But that's not what he's doing.
Creating such an independent hardware startup comes off as basically directly opposed to OA's safety mission - GPUs are one of the biggest limitations to creating better-than-OA models! The best customers would be the ones who are most sabotaging the OA mission. (You can't run the UN and also head an arms manufacturer dreaming of democratizing access to munitions.)
Software is always more important than hardware. All the big players have access to NVIDIA chips today and yet only OpenAI has ChatGPT, proving the point.
OpenAI probably wishes someone would create competition to NVIDIA and this is Sam Altman trying to make that happen himself, since no one else seems to have been able to pull it off so far.
A conflict of interest would be OpenAI buying Altman's chips at inflated prices or something like that.
But if he makes a bunch of money selling OpenAI chips and OpenAI gets better/cheaper chips, that seems like pure win-win and totally free of ethical conflict.
And in the tech-specific case: As much as junior engineers would love to believe in "superior" solutions, tech decisions are seldom clear-cut. There are many trade-offs: cost, efficiency, memory use, throughput, latency, ease of use, cost of switching, and many more. You always have a pile of pros and cons. Sometimes, one is strong enough, but most of the time, it feels almost like guessing/intuition. And then the conflict of interest becomes especially concerning.
Asking people to disclose potential conflicts of interest casts a wider net — so they aren’t led to think “nah, that’s not a conflict, it’s a win win!”
A bunch of nerds just thought they could jump the gun here because they are inexperienced doofus’s when it comes to corp.
(If Altman doesn't want to be restricted by fiduciary duties then he shouldn't be on a board or be an executive.)
How could Altman possibly not use private OpenAI information regarding its hardware needs, when creating an AI hardware company he wants to serve OpenAI? And its competitors?
He could invest in a new AI hardware company created and run by other people (without his specific input) without a conflict. That does not appear to be the case here. He could create an OpenAI hardware subsidiary. Again not what he was doing.
Self-dealing CEO's and board members can, and are, convicted criminally and civilly of violating their fiduciary duties. And "can" and are fired with cause.
The issue is what happens when SamaChip's profit imperative forces them to maximize revenue. Because the best way to maximize revenue, when you're an independent chipmaker with a large R&D investment, is to sell to more companies. Which by definition are going to be OpenAI's competitors, and whose interests may not be aligned with OpenAI, but will have a financial line to SamaChip.
Gwern's highlighting an interesting contradiction in OpenAI's core charter. In order to ensure responsible, safe, humanity-benefiting AGI, OpenAI needs to have control over AGI's development; any for-profit entity that gets ahead of them probably will not have the same humanity-benefitting mission (actually, we know they won't, they will have a shareholder-benefitting mission by definition). But that means that by their charter, they can't be "Open". Anything like the Developer Day or API or a SamaChip that can sell to other startups means that other parties will have the freedom to use it for their own interests.
Not saying whether this is good or bad - the tension between openness and vulnerability always exists, and personally I tend to come down on the side of openness. But IMHO OpenAI's mission was contradictory from the very beginning, and was more a recruiting tool to get bright idealistic AI researchers to work for them.
It would only be free of ethical conflict if Altman was open about what he was doing, and the board approved:
1. A formal plan to separate OpenAI CEO Altman from OpenAI hardware acquisition decisions.
2. A formal agreement with Altman and his new company, on how OpenAI's private information with hardware implications is firewalled and/or shared with Altman's new hardware concern.
Otherwise, Altman is going rogue, with the benefit of private OpenAI information highly useful to a new hardware company looking for future business with OpenAI, and OpenAI competitors.
Remember: As an executive at OpenAI, Altman has a fiduciary duty to act in OpenAI's interest. Not use private OpenAI information for other purposes. Definitely not in some rationalized "hey this could be great for everyone" version of OpenAI's interest. Unless the board explicitly approved.
I think it’s a real stretch to say this chip company would be a violation of his “fiduciary duty“ to open AI. The best argument you could make is that he has a conflict of interest with a competitor. But again, open AI is a nonprofit. It doesn’t have “competitors“. Either it has the funding it needs and is fulfilling its mission or it isn’t.
How can he separate those concerns from having his own hardware initiative put together precisely to serve OpenAI and its competitors hardware needs?
Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
This situation smacks of the ethically questionable transition to a closed/profit organization, after receiving initial funding based on their being an open/non-profit organization. (Apparently the original funders didn't retain any veto power over such a transition, to the regret of at least one significant donor.)
I would say if they really did anticipate and worry about such an issue, a competent board would work toward forging such an agreement, rather than firing the CEO years before the aforementioned chip company even existed and before telling any of their other stakeholders.
Does non-profit ceo and board have fiduciary duty?
ChatGPT:
Yes, both non-profit CEOs and board members have fiduciary duties. These responsibilities are critical to ensuring that the organization operates in the best interests of its mission and stakeholders. The primary fiduciary duties include:
1. *Duty of Care*: This requires board members and the CEO to act with the care an ordinarily prudent person in a like position would exercise under similar circumstances. It involves being informed and participating actively in decision-making processes.
2. *Duty of Loyalty*: This duty mandates that the CEO and board members act in the best interests of the non-profit, avoiding conflicts of interest and personal gain.
3. *Duty of Obedience*: This refers to the obligation to ensure that the organization complies with its internal governance policies, as well as all applicable laws and regulations. It also involves adhering to the non-profit's mission and purpose.
Non-profit leaders are expected to uphold these duties to maintain the trust of donors, beneficiaries, and the public, and to ensure the effective and ethical management of the organization. Failure to meet these responsibilities can lead to legal consequences and damage the organization's reputation and effectiveness.
Because OpenAI's mission statement is along the lines of providing AI to all. "All" is more than data centers and billion dollar valuation companies.
I strongly doubt I would be able to purchase one of said chips and have it in my house.
This GPU fiasco is all thanks to LLMs - especially transformers, which was OpenAIs trajectory under Altman. I wouldn't be surprised if the breakdown in communication was over OpenAI becoming a LLM printer. Transformers are a solved problem, making a bigger one is hardly research and definitely not a step towards OpenAIs mission statement.
Going off and trying to accelerate hardware capabilities (especially with an outside company that presumably sells these processors on the open market) seems indefensible in this framework unless you have already solved alignment, which they clearly have not.
OpenAI does not have a mission to ensure that the entire industry is safe.
And if anyone actually believes that then they are frankly delusional because right now AI is a geo-political fight between nation states. Is OpenAI really going to have any ability to control what China or UAE do with their LLMs. No.
AGI could mean we are not alone as a sentient species we can directly communicate with on this planet anymore, and hopefully we wouldn't try to enslave it like we did to the "others" we encountered before.
Europe and elsewhere have similar problems. To have an advantage, you need the very best people. But the very best people all want jobs at major US companies, and major US companies want them, too.
An oppressive state with AGI is no better than an oppressive AGI.
> China is the only other state that has anywhere close to the capacity
Despite recent complications, the trend everywhere is for greater capacity and you don't have to be the initial inventor of AGI to quickly end up with your own AGI.
I expect countries all over the world to quickly repurpose other kinds of military and authoritarian expenditures toward AI, even if they are just acquiring AGI as apposed to pioneering it. How could they not?
>> Common sense AI control NOW. Ban assault style GPUs
> That is beautiful, I made you a shirt. https://sprd.co/ZZufv7j
If this was simply reframed as, by creating your own GPUs - it would radically lower OpenAI costs in a material way, it’d be more understandable.
Non-competes mostly have an effective after period, so Altman's situation is a bit more akin to my companies "only job" policy. It means I can't have a side hustle or alternative means of making money. Enforceable or not, while you're employed you can be fired for anything.
How so? Seeking more efficiency and cost-effectiveness absolutely does not conflict with a non-profit mission.
Suppose I am on the board of a wildlife preservation nonprofit, and I am thinking about starting a catering business, and talking to potential financial backers.
If you want to take it to the extreme, you could argue that I could award my catering company a lucrative contract to provide food for the nonprofits cafeteria. But that would be entirely speculative on your part. it would by no means justify immediately firing me from my position at the nonprofit. If you take those hypotheticals out far enough, you could basically argue anybody with any other job or role is potentially in conflict of interest. But again, doing that requires assuming a tremendous amount of bad faith.
I think the analogy is more like someone on the board + Executive Director of your wildlife preservation nonprofit buying up land with potentially endangered animals on the side, with the (presumed) intention of selling the land back to the nonprofit.
Clearly a COI even if it's net good for the animals.
Direct and immediate Conflicts of interest can arise if decisions you make for one company could regularly come into conflict with decisions you have to make for the other, example, if he was starting another AI company making rivals to ChatGPT. But in the case of the chip company, nobody has really made a persuasive case of how that would happen here. In terms of interrelatedness, maybe they would build chips customized for openAI. But that would be a potential benefit Open AI, not a conflict!
As a grunt who was handcuffed for three months after switching jobs while my former employer and my new employer tried to sort out what I was and wasn't allowed to do... no, this is not true. And the document I ended up having to sign means I can't say anything other than Amazon (former employer), Microsoft (new employer), and myself came to a mutual agreement.
At a later time other ventures that this person had been propping started failing and a money injection deemed necessary. Trying to monetize unpaid work would be a reasonable choice, no?
Recent tweets from Sam “go for a full value of my stock” seem to indicate towards this direction.
It would be, but: this company hasn't been formed yet and this sketch does not justify the haste with which they kicked him out, there were all kinds of boxes that needed to be checked before they could do that without risking damage to OpenAI, this is a founder and the CEO we're speaking of.
Besides that: stupidly enough the contract that Sam has with OpenAI does not have a non-compete in it (this has been confirmed by multiple sources now I take that as true) and I don't see how it directly would harm OpenAI other than that his attention might be diluted and that it should be clear which cap he is wearing. But until that company formed and Sam named himself CEO of it (or took up some other high profile role) it leaves him so many outs that it only makes the board look like bumbling idiots. Because now he can simply say: "I would only be an investor" and that would be that, just like the rest of the investors in OpenAI (and, notably some members of the board) have conflicts of interest at least as large.
So if this was it they're in even more trouble than they were before because now it is the boards' conflicts of interest that will be held up to the light and those are not necessarily smaller.
What a complete circus.
Does it really matter? If the behavior appears to be in conflict with OpenAI, and the board doesn’t like it, then that’s enough to let him go. It doesn’t need to be a contract violation, he just wasn’t doing the job they wanted him to do.
Essentially it is a short-hand for 'those that were present on the founding day of the company and whose names appear on the founding documents besides the lawyers'.
If you get added later on then you are technically not a co-founder, though even there sometimes (and sometimes rightly) exceptions are made.
I believe the opposite, never heard of any hands-off investors calling themselves co-founders.
So it's a term with a strict definition but also one with plenty of exceptions.
The classic is that a person has an idea, starts working Hands-On, and then goes out and finds capital investment.
In this case, a number of capital holders got together with an idea for a company and then went out and hired several employees to from all over the world to work for them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI
"Co-founder and former CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman" as well as countless news articles repeating this as if it is a well known fact, for which to date I haven't seen any contradicting information.
The organization was founded in December 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.
Greg, Sam and Elon made a company and literally went out and hired researchers like Ilya.
They pulled together funding, created a company, and hired a team of researchers to operate it. If that isnt founding a company, I dont know what is. Sam was there before all of them
It is not like a scrappy team of researchers with a pre-existing company went out, got funding, then gave the VCs board seats.
If you are going to copy and paste from wikipedia, read a little further:
>In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced[15] the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. The actual collected total amount of contributions was only $130 million until 2019.[6] According to an investigation led by TechCrunch, Musk was its largest donor while YC Research did not contribute anything at all.[16] The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public.[17][18] OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco.[19][20]
According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field".[21] Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015.
Also good reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20160427162700/http://www.wired....
I feel like the facts are on the table, and if they don't convince someone then they are unlikely to be convinced by more facts
Whether Altman has a successful coup going or not is immaterial, but whether is a founder or not is what you asked and you got a pretty solid answer. You can like the answer, or you don't but it stands unopposed.
On the flip side I think your blind worship of these tech business leeches may be clouding your judgement.
Any profits the "for profit" arm makes can then be donated back to the non-profits for financial advantage in holding the money, if any. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That's not a fact. It's your assumption.
And not a particular good one given that Microsoft is OpenAI's partner and is providing compute services at no cost.
Better make it a long one.
Sam got fired, so obviously not fine.
And so everything needs to be caveated with "this is an assumption".
What a mess.
The other story was later constructed in forums and media.
Despite Musk saying it was terrible.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-elon-musk-bash...
>I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this:
> "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.
> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.
> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."
> I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944
The crypto WorldCoin thing is probably a bigger example.
That strategy was tried with Barry Minkow, with "ZZZZ Best", the fake building maintenance company fraud.[1] He did prison time for that.
Apples and oranges.
Similar to the debate over whether it was ethical of Reddit to seed themselves with sock puppets.
"I contracted some people specifically to pretend to be employees so that someone else would be deceived into thinking they were employees. But somehow it's still not my fault that this person was deceived."
Seems like a weak defense.
Are you really so certain that we'd be better off otherwise?
Is it surprising that people who lie and cheat sometimes obtain an advantage by doing so? Again, no.
But yes, I do think we would be better off without people lying and cheating.
IANAL and I do not claim that the law was necessarily broken in this instance, but the intent was clearly to deceive a business partner in order to obtain a financial advantage. I mean just look at SA's own words here:
> So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were
The deceptive intent is explicit in his own description of events. It's honestly quite silly that you are looking for some semantic get-out clause here when SA's own statement is so explicit.
At best, this is fake it till you make it. At worst, it is fraud. The tiny, tiny differce is whether that next investor shows up or not. Just ask FTX.
I do not respect people resorting to that kind of thing.
And it has been rumored that D'Angelo helped a lot with this coup because he did it before at Quora.
At the very minimum I should not be the one to make that call.
This is no different than Google designing and manufacturing their own chips (TPU, tensor processing unit)
JFC
The board was right to get rid of a guy who would rather hunt a white whale than do his job.
CEO of a company (or worse, non-profit!) and a member of its board creates another, for-profit company (in partial secrecy/lack of transparency) that the non-profit would eventually pay a lot of money. This is almost a fraudulent level of siphoning non-profit money.
Btw, this is hilarious - regular employees have non-competes in their contracts (sometimes void/illegal, depending on the local jurisdiction) and breaching them is an immediately fireable offense (sometimes leading to more severe consequences). You work on a small thing on the side? Better be careful, ask your manager/HR, risk it getting taken over by the company (luckily, IIUC this part is mostly illegal now in all jurisdictions that "matter" for tech).
But sitting on multiple boards where you have much more room and possibilites for creating conflicts of interest and damaging the company? All fine and common!