zlacker

This seems to me like an example of how difficult it is to organize a company around a goal other then making money. As a non-profit, OpanAI was not supposed to be a profit maximizing enterprise. But how is a board supposed to opperate, and set objectives without a clear goal like profit maximization? Usually a boards represents the owners of the business and their interested. The OpenAI board does not represent the owners because there are no owners. So the board is just 6 people and their opionions. Hard to see how that can work.

>>rowls6+(OP)
They represent the charter. That is literally the metric.

>>rowls6+(OP)
> This seems to me like an example of how difficult it is to organize a company around a goal other then making money.

Hard in sense that for-profit part has actual power here?

>>jprete+g
The problem is not the lack of "metric" itself, its just how vague and subjective that metric is.

>>rowls6+(OP)
The difficulty, in this case, doesn't seem to lie in the chosen objective. Rather, the investors, ex-CEO, and many, many employees don't believe in the non-profit objectives. They want money and power. So, it seems like the difficulty is building an organization where people willingly reject money and power when presented with the option.

>>rowls6+(OP)
How is board membership controlled?

For a profit company, you buy shares and elect the board, right? If they turn the company into something nobody wants, the shares lose value, and maybe someone picks up the shares cheap and turns it around. So there's a feedback cycle. The profit motive is almost incidental.

But here do the current board members just appoint the next board members and grow/shrink the total number?

>>timeon+V7
Corruption. 7 guys in a room may think they genuinely think one way. But change that picture to 7 guys in a room, alongside $10 billion dollars, and some, if not most, are suddenly going to start thinking in an entirely different way - even without needing to be 'persuaded.' Sums up politics and many other issues in society as well. People themselves don't even know who they are, until they have the freedom and resources to be whatever they want to be.

>>chmod6+gH
You'd need to have access to the various legal docs of the OpenAI non-profit to be able to answer that question. But there was a move in the works to expand the board after a recent resignation. This is why - normally - the number of directors on the board is specified in those documents and a quorum of a minimum number of people is required to be able to make certain decisions, especially ones with potentially far reaching consequences.

>>jacque+ZI
Isn't that the problem though? No outside feedback? Just whatever the current board thinks?

>>treesc+ap
Vague and subjective metrics are how you get cults or worse, politics.

>>chmod6+YR
Being a board member is something you normally take quite serious. I've been asked a couple of times but didn't see myself as qualified to fulfill that role in a responsible manner. Board members are free to search for outside feedback but they're supposed to be wise enough to know their own limits because they have some residual liability for any mistakes they make.

Depending on where you live you will open yourself up for at least the consequences of your own actions (negligence, errors of judgment) and possibly even for the errors of other board members because you are not only there to oversee the company, you also oversee the other board members. That's why on the spot board resignations are usually a pretty bad sign unless they are for health or other urgent personal reasons. It is a very strong signal that a board member feels that they have not been able to convince their colleagues that they are off the straight and narrow path and that their choices exceed their own thresholds for ethics or liability (or both...). And that in turn is one of the reasons why a board would normally be very upset if they feel that they have not been given all information they require to do their job and that was the very first line that the board trotted out as to why Altman was let go. But even then they should have built their case rather than just to take a snap poll at a point in time when they had a quorum to get rid of him because it seems that that and not Altman's behavior (which as far as I can see was fairly consistent from day #1) was the real reason they did what they did. In the original board (9 people) the four didn't have the vote but in the shrunk board (6) they did.