zlacker

>>nickth+(OP)
Unsurprising but disappointing none-the-less. Let’s just try to learn from it.

It’s popular in the AI space to claim altruism and openness; OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI (the new Musk one) all have a funky governance structure because they want to be a public good. The challenge is once any of these (or others) start to gain enough traction that they are seen as having a good chance at reaping billions in profits things change.

And it’s not just AI companies and this isn’t new. This is art of human nature and will always be.

We should be putting more emphasis and attention on truly open AI models (open training data, training source code & hyperparameters, model source code, weights) so the benefits of AI accrue to the public and not just a few companies.

[edit - eliminated specific company mentions]

>>mgreg+A5
The botched firing of Sam Altman proves that fancy governance structures are little more than paper shields against the market.

Whatever has been written can be unwritten and if that fails, just start a new company with the same employees.

>>ertgbn+Pg
> The botched firing of Sam Altman proves that fancy governance structures are little more than paper shields against the market.

The things I saw didn't make any sense, so I can't say that it proves anything other than the existence of hidden information.

The board fired him, and they chose a replacement. The replacement sided with Altman. This repeated several times. The board was (reportedly) OK with closing down the entire business on the grounds of their charter.

Why didn't the board do that? And why did their chosen replacements, not individually but all of them in sequence, side with the person they fired?

My only guess is the board was blackmailed. It's just a guess — it's the only thing I can think of that fits the facts, and I'm well aware that this may be a failure of imagination on my part, and want to emphasise that this shouldn't be construed as anything more than a low-confidence guess by someone who has only seen the same news as everyone else.

>>ben_w+VN1
You obviously have no experience with non-profit governance. OpenAI is organized as a public charity which is required to have an independent board. Due to people leaving the board, they were down to six members, three independent directors plus Sam and two of his employees. They had been struggling to add more board members because Sam and the independent directors couldn't agree on who to add. Then Sam concocted an excuse to remove one of the independent directors and lied to board members about his discussions with other board members.

I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.

Also, I am not surprised the new board isn't being completely open because they are still probably trying to figure out how to fix their governance problems.

>>baking+Sv2
> You obviously have no experience with non-profit governance.

Correct!

> I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.

As someone with no experience with non-profit governance, this does not seem coherent with (1) they didn't just say that, (2) none of their own choices for replacement CEO were willing to go along with this, and this happened with several replacements in a row.

For (1) I'd be willing to just assume good faith on their part, even though it seems odd; but (2) is the one which seems extremely weird to the point that I find myself unable to reconcile.

It would also not be compatible with the reports they were willing to close the company on grounds of it being a danger to humanity, but I'm not sure how reliable that news story was.

>>ben_w+vz2
Yes, ideally you would have a succession plan and a statement reviewed by lawyers, but in this case, you had a deadlocked board that suddenly had a majority to act and did so in the moment. If they had waited, they would have probably lost the opportunity because Ilya Sutskever would have switched his vote again. But the end result is that Sam is off the board and that is the important thing.

Maybe you should explain your blackmail theory and we could see which idea makes the most sense.