zlacker

They are already the dumbest board in history (even dumber than Apple’s board firing Steve Jobs). So it’s not out of keeping with anything. Besides, those 2 independent board members (who couldn’t do fizz-buzz if their lives depended on it) won’t be staying long if Sam returns— nor are they likely to ever serve on any board ever again after their shenanigans.

>>eigenv+(OP)
Some of the board member choices are baffling. Like why is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s wife on the board? Her startup has under 10 employees and has a personal email address as the contact address on the homepage.

>>spacem+u3
I hope there is an investigative report out there detailing why the 3 outsiders, 2 of them complete unknowns, are on the board, and how it truly benefits proper corporate governance.

That's way too much power for people who seemingly have no qualifications to make decisions about a company this impactful to society.

>>spacem+u3
Does Joseph Gordon Levitt’s wife have a name?

>>spacem+u3
I guess you missed the part about Amal Clooney‘s husband at the Golden Globes. It’s 2023, why are we still referring people like that?

>>spacem+u3
Non-profits always have those spouses of wealthy people whose whole career is being a professional non-profit board member with some vague academic/skin-deep work background to justify it. I'm just surprised OpenAI is one those.

>>ivan_g+u6
The insinuation is that her most notable accolade is the man she married and there are cases where that's an accurate insinuation.

I have no idea who she is or what her accolades are, but I do know who JGL is and therefore referring to her like that is in fact useful to me, where using any other name is not.

>>nozzle+b5
Why would anyone care as she’s not on the board because of it.

>>nozzle+b5
Mrs. Joseph Gordon Levitt :)

>>branda+75
Unless "proper corporate governance" is exactly what makes the company dangerous to society, in which case you will need to have some external people in charge. You might want to set things up as a non-profit, though you'll need some structure where the non-profit wholly owns the for-profit wing given the amount of money flowing around...

Oh wait, that's what OpenAI is.

(To be clear, I don't know enough to have an opinion as to whether the board members are blindingly stupid, or principled geniuses. I just bristled at the phrase "proper corporate governance". Look around and see where all of this proper corporate governance is leading us.)

>>ivan_g+u6
It was funny because with the Clooneys both of them have actually accomplished things in significant situations and it was clearly wrong.

In this case this person seems to have primarily tried and failed to spin a robotics company out of Singularity “university” in 2012.

This only sounds adjacent to AI if you work in Hollywood.

>>spacem+u3
Any proof that makes her incompetent or ill-informed or are you simply speculating as such?

>>sfink+pb
Well with this extremely baffling level of incompetence, the suspect backgrounds of the outside members (EA, SingularityU/shell companies... Logan Roy would call them "not serious people", Quora - why, for data mining?!) fit the bill.

The time to do this was before ChatGPT was unleashed on the world, before the MS investment, before this odd governance structure was setup.

Yes, having outsiders on the board is essential. But come on, we need folks that have recognized industry experience in this field, leaders, people with deep backgrounds and recognized for their contributions. Hinton, Ng, Karpathy, etc.

>>branda+wf
Isn't that like saying that the Manhattan Project should have only been overseen by people with a solid physics background? Because they're the best judges of whether it's a good idea to build something that could wipe out all life on Earth? (And whether that's an exaggeration in hindsight is irrelevant; that was exactly the sort of question that the overseers needed to be considering at that time. Yes, physicists' advice would be necessary to judge those questions, but you couldn't do it with only physicists' perspectives.)

>>sfink+Xg
Not sure I follow. The Manhattan project was thoroughly staffed by many of the best in the field in service to their country to build a weapon before Germany. There was no mission statement they abided by that said they were building a simple deterrent that wouldn't be used. There was no nuance to what the outcome could be, and there was no aspersions to agency over its use.

In the case of AI ethics, the people who are deeply invested in this are also some of the pioneers of the field who made it their life's work. This isn't a government agency. If the mission statement of guiding it to be a non-profit AGI, as soon as possible, as safely as possible, were to be adhered to, and where it is today is going wildly off course, then having a competent board would have been key.

>>spacem+u3
Yeah, I too would like to understand how the wife of a Hollywood actor got on this board. Did sama or Greg recruit her? Someone must have.

I have seen these types of people pop up in Silicon Valley over the years. Often, it is the sibling of a movie star, but it's the same idea. They typically do not know anything about technology and also are amusingly out of touch with the culture of the tech industry. They get hired because they are related to a famous person. They do not contribute much. I think they should just stay in LA.

EDIT: I just want to add that I don't know anything about this woman in particular (I'd never heard of her before yesterday), and it's entirely possible that she is the lone exception to the generalization I'm describing above. All I can say is that when I have seen these Hollywood people turn up in SF tech circles in the past (which has been several times, actually), it's always been the same story.

>>branda+wf
> Quora - why, for data mining?

What shocked me most was that Quora IMHO _sucks_ for what it is.

I couldn't think of a _worse_ model to guide the development and productization of AI technologies. I mean, StackOverflow is actually useful and its threatened by the existence of CoPilot, et al.

If the CEO of Quora was on my board, I'd be embarrassed to tell my friends.

>>Taek+g9
Could you please elaborate how is this fact useful to you? Can it be that you just make certain stereotypical assumptions from it?

>>svnt+6e
It was wrong not because they both did achieve something. It is generally wrong and the joke just used their achievements to break the barrier for understanding that.

>>ivan_g+up1
Suggesting that we should be on a first name basis with the romantic partner of every famous person we know of simply because they are the romantic partner of a famous person is pretty naive. “Spouse of Y” works just fine generally to save space and effort for (locally) real people.