Thats why Sam & Greg wasn't all they complained about. They lead with the fact that it was shocking and irresponsible.
Ron seems to think that the board is not making the right move for OpenAI.
I can see where the misalignment (ha!) may be: someone deep in the VC world would reflexively think that "value destruction" of any kind is irresponsible. However, a non-profit board has a primary responsibility to its charter and mission - which doesn't compute for those with fiduciary-duty-instincts. Without getting into the specifics of this case: a non-profit's board is expected to make decisions that lose money (or not generate as much of it) if the decisions lead to results more consistent with the mission.
Exactly. The tricky part is that board started a second for profit company with VC investors who are co-owners. This has potential for messy conflicts of interest if there is disagreement about how to run the co-venture, and each party has contractual obligations to each other.
Anyone investing in or working for the for-profit LLC has to sign an operating agreement that states the LLC is not obligated to make a profit, all investments should be treated as donations, and that the charter and mission of the non-profit is the primary responsibility of the for-profit LLC as well.
OpenAI employees might not like it and it might drive them to leave, but they entered into this agreement with a full understanding that the structure has always been in place to prioritize the non-profit's charter.
Which might only be possible with future funding? From Microsoft in this case. And in any case if they give out any more shares in the wouldn’t they (with MS) be able to just take over the for-profit corp?
However, to nitpick your nitpick: for non-profits there might be no other party - just the mission. Imagine a non-profit whose mission is to preserve the history and practice of making 17th-century ivory cuff links. It's just the organisation and the mission; sometimes the mission is for the benefit of another party (or all of humanity).
It’s possible Sam betrayed their trust and actually committed a fireable offense. But even if the rest of the board was right, the way they’ve handled it so far doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
It is even possible to not be candid without even using lies of omission. For a CEO this could be as simple as just moving fast and not taking the time to report on major initiatives to the board.
OED:
candour - the quality of being open and honest in expression.
"They didn't state he lied ... without even using lies of omission ... they said he wasn't [word defined as honest and open]"
Candour encapsulates exactly those things. Being open (i.e. not omitting things and disclosing all you know) and honest (being truthful).
On the contrary, "not consistently candid", while you call it a "generalized term", is actually a quite specific term that was expressly chosen, and says, "we have had multiple instances where he has not been open with us, or not been honest with us, or both".
If he didn't lie, and didn't lie by omission then he was by definition being candid.
Give us an example then, of how you can be "not candid" while being honest and open.
If I take the time to accuse my boss of failing to be candid instead of thanking him in my resignation letter or exit interview, I'm not saying I think he could have communicated better, I'm saying he's a damned liar, and my letter isn't sent for the public to speculate on.
Whether the board were justified in concluding Sam was untrustworthy is another question, but they've been willing to burn quite a lot of reputation on signalling that.
Business communication is never, ever forthright. These people cannot be blunt to the public even if their life depended on it. Reading between the lines is practically a requirement.
There is why you do something. And there is how you do something.
OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance.
They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two camps and have let Sam and Greg go angry and seeking retribution. Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.
For me there is no justification for how this all happened.
Whoever thinks you can tame a 100 billion dollar company by putting a "non-profit" in charge of it, clearly doesn't understand people.
By all accounts, this split happened a while ago and led to this firing, not the other way around.
And instead of resolving this and presenting a unified strategy to the company they have instead allowed for this split to be replicated everywhere. Everyone who was committed to a pro-profit company has to ask if they are next to be treated like Sam.
It's incredibly destabilising and unnecessary.
They probably joined because it was the most awesome place to pursue their skills in AI, but they _knew_ they were joining an organization with explicitly not a profit goal. If they hoped that profit chasing would eventually win, that's their problem and, frankly, having this wakeup call is a good thing for them so they can reevaluate their choices.
Biz 101.
I don't know why people even need to be explained this, except for ignorance of basic facts of business life.
The split existed long prior to the board action, and extended up into the board itself. If anything, the board action is a turning point toward decisively ending the split and achieving unity of purpose.
From what I've read, Ilya has been pushing to slow down (less of the move fast and break things start-up attitude).
It also seems that Sam had maybe seen the writing on the wall and was planning an exit already, perhaps those rumors of him working with Jony Ive weren't overblown?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23893939/jony-ive-openai-...
Wouldn’t a likely outcome in that case be that someone else overtakes them? Or are they so confident that they think it’s not a real threat?
Didn’t Microsoft already try this experiment a few years back with an AI chatbot?
You may be thinking of Tay?
Do you think if chickens treated us better with intrinsic value we won't kill them? For AGI superhuman x risk folks that's the bigger argument.
Maybe devs are a bad example, so replace them with “retail workers” in your statement if it helps.
Is “put out of work” a good thing with no practical limits?
I think the EA movement has been broadly skeptical towards Sam for a while -- my understanding is that Anthropic was founded by EAs who used to work at OpenAI and decided they didn't trust Sam.
Note that this clause would describe any government funded research for example.
I think danger from AGI often presumes the AI has become malicious, but the AI making mistakes while in control of say, industrial machinery, or weapons, is probably the more realistic present concern.
Early adoption of these models as controllers of real world outcomes is where I could see such a disagreement becoming suddenly urgent also.
If it was so easy to go to the back of the queue and become a threat, Open AI wouldn't be in the dominant position they're in now. If any of the leavers have taken IP with them, expect court cases.
Given the language in the press release, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Sam Altman, and not the board, blindsided everyone? It was apparently his actions and no one else's that led to the consequence handed out by the board.
> Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.
From all current accounts, doesn't that seem like what Altman and his crew were already trying to do and was the reason for the dismissal in the first place?
OpenAI's dual identity as a nonprofit/for-profit business was very well known. And the concentration of power in the nonprofit side was also very well known. From the media coverage of Microsoft's investments, it sounds as if MSFT prioritized getting lots of business for its Azure cloud service -- and didn't prioritize getting a board seat or even an observer's chair.
Not to mention, after that, MSFT might be left bagholding onto a bunch of unused compute.
All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Microsoft and Softbank, while OpenAI is the orphan child with the huge estate. Microsoft isn't exactly the kingmaker here.
Most likely outcome here does seem to be that Altman/Brockman come back, Sutskever leaves and joins Google, and OpenAI becomes for all intensive purposes a commercial endeavor, with Microsoft wielding a lot more clout over them (starting with one or more board seats).
Big winner in this scenario would be Google.
And while that might hurt OpenAI as an institution more than it hurts Microsoft as an institution, the effect on Microsoft's top decision-makers personally vs. OpenAI's top decisionmakers seems likely to be the other way around.
Amateurs on hugging face are able to match OpenAI in impressively short time. The actual former-OpenAI engineers with unlimited budget ought to be able to do as good or better.
When a company experiences this level of growth over a decade, the board evolves with the company. You end up with board members that have all been there, done that, and can truly guide the management on the challenges they face.
OpenAI's hypergrowth meant it didn’t have the time to do that. So the board that was great for a $100 million, even a billion $ startup falls completely flat for 90x the size.
I don’t have faith in their ability to know what is best for OpenAI. These are uncharted waters for anyone though. This is an exceptionally big non-profit with the power to change the world - quite literally.
Not providing this kind of oversight is how we get disasters like FTX and WeWork.
I'm sure theyll have lots of boring money to be thrown at it regardless but that demand for capital is not going away. It will be persistent.
One attempt involved a battleship “accidentally” firing onto another battleship where both Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping were visiting.
https://jamestown.org/program/president-xi-suspects-politica...
Biased source, but she’s able to get a lot of unreported news from the mainland.
https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2021/9/20/deleted-repo...
I will try to find more sources but Google is just shit these days. See my other comment for more.
A big problem is that mainland China is like the hermit kingdom. It’s a black hole for any news the CCP doesn’t want to get out
Hm. That really does qualify as an assassination attempt if it wasn't an actual accident. Enough such things happen by accident that it has a name.
No guarantees about NPOV on that page.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Falun_Gong
If you want to see what makes WikiPedia tick that's a great place to start.
It's like believing the scientology center. Not trustworthy, they have an angle.
2. It makes sense given Xi’s current paranoia and constant purges
search terms site:nytimes.com
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/xi-jinpings-fi...
http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/the-impossib...
I will try to find better sources. There are more not so great articles in my other comment
Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder, Charlie Cheever. If you're not happy with the way a company is doing business, your best action is to walk away.
Comparing PayPal's success in digital finance to cryptocurrency's is an admission against interest, as they say in the law.
They absolutely would. The other thing you should take away from this is how they'd do it-- by manipulating proxies to do it with/for them, which makes it harder to see coming and impossible to defend against.
Whistleblowers are pariahs by necessity. You can't trust a known snitch won't narc on you if the opportunity presents itself. They do the right thing and make themselves untrustworthy in the process.
(This is IMO why cults start one way and devolve into child sex abuse so quickly-- MAD. You can't snitch on the leader when Polaroids of yourself exist...)
> don't take vacations!
This can get used against you either way, so you might as well take that vacation for mental health's sake.
It feels like there is an impedance mismatch here.
Like, being crosswise in organizational politics does not imply less of a devotion of organizational goals, but rather often simply different interpretation of those goals.
That strikes me as someone who is either lacks the ability to do proper due diligence or they're straight up sociopaths looking for weak willed people they can strong arm out. Part of the latter is having the ability to create a compelling narrative for future marks, to put it bluntly.
I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.
Startups die from suicide, not homicide.
So you hired coupers but you would never hire coupers? Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...
You might have missed this from GP's comment:
>>I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup
In other words, at least once these people have pulled the wool over their eyes during the hiring process.
The point in my comment was this: in retrospect, I’m not sure there’s anything that would have tipped me off to that behavior at the time of interview. But if this was something I could somehow identify, it would absolute be my #1 red flag for future hires.
Edit: The “twice” part might have made my comment ambiguous. What I meant was after I hired them, these people went on to pull two separate, successive coups, which indicates to me the first time wasn’t an aberration.
At this point I'm in danger of triggering Godwin's Law so I had better stop.
2. CEO's at fast growing startups are very different than at large tech.
I've run or defended against 'grassroots organizations transformations' (aka, a coup) at several non-profit organizations, and all of us continued to do our daily required tasks while the politicking was going on.
It's just not possible. We're limited in how much energy we can bring to daily work, that's a fact. If your brain is occupied both with dreams of king-making and your regular duties at the job, your mental bandwidth is compromised.
This makes no sense at all!
Now, that sibling director allows a culture of sexual harassment, law breaking, and toxic throat slitting behavior. HR and the Organizations leadership is aware of this. However the company is profitable, outside his department happy, and stable. They don’t want to rock the boat.
Is it still “the domain of the petty” to have a plan to replace them? To have formed relationships to work around them, and keep them in check? To have enacted policies outside their department to ensure the damage doesn’t spread?
And most importantly to enact said replacement plan when they fuck up just enough leadership gives them the side-eye, and you push the issue with your documentation of their various grievances?
Because that… is a coup. That is a coup that is atleast in my mind moral and just, leading to the betterment of the company.
“Your best action is to walk away” - Good leadership doesn’t just walk away and let the company and employees fail. Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems. Captains always evacuate all passengers before they leave the ship. Else they go down with it.
Yes, exactly. In fact, it's corruption of leadership.
If an engineer came to the leader about a critical technical problem and said, 'our best choice is to pretend it's not there', the leader would demand more of the engineer. At a place like OpenAI, they might remind the engineer that they are the world's top engineers at arguably the most cutting edge software organization in the world, and they are expected to deliver solutions to the hardest problems. Throwing your hands up and ignoring the problem is just not acceptable.
Leaders need to demand the same of themselves, and one of their jobs is to solve the leadership problems that are just as difficult as those engineering problems - to deliver leadership results to the organization just like the engineer delivers engineering results, no excuses, no doubts. Many top-level leaders don't have anyone demanding performance of them, and don't hold themselves to the same standards in their job - leadership, management - as they hold their employees.
> Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems.
Even there, I think you are going to easy on them. Only in hindsight do you maybe say, 'I don't see what could have been done.' At the moment, you say 'I don't see it yet, so I have to keep looking and innovating and finding a way'.
Work or transfer of intellectual property or good name into another venture, while not disclosing it with OpenAI is a clear breach of contract.
He is clearly instrumental in attracting investors, talent, partners and commercialization of technology developed by Google Brain and pushed further by Hinton students and the team of OpenAI. But he was just present in the room where the veil of ignorance was pushed forward. He is replaceable and another leader, less creepy and with fewer conflicts of interest may do a better job.
It it no surprise that OpenAI board had attempted to eject him. I hope that this attempt will be a success.
Focus on results, not political games.
My use of "schadenfreude", in general, can be attributed largely to Avenue Q and Death Note. Twice is coincidence.
EDIT: I just noticed "verboten." Now I'm worried.
This wasn't a change of strategy, it was a restoration of it. OpenAI was structured with a 501c3 in oversight from the beginning exactly because they wanted to prioritize using AI for the good of humanity over profits.
> restoration
Wouldn’t that mean that over the longterm they will just be outcompeted by the profit seeking entities. It’s not like OpenAI is self sustainable (or even can be if they chose the non-profit way)
massive spending is needed for any project as massive as "AI", so what are you even asking? A "feed the poor project" does not expect to make a profit, but, yes, it needs large cash infusions...
This is the biggest takeaway for me. People are building businesses around OpenAI APIs and now they want to suddenly swing the pendulum back to being a fantasy AGI foundation and de-emphasize the commercial aspect? Customers are baking OpenAI's APIs into their enterprise applications. Without funding from Microsoft their current model is unsustainable. They'll be split into two separate companies within 6 months in my opinion.
But as far as I can tell, unless you are in the exec suites at both OpenAI and at Microsoft, these are just your opinions, yet you present them as fact.
Is Microsoft a higher purpose?
It's seeming like corporate governance and market domination are exactly the kind of thing the board are trying to separate from with this move. They can't achieve this by going to investors first and talking about it - you think Microsoft isn't going to do everything in their power to prevent it from happening if they knew about it? I think their mission is laudable, and they simply did it the way it had to be done.
You can't slowly untangle yourself from one of the biggest companies in the world while it is coiling around your extremely valuable technology.
Sorry I don't see the 'how' as necessarily appalling.
The less appalling alternative could have been weeks of discussions and the board asking for Sam's resignation to preserve the decorum of the company. How would that have helped the company ? The internal rife would have spread, employees would have gotten restless, leading to reduced productivity and shipping.
Instead, isn't this a better outcome ? There is immense short term pain, but there is no ambiguity and the company has set a clear course of action.
To affirm that the board has caused a split in the company is quite preposterous, unless you have first hand information that such a split has actually happened. As far as public information is concerned 3 researchers have quit so far, and you have this from one of the EMs.
"For those wondering what’ll happen next, the answer is we’ll keep shipping. @sama & @gdb weren’t micro-managers. The comes from the many geniuses here in research product eng & design. There’s clear internal uniformity among these leaders that we’re here for the bigger mission."
This snippet in fact shows the genius of Sam and gdb, how they enabled the teams to run even in their absence. Is it unfortunate that the board fired Sam, from the engineer's and builder's perspective yes, from the long term AGI research perspective, I don't know.
Oh! So, now you got him furious? when just yesterday he made a rushed statement to standby Mira.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/17/a-statement-from...
The board's job is specifically to do right by the charitable mission of the nonprofit of which they are the board. Investors in the downstream for-profit entity (OpenAI Global LLC) are warned explicitly that such investments should be treated as if they were donations and that returning profits to them is not the objective of the firm, serving the charitable function of the nonprofit is, though profits may be returned.
This exactly. Folks have completely forgotten that Altman and Co have largely bastardized the vision of OpenAI for sport and profit. It's very possible that this is part of a larger attempt to return to the stated mission of the organization. An outcome that is undoubtedly better for humanity.
What is the evidence of that, and what is your evidence that this "return to mission" will "undoubtedly better for humanity"
After all, as we see by looking to history, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, lots and lots of altruistic do gooders have created all manner of evil in their pursuit of a "better humanity".
I am not sure I agree with Sam Altman's vision of a "better tomorrow" any more than I would agree with the OpenAI boards vision of that same tomorrow. In fact I have great distrust of people that want to shape humanity into their vision of what is "best" that tends to lead to oppression and suffering
you get that you sow. The way Altman publicly treated Cruise co-founder establishes like a new standard of "not do right by". After that I'd have expected nobody would let Altman near any management position, yet SV is a land of huge money sloshing care-free, and so I was just wondering who is going to be left holding the bag.
I met Conway once. He described investing in Google because it was a way to relive his youth via founders who reminded him of him at their age. He said this with seemingly no awareness of how it would sound to an audience whose goal in life was to found meaningful, impactful companies rather than let Ron Conway identify with us & vicariously relive his youth.
Just because someone has a lot of money doesn’t mean their opinions are useful.
Yes. There can often be an inverse correlation, because they can have success bias, like survival bias.
That would make things more equitable perhaps. It’d at least be interesting
i'm surprised anyone can take this "oh woe is me i totally was excited about the future of humanity" crap seriously. these are SV investors here, morally equivalent to the people on Wall Street that a lot here would probably hold in contempt, but because they wore cargo shorts or something, everyone thinks that Sam is their friend and that just if the poor naysayers would understand that Sam is totally cool and uses lowercase in his messages just like mee!!!!
they don't give a shit that your product was "made with <3" or whatever
they don't give a shit about you.
they don't give a shit about your startup's customers.
they only give a shit about how many dollars they make from your product.
boo hooing over Sam getting fired is really pathetic, and I'd expect better from the Hacker News crowd (and more generally the rationalist crowd, which a lot of AI people tend to overlap with).
I don't know him but he seems a reasonably decent / maybe average type.
He might be emotional and defend his friends that’s not in challenge, he likes the guys— and he might be more cynical when it comes to firing 10,000 engineers —that’s less what I’ve heard about him personally, but maybe— however, in this case, he’s explicitly defending not an employee victim of the almighty board, but the people who created the entity, who later entrusted the board with some responsibility to keep the entity faithful to its mission.
Some might think Sam deserves that title less than Greg… not sure I can vouch for either. But Conway is trying to say that all entities (and their governance) owe their founders a debt of consideration, of care. That’s filial piety more than anything contractual. That isn’t the same as the social obligation that an employer might have.
The cult for founders, “0 to 1” and all that might be overblown in San Francisco, but there’s still a legitimate sense that the people who started all this should only be kicked out if they did something outrageous. Take Woz: he’s not working, or useful, or even that respectful of Apple’s decisions nowadays. But he still gets “an employee discount” (which is admittedly more a gimmick). That deference is closer to what Conway seems to flag than the (indeed) fairly violent treatment of a lot of employees during the staff reduction of the last year.
I think the distinction of founders is a rationalization of simple corruption: They know the founder, it's their buddy; they go to the same club, eat at the same restaurants, serve on the same boards, and have similar careers. Understanding the burden and challenges and the accomplishment of founders is instinctive, and appreciating founders is appreciating themselves.
With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway in particular, whom I don't know; see the comment below about Conway]: The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. When mangement lays off 10,000 employees, the investors congratulate management. And if anyone objects to the impact on the employees, they justify it with the magic words that somehow cancel all morality and humanity - 'it's business' - and call you an unserious bleeding heart. But when the investor's buddy CEO is fired ...
I think that's wrong and that they should also take into account the impact on employees. But CEOs are commanders on the business battlefield; they have great power over the company's outcomes, which are the reasons for the layoffs/firings. Lower-ranking employees are much closer to civilians, and also often can't afford to lose the job.