OpenAI investors considering suing the board after CEO's abrupt firing
reuters.com
reuters.com
The chumbox is slang for the part of news site web design you... try to ignore. These sites managed to optimize their design for <10% of users who will click just about anything.
I'm pretty sure you've just described the web.
I completely realize that my experience may not track your average Joe, but I read an article from this summer that said Quora was planning an IPO, and I just am trying to wrap my head around how there would be any decent valuation.
So you have a site, with a lot of valuable links, on a platform where anyone can & will create more, with widespread name recognition. That's valuable.
They had a fantastic, high quality service up to around 2015 - but they raised at least $226m at a (one point) $1.8bn valuation by 2017: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/21/uniquorn/
Justifying that valuation requires a metric ton of growth hacking that appears to be incompatible with maintaining a high level of quality on a Q&A site.
Then they flipped the switch on the new algorithms / monetization strategies and it all turned to shit. All of the thoughtful writers were replaced by whoever could churn out the most sensational (and usually blatantly false) answers. Whenever Google leads me there now I am physically pained by the awful user experience and absolute drivel in the top answers.
So yeah, not impressed at all with D'Angelo
The funny thing is that there will be a new one soon probably.
Or is it the AI app he’s already building?
Cheat people into generating top quality content for you. Once you have enough, put all of it behind a paywall. And use all that content as your chips in the new AI game.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/openai-s-...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-al...
https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1727026942560330172 / https://archive.is/l89JO
Then stop messing around and fully split off the for-profit unit, run by Altman. They're in perpetual conflict. The non-profit can use its ownership stake (liquidate it gradually) for funding for a very long time and can still pursue its mission of safe AGI. It should provide tens of billions of dollars in funding for the non-profit. The for-profit can then be unleashed to fully pursue commercialization related to GPT without hold-backs.
The absurd fantasy of the dual OpenAI missions co-existing in peace needs to die. They can't co-exist peacefully within one body, everything about their requirements to thrive going forward puts them at odds with each other (from speed, to compensation, to funding requirements, to management approach).
It hadn't been open AI for a long time.
The entity that you're referring to no longer exists at present. They can revive it by splitting these inherently at-conflict entities apart.
With tens of billions in funding via stock liquidation they can go back to pursuing actual open AI and have a lot of money to throw at doing so, without concerns for conflict with a for-profit mission in relation to a funding source.
Today the mission of being open with their AI tech is at conflict with the funding base: GPT commercialization. At least with how they have been operating for years now. There's no fixing that in the current structure.
To your points, such a split makes too much sense and the ship has probably sailed when the employees showed they have no loyalty or responsibilities to the organization itself.
Who else had the commercial/totally-for-profit interest in slowing OpenAI down, and was in a position to do something about it?
It is hard to see what unfolded as anything but active sabotage.
It would appear that there are different rules when profit is involved, which ironically is exactly what OpenAI's nonprofit parent was intended to prevent.
But if that's the case then just say it.
Not sure what this is from the thread context.
Unparalleled destruction with zero regards for the consequences.
Isn't this the size of the hammer needed, in case there's a danger of misaligned runaway superintelligence?
Possibly, but then you are better off not to develop the thing in the first place.
And you should only break the glass in a break-the-glass moment.
Where does the phrase, "is at war with God," denoting opposition to fundamental laws of reality, come from?
One of those random books you purloin in youth, and a total departure from her standard narrative fiction fare. It's a retelling of the original cosmic myth from the... rebellious perspective.
Also, none of them seem to have the temperament either (they are all relatively very young) to be able to handle such a complex topic as AI.
(image from https://openai.com/our-structure)
The non-profit entity (OpenAI Inc 501(c)(3)) "owns & controls" the for-profit entity (OpenAI Global LLC). Somewhat similar to non-profit Mozilla Foundation owning the for-profit entity Mozilla Corporation: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/organizations...
The non-profit 501(c)(3) entity doesn't have investors but they have a governing board that made decisions about the for-profit entity that severely degraded its equity value. Investors and employees are very upset about what the 501(c)(3) did.
This is a mistake that is made quite frequently and one that I always advise against: if you have no stake in an entity you shouldn't be governing it if you have a role elsewhere in the org chart because one day you might find that the interests between those two positions collide.
> What’s the point of all these subsidiaries?
> They’re to give Microsoft a stake in the commercial bit while wearing no responsibility for the Asimov-y stuff that concerns the management layer. This seemed to suit both parties. “From the beginning, [Microsoft] accepted our capped equity offer and our request to leave [artificial general intelligence] technologies and governance for the Nonprofit and the rest of humanity,” they said in 2019.
https://www.ft.com/content/6dd292c0-a551-4609-8649-f6b69b20f... (paywalled)
It is not a terrible setup if you need funding to get off the ground but also want to be able to operate the nonprofit on a stream of income being thrown off by the for profit subsidiary going forward.
Can you name some examples of such failed setup?
And it is pure mumbo-jumbo; I haven't talked to anyone and I could have told you "Microsoft has a legal team that will be looking into this", which is all the article actually says.
The article is pretty speculative but it does have a law professor basically saying he can't think of much.
Note that even if the grounds of the lawsuit are narrow if you prevail the damages can be immense. So the professor is talking about the likelihood of success, not about what will happen if the plaintiffs prevail. The plaintiff with the strongest motive (Microsoft) is now actively contributing to the damage so I doubt it is them that are going to sue.
The only actual action is firing an at will employee. The various supposed consequences are sort of second order effects that could easily be ascribed to the action of others and most of them haven’t actually happened as of now.
There’s a LOT of people in the world that have absolutely no interest in a court precedent that a board can’t just fire a CEO if they want to. This is basically a textbook application of the business judgement rule, and it’s even more clear cut since it’s a non profit and the board gets to decide how they want to interpret the mission.
People can sue anyone for anything and do all the time. Being sued by powerful people is worse than being sued by random people. These are truisms and meaningless observations.
There's not really much of a case for the premise that you can sue the board of a charity for a hiring/firing decision. What's the rationale?
There isn't one. And the law professor quoted in the article basically said yeah I can't really think of one. And you haven't stated one here.
Look at this in the reverse. If the board of Microsoft fired Satya tomorrow suddenly would OpenAI have cause of action for a lawsuit against them? Of course not, what would even be the premise for that? It's literally the same fact pattern though.
That being said, everything is securities fraud.
This isn't a boy scout operation, it's the governance structure of a 90 billion dollar company. That comes with some requirements regarding temperament and wisdom.
They definitely would have to document the decision, if they wish to sidestep future liability due to being challenged on that decision and not being able to prove that they went through all of the required steps of the dance to make an irreversible decision with far reaching consequences.
You can't just sue to reverse decisions you don't like if you're not a party to the decision at all.
What's your theory of standing for this cause of action?
If anybody holds actual equity, same thing applies, just slightly simpler.
Its completely a "we'll see" moment, and a lesson in not ever doing anything aside from the Delaware C-Corp when outside investors are involved.
Open AI tried the non-profit only route and only received $130 million, even with the stacked deck they had. Our system simply isn't compatible with altruistically crowdfunding things that would be optimal to be funded. They added the for-profit component and are selling shares of it at an $80bn valuation, that reality is not compatible with the non-profit's mission and duties. That's fine, I am only stating it as matter of fact.
Broadly speaking, allowing a nonprofit to own and control a for profit is already a big loophole in the tax system. If the nonprofit then becomes technically beholden to the shareholders of the for profit, then what exactly is the point of the nonprofit?
Far more than you ever wanted to know about this:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/directors-and-officers-...
The OpenAI board members were vivid examples of massive COI. It was bound to blow up in their faces. They really should have known better. Hard to believe such smart people could act so wrongly. Truly unbelievable.
> Even if investors found a way to sue, Weitzel said they would have a "weak case."
In similar news, I am "considering becoming a billionaire".