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Comment by bartwr | Hacker News Reader

"Conflict of interest" is not defined by a bad outcome or malice. It is defined as the potential of those, human nature, and various cognitive biases. "Conflict of interest" is disclosing anything that could lead to a biased decision or lack of transparency. Can a CEO of 2 companies be objective about a contract between the two and when claiming that his company no2 is better than the competition?

And in the tech-specific case: As much as junior engineers would love to believe in "superior" solutions, tech decisions are seldom clear-cut. There are many trade-offs: cost, efficiency, memory use, throughput, latency, ease of use, cost of switching, and many more. You always have a pile of pros and cons. Sometimes, one is strong enough, but most of the time, it feels almost like guessing/intuition. And then the conflict of interest becomes especially concerning.

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I thought “potential conflict of interest” was the term used to refer to the potential conflict.

yes, and "disclosure of" is the term used when you properly disclose conflicts.

“Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest” — if I understand?

Asking people to disclose potential conflicts of interest casts a wider net — so they aren’t led to think “nah, that’s not a conflict, it’s a win win!”

It may be a conflict of interest but it will be hidden by layers. OAI has deal with gpu producer and there is little conflict as they don't interact, but MS that owns Azure and resell of hardware creates that conflict. Maybe I have bad view, but I think many such conflicts that come from interdependent parties exist and especially in datacenter/cloud world.

This is patently wrong. All of it. You made up a concept and then ran with it like it’s reality. “Potential” is not an issue. “Actual” is. This isn’t a judge. This is a CEO and they can self deal as long as it stays as a value to the core company. It’s up to the board to decide that when it’s proven.

A bunch of nerds just thought they could jump the gun here because they are inexperienced doofus’s when it comes to corp.

No, conflict of interest is entirely about potential.

Lots of e.g. news organizations absolutely have tons of guardrails in place around conflicts of interest that may or may not really influence behavior but may even have the appearance of potentially doing so.

A CEO self-dealing can be civilly (and in gross cases, criminally) convicted of violating their fiduciary duty to act in the company's interest, over their own, and violating company trade secrets.

(If Altman doesn't want to be restricted by fiduciary duties then he shouldn't be on a board or be an executive.)

How could Altman possibly not use private OpenAI information regarding its hardware needs, when creating an AI hardware company he wants to serve OpenAI? And its competitors?

He could invest in a new AI hardware company created and run by other people (without his specific input) without a conflict. That does not appear to be the case here. He could create an OpenAI hardware subsidiary. Again not what he was doing.

“Can”. Everyone here is talking in absolutes. There is a shit ton of room in “can”.

I am not sure what you are saying. Agreeing with me or not? "Can" as "a shit ton of room" vs. some undescribed "absolutes"?

Self-dealing CEO's and board members can, and are, convicted criminally and civilly of violating their fiduciary duties. And "can" and are fired with cause.

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