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This sounds like an insane conflict of interest. CEO of a company (or worse, non-profit!) and a member of its board creates another, for-profit company (in par

by bartwr 3y ago

This sounds like an insane conflict of interest. CEO of a company (or worse, non-profit!) and a member of its board creates another, for-profit company (in partial secrecy/lack of transparency) that the non-profit would eventually pay a lot of money. This is almost a fraudulent level of siphoning non-profit money. Btw, this is hilarious - regular employees have non-competes in their contracts (sometimes void/illegal, depending on the local jurisdiction) and breaching them is an immediately fireable offense (sometimes leading to more severe consequences). You work on a small thing on the side? Better be careful, ask your manager/HR, risk it getting taken over by the company (luckily, IIUC this part is mostly illegal now in all jurisdictions that "matter" for tech). But sitting on multiple boards where you have much more room and possibilites for creating conflicts of interest and damaging the company? All fine and common!

philistine 3y ago
AND a complete Moby Dick move. You're going to suddenly get up and compete with all the chip designers and beat them at their job? Computer chips are literally the most complex products in the world. It is an astonishing development that the most profitable company in the world was able to make chips, let alone chips that beat Intel and Nvidia in some key metrics. It took Apple more than a decade of shipping chips in phones to be able to move up to desktop-class. The board was right to get rid of a guy who would rather hunt a white whale than do his job.
cma 3y ago
I think Altman hails from a kind of hustle culture that may not go great with AI safety: >I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this: > "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious. > We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day. > We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract." > I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 The crypto WorldCoin thing is probably a bigger example.
- hef19898 3y ago
  There was another AI start-up, one backed / supported by various conservative politians from Germany and Austria thatvdid the same thing, hiring people to look busy when customers (bad) and investors (a lot worse) showed up at the offices: Augustus Intelligence. At best, this is fake it till you make it. At worst, it is fraud. The tiny, tiny differce is whether that next investor shows up or not. Just ask FTX. I do not respect people resorting to that kind of thing.
- Animats 3y ago
  > We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract." That strategy was tried with Barry Minkow, with "ZZZZ Best", the fake building maintenance company fraud.[1] He did prison time for that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Minkow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Minkow
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    "Its not fraud when we do it"
    - gaganyaan 3y ago
      > While still in high school, Minkow founded ZZZZ Best (pronounced "Zee Best"), which appeared to be an immensely successful carpet-cleaning and restoration company. However, it was actually a front to attract investment for a massive Ponzi scheme. Apples and oranges.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      It's not fraud if Sam's company delivered. Did they?
      - foldr 3y ago
        I'm not sure if that's true. If they obtained a financial advantage (e.g. a contract) via deception, then that could well be fraud. I don't think it makes much difference if they eventually delivered on the contract or not.
jjoonathan 3y ago
Wow, that's some Adam Neumann level self-dealing.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Sam's Alameda moment
  - 38321003thrw 3y ago
    [flagged]
- dchichkov 3y ago
  Assume someone had been working for a startup, as CEO, for free. For years. That someone had cut himself away from any way to compensate his work directly. Due to altruism or poor planning or a result of a negotiation. At a later time other ventures that this person had been propping started failing and a money injection deemed necessary. It would not be surprising, if that person would try to risk his unpaid work position and monetize it. Recent tweets from Sam “go for a full value of my stock” seem to indicate towards this direction.
  - foldr 3y ago
    He presumably at least got paid a salary as CEO, so it's not uncompensated work. In any case, being in some kind of suboptimal financial situation isn't an excuse for breaking the rules.
    - dchichkov 3y ago
      I don’t know. It can easily be the case of $1 comp, and insane amounts of work and pressure, including financial, from all sides. It is quite clear that crypto is failing and he is deeply engaged into crypto with the WorldCoin project. For all we know, personal moneys may have been spent on crypto.
oooyay 3y ago
> regular employees have non-competes in their contracts (sometimes void/illegal, depending on the local jurisdiction) Non-competes mostly have an effective after period, so Altman's situation is a bit more akin to my companies "only job" policy. It means I can't have a side hustle or alternative means of making money. Enforceable or not, while you're employed you can be fired for anything.
not_wyoming 3y ago
Non-competes, like so many other workplace rules, only apply below the C-suite
- bko 3y ago
  I think the reverse is true. If you're a grunt no one really cares and it's not worth it to enforce. If you're c suite and leave to start a competitor you can be sure you'll be hearing from company lawyers. Similarly mandatory gardening leave generally grows with your title
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    > I think the reverse is true. If you're a grunt no one really cares and it's not worth it to enforce. As a grunt who was handcuffed for three months after switching jobs while my former employer and my new employer tried to sort out what I was and wasn't allowed to do... no, this is not true. And the document I ended up having to sign means I can't say anything other than Amazon (former employer), Microsoft (new employer), and myself came to a mutual agreement.
  - htrp 3y ago
    The CSuite walks in with a golden parachute. No SWE job automatically vests a ton of options when you're fired by the company.
jacquesm 3y ago
> This sounds like an insane conflict of interest. It would be, but: this company hasn't been formed yet and this sketch does not justify the haste with which they kicked him out, there were all kinds of boxes that needed to be checked before they could do that without risking damage to OpenAI, this is a founder and the CEO we're speaking of. Besides that: stupidly enough the contract that Sam has with OpenAI does not have a non-compete in it (this has been confirmed by multiple sources now I take that as true) and I don't see how it directly would harm OpenAI other than that his attention might be diluted and that it should be clear which cap he is wearing. But until that company formed and Sam named himself CEO of it (or took up some other high profile role) it leaves him so many outs that it only makes the board look like bumbling idiots. Because now he can simply say: "I would only be an investor" and that would be that, just like the rest of the investors in OpenAI (and, notably some members of the board) have conflicts of interest at least as large. So if this was it they're in even more trouble than they were before because now it is the boards' conflicts of interest that will be held up to the light and those are not necessarily smaller. What a complete circus.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  Do you think there's a problem with him pitching his hardware side-gig to investors who approached him with an interest in OpenAI's tender offer? That gives the appearance of quid pro quo; with the hope that the investors get to skip the next line at the next OpenAI investment opportunity. Imagine someone high up on the Nvidia sales org telling a customer they are all out of H200 graphics cards for the half, but they have a fantastic timeshare investment opportunity they are selling on the side while the customer waits for the next batch.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Not necessarily, unless he proposed to run it himself. I don't see any evidence of that. Just tons of speculation.
- murakamiiq84 3y ago
  I thought non-competes are not legally enforceable in the state of California anyway.
h2odragon 3y ago
A more usual method is to have the non-profits contract with a for-profit "management consulting firm" that does the running of the real things. Nonprofit can take in money, pay the for-profit for providing the thing the donation was earmarked for; all legal and fine. The same people can be employed by both companies. Any profits the "for profit" arm makes can then be donated back to the non-profits for financial advantage in holding the money, if any. Lather, rinse, repeat.
ergocoder 3y ago
One example of conflict of interests is Adam D'Angelo is sitting on OpenAI's board when Quora is building a competitor, Poe. And it has been rumored that D'Angelo helped a lot with this coup because he did it before at Quora.
gwern 3y ago
There's an even bigger problem here: if he were just making money, that would be a normal-sized problem. If he were just making a supplier for OA, heck, that might be a good thing on net for OA; a subsidiary doing hardware might be justifiable given the importance of securing hardware. But that's not what he's doing. Creating such an independent hardware startup comes off as basically directly opposed to OA's safety mission - GPUs are one of the biggest limitations to creating better-than-OA models! The best customers would be the ones who are most sabotaging the OA mission. (You can't run the UN and also head an arms manufacturer dreaming of democratizing access to munitions.)
- etrautmann 3y ago
  Kinda depends on your perspective on safety. In your view, should GPUs be regulated or not exist?
  - chasd00 3y ago
    reposting this since it's getting more and more relevant >> Common sense AI control NOW. Ban assault style GPUs > That is beautiful, I made you a shirt. https://sprd.co/ZZufv7j https://sprd.co/ZZufv7j /context https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38119845 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38119845
- goldinfra 3y ago
  How is it opposed to OpenAI's goals to have a friendly company selling them chips instead of NVIDIA, which is, at-best, a neutral company? Software is always more important than hardware. All the big players have access to NVIDIA chips today and yet only OpenAI has ChatGPT, proving the point. OpenAI probably wishes someone would create competition to NVIDIA and this is Sam Altman trying to make that happen himself, since no one else seems to have been able to pull it off so far. A conflict of interest would be OpenAI buying Altman's chips at inflated prices or something like that. But if he makes a bunch of money selling OpenAI chips and OpenAI gets better/cheaper chips, that seems like pure win-win and totally free of ethical conflict.
  - 3y ago
atleastoptimal 3y ago
Every single one of Elon's ventures are conflicts of interest with each other. Simply seeking money for a chip venture is small compared to pulling out Tesla engineers to work on X, the stuff with SolarCity, etc
- threeseed 3y ago
  As Twitter's usage declined the extra Sacramento DC was sold to Tesla. Despite Musk saying it was terrible. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-elon-musk-bashes-sacramento-data-centers-tesla-gets-one https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-elon-musk-bash...
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  It is funny that you say that after Elon cofounded openAI and then left due to conflicts of interest in the AI space.
ren_engineer 3y ago
major mistake by OpenAI's board not to mention this if it actually did play a role in removing him, public opinion now is that it was a coup over AI safety stuff. OpenAI board seemed to have no PR plan
- quonn 3y ago
  They mentioned it clearly. They said had hidden something from them. The other story was later constructed in forums and media.
jug 3y ago
And now they want him back because the investors want him back. What a mess.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
threeseed 3y ago
> that the non-profit would eventually pay a lot of money That's not a fact. It's your assumption. And not a particular good one given that Microsoft is OpenAI's partner and is providing compute services at no cost.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  When you do lunch with Microsoft, you want to bring your own spoon. Better make it a long one.
theptip 3y ago
> All fine and common! Sam got fired, so obviously not fine.
- threeseed 3y ago
  There is no evidence that this is the reason though. And so everything needs to be caveated with "this is an assumption".
jaybrendansmith 3y ago
I don't see a conflict at all but IANAL. His biggest issue is GPU cost. He was hustling to vertically integrate and knew that the non-profit nature of OpenAI would not allow for it. So he starts to think about the creation of a separate company to handle that with exclusivity of some kind. It makes perfect sense. No idea if he could get the board to go for it of course, but that's clearly something he would have needed to do to make it a reality. And it's completely in his remit to make these kinds of bets. This board may have seen this as an overstep but all they needed to do is tell him no. I'm sure he would have made a persuasive argument had they let him. This board seems completely out of touch with the reality of running a company like this. And GPUs have nothing to do with AI safety, that's like saying a faster neuron makes a person evil or good.
- bartwr 3y ago
  "non-profit nature of OpenAI would not allow for it." How so? Seeking more efficiency and cost-effectiveness absolutely does not conflict with a non-profit mission.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  You seem to be arguing that it isn't a conflict with the non-profit charter. What people are saying is that it's a conflict of interest. It's called self-dealing and one of the most common forms of conflict of interest.
  - kmlevitt 3y ago
    There’s no immediate conflict of interest though. No self-dealing has actually occurred yet, and you have to assume a tremendous amount of bad faith years in advance of reality to get there. Suppose I am on the board of a wildlife preservation nonprofit, and I am thinking about starting a catering business, and talking to potential financial backers. If you want to take it to the extreme, you could argue that I could award my catering company a lucrative contract to provide food for the nonprofits cafeteria. But that would be entirely speculative on your part. it would by no means justify immediately firing me from my position at the nonprofit. If you take those hypotheticals out far enough, you could basically argue anybody with any other job or role is potentially in conflict of interest. But again, doing that requires assuming a tremendous amount of bad faith.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
koliber 3y ago
Not at all fine. As we’ve just seen, it’s a fireable offense.
tptacek 3y ago
I sincerely don't give a shit and am just kibitzing but: why would this be a conflict of interest at all? One of OpenAI's biggest strategic concerns is getting out from under Nvidia. OpenAI is never going to do hardware; they don't even want to rack servers. The ultimate customer for a new AI chip would be Microsoft, not OpenAI. OpenAI is research and software. Hardware is a complement, not a competitor.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  You seriously don't see a conflict of interest with a board member and CEO creating a separate company that sells to the company he is the CEO of? That is the definition of conflict of interest.
  - murakamiiq84 3y ago
    Yeah something can be potentially net good for a company but still be a COI. If I'm in charge of awarding military contracts and I give it to a armaments company my son is a VP of, and I didn't disclose to anybody that my son was a VP there, this is a clear COI even if I later argue (and people agree with me!) that my son's armaments company is best suited for the business. At the very minimum I should not be the one to make that call.
joak 3y ago
Conflict of interest? This is no different than Google designing and manufacturing their own chips (TPU, tensor processing unit)
- murakamiiq84 3y ago
  The claim is that he's starting different AI hardware companies on the side, not that he's doing it under OpenAI's umbrella. It's more like if Sundar tried to get funding for some side hustles while talking with potential customers or contractors of Google, without disclosing to Google's board ahead of time.
sangnoir 3y ago
> SoftBank and others had hoped to be part of this deal, one person said, but were put on a waitlist for a similar deal at a later date. In the interim, Altman urged investors to consider his new ventures, two people said. JFC

by bartwr 3y ago

philistine 3y ago

AND a complete Moby Dick move. You're going to suddenly get up and compete with all the chip designers and beat them at their job? Computer chips are literally the most complex products in the world. It is an astonishing development that the most profitable company in the world was able to make chips, let alone chips that beat Intel and Nvidia in some key metrics. It took Apple more than a decade of shipping chips in phones to be able to move up to desktop-class. The board was right to get rid of a guy who would rather hunt a white whale than do his job.

cma 3y ago

I think Altman hails from a kind of hustle culture that may not go great with AI safety: >I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this: > "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious. > We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day. > We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract." > I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 The crypto WorldCoin thing is probably a bigger example.

hef19898 3y ago
There was another AI start-up, one backed / supported by various conservative politians from Germany and Austria thatvdid the same thing, hiring people to look busy when customers (bad) and investors (a lot worse) showed up at the offices: Augustus Intelligence. At best, this is fake it till you make it. At worst, it is fraud. The tiny, tiny differce is whether that next investor shows up or not. Just ask FTX. I do not respect people resorting to that kind of thing.
Animats 3y ago
> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract." That strategy was tried with Barry Minkow, with "ZZZZ Best", the fake building maintenance company fraud.[1] He did prison time for that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Minkow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Minkow
- h2odragon 3y ago
  "Its not fraud when we do it"
  - gaganyaan 3y ago
    > While still in high school, Minkow founded ZZZZ Best (pronounced "Zee Best"), which appeared to be an immensely successful carpet-cleaning and restoration company. However, it was actually a front to attract investment for a massive Ponzi scheme. Apples and oranges.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    It's not fraud if Sam's company delivered. Did they?
    - foldr 3y ago
      I'm not sure if that's true. If they obtained a financial advantage (e.g. a contract) via deception, then that could well be fraud. I don't think it makes much difference if they eventually delivered on the contract or not.

jjoonathan 3y ago

Wow, that's some Adam Neumann level self-dealing.

kelseyfrog 3y ago
Sam's Alameda moment
- 38321003thrw 3y ago
  [flagged]
dchichkov 3y ago
Assume someone had been working for a startup, as CEO, for free. For years. That someone had cut himself away from any way to compensate his work directly. Due to altruism or poor planning or a result of a negotiation. At a later time other ventures that this person had been propping started failing and a money injection deemed necessary. It would not be surprising, if that person would try to risk his unpaid work position and monetize it. Recent tweets from Sam “go for a full value of my stock” seem to indicate towards this direction.
- foldr 3y ago
  He presumably at least got paid a salary as CEO, so it's not uncompensated work. In any case, being in some kind of suboptimal financial situation isn't an excuse for breaking the rules.
  - dchichkov 3y ago
    I don’t know. It can easily be the case of $1 comp, and insane amounts of work and pressure, including financial, from all sides. It is quite clear that crypto is failing and he is deeply engaged into crypto with the WorldCoin project. For all we know, personal moneys may have been spent on crypto.

oooyay 3y ago

> regular employees have non-competes in their contracts (sometimes void/illegal, depending on the local jurisdiction) Non-competes mostly have an effective after period, so Altman's situation is a bit more akin to my companies "only job" policy. It means I can't have a side hustle or alternative means of making money. Enforceable or not, while you're employed you can be fired for anything.

not_wyoming 3y ago

Non-competes, like so many other workplace rules, only apply below the C-suite

bko 3y ago
I think the reverse is true. If you're a grunt no one really cares and it's not worth it to enforce. If you're c suite and leave to start a competitor you can be sure you'll be hearing from company lawyers. Similarly mandatory gardening leave generally grows with your title
- jwestbury 3y ago
  > I think the reverse is true. If you're a grunt no one really cares and it's not worth it to enforce. As a grunt who was handcuffed for three months after switching jobs while my former employer and my new employer tried to sort out what I was and wasn't allowed to do... no, this is not true. And the document I ended up having to sign means I can't say anything other than Amazon (former employer), Microsoft (new employer), and myself came to a mutual agreement.
- htrp 3y ago
  The CSuite walks in with a golden parachute. No SWE job automatically vests a ton of options when you're fired by the company.

jacquesm 3y ago

> This sounds like an insane conflict of interest. It would be, but: this company hasn't been formed yet and this sketch does not justify the haste with which they kicked him out, there were all kinds of boxes that needed to be checked before they could do that without risking damage to OpenAI, this is a founder and the CEO we're speaking of. Besides that: stupidly enough the contract that Sam has with OpenAI does not have a non-compete in it (this has been confirmed by multiple sources now I take that as true) and I don't see how it directly would harm OpenAI other than that his attention might be diluted and that it should be clear which cap he is wearing. But until that company formed and Sam named himself CEO of it (or took up some other high profile role) it leaves him so many outs that it only makes the board look like bumbling idiots. Because now he can simply say: "I would only be an investor" and that would be that, just like the rest of the investors in OpenAI (and, notably some members of the board) have conflicts of interest at least as large. So if this was it they're in even more trouble than they were before because now it is the boards' conflicts of interest that will be held up to the light and those are not necessarily smaller. What a complete circus.

sangnoir 3y ago
Do you think there's a problem with him pitching his hardware side-gig to investors who approached him with an interest in OpenAI's tender offer? That gives the appearance of quid pro quo; with the hope that the investors get to skip the next line at the next OpenAI investment opportunity. Imagine someone high up on the Nvidia sales org telling a customer they are all out of H200 graphics cards for the half, but they have a fantastic timeshare investment opportunity they are selling on the side while the customer waits for the next batch.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Not necessarily, unless he proposed to run it himself. I don't see any evidence of that. Just tons of speculation.
murakamiiq84 3y ago
I thought non-competes are not legally enforceable in the state of California anyway.

h2odragon 3y ago

A more usual method is to have the non-profits contract with a for-profit "management consulting firm" that does the running of the real things. Nonprofit can take in money, pay the for-profit for providing the thing the donation was earmarked for; all legal and fine. The same people can be employed by both companies. Any profits the "for profit" arm makes can then be donated back to the non-profits for financial advantage in holding the money, if any. Lather, rinse, repeat.

ergocoder 3y ago

One example of conflict of interests is Adam D'Angelo is sitting on OpenAI's board when Quora is building a competitor, Poe. And it has been rumored that D'Angelo helped a lot with this coup because he did it before at Quora.

gwern 3y ago

There's an even bigger problem here: if he were just making money, that would be a normal-sized problem. If he were just making a supplier for OA, heck, that might be a good thing on net for OA; a subsidiary doing hardware might be justifiable given the importance of securing hardware. But that's not what he's doing. Creating such an independent hardware startup comes off as basically directly opposed to OA's safety mission - GPUs are one of the biggest limitations to creating better-than-OA models! The best customers would be the ones who are most sabotaging the OA mission. (You can't run the UN and also head an arms manufacturer dreaming of democratizing access to munitions.)

etrautmann 3y ago
Kinda depends on your perspective on safety. In your view, should GPUs be regulated or not exist?
- chasd00 3y ago
  reposting this since it's getting more and more relevant >> Common sense AI control NOW. Ban assault style GPUs > That is beautiful, I made you a shirt. https://sprd.co/ZZufv7j https://sprd.co/ZZufv7j /context https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38119845 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38119845
goldinfra 3y ago
How is it opposed to OpenAI's goals to have a friendly company selling them chips instead of NVIDIA, which is, at-best, a neutral company? Software is always more important than hardware. All the big players have access to NVIDIA chips today and yet only OpenAI has ChatGPT, proving the point. OpenAI probably wishes someone would create competition to NVIDIA and this is Sam Altman trying to make that happen himself, since no one else seems to have been able to pull it off so far. A conflict of interest would be OpenAI buying Altman's chips at inflated prices or something like that. But if he makes a bunch of money selling OpenAI chips and OpenAI gets better/cheaper chips, that seems like pure win-win and totally free of ethical conflict.
- 3y ago

atleastoptimal 3y ago

Every single one of Elon's ventures are conflicts of interest with each other. Simply seeking money for a chip venture is small compared to pulling out Tesla engineers to work on X, the stuff with SolarCity, etc

threeseed 3y ago
As Twitter's usage declined the extra Sacramento DC was sold to Tesla. Despite Musk saying it was terrible. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-elon-musk-bashes-sacramento-data-centers-tesla-gets-one https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-elon-musk-bash...
s1artibartfast 3y ago
It is funny that you say that after Elon cofounded openAI and then left due to conflicts of interest in the AI space.

ren_engineer 3y ago

major mistake by OpenAI's board not to mention this if it actually did play a role in removing him, public opinion now is that it was a coup over AI safety stuff. OpenAI board seemed to have no PR plan

quonn 3y ago
They mentioned it clearly. They said had hidden something from them. The other story was later constructed in forums and media.

jug 3y ago

And now they want him back because the investors want him back. What a mess.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

threeseed 3y ago

> that the non-profit would eventually pay a lot of money That's not a fact. It's your assumption. And not a particular good one given that Microsoft is OpenAI's partner and is providing compute services at no cost.

CamperBob2 3y ago
When you do lunch with Microsoft, you want to bring your own spoon. Better make it a long one.

theptip 3y ago

> All fine and common! Sam got fired, so obviously not fine.

threeseed 3y ago
There is no evidence that this is the reason though. And so everything needs to be caveated with "this is an assumption".

jaybrendansmith 3y ago

I don't see a conflict at all but IANAL. His biggest issue is GPU cost. He was hustling to vertically integrate and knew that the non-profit nature of OpenAI would not allow for it. So he starts to think about the creation of a separate company to handle that with exclusivity of some kind. It makes perfect sense. No idea if he could get the board to go for it of course, but that's clearly something he would have needed to do to make it a reality. And it's completely in his remit to make these kinds of bets. This board may have seen this as an overstep but all they needed to do is tell him no. I'm sure he would have made a persuasive argument had they let him. This board seems completely out of touch with the reality of running a company like this. And GPUs have nothing to do with AI safety, that's like saying a faster neuron makes a person evil or good.

bartwr 3y ago
"non-profit nature of OpenAI would not allow for it." How so? Seeking more efficiency and cost-effectiveness absolutely does not conflict with a non-profit mission.
jjeaff 3y ago
You seem to be arguing that it isn't a conflict with the non-profit charter. What people are saying is that it's a conflict of interest. It's called self-dealing and one of the most common forms of conflict of interest.
- kmlevitt 3y ago
  There’s no immediate conflict of interest though. No self-dealing has actually occurred yet, and you have to assume a tremendous amount of bad faith years in advance of reality to get there. Suppose I am on the board of a wildlife preservation nonprofit, and I am thinking about starting a catering business, and talking to potential financial backers. If you want to take it to the extreme, you could argue that I could award my catering company a lucrative contract to provide food for the nonprofits cafeteria. But that would be entirely speculative on your part. it would by no means justify immediately firing me from my position at the nonprofit. If you take those hypotheticals out far enough, you could basically argue anybody with any other job or role is potentially in conflict of interest. But again, doing that requires assuming a tremendous amount of bad faith.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

koliber 3y ago

Not at all fine. As we’ve just seen, it’s a fireable offense.

tptacek 3y ago

I sincerely don't give a shit and am just kibitzing but: why would this be a conflict of interest at all? One of OpenAI's biggest strategic concerns is getting out from under Nvidia. OpenAI is never going to do hardware; they don't even want to rack servers. The ultimate customer for a new AI chip would be Microsoft, not OpenAI. OpenAI is research and software. Hardware is a complement, not a competitor.

jjeaff 3y ago
You seriously don't see a conflict of interest with a board member and CEO creating a separate company that sells to the company he is the CEO of? That is the definition of conflict of interest.
- murakamiiq84 3y ago
  Yeah something can be potentially net good for a company but still be a COI. If I'm in charge of awarding military contracts and I give it to a armaments company my son is a VP of, and I didn't disclose to anybody that my son was a VP there, this is a clear COI even if I later argue (and people agree with me!) that my son's armaments company is best suited for the business. At the very minimum I should not be the one to make that call.

joak 3y ago

Conflict of interest? This is no different than Google designing and manufacturing their own chips (TPU, tensor processing unit)

murakamiiq84 3y ago
The claim is that he's starting different AI hardware companies on the side, not that he's doing it under OpenAI's umbrella. It's more like if Sundar tried to get funding for some side hustles while talking with potential customers or contractors of Google, without disclosing to Google's board ahead of time.

sangnoir 3y ago

> SoftBank and others had hoped to be part of this deal, one person said, but were put on a waitlist for a similar deal at a later date. In the interim, Altman urged investors to consider his new ventures, two people said. JFC