6 ms·

Why OpenAI CEO was ousted

127 points by waezguy 2y ago

Tao3300 2y ago
Shucks, I was hoping he got canned again.
- ilikehurdles 2y ago
  Why is that?
  - Tao3300 2y ago
    So they can hire me instead, of course.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - nurettin 2y ago
    Probably because of shady business practices, witholding information, abusing office.
worik 2y ago
That was fascinating So interesting the, only mentioned, fact: > Altman did not tell the board he owned the OpenAI startup fund. It was a non profit. That on its own, IMO, a firing offense What a dreadfully dishonest human being
- dekhn 2y ago
  I wonder, if the board had explicitly said this (rather than their odd phrasing, "its board... concluded that Altman was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities") whether the firing would have stuck.
- throwcon 2y ago
  Typical sili(con) valley thing
- jl2718 2y ago
  Can you elaborate more on how this fund or the startups are connected to OpenAI money or technology, and how he profits from the association, aside from the name? Seems like there must be an evil genius plan behind all of this, but maybe I’m not fully grasping the whole thing.
dheera 2y ago
"When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance and found out about it on Twitter." Why the hell should a company have to announce products to the board before launching them?
- michaelteter 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors
- jsemrau 2y ago
  It's called governance. That's literally what a board of directors is for.
  - dheera 2y ago
    Give them access to high-level planning docs in a shared drive and if they don't look regularly it's their fault.
freejazz 2y ago
What happened to the other post about this, with many more comments?
- qup 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582
- notshift 2y ago
  Yeah, it's a dupe of the one that gets manually kicked off the front page after less than a day. Shameful, really. The importance of public critique & awareness of OpenAI's leadership should go beyond the interests of YC.
  - WhackyIdeas 2y ago
    I missed this yesterday. So basically Altman is a dishonest pos. Will fit right in with much of Silicon Valley then. …power and greed seems to get into all of their heads. Next thing they are part of an NSA Prism program so they can feel like spies too.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      You gotta hand it to him, most big tech bigwigs do a good job pretending to be soft-spoken thought leaders. It takes a special kind of narcissist to insist on destroying their own image early.
      - WhackyIdeas 2y ago
        Or colliding head on for the first time with a huge bunch of non-yes people… Which doesn’t bring out the nicer side of narcissists
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    There seems to be some mysterious method by which negative OpenAI comments and stories get downranked. The story ChrisArchitect links is missing at https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 -- it appears to be outranked by other stories which are both older and have fewer upvotes. dang has confirmed this happened in the past, but hasn't provided details. See this discussion I had with him 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342850 I'm currently composing an email to dang requesting some transparency.
odyssey7 2y ago
Who among us has not wanted to see a not-consistently-candid CEO / director / etc. removed from the organization? I see signs of Toner trying to spin things to save face. “for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board … [Altman gave] inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place … For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever … But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board” Thoughts: - The claim that this had been going on for years is presented as support for the decision to oust Sam. This is a spin, because an easy criticism is that, if this had been going on for so long, why didn’t Toner do anything about it years sooner? As she says herself, all along she had been responsible as a board member for “providing independent oversight over the company,” so there was a years-long lapse in effectiveness in her oversight duties if her claims are true. - The emphasis on “all four of us who fired him” is an attempt to provide social proof that she did the reasonable thing. It doesn’t help answer the question of “why” — the purpose of the article — so it’s rhetoric serving some other purpose.
- ilikehurdles 2y ago
  Activist boards are not good, and this was a successful strategy to oust a board that would have micromanaged and ultimately hindered the company’s success. I think Altman did the best thing for the company and hopefully the new board will also put the company’s best interests forward. Having discussions that don’t paint the board as default good and the company as default bad has become impossible on hn.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    Recall that Toner et al sat on the board of a nonprofit, not a company. See the nonprofit's charter: >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. >... >Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit. >... >We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/

127 points by waezguy 2y ago

Tao3300 2y ago

Shucks, I was hoping he got canned again.

ilikehurdles 2y ago
Why is that?
- Tao3300 2y ago
  So they can hire me instead, of course.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nurettin 2y ago
  Probably because of shady business practices, witholding information, abusing office.

worik 2y ago

That was fascinating So interesting the, only mentioned, fact: > Altman did not tell the board he owned the OpenAI startup fund. It was a non profit. That on its own, IMO, a firing offense What a dreadfully dishonest human being

dekhn 2y ago
I wonder, if the board had explicitly said this (rather than their odd phrasing, "its board... concluded that Altman was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities") whether the firing would have stuck.
throwcon 2y ago
Typical sili(con) valley thing
jl2718 2y ago
Can you elaborate more on how this fund or the startups are connected to OpenAI money or technology, and how he profits from the association, aside from the name? Seems like there must be an evil genius plan behind all of this, but maybe I’m not fully grasping the whole thing.

dheera 2y ago

"When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance and found out about it on Twitter." Why the hell should a company have to announce products to the board before launching them?

michaelteter 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors
jsemrau 2y ago
It's called governance. That's literally what a board of directors is for.
- dheera 2y ago
  Give them access to high-level planning docs in a shared drive and if they don't look regularly it's their fault.

freejazz 2y ago

What happened to the other post about this, with many more comments?

qup 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40506582

notshift 2y ago
Yeah, it's a dupe of the one that gets manually kicked off the front page after less than a day. Shameful, really. The importance of public critique & awareness of OpenAI's leadership should go beyond the interests of YC.
- WhackyIdeas 2y ago
  I missed this yesterday. So basically Altman is a dishonest pos. Will fit right in with much of Silicon Valley then. …power and greed seems to get into all of their heads. Next thing they are part of an NSA Prism program so they can feel like spies too.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    You gotta hand it to him, most big tech bigwigs do a good job pretending to be soft-spoken thought leaders. It takes a special kind of narcissist to insist on destroying their own image early.
    - WhackyIdeas 2y ago
      Or colliding head on for the first time with a huge bunch of non-yes people… Which doesn’t bring out the nicer side of narcissists
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  There seems to be some mysterious method by which negative OpenAI comments and stories get downranked. The story ChrisArchitect links is missing at https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 -- it appears to be outranked by other stories which are both older and have fewer upvotes. dang has confirmed this happened in the past, but hasn't provided details. See this discussion I had with him 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342850 I'm currently composing an email to dang requesting some transparency.

odyssey7 2y ago

Who among us has not wanted to see a not-consistently-candid CEO / director / etc. removed from the organization? I see signs of Toner trying to spin things to save face. “for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board … [Altman gave] inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place … For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever … But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board” Thoughts: - The claim that this had been going on for years is presented as support for the decision to oust Sam. This is a spin, because an easy criticism is that, if this had been going on for so long, why didn’t Toner do anything about it years sooner? As she says herself, all along she had been responsible as a board member for “providing independent oversight over the company,” so there was a years-long lapse in effectiveness in her oversight duties if her claims are true. - The emphasis on “all four of us who fired him” is an attempt to provide social proof that she did the reasonable thing. It doesn’t help answer the question of “why” — the purpose of the article — so it’s rhetoric serving some other purpose.

ilikehurdles 2y ago
Activist boards are not good, and this was a successful strategy to oust a board that would have micromanaged and ultimately hindered the company’s success. I think Altman did the best thing for the company and hopefully the new board will also put the company’s best interests forward. Having discussions that don’t paint the board as default good and the company as default bad has become impossible on hn.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  Recall that Toner et al sat on the board of a nonprofit, not a company. See the nonprofit's charter: >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. >... >Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit. >... >We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/