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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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NYT: Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding

The NYT scooped everybody. We finally know why Sam Altman was fired:

A few weeks before Mr. Altman’s ouster, he met with [OpenAI board member Helen Toner] to discuss a paper she had recently co-written for Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times.

In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.

Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”

Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity, later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed, a person involved in the conversations said.

There are a few other minor issues mentioned in the article, but this sounds like the big one. Rationalist/EA types take being told that they can't criticize "allies" in public very negatively, a position I am quite sympathetic to. Helen Toner works at an Open Philanthropy-funded think tank, so she's as blue blood an effective altruist as they get. My guess is that this was the moment that she decided that Sam had to be eliminated before he took control of the board and jeopardized OpenAI's mission.

What gets me is how disingenuous this makes the original firing announcement: "Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." It sounds like he was perfectly candid. They just didn't like what he was about.

In completely unrelated news, ChatGPT has been down for the last three hours.

Aaand he's back: https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727205556136579362

What a shitshow it has been.

Either something really strange is going on behind the scenes (like a pseudo government take over) or the board are complete clowns.

My bet is on them being clowns. Or, more charitably, out of their league. How many of them actually have any experience in boardroom intrigue? To loosely quote one journalist about a similar experience:

My first intimate encounters with the police were quite sobering. Here you are, a relatively famous journalist being questioned by a dull-looking criminal investigator. You are the master of the written and spoken word, you are, if not very smart, then definitely smarter that this uniformed oaf in front of you that can't use more than one finger to type your answers. You know what you should never say to the police, so you carefully choose every word of your replies, which the investigator dutifully records. And yet he then glances at the screen, looks at you and asks you a question that leaves you dumbfounded. How could you let yourself be led into this trap when you were his intellectual superior? And yet you yourself answered A to the first question, B to the second question, so C and D, which both prove your culpability, are the only possible answers to the third one.

Where did you get that story from? I’d love to read the rest of it.

It's from Arkady Babchenko, https://pastebin.com/9xw4R2PW

English, courtesy of GPT4: https://pastebin.com/UPGRajKA

Thank you. GPT4 blows DeepL out of the water, I didn't expect this level of quality.

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