16 ms·

OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

281 points by coloneltcb 3y ago

InvestorType 3y ago
Interesting they chose 3 more left leaning board members. Surprising an AI-focused company wouldn't have more diversity of perspective at the governance level.
- gkoberger 3y ago
  What things do you think a conservative board member would bring that's currently missing? A distaste for big government? Interest in trickle-down economics? Or is this just a weird way of saying OpenAI should be more comfortable indulging in racism and homophobia? Because there's one "right-leaning" major AI (Grok), and as far as I can tell that's the only differentiating feature.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    > Because there's one "right-leaning" major AI (Grok), and as far as I can tell that's the only differentiating feature. Did you actually look into that or did you just make assumptions? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/23/grok-ai-elon-musk-x-woke-bias/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/23/grok-ai... https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks...
    - gkoberger 3y ago
      From the article you posted: "Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you." Silly me for taking Elon at his word
      - freedomben 3y ago
        > Silly me for taking Elon at his word I really don't mean to dog pile, but this seems wrong in two ways. First he never said Grok would be right-wing. In fact he promised neutrality, so I don't think you were "taking Elon at his word" I think you were taking somebody else at their word about Elon's word. If Elon did say Grok would be right-wing, I would very much like to know so if you know of a source, please share. Second, it really is unwise at best to "take Elon at his word". For example, Elon has been saying Tesla would have full self driving for years. He tends to make very grand aspiration promises/declarations that aren't super grounded in reality. So yeah, if Elon says "Grok will be perfectly neutral/centrist" or even "Grok will be right wing" if you care at all about being accurate then you really need to check before assuming it's true. "Trust but verify" would be the minimum I would give to Elon.
        gkoberger 3y ago
        You're right; I almost used the phrases "woke"/"non-woke" since those are the words Elon uses [1], but given how much I hate that vague phrasing ("woke" has become a catch-all for things Elon/etc dislike) I skipped it. I also should have said "Because there's one AI led by a "right-leaning" creator", not that the AI itself is right-leaning. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1737704128220934311 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1737704128220934311
  - high_derivative 3y ago
    Just stopping by to say that this type of post is absolutely obnoxious and embarrassing for you.
- ugh123 3y ago
  Sure, get some right-leaning guys in there to balance out the misinformation.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
  > Interesting they chose 3 more left leaning board members. Surprising an AI-focused company wouldn't have more diversity of perspective at the governance level. Are you suggesting that diversity of perspective must come from people of different genders? That's weird.
qwertox 3y ago
[flagged]
- qwertox 3y ago
  [flagged]
mrcwinn 3y ago
Reviewing 30,000 documents seems like a great use case of Gemini's new 1M token context window.
gwern 3y ago
Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635058 You could predict this yesterday from the leaks that were coming out like https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executives-role-in-sam-altman-ouster.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executi...
- layer8 3y ago
  Reading the NYT article, this is such a shitshow. Sorry for the unsubstantive comment.
- reso 3y ago
  Highly recommend people read that NYT article. That the CEO had reported issues with Altman to the board hadn't been previously reported. Paywall free: https://web.archive.org/web/20240308043717/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executives-role-in-sam-altman-ouster.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240308043717/https://www.nytim...
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    I’m curious how long that CTO keeps her job.
- Recursing 3y ago
  For more context, gwern did predict this yesterday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-facts-from-a-weekend/comment/eFuasCwaKJr2YiScY https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-fac...
vdfs 3y ago
This is just anticlimactic
dang 3y ago
Since https://www.theinformation.com/articles/sam-altman-to-return-to-openai-board-of-directors https://www.theinformation.com/articles/sam-altman-to-return... is hardwalled, we need to find an alternate source. I've put a stub article up there for the moment. Is there a better one? theinformation.com used to open specific articles for HN readers on request*, but eventually stopped answering our emails. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20theinformation.com&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- firloop 3y ago
  You could use the OpenAI announcement: https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue-to-lead-openai https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-...
  - ChrisArchitect 3y ago
    Yep, and annoyingly there's multiple blog posts flying around now https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-board-of-directors https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-boar...
  - dang 3y ago
    That's certainly worth linking to but I'd prefer to have a more neutral source as the top link. I guess I'll put it and the other openai.com link in a top comment.
righthand 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't do this here. If a story is soporific, there are others to read.
code51 3y ago
If AGI achieved, Microsoft doesn't have the claim on it commercially. Microsoft with 49% stake in the for-profit entity and non-observer seat, what actually protects Microsoft here? First hand information that AGI is reached? Are we not seeing a card in Microsoft's hand here?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  "Money"
- Aloisius 3y ago
  > what actually protects Microsoft here Contract law and possession of the model.
- cooper_ganglia 3y ago
  Do we have a formal legal definition for AGI?
  - mikewarot 3y ago
    No, the Board determines when AGI is reached. Thus, if OpenAI already got there, and the board found out... Microsoft would have a very VERY strong incentive to ouster the board, and never, ever have Skynet, or whatever, declared an AGI. And then hush it up forever.
    - aedon 3y ago
      They've completely upended the original non-profit focused board and literally installed the former CEO of the Bill Gates Foundation. MSFT is going all in, dropping all pretense of OpenAI ever being viewed as a non-profit. It's insane how many people are seemingly forgetting Elon's lawsuit.
    - rvz 3y ago
      > No, the Board determines when AGI is reached. What if it never arrives? What if "AGI" is another narrative to fleece investor money to believe in something just to sell out of for as long as possible until they run out of money, investors to throw lots of money on or the lawsuits make it even harder for the company to continue?
minimaxir 3y ago
> The company will also announce the appointment of three new directors, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, a former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Nicole Seligman, a former president of Sony Entertainment, and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart, the Information said. This selection of directors seems...random? Is there a business reason for these directors? (aside from the obvious YC link with Instacart)
- code51 3y ago
  All women, announced on International Women's Day. The only significant side that's obvious.
  - DSingularity 3y ago
    We (humans) are so cheap and easily deceived. They pick us large salaries and we build whatever. They pander and we become subservient.
    - nozzlegear 3y ago
      Do you feel that none of them have any merit outside of them being women, and that there was some kind of “best potential OpenAI director” exam that all men are required to take but these three were allowed to skip because of their gender? Is that the deception?
      - jprete 3y ago
        I'm not the GP, but one can believe that it's cheap pandering, and simultaneously that the three of them have merit outside of that pandering. It's not required to be all one or all the other.
        DSingularity 3y ago
        Yes. I don’t know them to know if they are not qualified — overall I think they are unlikely to be unqualified. What I am saying is it is easy to find qualified stooges. Like I said: pay us humans enough and we build whatever. Note: not all pay is in dollars. Prestige and power are also sought by man. Overall: I am cynical wrt OpenAI. I just don't think that OpenAI is acting in the best interests of humanity and these appointments are strategic decisions taken to prolong survival long enough to execute their strategy and dominate. That was what I was originally insinuating. Technological development keeps intersecting into the space of ethics. Time and time again man proves that he cannot rise above his own personal world views to focus on universal values when developing technology. We’ve seen this repeatedly. These people designing these APIs and building the underlying models are making consequential decisions on behalf of mankind. In a way the world is delegating all this power to unelected individuals who have very little in common — in terms of values and ethics — with mankind at large.
rickreynoldssf 3y ago
I can't wait for the book(s) that will have details about what really happened over that period of chaos.
kweingar 3y ago
Total victory for sama, it seems. The company is his to run. Let’s hope he is a good steward of our emerging new world.
- dgfitz 3y ago
  Is that sarcasm?
- layer8 3y ago
  There are zero grounds for that hope.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- aedon 3y ago
  Lol they are completely shook by Elon's lawsuit
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Like most executives these days he has a fetish for shareholder value and permanent growth. And he will prioritise this at the cost of everything else; OpenAI's founding ideals being sacrificed in the first order.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
minimaxir 3y ago
The conclusion just raises further questions on why the coup happened, other than a "consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust between the prior Board and Mr. Altman".
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him, which scared the shit out of Microsoft. The prior and new Boards both cannot make the allegation that Altman tried to commit a corporate coup, albeit for different reasons[0], so we're never going to get official confirmation of anything. My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired, and then OpenAI will wind up being eaten by Microsoft for a song. [0] Old board: Potential defamation litigation, new board: they were literally put in there by Altman to not threaten him
  - catchnear4321 3y ago
    > My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired, and then OpenAI will wind up being eaten by Microsoft for a song. this is why microsoft loves sama. of course the firing spooked them. it would have seriously soured the trajectory. so much cleaner to let sama take the wheel. everyone important goes home rich, or at least happy, they think. ms gets a gold-painted goose. sama will undoubtedly get some form of gold plated escape hatch, parachute, life raft, etc.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    > My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired Who has this happened to except for Travis kalanick at Uber?
    - the_mar 3y ago
      for posterity: - Steve Jobs - Sandy Lerner - Noah Glass - Mark Pinkus - Kyle Vogt
chrisfosterelli 3y ago
I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, but there's really no way to put out a release like this without a "history is written by the victors" vibe coming across.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- philip1209 3y ago
  “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
  - liuliu 3y ago
    You cannot kill an immortal.
    - kevinventullo 3y ago
      Okay, that’s enough HN for me today.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      That's not correct. Immortals can be killed, they just don't die of old age or disease (I am basing this on an amalgamation of many immortals). In the greek pantheon, the gods ate ambrosia which made their blood into ichor, and if they lost their ichor, they could die.
  - artbristol 3y ago
    "You come at the king, you best not miss" - Omar Little
    - hef19898 3y ago
      "If you want to kill someone without people knowing they were the actual target, wait until they stand next to the President" - Bobby Lee Swagger (could also be a line from that old dude in his cabin)
htrp 3y ago
>Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, >Nicole Seligman, former EVP and General Counsel at Sony Corporation > Fidji Simo, CEO and Chair of Instacart. > Sam Altman, CEO, will rejoin the OpenAI Board of Directors. Guess Greg loses
- IAmNotACellist 3y ago
  The public loses
Jabrov 3y ago
Isn't it generally kind of weird for the CEO to also sit on the board?
- ivalm 3y ago
  For founders this is common.
- Jimmc414 3y ago
  It is actually very common, despite the conflicts of interest. eg., Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mary Barra, Jamie Dimon, Mark Zuckerberg
  - breadwinner 3y ago
    I wouldn't mention Zuckerberg in this list, because he is in a completely different category! Zuckerberg only owns about 13% of Meta's stock, but he holds over 50% of total voting power, meaning he essentially has a complete veto over other shareholders. I don't think any other big US corporation is run like this.
    - opinion-is-bad 3y ago
      Alphabet is similar. Larry and Sergei together have a majority of the voting power.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
iExploder 3y ago
[flagged]
scop 3y ago
> reviewed more than 30,000 documents As somebody completely ignorant of the inner workings of the legal trade, can somebody explain what this means? Does this mean a group of informed humans reviewed 30k docs? Does this mean 30k docs were grep’d for keywords? Somewhere in between?
- chatmasta 3y ago
  IANAL but I'm guessing it means they loaded 30k documents into an e-discovery system and performed at least one search over the entire index of documents.
- echelon 3y ago
  It means it cost OpenAI a lot in legal fees to keep Altman in power. With all of this boardroom drama, no wonder Microsoft is starting to diversify its AI investments.
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    it's likely it's diversifying hardware because of Nvidia. these things must be worse than crypto
- fireynis 3y ago
  ChatGPT?
- layer8 3y ago
  It means they billed a lot of hours.
- Aloisius 3y ago
  They likely had a few document review attorneys do a first pass review for relevance through all 30,000 documents (a "document" can be a short email). A reviewer can do somewhere from 50-70 documents/hour. Then attorneys do a second pass review on the much smaller set of relevant documents. Reviewing 30,000 documents is a relatively small project.
  - 3y ago
dataking 3y ago
[flagged]
mritchie712 3y ago
Good. It would have been a shame to waste another weekend on twitter if this had gone the other way.
whalesalad 3y ago
Interesting to see & get encoded as andamp; in the title lol.
- layer8 3y ago
  It’s a pity it wasn’t ampersandampsemicolon. ;)
pluc 3y ago
"They were right and so was he" well thank the lord for that level of accountability
bossyTeacher 3y ago
They hired an external firm to review the suitability of Altman and Brockman and it also reviewed 30k documents. I wonder how they managed to review that many documents in a few months. The outcome is very predictable anyway. Without Altman/Brockman OpenAI is dead. This explains why the instigators of the ousting (Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever) supported the return of the 2 people who purposely violated the goals of OpenAI the not-profit in pursuit of profit. No one is saying that they didn't need to do that (making AGI as anything other than a for-profit is not feasible) but lying about their immediate goals is definitely a red flag, especially when you are working on something as ethically sensitive as AGI. Imagine if Openheimer lied and turns out that the was planning to make a company to sell WMD to anyone with enough money
- Atotalnoob 3y ago
  Documents can refer to 1 line emails. Doc review is something attorneys do all the time and 30k isn’t a crazy amount.
dang 3y ago
See also: https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue-to-lead-openai https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-... and https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-board-of-directors https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-boar... (I've merged those threads hither in the interest of having a hopefully more neutral article as the top link.)
baobabKoodaa 3y ago
In all the possible timelines, there is no universe in which the review concluded wrongdoing on Altman's part and demanded his immediate removal. Trust me, I checked. In fact, I hired WilmerHale to review all 30,000 possible timelines. After paying them $2M in fees, they concluded that I was right all along.
- rain_iwakura 3y ago
  damn we got a Kwisatz Haderach over here.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    There is a narrow way through ... where the AIs don't lead to Kralizec.
    - madrox 3y ago
      This guy Children of Dunes
      - Rafuino 3y ago
        The Golden Path awaits
        Biganon 3y ago
        I don't understand a single word in this thread
        mtrovo 3y ago
        Dune jokes about the Golden Path. Without much spoilers a super powerful thing set the universe into one direction where he's the emperor and everybody else suffer at his will because according to him all the other possibilities were even worse.
    - 3y ago
soneca 3y ago
He really seems to be a real-life Frank Underwood.
m3kw9 3y ago
The only thing that matters is Sam Altman at the helm gives us the fastest path to actual useful AGI. Don’t listen to doomer logic
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  No, the only thing Altman will do is turn OpenAI into ClosedAI and pursue profit.
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    To pursue profit you need to constantly put do the competition and have a good product(better AI/UI for the AI for accessibility)
- mycologos 3y ago
  Where are people getting all the confidence they place in Sam Altman as a leader of a science/engineering effort? From my understanding, he has been a successful fundraiser and investor and that's kind of it. Those are real and valuable skills, but they don't seem so relevant to the task at hand. Or is the statement that Sam Altman will keep OpenAI funded (so somebody else can lead the work)?
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > Sam Altman as a leader of a science/engineering effort Sam Altman doesn't have to write a line of code to make OpenAI successful. Instead, all he has to do is not intentionally sabotage the efforts of the engineers, via overly doomsday predictions of diamond nanobots or skynet that result in OpenAI not releasing a product because of false claims about "safety". The problem with OpenAI, and their biggest weakness, has always been that many of the original people there were ideologically captured by what is effectively a doomsday cult. So all Sam has to do, is not fall into that trap, and instead have the company lead and run by bog standard tech employees, and OpenAI will be able to release great products that will change the world. He just needs to press the "release" button on all their projects, and OpenAI will be fine.
- 3y ago
dbg31415 3y ago
Done on a Friday at least, to reduce drama.
grensley 3y ago
It feels like Microsoft had to prematurely play their hand here, and it will cost them in the long term. The whole situation is blatantly corrupt.
boringg 3y ago
Poll: openAI dominating, relevant or depleted in 10 years?
ji_zai 3y ago
It's sad to see many comments here assume that Sam was at fault for something without really knowing what happened behind the scenes. Let's try not to jump to conclusions, as hard as that may be. And if you're actively wishing people to fail, then I ask you to try to understand where that stems from. If you think Openai should be run differently, and if you have the inclination, I genuinely encourage you to build a competitor. I actually mean it. People think that Openai is too far ahead, but the fact is that someone with a capability to understand things from first principles will often find a unique, valuable insight to compete with. And the world is sufficiently decentralized such that you can't be stopped from pursuing this, even by Openai. As technology becomes more powerful, first principles reasoning >> factual knowledge (information) about how things work. In a sense, Openai's work reduces their own moat.
- Vecr 3y ago
  I assume many people who want OpenAI to fail want to whole AGI program in general to fail, at least for a few decades longer. A competitor won't help, it'll plausibly make it worse.
  - ji_zai 3y ago
    Agreed. I was talking about folks that wish AI were being built differently (i.e. more transparent, etc.) as opposed to being against the rapid pace of AI development itself. I should have made myself more clear.
  - impossiblefork 3y ago
    Personally the way I'm thinking is AI cooperatives. Democratic membership controlled organisations with relatively low fees to train AI aligned with the interests of the members. Such organisations won't solve the fact that functioning AGI or very effective LLMs that can program or solve general text tasks precisely reduces the power of workers, but they'd at least mean that ordinary people control their own propaganda apparatus and are not stuck with models that are part of other people's propaganda apparatus (the state, Microsoft shareholders, some charity board that they do not control etc.).
  - 3y ago
outside1234 3y ago
Let the grifting begin!
sandspar 3y ago
[flagged]
- 99catmaster 3y ago
  I’m lacking a lot of context here, why are Altman and his crew (not sure who they are either) creeps?
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    You should look into Effective Accelerationism. It's legit nuts, created by people who will not have to deal with the consequences when the society collapses (they are way too rich for that). https://www.businessinsider.com/effective-accelerationism-humans-replaced-by-ai-2023-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/effective-accelerationism-hu...
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      I really wish all the effective accelerationists would effectively accelerate themselves to Mars so the rest of us can clean up their mess without continued fuckery.
xnx 3y ago
The palace intrigue of OpenAI is a lot less interesting now that they're are so many viable competitors. I don't see anything that says OpenAI is uncatchably ahead of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, or any number of AI start-ups.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
  That's because openai has no moat. The code is out in the open, or equivalent code is, and same for the ideas. There isn't anything else to it.

281 points by coloneltcb 3y ago

Interesting they chose 3 more left leaning board members. Surprising an AI-focused company wouldn't have more diversity of perspective at the governance level.

gkoberger 3y ago
What things do you think a conservative board member would bring that's currently missing? A distaste for big government? Interest in trickle-down economics? Or is this just a weird way of saying OpenAI should be more comfortable indulging in racism and homophobia? Because there's one "right-leaning" major AI (Grok), and as far as I can tell that's the only differentiating feature.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > Because there's one "right-leaning" major AI (Grok), and as far as I can tell that's the only differentiating feature. Did you actually look into that or did you just make assumptions? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/23/grok-ai-elon-musk-x-woke-bias/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/23/grok-ai... https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks...
  - gkoberger 3y ago
    From the article you posted: "Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you." Silly me for taking Elon at his word
    - freedomben 3y ago
      > Silly me for taking Elon at his word I really don't mean to dog pile, but this seems wrong in two ways. First he never said Grok would be right-wing. In fact he promised neutrality, so I don't think you were "taking Elon at his word" I think you were taking somebody else at their word about Elon's word. If Elon did say Grok would be right-wing, I would very much like to know so if you know of a source, please share. Second, it really is unwise at best to "take Elon at his word". For example, Elon has been saying Tesla would have full self driving for years. He tends to make very grand aspiration promises/declarations that aren't super grounded in reality. So yeah, if Elon says "Grok will be perfectly neutral/centrist" or even "Grok will be right wing" if you care at all about being accurate then you really need to check before assuming it's true. "Trust but verify" would be the minimum I would give to Elon.
      - gkoberger 3y ago
        You're right; I almost used the phrases "woke"/"non-woke" since those are the words Elon uses [1], but given how much I hate that vague phrasing ("woke" has become a catch-all for things Elon/etc dislike) I skipped it. I also should have said "Because there's one AI led by a "right-leaning" creator", not that the AI itself is right-leaning. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1737704128220934311 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1737704128220934311
- high_derivative 3y ago
  Just stopping by to say that this type of post is absolutely obnoxious and embarrassing for you.
ugh123 3y ago
Sure, get some right-leaning guys in there to balance out the misinformation.
bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
> Interesting they chose 3 more left leaning board members. Surprising an AI-focused company wouldn't have more diversity of perspective at the governance level. Are you suggesting that diversity of perspective must come from people of different genders? That's weird.

qwertox 3y ago

[flagged]

qwertox 3y ago
[flagged]

mrcwinn 3y ago

Reviewing 30,000 documents seems like a great use case of Gemini's new 1M token context window.

gwern 3y ago

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635058 You could predict this yesterday from the leaks that were coming out like https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executives-role-in-sam-altman-ouster.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executi...

layer8 3y ago
Reading the NYT article, this is such a shitshow. Sorry for the unsubstantive comment.
reso 3y ago
Highly recommend people read that NYT article. That the CEO had reported issues with Altman to the board hadn't been previously reported. Paywall free: https://web.archive.org/web/20240308043717/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executives-role-in-sam-altman-ouster.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240308043717/https://www.nytim...
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  I’m curious how long that CTO keeps her job.
Recursing 3y ago
For more context, gwern did predict this yesterday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-facts-from-a-weekend/comment/eFuasCwaKJr2YiScY https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-fac...

vdfs 3y ago

This is just anticlimactic

dang 3y ago

Since https://www.theinformation.com/articles/sam-altman-to-return-to-openai-board-of-directors https://www.theinformation.com/articles/sam-altman-to-return... is hardwalled, we need to find an alternate source. I've put a stub article up there for the moment. Is there a better one? theinformation.com used to open specific articles for HN readers on request*, but eventually stopped answering our emails. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20theinformation.com&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

firloop 3y ago
You could use the OpenAI announcement: https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue-to-lead-openai https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-...
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Yep, and annoyingly there's multiple blog posts flying around now https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-board-of-directors https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-boar...
- dang 3y ago
  That's certainly worth linking to but I'd prefer to have a more neutral source as the top link. I guess I'll put it and the other openai.com link in a top comment.

righthand 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Please don't do this here. If a story is soporific, there are others to read.

code51 3y ago

If AGI achieved, Microsoft doesn't have the claim on it commercially. Microsoft with 49% stake in the for-profit entity and non-observer seat, what actually protects Microsoft here? First hand information that AGI is reached? Are we not seeing a card in Microsoft's hand here?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cyanydeez 3y ago
"Money"
Aloisius 3y ago
> what actually protects Microsoft here Contract law and possession of the model.
cooper_ganglia 3y ago
Do we have a formal legal definition for AGI?
- mikewarot 3y ago
  No, the Board determines when AGI is reached. Thus, if OpenAI already got there, and the board found out... Microsoft would have a very VERY strong incentive to ouster the board, and never, ever have Skynet, or whatever, declared an AGI. And then hush it up forever.
  - aedon 3y ago
    They've completely upended the original non-profit focused board and literally installed the former CEO of the Bill Gates Foundation. MSFT is going all in, dropping all pretense of OpenAI ever being viewed as a non-profit. It's insane how many people are seemingly forgetting Elon's lawsuit.
  - rvz 3y ago
    > No, the Board determines when AGI is reached. What if it never arrives? What if "AGI" is another narrative to fleece investor money to believe in something just to sell out of for as long as possible until they run out of money, investors to throw lots of money on or the lawsuits make it even harder for the company to continue?

minimaxir 3y ago

> The company will also announce the appointment of three new directors, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, a former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Nicole Seligman, a former president of Sony Entertainment, and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart, the Information said. This selection of directors seems...random? Is there a business reason for these directors? (aside from the obvious YC link with Instacart)

code51 3y ago
All women, announced on International Women's Day. The only significant side that's obvious.
- DSingularity 3y ago
  We (humans) are so cheap and easily deceived. They pick us large salaries and we build whatever. They pander and we become subservient.
  - nozzlegear 3y ago
    Do you feel that none of them have any merit outside of them being women, and that there was some kind of “best potential OpenAI director” exam that all men are required to take but these three were allowed to skip because of their gender? Is that the deception?
    - jprete 3y ago
      I'm not the GP, but one can believe that it's cheap pandering, and simultaneously that the three of them have merit outside of that pandering. It's not required to be all one or all the other.
      - DSingularity 3y ago
        Yes. I don’t know them to know if they are not qualified — overall I think they are unlikely to be unqualified. What I am saying is it is easy to find qualified stooges. Like I said: pay us humans enough and we build whatever. Note: not all pay is in dollars. Prestige and power are also sought by man. Overall: I am cynical wrt OpenAI. I just don't think that OpenAI is acting in the best interests of humanity and these appointments are strategic decisions taken to prolong survival long enough to execute their strategy and dominate. That was what I was originally insinuating. Technological development keeps intersecting into the space of ethics. Time and time again man proves that he cannot rise above his own personal world views to focus on universal values when developing technology. We’ve seen this repeatedly. These people designing these APIs and building the underlying models are making consequential decisions on behalf of mankind. In a way the world is delegating all this power to unelected individuals who have very little in common — in terms of values and ethics — with mankind at large.

rickreynoldssf 3y ago

I can't wait for the book(s) that will have details about what really happened over that period of chaos.

kweingar 3y ago

Total victory for sama, it seems. The company is his to run. Let’s hope he is a good steward of our emerging new world.

dgfitz 3y ago
Is that sarcasm?
layer8 3y ago
There are zero grounds for that hope.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
aedon 3y ago
Lol they are completely shook by Elon's lawsuit
bitcharmer 3y ago
Like most executives these days he has a fetish for shareholder value and permanent growth. And he will prioritise this at the cost of everything else; OpenAI's founding ideals being sacrificed in the first order.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

minimaxir 3y ago

The conclusion just raises further questions on why the coup happened, other than a "consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust between the prior Board and Mr. Altman".

kmeisthax 3y ago
The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him, which scared the shit out of Microsoft. The prior and new Boards both cannot make the allegation that Altman tried to commit a corporate coup, albeit for different reasons[0], so we're never going to get official confirmation of anything. My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired, and then OpenAI will wind up being eaten by Microsoft for a song. [0] Old board: Potential defamation litigation, new board: they were literally put in there by Altman to not threaten him
- catchnear4321 3y ago
  > My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired, and then OpenAI will wind up being eaten by Microsoft for a song. this is why microsoft loves sama. of course the firing spooked them. it would have seriously soured the trajectory. so much cleaner to let sama take the wheel. everyone important goes home rich, or at least happy, they think. ms gets a gold-painted goose. sama will undoubtedly get some form of gold plated escape hatch, parachute, life raft, etc.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  > My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired Who has this happened to except for Travis kalanick at Uber?
  - the_mar 3y ago
    for posterity: - Steve Jobs - Sandy Lerner - Noah Glass - Mark Pinkus - Kyle Vogt

chrisfosterelli 3y ago

I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, but there's really no way to put out a release like this without a "history is written by the victors" vibe coming across.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
philip1209 3y ago
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
- liuliu 3y ago
  You cannot kill an immortal.
  - kevinventullo 3y ago
    Okay, that’s enough HN for me today.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    That's not correct. Immortals can be killed, they just don't die of old age or disease (I am basing this on an amalgamation of many immortals). In the greek pantheon, the gods ate ambrosia which made their blood into ichor, and if they lost their ichor, they could die.
- artbristol 3y ago
  "You come at the king, you best not miss" - Omar Little
  - hef19898 3y ago
    "If you want to kill someone without people knowing they were the actual target, wait until they stand next to the President" - Bobby Lee Swagger (could also be a line from that old dude in his cabin)

htrp 3y ago

>Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, >Nicole Seligman, former EVP and General Counsel at Sony Corporation > Fidji Simo, CEO and Chair of Instacart. > Sam Altman, CEO, will rejoin the OpenAI Board of Directors. Guess Greg loses

IAmNotACellist 3y ago
The public loses

Jabrov 3y ago

Isn't it generally kind of weird for the CEO to also sit on the board?

ivalm 3y ago
For founders this is common.
Jimmc414 3y ago
It is actually very common, despite the conflicts of interest. eg., Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mary Barra, Jamie Dimon, Mark Zuckerberg
- breadwinner 3y ago
  I wouldn't mention Zuckerberg in this list, because he is in a completely different category! Zuckerberg only owns about 13% of Meta's stock, but he holds over 50% of total voting power, meaning he essentially has a complete veto over other shareholders. I don't think any other big US corporation is run like this.
  - opinion-is-bad 3y ago
    Alphabet is similar. Larry and Sergei together have a majority of the voting power.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

iExploder 3y ago

[flagged]

scop 3y ago

> reviewed more than 30,000 documents As somebody completely ignorant of the inner workings of the legal trade, can somebody explain what this means? Does this mean a group of informed humans reviewed 30k docs? Does this mean 30k docs were grep’d for keywords? Somewhere in between?

chatmasta 3y ago
IANAL but I'm guessing it means they loaded 30k documents into an e-discovery system and performed at least one search over the entire index of documents.
echelon 3y ago
It means it cost OpenAI a lot in legal fees to keep Altman in power. With all of this boardroom drama, no wonder Microsoft is starting to diversify its AI investments.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  it's likely it's diversifying hardware because of Nvidia. these things must be worse than crypto
fireynis 3y ago
ChatGPT?
layer8 3y ago
It means they billed a lot of hours.
Aloisius 3y ago
They likely had a few document review attorneys do a first pass review for relevance through all 30,000 documents (a "document" can be a short email). A reviewer can do somewhere from 50-70 documents/hour. Then attorneys do a second pass review on the much smaller set of relevant documents. Reviewing 30,000 documents is a relatively small project.
- 3y ago

dataking 3y ago

[flagged]

mritchie712 3y ago

Good. It would have been a shame to waste another weekend on twitter if this had gone the other way.

whalesalad 3y ago

Interesting to see & get encoded as andamp; in the title lol.

layer8 3y ago
It’s a pity it wasn’t ampersandampsemicolon. ;)

pluc 3y ago

"They were right and so was he" well thank the lord for that level of accountability

bossyTeacher 3y ago

They hired an external firm to review the suitability of Altman and Brockman and it also reviewed 30k documents. I wonder how they managed to review that many documents in a few months. The outcome is very predictable anyway. Without Altman/Brockman OpenAI is dead. This explains why the instigators of the ousting (Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever) supported the return of the 2 people who purposely violated the goals of OpenAI the not-profit in pursuit of profit. No one is saying that they didn't need to do that (making AGI as anything other than a for-profit is not feasible) but lying about their immediate goals is definitely a red flag, especially when you are working on something as ethically sensitive as AGI. Imagine if Openheimer lied and turns out that the was planning to make a company to sell WMD to anyone with enough money

Atotalnoob 3y ago
Documents can refer to 1 line emails. Doc review is something attorneys do all the time and 30k isn’t a crazy amount.

dang 3y ago

See also: https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue-to-lead-openai https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-... and https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-board-of-directors https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-boar... (I've merged those threads hither in the interest of having a hopefully more neutral article as the top link.)

baobabKoodaa 3y ago

In all the possible timelines, there is no universe in which the review concluded wrongdoing on Altman's part and demanded his immediate removal. Trust me, I checked. In fact, I hired WilmerHale to review all 30,000 possible timelines. After paying them $2M in fees, they concluded that I was right all along.

rain_iwakura 3y ago
damn we got a Kwisatz Haderach over here.
- goatlover 3y ago
  There is a narrow way through ... where the AIs don't lead to Kralizec.
  - madrox 3y ago
    This guy Children of Dunes
    - Rafuino 3y ago
      The Golden Path awaits
      - Biganon 3y ago
        I don't understand a single word in this thread
        mtrovo 3y ago
        Dune jokes about the Golden Path. Without much spoilers a super powerful thing set the universe into one direction where he's the emperor and everybody else suffer at his will because according to him all the other possibilities were even worse.
  - 3y ago

soneca 3y ago

He really seems to be a real-life Frank Underwood.

m3kw9 3y ago

The only thing that matters is Sam Altman at the helm gives us the fastest path to actual useful AGI. Don’t listen to doomer logic

bitcharmer 3y ago
No, the only thing Altman will do is turn OpenAI into ClosedAI and pursue profit.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  To pursue profit you need to constantly put do the competition and have a good product(better AI/UI for the AI for accessibility)
mycologos 3y ago
Where are people getting all the confidence they place in Sam Altman as a leader of a science/engineering effort? From my understanding, he has been a successful fundraiser and investor and that's kind of it. Those are real and valuable skills, but they don't seem so relevant to the task at hand. Or is the statement that Sam Altman will keep OpenAI funded (so somebody else can lead the work)?
- stale2002 3y ago
  > Sam Altman as a leader of a science/engineering effort Sam Altman doesn't have to write a line of code to make OpenAI successful. Instead, all he has to do is not intentionally sabotage the efforts of the engineers, via overly doomsday predictions of diamond nanobots or skynet that result in OpenAI not releasing a product because of false claims about "safety". The problem with OpenAI, and their biggest weakness, has always been that many of the original people there were ideologically captured by what is effectively a doomsday cult. So all Sam has to do, is not fall into that trap, and instead have the company lead and run by bog standard tech employees, and OpenAI will be able to release great products that will change the world. He just needs to press the "release" button on all their projects, and OpenAI will be fine.
3y ago

dbg31415 3y ago

Done on a Friday at least, to reduce drama.

grensley 3y ago

It feels like Microsoft had to prematurely play their hand here, and it will cost them in the long term. The whole situation is blatantly corrupt.

boringg 3y ago

Poll: openAI dominating, relevant or depleted in 10 years?

ji_zai 3y ago

It's sad to see many comments here assume that Sam was at fault for something without really knowing what happened behind the scenes. Let's try not to jump to conclusions, as hard as that may be. And if you're actively wishing people to fail, then I ask you to try to understand where that stems from. If you think Openai should be run differently, and if you have the inclination, I genuinely encourage you to build a competitor. I actually mean it. People think that Openai is too far ahead, but the fact is that someone with a capability to understand things from first principles will often find a unique, valuable insight to compete with. And the world is sufficiently decentralized such that you can't be stopped from pursuing this, even by Openai. As technology becomes more powerful, first principles reasoning >> factual knowledge (information) about how things work. In a sense, Openai's work reduces their own moat.

Vecr 3y ago
I assume many people who want OpenAI to fail want to whole AGI program in general to fail, at least for a few decades longer. A competitor won't help, it'll plausibly make it worse.
- ji_zai 3y ago
  Agreed. I was talking about folks that wish AI were being built differently (i.e. more transparent, etc.) as opposed to being against the rapid pace of AI development itself. I should have made myself more clear.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  Personally the way I'm thinking is AI cooperatives. Democratic membership controlled organisations with relatively low fees to train AI aligned with the interests of the members. Such organisations won't solve the fact that functioning AGI or very effective LLMs that can program or solve general text tasks precisely reduces the power of workers, but they'd at least mean that ordinary people control their own propaganda apparatus and are not stuck with models that are part of other people's propaganda apparatus (the state, Microsoft shareholders, some charity board that they do not control etc.).
- 3y ago

outside1234 3y ago

Let the grifting begin!

sandspar 3y ago

[flagged]

99catmaster 3y ago
I’m lacking a lot of context here, why are Altman and his crew (not sure who they are either) creeps?
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  You should look into Effective Accelerationism. It's legit nuts, created by people who will not have to deal with the consequences when the society collapses (they are way too rich for that). https://www.businessinsider.com/effective-accelerationism-humans-replaced-by-ai-2023-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/effective-accelerationism-hu...
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    I really wish all the effective accelerationists would effectively accelerate themselves to Mars so the rest of us can clean up their mess without continued fuckery.

xnx 3y ago

The palace intrigue of OpenAI is a lot less interesting now that they're are so many viable competitors. I don't see anything that says OpenAI is uncatchably ahead of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, or any number of AI start-ups.

bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
That's because openai has no moat. The code is out in the open, or equivalent code is, and same for the ideas. There isn't anything else to it.