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Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

This is insane. "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board".

First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense.

Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with the minimal exception that the drama they have incepted might make this holiday week a complete loss for productivity).

Third: in general, "publishing scholarly articles claiming the company is bad" is a good reason to remove someone from the board of a company. Some vague (and the fact that nobody will own up to anything publicly proves it is vague) ideological battle isn't a good enough rationale for the exception to a rule that suggests that her leaving the board soon would be a good idea.

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> "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board".

I mean, yes? The board is explicitly there to replace the CEO if necessary. If the CEO stuffs the board full of their allies, it can no longer do that.

> First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense.

Boards of for-profits are accountable to shareholders because corporations with shareholders exist for the benefit of (among others) shareholders. Non-profit corporations exist to further their mission, and are accountable to the IRS in this regard.

> Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with the minimal exception that the drama they have incepted might make this holiday week a complete loss for productivity).

No, the argument is that Sam Altman trying to bump off a board member on an incredibly flimsy pretext would be an obvious attempt at seizing power.

> Third: in general, "publishing scholarly articles claiming the company is bad" is a good reason to remove someone from the board of a company. Some vague (and the fact that nobody will own up to anything publicly proves it is vague) ideological battle isn't a good enough rationale for the exception to a rule that suggests that her leaving the board soon would be a good idea.

This might be true w.r.t. for-profit boards (though not obviously so in every case), but seems nonsensical with non-profits. (Also, the article did not reductively claim "the company is bad".)

if thats the case why didnt they just stuff the board when they had the chance?

I think it’s also mentioned the article that they have failed to add new members to the board due to the disagreement between the board members.

then the argument that altman would be able to easily stuff the board doesnt hold -- he didnt even have majority.

either you claim (1) that there was a risk of altman having majority and stuffing the board and hence concede that majority allows stuffing the board, in which case you concede the actual majority which was anti-altman could have done that

or (2) you concede that having majority is not enough to stuff the board, in which case we were far from any risk of altman doing so, given that he did not even have a majority of the board

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edit because i cant seem to reply further down thread: i read the article. my point is precisely that the board had majority. that is how they got to fire altman in the first place. given they had majority they had the chance to stuff the board in their own favor, as per the argument above.

You should read the article, because it’s clearly stated how Altman could get a majority. For your other concern, a simple vote change (like Ilya’s) can explain it.

Yeah it sounded like 3-3 gridlock until someone flipped, either it was Sam/Greg/Ilya against Adam/Helen/Tasha or it was Sam/Greg/Adam against Ilya/Helen/Tasha.

I’m curious about the IRS angle. Anyone know more about that?

One reason open source software projects struggle to get donations is because the IRS is skeptical of OSS as a true non-profit activity, so often doesn’t allow 503c tax deductible donations. OpenAI seems like a data point in favor of the IRS skepticism.

> Non-profit corporations exist to further their mission, and are accountable to the IRS in this regard.

The IRS’s actual power in this regard is extremely limited. There’s so much wiggle room to define the “mission” that, at best, the only thing they can do is make sure you’re not secretly using your nonprofit as a tax shelter for a regular for-profit business, and even then some companies find ways around it (see IKEA).

Ordinary fraud (as opposed to tax fraud, though maybe that too) is even easier to pull off with a nonprofit than with an for-profit. Any nonprofit has a fundraising mechanism (which is usually an obnoxious set of dark patterns and outright spam reached through decades of optimization; the techniques are well understood), some overhead for managing the organization and money itself, and then the actual work involved with the mission. It’s quite simple for the overhead and fundraising parts of the organization to become most of the organization. But it gets worse: when your “mission” is vague enough, you can also turn that side of the business into a bunch of sinecures for your friends. There are well known “awareness” nonprofits that do literally nothing to actually solve the problems they’re nominally about because their job is to “spread awareness” (i.e. the top of the funnel for the fundraising part of the organization).

This is ironically also the origin story of “effective altruism”. The IRS doesn’t stop you from running a non-profit scam, so you have to do your own research to find out which non-profits are legit, and that’s what the effective altruists started off with, along with some cost-benefit modeling once you get past the outright scams.

The problem with OpenAI seems to be related to a vague mission as well. From the “an organization is what it does” perspective, OpenAI develops AI. If you have a formal mission that emphasizes safety over capability, you could certainly argue that OpenAI was closer to achieving that mission by sabotaging its own work, but if your interpretation of “safety” is to sabotage the development of AI, there are certainly better ways to do it than to develop AI and then sabotage yourself.

> Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down...

Isn't that the pro-Altman argument? The pro-Altman side is saying "let's shut the company down if we don't get our way." The anti-Altman side is saying "let's get rid of Sam Altman and keep going."

No. No it isn't.

The board-aligned argument seems to be "destroying the company is the right thing to do if it helps the cause of AI alignment".

Whereas the pro-Altman side seems to be "if you have the most successful startup since Google/Facebook, you shouldn't blow it up merely because of vague arguments about << alignment >> ".

Your pro-Altman means that the argument should be won by Altman side, just because it’s a successful startup, while in reality, it’s a non-profit with a mission, which contradicts Altman’s position (according to the article).

> "if you have the most successful startup since Google/Facebook, you shouldn't blow it up"

... But they aren't the ones blowing it up? Firing one guy, even the CEO, isn't blowing it up. The only side that directly threatened "if you don't do X, we blow it up" was the pro-Altman side.

Do you think Sam is more aligned to OpenAI non-profit charter than Helen?

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