Why OpenAI CEO was ousted
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582
Shameful, really. The importance of public critique & awareness of OpenAI's leadership should go beyond the interests of YC.
So basically Altman is a dishonest pos. Will fit right in with much of Silicon Valley then.
…power and greed seems to get into all of their heads. Next thing they are part of an NSA Prism program so they can feel like spies too.
Which doesn’t bring out the nicer side of narcissists
dang has confirmed this happened in the past, but hasn't provided details. See this discussion I had with him 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342850
I'm currently composing an email to dang requesting some transparency.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
dang says: "The only thing we care about is not having tedious internet indignation dominating HN threads—and boy has there been a lot of that on OpenAI lately."
Also: "there are a few people who aren't mods in the sense of working for YC but whom you could call mods in the sense that they have some limited moderation abilities, one of which is to mark subthreads as offtopic or generic"
"Should" is doing a lot of heavy lifting; YC is ultimately about getting rich, and unfortunately there are a lot of pro-Altman types 'round these parts who share that "wealth at all costs" mentality.
I'll take my downvotes.
So interesting the, only mentioned, fact:
> Altman did not tell the board he owned the OpenAI startup fund.
It was a non profit. That on its own, IMO, a firing offense
What a dreadfully dishonest human being
Why the hell should a company have to announce products to the board before launching them?
I see signs of Toner trying to spin things to save face.
“for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board … [Altman gave] inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place … For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever … But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board”
Thoughts:
- The claim that this had been going on for years is presented as support for the decision to oust Sam. This is a spin, because an easy criticism is that, if this had been going on for so long, why didn’t Toner do anything about it years sooner? As she says herself, all along she had been responsible as a board member for “providing independent oversight over the company,” so there was a years-long lapse in effectiveness in her oversight duties if her claims are true.
- The emphasis on “all four of us who fired him” is an attempt to provide social proof that she did the reasonable thing. It doesn’t help answer the question of “why” — the purpose of the article — so it’s rhetoric serving some other purpose.
Having discussions that don’t paint the board as default good and the company as default bad has become impossible on hn.
>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 anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.
>...
>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.
Like imagine if chatgpt was held back where would openai even be today?
I'm not sure we can extrapolate trends from recent releases to "late-stage AGI development". AGI control is supposed to be challenging when the system becomes smarter than its creators. If the system is sub-human in intelligence then the main challenge doesn't seem to apply.