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Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanag
by kmlevitt 3y ago
Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions.
Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scientist who is concerned about AGI. But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gongagong 3y ago[flagged]
- aravindgp 3y agoExactly my point why would d Angelo want openai to thrive when his own company poe(chatbot) wants compete in the same space. Its conflict of interest which ever way you look. He should resign from board of openai in the first place. The main point is greg, Ilya can get 50% vote and convince Helen toner to change decision. It's all done then it's 3 to 2 in board of 5 people. Unless greg board membership is reinstated. Now it's increasingly look like Sam will be heading back into the role of CEO of openai.
- aravindgp 3y ago[flagged]
- joneholland 3y agoThis comment was written by ChatGPT ^
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aravindgp 3y agoUpdated
- anupamchugh 3y agoThere’s lots of conflicts of interests beyond Adam and his Poe AI. Yes, he was building a commerical bot using OpenAI APIs, but Sam was apparently working on other side ventures too. And Sam was the person who invested in Quora during his YC tenure, and must have had a say in bringing him onboard. At this point, the spotlight is on most members of the nonprofit board
- nemo44x 3y agoI wouldn’t hold Sam bringing him over in too high a regard. Fucking each other over is a sport in Silicon Valley. You’re subservient exactly until the moment you sense an opportunity to dominate. It’s just business.
- bezier-curve 3y ago"Business" sucks then. This is sociopathic behavior.
- bredren 3y agoWhat has been seen can not be unseen. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296
- dendrite9 3y agoThanks for that. The discussion feels like a look into another world, which I guess is what history is.
- rjbwork 3y agoYes. That is what is valued in the economic system we have. Absolute cut throat dominance to take as big a chunk of any pie you can get your grubby little fingers into yields the greatest amount of capital.
- nemo44x 3y agoIt’s not just business that works like this. Any type of organization of consequence has sociopaths at the top. It’s the only way to get there. It’s a big game that some people know how to play well and that many people are oblivious to.
- 015a 3y agoSo? Sam gave Worldcoin early access to OpenAI's proprietary technology. Should Sam step down (oh wait)?
- aravindgp 3y agoEarly access is different from firing board members or CEO! If Sam was always involved in furthering openai success as far the facts and actions he has taken show. It never showed his action is against openai. Like all bets are not correct I don't agree with sams worldcoin project at all in the first place. Giving early access to worldcoin doesn't correlate to firing employees or board or CEO.
- blackoil 3y agoWorldcoin has no conflict of interest with OpenAI. Unless he gave tech for free causing great loss to the OpenAI it is simply finding an early beta customer. Also, to fire over something so trivial would be equally if not more stupid. It is like firing Elon because he without open bidding sent Tesla on SpaceX.
- anoy8888 3y agoThis is the most likely scenario. Adam wants to destroy OpenAI so that his poop AI has a chance to survive
- resource0x 3y agoThe failure to create anything resembling AGI can be easily explained away by concerns about the safety of AGI. This can be done in perpetuity. Google explains its AI failures along the same lines.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago> The failure to create anything resembling AGI can be easily explained away by concerns about the safety of AGI. Isn't the solution to just pipe ChatGPT into a meta-reinforcement-learning framework that gradually learns how to prompt ChatGPT into writing the source-code for a true AGI? What do we even need AI ethicists for anyway? /s
- kuchenbecker 3y agoThe singularity is where this works.
- fhqwhgads 3y agoThe number of hours I've wasted trying to do this lol
- 1024core 3y ago> But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features. Could this be the explanation? That D'Angelo didn't like how OpenAI was eating his lunch and wanted Sam out? Occam's razor and all that.
- insanitybit 3y agoIt seems extremely short sighted for the rest of the board to go along with that.
- adastra22 3y agoWell obviously that wouldn't be the explanation given to other board members. But it would be the reason he instigated this after dev day, and the reason he won't back down (OpenAI imploding? All the better).
- shandor 3y agoBut it’s still surprising the other three then haven’t sacked D’Angelo, then. You’d think with the shitstorm raging and the underlying reasoning seemingly so…inadequate, they would start seeing that D’Angelo was just playing them.
- singularity2001 3y agomaybe they have their own 'good' reasons to sabotage openAI
- rtpg 3y agoBut you would need to convince the rest of the board with _something_, right? Like to not only fire this guy, but to do it very publicly, quickly, with the declaration of lying in the announcement. There are 3 other people on the board, right? Maybe they're all buddies of some big masterminding, but I dunno..
- AndyNemmity 3y agoWouldn't it make sense that Ilya Sutskever presented the reasons the board had for firing Sam Altman, which were not his reasons. My feeling is Ilya was upset about how Sam Altman was the face of OpenAI, and went along with the rest of the board for his own reasons. That's often how this stuff works out. He wasn't particularly compelled by their reasons, but had his own which justified his decision in his mind.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Wouldn't it make sense that Ilya Sutskever presented the reasons the board had for firing Sam Altman, which were not his reasons. Ilya was one of the board members that removed Sam, so his reasons would, ipso facto, be a subset of the board's reasons.
- skygazer 3y agoIt’s also weird that he’s not admitting to any of his own reasons, only describes some trivial reasons he seems to have coaxed out of the other board members?! Perhaps he still has his own reasons but realizing he’s destroying what he loves he’s trying to stay mum? The other board members seem more zealous for some reason, maybe not being employed by the LLC. Or maybe the others are doing it for the sake of Ilya or someone else that prefers to remain anonymous? Okay, clearly I have no idea.
- aravindgp 3y agoI think Ilya was naive and didn't see this coming and good that he reliased quickly announced on twitter and made the right call to get Sam back. Otherwise it was like Ilya vs Sam showdown,and people were siding towards Ilya for agi and all. But this behind the scene looks like corporate power struggle and coup.
- karmasimida 3y agoHe lets the emotion gets the better part of him for sure.
- 3y ago
- lfclub 3y agoIt could be a more primal explanation. I think OpenAi doesn’t want to effectively be a R&D arm of Microsoft. The ChatGPT mobile app is an unpolished and unrefined. There’s little to no product design there, so I totally see how it’s fair criticism to call out premature feature milling (especially when it’s clear it’s for Microsoft). I’m imagining Sam being Microsoft’s Trojan horse, and that’s just not gonna fly. If anyone tells me Sam is a master politician, I’d agree without knowing much about him. He’s a Microsoft plant that has support of 90% of the OpenAi team. The two things are conflicts of interest. Masterful. It’s a pretty fair question to ask a CEO. Do you still believe in OpenAi vision or do you know believe in Microsoft’s vision? The girl she said not to worry about.
- diordiderot 3y ago> There’s little to no product design there I consider this a feature.
- 47494ureieurr 3y ago[flagged]
- concordDance 3y agoWay too speculative and early to be saying this.
- om2 3y agoPeople who were wrong and change their minds should be punished less, not more, than those who persist in being wrong. The rest of the board is holding firm and preventing the problem from being resolved, so they are more culpable than Ilya.
- 47494ureieurr 3y agoThere's nothing admirable about jumping off a sinking ship that you put the holes in. At this stage it's on him to clear his name.
- losteric 3y agoHas Ilya left OpenAI? Not to my knowledge. This is more like a guy apologizing for the holes and actively trying to fix the ship. Which is absolutely worth something, even if no holes would still be better.
- Kwpolska 3y agoIlya signed the "reinstate Altman or we're leaving" letter.
- LMYahooTFY 3y agoAfter seemingly being the front man in the firing of Altman he supposedly has put his name on the internal letter to reverse course, fire the board, and reinstate Altman.
- chucke1992 3y agoIt is fascinating considering that D'Angelo had a history with coup (in Quora he did the same, didn't he?)
- gorgoiler 3y agoRemember Facebook Questions? While it lives on as light hearted polls and quizzes it was originally launched by D’Angelo when he was an FB employee. It was designed to compete with expert Q&A websites and was basically Quora v0. When D’Angelo didn’t get any traction with it he jumped ship and launched his own competitor instead. Kind of a live wire imho. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#Facebook_Questions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#Face...
- aravindgp 3y agoWow this is significant, he did this to Charlie cheever the best guy at Facebook and quora. He got Matt on board and fired Charlie without informing investors. Only difference this time 100 billion company is at stake at openai. Process is similar. This going very wrong for Adam D'Angelo. With this I hope other board members get to the bottom get Sam back and vote out D'Angelo from board. This school level immaturity. Old story https://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-of-a-quora-cofounder-has-silicon-valley-baffled-2012-10?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-o...
- mcv 3y agoPeople keep talking about an inexperienced board, but this sounds like this D'Angelo might be a bit too experienced, especially in this kind of boardroom maneuvering.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat may be so but those other times he didn't check to see if the arm holding the banana wasn't accidentally attached to the 900 pound gorilla before trying to snatch the banana. And now the gorilla is angry.
- JyB 3y agoThat's the only thing that make sense with Ilya & Murati signing that letter.
- shandor 3y agoI’m confused how the board is still keeping their radio silence 100%. Where I’m from, with a shitstorm this big raging, and the board doing nothing, they might very easily be personally held responsible for all kinds of utterly nasty legal action. Is it just different because they’re a nonprofit? Or how on earth the board is thinking they can get away with this anymore?
- lolinder 3y agoWhat specific legal action could be pursued against them where you're from? Who would have a cause for action? (I'm genuinely curious—in the US I'm not aware of any action that could be taken here by anyone besides possibly Sam Altman for libel.)
- 23B1 3y agoShareholder lawsuits happen all the time for much smaller issues.
- lolinder 3y agoRight, but my understanding is that the nonprofit structure eliminates most (if not all) possible shareholder suits.
- 23B1 3y agoNo corporate structure – except for maybe incorporating in the DPRK – can eliminate lawsuits.
- shandor 3y agoAs I mentioned in my comment, I'm unaware of the effect of the nonprofit status on this. But like the parent commenter mentioned I mostly was thinking of laws prohibiting destruction of shareholder value (edit: whatever that may mean considering a nonprofit). It just seems ludicrous that the board could run a company into the ground like this and just shrug "nah we're nonprofit so you can't touch us and BTW we don't even need to make any statements whatsoever". There have been many comments that the initial firing of Altman was in a way completely according to the nonprofit charter, at least if it could prove that Altman had been executing in a way as to jeopardize the Charter. But even then, how could the board say they are working in the best interest of even the nonprofit itself, if their company is just disintegrating while they willfully refuse to give any information to public?
- dwd 3y agoDo we even have an idea of how the vote went? Greg was not invited (losing Sam one vote), and Sam may have been asked to sit out the vote, so the 3 had a majority. Ilya who is at least on "Team Sam" now; may have voted no. Or simply went along thinking he could be next out the door at that point; we just don't know. It's probably fair to say not letting Greg know the board was getting together (and letting it proceed without him there) was unprofessional and where Ilya screwed up. It is also the point when Sam should have said hang-on - I want Greg here before this proceeds any further.
- moberley 3y agoI find it interesting that the attempted explanations, as unconvincing as they may be, are related to Altman specifically. Given that Brockman was the board chairperson it is surprising that there don't seem to be any attempts to explain that demotion. Perhaps its just not being reported to anyone outside but it makes no sense to me that anyone would assume a person would stay after being removed from a board without an opportunity to be at the meeting to defend their position.
- Irishsteve 3y agoMaybe the personal issue was Ilya and sam was saying to one board member he has to go and to another he is good.
- havercosine 3y agoNaive question. In my part of the world, board meetings for such consequential decisions can never be called out on such short notice. Board meeting has to be called ahead of time by days, all the board members must be given written agenda. They have to acknowledge in writing that they've got this agenda. If the procedures such as these aren't followed, the firing cannot stand in court of law. The number of days are configurable in the shareholders agreement, but it is definitely not 1 day. Do things work differently in America?
- Zolde 3y agoNo. Apparently they had to give 48 hours notice for calling special teleconference meetings, and only Mira was notified (not a board member) and Greg was not even invited. > at least four days before any such meeting if given by first-class mail or forty-eight hours before any such meeting if given personally, [] or by electronic transmission. But the bylaws also state that a board member may be fired (or resign) at any time, not necessarily during a special meeting. So, technically (not a lawyer): Board gets majority to fire Sam and executes this decision, notifying Mira in advance of calling the special meeting. During the special meeting, Sam is merely informed that he has been let go already (is not a board member since yesterday). All board members were informed timely, since Sam was not a board member during the meeting.
- LMYahooTFY 3y agoWell, the appointment of a CEO who believes AGI is a threat to the universe is potentially one point in favor of AI safety philosophical differences.
- arthur_sav 3y ago> Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. You mean to tell me that the 3-member board told Sutskever that Sama was being bad and he was like "ok, I believe you".
- laurels-marts 3y agoTwo possibilities when it comes to Ilya: 1. He’s the actual ringleader behind the coup. He got everyone on board, provided reassurances and personally orchestrated and executed the firing. Most likely possibly and the one that’s most consistent with all the reporting and evidence so far (including this article). 2. Others on the board (e.g. Adam) masterminded the coup and saw Ilya as a fellow traveler useful idiot that could be deceived into voting against Sam and destroy the company he and his 700 colleagues spent so hard to build. He then also puppeteer Ilya to do the actual firing over Google Meet.
- aerhardt 3y agoIf #1 is real, he’s just the biggest weasel in tech history by repenting so swiftly and decisively… I don’t think neither the article, nor the broader facts really point to him being the first to cast the stone.
- jacquesm 3y agoBased on Ilya's tweets and his name on that letter (still surprised about that, I have never sees someone calling for their own resignation) that seems to be the story.