Sam -> Mira -> Emmet -> Sam
There are two hard problems: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.
naming things, cache invalidation, off-by one errors, and overflows.
This is overly dramatic, but I suppose that's par for this round.
> none of this outrage would have taken place.
Yeah... I highly doubt this, personally. I'm sure the outrage would have been similar, as HN's current favorite CEO was fired.
I also have a Twitter account. Guess my opinion on the current or former Twitter CEOs?
Imagine arguing this in another context: "Man, if only the Supreme Court had clearly articulated its reasoning in overturning Roe v Wade, there wouldn't have been all this outrage over it."
(I'm happy to accept that there's plenty of room for avoiding some of the damage, like the torrents of observers thinking "these board members clearly don't know what they're doing".)
Did you read the bylaws? They have no responsibility to do any of that.
Here lies the body of William Jay,
Who died maintaining his right of way –
He was right, dead right, as he sped along,
But he's just as dead as if he were wrong.
- Dale Carnegiedoes it mean it's right or professional?
getting your point, but i hope you get the point i make as well, that just because you have no responsibility for something doesn't mean you're right or not unethical for doing or not doing that thing. so i feel like you're losing the point a little.
They did notify everyone. They did it after firing which is within their rights. They may also choose to stay silent if there is legitimate reason for it such as making the reasons known may harm the organization even more. This is speculation obviously.
In any case they didn't omit doing anything they need to and they didn't exercise a power they didn't have. The end result is that the board they choose will be impotent at the moment, for sure.
All this proved is that you can't take a major action that is deeply unpopular with employees, without consulting them, and expect to still have a functioning organization. This should be obvious, but it apparently never crossed the board's mind.
Like, nobody is going to arrest you for spitting on the street especially if you're an old grandpa. Nobody is going to arrest you for saying nasty things about somebody's mom.
You get my point, to some boundary both are kinda within somebody's rights, although can be suable or can be reported for misbehaving. But that's the keypoint, misbehavior.
Just because something is within your rights doesn't mean you're not misbehaving or not acting in an immature way.
To be clear, Im not denying or agreeing that the board of directors acted in an immature way. I'm just arguing against the claim that was made within your text that just because someone is acting within their rights that it's also a "right" thing to do necessary, while that is not the case always.
They may choose to, and they did choose to.
But it was an incompitant choice. (Obviously.)
most certainly would have still taken place; no one cares about how it was done; what they care about it being able to make $$; and it was clearly going to not be as heavily prioritized without Altman (which is why MSFT embraced him and his engineers almost immediately).
> notified their employees and investors they did notify their employees; they have fiduciary duty to investors as a nonprofit.
This whole conversation has been full of appeals to authority. Just because us tech people don't know some of these names and their accomplishments, we talk about them being "weak" members. The more I learn, the more I think this board was full of smart ppl who didn't play business politics well (and that's ok by me, as business politics isn't supposed to be something they have to deal with).
Their lack of entanglements makes them stronger members, in my perspective. Their miscalculation was in how broken the system is in which they were undermined. And you and I are part of that brokenness even in how we talk about it here
Everybody's guard is going to be up around Sam from now on. He'll have much less leverage over this board than he did over the previous one (before the other three of nine quit). I think eventually he will prevail because he has the charm and social skills to win over the other independent members. But he will have to reign in his own behavior a lot in order to keep them on his side versus D'Angelo
My guess is that he has less than a year, based on the my assumption that there will be constant pressure placed on the board to oust him.
I personally think it's weird if he really settles back in, especially given the other guys who resigned after the fact. There must be lots of other super exciting new things for him to do out there, and some pretty amazing leadership job offers from other companies. I'm not saying OpenAI will die out or anything, but surely it has shown a weak side.
People will contort themselves into pretzels to invent rationalizations.
Money.
There ist the board the investors the employees the senior management.
All other parties aligned against it and thus it couldn’t act. If only Sam would have rebelled. Or even just Sam and the investors (without the employees) nothing would have happened.
If you don't think there would be a shareholder revolt against the board, for simply exercising their most fundamental right to fire the CEO, I think you're missing part the picture.
If they were super-duper worried about how Sam was going to cause a global extinction event with AI, or even just that he was driving the company in too commercial of a direction, they should have said that to everyone!
The idea that they could fire the CEO with a super vague, one-paragraph statement, and then expect 800 employees who respect that CEO to just... be totally fine with that is absolutely fucking insane, regardless of the board's fiduciary responsibilities. They're board members, not gods.
I still believe in the theory that Altman was going hard after profits. Both McCauley and Toner are focused on the altruistic aspects of AGI and safety. Altman shouldn't be at OpenAI and neither should D’Angelo.
Sure, they don't have to. How did that work out?
Four CEOs in five days, their largest partner stepping in to try to stop the chaos, and almost the entirety of their employees threatening to leave for guaranteed jobs at that partner if the board didn't step down.
But why would anyone expect 800 people to risk their livelihoods and work without a little serious justification? This was an inevitable reaction.
If Altman was silent and/or said something like "people take some time off for Thanksgiving, in a week calmer minds will prevail" while negotiating behind the scenes, OpenAI would look a lot less dire in the last few days. Instead he launched a public pressure campaign, likely pressured Mira, got Satya to make some fake commitments, got Greg Bockman's wife to emotionally pressure Ilya, etc.
Masterful chess, clearly. But playing people like pieces nonetheless.
You could tell the same story about a rising sports team replacing their star coach, or a military sacking a general the day after he marched through the streets to fanfare after winning a battle.
Even without the money involved, a sudden change in leadership with no explanation, followed only by increasing uncertainty and cloudy communication, is not going to go well for those who are backing you.
Even in the most altruistic version of OpenAI's goals I'm fairly sure they need employees and funding to pay those employees and do the research.
Developer platform updates seem to be inline.
And in any case, the board also failed to specify how their action furthered the mission of the company.
From all appearances, it appeared to damage the mission of the company. (If for no other reason that it dissolve the company and gave everything to MSFT.)
1) Somebody with a competing phone product.
2) A think tanker who is trying to make it so that the government is more involved in phones, and seems to think phones probably shouldn’t exist at all.
3) A relative unknown who’s primarily claim to fame seems to be marrying an actor who was famous 15 years ago.
It’s clownish. OpenAI needs to completely free themselves of these people. The Microsoft plan seems like it would have been the best for literally everybody.
i know it is fun to deride people, but i suspect Tasha has done more and gone further in her life than you will, and your tone indicates anger at this
Well this sure seems unnecessary. I’m saying this because I googled her name when this happened, and the only articles I could find referenced her husband. I wasn’t seeing any of this work you’re talking about, at least not anything that would seem relevant. Can you link to some stuff?
Here’s a TechCrunch article that tries to go into the history of the OAI board, and doesn’t really have any information either: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/a-brief-look-at-the-histor...
Btw, I think “university trained prior executive” describes not just me but almost every single person on HN. “Involved in a non profit related to their work” I suspect also describes me and probably >90% of people posting on HN.
And also; maybe you haven’t been involved in non profit boards? “Spouse of famous/rich/etc” person is an extremely common reason to put somebody on a board for a practical reason: it helps with fundraising and exposure.
like, you get me, the board of directors is not the only actual power within a company, and that was proven by the whole scandal of Sam being discarded/fired that was made by the developers themselves. they also have the right to exercise their right to just not work at this company without the leader they may had liked.
The board seemed to have the confidence of none of the groups they needed confidence from.
As it's within the board's rights to hire or fire people like Sam or the developers.