Sam Altman wins power struggle, returns to OpenAI with new board
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No employees or investors anywhere are "promised" any such thing, that's ridiculous. In the case of investors, it would be illegal.
Lots of people want lots of things, but it is beyond the pale when hardball capitalists start whining about how unfair their own system is.
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I am also struck by:
So like... a venture to be owned by OpenAI with the blessings of his board? A venture to be owned by OpenAI without running it past his board? Or his own little side project he's running while also the OpenAI CEO?
I have no particular vested interests here, but I am just so skeptical that the board has totally done wrong here and that Altman is above reproach. It just never happens like that.
And that letter signed by 700 employees... honestly that is also super... odd ... if you really think about it. Yes these skills are in high demand.... but they're all signing in solidarity for this guy most of them haven't met? Their work environment is so perfect that they'll follow him anywhere? Every last one of them For Sure had a new job awaiting them and was super confident about that?
Then you add in the whole "Oh I know, let's get Larry Summers in here, he's the dude who will fix everything."
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I'm not super up on the lingo and I'm in a little bit of a hurry so if this sounds a bit disjointed, I apologize to anyone unfortunate enough to read it.
I think that this whole episode really sort of exposes the reality behind this concept of ethical governance or keeping humanity safe or whatever the buzzwords are. It turns out that having the power to pull the plug on something doesn't mean a lot when there are billions of dollars at stake, an utterly minuscule amount of which could be used to destroy the lives of anyone who puts that wealth in any sort of jeopardy.
Ultimately, I'm of several minds about this. A company like Firefox can have an ethical governance board because...look, I like Firefox, but it's a browser. I've used it preferentially since forever. But if it shut down tomorrow, I can still use Safari, or Brave (which I already use on iOS anyway, such as it is), or Vivaldi, or whatever. It would suck a lot, because aside from Safari in it's various forms, Firefox is the only real bulwark against Chromium dominance. But it wouldn't result in nuclear bombs vaporizing metropolises.
I actually am very concerned about ML. I don't think it's overmuch to say that, at the very least, the possibility exists that it could become an existential threat to humanity. I think the idea of safeguards is a noble one. I just don't believe that, in the world we inhabit today, there's much of anything that can be done to postpone the inevitable. Even if EMPs fried every computer in existence today, enough people and enough written technical material would survive to ensure that integrated circuits would be reinvented in short order.
It's like warrant canaries...it's all fun and games until the three-letter agency making the demand makes it clear that they can kill your entire family, make it look like an accident, and then lean on the local constabulary to write the whole thing off rather than carry out an actual investigation.
So, I mean, in conclusion, I guess...RIP humanity?We had an okay run, I guess...
The Profit Motive is, by definition, incompatible with ethical governance. Though individual publicly traded businesses sometimes put on a show of being governed by principle, the Stock Market writ large does not try or even pretend to be ethical, at any point.
A lot of people sort of vaguely believe/assume it is, so they can sleep at night. But it's either maximizing profits OR sticking to an ethical position, you can't prioritize both. Any company with a share price is indelibly compromised in that regard.
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The board could have talked it over with some more people, voiced their concerns, held town-halls with employees or done literally anything to appear deliberative, thoughtful and prepared before pressing the big red button.
It doesn't look like this board made any attempt to wield their soft power at all.
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The board has definitely done wrong here. Either:
1. Altman is super guilty and should be removed. But they fucked it up and now he's in charge with no stops on his power. OR:
2. Altman is innocent and should not be removed. But then why did they try?
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The old board did have a "know your place" attitude, hence their arrogance in the firing of Sam.
But when the workers and investors revolted and the board learned their true place. The board doesn't have the power to destroy the company.
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They actually do have a right to. In fact, if they stuck to their guns, that's exactly what was going to happen, by all accounts.
Turns out, that was NOT their goal, else they would have stuck with it.
I wrote it out elsewhere, but the board has revealed themselves to be utterly, objectively incompetent. Shit on Larry Summers all you want, I promise you he's more competent than these folks. This whole thing has been a class in "what not to do on a company board."
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Why are people acting like this beef had anything to do with A I. safety when the whole thing was a personal vendetta about money?
Nothing has changed except Open AI no longer being a clown car in its governance.
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They only failed because of thousands of people like you who regard their ethical decision making as a practical failure. If everyone stepped back and asked themselves, without panic, what was behind the decision and gave the decision time to prove itself one way or the other this situation would be very different. Instead everyone acted as though the firing of two employees would mean the inherent destruction of the company and that drastic action was needed within hours to avert disaster. The employees who signed the letter are shortsighted, panicky fools, and exactly not the kind of people who should be in charge of the future.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
Heh a few of us were griping about leadership at work recently and I brought this up, how wow it must be nice to have a leader people would actually walk out the door with. But it got me thinking, what‘s it like there that this is the case? Altman doesn’t seem like your cult leader type. Great benefits? Great pay? Foosball tables at every cube? What exactly makes them all feel like he’s worthy of that kind of loyalty?
I guess it could just be that they were pissed at the board for jeopardizing the company, so Altman was the alternative and a way forward, rather than it being loyalty to him in per se. Or as you say maybe there’s more to it.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall at some employee chats about this.
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These aren't donations, they are INVESTMENTS. Both counterpaties have responsibilities. I suspect every investor has a contract that says something entirely different than what you think.
But you glossed right over the part where you completely misstate OpenAI's charter which defines the responsibilities of the board. OpenAI's mission is to achieve and control AGI. That is what the nonprofit exists to achieve. How does shutting down commercial OpenAI and skulking away in fear achieve any of that? It doesn't. It does the opposite of that.
Either that board member is tossing out complete bullshit or they are wholly unsuited to be board memebers. AGI doesn't exist. It's not even close to existing. It might never exist. Whatever the board THINKS they're controlling right now, they aren't controlling AGI as an objective fact. Again, AGI doesn't exist.
This is the board trying to leverage some kind of control over the humans working on clearly non-AGI products. In the right context, it might even be appropriate to do so. But that context is the charter.
The charter doesn't actually say a damn thing about making sure non-AGI technologies developed along the way work for the benefit of anyone but investors. In fact, the entire structure is built on exactly this premise. Again, being able to commercialize non-AGI discoveries for their own corporate benefit is literally the deal the OpenAI nonprofit took to the marketplace and offered investors.
That's why I've always said OpenAI is full of crap. And they're still full of crap. Some full of crap board member trying to pretend like their C-suite dick slinging match was for the benefit of all humaity is just the icing on the cake.
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Whether or not they have the right (or maybe the "right"?) to destroy OpenAI or not has to do with whatever is written in the charter. Some people are claiming that they had no right to do what they did, some people are claiming that they did.
It doesn't really matter. What the board learned is that they don't have the power to destroy the company. I'd say that there's a lesson in here about the difference between intelligence and wisdom, but there were definitely some failures of intelligence as well as an insufficiency of wisdom.
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You may want to read the documentation on these specific investments. They are explicitly disclaimed as being anything even close to anything other than the equivalent of a high risk/loss all but guaranteed investment and they say any investor should consider it more of a donation than an investment.
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Equity. A lot of the employs have stock/equity that is worth millions. It's value would not be worth much if Sam poached a decent amount of the lead engineers etc or if the non-profit wing put the breaks on the companies development.
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They had the right and the power. They simply decided that the best interests of OpenAI (or themselves) was in not exercising that power.
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Taking the longterm historical view, this is what I see about what the OpenAI board wanted to accomplish.
From the article;
noted that the nonprofit board's mission is to "ensur[e] the company develops AI for humanity's benefit—even if that means wiping out its investors."
I have heard a similar kind of rationale about the old Xerox PARC.
From the IEESpectrum website;
”Some researchers say PARC was a product of the 1960s and that decade’s philosophy of power to the people, of improving the quality of life.”
From Alan Kay;
“Xerox offered 10 years of blank-check funding. They never promised to make the stuff into products; that wasn’t the charter.”
The goals of the OpenAI Board and the goals of Xerox PARC have a lot of similarities, to do things slowly and carefully..
But against this idealism there is also a capitalist argument to push out products as soon as possible.
The capitalist side of the argument against Xerox PARC was most clearly led by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jobs and his team went to Xerox PARC. Jobs hired people from Xerox PARC and so did Gates. From that the GUI personal computer revolutionized that market.
Against the OpenAI Board are Sam Altman and MS CEO Satya Nadella.
What about ethical safeguards?
Think about all the businesses which have almost been killed off by progressing technology.
The iPhone/Android have almost eliminated physical media use and outlets to sell or rent it. Or with various video streaming/text sites which copy media and how copyright has almost been buried.
Now AI companies want to scrape as much information as possible from writers, artists, musicians and everything else.
AI will be used to try to mimic and manipulate including in politics.
There is lots of talk about more monitoring of AI but when money is to be made, consequences are often pushed aside.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-parc
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What you are thinking of we is what we like to call "Title" power. Title power isn't worth much if nobody follows you. Besides in the real world most big power moves are made with phone calls behind closed doors. No real declarations of authority and Title power needed
The reality is that in most cases if you have to resort to using Title power it means you've already lost. You just don't know it yet.
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If the board had wanted they could have (effectively) ended the LLC and stayed on the board. It was their decision to make. They literally were empowered to do so by the the charter. However, they valued other things more than that and thus decided to come to a compromise.
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I think the board recognised a losing proposition when they saw one. Even if they decided to shutter the company, nothing was stopping Microsoft from scooping up Sam Altman or their employees. So Microsoft could in theory just eventually end up replicating openAI with sufficient time and money.
So just having the right and the power to do something may not ultimately amount to anything if you have basically lost all leverage and with it, the ability to directly influence the outcome you were hoping for in the first place.
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No. They wanted Altman fired and to have the company to continue running business as usual with their new hand picked CEO.
But that didn't happen...at all. Ttle power can only get you so far...Think:
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"I'm in charge here."
"Do you feel in charge?"
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Kind of like that.
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It's not lost on me either. Particularly egregious that they're firing the two women (apparently this whole thing started when Altman tried to fire Helen for writing an academic paper he didn't like and she fired him first) on the board and replacing them with not just two men, but one of those men being Larry "Women are genetically inferior to men at science and mathematics" Summers, also of "We need 10 million people to lose their jobs for the economy" fame. And people wonder why women in STEM struggle and get pushed out.
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They did - the unique structure of the board was that 50% were accountable to the non-profit org and their priority was ensuring AI safety. They believed that Altman was compromising that aspect, and so had a duty of care to act against him. The fact that Altman and MSFT won, raises big questions about future safety priorities.
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I wouldn't go that far but at least you are on the right track.
Altman had the true power in this confrontation. Those board members had Title power and nothing more.... absolutely nothing. Which is why Altman won and they lost.
Just think about it for a minute. Altman had 700 employees doing his bidding with NO TITLE. the guy was basically unemployed with no Title authority over anybody. The board members only had their official titles to stand on and it meant less than nothing to the employees, the actual true life blood of the company.
To any aspiring managers out there I implore you not to strictly rely on title power get them to to do what you want. Only the worst of the worst managers do that.
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Yes I can disagree with the above.
1) His rockets will do nothing to save humanity, cause there is no destination they can possibly reach to do that.
2) Already around before.
3) Look at 2.
4) Even Al Gore has more claim to that.
5) Twitter is a crapfest now.
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Snarky Robot
Ars Legatus Legionis
The notion that capitalism must inherently be evil is silly. As is the notion that companies making profits cannot be ethical.
Even publicly traded companies don’t have a responsibility to put profit above all else. That often is how they’re run, because the Board demands it (and executives get stock options that incentivize them to maximize it). But being for profit doesn’t mean a lack of ethics. You work as a for-profit person and you don’t lack ethics.
It’s very easy to set up a corporation that has firm limits on disparity between highest and lowest paying employee (or even a completely flat pay structure where everyone makes the same), on setting limits on how much of a profit they can make (and where any excess must go). They can push for their employees to take collective action (union or otherwise). They can put 1 or more positions on the BoD for the exclusive use of a person nominated by employees. Corporate structure can mandate ethics, or otherwise incentivize them.
The problem is not capitalism or having a profit motive. The problem is with people actually wanting to form or work for a company like that. It’s just reality that you need buy-in from everyone involved if you want that.
They very clearly didn’t here. Maybe it was greed, as some insist. Or maybe it was the fact that they didn’t buy into the way it was handled or even the specific ethics the Board wanted.
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I would have thought a 49% ownership might be worth a board seat regardless.
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Sure, perfect theoretical capitalism can be all flowers and rainbows, like perfect theoretical anything.
The fact is that this particular shot at ethical capitalism failed astoundingly, and as you yourself point out most people don't even want to try. Business could be ethical in theory, but it isn't in practice, and that's what people care about. I'm not aware of any real life examples that actually, explicitly forwent significant profits--let alone hit the Self Destruct Button, as in this case--purely out of principle.
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There were no reusable rockets before Falcon 9. The cost reduction and schedule rate that SpaceX has enabled is revolutionary for space access. How that “saves” humanity is unclear I’ll grant.
Electric cars: Tesla definitely helped speed it up and end the constant waffling about at the majors. They only signed up to big battery investments when they saw it was that or let Tesla and various Chinese companies own their entire market.
Solar: Tesla did nothing of note here. No idea what this claim is about. The also-ran rooftop solar business?
Twitter: proudly a nazi bar, as opposed to kind of ashamed of the Nazis as it used to be. It’s a major change, to be sure!
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He took enough money for fifty people to retire comfortably and bet it on two things:
- electric cars, which were so pie-in-the-sky that there were literal conspiracy theories at the time about how the big car companies wouldn’t let anyone develop an electric car
- reusable space launch, which the parallel efforts of all spacefaring governments and their supporting aerospace contractors had failed to achieve over the previous fifty years
Those things exist the way they do today because he made those bets. When they’d have existed otherwise is an entirely hypothetical question.
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meaning we might be much further along at all of them, and who knows what else, if Musk had never been born
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Investors are thrilled he’s back, but perhaps the board had valid concerns?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/...etter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/...etter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/
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For those interested, here's a copy of the article without the paywall.
Altman's shilling of WorldCoin is really all I need to know about him to know he's a sleazy crank, but additional context is always useful.
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Heres the thing with Elon.
Hes almost our generations Edison. He seems to act like Edison, a complete asshole. He gets credited like Edison, it was Edison’s employees who did all the work.
Lets us just hope that history is a bit more clear with Elon than it has been with Edison.
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