These are serious questions, not gotchas. I don’t know the answers, and I think having those answers would make it easier to evaluate whether or not the paper was a significant conflict of interest. The opinions we have formed now are shaped by our biases about current events.
It didn’t make HN.
> 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.
Considering what's in the charter, it seems like she didn't do anything wrong?
> 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.
>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.
It’s incredibly disingenuous to slap your name on a paper claiming a company is doing malfeasance such as triggering a race-to-the-bottom for AI ethics, when you serve on the board of directors for that company.
It’s shameful. Either she should have resigned from the company or recused herself from the paper.
It’s like if I went around slashing tires in the neighborhood then posted signs on my common entrance “a criminal lives here” and show my poster as an example of my great civic service protecting others from my vile neighbors.
I'm not sure if this is the true statement, because the not-for-profit/profit arms make it more complex.
In this case, the non-for-profit board seems to act as a kind of governance over the profit arm, in a way, it's there to be a roadblock to the profit arm.
Normally a board aligns with the incentives: to maximize profit for shareholders.
Here the board has the opposite incentive, to maximize AGI safety and achievement, even at the detriment of profit and investors.
To put these claims in a published paper in such a naive way with no disclosure is academically disingenuous.
Academically, did she not disclose being on the board on her paper?
Being at the top of the org and being present during the specific incidents that gives one qualms burdens one with moral responsibility, even if they were the one who voted against.
You shouldn’t say “they did [x]” instead of “we did [x]” when x is bad and you were part of the team.
Or, that she should write her paper in the first person: "We, OpenAI, are doing bad things." That would probably be seen as vastly more damaging to OpenAI, and also ridiculous since she doesn't have the right to represent OpenAI as "we".
I have no idea why you think that should be a rule, aside from wanting Helen to never be able to criticize OpenAI publicly. I think it's good for the public if a board member will report what they see as potentially harmful internal problems.
Regarding specific verbiage and grammar, I’m sure an academic could give clearer guidance on what is better form in professional writing. What was presented was clearly lacking.
While the system card itself has been well received among researchers interested in understanding GPT-4’s risk profile, it appears to have been less successful as a broader signal of OpenAI’s commitment to safety. The reason for this unintended outcome is that the company took other actions that overshadowed the import of the system card: most notably, the blockbuster release of ChatGPT four months earlier. Intended as a relatively inconspicuous “research preview,” the original ChatGPT was built using a less advanced LLM called GPT-3.5, which was already in widespread use by other OpenAI customers. GPT-3.5’s prior circulation is presumably why OpenAI did not feel the need to perform or publish such detailed safety testing in this instance. Nonetheless, one major effect of ChatGPT’s release was to spark a sense of urgency inside major tech companies.149 To avoid falling behind OpenAI amid the wave of customer enthusiasm about chatbots, competitors sought to accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes, with Google creating a fast-track “green lane” to allow products to be released more quickly.150 This result seems strikingly similar to the race- to-the-bottom dynamics that OpenAI and others have stated that they wish to avoid. OpenAI has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of ChatGPT and GPT-4, including regarding copyright issues, labor conditions for data annotators, and the susceptibility of their products to “jailbreaks” that allow users to bypass safety controls.151 This muddled overall picture provides an example of how the messages sent by deliberate signals can be overshadowed by actions that were not designed to reveal intent.
What a lovely turn of phrase! I'm stealing it for use later, in place of "actions speak louder than words".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374972
It has an excess amount of weasel words, so you might need to employ ChatGPT to read between the lines.
If I were the CEO of OpenAI, I'd be pretty pissed if a member of my own board was shitting on the organization she was a member of while puffing up a competitor. But the tone of that paper makes me think that the schism must go back much earlier (other reporting said things really started to split a year ago when ChatGPT was first released), and it sounds to me like Toner was needling because she was pissed with the direction OpenAI was headed.
I'm thinking of a good previous comment I read when the whole Timnit Gebru situation at Google blew up and the Ethical AI team at Google was disbanded. The basic argument was on some of the inherent incompatibilities between an "academic ombudsman" mindset, and a "corporate growth" mindset. I'm not saying which one was "right" in this situation given OpenAI's frankenstein org structure, but just that this kind of conflict was probably inevitable.