Comment by lawxls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawxls | Hacker News Reader

While the unfolding situation at OpenAI is certainly complex, one can't help but question the role of D'Angelo in this scenario. Given his entanglement in AI development and his recent ventures that place him in direct competition with OpenAI, his continued presence on the board raises legitimate concerns. The essence of board membership, especially in a field as intricate and rapidly evolving as AI, should be rooted in unconflicted support and clear alignment with the organization's goals. If the circulating rumors hold any weight—those hinting at his involvement in the CEO's abrupt dismissal—then it only compounds the argument for a reconsideration of his board role. Entrepreneurship, while often a game of strategic moves, must also adhere to a code of ethics. If these stories of past betrayals among peers are more than just whispers, it does raise questions about the integrity of leadership and decision-making within such influential tech circles. In the interest of transparency and maintaining trust within the tech community, perhaps it's time for D'Angelo to reevaluate his position and possibly step down, ensuring OpenAI can navigate its path without potential conflicts.

I have trouble finding respect for Adam knowing he permitted Quora to gradually transform from something promising to trashing it’s quality for financial sellout to the point that it can no longer be taken seriously. I don’t understand how someone can let that happen.

Yeah I was thinking last night after hearing his involvement in this, does anyone else realize that Quora is basically unusable now? I mean it started from such a noble cause to answer all of humanity's questions to literally tricking end-users into clicking ads...

It’s not just this, you are given answers to related questions when the answer to your actual question is further down. Possibly to increase stickiness? It doesn’t make sense.

This is the most confusing thing any time I've clicked a quora link. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Who designed that? It's crazy how bad it is. They probably got a promo for it lol

It used to be good/great in the past but nowadays I avoid Quora like the plague, due to its massively confusing interface.

Quora is the text version of the Chumbox.

The chumbox is slang for the part of news site web design you... try to ignore. These sites managed to optimize their design for <10% of users who will click just about anything.

> I mean it started from such a noble cause to answer all of humanity's questions to literally tricking end-users into clicking ads...

I'm pretty sure you've just described the web.

Cough cough Reddit.

I'm honestly curious how Quora is still in business. I wouldn't say I was a heavy user, but I used to use it fairly frequently, and then it just became a minefield of walls and dark patterns such that whenever I get a Quora result in search I just go somewhere else. I used to hear people talk about Quora but now I never hear any sort of discussion about it from tech types, besides jests and disdain.

I completely realize that my experience may not track your average Joe, but I read an article from this summer that said Quora was planning an IPO, and I just am trying to wrap my head around how there would be any decent valuation.

Their SEO is very good. "I got it from Quora" is still an answer which carries some weight. And a lot of those answers have a long shelf life - easily 4+ years, even 20 in the case of, say, an answer about Steve Jobs.

So you have a site, with a lot of valuable links, on a platform where anyone can & will create more, with widespread name recognition. That's valuable.

Their SEO was/is technically extremely poor (per Google's rules) and should have gotten their content largely banished from Google. They were intentionally violating one of Google search's primary SEO rules: do not show the Google bot and users a meaningfully different site. Quora was doing exactly that, providing a very different experience to the non-signed in search user (arriving to the site via search results) vs Google bot. Google let Quora get away with SEO murder (speculation on HN has always been that it was due to the close relationships in SV), which is the sole thing that has kept Quora propped up (otherwise its traffic would have been properly obliterated for its blackhat SEO practices).

Quora is my biggest internet disappointment by far. I used to spend a lot of time there between 2013-2017. It wasn't perfect but there were great questions, great authors to follow, and the feed consistently served me quality content.

Then they flipped the switch on the new algorithms / monetization strategies and it all turned to shit. All of the thoughtful writers were replaced by whoever could churn out the most sensational (and usually blatantly false) answers. Whenever Google leads me there now I am physically pained by the awful user experience and absolute drivel in the top answers.

So yeah, not impressed at all with D'Angelo

One of my favorite use-cases for Kagi is to block Quora from all of my search results.

A classic case of enshittification. Quora is the new Yahoo Answers.

The funny thing is that there will be a new one soon probably.

Or is it the AI app he’s already building?

I always assumed Quora was a classic example of a company that raised too much money.

They had a fantastic, high quality service up to around 2015 - but they raised at least $226m at a (one point) $1.8bn valuation by 2017: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/21/uniquorn/

Justifying that valuation requires a metric ton of growth hacking that appears to be incompatible with maintaining a high level of quality on a Q&A site.

Wasn’t this the game?

Cheat people into generating top quality content for you. Once you have enough, put all of it behind a paywall. And use all that content as your chips in the new AI game.

Also interesting that D’Angelo was the one who was negotiating with OpenAI leadership as representative of the board,[1] and the employee protest letter states that the board "informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed would be consistent with the mission" during these negotiations.[2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/openai-s-...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-al...

Note that "allowing the company to be destroyed" is outside of the literal quote (which is just "consistent with the mission"), so "destroyed" may be an appraisal by the leadership that the board doesn't share.

Some speculate that Helen and Adam were on the verge of being forced out by Sam, the former in the lieu of new investors needing a board seat for their person and the latter due to conflict of interest (via Poe after GPT Store launched on Devday). Once Ilya bought into their concerns, Adam and Helen, without informing any stakeholder (incl Microsoft), moved swiftly and decisively before any director changed their mind (like Ilya eventually did).

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1727026942560330172 / https://archive.is/l89JO

This seems the simplest explanation, and relevant to the post, cause for a lawsuit. Helen could be principled about the mission, but difficult to say Adam was, given what he stood to gain.

If you're an investor in OpenAI's for-profit unit, the very clear lawsuit target is D'Angelo. His extreme conflict of interest problem is a personal bankruptcy waiting to happen given the value destruction OpenAI has just (probably) suffered. Investors should be promptly slapping a multi billion dollar lawsuit down on the table: resign or else.

Then stop messing around and fully split off the for-profit unit, run by Altman. They're in perpetual conflict. The non-profit can use its ownership stake (liquidate it gradually) for funding for a very long time and can still pursue its mission of safe AGI. It should provide tens of billions of dollars in funding for the non-profit. The for-profit can then be unleashed to fully pursue commercialization related to GPT without hold-backs.

The absurd fantasy of the dual OpenAI missions co-existing in peace needs to die. They can't co-exist peacefully within one body, everything about their requirements to thrive going forward puts them at odds with each other (from speed, to compensation, to funding requirements, to management approach).

Nothing is absurd about expecting a company, run by a group of people, to uphold the values and mission its existence was predicated upon, down to the name of the company itself. Especially in such a short time frame.

Of course it's absurd: it was all a game of playing pretend. That's the fantasy part.

It hadn't been open AI for a long time.

The entity that you're referring to no longer exists at present. They can revive it by splitting these inherently at-conflict entities apart.

With tens of billions in funding via stock liquidation they can go back to pursuing actual open AI and have a lot of money to throw at doing so, without concerns for conflict with a for-profit mission in relation to a funding source.

Today the mission of being open with their AI tech is at conflict with the funding base: GPT commercialization. At least with how they have been operating for years now. There's no fixing that in the current structure.

All great points, it’s wild that this small non-profit board had so much power with so little at stake for themselves. That’s a typical feature of a non-profit board, but in this case the entity wasn’t a typical non-profit.

To your points, such a split makes too much sense and the ship has probably sailed when the employees showed they have no loyalty or responsibilities to the organization itself.

Given that this debacle turned out to be NOT about AI safety (as Emmet Shear confirmed), the whole "slowing down" angle becomes about interests.

Who else had the commercial/totally-for-profit interest in slowing OpenAI down, and was in a position to do something about it?

It is hard to see what unfolded as anything but active sabotage.

Indeed, this is most puzzling and it is now a 33% chance that he's the one that started all this. If it turns out that is true the chances of a successful suit go up considerably.

Who cares who started this? All four are equally responsible. You can’t vote then say it wasn’t your fault (unless you were literally coerced).

That might cause the board to split up further, there is already one defector from the 'gang of four'. If D'Angelo started it the other two might say they were pressured by him and come out publicly against him (like Ilya Sustkever did).

I'm starting to wonder if it was a gang of four or if it was a gang of three and they used one of the cofounders (Ilya) to turn on his cofounders to get control of the company.

Likely the second or it was a gang of one who used the inexperience of the other board members to get them to act against their own long term interests. That does not absolve them, they are still board members and they should own their decisions.

That's a big reason why VC's prefer co-founders rather than solo founders.

I know it’s nuts, but is there any chance this was orchestrated to some degree? If someone wanted to throw off the non profit structure, they couldn’t have done a better job than this. I mean, it really works out well for Microsoft.

You forgot the "It's important to keep in mind" part.

Perhaps ironic? Your wording sounds exactly like is was written by ChatGPT (especially the last sentence)!

:)

and a smile face exactly like how chatgpt would do, too! ;)

First thing I thought of, but I didn't want to be the first one to throw out accusations. That comment has the same unnatural writing patterns that ChatGPT uses. Something about the style makes me feel uneasy when reading it.

What's funny is that, as content written by AI becomes normalized across media, which it inevitably will, people will necessarily imitate the style of AI if they want to appear serious.

Did Sam Altman have any conflicts of interest, between OpenAI's charter and his other investments?

The answer to that one is of indeed YES.

It would appear that there are different rules when profit is involved, which ironically is exactly what OpenAI's nonprofit parent was intended to prevent.

Yes, it would be funny if it wasn't tragic: the exact scenario they wanted to prevent materialized but from the one angle where they weren't covered. I predict this is the last time that a non-profit is put in charge of a for profit that has investors. That mistake is not going to be made again. And it also shows how risky it is to put together new governance structures even if they seem to be a good idea at the time. Because the fig leaf suddenly turned into a hammer the size of which would be hard to replicate in a normal governance setting. Unparalleled destruction with zero regards for the consequences.

the one angle where they weren't covered

Not sure what this is from the thread context.

Unparalleled destruction with zero regards for the consequences.

Isn't this the size of the hammer needed, in case there's a danger of misaligned runaway superintelligence?

> Isn't this the size of the hammer needed, in case there's a danger of misaligned runaway superintelligence?

Possibly, but then you are better off not to develop the thing in the first place.

And you should only break the glass in a break-the-glass moment.

Purely hypothetical but this presents a tiny angle which Adam could come out of this as a reasonable person... if all of this was basically him saying "I have to go. You have to go. We are both compromised and our positions are now against the charter" then maybe Sam was fighting against that because of the team he built and loves leading. This is one reason I would accept Adam's role if it is just him hanging on to make sure Sam is out before leaving himself.

But if that's the case then just say it.

It's a stretch but it could be true. Unlikely though. And if it were true I would have expected Sustkever to spill the beans by now.

If a single “donor”/investor owns you you cannot enforce anything nonprofit or not.

Which investment?

Absolutely, but that seems to have been a prerequisite for joining the board of OpenAI.

Yes but that's most boards these days, at least by the standards of a layperson.

D'Angelo is mad he weaponized web design against Quora users for years because he would go bankrupt otherwise, and now he is going bankrupt anyway. Adam is at war with god, not OpenAI.

Adam is at war with god, not OpenAI.

Where does the phrase, "is at war with God," denoting opposition to fundamental laws of reality, come from?

For me personally, likely Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice.

One of those random books you purloin in youth, and a total departure from her standard narrative fiction fare. It's a retelling of the original cosmic myth from the... rebellious perspective.

Stab in the dark here, but I would not be surprised if such a phrase is untraceable in origin due to long usage. There are many ancient stories where men battle with gods and they are analogous to fighting nature. Especially considering many gods are considered to be those that control nature and who's moods are characterized by it. We can even find references in the bible but I don't read Hebrew so idk if these are direct translations and not bothering to check changes from versioning. But I suspect that this phrase, in some form or another (battling with god, fighting god, etc), is rather old and not even unique to westerners. So I wouldn't be surprised if the phrase is older than language itself. But I'm not a linguist or historian and this is pure conjecture. Just someone who enjoys language and mythos as hobbies.

My guess would be that it's from Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), which leans on the story of Sisyphus. She never actually uses the word "war", but does use various war metaphors ("see how deep the bullet lies", etc.).

To me, it's a "Deal with God" not being at war with God. Deals with gods and deals with devils seem to have something in common, in a way which is topical to discussing OpenAI.

That's the perennial debate about the song. Does Bush want to swap places with her ex-lover, or does she want to swap places with God so that God can feel the pain of continually running up that hill? My take has always been the latter, given the Sisyphus metaphor (Sisyphus was condemned by a god to keep rolling a boulder up a hill). It's not war, no, but there is clearly some major hostility.

So OpenAI has no conflict of interest clause?

For those keen on following this situation as it evolves, consider subscribing to keywords 'OpenAI' and 'Sam Altman' via my Telegram HackerNews alerts bot to receive related stories. The bot is completely free and open-source. My aim here isn't financial gain or power, but rather to offer a useful tool for the community (https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com