9 ms·

Warning from OpenAI leaders helped trigger Sam Altman's ouster

120 points by c5karl 3y ago

c5karl 3y ago
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3RyScpS https://wapo.st/3RyScpS
INGELRII 3y ago
Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse 1. Pressure to maintain numbers 2. Fear and silence 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 4. Weak board of directors 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others from "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies Before It's Too Late", 2005 by Marianne M. Jennings, professor of legal and ethical studies in business in the Department of Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona
- lumost 3y ago
  I really dislike the current attitudes around ethics and AI. Tools should be 100% open about what they can and can't do. Building unethical software like deepfakes for porn is also unethical. Quoting of vague "ethics" risks around AI, or neutering LLMs in the vein of making them "safer" seems dubious to me. Obviously, there are a huge number of problems which depend on safe AI - where safe often means something completely different from what is currently being talked about. e.g. does the AI reliably do what I expect it to do in the face of adversarial inputs? does it handle risky settings like deciding to refund customers? How can I ensure that the AI is making legal decisions and not secretly using redlining, or other illegal criteria to make its decision?
  - PawgerZ 3y ago
    I am still taking in information and trying to figure out my stance for AI ethics, but this is moreso about the ethics of the business and its structure, not the ethics of the AI that they make.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Both of these are intertwined, if not outright the same thing. A place that has no corporate understanding of ethics, no staff to take care about that, or even fires that staff (like Twitter did [1]), cannot build any ethical system. No matter if it's chatbots that shouldn't scoop up abuse by 4chan [2], reproduce long-debunked racially charged myths [3], or even something as simple and innocent-seeming as a soap dispenser that had never even been tested by Black people [4]. Many people think like this is "wokeness" and at best a waste of money, and yet time and time again there are incidents that show in sometimes very horrible ways just how bad biases and a lack of diversity and oversight at all stages - planning, development and post-launch support - can end. IMHO, ethics oversight and threat modelling based on ethics should be seen, similar to pentesting and QA in AI, software (and, as the example shows, also hardware) development, as an absolute requirement to do - because if you don't do it, 4chan will, and tear your public image apart in the process. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/26/tech-companies-are-laying-off-their-ethics-and-safety-teams-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/26/tech-companies-are-laying-of... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch... [3] https://fortune.com/well/2023/10/20/chatgpt-google-bard-ai-chatbots-medical-racism-black-patients-health-care/ https://fortune.com/well/2023/10/20/chatgpt-google-bard-ai-c... [4] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/automatic-soap-dispenser-sparks-racism-outrage-after-footage-shows-it-doesn-t-work-for-darkskinned-people-a3615096.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/automatic-soap-dispens...
      - lumost 3y ago
        I agree that oversight is needed - but I'm not certain people are the right approach to this oversight. Everything described above represents an undesirable software output for the given business. Why can't we make the LLM smart enough to know it's current operating context and build guardrails to catch the cases which slip through?
        mschuster91 3y ago
        Thing is, you need people to take care in selecting training data. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out - especially applies in AI.
  - Racing0461 3y ago
    [flagged]
- INGELRII 3y ago
  Letter signing looks like a masterful use of the bandwagon effect. Quickly reframing the issue, going to attack, and creating a sense of outrage and hurry. People start quickly pressuring each other because there is a need to be unity for the scheme to work and no time to think. > Within hours, messages dismissed the board as illegitimate and decried Altman’s firing as a coup by OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to the people. >people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter. >“Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,”
  - tptacek 3y ago
    This is also consistent with some number of OpenAI operators wanting Altman removed, and then discovering that the company's long-term financial outlook, and their accrued compensation in particular, was highly contingent on him staying. It's pretty normal for people to believe that they could, if all else was equal, have a better or more healthy management culture. But people rarely act on that belief precisely because earnestly pursuing it can end up threatening everyone's future well-being. It's also consistent with OpenAI's board comprehensively botching their response to those concerns, even if had been clear that over the medium term Altman needed to be managed out. That's why there's a term for this ("managed out"). Instead, the OpenAI board created news cycle after news cycle of palace intrigue by seeming obliviousness to how their actions would be read.
    - INGELRII 3y ago
      Incentives are the force behind almost everything. "Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." -- Charlie Munger
    - 7e 3y ago
      The board fired Altman and maintained discretion. It was Altman that instigated the circus after that.
himaraya 3y ago
I wonder if those same senior employees signed the letter. If the WaPo could verify that, that could clarify whether peer pressure extended beyond Ilya.
- tptacek 3y ago
  It wouldn't be surprising if they did sign the letter, and it wouldn't take peer pressure to make it happen. People can have concerns about a manager's style or a leadership culture and still not want to have years of lucrative equity comp erased overnight by the board's reaction to those concerns.
  - himaraya 3y ago
    I'd still find the added context insightful. They went to the board alleging psychological abuse, so I assume they understood the board would at least consider removing Sam.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Sure, and it's entirely possible for them to have changed their mind once they saw how contingent the whole company was on his remaining.
wnevets 3y ago
Even if everything mentioned is 100% true the board handled the situational so poorly they lost and Sam won. It was like an average episode of Succession being played out.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Nah, it was like a good episode of Succession!
DeIlliad 3y ago
I will never understand the cult of personality that appears around people like Altman, Musk, or whoever the unicorn CEO of the month is. They are always, without exception, smooth talking psychopaths. That might as well be the job description of being a CEO of a company startup with this kind of growth.
- wnevets 3y ago
  > Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. "Smooth talking psychopaths" can make you rich if you get in early enough and not left holding the bag.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Sure, but you can remain self aware about what's going on. So many people seem to join the cult of personality, not just recognize the aligned incentives.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  Being a smooth talking steve jobs is valuable in an of itself. If you can sell your company to the public with an aura, that's worth more than CTO/CIO/CMO etc combined. Better to be a thomas edison than a tesla.
  - mikeryan 3y ago
    My immediate thought on this comment was of was Steve Jobs but I’ve backed off a bit. The man seems to have been a bit of an asshole to some, the stories are numerous, but in some ways he seems different. I think mostly because he didn’t seem devious, or self serving, just blunt and his mission was to the company or product more so than to himself.
    - martythemaniak 3y ago
      Hi died relatively young and before the general tech backlash, which is why people look back at him fondly. Had he lived, he would've been taken down many notches. I mean, rich asshole who verbally abuses and berates his staff, upgrades his Benz every six months so he doesn't need a license plate like the plebs AND parks exclusively in the disabled spot? That was never gonna fly.
bentt 3y ago
Well I for one am shocked that these allegations of psychological abuse would have led to such a cunning and effective response from Sam after the firing.
carbine 3y ago
this article tells us nothing new
vlovich123 3y ago
> Some OpenAI employees have rejected the idea that there was any coercion to sign the letter. “Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,” a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, who tweets under the pseudonym @roon, posted on X. “That’s not something that can be accomplished by peer pressure.” > Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. The deal — led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital — values the company at almost $90 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, more than triple its $28 billion valuation in April, and it could have been threatened by tanking value triggered by the CEO’s departure. Ok so the company was offering a cash out of 3x and the long term employees are most likely to have most power and influence within the company. Yeah, no undue coercion that everyone is so motivated by this they’re signing things at 2am? Or more like they’re reading tea leaves and don’t want to be the odd man out because this is a convenient enemies list if your name isn’t on it, especially since Sam apparently has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior + a huge pay day for either you, your bosses, or people who have significant standing to impact your performance reviews / career trajectory.
- Shank 3y ago
  > Or more like they’re reading tea leaves and don’t want to be the odd man out because this is a convenient enemies list if your name isn’t on it, especially since Sam apparently has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior + a huge pay day for either you, your bosses, or people who have significant standing to impact your performance reviews / career trajectory. To me, the tea leaves at the time said “a once in a lifetime acquihire that will rescue everyone is about to happen OR Sam will come back and the damage will be undone”. There’s life-changing amounts of money on the table and signing a letter with the majority of employees is a no-brainer for the upside scenario. And to-be-fair, a lot of people were up at 2am waiting for news on this drama. A lot of people with no skin in the game with nothing to lose were watching it intently. Why wouldn’t the employees of the actual company do the same?
- drfuzzy89 3y ago
  >Joanne Jang, who works in products at OpenAI, tweeted that no influence had been at play. “The google doc broke so people texted each other at 2-2:30 am begging people with write access to type their name.” Also, this line seems self-contradictory. There was no influence, but people were "begging" others to sign?
caesil 3y ago
I'm so skeptical of the "he mischaracterized others' views on Helen Toner" narrative, devoid of details. There are lots of decisions where consensus has to be forged by getting skeptical people onboard. If I had to guess, it probably went something like: --- SAM: Hey, I think we should remove Helen Toner. EMPLOYEE A: Hmmm, I'm not sure I agree. SAM: Well, [reasons x, y, and z], and I'm talking to [employee b] to see if they agree. EMPLOYEE A: Well, if [reasons x, y, and z] are true, and [employee b] wants to fire her, then I guess I could be convinced. [later] SAM: Hey [employee b], I think we should remove Helen Toner. I talked to [employee a] and they said they would be open to it.
- baking 3y ago
  There were six board members. Sam and Helen were two of them. The conversations were with the other four board members. So it would be something like this: Sam to A: We should get rid of Helen. B, C, and D agree with me. Rinse and repeat. Typical Mean Girls stuff.
  - caesil 3y ago
    That was the original allegation, yes, but the above article makes that allegation specifically for employees as well.
nothrowaways 3y ago
That's a hell of allegations on Sama from employees, if true.
tiahura 3y ago
He was mean, even though everyone liked him. Did the Washington Post really publish this?
- ilikehurdles 3y ago
  I’m not surprised by the lack of quality in WaPo and Business Insider articles. Today, these names are nothing more than rebranded Gawker. I _am_ surprised by the hn crowd eating up this kind of recycled, second-hand pov palace intrigue these publications profit from. Guess the death throes of legacy media are still some time away.
  - 93po 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - ldehaan 3y ago
      [dead]
next_xibalba 3y ago
Sam Altman was toxic, but also, 90% of OpenAI employees joined the counter-coup. Doesn't really add up. That this article is written by Nitasha Tiku, a Gawker alum, casts even further doubt on its claims.
- summerlight 3y ago
  I'm pretty much sure that Tesla employees will revolt if its board tries to oust Elon. That doesn't necessarily mean that Elon is not a toxic leader.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    IMO, ousting Elon would be the best thing Tesla could do for the future of the company. The problem is that stock traders hate uncertainty, and ousting the CEO of any company brings massive uncertainty. So in the short term, an ousting of Elon would probably tank the stock.
    - ElijahLynn 3y ago
      I'm not a fan of some of the things Elon has done recently, like really not a fan, bigly, but I also know I don't have to love the whole person to really appreciate some things that person has done. And Tesla wouldn't be Tesla without Elon, it wouldn't be nearly as innovative. There definitely wouldn't be a Tesla Semi that is going to change the trucking industry, there wouldn't be a Cybertruck that is going to change the farm truck industry. EVs wouldn't be nearly as far along as they are now. I suppose ousting Elon would keep Tesla where it is now, but that is like ousting Jobs from Apple. Elon has many great ideas and he delivers. I don't have to agree with his personal politics to really appreciate what Elon has done for humanity. He is one persistent person, and he gets things done. I mean, how many people have internet access now that didn't before due to Starlink. It wasn't just him obviously, it was a very large team of people. But he somehow got those people to believe in the mission. And THEY delivered. And I don't think we would be where we would be today with renewable energy and electric vehicles if it wasn't for his contributions. Again, we don't have to like the whole person to appreciate their contributions. None of us are perfect, and some of us say highly offensive things in public hat can feel very threatening and may actually be threatening to some. I think Elon's public statements sometimes are taken even more seriously because some/many of us idolized Elon (myself included) for a while. And there was this big reveal of like "oh, I don't like that part of you", "what you said was insensitive and mean". And then this tendency to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and overlook everything great that he has done. It is a complicated thing for sure.
comeonbro 3y ago
> who tweets under the pseudonym @roon Fundamental factual error, about a figure who anybody doing OpenAI kremlinology would be extremely familiar with. Inspiring reporting by the Washington Post as usual.
z7 3y ago
[flagged]
CodeWriter23 3y ago
Well that explains a non-trivial number of employees signing a letter threatening to quit unless he returned.
gwern 3y ago
Note that the executives approaching the board was previously reported by Time: https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman/ https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550240 This adds some additional material, like blaming internal chaos on Altman inconsistencies, which seems consistent with what the Atlantic was hinting at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399 (It also seems consistent with the reporting on Altman's firing from YC, which suggested that it wasn't any single smoking gun or crossed redline, just a pattern of behavior which eventually led to his ouster and some internal YC reforms: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216 )
stacemarshall7 3y ago
[dead]

120 points by c5karl 3y ago

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3RyScpS https://wapo.st/3RyScpS

Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse 1. Pressure to maintain numbers 2. Fear and silence 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 4. Weak board of directors 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others from "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies Before It's Too Late", 2005 by Marianne M. Jennings, professor of legal and ethical studies in business in the Department of Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona

lumost 3y ago
I really dislike the current attitudes around ethics and AI. Tools should be 100% open about what they can and can't do. Building unethical software like deepfakes for porn is also unethical. Quoting of vague "ethics" risks around AI, or neutering LLMs in the vein of making them "safer" seems dubious to me. Obviously, there are a huge number of problems which depend on safe AI - where safe often means something completely different from what is currently being talked about. e.g. does the AI reliably do what I expect it to do in the face of adversarial inputs? does it handle risky settings like deciding to refund customers? How can I ensure that the AI is making legal decisions and not secretly using redlining, or other illegal criteria to make its decision?
- PawgerZ 3y ago
  I am still taking in information and trying to figure out my stance for AI ethics, but this is moreso about the ethics of the business and its structure, not the ethics of the AI that they make.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Both of these are intertwined, if not outright the same thing. A place that has no corporate understanding of ethics, no staff to take care about that, or even fires that staff (like Twitter did [1]), cannot build any ethical system. No matter if it's chatbots that shouldn't scoop up abuse by 4chan [2], reproduce long-debunked racially charged myths [3], or even something as simple and innocent-seeming as a soap dispenser that had never even been tested by Black people [4]. Many people think like this is "wokeness" and at best a waste of money, and yet time and time again there are incidents that show in sometimes very horrible ways just how bad biases and a lack of diversity and oversight at all stages - planning, development and post-launch support - can end. IMHO, ethics oversight and threat modelling based on ethics should be seen, similar to pentesting and QA in AI, software (and, as the example shows, also hardware) development, as an absolute requirement to do - because if you don't do it, 4chan will, and tear your public image apart in the process. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/26/tech-companies-are-laying-off-their-ethics-and-safety-teams-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/26/tech-companies-are-laying-of... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch... [3] https://fortune.com/well/2023/10/20/chatgpt-google-bard-ai-chatbots-medical-racism-black-patients-health-care/ https://fortune.com/well/2023/10/20/chatgpt-google-bard-ai-c... [4] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/automatic-soap-dispenser-sparks-racism-outrage-after-footage-shows-it-doesn-t-work-for-darkskinned-people-a3615096.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/automatic-soap-dispens...
    - lumost 3y ago
      I agree that oversight is needed - but I'm not certain people are the right approach to this oversight. Everything described above represents an undesirable software output for the given business. Why can't we make the LLM smart enough to know it's current operating context and build guardrails to catch the cases which slip through?
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        Thing is, you need people to take care in selecting training data. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out - especially applies in AI.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  [flagged]
INGELRII 3y ago
Letter signing looks like a masterful use of the bandwagon effect. Quickly reframing the issue, going to attack, and creating a sense of outrage and hurry. People start quickly pressuring each other because there is a need to be unity for the scheme to work and no time to think. > Within hours, messages dismissed the board as illegitimate and decried Altman’s firing as a coup by OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to the people. >people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter. >“Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,”
- tptacek 3y ago
  This is also consistent with some number of OpenAI operators wanting Altman removed, and then discovering that the company's long-term financial outlook, and their accrued compensation in particular, was highly contingent on him staying. It's pretty normal for people to believe that they could, if all else was equal, have a better or more healthy management culture. But people rarely act on that belief precisely because earnestly pursuing it can end up threatening everyone's future well-being. It's also consistent with OpenAI's board comprehensively botching their response to those concerns, even if had been clear that over the medium term Altman needed to be managed out. That's why there's a term for this ("managed out"). Instead, the OpenAI board created news cycle after news cycle of palace intrigue by seeming obliviousness to how their actions would be read.
  - INGELRII 3y ago
    Incentives are the force behind almost everything. "Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." -- Charlie Munger
  - 7e 3y ago
    The board fired Altman and maintained discretion. It was Altman that instigated the circus after that.

himaraya 3y ago

I wonder if those same senior employees signed the letter. If the WaPo could verify that, that could clarify whether peer pressure extended beyond Ilya.

tptacek 3y ago
It wouldn't be surprising if they did sign the letter, and it wouldn't take peer pressure to make it happen. People can have concerns about a manager's style or a leadership culture and still not want to have years of lucrative equity comp erased overnight by the board's reaction to those concerns.
- himaraya 3y ago
  I'd still find the added context insightful. They went to the board alleging psychological abuse, so I assume they understood the board would at least consider removing Sam.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Sure, and it's entirely possible for them to have changed their mind once they saw how contingent the whole company was on his remaining.

wnevets 3y ago

Even if everything mentioned is 100% true the board handled the situational so poorly they lost and Sam won. It was like an average episode of Succession being played out.

sanderjd 3y ago
Nah, it was like a good episode of Succession!

DeIlliad 3y ago

I will never understand the cult of personality that appears around people like Altman, Musk, or whoever the unicorn CEO of the month is. They are always, without exception, smooth talking psychopaths. That might as well be the job description of being a CEO of a company startup with this kind of growth.

wnevets 3y ago
> Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. "Smooth talking psychopaths" can make you rich if you get in early enough and not left holding the bag.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Sure, but you can remain self aware about what's going on. So many people seem to join the cult of personality, not just recognize the aligned incentives.
Racing0461 3y ago
Being a smooth talking steve jobs is valuable in an of itself. If you can sell your company to the public with an aura, that's worth more than CTO/CIO/CMO etc combined. Better to be a thomas edison than a tesla.
- mikeryan 3y ago
  My immediate thought on this comment was of was Steve Jobs but I’ve backed off a bit. The man seems to have been a bit of an asshole to some, the stories are numerous, but in some ways he seems different. I think mostly because he didn’t seem devious, or self serving, just blunt and his mission was to the company or product more so than to himself.
  - martythemaniak 3y ago
    Hi died relatively young and before the general tech backlash, which is why people look back at him fondly. Had he lived, he would've been taken down many notches. I mean, rich asshole who verbally abuses and berates his staff, upgrades his Benz every six months so he doesn't need a license plate like the plebs AND parks exclusively in the disabled spot? That was never gonna fly.

bentt 3y ago

Well I for one am shocked that these allegations of psychological abuse would have led to such a cunning and effective response from Sam after the firing.

carbine 3y ago

this article tells us nothing new

vlovich123 3y ago

> Some OpenAI employees have rejected the idea that there was any coercion to sign the letter. “Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,” a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, who tweets under the pseudonym @roon, posted on X. “That’s not something that can be accomplished by peer pressure.” > Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. The deal — led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital — values the company at almost $90 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, more than triple its $28 billion valuation in April, and it could have been threatened by tanking value triggered by the CEO’s departure. Ok so the company was offering a cash out of 3x and the long term employees are most likely to have most power and influence within the company. Yeah, no undue coercion that everyone is so motivated by this they’re signing things at 2am? Or more like they’re reading tea leaves and don’t want to be the odd man out because this is a convenient enemies list if your name isn’t on it, especially since Sam apparently has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior + a huge pay day for either you, your bosses, or people who have significant standing to impact your performance reviews / career trajectory.

Shank 3y ago
> Or more like they’re reading tea leaves and don’t want to be the odd man out because this is a convenient enemies list if your name isn’t on it, especially since Sam apparently has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior + a huge pay day for either you, your bosses, or people who have significant standing to impact your performance reviews / career trajectory. To me, the tea leaves at the time said “a once in a lifetime acquihire that will rescue everyone is about to happen OR Sam will come back and the damage will be undone”. There’s life-changing amounts of money on the table and signing a letter with the majority of employees is a no-brainer for the upside scenario. And to-be-fair, a lot of people were up at 2am waiting for news on this drama. A lot of people with no skin in the game with nothing to lose were watching it intently. Why wouldn’t the employees of the actual company do the same?
drfuzzy89 3y ago
>Joanne Jang, who works in products at OpenAI, tweeted that no influence had been at play. “The google doc broke so people texted each other at 2-2:30 am begging people with write access to type their name.” Also, this line seems self-contradictory. There was no influence, but people were "begging" others to sign?

caesil 3y ago

I'm so skeptical of the "he mischaracterized others' views on Helen Toner" narrative, devoid of details. There are lots of decisions where consensus has to be forged by getting skeptical people onboard. If I had to guess, it probably went something like: --- SAM: Hey, I think we should remove Helen Toner. EMPLOYEE A: Hmmm, I'm not sure I agree. SAM: Well, [reasons x, y, and z], and I'm talking to [employee b] to see if they agree. EMPLOYEE A: Well, if [reasons x, y, and z] are true, and [employee b] wants to fire her, then I guess I could be convinced. [later] SAM: Hey [employee b], I think we should remove Helen Toner. I talked to [employee a] and they said they would be open to it.

baking 3y ago
There were six board members. Sam and Helen were two of them. The conversations were with the other four board members. So it would be something like this: Sam to A: We should get rid of Helen. B, C, and D agree with me. Rinse and repeat. Typical Mean Girls stuff.
- caesil 3y ago
  That was the original allegation, yes, but the above article makes that allegation specifically for employees as well.

nothrowaways 3y ago

That's a hell of allegations on Sama from employees, if true.

tiahura 3y ago

He was mean, even though everyone liked him. Did the Washington Post really publish this?

ilikehurdles 3y ago
I’m not surprised by the lack of quality in WaPo and Business Insider articles. Today, these names are nothing more than rebranded Gawker. I _am_ surprised by the hn crowd eating up this kind of recycled, second-hand pov palace intrigue these publications profit from. Guess the death throes of legacy media are still some time away.
- 93po 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ldehaan 3y ago
    [dead]

next_xibalba 3y ago

Sam Altman was toxic, but also, 90% of OpenAI employees joined the counter-coup. Doesn't really add up. That this article is written by Nitasha Tiku, a Gawker alum, casts even further doubt on its claims.

summerlight 3y ago
I'm pretty much sure that Tesla employees will revolt if its board tries to oust Elon. That doesn't necessarily mean that Elon is not a toxic leader.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  IMO, ousting Elon would be the best thing Tesla could do for the future of the company. The problem is that stock traders hate uncertainty, and ousting the CEO of any company brings massive uncertainty. So in the short term, an ousting of Elon would probably tank the stock.
  - ElijahLynn 3y ago
    I'm not a fan of some of the things Elon has done recently, like really not a fan, bigly, but I also know I don't have to love the whole person to really appreciate some things that person has done. And Tesla wouldn't be Tesla without Elon, it wouldn't be nearly as innovative. There definitely wouldn't be a Tesla Semi that is going to change the trucking industry, there wouldn't be a Cybertruck that is going to change the farm truck industry. EVs wouldn't be nearly as far along as they are now. I suppose ousting Elon would keep Tesla where it is now, but that is like ousting Jobs from Apple. Elon has many great ideas and he delivers. I don't have to agree with his personal politics to really appreciate what Elon has done for humanity. He is one persistent person, and he gets things done. I mean, how many people have internet access now that didn't before due to Starlink. It wasn't just him obviously, it was a very large team of people. But he somehow got those people to believe in the mission. And THEY delivered. And I don't think we would be where we would be today with renewable energy and electric vehicles if it wasn't for his contributions. Again, we don't have to like the whole person to appreciate their contributions. None of us are perfect, and some of us say highly offensive things in public hat can feel very threatening and may actually be threatening to some. I think Elon's public statements sometimes are taken even more seriously because some/many of us idolized Elon (myself included) for a while. And there was this big reveal of like "oh, I don't like that part of you", "what you said was insensitive and mean". And then this tendency to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and overlook everything great that he has done. It is a complicated thing for sure.

comeonbro 3y ago

> who tweets under the pseudonym @roon Fundamental factual error, about a figure who anybody doing OpenAI kremlinology would be extremely familiar with. Inspiring reporting by the Washington Post as usual.

z7 3y ago

[flagged]

CodeWriter23 3y ago

Well that explains a non-trivial number of employees signing a letter threatening to quit unless he returned.

gwern 3y ago

Note that the executives approaching the board was previously reported by Time: https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman/ https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550240 This adds some additional material, like blaming internal chaos on Altman inconsistencies, which seems consistent with what the Atlantic was hinting at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399 (It also seems consistent with the reporting on Altman's firing from YC, which suggested that it wasn't any single smoking gun or crossed redline, just a pattern of behavior which eventually led to his ouster and some internal YC reforms: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216 )

stacemarshall7 3y ago

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