Board Members (2014)
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
It's easy to say in hindsight that a board member was good, after the company has succeeded. Harder to tell in advance.
In a non-profit structure, your options are much more limited. There are no shares, no shareholders, no IPOs, no investors, no valuations that you can appeal to as an indicator of your performance. Conflicts within the board often boil down to a battle of reputation and influence, ego and resentment.
It's easy to get the share structure you want if you're the founder of a typical C Corp.
He was the initial board members. Not founders.
In reality, I think Ilya fits as more of a founder in this situation. He worked with Hinton directly as one of the founders in the technology, has been one of the main technical contributors for well over a decade, and him leaving Google/DeepMind to join Open AI as a founder was arguably the main catalyst that led to openAI being created in the first place.
Once again it looks like we might have found ourselves in the classic Edison-Tesla-Westinghouse confusion.
Of course it's early days and this is so just speculation. Might be jobs Apple, but I do think the context and situation is a lot more Edison Tesla Westinghouse.
Altman, Brockman, Ilya, and a handful of mostly-unknown board members — the entire relevant group could sit (and has sat) around a table.
Not to mention they’ve all had the most stressful year of their lives, worked harder, and been exposed to insane hyper growth.
I don’t know what happened anymore than anyone else does but I suppose the people involved were experiencing substantial, prolonged, elevated stress.
They believe that they will and therefore we need to ask is their governance structure fit for purpose if they achieve their goals?
It has been done for weapons, it has been done for cryptography in the 80s, it has been discussed for vaccines during the pandemic, it has been done for finance and surely it will be done for AGI.
There's absolutely no reason to believe OpenAI is right about this when thousands of experts have been wrong. AGI is deceptively difficult because it's almost impossible to see how far away you are from the goal. You can see how far you've come and extrapolate, but that's always a mistake.
Boards do answer to shareholders. The structure is execs answer to the chief exec who answers to the board who answers to share holders. No one else is relevant.
Are you suggesting confiscation of their property? That’s a terribly dark path. The government doesn’t exist to steal private property. It exists to create regulations and legal frameworks for them.
It has nothing to do with the governance of non-profit purpose driven organizations.