Sam Altman wins power struggle, returns to OpenAI with new board

Altman has agreement to return, while most of the board that fired him is out.

See full article...

 

[Tall Dwarf]

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.

Helen Toner graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2014, her qualifications for being on this board are what exactly? "That would actually be consistent with the mission" - no thanks, get lost.

Tasha McCauley is associated with companies Fellow Robot and GeoSim Systems - good luck finding out what they are. The most remarkable thing about her is her husband, an actor Joseph Gordon Levitt.

These people tried to fire Sam Altman? What a joke. Diversity hires who were given a cushy job and failed miserably. Good riddance. Hiring board members based on genitalia just doesn't work whatever are the presumed benefits of diversity.

"And people wonder" - people wonder why D'Angelo is still there, not why these two are out. The entire board richly deserve the booting regardless of gender.

 

[Tall Dwarf]

Wait. Larry Summers? Larry "Women inherently can't be the best engineers" Summers? Larry "Decades of deregulation in banking immediately preceding the largest banking collapse in history" Summers?

I don't fully understand what all has gone on here, but someone's judgment is sus AF.

It was a result of negotiations between Altman and the old board. There is no other "someone", the board was the entity with power to make this deal. They had a choice to give OpenAI to Microsoft or to compromise. They compromised. Larry Summers is part of the deal.

"Women inherently can't be the best engineers" - not quite true. He pointed out that larger variability in traits among males can partially explain difference in gender representation in academics. He was right. Variability hypothesis is rather well researched and supported. He apologized not because he was wrong but because it was politically convenient. Good luck trying to cancel him.

 

[Tall Dwarf]

It was a bit more than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

He explicitly said that his best guess (in 2005) was that when it came to the radical difference in male/female faculty representation in the sciences, the 'largest phenomenon, by far' was 'issues of intrinsic aptitude', followed by 'what are in fact lessor factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.'

He's making a much stronger assertion that the variability hypothesis is true; he's asserting that 'intrinsic aptitude' was the largest factor in play. Even if he believed the variability hypothesis to be true (though your wikipedia link doesn't appear to give much reason to think he did, nor that he should have) isn't a meaningful support for his claims, except to mean that they aren't obviously false.

Even at the time, that seemed to be unsupported by the evidence available. Having just skimmed your link, it seems like his claim is less-supportable now than it was then, if not clearly false.

Here is another quote:

It does appear that on many, many different human attributes -- height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability -- there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means -- which can be debated -- there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top 25 research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.

It is VH exactly coupled with the effect on distribution of researchers. Even from your quote it is obvious that it was not a hard claim, it was an invitation for discussion of hypothesis. No one intended to have a honest discussion, so he apologized.

"that seemed to be unsupported by the evidence available" - nope, he said "there is relatively clear evidence". "it seems like his claim is less-supportable now than it was then, if not clearly false" - well, that's just a lie. A difference between genders in variability exists, it is undeniable. The Wikipedia page lists multiple researches that support it.

The hypothesis is actively suppressed due to the current "culture war". Anyone trying to touch the topic would risk their grants, may have problems with publication and likely to be cancelled:

a mathematics research paper presenting a possible evolutionary explanation for the variability hypothesis was peer-reviewed, accepted, and formally published in The New York Journal of Mathematics. Three days later, that article was removed without explanation and replaced by an unrelated article by different authors.

"except to mean that they aren't obviously false" - they are not just "aren't obviously false", they are well supported by facts and make sense. LS had to apologize for expressing a plausible scientific theory. And even 18 years later some people go out of their way to twist his words into something else to vilify him.

Science is censored. Politically inconvenient hypothesis can't be researched. Just mentioning it without mandatory genuflections can be sufficient for termination. Truth doesn't matter, truthiness is good enough.