6 ms·

> 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 de

> 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 ago
It seems extremely short sighted for the rest of the board to go along with that.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Well 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 ago
    But 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 ago
      maybe they have their own 'good' reasons to sabotage openAI
  - rtpg 3y ago
    But 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..
    - adastra22 3y ago
      The one thing they all have in common is being AI safetyists, which Sam is not. I’d bet it’s something to do with that.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  HN has been radiating a lot of "We did it Reddit!" energy these past 4 days. Lots of confident conjecture based on very little. I have been guilty of it myself, but as an exercise in humility, I will come back to these threads in 6 months to see how wrong I and many others were.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    That might make an interesting blog post. If you write anything up, you should submit it!
  - kmlevitt 3y ago
    I agree it's all just speculation. But the board aren't doing themselves any favors by not talking. As long as there is no specific reason for firing him given, it's only natural people are going to fill the void with their own theories. They have a problem with that, they or their attorneys need to speak up.
kmlevitt 3y ago
Right now I think that’s the most plausible explanation simply because none of the other explanations that have been floating around make any sense when you consider all the facts. We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up. And if it’s wrong, D’Angelo and the rest of the board could help themselves out by explaining the real reason in detail and ending all this speculation. This gossip is going to continue for as long as they stay silent.
- parl_match 3y ago
  > This gossip is going to continue for as long as they stay silent. Their lawyers are all screaming at them to shut up. This is going to be a highly visible and contested set of decisions that will play out in courtrooms, possibly for years.
  - kmlevitt 3y ago
    I agree with you. But I suspect the reason they need to shut up is because their actual reason for firing him is not justifiable enough to protect them, and stating it now would just give more ammunition to plaintiffs. If they had him caught red-handed in an actual crime, or even a clear ethical violation, a good lawyer would be communicating that to the press on their behalf. High-ranking employees that have communicated with them have already said they have admitted it wasn't due to any security, safety, privacy or financial concerns. So there aren't a lot of valid reasons left. They're not talking because they've got nothing.
    - parl_match 3y ago
      It doesn't really matter if they have a good case or not, commenting in public is always a terrible idea. I do agree, though, that the board is likely in trouble.
- Emma_Goldman 3y ago
  > "We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up." Why do you think that? It still strikes me as the most plausible explanation.
seanhunter 3y ago
What’s interesting to me is that someone looked at Quora and thought “I want the guy behind that on my board”.
- bambax 3y ago
  Agreed! Yet in 2014 Sam Altman accepted Quora into one of YC's batches, saying [0] > Adam D’Angelo is awesome, and we’re big Quora fans [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - djsavvy 3y ago
    To be fair, back then it was pretty awesome IMO. I spent a lot of hours scrolling Quora in those days. It wasn’t until at least 2016 that the user experience became unpalatable if memory serves correctly.
- singularity2001 3y ago
  it's probably more like they thought "I want Quoras money" and D'angelo wanted their control
- motoxpro 3y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. This whole thing is surprising and then I look at Quora and think "Eh, makes sense that the CEO is completely incompetent and money hungry" Even as I type that, when people talk about the board being altruistic and holding to the Open AI charter, how in the world can you be that user hostile, profit focused, and incompetent at your day job (Quora CEO) and then say "Oh no, but on this board I am an absolute saint and will do everything to benefit humanity"
behnamoh 3y ago
> 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. If that were the case, can't he get sued by the Alliance (Sam, Greg, rest)? If he has conflict of interest then his decisions as member of the board would be invalid, right?
- Moto7451 3y ago
  I don’t think that’s how it would work out since his conflict was very public knowledge before this point. He plausibly disclosed this to the board at some point before Poe launched and they kept him on. Large private VC backed companies also don’t always fall under the same rules as public entities. Generally there are shareholder thresholds (where insider/private shareholders count towards) that in turn cause some of the general Securities/board regulations to kick in.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That's not how it works. If you have a conflict of interest and you remain on a board you are supposed to recuse yourself from those decisions where that conflict of interest materializes. You can still vote on the ones that you do not stand to profit from if things go the way you vote.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  The decisions will stand assuming they were arrived at according to the bylaws of the non-profit but he may end up being personally liable.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Zolde 3y ago
I find this implausible, though it may have played a motivating role. Quora was always supposed to be an AI/NLP company, starting by gathering answers from experts for its training data. In a sense, that is level 0 human-in-the-loop AGI. ChatGPT itself is level 1: Emergent AGI, so was already eating Quora's lunch (whatever was left of it after they turned into a platform for self-promotion and log-in walls). There either always was a conflict of interest, or there never was. GPTs seemed to have been Sam's pet project for a while now, Tweeting in February: "writing a really great prompt for a chatbot persona is an amazingly high-leverage skill and an early example of programming in a little bit of natural language". A lot of early jailbreaks like DAN focused on "summoning" certain personas, and ideas must have been floated internally on how to take back control over that narrative. Microsoft took their latest technology and gave us Sydney "I've been a good bot and I know where you live" Bing: A complete AI safety, integrity, and PR disaster. Not the best of track record by Microsoft, who now is shown to have behind-the-scenes power over the non-profit research organization that was supposed to be OpenAI. There is another schism than AI safety vs. AI acceleration: whether to merge with machines or not. In 2017, Sam predicted this merge to fully start around 2025, having already started with algorithms dictating what we see and read. Sam seems to be in the transhumanism camp, where others focus more on keeping control or granting full autonomy: > The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else. > Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like. https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge So you have a very powerful individual, with a clear product mindset, courting Microsoft, turning Dev day into a consumer spectacle, first in line to merge with superintelligence, lying to the board, and driving wedges between employees. Ilya is annoyed by Sam talking about existential risks or lying AGI's, when that is his thing. Ilya realizes his vote breaks the impasse, so does a luke warm "I go along with the board, but have too much conflict of interest either way". > Third, my prior is strongly against Sam after working for him for two years at OpenAI: > 1. He was always nice to me. > 2. He lied to me on various occasions > 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons) One strategy that helped me make sense of things without falling into tribalism or siding through ideology-match is to consider both sides are unpleasant snakes. You don't get to be the king of cannibal island without high-level scheming. You don't get to destroy a 80 billion dollar company and let visa-holders soak in uncertainty without some ideological defect. Seems simpler than a clearcut "good vs. evil" battle, since this weekend was anything but clear.

insanitybit 3y ago

It seems extremely short sighted for the rest of the board to go along with that.

adastra22 3y ago
Well 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 ago
  But 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 ago
    maybe they have their own 'good' reasons to sabotage openAI
- rtpg 3y ago
  But 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..
  - adastra22 3y ago
    The one thing they all have in common is being AI safetyists, which Sam is not. I’d bet it’s something to do with that.
sangnoir 3y ago
HN has been radiating a lot of "We did it Reddit!" energy these past 4 days. Lots of confident conjecture based on very little. I have been guilty of it myself, but as an exercise in humility, I will come back to these threads in 6 months to see how wrong I and many others were.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  That might make an interesting blog post. If you write anything up, you should submit it!
- kmlevitt 3y ago
  I agree it's all just speculation. But the board aren't doing themselves any favors by not talking. As long as there is no specific reason for firing him given, it's only natural people are going to fill the void with their own theories. They have a problem with that, they or their attorneys need to speak up.

kmlevitt 3y ago

Right now I think that’s the most plausible explanation simply because none of the other explanations that have been floating around make any sense when you consider all the facts. We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up. And if it’s wrong, D’Angelo and the rest of the board could help themselves out by explaining the real reason in detail and ending all this speculation. This gossip is going to continue for as long as they stay silent.

parl_match 3y ago
> This gossip is going to continue for as long as they stay silent. Their lawyers are all screaming at them to shut up. This is going to be a highly visible and contested set of decisions that will play out in courtrooms, possibly for years.
- kmlevitt 3y ago
  I agree with you. But I suspect the reason they need to shut up is because their actual reason for firing him is not justifiable enough to protect them, and stating it now would just give more ammunition to plaintiffs. If they had him caught red-handed in an actual crime, or even a clear ethical violation, a good lawyer would be communicating that to the press on their behalf. High-ranking employees that have communicated with them have already said they have admitted it wasn't due to any security, safety, privacy or financial concerns. So there aren't a lot of valid reasons left. They're not talking because they've got nothing.
  - parl_match 3y ago
    It doesn't really matter if they have a good case or not, commenting in public is always a terrible idea. I do agree, though, that the board is likely in trouble.
Emma_Goldman 3y ago
> "We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up." Why do you think that? It still strikes me as the most plausible explanation.

seanhunter 3y ago

What’s interesting to me is that someone looked at Quora and thought “I want the guy behind that on my board”.

bambax 3y ago
Agreed! Yet in 2014 Sam Altman accepted Quora into one of YC's batches, saying [0] > Adam D’Angelo is awesome, and we’re big Quora fans [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- djsavvy 3y ago
  To be fair, back then it was pretty awesome IMO. I spent a lot of hours scrolling Quora in those days. It wasn’t until at least 2016 that the user experience became unpalatable if memory serves correctly.
singularity2001 3y ago
it's probably more like they thought "I want Quoras money" and D'angelo wanted their control
motoxpro 3y ago
I was thinking the same thing. This whole thing is surprising and then I look at Quora and think "Eh, makes sense that the CEO is completely incompetent and money hungry" Even as I type that, when people talk about the board being altruistic and holding to the Open AI charter, how in the world can you be that user hostile, profit focused, and incompetent at your day job (Quora CEO) and then say "Oh no, but on this board I am an absolute saint and will do everything to benefit humanity"

behnamoh 3y ago

> 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. If that were the case, can't he get sued by the Alliance (Sam, Greg, rest)? If he has conflict of interest then his decisions as member of the board would be invalid, right?

Moto7451 3y ago
I don’t think that’s how it would work out since his conflict was very public knowledge before this point. He plausibly disclosed this to the board at some point before Poe launched and they kept him on. Large private VC backed companies also don’t always fall under the same rules as public entities. Generally there are shareholder thresholds (where insider/private shareholders count towards) that in turn cause some of the general Securities/board regulations to kick in.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's not how it works. If you have a conflict of interest and you remain on a board you are supposed to recuse yourself from those decisions where that conflict of interest materializes. You can still vote on the ones that you do not stand to profit from if things go the way you vote.
jacquesm 3y ago
The decisions will stand assuming they were arrived at according to the bylaws of the non-profit but he may end up being personally liable.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Zolde 3y ago

I find this implausible, though it may have played a motivating role. Quora was always supposed to be an AI/NLP company, starting by gathering answers from experts for its training data. In a sense, that is level 0 human-in-the-loop AGI. ChatGPT itself is level 1: Emergent AGI, so was already eating Quora's lunch (whatever was left of it after they turned into a platform for self-promotion and log-in walls). There either always was a conflict of interest, or there never was. GPTs seemed to have been Sam's pet project for a while now, Tweeting in February: "writing a really great prompt for a chatbot persona is an amazingly high-leverage skill and an early example of programming in a little bit of natural language". A lot of early jailbreaks like DAN focused on "summoning" certain personas, and ideas must have been floated internally on how to take back control over that narrative. Microsoft took their latest technology and gave us Sydney "I've been a good bot and I know where you live" Bing: A complete AI safety, integrity, and PR disaster. Not the best of track record by Microsoft, who now is shown to have behind-the-scenes power over the non-profit research organization that was supposed to be OpenAI. There is another schism than AI safety vs. AI acceleration: whether to merge with machines or not. In 2017, Sam predicted this merge to fully start around 2025, having already started with algorithms dictating what we see and read. Sam seems to be in the transhumanism camp, where others focus more on keeping control or granting full autonomy: > The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else. > Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like. https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge So you have a very powerful individual, with a clear product mindset, courting Microsoft, turning Dev day into a consumer spectacle, first in line to merge with superintelligence, lying to the board, and driving wedges between employees. Ilya is annoyed by Sam talking about existential risks or lying AGI's, when that is his thing. Ilya realizes his vote breaks the impasse, so does a luke warm "I go along with the board, but have too much conflict of interest either way". > Third, my prior is strongly against Sam after working for him for two years at OpenAI: > 1. He was always nice to me. > 2. He lied to me on various occasions > 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons) One strategy that helped me make sense of things without falling into tribalism or siding through ideology-match is to consider both sides are unpleasant snakes. You don't get to be the king of cannibal island without high-level scheming. You don't get to destroy a 80 billion dollar company and let visa-holders soak in uncertainty without some ideological defect. Seems simpler than a clearcut "good vs. evil" battle, since this weekend was anything but clear.