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What does any of that have to do with whether it's a "coup" or not? "Coup" has an implication of illegitimacy, but by all accounts the board acted within its au
by djur 3y ago
What does any of that have to do with whether it's a "coup" or not? "Coup" has an implication of illegitimacy, but by all accounts the board acted within its authority. It doesn't matter if it was an ill-advised action or if Altman has more leverage here.
- tsunamifury 3y agoLegitimacy is derived from power not from abstraction. Sorry that’s the reality. Rules are an abstraction. Power let’s you do whatever you want including making new rules.
- x86x87 3y agoYeah no. While you may be onto something that still does not make it a coup.
- tsunamifury 3y agoIt’s doesn’t matter what you call it.
- x86x87 3y agoit sort of does. a coup is usually regarded as a bad thing. firing a ceo? not so much. pushing to call it a coup is an attempt to control the narrative.
- jacquesm 3y agoThey acted within their authority but possibly without the support of those that asked them to join in the first place and possibly without sufficient grounds and definitely in a way that wasn't in the interest of OpenAI as far as the story is known today.
- hansSjoberg 3y agoYou're speaking as if Altman and Brockman did Sutskever a favour by "asking him to join". They were practically begging.
- jacquesm 3y agoDoesn't change the fact that this probably wasn't the outcome they were going for.
- chatmasta 3y agoThere's a distinction between what's technically allowed and what's politically allowed. The board has every right to vote Sam and Greg off the island with 4/6 voting in favor. That doesn't mean they won't see resistance to their decision on other fronts, and especially those where Sam and Greg have enough soft power that the rest of the board would be obviously inadvised to contradict them. If the entire media apparatus is on their side, for example (soft power), then the rest of the board needs to consider that before making a decision that they're technically empowered to make (hard power). IMO, there are basically two justifiably rational moves here: (1) ignore the noise; accept that Sam and Greg have the soft power, but they don't have the votes so they can fuck off; (2) lean into the noise; accept that you made a mistake in firing Sam and Greg and bring them back in a show of magnanimity. Anything in between these two options is hedging their bets and will lead to them getting eaten alive.
- tsunamifury 3y agoExcept You are discounting the major player with all the hard power who can literally call any shot with money
- chatmasta 3y agoYou mean Microsoft, who hasn't actually paid them the money they said they will eventually, and who can change their Azure billing arrangement at any time? Sure, I guess I didn't consider them, but you can lump them into the same "media campaign" (while accepting that they're applying some additional, non-media related leverage) and you'll come to the same conclusion: the board is incompetent. Really the only argument I see against this is that the legal structure of OpenAI is such that it's actually in the board's best interest to sabotage the development of the underlying technology (i.e. the "contain the AGI" hypothesis, which I don't personally subscribe to - IMO the structure makes such decisions more difficult for purely egotistical reasons; a profit motive would be morally clarifying).
- RandomLensman 3y agoThe objective functions might be different enough and then there is nothing the hard power can do to get what it wants from OpenAI. Non-profit might consider winddown more in line with mission than something else, for example.