The dude essentially threatened to destroy the company if he didn't get his way. Might does not make right. Sam turned out to have more leverage here; that doesn't make him a good person.
>You don’t fire someone so important for that and extrapolate it into equating human extinction.
On the other hand, would you really want a company developing existentially dangerous technology to be lead by someone who's known as a slippery operator?
My hunch is that part of the board's motivation was a feeling that they should have unusually high standards for the CEO of OpenAI.
>...
>Pretty much everyone who works on AI thinks that they're 'one of the good people'. Statistically, this is unlikely to be the case.
>...
>Proactively giving up power is one of the hardest things for people to do. Giving up power and money is even harder. AI orgs are rapidly gathering power and money and it's not clear they have right incentives to willfully shed their own power. This sets us up for racing.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1555980412333133824
>Also who is to say deceleration in the age of AI isn’t worse than acceleration? Every govt entity is developing it, and it could be a national sec issue to speed it up faster than an adversary
See e.g. https://pauseai.info/faq#if-we-pause-how-about-china
Silicon Valley seems to have a fairly strong monopoly on AI talent.
Leadership is fundamentally about manipulating people. If the people already agreed, they wouldn't need leadership. Your job as leader is to get them all working in more or less the same direction, even though they don't really want to.
Honesty is a great way to do that, when it works. Honesty has the virtue of not having to keep track of your lies, and you don't get caught in an inconsistency.
But it doesn't always work, and then you have to consider alternatives. Sometimes people are dumb. Sometimes people are wrong. Sometimes people are hostile. Sometimes people are right, but in a way that can't actually be implemented, and you need to go with a sub-optimal path despite that.
At core, you can't lead if you don't believe that you've listened to all of the concerns and reached the solution that is best for the group as a whole, according to whatever definition of "best" and "whole" you were hired for. Sometimes that's going to force you to use other means that just telling people the truth and hoping they reach the same conclusion.
Leadership is fundamentally a people problem, not a technical one. And sometimes that's going to mean being dishonest. A good leader does it as little as possible, but simply dismissing it as a tactic is a recipe for failure because it hides a fundamental truth about why and how people behave in groups.
Which successful CEO takes direction from a board that meets a few times a year?
"Managing the board" is one of the major jobs of the CEO, most of that work done outside those key moments when the board meets to formally vote on what they usually already decided based on earlier discussions between themselves, CEO, shareholders and others.
Honestly? Nearly all of them. It's how the whole thing is supposed to work, and for the most part it works ok. There are exceptions.
Hard disagree. A leader cultivates agreement and cooperation through clear articulation of a vision and a path to get there.
lying to board is dick move, manoeuvring to get someone fired is a dick move. If what we read is mostly true, then I can see why the board fired him, after all, how can they trust him?
Not that that's actually ever going to be the case at OpenAI again, but the parent has the chain of command here totally bass-ackwards.
In theory, yes. In practice: Not always.
In truth it's both. That said, leadership doesn't mean lying. Particularly not about what another person has said. Very particularly not when it's trivial for them to compare notes.
Your line of reasoning fulfills the stereotype that tech people are sorely lacking in a well-rounded education.
This is wrong. Manipulating people is not leadership. It might be management in some circumstances, but management is not leadership.
> If the people already agreed, they wouldn't need leadership.
This is wrong too. People can agree on a goal without seeing how to get there. Leadership is not just about seeing the goal. It's about leading people there. But if you have to manipulate the people, you're not leading them. You're just using them for your own ends.
This is true...if you are the leader of a cult, which exist to deify you more than benefit the group.
> If the people already agreed, they wouldn't need leadership. Your job as leader is to get them all working in more or less the same direction, even though they don't really want to.
Yes, but if you're having to puppet people to do it, it's not leadership. It's just manipulation. You should be able to do this through inspiration, and transparently in group settings, not by compartmentalizing lies and half-truths privately. That's just fucking embarrassing. Altman's leadership skills are on par with a 14-year old influencer.
I feel like you're taking the argument for why "we let Pearl Harbor happen" and using it to excuse the whims of a psychopath.