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Notes -
NYT: Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding
The NYT scooped everybody. We finally know why Sam Altman was fired:
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.
The lack of candour may have referred to this or to things not reported on in the article.
Luckily, a brand new article just dropped with details about that:
Not entirely related, but here's a particularly eye-popping quote:
The link doesn't work for me - maybe this is explained elsewhere in the article, but going solely on the excerpt...
Horseshit. "Oh he was lying but we can't give you any examples because he's that good at lying" is the kind of excuse I would expect from a four year old, not a group of supposedly intelligent and qualified professionals. At this point I think that unless they actually give us the specifics, this all boils down to the GPT marketplace blowing up Poe and making a boardmember unreasonably angry.
I took the point to be adjacent to the one Scott made - wow, is it really that long ago? - last December about how the media rarely lies. I don't agree with how Scott frames the observation, which I would have phrased in terms of how the ways they lie are relatively subtle - but the observation itself, as distinct from the debate over the best language to characterize it, is solid.
Skilled liars make as few statements that are straightforwardly false in a plain, literal way as they can and still spread whatever narrative they want to spread. One of the many advantages of this is that there's rarely a clear-cut smoking gun someone in the board's position can point to. Instead it's a matter of which facts they emphasize and which they omit, what they juxtapose with what in order to imply connections that may not actually exist, how they manipulate your emotions around aspects of their narrative, how they take advantage of people's trust in them, or at least willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in situations that really are ambiguous.
So while I can see how the statement you quote is poor optics, I have no trouble imagining how it could be true.
I totally agree with you that it is possible for someone to be deceptive in a subtle manner like this, but that doesn't change anything about the obligation to make your accusations comprehensible. There's nothing about this type of deception that makes it impossible to describe - even something simple in the form "While the situation was actually x, Sam deceived us into believing that the situation was y" would work. If the deception is so subtle and mysterious in its effects that it had no impact whatsoever, it wasn't a good enough justification for Sam's ouster.
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