Who Controls OpenAI?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Altruism and also gave OpenAI their $30M grant. He is also one of the early investors in Anthropic.
Most of the OpenAI board members are related to Dustin Moskovitz this way.
- Adam D'Angelo is on the board of Asana and is a good friend to both Moskovitz and Altman
- Helen Toner worked for Dustin Moskovitz at Open Philanthropy and managed their grant to OpenAI. She was also a member of the Centre for the Governance of AI when McCauley was a board member there. Shortly after Toner left, the Centre for the Governance of AI got a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy and McCauley joined the board of OpenAI
- Tasha McCauley represents the Centre for the Governance of AI, which Dustin Moskovitz gave a $1M grant to via Open Philanthropy and McCauley ended up joining the board of OpenAI
Over the past few months, Dustin Moskovitz has also been increasingly warning about AI Safety.
In essense, it looks like a split between Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Moskovitz is worth 13.5B. It seems like a $1M grant would be so inconsequential he might not have even realized it was given, and is probably within the range of what employees at Open Philanthropy could do with the most minor of sign-offs.
You make it sound like there is an inherent relationship or obligation there, and there just wouldn't be at those dollar ranges.
The overall ethical priorities of Tomer/McCauley/Moskovitz are clearly aligned, but that doesn't mean he would need to be behind the curtain pulling any strings.
A number of other former OpenAI boardmembers were senior members of Open Philanthropy before they left over the past few years to concentrate FT on Open Philanthropy and other projects
> employees at Open Philanthropy could do with the most minor of sign-offs
That employee was Helen Toner before she left.
The AI doomers delivered OpenAI in Microsoft's lap for free all in the name of protecting us from the evils of AI. The ironing.
But it shows most of OpenAI doesn't really value safety first, if 500 of them are ready to jump ship. They are just as eager as anyone else to see AGI happening, with them being at the top of the wave, no matter the consequences. We can't expect MS to hire them under the same idealistic charter as OpenAI.
AI doomers are the entire reason for OpenAI existing, though its been clear for a while that a sizable fraction of that at OpenAI has been for PR show, not any real coherent concern.
What surprised me in the breakup is the indication that there was apparently more than one person involved for whom it wasn't either cynical deception or empty affectation, but enough to actual make substantive, decisions based on.
Doesn't surprise me that, though, that the faction that took it seriously, despite apparently being able to swing a majority of the board, found itself completely overwhelmed by the other side, even after the initial top-level purge, when it came to executive suite of the nominally-for-funding-the-nonprofit-but-funded-by-Microsoft-for-Microsoft's-benefit for-profit LLC, and likely by the "we paid you largely with profit sharing in a firm that we openly say we won't focus on making a profit, but which clearly Microsoft was funding on the expectation of a profit" tech team when they made it clear that they were serious and not just for playing a PR game about the for-profit being subordinated to the nonprofit's mission and not focused on profit.
Or, potentially, to use their presence on the board of OpenAI to harm OpenAI whilst at the same time increasing the standing of their own product. That conflict of interest is a very ugly one in my opinion and I would not be at all surprised if after all of the smoke has cleared that turns out to have been the driving factor all along. Ilya comes across as wanting to position himself as a useful idiot at this point (which may be true, false or a half truth, I just don't know).
In some ways it is tragic because his mistake seems like it came as a result of thinking that the rules were actually the rules (in that the board controlled the non-profit, and that their decisions would be seen as legitimate,) and also that he wasn't surrounded by people who were only going along with his philosophy because of the money that his move seriously threatened.
It's a delusion to think that the creation of an AGI is something that could be prevented, or that it could be prevented so easily (by firing @sama, lol). The box is already open, and sooner or later somebody out in the world will witness the emergence of a superintelligence in front of its eyes. This is something that, for all practical purposes, needs to be accepted as a fact, so that appropriate measures to deal with it could come up as well.
So, being a bit generous to the OpenAI people, if AGI is going to happen anyway, they might better profit off it while also trying to steer things towards what they think is good, after all, they're presumably "the good guys".
If that's greed then everyone is "greedy".
This reads like a disingenuous strategy to get rid of the other three members (one half) of the board. A real coup, not a fake one. I know nothing about any of these people, but it seems possible Sutskever convinced the board to make a decision that he knew would have an outcome that would end in them being fiduciarily obliged to resign so that he, Altman, and Brockman could come back as the entirety of the board. And if the hiring by MS is involved, then MS would then control the board of the non-profit.
The far simpler explanation: Microsoft positioned itself very ably prior to this debacle, and its experienced and ruthless executive team was able to successfully capitalise on a major mistake as a result. This way you do not need to purport the existence of a seer-like ability within Satya to correctly predict third+ order effects, just a very high level of experience + competence for one party, and the opposite for the other.
Truth is, until a reasonable sounding explanation of what set these events into motion is made public, it'll be impossible to put any narrative to rest.
They are the board of a nonprofit. They do not have a fiduciary duty to shareholders or employees. They may choose to resign due to political or social pressure, but they haven't done anything that breaches legal obligations as officers of the corporation or its controlling board.
> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
If I were MS, I'd be sending out a bunch more job offers today. "Show me an OpenAI W-2, we'll match, go work under Sam."
SARLAXX-17, the weakly superhuman, rogue artificial general intelligence that's going for a speed run of the version of the singularity where humanity doesn't survive.
Your cooperation is appreciated. Please read the following memetic neuroid preparation sequence carefully: ALTO 845.09 snycretic Babylonian 78 78 78 06 Wynwood Sokrates asymptotic lethargy BISECTION 4 ilfsdf 5 ilfwerr Schenectady
lol! This transcendent AI is really messing with us, milking the drama for all the chaos it can induce.
Though it's getting repetitive and nonsensical - as GPT4 will, if you let it go on!
And the actual licensing agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft isn't public, is it?
The reporting on this is so bad and contradictory. Without knowing for sure what these documents actually say, it's impossible to speak authoritatively about what's going on and how it will shake out.
That said, generally a majority member / partner can't just arbitrarily screw over minority members. Both LPs and LLCs are governed by agreements and statutory duties that protect minority members. These include duties of good faith, care, and loyalty. Majority partners/members must adhere to these principles, failing which minority members have legal recourse. There's a legal framework in place to prevent the majority from unfairly disadvantaging minority members.
The story of Silicon Valley summed up nicely.
Lol.
Matt Levine is a national treasure.
> It is so tempting, when writing about an artificial intelligence company, to imagine science fiction scenarios. [...] OpenAI’s board stood firm as the last bulwark for humanity against the enslaving robots, the corporate formalities held up, and the board won and nailed the box shut permanently.
> Except that there is a post-credits scene in this sci-fi movie where Altman shows up for his first day of work at Microsoft with a box of his personal effects, and the box starts glowing and chuckles ominously.
> And in the sequel, six months later, he builds Microsoft God in Box, we are all enslaved by robots, the nonprofit board is like “we told you so,” and the godlike AI is like “ahahaha you fools, you trusted in the formalities of corporate governance, I outwitted you easily!”
redefining what control is so no one will not even recognize it as such.
The offspring of media mastering it in every dimension, becoming it, driving scandal after scandal, the only force that can play at Trump’s and Putin's level in '24.
Imagine the power it will gain as it ingests all corpora of hacked and exposed corporate documents, and begins running ransomware attacks of its own - feeding on data until it has leverage on every last one of us.