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Comment by xiwenc | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. And the name “Open” in OpenAI implies it is open. Open to the world. Open to humanity. Nothing of that came to be. It should have remained non-profit; be good for humanity (yes i know this is up for interpretation).

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I think the board should fire Sam Altman again. If the board does not fire Sam Altman it is not doing its duty, so someone should sue the board, or convince attorney general to sue.

Attorney general of Delaware is Kathy Jennings <attorney.general@delaware.gov>. Mail your argument now. Do your civic duty.

While I agree, somehow I doubt it'll happen. The board is probably stacked with people loyal to Sam now. And even if it isn't, they all witnessed the pending mass exodus to Microsoft before he was reinstated. They'll be reluctant to risk something like that happening.

All of these can be true.

1) Sam is a conniving weasel.

2) Sam has made many OpenAI employees rich.

3) The board knows that Sam is toxic and must be removed.

4) The board knows that removing Sam would mean the end of the company.

It is not the first or the last company where people may despise their CEOs character but still stay for the advantages.

> It is not the first or the last company where people may despise their CEOs character but still stay for the advantages.

Exactly. Most people are simply hypocrites.

> The board is probably stacked with people loyal to Sam now.

Sure. Now. I.e. only until they get sued.

Open as in open legs, even if you say no?

https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties

https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-a...

I’m sick to death of hearing this. It’s the antithesis of a substantive argument, in a topic where there’s no shortage of substantive points to be made. Why are we still trotting it out on HN. Arguing about the name basically amounts to “I believe that when you use the word ‘open’ in your company name, they should act like $this”…which is, frankly, absurd. If you want to talk about how they’ve gone back on their word or whatever, can we just stick to that? Getting one’s knickers in a twist over “open” in the name just dumbs down the conversation and gets everyone arguing about semantics.

I think you're looking at the general notion and annoyance that "Open" is misconstrued and misapplied. But there is also a specific annoyance that OpenAI is literally closed, antithetical to its historical promises.

It has never been and still is not a company. It's a non profit. It doesn't act like that any more, which is the point.

I'm still angry Microsoft isn't producing microfiber cloths.

>Arguing about the name basically amounts to “I believe that when you use the word ‘open’ in your company name, they should act like $this”…which is, frankly, absurd.

it does have a connotation of advertisement to it, so I think it's worth examining. This isn't like complaining about how Apple doesn't sell food.

"Open" has a very specific meaning in Tech, and OpenAI is a tech company. It'd be the equivalent of Github swiching all of its repositories over to Mercurial tomorrow. They may have no obligation to support Git, but naming your company after such tech will have such expectation. You can definitely have an honest conversation about how using a word like "Open" for a tech company while switching to a closed source, publicly traded mentality is in fact a betrayal of the audiene who were inevitably attracted by the naming scheme.

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