Comment by Rastonbury | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rastonbury | Hacker News Reader

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This is not any other company though? It's a non-profit with charter to make AI to benefit all of humanity

Helen believed she was doing her job according to the non-profit charter, obviously this hurts the for-profit side of things but that is not her mandate. That is the reason OpenAI is structured the way it is, with the intention of preventing capitalist forces from swaying them away from the non-profit charter, in hindsight it didn't work, but that was the intention (with the independent directors, no equity stakes, etc)

The board has all my respect for standing up to the capitalists of Altman, the VCs, Microsoft. Big feathers to ruffle - even though the execution was misjudged, turns out most of its employees are pretty capitalistic too

> The board has all my respect for standing up to the capitalists of Altman, the VCs, Microsoft. Big feathers to ruffle - even though the execution was misjudged, turns out most of its employees are pretty capitalistic too

Exactly. This is a battle between altruistic principles and some of the most heavyweight greedy money in the world. The board messed up the execution, but so did OpenAI leadership when they offered million dollar pay packages to people in a non-profit that is supposed to be guided by selfless principles.

One man's altruist is another man's fanatic. I, for one, would prefer an evil bandit over an evil fanatic because at least a bandit sleeps once in a while as that C.S Lewis quote goes.

And the bandit likely is honest about their motives.

I don't see why we have to paint these people with vagaries and reduction to analogy

For the board, their job is to keep the mandate of the non-profit. The org is structured to prevent "bandits" from influencing their goals. Hence, I cannot fault non-profit directors for rejecting bandits, that is the reason they are there.

It is like criticising a charity's directors for not bowing to the pressure of large donors to change their focus or mandate. Do we want to live in a world where the rich entrench control and enrich themselves and allies, and we just justify it as bandits being bandits? And anyone who stands up against them gets labelled a fanatic or pejorative altruist?

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