“It’s a good idea to keep enough control so that investors can’t fire you (there are a lot of different ways to do this), but beyond that, it’s important to bring in other people and trust them to help you build the company.”

It's easy to do that if you're the founder of a typical C Corp. Sam Altman can probably do it in his sleep.

In a non-profit structure, your options are much more limited. There are no shares, no shareholders, no stock prices, investors, or valuations that you can appeal to as an indicator of success. Conflicts within the board often boil down to a battle of reputation and influence, ego and resentment.

Often they boil down to honest substantive disagreements about what would best accomplish the non-profit's mission.

But in addition to the problem of predicting the future that applies to any businesses assessment of what will best serve its future goals, the goals of a charitable nonprofit are often not things that are easily to measure achievement of or progress toward objectively, which makes some debates even fuzzier than they are in business organizations.

Agreed.

Can you go into more detail about this:

It's easy to get the share structure you want if you're the founder of a typical C Corp.

There will be two classes of shares, one where each gets 50 votes, and one where each gets one. I get the first one and we'll issue the second to everyone else.

This is in reference to founders, which Sam Altman wasn’t for OpenAI.

He was one of the founders according to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

You are misreading, the article only lists Sam Altman as an initial board member, not as a founder. See also https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai#openai.

>with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.

He was the initial board members. Not founders.

> The companies that have had the biggest impact and created the most value have had excellent board members (and executives).

It's easy to say in hindsight that a board member was good, after the company has succeeded. Harder to tell in advance.

The same can be said for a lot of things.

It’s a tautology essentially. It would be weird for lousy leaders to have amazing success. So obviously great companies have great leaders because they wouldn’t have a chance of being great otherwise.

But yet here we are!

Ha - good point.

written 9 years ago - like a memo to yesterdays events

This story is about corporate boards. It talks a lot about equity.

It has nothing to do with the governance of non-profit purpose driven organizations.

An observation about the current clamor around OpenAI is the minuscule number of people involved.

Altman, Brockman, Ilya, and a handful of mostly-unknown board members — the entire relevant group could sit (and has sat) around a table.

Not to mention they’ve all had the most stressful year of their lives, worked harder, and been exposed to insane hyper growth.

I don’t know what happened anymore than anyone else does but I suppose the people involved were experiencing substantial, prolonged, elevated stress.

So the big issue is that the control is in so few hands? If we are to believe that OpenAI will develop AGI is this not a form of dictatorship? Should there be a kind of surrogate shareholders who the board answer to?

Apologies, but I’m seeing this everywhere so I have to quip on this: OpenAI is no closer to developing AGI than you or I am. Transformer models and the GPT series are huge breakthroughs, but they are not AGI and there’s no indication the path to AGI is via transformer models. It seems increasingly like transformers/LLMs are just a local optima on the path to AGI.

But OpenAI believe that they will develop AGI, maybe they will, and may they won’t, and also highly unlikely if they don’t close the next round, but that misses the point.

They believe that they will and therefore we need to ask is their governance structure fit for purpose if they achieve their goals?

They operate inside a legal framework. If they do achieve AGI, various parliaments will quickly pass laws. Congress is likely to take action.

It has been done for weapons, it has been done for cryptography in the 80s, it has been discussed for vaccines during the pandemic, it has been done for finance and surely it will be done for AGI.

AI researchers have been making breakthroughs and proclaiming that AGI is "just around the corner" since 1959.

There's absolutely no reason to believe OpenAI is right about this when thousands of experts have been wrong. AGI is deceptively difficult because it's almost impossible to see how far away you are from the goal. You can see how far you've come and extrapolate, but that's always a mistake.

Right, right, nothing surprising about computers suddenly creating original works of art, poetry, legal arguments, bedtime stories and screenplays. AGI? Pshaw. Wake me up when they’ve proved the Riemann Hypothesis using nothing but a collection of vintage cookbooks.

> Should there be a kind of surrogate shareholders who the board answer to?

Boards do answer to shareholders. The structure is execs answer to the chief exec who answers to the board who answers to share holders. No one else is relevant.

Are you suggesting confiscation of their property? That’s a terribly dark path. The government doesn’t exist to steal private property. It exists to create regulations and legal frameworks for them.

A lot of this advice is told from the perspective of the founder. I think a lot of people probably associate Sam with being the founder of openAI because he was the face of it.

In reality, I think Ilya fits as more of a founder in this situation. He worked with Hinton directly as one of the founders in the technology, has been one of the main technical contributors for well over a decade, and him leaving Google/DeepMind to join Open AI as a founder was arguably the main catalyst that led to openAI being created in the first place.

Once again it looks like we might have found ourselves in the classic Edison-Tesla-Westinghouse confusion.

Of course it's early days and this is so just speculation. Might be jobs Apple, but I do think the context and situation is a lot more Edison Tesla Westinghouse.