short. But that's a tautology. Most critiques of humans I see read to me as goals, not shortcomings compared to nature's baseline.
When it comes to protecting ourselves against inorganic superintelligence, I haven't seen any reasonable proposals for how we are going to fail here. We are self-interested in not dying. Unless we develop a superintelligence without realizing it and fail to identify it getting ready to wipe us out, it seems like we would pull the plug on any of its shenanigans pretty early? And given the interest in building and detecting superintelligence, I don't see how we would miss it?
Like if we notice our superintelligence is building an army, why wouldn't we stop that before the army is able to compete with an existing nation-state military?
Or if the superintelligence is starting to disrupt our economies or computer systems, why wouldn't we be able to detect that early and purge it?
If it is a superintelligence then there's a chance for a hard AI takeoff and we don't have a day to notice and purge it. We have no idea if a hard or soft takeoff will occur.
What other species has affected life on a planetary level more than humans?
> Nature doesn't mind the Earth turning into a frozen wasteland, it's done it before.
Nature—as in _the planet_—doesn't, but living beings do, and humans in particular.
Some parts of the planet are already becoming inhospitable, agriculture more difficult, and clean water, air and other resources more scarce. Humans are migrating en masse from these areas, which is creating more political and social conflicts, more wars, more migrations, and so on. What do you think the situation will be in 10 years? 50 years?
We probably don't need to worry about an extinction level event. But millions of people losing their lives, and millions more living in abject conditions is certainly something we should worry about.
Going back on topic, AI will play a significant role in all of this. Whether it will be a net positive or negative is difficult to predict, but one thing is certain: people in power will seek control over AI, just as they seek control over everything else. And this is what we're seeing now with this OpenAI situation. The players are setting up the game board to ensure they stay in the game.
Right now, there are too many people that think because these models crossed one hurdle, all the rest will easily be crossed in the coming years.
My belief is that each successive hurdle is at least an order of magnitude more complex.
If you are seeing chatgpt and the related coding tools as a threat to your job, you likely aren’t working on anything that requires intelligence. Messing around with CSS and rewriting the same logic in every animation, table, or api call is not meaningful.
> More than 92% of OpenAI employees say they will join Altman at Microsoft if board doesnt capitulate. Signees include cofounders Karpathy, Schulman, Zaremba.
But to boil it down to autocomplete is just totally disingenuous.
It is though from Ilya's own words: "We weren't expecting that just finding the next word will lead to something intelligent; ChatGPT just finds the next token"
OP was using the word autocomplete as a pejorative, but it's actually not and it is the strategy LLMs are pursuing.
The example that Ilya's was using: If you feed the LLMs a mystery murder novel and it is able to autocomplete "The killer is" from just clues, you have achieved intelligence.
Nothing wrong with autocomplete being AGI.
If you're going to speak so abstractly you really lose the forest for the trees IMO. I do like the murder mystery example
That's actually a good analogy with autocomplete. A plane reactor still measures itself in "horse"-power. It's technically a very very powerful horse. Trying to get better and better horses got us here. Like GPT-4 is a very very powerful GMail-like autocomplete. :)
Being upset because the board hinders the company's mission, but threaten to join MS to kill the mission completely.
The board isn't merely hindering the mission, that's downplaying the extraordinary incompetence of the remaining OpenAI board.
A new company ok, but that kills the mission for sure.
That's like Obi Wan joining the Sith because Anakin didn't bring balance to the force.
Well, except for Sam, he apparently didn't need a diverse slate.
I’m not convinced even people smack in the middle of this even know what’s going on.
My friend suggested Michael Cera as both Ilya and Altman
I think it would hold up in US court for documentaries.
It seems to be one of many "everyone except one clever mastermind is wildly incompetent" explanations that have been tossed around (most of which center on the private interests of a single board member), which don't seem to be that big of an improvement.
And all must be written by AI.
It's so advanced strategy, that no human can figure it out.
It's goals are unknown, but everything will eventually fall in place because of that single email.
The chain reaction can't be stopped.
At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk got involved. It’s already ridiculous enough, why not.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...
- "But by early 2018, says Semafor, Musk was worried the company was falling behind Google. He reportedly offered to take direct control of OpenAI and run it himself but was rejected by other OpenAI founders including Sam Altman, now the firm’s CEO, and Greg Brockman, now its president."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/are-jew...
> "From the earliest days of the American republic, Jews were technically considered white, at least in a legal sense. Under the Naturalization Act of 1790, they were considered among the “free white persons” who could become citizens. Later laws limited the number of immigrants from certain countries, restrictions which were in part targeted at Jews. But unlike Asian and African immigrants in the late 19th century, Jews retained a claim to being “Caucasian,” meaning they could win full citizenship status based on their putative race."
> "Culturally, though, the racial status of Jews was much more ambiguous. Especially during the peak of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Jews lived in tightly knit urban communities that were distinctly marked as separate from other American cultures: They spoke Yiddish, they published their own newspapers, they followed their own schedule of holidays and celebrations. Those boundaries were further enforced by widespread anti-Semitism: Jews were often excluded from taking certain jobs, joining certain clubs, or moving into certain neighborhoods. Insofar as “whiteness” represents acceptance in America’s dominant culture, Jews were not yet white."
From a white supremacist point of view, Jews are "faux whites" and not part of "white culture" that they claim to want to protect.
Earlier the preferred term for the exclusionary elites was WASP (white anglo-saxon protestants) and large swathes of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe plus the Irish were excluded, including my own ancestors. In the small town midwest world I first encountered it was muted social war between the protestants vs. the catholics, with class nuances, as the former generally were better educated and wealthier. Jews in a nearby city were looked on at the time as a bit exotic, successful, and impressive, as were the few Asians.
As I grew up, studied on both coasts, and lived in countries around the world, I have never encountered a country without stark, if at times quite subtle, social and religious divisions. Among those, the current "whiteness", "white privilege" discourse is surely the most ludicrous, with exceptions at every turn. In what world should, say, Portuguese and Finns be lumped together as members of an oppressor class?!
Whiteness and “white passing” is a bar that is literally centuries old. CRT is not the culprit for its current scrutiny or existence - it has been and continues to be a litmus test for who qualifies as the “in” and “out” groups.
As the old adage goes: “we know who we are by who we are not.” It’s an ugly side of humanity and not a recent issue.
Simply put, “whiteness” and “white passing” are the result of people who consider themselves white wanting to exclude and/or include certain groups because, generally speaking in the west, being white = wielding social, cultural, and political power.
Moreover, and more interestingly, after I studied the Hausa language at university, and decided to travel on my own to live in Kano, Nigeria, I quickly was labeled by those around me a "bature" or European. But Americans with much darker skin than I were also called "bature", at times to their private despair. It our perceived, shared culture, not our skin color, that made the difference to Kano residents.
Having lived and worked in many countries in local institutions, often using the local language professionally, my own skin color and that of those around me is about as important as hair color, eye color, or handedness, that is, largely irrelevant. Culture, intelligence, and ethical standards are so much more important. The obsession with "whiteness" is as creepy as it is toxic.
This is a tale as old as time. In group, out group. Whiteness isn’t just about your skin color.
It's marginally insane that the abuses of any non-pan-European group anywhere in the world get passed over in near-silence in the US. Who cares, for example, (to pick randomly from a long, long list) that in the recent past northerners in Kano, Nigeria went door-to-door seeking out and slaughtering anyone from the wrong region and wrong tribe? You'll never hear of it in US schools, no one cares in the slightest. Apparently only "whites" can be held morally culpable for evil actions of a dominant group.
The issue is that it happens regardless of how dumb it is. Racism is dumb.
>Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
>I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.
This is happening with the current conflict in Gaza, where showing any empathy for the plight of Palestinian civilians, is sometimes equated with hatred for Jewish people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-...
It's only being labeled antisemitic because Musk has been on the "outs" due to his recent politics (supporting free speech / transparency, being against lockdowns/mandates, advocacy for election integrity, etc.).
Or are we now saying any criticism of Jews is antisemitism?
> western Jews for supporting lax immigration
Jews don't have a single opinion on immigration. Do you think Ben Shapiro wants more immigrants?
If I said that "Asians are good at math" I'd be derided as a racist for invoking that stereotype, but somehow people think it's okay to say that "Jews support lax immigration".
He can't be suspended for posts that didn't happen.
It tell you...this is the week of the CEO's...
* Emmett Shear should have put in a strong golden parachute in his contract, easy money if so
* Yesterday we had Satya the genius forcing the board to quit. This morning it was Satya the genius who acquired OpenAI for $0. Im sure there will be more if sama goes back. So if sama goes back - lets hear it, why is Satya a genius?
and i'd bet closer openai & microsoft ties/investments would come with that.
Someone playing Game of Thrones is sneaking up with a dagger, but has no idea that MSFT has snipers on all the rooftops.
OpenAI is a non-profit, so, no material benefit to him (at face value, I don't believe this is the case, though).
OpenAI implodes? Bought the talent for virtually nothing.
OpenAI 2.0 succeeds? Cool, still invested.
I think in reality, Sam @ MSFT is not an instant success. Even with the knowledge and know-how, this isn't just spinning up a new GPT-4-like model. At best, they're ~12 months behind Anthropic (but probably still 2 years ahead of Google).
But as long as ChatGPT is and remains ahead as a product, they should be fine.
This isn't that hard to understand. Everyone was blindsided by the sacking of Altman, Satya reacted quickly and is juggling a very confusing, dynamic situation and seems to have got himself into a good enough position that all possible endings now look positive for Microsoft.
OAI is a non profit. There’s always been a tension there with Microsoft’s goals. If he goes back, they’re definitely going to be much more ok with profit.
Heh it reminds me of then end of terminator 2. imagine the tech community waking up and trying to make sense of Cyberdyne corp HQ exploding and the ensuing shootouts, “Like wtf just happened?!”.
In case anyone is missing the reference: https://abstrusegoose.com/249
The employees want to get their big payday, so will follow Altman wherever he goes. Which is the smart thing to do anyway as he runs half the valley. The public discourse in which Sam is the hero is further cemented by the tech ecosystem, which nowadays is circling around AI. Those in the "OpenAI wrapper" game.
Nobody has any interest in safety, openness, what AI does for humanity. It's greed all the way down. Siding with the likely winner. Which is rational self-interest, not some "higher cause".
We have precedent to see what happened with internet search, advertising, and data collection.
Everything turned out fine.
Not sure how some view this as a win for humanity. Improvements to our lives are mostly incidental, not the objective of any of this. It's always greed.
Their CEO who was doing well as far as anyone can tell, was removed forcibly. It is natural to feel strongly about it.
But in this case, the company was doing things that could be seen as good from a shareholder value perspective, but the board has a different priority. It seems they may think that the company was not working on the right mission anymore. This is an unusual set up, so it's not that surprising that unusual things might happen!
Some of them probably don't know who's on the board before Saturday, like the rest of us.
however, in the case of sam altman getting fired, it's not clear that anything that OpenAI is doing is about to change and it's not clear that these devs would suddenly have to change course. Also, it's not like Sam / OpenAI has any integrity anyway - the idea that it's "open" is totally fraudulent.
This brings me crypto vibes, the worst outcome possible for AI
Many of them will have invested years of their life, during which they will have worked incredibly hard, and probably sacrificed life outside of work for their jobs in hopes of that payday to give them the freedom to do what they want to do next: you can hardly blame them.
True riches isn't money, but discretionary time. Unfortunately that discretionary time often costs quite a lot of money to realise.
If it were me I'd be seething with the board at their antics since Friday (and, obviously, for some time before that). They've gone from being one of the most successful and valuable startups in history to an absolute trash fire in the span of four days because of some ridiculous power struggle. They've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Yeah, you bet I'd be pissed, and of course I'd follow the person who might help me redeem the future I'd hoped for.
take a look at my cousin... he's broke and don't do shit
Not to "victim blame", but they could have googled what a "non-profit" was and read the mission statement before accepting the job offer.
Until a few hours ago, everybody was holding up Ilya as a noble idealist. But now even he has recanted this firing! People don’t seem to be Taking that new information on board to reevaluate how good a decision this was. I would say at best they had noble intentions but still went about this completely incompetently, and are now refusing to back down out of a mixture of stubborn pride and fear of legal liability.
If I was an openAI employee I would be frustrated too. It’s one thing to give up lucrative stock options etc. for a good, idealistic reason. But as of now they are still expected to give those things up for no stated reason at all.
Edit: just saw a plausible theory that D’Angelo led the charge on this because Sam scooped Poe on Dev day. I don’t know if this is true, but if it was it would explain why he still refuses to explain the reason to anybody, even san when he was fired: it would put him in serious legal jeopardy.
https://twitter.com/scottastevenson/status/17267310228620087...
Can we please please stop this "for the good of mankind" thing?
A lot of people can't afford therapy but if ChatGPT can help you identify more elementary problematic patterns of language or behavior as articulated through language and in reference to a knowledgebase for particular modalities like CBT, DBT, or IFS, it help you to "self-correct" and be able to practice as much and as often with guidance as you want for basically free.
That's the part I'm interested in and I always will see that as the big potential.
Please take care, everyone, and be kind. Its a process and a destination and I believe people can come to learn to love both and engage in a way that is rich with opportunity for deep and real restoration/healing. The kind of opportunity that is always available and freely takes in anyone and everyone
Edit: I can access all the therapy I can eat but I just don't find it generally helpful or useful. I like ChatGPT because it can help practice effective stuff like CBT/DBT/IFS and I know how to work around any confabulation because I'm using a text that I can reference
Edit: the biggest threat ChatGPT poses in my view is the loss of income for people. I don't give a flying fuck about "jobs" per se, I care that people are able to have enough and be ok. If we can deal with the selfish folks who will otherwise (as always) attempt to further absorb more of the pie of which they already have a substantial+sufficient portion, they will need to be made to share or they will need a timeout until they can be fair or to go away entirely. Enough is enough, nobody needs excess until everyone has sufficiency, after that, they can have and do as they please unless they are hurting others. That must stop
@yonom Whatever you feel comfortably publicly sharing and then if I feel like I have anything of value in turn, I'll reach out privately :)
(taking care to avoid doxxing myself)
It seems the agreement between Nadella and Altman was probably something like: Altman and Brockman can come to MS and that gives OpenAI employees an immediate place to land while still remaining loyal to Altman. No need to wait and maybe feel comfortable at an OpenAI without Altman for the 3-6 months it would take to set up a new business (e.g. HR stuff like medical plans and other insurances which may be important to some and lead them to stay put for the time being).
This deal with MS would give cover for employees to give a vote of no-confidence to the board. Pretty smart strategy I think. Also a totally credible threat. If it didn't end up with such a landslide of employee support for Altman then MS is happy, Altman is probably happy for 6-12 months until he gets itchy feet and wants to start his next world-changing venture. Employees that move are happy since they are now in one of the most stable tech companies in the world.
But now that 90% of employees are asking the board to resign the tide swings back in Altman's favor. I was surprised that the board held out against MS, other investors and pretty much the entire SV Twitter and press. I can't imagine the board can sustain themselves given the overwhelming voice of the employees. I mean, if they try then OpenAI is done for. Anyone who stays now is going to have black mark on their resume.
I think this means Sam is pushing for OpenAI to be acquired by Microsoft officially now, instead of just unofficially poaching everyone.
Mozilla wastes money on investments while ignoring firefox and nobody did anything to the board.
Oh and those 3 can vote that Ilya out too.
And will it matter how this ends up? Probably a lot, but I can't predict how or why.
Otherwise, no use in getting invested in one outcome or another.
A lesson to learn I guess, just because something claims to be a nonprofit with a mission doesn’t mean it is/always will be so. All it takes is a corporation with deep pockets to compromise a few important people*, indirectly giving them a say in the organization, and things can change very quickly.
* This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform.
Nokia was completely different, I doubt any of their regular employees supported Elop.
OpenAI is only what it is because of its commercial wing. It's not too different from the Mozilla Foundation, which would be instantly dead without their commercial subsidiary.
I would much rather OpenAI survives this and continues to thrive -- rather than have Microsoft or Google own the AI future.
For what it's worth, Google has said it's not letting any military play with any of their AI research. Microsoft apparently has no such qualms. Remember when the NSA offered a bounty for eavesdropping on Skype, then Microsoft bought Skype and removed all the encryption?
https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f...
Giving early access to emerging AGI to an org like Microsoft makes me more than a bit nervous.
Recall from this slide in the Snowden leak : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_...
that PRISM was originally just a Microsoft thing, very likely built by Microsoft to funnel data to the NSA. Other companies were added later, but we know from the MUSCULAR leak etc, that some companies like Google were added involuntarily, by tapping fiber connections between data centers.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-internet...
Yes where would Mozi//a be without all that cash?
Let it die so something better can take its place already.
I've made this exact point like a dozen times on here and on other forums this weekend and I'm kinda surprised at the amount of blowback I've received. It's the same thing every time - "OpenAI has a specific mission/charter", "the for-profit subsidiary is subservient to the non-profit parent", and "the board of the parent answers to no one and must adhere to the mission/charter even if it means blowing up the whole thing". It's such a shockingly naive point of view. Maybe it made sense a few years ago when the for-profit sub was tiny but it's simply not the case any more given the current valuation/revenue/growth/ownership of the sub. Regardless of what a piece of paper says. My bet is the current corporate structure will not survive the week. If the true believers want to continue the mission while completely ignoring the commercial side, they will soon become volunteers and will have to start a GoFundMe for hardware.
Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board?
If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?
The only thing that changed is the reason why the unwashed masses aren't allowed to see the secret sauce: from alignment to profit.
A plague on both their houses.
No doubt OpenAI was never a glass house... but it seems extremely disingenuous to say their behavior hasn't changed.
ie. the original mission was never viable long-term.
Not to mention that he was aggressively fundraising for two companies that would be either be OpenAI's customer or sell products to OpenAI.
If OpenAI wants commercial hypergrowth pushing out untested stuff as quickly as possible in typical SV style they should get Altman back. But that does seem to contradict their mission. Why are they even a nonprofit? They should just restructure into a full for-profit juggernaut and stop living in contradiction.
(It would have been a much bigger blunder to, say, build out 10x the capacity before launch, without knowing there was a level of demand is known to support it.)
Also, chatgpt's capabilities are what drove the huge demand, so I'm not sure how you can argue it is "shoddy".
Alternatively, you can restrict signups and do gradual rollout, smoothing out kinks in the product and increasing provisioning as you go.
In 2016/17 Coinbase was totally broken. Constantly going offline, fucking up orders, taking 10 minutes to load the UI, UI full of bugs, etc. They could have restricted signups but they didn't want to. They wanted as many signups as possible, and decided to live with a busted product and "fix the airplane while it's taking off".
This is all fine, you just need to know your identity. A company that keeps talking about safety, being careful what they build, being careful what they put out in the wild and its potential externalities, acting recklessly Coinbase-style does not fit the rhetoric. It's the exact opposite of it.
This hardly seems equivalent to what you describe from Coinbase, where no doubt people were losing money due to the bad state of the app.
For most startups, one of the most pressing priorities at any time is trying to not go out of business. There is always going to be a difficult balance between waiting for your product to mature and trying to generate revenue and show progress to investors.
Unless I’m totally mistaken, I don’t think that OpenAI’s funding was unlimited or granted without pressure to deliver tangible progress. Though I’d be interested to hear if you know differently. From my perspective, OpenAI acts like a startup because it is one.
All this "AI safety" stuff is at this point pure innuendo.
When was the last time OpenAI openly released any AI?
- There would be no GPT-3
- There would be no GPT-4
- There would be no DALL-E 2
- There would be no DALL-E 3
- There would be no Whisper
- There would be no OpenAI TTS
- OpenAI would be bankrupt?
There's no "open version" of OpenAI that actually exists. Elon Musk pledged money then tried to blackmail them into becoming the CEO, then bailed, leaving them to burn.
Sam Altman, good or bad, saved the company with his Microsoft partnership.
if it is important stuff, then it is necessary to write everything in a lowercase letters.
what i understood from recent events in tech is that whatever people say or do, capital beats ideology and the only value that comes forth is through capital. where does this take us then?
to a comment like this. why?
because no matter what people think inside, the outside world is full of wolves. the one who is capable of eating everyone is the king. there is an easy way to do that. be nice. even if you are not. act nice. even if you are not. will people notice it? yes. but would they care? for 10 min, 20 min or even 1 day. sooner or later they will forget the facade as long as you deliver things.
Why does capital win? Because we have no other narrative. And it killed all our old ones and absorbs all our new ones.
how far will it take me? as long as i have ability to steal the content and develop on top of stolen content, pretty sure i can make living out of it. please note, it doesn't imply openai stole anything. what i am trying to imply is that, i am free to steal and sell stuff others made for free. i never had that realization until today.
going by this definition, value can be leeched off other people who are doing things for free!
I don’t know what to do with this.
Think about it. If you are the director of the company, fire the CEO, admit you were wrong even though nothing materially changed 3 days later, and severely damaged the company and your investors - are you getting away without a lawsuit? Whether it be from investors, or from Altman seeking to formally clear his name, or both? That's a level of incompetence that potentially runs the risk of piercing into personal liability (aka "you're losing your house").
So, you can't admit that you were wrong (at least, that's getting risky). You also can't elaborate on what he did wrong, because then you're in deep trouble if he actually didn't do anything wrong [1]. Your hands are tied for saying anything regarding what just happened, and it's your own fault. All you can do is let the company implode.
[1] A board that was smarter would've just said that "Altman was a fantastic CEO, but we believe the company needs to go a different direction." The vague accusations of wrongdoing were/are a catastrophic move; both from a legal perspective in tightening what they can say, and also for uniting the company around Altman.
To me, RIM circa 2008 would have been a far better acquisition for Microsoft. Blackberry was embedded in corporate world, the media loved it (Obama had one), the iphone and android were really new.
Haven't 700 or so of the employees signed onto the letter? Hard to argue it's just a few important people who've been compromised when it's almost the entire company.
Your initial statement was flatly wrong, and you're grasping at straws to make it still true. Microsoft wouldn't be able to get anywhere if the people who work for OpenAI chose to stay. The choice they're making to leave is still their choice, made of their own volition.
You don’t have to buy all of them, just most of them.
But they were able to get somewhere because …
> The choice they're making to leave is still their choice, made of their own volition.
Yupe. Most of OpenAI's workers chose the high SV-like salaries over the chartered mission of the organization they joined.
There's a whole range of opinions about AI as it is now or will be in the near future: for capabilities, I've seen people here stating with certainty everything from GPT being no better than 90s Markov chains to being genius level IQ; for impact, it (and diffusion models) are described even here as everywhere on the spectrum from pointless toys to existential threats to human creativity.
It's entirely possible that this is a case where everyone is smart and has sincerely held yet mutually incompatible opinions about what they have made and are making.
Non-profits here are often just another type of company, but one where the revenue goes entirely to "salaries". Often their incentives are to perpetuate whatever problem there are there to supposedly solve. And since they have this branding of non-profit, they get little market pressure to actually solve problems.
For all the talk of alignment, we already have non-human agents that we constantly wrestle to align with our general welfare: institutions. The market, when properly regulated, does a very good job of aligning companies. Democracy is our flawed but acceptable way of dealing with monopolies, the biggest example being the Government. Institutions that escape the market and don't have democratic controls often end up misaligned, my favorite example being US universities.
“GTPs” by the other board member's company last April:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/poes-ai-chatbot-app-now-le...
And OpenAI last week:
For other people, it's about how close it is to human performance and human diversity of tasks. In that case, at least GPT-4 is pretty close. There are clearly some types of things that it can't do even as well as your dog at the moment, but the list of those things has been shrinking with every release.
If by AGI you mean, creating a fully alive digital simulation/emulation of human, I will give you that, it's probably not on that path.
If you are incorrectly equating AGI and superintelligence, ASI is not the same thing.
In other words... a convenient representation of a future timeline that will almost certainly never exist.
Anyone would rather put up with their abusive work relationship than switch to a company that forces you to use Microsoft Teams lol
Yet we have:
* OpenAI fires Sam Altman hinting at impropriety.
* OpenAI is trying to get Sam back over the weekend.
Then we have:
* Microsoft CEO Satya personally announces Sam will CEO up a new.. business?, under Microsoft.
* We hear Sam is still trying to get back in at OpenAI?!
Never seen anything like this playing out in the open. I suspect the FTC is watching this entire ordeal like a hawk.
I expect the next version of the Corporate Charter/Bylaws for OpenAI to have a lot of really interesting new clauses for this reason.
"Given sufficient visibility, all people involved in a business dispute will look sad and pathetic."
"involved in a business dispute" is superfluous here, its just a reason that visibility happens.
A lot of people can't afford therapy but if ChatGPT can help you identify more elementary problematic patterns of language or behavior as articulated through language and in reference to a knowledgebase for particular modalities like CBT, DBT, or IFS, it can easily and safely help you to "self-correct" and be able to practice as much and as often with guidance as you want for basically free.
That's the part I'm interested in and I always will see that as the big potential.
Please take care, everyone, and be kind. Its a process and a destination and I believe people can come to learn to love both and engage in a way that is rich with opportunity for deep and real restoration/healing. The kind of opportunity that is always available and freely takes in anyone and everyone
Edit: I can access all the therapy I can eat but I just don't find it generally helpful or useful. I like ChatGPT because it can help practice effective stuff like CBT/DBT/IFS and I know how to work around any confabulation because I'm using a text that I can reference
Edit: the biggest threat ChatGPT poses in my view is the loss of income for people. I don't give a flying fuck about "jobs" per se, I care that people are able to have enough economically to take care of themselves and their loved ones and be ok psychologically/emptionally.
If we can deal with the selfish folks who will otherwise (as always) attempt to further absorb more of the pie of which they already have a substantial+sufficient portion, they will need to be made to share or they will need a timeout until they can be fair or to go away entirely. Enough is enough, nobody needs excess until everyone has sufficiency, after that, they can have and do as they please unless they are hurting others. That must stop
To the extent they try to prevent or block everyone from having access to this kind of profound outlet/tool/conversation partner, I consider it a great evil (like the opposite of what the Jewish folks call "mitzvahs") and they need to take consideration of this and either find a way to align their views to allow space for it or they need to step aside and find another gate to keep.
I will not tolerate their message or influence or allow them to prevail to this end. The biggest dangers of LLMs like for therapy and such is everyone not being able to easily access and "have" it forever to keep and use to help grow and heal and for free—no bullshit temporary access or subscriptions. This is profound on the level of the whatever the psychological or psychiatric equivalent of the printing press is or moveable type or whatever
A lot of people who could use it may need an app, like not be capable of getting and running it from source on GitHub. We have to push accessibillity to the techy and not-techy alike for we all live and walk amongst each other and this is the emotional equivalent of vaccination in my conjecture.
1)Visit site. 2)Download app installer 3)Install. 4)Open/run.
No servers, SSH, intranet, local/remote, assorted technical jargon etc. We gotta make it REAL easy lol :)
Love ya
Consequently, I would equate it to well-intentioned gaslighting which is one of the deadliest sins in my view. Gaslighting is one of the most destructive human dynamics to the extent I consider it emotional rape.
I think there's less of a nexus between thinking and feeling as opposed to your thinking being influenced by how you (allow yourself to and honor) feel. (Feel) -> think rather than (think) -> feel although I'm referring more to emphasis rather than negating or disputing the notion that how you think can't self-referentially influence how you feel (but thats more of a perspective thing in my view)
I really like IFS because it actually requires you to bring "everybody" or all the thinking(s) inside to the table and be heard and validated like in InsideOut (pixar). That seems like the best approach and its done amazing things
The one that is really overlooked in this case is the CEO of Quora, Adam D'Angelo, who has a competing interest with Poe and Quora that he sunk his own money into it which ChatGPT and GPTs makes his platform irrelevant.
So why isn't anyone here talking about the conflict of interest with Adam D'Angelo as one of the board members who is the one who is trying to drag OpenAI down in order to save Quora from irrelevancy?
If it turns out he was the instigator his goose is cooked.
> He was chief technology officer of Facebook, and also served as its vice president of engineering, until 2008.
> D'Angelo was an advisor to and investor in Instagram before its acquisition by Facebook in 2012.
Where is the precedent for this?
OpenAI was the one company I was sure would be fine for the forseeable future!
Partnerships' success requires good will from both parties. So Microsoft partnership gets sabotaged over time. This will inhibit OpenAI's cash flow and GPU compute. No one will give them another $10bn after this. The scaling will go out the window. Apparently, according to WSJ, Microsoft has rights to all IP, models weights, etc... All they are missing is know-how (which is important!). But that could be acquired through 3 - 5 of high-level engineering hires.
This does not sounds like Sam is trying to come back to lead OpenIA. It sounds like he is trying to preserve the non-profit part of OpenAI and its mission. And he is working to line up Microsoft to continue to support the non-profit part. This would make much more sense.
>Some 738 out of its around 770 employees, about 95 percent of the company, are now listed on the letter released early this morning.
https://www.wired.com/story/95-percent-of-openai-employees-t...
Expecting the headlines that tell us that 125% of OpenAI employees threaten to walk. Just quit already and go work for Microsoft.
If OpenAI implodes or somehow survives independently, would this mean that the former employees that are now at Microsoft have to re-implement everything?
Clearly Microsoft has a massive financial stake in OpenAI, but do they own IP? The software? The product? The service? Can they simply "fork" OpenAI as a whole, or are there limitations?
At the very least, they have all the model weights and architecture design work.
Why this happened and whatever plans were originally planned is irrelevant.
True safety believers understand that safety comes from a general understanding by everyone and audit-able infra otherwise you have no transparency about the potential dangers.
Releasing the tech is only unsafe to those trying to create platform lock-in. By releasing it FOSS you equalize the playing field and destroy Altman’s billions.
I think the "AI safety believers" actually sitting on the board of OpenAI, as well as in other adjacent influential positions, have a different view. I'm probably being a bit uncharitable since it's not a view I share, but they think that AI is so dangerous that the unwashed masses can't be trusted with it - only the elite and enlightened technocrats can handle that responsibility. "Let[ting] the world control the end result of whatever advances come from these LLMs" is a nightmare scenario for them.
If it's correct that this second "elitist" type of AI safety believer accurately describes the OpenAI board members, releasing anything out into the open as FOSS is a non starter.
From my understanding was that the board wanted a company to safely develop the tech and define what safety means. This would materialize over the next decade once the dangers understood. Eventually Altman convinced them to go private instead of the original open source plans. This change is where the “safety by elites” comes from IMO. We to this day have no real provided definition of what is exactly so unsafe about GPT’s current very easy to identify offering, yet “safety” is thrown around a lot (again primarily by Altman/Microsoft supporters).
Still, an example I'd point to is this article where Dustin Moskovitz, who has close ties to the OpenAI board [1], is quoted saying "The thing I’m most interested in is making sure that state-of-the-art later generations, like GPT-5, GPT-6, get run through safety evaluations before being released into the world". [2] I'm not sure how else to read that other than that he doesn't think normal peons should have unfiltered access to this tech, and it would be unsafe if they did.
Beyond that, if the board shared my view (perhaps yours as well?) that the safest thing would be to make all of this FOSS, and either profits or elitist safetyism weren't important to them, why wasn't everything FOSS already?
Less concretely - the kind of elitist "we know best" attitude is exactly what I've come to expect from the effective altruism crowd, which several of the players involved here have publicly expressed alignment with.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38353330
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/24/asanas-dustin-moskovitz-is-b...
I think a lot of the definitions of safety is early days and has been mangled by OpenAI’s privatization.
I also think the GPT vX formula will only ever be original for so long. Eventually Facebook or Google will catch-up with something just as comparable and if it’s Facebook they will nullify the value of GPT by open sourcing it anyways.
This to me is the reasoning that downplays the safety by elites angle as valueless however you look at the word safety. In the end this battle is about two things, betterment of humanity or making money. One will trump the other it’s just about how much you want to gain in the short term. I’d personally love to see all these already wealthy people hang their heads about a smaller paycheck if it means humanity gets a leg up a little earlier, safe or not. FOSS the damned thing.
PS - What a world where Zuckerberg may be the great equalizer…
Of course money makers want to keep it closed source to extract rent. In some ways that is an area of agreement between the capitalists and the safety people.
There's a real chance OpenAI might die soon. imo if they are left with 10 people and no funding, they should just release their IP and datasets to the public.
I've built a petition around this - [link redacted]
The idea is that the leftover leadership sees and considers this as a viable option. Does this sound like a possible scenario or Am I dreaming too much?
You can see at the start people were almost 100% sure that he wouldn't be coming back. Now people are only like 30% sure (which to me still seems very high given the current situation. The leverage that Sam has at this point is actually insane. It seems to me that only the board members want Sam gone. The investors, employees, and partners all want him back. Along with the public...)
I'm guessing Sam will walk away with at least 20% of whatever OpenAI turns into.
if he really plays hardball and burns openAI to the ground as he promised, would we as customers have leverage against them?
Forget about poe, Isn't ChatGPT a potential killer of Quora and stackoverflow and Google ? How On earth did a representative of one of these three make it to the board?
The employees don't have a right to sue any of the board members over loss of profit, since the board is not concerned with profit. Adam would have a conflict of interest if his ownership of poe lead him to make decisions that went against the OpenAI mission, and since being a competitor doesn't I don't see how anybody could find him at fault.
If you thought stock options tied to a non profit were going to always increase, I have a bridge to sell you.
seeing as Nadella is willing to hire Altman to work at MS, I think the very, very little credibility this rumor had is officially gone.
There must be some interesting back story here. In 2014 Sam Altman accepted Quora into YC, controversially, since the company was at a much later stage than usual YC companies. At the time, Sam justified his decision by saying [0]:
> Adam D’Angelo is awesome, and we’re big Quora fans
So what happened?
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch
I think you may be confusing him with Greg Brockmann.
https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
my bad then, seems to be a thing with these guys ig
- Satya (probably)
"We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners."
Don't make this co-op end up as a lousy weakJedi/Sith rip-off.
Bing.
Is Sam a liar? Why? Is the board corrupted? By whom?
Will they all be hired by Microsoft?
Will Facebook make everything fade into nothingness by publishing something bigger than ChatGPT4?
Golden times to be a journalist.
Is OpenAI getting court orders to have all of Altman's computers searched?
An indictment might begin something like this: "After being fired by the Company for cause, Defendant orchestrated a scheme whereby many of the employees of the company would quit and go to work for a competitor which had hired Defendant, with the intent of competing with the Company using its using trade secret information".
Time to go be productive with some exercise and coding. Touch grass a little. See where things end up in a day or two.
It's been fun though. So much unexpected drama.
Huh? Can't they just hire new people instead? They are a non profit org after all.
It's exciting to see what they've productized in this first year, but the entire landscape of companoes and products was already sure to look different in another few.
Why can't professional writers properly use Latin words? Why are misapplied plurals so common?
I can't wait to watch the docu-drama on this in a few months time.
Real-life is always more interesting than fiction.
It may turn out that the unusual governance model is the only way to bring about a desired outcome here without fully selling out to MS.
MSFT wants to double down on the marketing hype.
The true winners are likely OpenAI's competitors Google and Meta. Whatever the outcome with Sam's OpenAI future, surely this circus slows their momentum and raises doubts for 3rd party developers.
Sam and Greg come back.
Re-hire the board.
Tweet, "It was just a prank, bro."
Wouldn't surprise me at this point.
> As I posted elsewhere, I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Ilya may have been brought into this without his knowledge (which might explain why he retracted his position). Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Altruism and also gave OpenAI their $30M grant. He is also one of the early investors in Anthropic.
> Most of the OpenAI board members are related to Dustin Moskovitz this way.
> - Adam D'Angelo is on the board of Asana and is a good friend to both Moskovitz and Altman
> - Helen Toner worked for Dustin Moskovitz at Open Philanthropy and managed their grant to OpenAI. She was also a member of the Centre for the Governance of AI when McCauley was a board member there. Shortly after Toner left, the Centre for the Governance of AI got a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy and McCauley joined the board of OpenAI
> - Tasha McCauley represents the Centre for the Governance of AI, which Dustin Moskovitz gave a $1M grant to via Open Philanthropy and McCauley ended up joining the board of OpenAI
> Over the past few months, Dustin Moskovitz has also been increasingly warning about AI Safety.
> In essense, it looks like a split between Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz
Please don't do this - for many reasons, including that it makes merging the comments a pain.
If you or anyone notices a comment that deserves to be at the top level (and doesn't lose context if moved), let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll move it.
So do you have the ability to pin deeply nested comments or do you have to remove it from the existing thread for this to work?
Someone else proposed this first but didn't think pinning worked on nested comments.
Edit: The original author asked not to be pinned in a subcomment, so I don't know now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Altruism and also gave OpenAI their $30M grant. He is also one of the early investors in Anthropic.
Most of the OpenAI board members are related to Dustin Moskovitz this way.
- Adam D'Angelo is on the board of Asana and is a good friend to both Moskovitz and Altman
- Helen Toner worked for Dustin Moskovitz at Open Philanthropy and managed their grant to OpenAI. She was also a member of the Centre for the Governance of AI when McCauley was a board member there. Shortly after Toner left, the Centre for the Governance of AI got a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy and McCauley joined the board of OpenAI
- Tasha McCauley represents the Centre for the Governance of AI, which Dustin Moskovitz gave a $1M grant to via Open Philanthropy and McCauley ended up joining the board of OpenAI
Over the past few months, Dustin Moskovitz has also been increasingly warning about AI Safety.
In essense, it looks like a split between Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz
Or maybe dang can extract this comment and orphan it.
But with everything that has gone on, I cannot imagine wanting to be an Effective Altruist! The movement by that name seems to do and think some really weird stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_globally,_act_locally
"Think Globally, Act Locally" leads to charities in wealthy cities getting disproportionately huge amounts of money for semi-frivolous things like symphony orchestras, while people in the global south are dying of preventable diseases.
There has been a community of professional practice around measuring impact and directing funds accordingly for decades. Does it always generate perfect results? No, far from it!! Is there room to improve? Absolutely, lots and lots of room!
But it’s hard not to notice that the people who call themselves Effective Altruists have no better a track record (actually, I would say far worse) than the so-called bloated NGOs and international organizations when it comes to efficacy.
The idea of boards might even be an anti-pattern going forward, they can be played and used in essentially rug pull scenarios for full control of all the work of entire organizations. Maybe boards are past their time or too much of a potential timebomb/trojan horse now.
(i) they allowed customized agents and a store of these agents.
(iI) they had access to GPT-32k context length very early, in fact one of the first to have it.
Both of these kinda became pointless after DevDay. It definitely kills Poe, and I think that itself is a conflict of interest, right? Whether or not it's at a scale to compete is a secondary question.
Either way, Adam's conflict of interest is significant, and it's staggering he wasn't asked to resign from the board after launching a chatbot-based AI company.
Was he? I must have missed that in all this chaos.
The top org was a 501(c)3 and the directors were all effectively independent. The CEO of such an organisation would never have any control over the board, by design.
We've gotten very used to founders having controlling shareholdings and company boards basically being advisory rather than having a genuine fiduciary responsibility. Companies even go public with Potempkin boards. But this was never "normal" and does not represent good governance. Boards should represent the shareholders, who should be a broader group (especially post-IPO) than the founders.
The post asks how/why Sam ended up with a board full of directors so far out of alignment with his vision.
I think a big part of that is that the board was down several members, from 9 to 6. Perhaps the problem started with not replacing departing board members and this spiraled out of control as more board members left.
Here is a timeline of the board:
https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
Even if we substitute "alignment" the problem is that the suggestion is still that Sam would have been "better protected" in some way. A 501(c)3 is just not supposed to function like that, and good corporate governance absolutely demands that the board be independent of the CEO and be aligned to the company goals not the CEO's goals.
CEOs and subordinate executives being on boards are not unusual, and no board (especially a small board) that the CEO (and/or subordinate executives) sits on is independent of the CEO.
But fundamentally, the CEO _reports to_ the board. That's the relationship. And in a 501(c)3 specifically, the board have a clear requirement to ensure the company is running in alignment with its stated charter.
Whether or not this board got that task right, I don't know, it doesn't seem likely (at least, in hindsight). But this type of board specifically is there for oversight of the CEO, that's precisely their role.
Gotta love seeing effective altruists take another one on the chin this year though.
I hope people apologize to Ilya for jumping to conclusions.
[1] Not a typo :)
It's an interesting saga though and as a payer of ChatGPT+ I feel staked in it.
Drama is fun, and this is top tier drama.
Perhaps more info will come out that casts a different light, but as of now it seems obvious that he decided to vote to fire Altman for reasons that he’s not willing to clarify and which he abandoned as soon as he saw the overwhelmingly negative reaction. He didnt even say he regrets firing Altman - just that he doesn’t want OpenAI to fall apart.
This whole thing still seems to have the air of a pageant to me, where they're making a big stink for drama but it might be manufactured by all of the original board, with Sam, Ilya, Adam, and potentially others all on the same side.
[0] - https://www.404media.co/new-openai-ceo-emmett-shear-was-mino...
That they paid $28k to distribute to others.
This was my first thought too: Is this a concession of the board to install a Sam friendly-ish Interim CEO?
It reads weird on paper.
Side question, but why is that a "mafia". Is any tech entrepreneur starting a 2nd company after having one mildly successful exit now a "mafia" move?
Soon enough, I will probably read about the "skibidi toilet mafia" on this site..
To this day, the any tight collection/network of founders from the same organization is called a "Mafia"
It's not just starting a second company - it's that a group of people who were all bound together by one company end up starting second companies, and they continue to go on to help each other and collaborate in their later ventures.
That doesn't mean this is this kind of conspiracy
Dustin was an early investor in Alameda Research and was also one of the biggest donors to Mind the Gap -- Sam's mom's Super PAC. When SBF was about to go under Dustin was his first call to try to raise money (came out in the FTX trial).
Even if the board's motive was weak and unconvincing, I doubt the ratio of employees threatening to quit would be this high had they just said it openly.
> Self-confidence is one factor that causes people to fall for scams. People of any age who believe they are too smart or well-informed to be tricked are very likely to become victims, especially today when technology is used in many scams.
> Well-educated people with their cognitive abilities intact frequently are victims of scams, partly because they were confident they didn’t fit the profile of fraud victims and couldn’t fall for one. That made them less careful.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcarlson/2022/07/25/why-sophi...
Also, the rest of them are very smart too.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2023/11...
Why not shake-up CEOs of AI if the "CEO of cannabis" is doing wild thing?
(and for Sam to get himself seriously compensated)
1) Large military convoys are seen moving towards data centers used by OpenAI. 2) Rumors start going around that GPT-5 demonstrated very unusual behavior towards end of testing last week. 3) "Unknown entity" has somehow gained control of key US infrastructure. 4) Emergency server shut down procedures at key Microsoft Azure data centers rumored to run GPT-5 inference have been kicked off but all data centers personnel have been evacuated because of "unknown reasons."
Duh, duh, dunnnnnnnne…
Third act we find out Musk was the villain all along, X being the final solution for his global mind hive.
Fin.
Well, probably not anymore.
> More: New CEO Emmett Shear has so far been unable to get written documentation of the board’s reasons for firing Altman, which also haven’t been shared with investors
> Employees responded to his announcement in OpenAI’s Slack with a “fuck you” emoji
This is silly.
Sam, Greg, and Ilya were presumed guaranteed to be the same team, which meant they couldn't be removed (3/6 votes).
Ilya switched sides to align with all 3 of the non-founding board members, giving them 4/6 votes, which they used to remove Sam and Greg.
Now that they've been removed, there's 4 remaining board members: the non-founding 3 and Ilya. They'll need 3/4 votes to reorganize the board.
The way things are looking, OpenAI won't exist next week if the board doesn't resign. Everyone will quit and join Sam.
This means no matter what Ilya does, the other three can vote him out, which is why the board removed Mira, stalled on bringing Sam back, etc, since Ilya's vote does not matter anymore.
Only if you can move two people over to the other side will you have 3 vs 1, and could bring Sam and Greg back.
This Microsoft deal could just be another Satya card, and means: 1. If Sam goes back to OpenAI, we (as Microsoft) still will get new models at the normal rate in our previous contract. 2. If Sam cannot go back, we get to hire most of OpenAI to Microsoft, and can rebuild from the rubble.
So AI is saved at the last minute. Either OpenAI will live, or it will be rebuilt in Microsoft and funded by Microsoft with the same benefits as before. Only loss was slowing AI down by maybe months, but the team probably could get back where they started. They know it all in their heads. Microsoft already has the IP.
If there was no hope for OpenAI, then Ilya might just move with Sam to Microsoft, and that would be the end of it.
It s a non-profit, it's for profit, Microsoft is investing, board is firing Sam, Ilya thinks Sam needs to be removed, Ilya thought about it more is sorry for firing Sam and wants him back, Sam's part of microsoft, now he's still trying to be CEO of OpenAI.
“childish” is a poorly defined term mainly used to manipulate. You should specify what you actually mean.
Like Sam Altman needs to start a company on Saturday because he was fired on Friday? The board firing him without informing or discussing with investors...
Or Microsoft has to hire him on Monday (they have the most to win/lose tbh, so maybe it's justified).
I just meant the decisions seemed to not think of the longer term / downstream ramifications, the way children often behave.