5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed
6. Innovation like no other company
7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
from "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies Before It's Too Late", 2005 by Marianne M. Jennings, professor of legal and ethical studies in business in the Department of Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona
Letter signing looks like a masterful use of the bandwagon effect. Quickly reframing the issue, going to attack, and creating a sense of outrage and hurry. People start quickly pressuring each other because there is a need to be unity for the scheme to work and no time to think.
> Within hours, messages dismissed the board as illegitimate and decried Altman’s firing as a coup by OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to the people.
>people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter.
>“Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,”
This is also consistent with some number of OpenAI operators wanting Altman removed, and then discovering that the company's long-term financial outlook, and their accrued compensation in particular, was highly contingent on him staying. It's pretty normal for people to believe that they could, if all else was equal, have a better or more healthy management culture. But people rarely act on that belief precisely because earnestly pursuing it can end up threatening everyone's future well-being.
It's also consistent with OpenAI's board comprehensively botching their response to those concerns, even if had been clear that over the medium term Altman needed to be managed out. That's why there's a term for this ("managed out").
Instead, the OpenAI board created news cycle after news cycle of palace intrigue by seeming obliviousness to how their actions would be read.
How do you distinguish between bandwagoning and genuine consensus? How unpopular does someone need to be before they can cry "bandwagoning" whenever they're unaminously criticized?
I really dislike the current attitudes around ethics and AI. Tools should be 100% open about what they can and can't do. Building unethical software like deepfakes for porn is also unethical.
Quoting of vague "ethics" risks around AI, or neutering LLMs in the vein of making them "safer" seems dubious to me. Obviously, there are a huge number of problems which depend on safe AI - where safe often means something completely different from what is currently being talked about. e.g. does the AI reliably do what I expect it to do in the face of adversarial inputs? does it handle risky settings like deciding to refund customers? How can I ensure that the AI is making legal decisions and not secretly using redlining, or other illegal criteria to make its decision?
I am still taking in information and trying to figure out my stance for AI ethics, but this is moreso about the ethics of the business and its structure, not the ethics of the AI that they make.
> Some OpenAI employees have rejected the idea that there was any coercion to sign the letter. “Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,” a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, who tweets under the pseudonym @roon, posted on X. “That’s not something that can be accomplished by peer pressure.”
> Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. The deal — led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital — values the company at almost $90 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, more than triple its $28 billion valuation in April, and it could have been threatened by tanking value triggered by the CEO’s departure.
Ok so the company was offering a cash out of 3x and the long term employees are most likely to have most power and influence within the company. Yeah, no undue coercion that everyone is so motivated by this they’re signing things at 2am? Or more like they’re reading tea leaves and don’t want to be the odd man out because this is a convenient enemies list if your name isn’t on it, especially since Sam apparently has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior + a huge pay day for either you, your bosses, or people who have significant standing to impact your performance reviews / career trajectory.
> Or more like they’re reading tea leaves and don’t want to be the odd man out because this is a convenient enemies list if your name isn’t on it, especially since Sam apparently has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior + a huge pay day for either you, your bosses, or people who have significant standing to impact your performance reviews / career trajectory.
To me, the tea leaves at the time said “a once in a lifetime acquihire that will rescue everyone is about to happen OR Sam will come back and the damage will be undone”. There’s life-changing amounts of money on the table and signing a letter with the majority of employees is a no-brainer for the upside scenario.
And to-be-fair, a lot of people were up at 2am waiting for news on this drama. A lot of people with no skin in the game with nothing to lose were watching it intently. Why wouldn’t the employees of the actual company do the same?
>Joanne Jang, who works in products at OpenAI, tweeted that no influence had been at play. “The google doc broke so people texted each other at 2-2:30 am begging people with write access to type their name.”
Also, this line seems self-contradictory. There was no influence, but people were "begging" others to sign?
I think person A was calling person B (who had write access) to write person's A name, since person A was unable to do so because the google doc "broke?"
Even if everything mentioned is 100% true the board handled the situational so poorly they lost and Sam won. It was like an average episode of Succession being played out.
Well I for one am shocked that these allegations of psychological abuse would have led to such a cunning and effective response from Sam after the firing.
I wonder if those same senior employees signed the letter. If the WaPo could verify that, that could clarify whether peer pressure extended beyond Ilya.
It wouldn't be surprising if they did sign the letter, and it wouldn't take peer pressure to make it happen. People can have concerns about a manager's style or a leadership culture and still not want to have years of lucrative equity comp erased overnight by the board's reaction to those concerns.
I'd still find the added context insightful. They went to the board alleging psychological abuse, so I assume they understood the board would at least consider removing Sam.
The word "toxic" has lost all meaning these days. It would be interesting to see some actual examples. I've worked with people, in the past, who would be considered "toxic" by today's standards. For example, they were disagreeable, pointing out when time was being wasted on tangents, demanding data to back up claims, and all those other nasty things that help keep a team truthful and on track. They were great to work for, if you could stomach criticism and directness, which seems to be getting rare.
IMO, ousting Elon would be the best thing Tesla could do for the future of the company.
The problem is that stock traders hate uncertainty, and ousting the CEO of any company brings massive uncertainty. So in the short term, an ousting of Elon would probably tank the stock.
I doubt that. I think Tesla the business would be better off without him. That said, the stock is ludicrously overvalued, which must be largely due to his cult of personality. So if employees are concerned about their options being devalued in the short term, I could at least see the possibility. On the other side, I'm sure Tesla employees lean left, so I doubt most are fans of Elon. I'm not sure the financial motive alone would be enough to engender this sort of reaction.
Altman’s departure represented a real possibility they may miss out of enormous amounts of wealth. People are willing to put up with or even support a lot of things when money is on the line.
Everyone is reading so much into this, when it sounds like a personal conflict between Helen and Sam that blew up and turned into a board coup by Helen, packed with vague justifications no one bought because they weren't given any reason to believe them.
Why would the employees buy the coup leaders pitch when they barely explained why it happened in the first place?
The story of the next day's morning meeting was everyone was unsasitfied for the reasons they were given, they were as confused as everyone else, and then the next story is the employees all signing a letter and Ilya doing a 180.
Why would the employees immediately trust the new leadership by a board member not involved in day to day operations? I doubt it's all just about making more $$ under Sam. It's about trust and stability.
Everyone was talking about how it was about AI saftey vs reckless capitalism but tangibly we still have little evidence of that. What we do have is Sam critiquing Helen's paper, then suddenly half the board is moving against Sam and an interim CEO whose slow-AI-dev views on AI, which are 100% in line with Helen's paper, is replacing him. While the conviction of the other board members like Ilya seemed pretty thin.
Sam tried to remove Helen from the board which would effectively give him control over the board with the two people who worked for him holding seats. He was the one that tried to upset the board-CEO balance.
Readit News
1. Pressure to maintain numbers
2. Fear and silence
3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO
4. Weak board of directors
5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed
6. Innovation like no other company
7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others
from "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies Before It's Too Late", 2005 by Marianne M. Jennings, professor of legal and ethical studies in business in the Department of Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona
> Within hours, messages dismissed the board as illegitimate and decried Altman’s firing as a coup by OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to the people.
>people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter.
>“Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,”
It's also consistent with OpenAI's board comprehensively botching their response to those concerns, even if had been clear that over the medium term Altman needed to be managed out. That's why there's a term for this ("managed out").
Instead, the OpenAI board created news cycle after news cycle of palace intrigue by seeming obliviousness to how their actions would be read.
Quoting of vague "ethics" risks around AI, or neutering LLMs in the vein of making them "safer" seems dubious to me. Obviously, there are a huge number of problems which depend on safe AI - where safe often means something completely different from what is currently being talked about. e.g. does the AI reliably do what I expect it to do in the face of adversarial inputs? does it handle risky settings like deciding to refund customers? How can I ensure that the AI is making legal decisions and not secretly using redlining, or other illegal criteria to make its decision?
Dead Comment
> Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. The deal — led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital — values the company at almost $90 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, more than triple its $28 billion valuation in April, and it could have been threatened by tanking value triggered by the CEO’s departure.
Ok so the company was offering a cash out of 3x and the long term employees are most likely to have most power and influence within the company. Yeah, no undue coercion that everyone is so motivated by this they’re signing things at 2am? Or more like they’re reading tea leaves and don’t want to be the odd man out because this is a convenient enemies list if your name isn’t on it, especially since Sam apparently has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior + a huge pay day for either you, your bosses, or people who have significant standing to impact your performance reviews / career trajectory.
To me, the tea leaves at the time said “a once in a lifetime acquihire that will rescue everyone is about to happen OR Sam will come back and the damage will be undone”. There’s life-changing amounts of money on the table and signing a letter with the majority of employees is a no-brainer for the upside scenario.
And to-be-fair, a lot of people were up at 2am waiting for news on this drama. A lot of people with no skin in the game with nothing to lose were watching it intently. Why wouldn’t the employees of the actual company do the same?
Also, this line seems self-contradictory. There was no influence, but people were "begging" others to sign?
This adds some additional material, like blaming internal chaos on Altman inconsistencies, which seems consistent with what the Atlantic was hinting at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399
(It also seems consistent with the reporting on Altman's firing from YC, which suggested that it wasn't any single smoking gun or crossed redline, just a pattern of behavior which eventually led to his ouster and some internal YC reforms: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216 )
That this article is written by Nitasha Tiku, a Gawker alum, casts even further doubt on its claims.
The problem is that stock traders hate uncertainty, and ousting the CEO of any company brings massive uncertainty. So in the short term, an ousting of Elon would probably tank the stock.
Why would the employees buy the coup leaders pitch when they barely explained why it happened in the first place?
The story of the next day's morning meeting was everyone was unsasitfied for the reasons they were given, they were as confused as everyone else, and then the next story is the employees all signing a letter and Ilya doing a 180.
Why would the employees immediately trust the new leadership by a board member not involved in day to day operations? I doubt it's all just about making more $$ under Sam. It's about trust and stability.
Everyone was talking about how it was about AI saftey vs reckless capitalism but tangibly we still have little evidence of that. What we do have is Sam critiquing Helen's paper, then suddenly half the board is moving against Sam and an interim CEO whose slow-AI-dev views on AI, which are 100% in line with Helen's paper, is replacing him. While the conviction of the other board members like Ilya seemed pretty thin.