>The embarassing part is that the board decided to fire the CEO, announced their decision, refused to say why, attempted to put in place a new CEO but had to immediately demote the new CEO (Mira) after she rejected their plan, upset and alienated their core partners, along with almost all of their employees, and then publicly backtracked to undo the firing that led to this all happening.
I'm reminded of these great PG tweets:
>When people criticize an action on the grounds of the "optics," they're almost always full of shit. All they're really saying is "What you did looks bad." But if they phrased it that way, they'd have to answer the question "Was it actually bad, or not?"
>If someone did something bad, you don't need to talk about "optics." And if they did something that seems bad but that you know isn't, why are you criticizing it at all? You should instead be explaining why it's not as bad as it seems.
https://nitter.net/paulg/status/1728015636771504300#m
The situation is similar if you criticize an action on the grounds that "it upset people". If the action was actually bad, you should be able to explain why directly.
Here are some quotes from the OpenAI charter:
>We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.
>...
>Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.
>...
>We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.
https://openai.com/charter
And here's a quote from the OP:
>In October, Toner, who is director of strategy at a think tank in Washington, D.C., co-wrote a paper on AI safety. The paper said OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT sparked a “sense of urgency inside major tech companies” that led them to fast-track AI products to keep up. It also said Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, avoided “stoking the flames of AI hype” by waiting to release its chatbot.
>After publication, Altman confronted Toner, saying she had harmed OpenAI by criticizing the company so publicly. Then he went behind her back, people familiar with the situation said.
Who is doing a better job of upholding the charter in this situation: Altman, or Toner?
The "people are upset" criticism essentially states that people became upset when Toner attempted to actually uphold the charter. To me, that says more about those people than it says about Toner.