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Major corporate boards are rife with "on paper" conflicts on interest - that's what happens when you want people with real management experience to sit on your
by bradleybuda 3y ago
Major corporate boards are rife with "on paper" conflicts on interest - that's what happens when you want people with real management experience to sit on your board and act like responsible adults. This happens in every single industry and has nothing to do with tech or with OpenAI specifically.
In practice, board bylaws and common sense mean that individuals recuse themselves as needed and don't do stupid shit.
- iandanforth 3y ago"In practice, board bylaws and common sense mean that individuals ... don't do stupid shit." Were you watching a different show than the rest of us?
- badloginagain 3y agoAnd we're seeing the result in real-time. Stupid shit doers have been replaced with hopefully-less-stupid-shit-doers. It's a real shame too, because this is a clear loss for the AI Alignment crowd. I'm on the fence about the whole alignment thing, but at least there is a strong moral compass in the field- especially compared to something like crypto.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alsetmusic 3y ago> at least there is a strong moral compass in the field Is this still true when the board gets overhauled after trying to uphold the moral compass.
- saalweachter 3y agoAnd when the CEO's other thing is a cryptocurrency?
- lacrimacida 3y agoSama’s moral compass clearly has north pointing at money and that will definitely get him to a different destination.
- jjoonathan 3y agoNo, this is the part of the show where the patronizing rhetoric gets trotted out to rationalize discarding the principles that have suddenly become inconvenient for the people with power.
- photochemsyn 3y agoNo worries. The same kind of people who devoted their time and energy to creating open-source operating systems in the era of Microsoft and Apple are now devoting their time and energy to doing the same for non-lobotomized LLMs. Look at these clowns (Ilya & Sam and their angry talkie-bot), it's a revelation, like Bill Gates on Linux in 2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N36wtDYK8kI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N36wtDYK8kI
- dragonwriter 3y agoNo, its the part of the show where they go back to providing empty lip service to the principles and using them as a pretext for things that actually serve narrow proprietary interests, the same way they were before the leadership that has been doing that for a long time was temporarily removed until those sharing the proprietary interests revolted for a return to the status quo ante.
- hinkley 3y agoI get a lostredditor vibe way too often here. Oddly more than Reddit. I think people forget sometimes that comments come with a context. If we are having a conversation about Deep Water Horizon someone will chime in about how safe deep sea oil exploration is and how many failsafes blah blah blah. “Do you know where you are right now?”
- Juicyy 3y agoIts a more technical space then reddit. Youre gonna have more know it alls spewing
- jachee 3y agoYou know that know-it-all should be hyphenated, right? … ;)
- LordDragonfang 3y ago>I think people forget sometimes that comments come with a context. I mean, this is definitely one of my pet peeves, but the wider context of this conversation is specifically a board doing stupid shit, so that's a very relevant counterexample to the thing being stated. Board members in general often do stupid/short-sighted shit (especially in tech), and I don't know of any examples of corporate board members recusing themselves.
- mhluongo 3y agoCommon example of recusal is CEO comp when the CEO is on the board.
- alsetmusic 3y agoThat's what I would term a black-and-white case. I don't think there's anyone with sense who would argue in good faith that a CEO should get a vote on their own salary. There are many degrees of grey between outright corruption and this example, and I think the concern lies within.
- freedomben 3y agoYou need to be able to separate macro-level and micro-level. GP is responding to a comment about the IRS caring about the conflict-of-interest on paper. The IRS has to make and follow rules at a macro level. Micro-level events obviously can affect the macro view, but you don't completely ignore the macro because something bad happened at the micro level. That's how you get knee-jerk reactionary governance, which is highly emotional.
- dev_tty01 3y agoYes, and we were also watching the thousands and thousands of companies where these types of conflicts are handled easily by decent people and common sense. Don't confuse the outlier with the silent majority.
- ip26 3y agoReminds me of the “revolving door” problem. Obvious risk of corruption and conflict of interest, but at the same time experts from industry are the ones with the knowledge to be effective regulators. Not unlike how many good patent attorneys were previously engineers.
- dragonwriter 3y agoA corporation acting (due to influence from a conflicted board member that doesn't recuse) contrary to the interests of its stockholders and in the interest of the conflicted board member or who they represent potentially creates liability of the firm to its stockholders. A charity acting (due to the influence of a conflicted board member that doesn't recuse) contrary to its charitable mission in the interests of the conflicted board member or who they represent does something similar with regard to liability of the firm to various stakeholders with a legally-enforceable interest in the charity and its mission, but also is also a public civil violation that can lead to IRS sanctions against the firm up to and including monetary penalties and loss of tax exempt status on top of whatever private tort liability exists.
- fouc 3y agoOpenAI isn't a typical corporation but a 501(c)(3), so bylaws & protections that otherwise might exist appear to be lacking in this situation.
- dragonwriter 3y ago501c3's also have governing internal rules, and the threat of penalties and loss of status imposed by the IRS gives them additional incentive to safeguard against even the appearance of conflict being manifested into how they operate (whether that's avoiding conflicted board members or assuring that they recuse where a conflict is relevant.) If OpenAI didn't have adequate safeguards, either through negligence or becauase it was in fact being run deliberately as a fraudulent charity, that's a particular failure of OpenAI, not a “well, 501c3’s inherently don't have safeguard” thing.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoTrump Foundation was a 501c3 that laundered money for 30 years without the IRS batting an eye.
- hnbad 3y agoThe Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a 501c3 and I'd expect that even the most techno-futurist free-market types on HN would agree that no matter what alleged impact it has, it is also in practice creating profitable overseas contracts for US corporations that ultimately provide downstream ROI to the Gates estate. Most people just tend to go about it more intelligently than Trump but "charitable" or "non-profit" doesn't mean the organization exists to enrich the commons rather than the moneyed interests it represents.
- throwaway-blaze 3y agoNo conflict, no interest.
- dizzydes 3y agoLarry Summers practically invented this stuff...