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The board seems truly incompetent here and looking at the member list it doesn't seem very surprising. A competent board should have asked for legal and profess

The board seems truly incompetent here and looking at the member list it doesn't seem very surprising. A competent board should have asked for legal and professional advice before taking a drastic step like this. Instead the board thought it was a boxing match and tried to deliver a knockout punch before the market closes with blunt language. This might be the most incompetent board for an organisation of this size.

adharmad 3y ago
It was complete amateur hour for the board. But that aside, how did so many clueless folks who understand neither the technology, or the legalese, nor have enough intelligence/acumen to forsee the immediate impact of their actions happen to be on the board of one of the most important tech companies?
- csomar 3y ago
  I think when it started it was not the most important tech company but just some open research effort.
- leoh 3y ago
  Not many and even fewer if you consider folks that have a good grasp of themselves, their psychology, their emotions — and how they can mislead them, and their heart. IME most folks at Anthropic, OpenAI or whatever that are freaking out about things never defined the problem well and typically were engaging with highly theoretical models as opposed to the real capabilities of a well-defined, accomplished (or clearly accomplishable) system. It was too triggering for me to consider roles there in the past given that these were typically the folks I knew working there. Sam may have added a lot of groundedness, but idk ofc bc I wasn’t there.
  - jprete 3y ago
    Is this a way of saying that AI safety is unnecessary?
    - margalabargala 3y ago
      It's a way of saying that what has been historically been considered "studying AI safety" in fact bears little relation to real life AIs and what may or may not make them more or less "safe".
      - leoh 3y ago
        Yes, with the addition that I do feel that we deserve something better than I perceive we’ve gotten so far and that safety is super important; but also I don’t work at OpenAI and am not Ilya so idk
- hfjjbf 3y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- peterclary 3y ago
  Pretty sure that Sutskever understands the technology, and it looks like he persuaded the others.
dehrmann 3y ago
I wonder if any of this is related it to it being envisioned as a non-profit board, but in the past ~year, the for-profit part has outgrown what they were really ready to handle.
magicalhippo 3y ago
> Instead the board thought it was a boxing match Or maybe chess[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cv9n0QbLUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cv9n0QbLUM
yathaid 3y ago
>> A competent board should have asked for legal and professional advice... I will bite. How do you know they didn't?
- skygazer 3y ago
  Typically it would be framed amicably, without so much axe-grinding, particularly for public release. Even ChatGPT itself would have written a more balanced release, and advised against such shenanigans. I enjoy that irony.
  - hfjjbf 3y ago
    [dead]
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  >house collapses in 15mph wind Why didn’t they hire a competent builder? You: >how do you know they weren’t? It could be pure happenstance! All the nails could… could have been defective! Or something! waves hands
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    Enron had independent auditors and a law firm approving what they did.
- arbuge 3y ago
  That's the thing. Lawyers can give them the letter of the law but might have no idea how popular Sam was inside and outside the company, or how badly he was needed. And that's what really matters here.
  - braiamp 3y ago
    Why does it matters to a board that sticks to the principles of the charter of a non-profit? Why would they look at anything else other than the guiding principles?
yosito 3y ago
Maybe they asked ChatGPT for legal advice.
- nomy99 3y ago
  i see what you did there.
- leoh 3y ago
  Better yet, Sutskever’s version with AGI!
- adrr 3y ago
  Maybe they and it didn't help them. Guardrails for chatgpt will prevent it from predicting outcomes, or providing any personalized advice. I asked it and just said to consult with counsel and have a succession plan. >Predicting specific outcomes in a situation like the potential firing of a high-profile executive such as Sam Altman from OpenAI is quite complex and involves numerous variables. As an AI, I can't predict future events, but I can outline some possible considerations and general advice:
  - wincy 3y ago
    Surely there’s a wholly uncensored chatGPT 5 at OpenAI running on some engineering sample H200 cluster with a Terabyte of video RAM or something.
krashidov 3y ago
Perhaps the AGI convinced the board to make a wild move like this as part of its first chess move
- chasd00 3y ago
  I’ve mused that an advanced AGI would probably become suicidal after dealing with humans for a while and realizing there’s no escape. Maybe this is an attempt.
silenced_trope 3y ago
The major investors whose money is on the line and who are funding the venture, Microsoft, Sequoia, and Khosla, were not given advanced warning or any input in to how this would impact their investment. I would definitely say the board screwed up. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/openai-investors-blindsided-by-sam-altmans-firing/?sh=11ad13f73fc9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/openai-in...
- barfingclouds 3y ago
  Non profit board therefore for profit investors have no say
- itchy_spider44 3y ago
  I'm surprised that none of these investors secured a board seat for themselves before handing over tens of billions. The board is closer to a friendship circle than a group of experienced business folks.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kyle_grove 3y ago
    FOMO
  - frontalier 3y ago
    > The board is closer to a friendship circle than a group of experienced business folks. Isn't this true for most of S.V.?
- MVissers 3y ago
  The board of the non-profit (one that fired Sam) has no fiduciary duty to those investors, I believe. Microsoft invested in the for-profit Openai, which is owned by the non-profit. The other ones I don't know. The board has no responsibility to Microsoft whatsoever regarding this. Sam Altman structured it this way himself. Not to say that the board didn't screw up.
jeron 3y ago
Even an episode of Succession and they would have known better than to have attempted this
- curiousgal 3y ago
  They're the board of a non-profit not a Fortune 500 company. Everyone should just chill.
  - cwxm 3y ago
    a non-profit that controls one of the most valuable private tech companies that rivals the importance of a lot of F500 companies.
    - curiousgal 3y ago
      It didn't start out that way now did it?
Zolde 3y ago
They almost certainly consulted both lawyers and chatGPT and still proceeded with the dismissal. So, in a way, this could be a test of the alignment of chatGPT (and corporate lawyers). One scenario where both parties are fallible humans and their hands are forced: Increased interest has to close down plus signups, because compute can't scale. Sam goes to Brockman and they decide to use compute meant for GPT-5 to try to scale for new users, without informing board. Can perfectly fine break that rule with GPT-4, but what if Sam does this again in the future when they have AGI on their hands?
ksec 3y ago
>OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner. >non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner. From Forbes [1] Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of answers site Quora, joined OpenAI’s board in April 2018. At the time, he wrote: “I continue to think that work toward general AI (with safety in mind) is both important and underappreciated.” In an interview with Forbes in January, D’Angelo argued that one of OpenAI’s strengths was its capped-profit business structure and nonprofit control. “There’s no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies,” D’Angelo said. “This is something that’s fundamentally different, and my hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big.” Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.) McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization. Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time. More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/these-are-the-people-that-fired-openai-ceo-sam-altman/?sh=1a0e64984ae9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/these-are...

adharmad 3y ago

It was complete amateur hour for the board. But that aside, how did so many clueless folks who understand neither the technology, or the legalese, nor have enough intelligence/acumen to forsee the immediate impact of their actions happen to be on the board of one of the most important tech companies?

csomar 3y ago
I think when it started it was not the most important tech company but just some open research effort.
leoh 3y ago
Not many and even fewer if you consider folks that have a good grasp of themselves, their psychology, their emotions — and how they can mislead them, and their heart. IME most folks at Anthropic, OpenAI or whatever that are freaking out about things never defined the problem well and typically were engaging with highly theoretical models as opposed to the real capabilities of a well-defined, accomplished (or clearly accomplishable) system. It was too triggering for me to consider roles there in the past given that these were typically the folks I knew working there. Sam may have added a lot of groundedness, but idk ofc bc I wasn’t there.
- jprete 3y ago
  Is this a way of saying that AI safety is unnecessary?
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    It's a way of saying that what has been historically been considered "studying AI safety" in fact bears little relation to real life AIs and what may or may not make them more or less "safe".
    - leoh 3y ago
      Yes, with the addition that I do feel that we deserve something better than I perceive we’ve gotten so far and that safety is super important; but also I don’t work at OpenAI and am not Ilya so idk
hfjjbf 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
peterclary 3y ago
Pretty sure that Sutskever understands the technology, and it looks like he persuaded the others.

dehrmann 3y ago

I wonder if any of this is related it to it being envisioned as a non-profit board, but in the past ~year, the for-profit part has outgrown what they were really ready to handle.

magicalhippo 3y ago

> Instead the board thought it was a boxing match Or maybe chess[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cv9n0QbLUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cv9n0QbLUM

yathaid 3y ago

>> A competent board should have asked for legal and professional advice... I will bite. How do you know they didn't?

skygazer 3y ago
Typically it would be framed amicably, without so much axe-grinding, particularly for public release. Even ChatGPT itself would have written a more balanced release, and advised against such shenanigans. I enjoy that irony.
- hfjjbf 3y ago
  [dead]
newZWhoDis 3y ago
>house collapses in 15mph wind Why didn’t they hire a competent builder? You: >how do you know they weren’t? It could be pure happenstance! All the nails could… could have been defective! Or something! waves hands
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  Enron had independent auditors and a law firm approving what they did.
arbuge 3y ago
That's the thing. Lawyers can give them the letter of the law but might have no idea how popular Sam was inside and outside the company, or how badly he was needed. And that's what really matters here.
- braiamp 3y ago
  Why does it matters to a board that sticks to the principles of the charter of a non-profit? Why would they look at anything else other than the guiding principles?

yosito 3y ago

Maybe they asked ChatGPT for legal advice.

nomy99 3y ago
i see what you did there.
leoh 3y ago
Better yet, Sutskever’s version with AGI!
adrr 3y ago
Maybe they and it didn't help them. Guardrails for chatgpt will prevent it from predicting outcomes, or providing any personalized advice. I asked it and just said to consult with counsel and have a succession plan. >Predicting specific outcomes in a situation like the potential firing of a high-profile executive such as Sam Altman from OpenAI is quite complex and involves numerous variables. As an AI, I can't predict future events, but I can outline some possible considerations and general advice:
- wincy 3y ago
  Surely there’s a wholly uncensored chatGPT 5 at OpenAI running on some engineering sample H200 cluster with a Terabyte of video RAM or something.

krashidov 3y ago

Perhaps the AGI convinced the board to make a wild move like this as part of its first chess move

chasd00 3y ago
I’ve mused that an advanced AGI would probably become suicidal after dealing with humans for a while and realizing there’s no escape. Maybe this is an attempt.

silenced_trope 3y ago

The major investors whose money is on the line and who are funding the venture, Microsoft, Sequoia, and Khosla, were not given advanced warning or any input in to how this would impact their investment. I would definitely say the board screwed up. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/openai-investors-blindsided-by-sam-altmans-firing/?sh=11ad13f73fc9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/openai-in...

barfingclouds 3y ago
Non profit board therefore for profit investors have no say
itchy_spider44 3y ago
I'm surprised that none of these investors secured a board seat for themselves before handing over tens of billions. The board is closer to a friendship circle than a group of experienced business folks.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kyle_grove 3y ago
  FOMO
- frontalier 3y ago
  > The board is closer to a friendship circle than a group of experienced business folks. Isn't this true for most of S.V.?
MVissers 3y ago
The board of the non-profit (one that fired Sam) has no fiduciary duty to those investors, I believe. Microsoft invested in the for-profit Openai, which is owned by the non-profit. The other ones I don't know. The board has no responsibility to Microsoft whatsoever regarding this. Sam Altman structured it this way himself. Not to say that the board didn't screw up.

jeron 3y ago

Even an episode of Succession and they would have known better than to have attempted this

curiousgal 3y ago
They're the board of a non-profit not a Fortune 500 company. Everyone should just chill.
- cwxm 3y ago
  a non-profit that controls one of the most valuable private tech companies that rivals the importance of a lot of F500 companies.
  - curiousgal 3y ago
    It didn't start out that way now did it?

Zolde 3y ago

They almost certainly consulted both lawyers and chatGPT and still proceeded with the dismissal. So, in a way, this could be a test of the alignment of chatGPT (and corporate lawyers). One scenario where both parties are fallible humans and their hands are forced: Increased interest has to close down plus signups, because compute can't scale. Sam goes to Brockman and they decide to use compute meant for GPT-5 to try to scale for new users, without informing board. Can perfectly fine break that rule with GPT-4, but what if Sam does this again in the future when they have AGI on their hands?

ksec 3y ago

>OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner. >non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner. From Forbes [1] Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of answers site Quora, joined OpenAI’s board in April 2018. At the time, he wrote: “I continue to think that work toward general AI (with safety in mind) is both important and underappreciated.” In an interview with Forbes in January, D’Angelo argued that one of OpenAI’s strengths was its capped-profit business structure and nonprofit control. “There’s no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies,” D’Angelo said. “This is something that’s fundamentally different, and my hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big.” Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.) McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization. Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time. More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/these-are-the-people-that-fired-openai-ceo-sam-altman/?sh=1a0e64984ae9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/these-are...