>...
>We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.
>Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.
>...
>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. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”
Seems to me like Helen is doing a better job of upholding the charter than Sam is.
Safety isn’t binary, it’s degrees of risk assessment, mitigation and acceptance. Infinite safety is never progressing. But never progressing means failing the charity mission. And AI isn’t just being created at OpenAI, for them to succeed at the charity mission they need to stay ahead of risky competitors with a safer AI.
The charity can’t afford its GPU costs without the LLC, and the LLC can’t lead the industry if it’s behind all the competitors. To be relevant the safety side needs compute, and they need to be ahead of the curve, and they also need real world data from the LLC. If the charity nukes the LLC, it takes itself with it and fails its mission. They’re so intertwined they need compromise in the board. And they let that board dwindle to small entrenched factions, which sounded more like the Hatfield’s and the mcCoys. With such a fragile structure they needed mature adults with functional conflict resolution.
So -- if appropriate -- he could make changes.
Or he could not change, and she publishes anyway.
> No, Sam wanted to be the first recipient of Helen's expression.
If I get copy approval to what you write, that is by definition a restriction to your freedom of expression. How is this up for debate?
Agreed. It seems remarkable that she dealt with her conflict of interest so thoroughly that she published an article that was mildly critical of the organization. I do not think her duty was to let Sam Altman seize power by firing her from the board on a flimsy pretext, though.
I'd say the OpenAI employees are the ones with the conflict of interest, since they stand to get rich if the company does well, independent of whether the charter is being upheld.
> I'd say the OpenAI employees are the ones with the conflict of interest, since they stand to get rich if the company does well, independent of whether the charter is being upheld.
Those pesky employees again. Too bad we still need them. But after AGI is a fact we don't and then it'll be a brave new world.
Where are you drawing this conclusion from? Nothing in the text suggests that was his intent - certainly his actions thereafter suggest that he was in fact more concerned with the potential harm to the for-profit company.
>In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.
Otherwise I'm not sure what changes would be "appropriate" for him to direct.
A board member should care about their organization more than their interpretation of the charter. If a Mozilla board member publicly criticized Firefox for violating their charter of a free and open internet because they're receiving money from Google, while also praising Brave for not doing so, I guarantee that they'd also be ousted.
Isn't the whole reason we have non-profit boards and charters is so that they can make just this kind of call?
(I'm not saying that this is what is happening here -- just responding to your particular claim.)
Yes. From the board. That's why we typically don't see boards air their dirty laundry out in the open even when in retrospect, they obviously had a problem with leadership.
It's not a contradiction to criticize someone for saying too much sometimes and saying too little another time. The board should be open to insiders and cautious with external communications.
As a CEO I'd want your concerns brought to me so they could be addressed. But if they were addressed, that is one less paper that could be published by Ms. Toner. As a member of the openai board, seeing the problem solved is more important to openai than her publishing career.
"Second, because the board is still the board of a Nonprofit, each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to make and distribute profit, it is subject to this mission. The Nonprofit’s pzrincipal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors."
I see. I don't know whether she did discuss any issues with Sam before hand, but it really does not sound like she had any obligation to do so (this isn't your typical for-profit board so her duty wasn't to OpenAI as a company but to what OpenAI is ultimately trying to do).
The optics dont look good though if a board member is complaining publicly.
If Sam would let it go what would happen? Nothing. Criticism and comparisions already exist and will exist. Having it coming from board member at least gives counter argument that they're well aware of potential problems and there is opportunity to address gaps if they are confirmed.
If regulators find argument in the paper reasonable and that's going to have impact - what's wrong with that? It just means argument was true and should be addressed.
They don't need to worry about commercial side because money is being pured more than enough.
The nature of safety research is critical by definition. You can't expect to have research constrained to talk only in positive terms.
Both sides should have worried less and carry on.
That's the pro safety solution.
If she believes that the most advanced current effort is heading in the wrong direction, then slowing it down is helpful. "Most advanced" isn't the same as "safest".
> and potentially let a different effort take the lead
Sure but her job isn't to worry about other efforts, it's to worry about whether OpenAI (the non-profit) is developing AGI that is safe (and not whether OpenAI LLC, the for-profit company, makes any money).
Then it was 1/6 about the voting.
But voting is totally different thing than speaking about concerns and then getting actually them into the list, which will we voted further if they decide to do something about it.
In theory that is 1/6 * 1/6 power if you are alone with it for the decision to happen.
How? Being a board member is not enough. There were aready likely two against her in this case, while the rest is unknown.
Fall 2021
Holden Karnofsky resigns from the Board, citing a potential conflict because his wife, Daniela Amodei, is helping start Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor, with her brother Dario Amodei. (They all live(d) together.) The exact date of Holden’s resignation is unknown; there was no contemporaneous press release.
Between October and November 2021, Holden was quietly removed from the list of Board Directors on the OpenAI website, and Helen was added (Discussion Source [1]).
0. https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
1. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fmDFytmxwX9qBgcaX/...
Isn’t she an academic? Getting people to pay attention to her is at least half her job.
how could this possibly be accomplished when trying to sell the product itself. Investors pouring Billions into it are in it for profit... they're not going to let you just stop, or help a competitor for free.
This whole thing has been wildly mishandled but there’s an angle here where the nonprofit is doing exactly what they always said they would do and the ones that potentially look like fools are Microsoft and other investors that put their shareholder capital into this equation thinking that would go well.
I don't think I have seen Idefix being on a leash ever .. he just runs around free. And there are indeed many dogs on a leash, who lead their "masters" who just follow behind.
So it adds up the same.
At least assuming Microsoft hasn't run out of capacity in their data centers. I know Azure sometimes have capacity issues but those issues are intermittent and not say 5 year long (or whatever the windoe is when it comes to consuming these credit)
Yes it does, because we're taking about GPU availability that is absolutely highly constrained across the economy.
If we were talking about CPU credits instead, then you're right that Microsoft would be paying/losing merely cost.
That seems dishonest given the last three years or so of conflict about these concerns that he’s been the center of. Of course he’s aware of those concerns. More likely, that statement was just him maneuvering to be the good guy when he tried to fire her, but it backfired on him.
> Mr. Altman, the chief executive, recently made a move to push out one of the board’s members because he thought a research paper she had co-written was critical of the company.
It's like your job is to fire me if I fail to fulfill the company mission, but I will fire you if you don't get my approval before saying stuff in public.
Other board members elect replacements iirc
OpenAI is operated at a public charity and is required to meet a "public support test" of 33%, so Musk could not have given his $40 million without the $20 million from Open Philanthropy, an EA supported public charity. In fact, most of Open Philanthropy's money went to OpenAI.
Public charities are also required to have less than a majority of the board be employees or relatives of employees. For a while, after Elon Musk was removed, Holden Karnofsky of Open Philanthropy was the only non-employee on the board.
[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding...
> How does a language model decide which questions it will engage with and which it deems inappropriate?
This is what we mean by safety? Content moderation?
This is crucial, because safety is a convenient pretext for people whose real motivations are elitist. It's not that they want to slow down AI development; it's that they want to keep it restricted to a tight inner circle.
We have at least as much to fear from elites who think only megacorps and governments are responsible enough to be given access as we do from AI itself. The failures of our elite class have been demonstrated again and again in recent decades--from the Iraq War to Covid. These people cannot be trusted as stewards, and we can't afford to see such potentially transformative technology employed to further ossify and insulate the existing power structure.
OpenAI had the right idea. Keep the source closed if you must, and invest heavily on safety, but make the benefits available to all. The last thing we need is an AI priesthood that will inevitably turn corrupt.
Well, you see the result. Apart from this drama, lots of debate and speculation whether we are already in AGI territory, because it is all just a black box and no one knows what exactly was in the training data to be able to judge the quality of the output.
That is way too much AI priesthood for me, just open it for real, if you don't want concentration of power.
My point is this coup against OpenAI (seemingly) wasn't started by people who want to make AI more open. They want to make it inaccessible unless you're in their club. To my reading, that is more starkly opposed to the charter than anything Sam Altman has done. Commercialization = giving wide access. Not total 100% open source access, but wide access nonetheless.
The velocity of release and entwining with MSFT (by the profit side) might then be reasonably seen as a great concern for the board.
The default, in the absence of an OpenAI, is that it gets developed secretly by these organizations, and they get to decide who can use it (hint: it's not you, typical HN reader).
OpenAI were the only ones at least trying to walk this tightrope, and I think they were doing a pretty good job. So what were the real motivations of these three wealthy/elite board members who are taking it upon themselves to decide this issue for the rest of humanity? It's looking less and less likely that safety was the reason.
Which can end up with China taking the lead. I don't understand why they think it's safer. Imagine if the US did nothing during the Cold War "for safety".
> Suppose a leader pledges during a campaign to provide humanitarian aid to a stricken nation or the CEO of a company commits publicly to register its algorithms or guarantee its customers' data privacy. In both cases, the leader has issued a public statement before an audience who can hold them accountable if they fail to live up to their commitments. The political leader may be punished at the polls or subjected to a congressional investigation; the CEO may face disciplinary actions from the board of directors or reputational costs to the company's brand that can result in lost market share.
I wonder if she had Sam Altman in mind while writing this.
But she could have made that point more forcefully by not comparing Anthropic to OpenAI, after all who better than her to steer OpenAI in the right direction. I noted in a comment elsewhere that all of these board members appear to have had at least one and some many more conflicts of interest. Helen probably believes that her loyalty is not to OpenAI but to something higher than that based on her remark that destroying the company would serve to fulfil its mission (which is a very strange point of view to begin with). But that doesn't automatically mean that she's able to place it in context, within OpenAI, within the USA, the Western world and the world as a whole.
It's like saying the atomic bomb would have never been invented if the people at Los Alamos didn't do it. They did it in three years after it became known that it could be done in principle. Others tried and failed but without the same resources. I suspect that if the USA had not done it that eventually France, the UK and Russia would have gotten there as well and later on China. Israel would not have had the bomb without the USA (willing or unwilling) and India and Pakistan would have achieved it but much later as well. So we'd end up with the same situation that we have today modulo some timing differences and with another last chapter on WWII. Better? Maybe. But it is also possible that the Russians would have launched a first strike on the USA if they were unopposed. It almost happened as it was!
The open question then is: does she really believe that no other entity has the resources to match OpenAI and does she believe that if such an entity does exist that it too will self destruct rather than to go through with the development?
And does she believe that this will hold true for all time? That they and their colleagues are so unique that they hold the key to something that can otherwise not be replicated.
People at "top" companies fall into this fallacy very readily. FAANG (especially Google and Facebook engineers) think this way on all sorts of things.
The reality is that for any software project, your competition is rarely more than 1 year behind you if what you're doing is obviously useful. OpenAI made ChatGPT, and that revealed that this sort of thing was obviously useful, kicking off the arms race. Now they are bleeding money running a model that nobody could run profitably in order to keep their market position.
I have tried to explain this to xooglers several times, and it often goes in one ear and out the other until they get complacent and the competition swipes them about a year later.
A non-profit could not have beaten the superpowers in developing the atomic bomb, and a non-profit cannot beat commercial interests in developing AI.
Not a day passes that I don't hear from some company that has pretensions about the good of humanity and how they are leading the way to it. Plenty of non-profits and government orgs have the same pretensions.
It's impossible to understand this position. We can be sure that in some countries right now there are vigorous attempts to build autonymous AI-enabled killing machines, and those people care nothing for whatever safety guardrails some US startup is putting in place.
I'm a believer in a skynet scenario, though much smarter people than me are not, so I'm hopefully wrong. But whatever, hand waving attempts to align/ soften, safeguard this technology are pointless and will only slow down the good actors. The genie is out of the bottle.
From the perspective of avoiding an AI race, conflict of interest could very well be a good thing. You're operating under a standard capitalist model, where we want the market to pick winners, may the most profitable corporation win.
> From the perspective of avoiding an AI race, conflict of interest could very well be a good thing.
On the American subcontinent: yes. But the world is larger than that.
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at.
I don't know why she chose to publicly execute Altman, there just isn't enough information to say for sure. It probably wasn't a specific, imminent safety concern like "Our new frontier model was way more capable than we were expecting and attempted a breakout that nearly succeeded during internal red teaming", according to the new CEO it wasn't anything like that. The new CEO has heard their reason, but is putting a lot of pressure on them to put that reason in writing for some reason. I don't know why, we just don't have enough information.
But basically, she is a very qualified person on the exact topic you are concerned about and has devoted her career to solving that problem. I wouldn't write off what she's doing or has done here as "She didn't consider that China exists".
So I'm not sure how this all integrates in her head but you break the glass in break-the-glass moments, not before, it's a one-shot thing.
I think any action to immediately destroy OpenAI should have been preceded by being on-track to create AGI and strong indications that it was not going to benefit humanity, as the charter implies. Anything less and it's just a powerplay. But what is the point of having a nice fat red button if you never get to push it?
When did a first strike of the Sowjetunion allmost happened? I rather think it was the other way around, first strike was evaluated, to hit them before they got the bomb.
Perhaps if you think of it as another YC startup, but not so much if you view OpenAI as a non-profit first and foremost.
Huh, this sounds pretty crazy to me. Like, it's assuming that a board member should act deceptively in order to help the for-profit arm of OpenAI avoid government scrutiny, and that trying to remove them from the board if they don't want to do that is reasonable. But in fact the entire purpose of the board is to advance the mission of the parent non-profit, which doesn't sound obviously compatible with "avoid giving the FTC (maybe legitimate) ammunition against the for-profit subsidiary, even if that means you should hide your beliefs".
Sorry for the confusion.
I, personally, have a hard time picking sides here. On its face it seems that Ms Toner is more aligned with OpenAI’s stated mission.
However Sam seems much better suited to operating the company and being the “public face” of AI. One thing I’m pretty confident in is that the board isn’t capable of navigating OpenAI through the rough seas it’s currently in.
I think an argument could realistically be made to blow up the whole governance structure and reset with new principals across the board, that being said I don’t know who’d be a natural arbiter here.
At the end of the day the untenable spot Ms Toner is in is that the genie is out of the bottle which makes her position of allowing the company to self-destruct a bit tone deaf.
AGI is either just around the corner or it will be 50 years or more and if it is just around the corner you'd hope that parties that have at least some semblance of balance would end up in charge of the thing. Because if it is possible I expect it to be done given the amount of resources that are being thrown at this. Assuming it can be done weaponization of this tech would change the balance of power in the world dramatically. Everybody seems to be worried about the wrong thing: whether or not the AGI will be friendly to us. That doesn't really matter, what matters is who controls it.
No single individual (Altman, Toner, Nadella, or anybody else) should be taking the responsibility about what happens onto themselves, if anything the board of OpenAI has shown that this isn't a matter for junior board members because the effects range far further than just OpenAI.
> Assuming it can be done weaponization of this tech would change the balance of power in the world dramatically.
Yes it would, but it wouldn't be as bad as everyone dying.
> Everybody seems to be worried about the wrong thing: whether or not the AGI will be friendly to us. That doesn't really matter, what matters is who controls it.
No, "who controls it" is a problem best tackled after "will it kill everyone." You say "That doesn't really matter," but again, Sam Altman himself thinks "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
Oh, ok. That makes it alright then. So, let's see those minutes of that meeting where this was decided with all of the pomp and gravitas required rather than that it was a petty act of revenge or to see who could oust who first from OpenAI. Because that's what it looks like to me based on what is now visible.
> Yes it would, but it wouldn't be as bad as everyone dying.
Not much is as bad as everyone dying. But for now that hasn't happened. It also seems a bit like a larger version of the 'think of the children' argument, you can justify any action with that reason.
> No, "who controls it" is a problem best tackled after "will it kill everyone." You say "That doesn't really matter," but again, Sam Altman himself thinks "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
Then why the fuck is he trying to bring it into the world? Seriously, they should spend all of their talent on trying to sabotage those efforts then, infiltrate research groups and set up a massive campaign to divert resources away from the development of AGI. Instead they are trying as hard as they can to create the genie in the sure conviction that they can keep it bottled up.
It's delusional on so many fronts at once that it is isn't even funny, their position is so horribly inconsistent that you have to wonder if they're all right in the head.
EA is becoming a massive red flag in my book.
They seem to miss the fact that every weapon that humanity has so far produced has been used, and that those that haven't been used hang over us like shadows, and have been doing that for the last 70 some years. Those are weapons whose use you will notice. AGI is a weapon whose use you will not notice until you realize you are living in a stable dictatorship. The chances of that happening are far larger than the chances of everybody dying.
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the original founders of OpenAI believe AGI is an existential threat and are building it with the belief that it’s best they’re the ones who do it, rather than worse people, in an arms race. Eliezer is the one saying “you fucking fools, you’re speeding up the arms race and have now injected a shit ton of $ from all VC into accomplishing the naive capabilities with no alignment.”
People don’t even realize that Elon Musk founded Neuralink with the belief that AGI is such an existential threat, we’re better off becoming the AGI cyborgs than a separate inferior intelligence. But most of the people thinking theyre so smart and understand the AGI X risk landscape here, even Elon fans, don’t know that.
People really watch too many movies. The real risk isn't AGI killing us all, the real risk is that plenty of people will think they are smart enough to create it and then to contain it whilst the ruthless faction of humanity uses it to set up shop in a way that they can never ever be dislodged again. Think global Mafia or something to that effect, or a world divided into three chunks by three major power blocs each with their own AI core. That's a much more likely outcome and one that on account of an incompetent board has just become a little bit more likely.
Tone-deaf basically means "unpopular", doesn't it?
I'm old enough to remember when doing the right thing, even when it's unpopular, was considered a virtue.
NORTH AMERICAN
noun
a timid or feeble person. "Jennings plays him as something of a milquetoast"
adjective
feeble, insipid, or bland. "a soppy, milquetoast composer"
I only see negatives. Other entities with less of a brake on their ethics are gaining ground. Microsoft of all parties is strengthening their position and has full access to the core tech.
Did OpenAI actually have a meaningful brake though? Like, if all the employees apparently think that the success of the company is more important than the charter, can we be sure that OpenAI actually had a meaningful brake?
edit: Or that the board can't actually make a difference because whatever OpenAI doesn't do someone else will. But if people actually thought that were true they wouldn't have set up the board and charter.
It's amateur behavior. I'm sympathetic to her goals, less impressed by the execution.
Again, her mandate is not to help OpenAI deal with the FCC it's to prevent the company from building unsafe AI, one reasonable aspect of which might be to compare the methodologies of different companies.
You can justify pretty much anything with ends-justify-the-means logic and I have a hard time believing that the people who set up the charter would, a priori, have said that suppressing research comparing the safety approach of the company to a competitor in order to not make the company look bad so that the competitor wins because the company insists, without any basis, that they would be better for safety is in line with the principles of the charter. That is just trying to game the charter in order to circumvent it and is a textbook case of what the board was appointed to prevent.
This isn't a theoretical exercise where we get to do it all over again next week to see if we can do better, this is for keeps.
The point could have been made much more forceful by not releasing the report but holding it over Altman's head to get him to play ball.
> You can justify pretty much anything with ends-justify-the-means logic
Indeed. That's my point: the ends justify the means. This isn't some kind of silly game this is to all intents and purposes and arms race and those that don't understand that should really wake up: whoever gets this thing first is going to change the face of the world, it won't be the AGI that is your enemy it is whoever controls the AGI that could well be your enemy. Think Manhattan project, not penicillin.
> I have a hard time believing that the people who set up the charter would, a priori, have said that suppressing research comparing the safety approach of the company to a competitor in order to not make the company look bad so that the competitor wins because the company insists, without any basis, that they would be better for safety is in line with the principles of the charter. That is just trying to game the charter in order to circumvent it and is a textbook case of what the board was appointed to prevent.
That charter is and always was a fig leaf, I am probably too old and cynical to believe that it was sincere, it was in my opinion nothing but a way to keep regulators at bay. Just like I never bought SBF's 'Altruism' nonsense.
The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions comes to mind.
Given how Altman has responded to things throughout his career and in this, I fail to see how doing this would result in anything other than the same outcome: Altman won't be moved by that, but consider it extortion and move for her removal from the board, regardless. In the end, he wants criticism or calls for caution stifled.
That effort isn't critical to OpenAI other than to try to create a monopoly.
Would the destruction of OpenAI in 2023 be seen as bad or good with that hindsight?
It seems bad now but if you believe the board was operating with that future in mind (whether or not you agree with that future) it's completely reasonable imo.
She is doing her job to uphold the mission of the organization.
Who pays the bill for the non profit arm, wasnt that the for profit arm?
The important thing for the non-profit arm is the mission, its own existence is secondary.
So OpenAI should just shut down because the charitable donations were not enough to keep the lights on.
Also running the for-profit arm the way Altman did isn’t the only way.
A more reasonable CEO would do what he/she can to make money without running afoul of the charter. Yes, it will be less profit - and sometimes no profit at all - but that’s the way it should be in a non-profit organization.
OpenAI used to be an organization that dabbled with various AI technologies. Anyone remember their DOTA2 bot? Before Altman turned it into all about commercializing their LLM - going so far as to try to lobby congress to create laws, in the name of safety of course, to hobble any upstart competition.
Management and stockholders beware.
After his plans for rapid expansion and commercialization were in direct contrast to the company's aims, I guess she wrote the paper to highlight the issue.
It seems that, like in the case of Disney, the board has lower power and control than the CEO. Highly likely if you have larger than life people like Sam at the helm.
I would not trust the board, but I would also not trust Sam. When billions of dollars are at stake, its important to be critical of all the parties involved.
Say what? The CEO serves at the behest of the board, not the other way around. For Sam to tell a board member that they should bring their concerns to him suggests that Sam thinks he's higher than the board. No wonder she told him to go fly a kite.
That said, if she objects to open AI’s practices, the common sense thing to do is to resign from the board out of protest, not take actions that lead to the whole operation being burned to the ground.
My gut says that she is the central figure in how this all went down. She and D'Angelo are the central figures, if my gut is right.
It looks like Helen Toner was OK with destroying the company to make a point.
FTA:
> Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission
So as a break-the-glass move it was about as ineffective as throwing a can of gasoline on a fire.
It looks like Helen Toner is out of the board.
Helen believed she was doing her job according to the non-profit charter, obviously this hurts the for-profit side of things but that is not her mandate. That is the reason OpenAI is structured the way it is, with the intention of preventing capitalist forces from swaying them away from the non-profit charter, in hindsight it didn't work, but that was the intention (with the independent directors, no equity stakes, etc)
The board has all my respect for standing up to the capitalists of Altman, the VCs, Microsoft. Big feathers to ruffle - even though the execution was misjudged, turns out most of its employees are pretty capitalistic too
Exactly. This is a battle between altruistic principles and some of the most heavyweight greedy money in the world. The board messed up the execution, but so did OpenAI leadership when they offered million dollar pay packages to people in a non-profit that is supposed to be guided by selfless principles.
For the board, their job is to keep the mandate of the non-profit. The org is structured to prevent "bandits" from influencing their goals. Hence, I cannot fault non-profit directors for rejecting bandits, that is the reason they are there.
It is like criticising a charity's directors for not bowing to the pressure of large donors to change their focus or mandate. Do we want to live in a world where the rich entrench control and enrich themselves and allies, and we just justify it as bandits being bandits? And anyone who stands up against them gets labelled a fanatic or pejorative altruist?
Of course, it could also be that whatever interest groups she represents could not bare to lose a seat.
Whether initiated by her or her backers (or other board forces), I can't see any of the board stepping down if these are the kind of palace intrigues that have been occurring. They are all clearly so desperate for power they will cling to the positions on this rocketship for dear life. Even if it means blowing up the rocketship so they can keep their seat.
Microsoft can't spend good will erasing the entire board and replacing it, even tho it's near major shareholder because too much values the optics around its relationship to AI right now.
A strong, effective leader in the first place would have prevented this kind of situation. I think the board should be reset and replaced with more level headed, less ideological, more experienced veterans...tho picking a good board is no easy task.
because they don't have the power to as they do not have any stake in the governing non-profit.
Indeed. This is far more interesting. How the hell did Helen and Tasha get on, and stay on, the board.
https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board
That says Anthropic has a better approach to AI safety than OpenAI.
Sam apparently said she should have come to him directly if she had concerns about the company's approach and pointed out that as a board member her words have weight at a time when he was trying to navigate a tricky relationship with the FTC. She apparently told him to kick rocks and he started to look for ways to get her off the board.
All of that ... seems completely reasonable?
Like I've heard a lot of vague accusations thrown at Sam over the last few days and yet based on this account I think he reacted the exact same way any CEO would.
I'm much more interested in how Helen managed to get on this board at all.