4 ms·
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
by 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 agoActivist 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 agoRecall 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/
- ilikehurdles 2y agoI’m aware. And the company has shown its market-driven motive to be superior in pursuing these goals to the “micromanage-to-death” motive of a reactionary yet uninvolved board. Like imagine if chatgpt was held back where would openai even be today?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago>And the company has shown its market-driven motive to be superior in pursuing these goals I'm not sure we can extrapolate trends from recent releases to "late-stage AGI development". AGI control is supposed to be challenging when the system becomes smarter than its creators. If the system is sub-human in intelligence then the main challenge doesn't seem to apply.
- tines 2y agoCan’t you always ask why something wasn’t done sooner, no matter how soon it was done? I understand that longstanding issues can cover up real causes, but just because an issue is longstanding doesn’t mean it isn’t the real cause.