Comment by xianshou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xianshou | Hacker News Reader

Now that this and other articles have established that the board's actions were based not on a single event but rather on general, long-term, underspecified concerns, no one captures the essence of what happened more perfectly than Matt Levine:

"Well, sure, but [the board not trusting Altman] is a fight about AI safety. It’s just a metaphorical fight about AI safety. I am sorry, I have made this joke before, but events keep sharpening it. The OpenAI board looked at Sam Altman and thought 'this guy is smarter than us, he can outmaneuver us in a pinch, and it makes us nervous. He’s done nothing wrong so far, but we can’t be sure what he’ll do next as his capabilities expand. We do not fully trust him, we cannot fully control him, and we do not have a model of how his mind works that we fully understand. Therefore we have to shut him down before he grows too powerful.'

I’m sorry! That is exactly the AI misalignment worry! If you spend your time managing AIs that are growing exponentially smarter, you might worry about losing control of them, and if you spend your time managing Sam Altman you might worry about losing control of him, and if you spend your time managing both of them you might get confused about which is which. Maybe Sam Altman will turn the old board members into paper clips."

(Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-29/the-ro...)

That's pure gold, and I'm even more impressed at Levine finding time and will to understand enough about AI x-risk arguments to not just speak the language, but make a joke in it.

Makes me wonder, has anyone actually physically seen Sam A. lately? :-)

Is Altman using OpenAI to guide his decisions? Does he ask his "oracle" how to handle these individuals on the board based on what it knows about them and how they have reacted in the past? From many posts on here he sounds like a master manipulator and therefore he should not be allowed control of anything that affected anyone else's life, property, health, etc since he is obviously only in it for himself.

I don't know the guy but frankly from reading a lot of stuff on here posted by people that have experience with him I am not inclined to trust him at all with anything and would watch him like a hawk. Trust is critical and he does not inspire trust.

"...he does not inspire trust."

This is the part that his sycophants shout over so nobody can hear it. The Board™ didn't trust Altman. He isn't a martyr, just another startup success rotting on the vine.

I agree with that assessment. He seems to be another one of the things in SV that is rotten and that threatens to spoil the whole ecosystem. Too bad he has so much suction that he can always find someone willing to rally to his defense.

There's also this gem around states/corporations at the end of another recent New Yorker article: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/maybe-we-alread...

"For Runciman, we’ll be lucky if we can coax into alignment the machines we’ve made of ourselves, never mind the ones made of silicon."

That's hilarious, though it also demonstrates the AI Safety problem in another way - If true, Sam made a stupid mistake in assuming he could lie/fudge/exaggerate each board member's position to the others and that they wouldn't eventually talk amongst themselves and compare notes. That suggests he's either really not that smart, or he's overconfident and sloppy.

An AGI, or especially an ASI, would presumably avoid such easily-detectable mistakes. Things just start happening and seemingly disconnected events steer reality in a particular direction, and there is no way to concretely link them or discern their true provenance.

This is already exactly the problem with the most sophisticated disinformation campaigns run by the FSB/IRA/etc. It appears random, grassroots, and uncoordinated, and is difficult or impossible to discern its true provenance. But it all operates across a shared a set of objectives - increase social divisions, decrease trust in democracy and democratic institutions, and/or increase general irrationality and emotional response among the public.

If humans can already accomplish that, imagine what an ASI could do.

> That suggests he's either really not that smart, or he's overconfident and sloppy.

I think he's very obviously overconfident and sloppy.

It’s only overconfidence if he gets caught.

This is the essence of playing poker- the bluffs need to be called for it to be a bad bluff.

Well, if the board shot Altman or forcibly put him into suspended animation, I think it's fairly likely that he wouldn't be CEO now.

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