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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled.

Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity, when many of us believe that OpenAI’s tech is perfectly safe and amazingly beneficial?

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> Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity

Not sure why you’re singling her out - all execs of massive tech companies think exactly the same.

A handful of execs have decided that AI is what humanity needs and they’ve spent the last year shoehorning it into every product possible, giving the consumer no choice but to use it. I even discovered it in a journaling app - AI rated my response to the journaling prompt, completely defeating the purpose.

I think the difference is this: if a tech exec thinks something is good for the humanity and releases it as a product, I can choose not to use it. On the other hand, if Toner kills OpenAI because she thinks AI is dangerous, I won't be able to use OpenAI's product any more. And of course, I don't think someone who does not work on tech or STEM in general can have any insights on machine learning.

But that's how OpenAI is set up. As director she is bound by the charter which she arguably is carrying out in good faith, as she has a fiduciary obligation to do.

So why are you mad at her? Altman was a founder and he set it up this way. Why aren't you pissed off at him?

That's her job to decide what's good for humanity from my reading of the charter

It's not her job to overrule the people running the actual organization, 95% of the employees, and all of OpenAI's stakeholders without a good fucking reason.

But it literally is

She needs a legitimate reason. Without one, her actions could well be illegal. Being on a board doesn’t mean you can act with impunity or that you don’t owe anyone an explanation. You can’t accept bribes, commit fraud, etc. If you don’t explain yourself in a high stakes situation like this one where you are burning down the organization you claim to be safeguarding the interests of, people are rightfully going to start asking questions about what your motivations are.

And who decides what's legitimate? The board.

Who made the decision to fire Altman? The board.

Who is the board answerable to? The law.

"Who is the board answerable to? The law."

Which is why she needs a legitimate reason.

From her perspective, she does have a good reason. And in what way was publishing the paper "overruling" the employees of the for-profit company? The board of the non-profit is beholden to their charter first and foremost

“From her perspective, she does have a good reason.”

Does she? In that case, perhaps she should tell someone what it is.

She told the board. Who else should she tell?

My limited understanding is that this was all that was strictly required, and would normally be sufficient.

Nevertheless, when a board decision explodes into international headline news as this one did, my gut feeling is it might possibly be a good idea to make a press release with more details.

But that's easy for me to say — I don't have the real insider information, and I wasn't in their shoes.

What do you think a board does? It supervises the executive. It approves the actions of he executive. It hires and fires the CEO.

Funny, I thought elected officials held that role, but apparently I'm mistaken.

No you don't normally elect people to boards

You are missing some context. The context is apparently 'Humanity' and humanity didn't elect Helen Toner.

OpenAI is a charity, and doing exactly that is their charter.

> The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled.

How does destroying company achieve the mission of having _that very company_ create artificial intelligence that "benefits all of humanity?"

By stopping AI that doesn't (benefit all of humanity).

She's doing her job. This notion that somehow she's holding the fate of humanity in her hands is really drinking the OpenAI/AGI kool-aid in a really cringey way.

>Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity, when many of us believe that OpenAI’s tech is perfectly safe and amazingly beneficial?

Yeah, well, hate to burst your nice warm Silicon-Valley bubble, but most Americans believe that continuing to create smarter and smarter AIs is dangerous, so who's playing god now?

(No one I know thinks it is dangerous to fine-tune GPT-4 or to integrate GPT-4 deeply into the economy: the danger is the plans for the creation of much bigger models and algorithmic improvements.)

> but most Americans believe that continuing to create smarter and smarter AIs is dangerous, so who's playing god now?

Aren't you just making this up? I haven't seen any surveys on what "most Americans believe" re AI. I know a lot of people that are concerned. But I'll bet good money that "most Americans" don't give a crap

Googling "americans AI polling" produces this as the first result: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/21/what-the-...

I don't put much stock into polls like this, when it comes to actually deciding whether things are dangerous, but I think you should spend five seconds doing an incredibly trivial sanity-check before accusing people of making things up.

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