zlacker

>>staran+(OP)
At the end of the day, we still don't know what exactly happened and probably, never will. However, it seems clear there was a rift between Rapid Commercialization (Team Sam) and Upholding the Original Principles (Team Helen/Ilya). I think the tensions were brewing for quite a while, as it's evident from an article written even before GPT-3 [1].

> Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration

Team Helen acted in panic, but they believed they would win since they were upholding the principles the org was founded on. But they never had a chance. I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework. I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?

Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before. Maybe, it isn't without substance as I thought it to be. Hopefully, there won't be a day when Team Helen gets to say, "This is exactly what we wanted to prevent."

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...

>>shubha+B7
One funny thing about this mess is that "Team Helen" has never mentioned anything about safety, and Emmett said "The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety".

The reason everyone thinks it's about safety seems largely because a lot of e/acc people on Twitter keep bringing it up as a strawman.

Of course, it might end up that it really was about safety in the end, but for now I still haven't seen any evidence. The story about Sam trying to get board control and the board retaliating seems more plausible given what's actually happened.