8 ms·

None of the comments thus far seem to clearly explain why this matters. Let me summarize the implications: Sam Altman expelling Toner with the pretext of an in

• abi 3y ago
  I mean it's not cool for board members to publicly criticize the company.
  • kragen 3y ago
    it's not cool for companies to try to shut down academic freedom of inquiry in scholarly publishing in order to improve their public image her independence from openai was the nominal reason she was asked to supervise it in the first place, wasn't it
    • foota 3y ago
      I'm not sure you should get to have your cake and eat it too.
      • 15457345234 3y ago
        You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the role of non-executive board members. In many cases they're industry experts / academics and in many cases those academics continue to publish papers that look objectively at the actions of all companies in their sphere of influence, including the one they're on the board of. It's _expected_ for them to publish this type of material. It's literally their job. Cheerleading is for the C-suite.
        • foota 3y ago
          They've admitted that they think it would be better to destroy open AI than to continue on its path, but how can an organization uphold its goals if it doesn't exist? Imo you have to commit to working within an organization if you're on its board, you can't burn it down from within. I think it's less of an issue to try to remove the CEO if you don't agree with the direction they're taking, but this was obviously done in a sloppy manner in this case, and their willingness to destroy it makes me distrust them (not that my opinion matters per se).
          • 15457345234 3y ago
            > but this was obviously done in a sloppy manner I don't think it was done in a sloppy manner, I think there's a huge amount of spin and froth being generated to make it _look_ like it was done in a sloppy manner, but the reality is that the board took an executive action, released a discreet and concisely worded press release and then fell silent, which is 100% professional behaviour. To me it's the other side that are acting sloppily, they're thrashing around like maniacs, they're obviously calling in favours behind the scenes as supportive articles are popping up all over the place, apparently employees were calling other employees in the middle of the night urging them to sign the 'I'll quit unless' letter, employees have been fed a misleading narrative (two of them, actually) about why the action was taken in the first place which riled them up... I have to assume here that the board - as they're the ones acting professionally - similarly acted professionally before the firing and discussed the matter at great length and only resorted to this last minute firing because of exigent circumstances. The fact that a fired employee was able to cajole/bluff/whatever his way back into the office to prove some sort of point suggests that the board's action may have been necessary. What exactly was done during that time in the office, one might ask? Were systems accessed? Surely it was an unauthorised entry and a major security violation. You do see that that action (re-entering the office after being fired) gives off lunatic vibes, don't you? Maybe it really did come down to 'yeah you're technically my boss but I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want and there's nothing you can do about it because everyone loves me' to which the board's only possible course of action is to fire immediately.
    • jxi 3y ago
      He wasn't shutting down her academic freedom. However, if you're going to diss what your own company is doing and praise competitors, you probably shouldn't be on the board. >During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities. >Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission. This person is too far gone. Life isn't a movie.
      • sudosysgen 3y ago
        This is a non-profit, not a for profit company. Nominally, she's on the board precisely to criticize.
        • random_cynic 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • comp_throw7 3y ago
            > A board member cannot sabotage their own company. Criticism (especially valid criticism) is not sabotage, and in any case the board's responsibility is to advance the charter, not to support the (non-profit) company regardless of what it's doing.
      • kragen 3y ago
        that would be true for a for-profit company where her fiduciary duty was to shareholders, but in this case, given the charter in question, not publicly criticizing the company would be more likely to be a breach of her fiduciary duty
      • jibal 3y ago
        > This person is too far gone. Life isn't a movie. This comment is a credibility killer. "This person", as a member of the board of a non-profit, has a duty to keep the non-profit on mission, and even to call for its dissolution if that isn't possible.
    • ecshafer 3y ago
      There is a difference between independent from an organization, and someone that takes a public stand against a company. Reading that paper, which I am not really impressed with, they are taking a stance that openai's current trajectory is not as good as a competitor. I bet that if a Microsoft board member wrote a paper how Google search is better than Bing / AWS Better than Azure / OSX better than Windows they would be reprimanded also.
      • ralfd 3y ago
        But I bet if a Greenpeace-like-organization board member would write a paper how a different environmental group is greener, they would be praised.
      • abracadaniel 3y ago
        A comparison to another nonprofit would make more sense. A board member of the Komen Foundation being reprimanded for pointing out that other nonprofits are far more effective at helping cancer research would be a better comparison.
      • jibal 3y ago
        Non-profits and for-profits aren't comparable. The latter have a duty to make money. The former has a duty to its mission.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • 15457345234 3y ago
    It's a nonprofit board & it's absolutely the role of advisory board members to continue their work in the sector they're specialized in without bias.
    • jxi 3y ago
      But she was biased. She seemed so biased against her own company that her intended course of action seems to be to destroy it.
      • 15457345234 3y ago
        If she has a justifiable reason for holding that position it isn't bias.
    • kickopotomus 3y ago
      OpenAI does not have an advisory board. She is on the board of directors and has fiduciary responsibilities. It does not matter that the parent organization is a non-profit. The duty remains.
      • comp_throw7 3y ago
        Yes, those responsibilities are to advance the charter of the organization, which notably is totally compatible with publishing articles that contain mild criticism of the organization's behavior.
      • 15457345234 3y ago
        This has been argued here already and dissected thoroughly. It's basically restating 'her role is to cheerlead' but with more sophisticated wording. You haven't made an argument, you've just used longer words to restate your (incorrect) opinion. Also I never said they had an 'advisory' board. Board members ar either executive or non-executive members. If they're nonexec then their role is to advise the executive members. They're generally fairly independent and many nonexecutive board members serve on the boards of multiple companies, sometimes including ones that are nominally in competition with each other.
  • zucker42 3y ago
    I think you're taking the intuition from a for-profit company and wrongly applying it to a non-profit company. When a board member criticizes a for-profit company, that's bad because the goal of the company is make a profit, and bad PR is bad for profit. A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company. And if you actually read the page, it's an extremely mild criticism of OpenAI's decisions. This situation is simultaneously "reckless board makes ill-considered mistake to suddenly fire CEO with insufficient justification" and "non-profit CEO slowly changes the culture of a non-profit to turn it into profit-seeking enterprise that he has a large amount of control over".
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • Aunche 3y ago
      >A board member criticizing a non-profit doesn't have the same direct connection to a result opposite of the goals of the company. Even in a nonprofit, the board has an obligation to maintain a good working relationship with their organization. It's very rare for a board member to publicly criticized for their own organization. Also, this argument goes out the window because OpenAI is not just a nonprofit. When they started their for-profit subsidiary in 2019, they accepted a fiduciary duty to their investors.
      • sarchertech 3y ago
        That’s not how that works. You can argue that Ilya has a fiduciary responsibility to the investors as an officer of the company. Toner doesn’t. She is an independent board member on the board of the non-profit that owns a controlling share in the company, but she doesn’t personally own a majority share of the company. As an independent board member, she has no duty but to uphold the charter. She represents no shareholders. Majority shareholders may have some fiduciary responsibility to minority shareholders, so you might be able to make the argument that the board as a whole shouldn’t write disparaging remarks about the company. But even that argument is tenuous.
  • cycomanic 3y ago
    What do you mean? Schmidt was on Apple's board for 3 years while he was CEO of Google. Do you think Google did not criticise Apple during that whole time (remember that the CEO is ultimately responsible for the company communications)? Even more in the case of OpenAI, the board member is on the board of a non-profit, those are typical much more independent and very often more critical of the decisions made by other board members. Just search for board members criticising medical/charity/government boards they are sitting on, there are plenty. That's not even considering if the article was in fact critical.
    • selestify 3y ago
      Why was Schmidt on Apple’s board? Did he care about Apple’s mission or Apple shareholders?
    • nvm0n2 3y ago
      FWIW that was a pretty strained relationship and iirc Eric had to frequently recuse himself during any discussion of the iPhone which eventually made his membership untenable.
  • murakamiiq84 3y ago
    Is this even true for for-profit companies? Like if a professor is on the board of a for-profit (which I think is pretty common for deeptech? Maybe companies in general too? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/fima.12069#:~:text=US%20corporations%20commonly%20elect%20professors,directors%20are%20drawn%20from%20academia https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/fima.12069#:....), is he/she banned from making a technical point about how a competitor's product or best practices is occasionally superior to the company's product?
• svnt 3y ago
  This is the inherent conflict in the company. Once it turned out you needed 7B parameters or more to get LLMs worth interacting with, it went from a research project to a winner-take-all compute grab. OpenAI, with an apparent technical lead and financial access, was well-positioned to win it. It is/was naive of the board to think this could be won on a donation basis.
• powera 3y ago
  This is insane. "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board". First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense. Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with the minimal exception that the drama they have incepted might make this holiday week a complete loss for productivity). Third: in general, "publishing scholarly articles claiming the company is bad" is a good reason to remove someone from the board of a company. Some vague (and the fact that nobody will own up to anything publicly proves it is vague) ideological battle isn't a good enough rationale for the exception to a rule that suggests that her leaving the board soon would be a good idea.
  • comp_throw7 3y ago
    > "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board". I mean, yes? The board is explicitly there to replace the CEO if necessary. If the CEO stuffs the board full of their allies, it can no longer do that. > First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense. Boards of for-profits are accountable to shareholders because corporations with shareholders exist for the benefit of (among others) shareholders. Non-profit corporations exist to further their mission, and are accountable to the IRS in this regard. > Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with the minimal exception that the drama they have incepted might make this holiday week a complete loss for productivity). No, the argument is that Sam Altman trying to bump off a board member on an incredibly flimsy pretext would be an obvious attempt at seizing power. > Third: in general, "publishing scholarly articles claiming the company is bad" is a good reason to remove someone from the board of a company. Some vague (and the fact that nobody will own up to anything publicly proves it is vague) ideological battle isn't a good enough rationale for the exception to a rule that suggests that her leaving the board soon would be a good idea. This might be true w.r.t. for-profit boards (though not obviously so in every case), but seems nonsensical with non-profits. (Also, the article did not reductively claim "the company is bad".)
• gizmo 3y ago
  Okay, let's stipulate that Sam was maneuvering to get full board control. Then the independent directors were probably worried that -- sooner or later -- Sam would succeed. With Sam fully in charge the non-profit goals would be completely secondary to the commercial goals. This was unacceptable to the independent directors and Ilya and so they ousted Sam before he could oust them? That's a clear motive. Sam and the independent directors were each angling to get rid of the other. The independent directors got to a majority before Sam did. This at least explains why they fired Sam in such a haphazard way. They had to strike immediately before one of the board members got cold feet.
  • skygazer 3y ago
    Besides explaining the haphazardness, that would also nicely explain why they didn't want to elaborate publicly on why they "had" to let him go -- "it was either him or us" wouldn't have been popular given his seeming popularity.
    • 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
      I suspect his popularity is mostly about employees who want to maintain the value of their equity: https://nitter.net/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410#m https://nitter.net/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410#m Wild guess: If the board stands its ground, appoints a reasonable new CEO, and employees understand that OpenAI will continue to be a hot startup, most of them will stay with the company due to their equity
      • cpncrunch 3y ago
        Except, the facts behind Sam's firing will inevitably come out, and it won't be possible to brush it under the carpet. I think they hoped the facts wouldn't come out, and they could just give a hand-wavey explanation, but that's clearly not going to happen. It seems they have well and truly shot themselves in the feet, and they will likely have to be replaced now.
        • 3y ago
• ugh123 3y ago
  In that page linked, she says that OpenAI's system card wasn't a suitable replacement as a "commitment to safety". I feel thats a fair critique even for someone on a non-profit board, unless she's really advocating for systemic change in the way the company operates and does any commercial business.
• losvedir 3y ago
  This is really interesting. It makes perfect sense that they weren't sitting at 6 board members for 9 months because Sam and the others didn't see the implications, but because they saw them all too well and were gridlocked. But then it gets interesting inferring things from there. Obviously sama and gdb were on one side (call it team Speed), and Helen Toner on the other (team Safety). I think McCauley is with Toner (some connection I read about which I don't remember now: maybe RAND or something?). But what about D'Angelo and Ilya? For the gridlock, one would have to be on each side. Naively I'd expect tech CEO to be Speed and Ilya Safety, but what would have precipitated the switch Friday? If D'Angelo wanted to implode the company due to conflict of interest, wouldn't he just have sided with Team Safety earlier? But maybe Team Speed vs Team Safety isn't the same as Team Fire Sam vs Team Don't. I could see that one as Helen, Tasha, and Adam vs Sam, GDB, and Ilya. And, that also makes sense to me in that Ilya seems the most likely to flip for reasons, which also lines up with his regret and contrition. But then that raises the question of what made him flip? A scary exchange with prototype GPT5, which made him weigh his Safety side more highly than his loyalty to Sam?
  • sanxiyn 3y ago
    Maybe Sam wanted to redirect Ilya's GPUs to ChatGPT after DevDay surge. 20% of OpenAI's GPUs are allocated to Ilya's team.
    • hackerbob 3y ago
      My conclusion was that Sam slipped up somewhere and lost Ilya. Which maybe because of the reason you mentioned. Previously it seems like it was a 3 cofounders vs 3 non cofounders board split. Ilya switched teams after being upset by something. If I may wear my conspiracy hat for a second. Adam D'Angelo is a billionaire or close to it so he has a war chest for a battle to hold on to the crown jewel's of AI. Sam has powerful friends but so does D'Angelo(Facebook mafia). I don't think the board anticipated the 90% potential employee turnover, so there is a small chance they leave the board because of that reason. But my guess is there is a 4 letter company that starts with an 'M' and ends with an 'a' that comes into the picture eventually.
  • 3y ago
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I mean, here is a relevant passage from the paper, linked in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38373684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38373684 If I were the CEO of OpenAI, I'd be pretty pissed if a member of my own board was shitting on the organization she was a member of while puffing up a competitor. But the tone of that paper makes me think that the schism must go back much earlier (other reporting said things really started to split a year ago when ChatGPT was first released), and it sounds to me like Toner was needling because she was pissed with the direction OpenAI was headed. I'm thinking of a good previous comment I read when the whole Timnit Gebru situation at Google blew up and the Ethical AI team at Google was disbanded. The basic argument was on some of the inherent incompatibilities between an "academic ombudsman" mindset, and a "corporate growth" mindset. I'm not saying which one was "right" in this situation given OpenAI's frankenstein org structure, but just that this kind of conflict was probably inevitable.
  • lossolo 3y ago
    > If I were the CEO of OpenAI, I'd be pretty pissed if a member of my own board was shitting on the organization she was a member of while puffing up a competitor. Considering what's in the charter, it seems like she didn't do anything wrong? > We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. >We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power. more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372769
    • xigency 3y ago
      > Considering what's in the charter, it seems like she didn't do anything wrong? It’s incredibly disingenuous to slap your name on an ethics paper claiming a company is doing malfeasance such as triggering a race-to-the-bottom for AI ethics when you have an active hand in steering the company. It’s shameful. Either she should have resigned from the company, for ethical reasons, or recused herself from the paper, for conflict of interest.
• lacker 3y ago
  It's not just OpenAI. Every AI organization is discovering that they have internal groups which are pulling in a different direction than the rest of the organization, and trying to get rid of those groups. * Google got rid of its "Ethical AI" group * Facebook just got rid of its "Responsible AI" team * OpenAI wanted to get rid of the "Effective Altruists" on the board I guess if I was afraid of AI taking over the world then I would be rooting for OpenAI to be destroyed here. Personally I hope that they bring Sam back and I hope that GPT-5 is even more useful than GPT-4.
  • didibus 3y ago
    I feel the people advocating safety, while they are probably right from a moral and ethics point of view, are just doomed to fail. It's like with the Nuclear Bomb, it's not like had Einstein withheld his contributions, we wouldn't have Nuclear Bombs today. It's always a matter of time before someone else figured it out, and until someone else with bad intentions does. How to attack safety in AI I think has to assume there are already bad actors with super powerful AI around, and what can we do in defense of that.
    • sbrother 3y ago
      Yeah, it’s an awful role basically by design. It reminds me of my uncle’s role as the safety/compliance lead at a manufacturing facility. He was just trying to do his job but constantly getting bullied, maneuvered around etc because his job was effectively to slow everyone else down. It drove him crazy, he ended up having a mental breakdown, becoming an alcoholic, and having to go on disability for the remainder of his career. I’m sure some people can handle the stress of those roles, but ugh, not worth it IMO.
    • lacker 3y ago
      Yes, I agree. There will always be some evil person out there using AI to try to achieve evil goals. Scammers, terrorists, hackers. All the people who use computers now to do bad things, they're going to try to do even worse bad things with AI. We need to stop those people by improving our security. Like fixing the phone number system already. There must be some way to stop robo scam calls. Validate everyone making a call and stop phone spam. That would do a lot more to help AI safety than randomly slowing down the top companies.
• marquisdepolis 3y ago
  In this instance, "Sam is trying to take over the Board on a flimsy basis" is an reasonable reason to remove him. Started leading discussions about whether she should be removed, is also very very far from actively working to remove her. This is amateur hour and considering what happened she probably should have been removed.
  • jprete 3y ago
    Leading discussions on whether someone should be removed is literally actively working to remove them.
    • marquisdepolis 3y ago
      It's quite literally not. After she wrote that it would be silly if you didn't even have discussions considering this. Actively working would require active efforts to make this happen.
      • lmm 3y ago
        What would those "active efforts" consist of beyond "leading discussions"? You have the discussion, you have the board vote, you're done, there's no ??? step.
• ah765 3y ago
  This sounds convincing, especially considering this story where Sam Altman was involved in a "long con" to seize board control of Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/cszjqg2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/c...). I think Sam may have been angling to get control of the board for a long time, perhaps years, manipulating the board departures and signing deals with Microsoft. The board finally realized this when it was 3 v 3 (or perhaps 2 v 3 with 1 neutral). But Sam was still working on more funding deals and getting employee loyalty, and the board knew it was only a matter of time until he could force their hand.
  • ah765 3y ago
    Also of note, this comment by Sam's verified reddit account describing the con as "child's play": (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/cszwpgq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/c...)
• dmix 3y ago
  It's interesting the paper is selling Anthropic's approach to 'safety' as the correct approach when they just launched a new version of Claude and HN thread is littered with people saying its unusable because half the prompts they type get flagged as ethical violations. It's pretty clear some legitimate concerns about a hypothetical future AGI, that we've barely scraped the surface of, turns into "what can we do today" and it's largely virtue signalling type behaviour crippling a non-AGI very very alpha version of LLMs just to show you care about hypothetical future risks. Even the coorelation between commercialization and AI safety is pretty tenuous. Unless I missed some good argument about how having a GPT store makes AGI destroying the world easier. It can probably best be summarized as Helen Toner simply wants OpenAI to die for humanity's sake. Everything else is just minor detail. > Over the weekend, Altman’s old executive team pushed the board to reinstate him—telling directors that their actions could trigger the company’s collapse. > “That would actually be consistent with the mission,” replied board member Helen Toner, a director at a Washington policy research organization who joined the board two years ago. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/altman-firing-openai-520a3a8c https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/altman-firing-openai-520a3a8c
  • remarkEon 3y ago
    Has Toner (or someone with like-minded views) filled in the blanks between "GPT-4" and "Terminator Judgement Day" in a believable way? I've read what Yudkowsky writes but it all sounds so fantastical that it's, at least to me, more like an episode of The Twilight Zone or The X-Files than something resembling reality. Is Toner really in the "nuke the datacenters" camp? If so, was her placement on the board not a mistake from the beginning?
    • dmix 3y ago
      I have a feeling EA[1] is like anarcho capitalist communities (or just inverse for socialism) where you have a good idea like markets==good then apply it like a hammer to everything you see in life. Any hint of gov/statism is treated as the enemy, regardless of its IRL negative impact on markets or net freedom, or whatever positive end goal they envision. OpenAI is (hypothetically) progressing to AGI, therefore bad. Whether GPT specifically is a half a foot on a 1000km journey or potentially insignificant, it doesn't matter to them as they've pre-selected any potential for progress as all bad. [1] if you search "Helen Toner" on YouTube it's just a collection of videos of her talking at EA conferences. So she's a believer