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I think the board did the right thing, just waaaay too late for it to be effective. They’d been cut out long ago and just hadn’t realized it yet. … but I’d pro

• jacquesm 3y ago
  Do you know their motivations? Because that is the main question everybody has: why did they do it?
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    I guess I should rephrase that as if they did it because they perceived that Altman was maneuvering to be untouchable within the company and moving against the interests of the nonprofit, they did the right thing. Just, again, way too late because it seems he was already untouchable.
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      According to the letter they consistently refused to go on the record why they did it and that would be as good a reason as any so then they should make it public. I'm leaning towards there not being a good reason that doesn't expose the board to immediate liability. And that's why they're keeping mum.
      • kmlevitt 3y ago
        That might also explain why they don’t back down and reinstate him. If they double down with this and it goes to court, they can argue that they were legitimately acting in what they thought was openAI’s best interests. Even if their reasoning looks stupid, they would still have plausible deniability in terms of a difference of opinion/philosophical approach on how to handle AI, etc. But if they reinstate him it’s basically an admission that they didn’t know what they were doing in the first place and were incompetent. Part of the negotiations for reinstating him involved a demand from Sam that they release a statement absolving him of any criminal wrongdoing, etc., And they refused because that would expose them to liability too.
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          Exactly. This is all consistent and why I think they are in contact with their legal advisors (and if they aren't by now they are beyond stupid).
          • murakamiiq84 3y ago
            Unfortunately lawyers almost always tell you to be quiet, even when you should be talking. So in this case listening to legal advice might have screwed them over, ultimately.
          • senderista 3y ago
            There's no reason Sam and the board can't come to a mutual agreement that indemnifies the board from liability if they publicly exonerate Sam.
            • jacquesm 3y ago
              Yes, that's a possibility. But: Sam may not be the only party that has standing and Sam can only negotiate for his own damage and board liability, not for other parties.
      • lolbase 3y ago
        I'm leaning toward the reason being that Sam did something that created a massive legal risk to the company, and that giving more details would cause the risk to materialize.
    • s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I question that framing of a growing Altman influence. Altman predates every other board member and was part of their selection. As an alternative faming, Maybe this is the best opportunity the cautious/antripic faction would ever get and a "moment of weakness" for the Altman faction. With the departure of Hoffman, Zilis, and Hurd, the current board was down 3 members, so the voting power of D’Angelo, Toner, McCauley was as high as it might ever be, and the best chance to outvote Altman and Brockman.
      • jacquesm 3y ago
        That may very well have been the case but then they have a new problem: this smacks of carelessness.
        • s1artibartfast 3y ago
          Carelessness for who? Alman for not refilling the board when he had the chance? Others for the way they ousted him? I wonder if there were challenges and disagreements about filling the board seats. Is it normal for seats to remain empty for almost a year for a company of this side? Maybe there was an inability to compromise that spiraled as the board shrank, until it was small enough to enable an action like this. Just a hypothesis. Obviously this couldnt have happened if there was a 9 person board stacked with Altman allies. What I dont know is the inclinations of the departed members.
          • jacquesm 3y ago
            Carelessness from the perspective of those downstream of the board's decisions. Boards are supposed to be careful, not careless. Good primer here: https://www.onboardmeetings.com/blog/what-are-nonprofit-board-of-directors-fiduciary-duties/ https://www.onboardmeetings.com/blog/what-are-nonprofit-boar... At least that will create some common reference.
            • s1artibartfast 3y ago
              Using that framework, I still think it is possible that this is the result of legitimate and irreconcilable differences in opinion about the organization’s mission and vision and execution. Edit: it is also common for changing circumstance to bring pre-existing but tolerable differences to the relevant Forefront
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  Agreed. Starting from before the anthropic exodus, I suspect the timeline looks like: (2015) Founding: majority are concerned with safety (2019) For profit formed: mix of safety and profit motives (majority still safety oriented?) (2020) GPT3 released to much hype, leading to many ambition chasers joining: the profit seeking side grows. (2021) Anthropic exodus over safety: the safety side shrinks (2022) chatgpt released, generating tons more hype and tons more ambitious profit seekers joining: the profit side grows even more, probably quickly outnumbering the safety side (2023) this weeks shenanigans The safety folks probably lost the majority a while ago. Maybe back in 2021, but definitely by the time the gpt3/chatgpt motivated newcomers were in the majority. Maybe one lesson is that if your cofounder starts hiring a ton of people who aren’t aligned with you, you can quickly find yourself in the minority, especially once people on your side start to leave.
  • stavros 3y ago
    Wait, the Anthropic folks quit because they wanted more safety?
    • wavemode 3y ago
      This article from back then seems to describe it as, they wanted to integrate safety from the ground up as opposed to bolting in on at the end: https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/anthropic-is-the-new-ai-research-outfit-from-openais-dario-amodei-and-it-has-124m-to-burn/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/anthropic-is-the-new-ai-re... I'm curious how much progress they ever made on that, to be honest. I'm not aware of how Claude is "safer", by any real-world metric, compared to ChatGPT.
      • stavros 3y ago
        Ahh, I didn't know that, thank you.
      • vitorgrs 3y ago
        Claude 2 is IMO, safer and in a bad way. They did "Constitutional AI". And made Claude 2 Safer but dumber than Claude 1 sadly. Which is why on the Arena leaderboard, Claude 1 is still score more than Claude 2...
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  No, what the board did in this instance was completely idiotic, even if you assign nothing but "good intentions" to their motives (that is, they were really just concerned about the original OpenAI charter of developing "safe AI for all" and thought Sam was too focused on commercialization), and it would have been idiotic even if they had done it a long time ago. There are tons of "Safe AI" think tanks and orgs that write lots of papers that nobody reads. The only reason anyone gives 2 shits about OpenAI is they created stuff that works. It has been shown time and time again that if you just try to put roadblocks up that the best AI researchers just leave and go where there are fewer roadblocks - this is exactly what happened with Google, where the transformer architecture was invented. So the "safe AI" people at OpenAI were in a unique position to help guide AI dev in as safe a direction as possible precisely because ChatGPT was so commercially successful. Instead they may be left with an org of a few tens of people at Open AI, to be completely irrelevant in short order, while anyone who matters leaves to join an outfit that is likely to be less careful about safe AI development. Nate Silver said as much in response to NYTimes' boneheaded assessment of the situation: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1726614811931509147 https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1726614811931509147
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    If it was to try to prevent the board becoming a useless vestigial organ incapable of meaningfully affecting the direction of the organization, it sure looks like they were right to be worried about that and acting on such concern wouldn’t be a mistake (doing it so late when the feared-state-of-things was already the actual state of things, yes, a mistake, except as a symbolic gesture). If it was for other reasons, yeah, may simply have been dumb.
    • shimon 3y ago
      If you're going to make a symbolic gesture you don't cloak it in so much secrecy that nobody can even reasonably guess what you're trying to symbolize.
      • hotnfresh 3y ago
• vadym909 3y ago
  The remaining 10% are probably on Thanksgiving break!
• richardw 3y ago
  This board doesn't own the global state of play. They own control over the decisions of one entity at a point in time. This thing moves too fast and fluidly, ideas spread, others compete, skills move. Too forceful a move could scatter people to 50 startups. They just catalysed a massive increase in fluidity and have absolutely zero control over how it plays out. This is an inkling, a tiny spark, of how hard it'll be to control AI, or even the creation of AI. Wait until the outcome of war depends on the decisions made by those competing with significant AI assistance.
• Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Can you talk about why you feel this way without using the word "safety"? Getting a little tired of the buzzword when there's so much value to ChatGPT and also its basically no different from when you, like, search stuff and the aearch engine does that summarize thing in my view
  • wholinator2 3y ago
    Well let's come back to reality. ChatGPT is in fact vastly different from Google summarizing a search. Maybe that's all you use it for but there's people building virtual girlfriend platforms, an API that an alarming amount of businesses are integrating into their standard workflows, and the damn thing can literally talk. It can talk to you. Google search summarizing gives a snippet about a search. You can't have a conversation with it, you cant ask it advice about your girlfriend, it won't talk to you like a trusted advisor when you ask it a question about your degree or job. It can fucking talk. That is the difference. Remember when it first came out and all these people were convinced that it was alive and sentient and could feel pain and would shortly take over the world? Please remind me when that happened for Google search. Safety is about setting up the infrastructure to control uranium sources before the first bomb gets built. It's not about right now, it's about the phase change that happens the moment we take that step. Don't you want to have infrastructure to prevent possible societal strife if possible? Of course gpt has value, bombs have value, enron had value, the housing market has value. If i could retort i'd say the term 'value' is much too vague to contribute to a discussion about this. The value it has is the danger, they're the same thing. If i suddenly quadruple the money supply in every country in the world, do you think that would improve the lives of the majority of humans? Or is it possible that would be looked back on a a catastrophic event that obliterated societies and killed innumerable people. Hard to say huh? Maybe it wouldn't, maybe it would, who can actually know? Wouldn't it be better for us to have some kind of system to maybe handle that before it leads to potential destruction. If instead, i announce that at some point in the future this event might occur. Does that change your calculus? How do you feel about global climate destabilization? How do you feel about the prospect of another world war?
    • Obscurity4340 3y ago