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Comment by robg | Hacker News Reader

Looking more and more like the dev day nuking of D’Angelo’s Poe led to this outcome. I’m surprised that connection has escaped close scrutiny - it was a conflict of interest AND now Poe is viable again as intended. For a minor player in AI he’s managed to maximize his interests and while serving on a non-profit board.

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I see stuff like this spreading in social media and it’s always people speculating without any evidence. On Saturday it was a coup by Ilya, on Sunday it was a coup by effective altruists/decelerationists on the board, today is D’Angelo’s Poe getting eaten up tomorrow it will be something else.

Your theory collapses in the slightest amount of scrutiny, if D’Angelo tries to destroy the company due to his own company losing value why would the other 3 board members be on board with that? You’re not doing anyone any good speculating stuff like this just adding more noise.

Not saying I agree with the theory, but if D’Angelo was any but manipulative he would obviously lie and convince them using other reasons. For instance he could claim that he’s worried about alignment, safety, etc.

any *bit manipulative

Your argumentation against parent is very fluffy.

> Your theory collapses in the slightest amount of scrutiny, if D’Angelo tries to destroy the company due to his own company losing value why would the other 3 board members be on board with that?

The other 3 have their own motives which have been repeated over and over here. It came to light that there were strong tensions between Helen and Sam as he wanted her to be removed from the board. Ilya was hurt by Sam over the competing teams fiasco. Adam wanted to protect his competitor which is a clear interest conflict and could bring him in severe legal trouble.

And you figured out 4 different motives for 4 different people based on what exactly?

The motives are well documented. Whether these motives were enough to pull the trigger, or other motives will appear remains to be seen.

You don’t think D’Angelo has a conflict of interest?

One is not enough you need 4

Re: "destroy the company"

It's plausible that none of the key participants had really thought this through or imagined that the co would lose value as a result.

I think you might have mixed up effective accelerationist with effective altruists there, but I couldn't say for sure

>On Saturday it was a coup by Ilya, on Sunday it was a coup by effective altruists/decelerationists on the board, today is D’Angelo’s Poe getting eaten up tomorrow it will be something else.

It's already moved on to Helen Toner.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726755613667934217?s...

>>why would the other 3 board members be on board with that?

I guess all had their reasons. This is one big reason why you don't want these non-profit kind of things. No stake, No play. Human beings don't feel about the things they don't own the same way, they feel about things they own.

I think the motivation to make profits, get rewarded is a tremendous driver of things. In situations like these you are always tempted to think that the true end of altruism is nobody(who works on things to make them happen) benefits. Notice how its the same when the set up succeeds, same when it fails.

If D'Angelo acted to protect his company it shouldn't be surprising. The whole point of having people with conflict of interests to not serve on your board is exactly this. They have more reasons to see you fail, than see you win.

Other people likely had their own reasons. Ilya probably was acting too altruistic, and had thoughts about Sama for a long time.

Expecting the whole company to sign up with your moves, especially when their financial interests are the exact opposite, is taking it a little too far. Which again brings us back the same thing. Lots of people seem to be arguing that people working on this at all levels must be doing this for grander reasons, and not making it about just money alone. Which is so unfair and such wrong evaluation of people's motives to work on anything at all, let alone this.

Finally, it feels like nobody wanted to see the company win. And they didn't have incentives to do that either. Every one seems to be happy it ended.

This theory is endorsed by OpenAI's Head of Applied Research, Dr. Boris Power, who retweeted a Robert Scoble tweet saying this. See his twitter timeline here https://twitter.com/borismpower?lang=en

For those not logged in, Power said the following was "an interesting thread, maybe too speculative":

https://nitter.net/scottastevenson/status/172673102286200873...

Correct, and Dr. Power also retweeted a tweet from @Scobleizer that says:

    Who held the gun that killed OpenAI?

    Hey 
    @adamdangelo
     all evidence points at you.

    Wanna come on my show?

Being spun as deeply ideological seems about right - the 3 non-profit oriented board members seem like they were already open about their views in that direction, so just took one vote to flip - D’Angelo.

It has not escaped close scrutiny. It's just that people don't go around accusing a specific person without evidence.

The timing of Dev Day and its impacts on Poe aren’t suspect to you?

And you don’t think D’Angelo has a conflict of interest that impacts his board role at OpenAI?

D’Angelo is certainly naive in his self-interest, and definitely not capable as to orchestrate this thing. Think of him like he's useful bastard, and now it's his turn to become the scape-goat bastard for everybody to hate. This is counter-spin for containment purposes. The real questions we should be asking is how come the NATSEC patriot-ladies on the board managed to exploit Sutskever in such blatant way, what that entailed, and what kind of psychosis it took to get there.

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