Comment by skmurphy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skmurphy | Hacker News Reader

Thoughtful analysis of dynamics in play at OpenAI that may have led to his firing and likely will result in his reinstatement.

Key take-aways (excerpts from article):

"The board made a blunder. OpenAI’s employees will likely get their CEO back by Monday, and Satya Nadella’s 10 billion dollars in Azure credits will have some vote in the future of OpenAI.

What’s clear is that the board is grossly mismanaged. A non-profit board should not be running a critically important company like OpenAI. Just look at the turnover and lack of transparency on re-election.

I think that Ilya [Sutskever] will leave OpenAI when Sam is reinstated. He has to be the player who initiated the power play. The entire current board will leave, and a new board with fewer AI safety people (sadly) will be reinstated.

I would not be surprised to see the OpenAI charity and capped-profit structure flipped, with a formal board at the GP that becomes the real locus of power.

The boardroom move was amateur and sudden. And as much as boards have technical legal power, so do the organizations they rule. It’s all a construct, and the people of OpenAI will get their way. And hopefully, a better governance structure.

I believe that the longer-term problem of safe AI is important, but you don’t do that with sudden shakeups of the founder and an exodus of half of the employees.

OpenAI has been doing something special for a long time, beating the likes of better-funded research organizations like Google or Microsoft. It’s probably in everyone’s best interest to keep the team together. "

> A non-profit board should not be running a critically important company like OpenAI

A for-profit board should not be running a critically important company like OpenAI.

There’s been a rewrite btw, mostly a critique of the non profit board structure not the non profit.

Thanks I did not realize this. My excerpts are from the original version, most of them no longer appear in the text.

>What’s clear is that the board is grossly mismanaged. A non-profit board should not be running a critically important company like OpenAI. Just look at the turnover and lack of transparency on re-election.

This is an insane thing to say. It's an argument against OpenAI existing at all, and the alternatives (for-profit boards and a military research project) are both much, much worse.

Why would the board agree to all that? If they are worried about the direction Altman is taking OpenAI, then surely the price for Altman’s return is a strengthening of the current structure and some guarantees from Altman to slow down, not a weakening and hollowing out of the structure.

> Why would the board agree to all that?

Because if they don't agree, then all their best employees, and probably also their Azure cloud credits, will leave to join Sam and Greg at a new company picking up right where they left off.

Only 3 people are reported to have resigned.

There’s no evidence that a mass resignation will happen.

The remaining org may likely desicate without Microsoft and other commercial investment and revenue sources, but I don't think you can assume a new entity would be off to a strong start without the IP which OpenAI itself ultimately owns (the brand, the software products and infrastructure, the customer accounts, the trained systems, etc).

Unraveling this weekend's drama is way more complicated than you suggest. Both factions actually have quite a bit of leverage.

All the best people you say are just sales guys or people who are trying to create a product out of real engine.

OpenAI is the hottest of the hot, there’s no shortage of talented people who want to work there. The people who decide this is why they want to leave are probably the ones least aligned to OpenAI’s mission.

The same goes for the Azure credits. If MS decides they want out then other big tech companies will be lining up to take their place. This makes Microsoft’s threats rather hollow.

I posted these excerpts about an hour after the original post went it. The article has now been substantially re-written (with no indication in the text of the changes) and most of the sentences I excerpted have been removed. It was an accurate summary at the time I posted it.

Strange to see this stated as if they were clear facts. Openai when founded had the goal of AGI in mind. That's why they chose this structure so that the corporation side would not have almost unbounded power when the technology matures and the total revenue becomes a sizable proportion of the GDP. Weird and idealistic? Maybe, but also possibly correct. If the only way to get there is through raw capitalism, society is in for a big shock. Bigger than it would be with its original model.

Let’s be honest… the cat is out of the bag and now it’s a race. If Openai tries to regulate itself too much they will eventually be eclipsed by another player that only worries about gov regulations and possibly just accepts the fines like many capitalists. I say buckle up and get ready for some massive disruption! Better for the US (at least for us citizens) to lead the way and maintain the power of AGI than many other alternatives… let’s start working on the post capitalist society!

If OpenAI changes their governance structure I think every single major AI lab will be controlled by corporations. What makes you so optimistic about a world where the most powerful technology of all time is controlled by a narrow set of capitalist interests? Just think about what the world would be like, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a 'post-capitalist' society. If anything it'll be the exact opposite

We'll see. Apparently they're meeting right now at OpenAI and they made Sam use a guest badge. The level of pettiness is mind blowing.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1726345564059832609

What badge do you suggest they should have given him? Those badges actually serve a function.

Pettiness seems to be Sam tweeting about this. As a person who is, at the moment, not an employee, using guest pass is correct.

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