Of course, the employees want the company to continue, and weren't told much at this point so it is understandable that they didn't like the statement.
Of course, the employees want the company to continue, and weren't told much at this point so it is understandable that they didn't like the statement.
Think of that what you wish. To me, this does not project confidence in this being the new Bell Labs. I'm not even sure they have it in their DNA to innovate their products much beyond where they currently are.
The big thing for me is that the board didn't say anything in its defense, and the pledge isn't really binding anyway. I wouldn't actually be sure about supporting the CEO and that would bother me a bit morally, but that doesn't outweigh real world concerns.
The existing board is just a seat-warming body until Altman and Microsoft can stack it with favorables to their (and the U.S. Government’s) interests. The naïveté from the NPO faction was believing they’d be able to develop these capacities outside the strict control of the military industrial complex when AI has been established as part of the new Cold War with China.
[1]:(https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727216818648134101)
You might be able to imagine a world where there was an external company that did the same thing as for-profit OpenAI, and OpenAI nonprofit partnered with them in order to get their AI ideas implemented (for free). OpenAI nonprofit is basically getting a good deal.
MSF could similarly create an external for-profit hospital, funded by external investors. The important thing is that the nonprofit (donated, tax-free) money doesn't flow into the forprofit section.
Of course, there's a lot of sketchiness in practice, which we can see in this situation with Microsoft influencing the direction of nonprofit OpenAI even though it shouldn't be. I think there would have been real legal issues if the Microsoft deal had continued.
> Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration
Team Helen acted in panic, but they believed they would win since they were upholding the principles the org was founded on. But they never had a chance. I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework. I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?
Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before. Maybe, it isn't without substance as I thought it to be. Hopefully, there won't be a day when Team Helen gets to say, "This is exactly what we wanted to prevent."
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
The reason everyone thinks it's about safety seems largely because a lot of e/acc people on Twitter keep bringing it up as a strawman.
Of course, it might end up that it really was about safety in the end, but for now I still haven't seen any evidence. The story about Sam trying to get board control and the board retaliating seems more plausible given what's actually happened.
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38375767
It will be super interesting to see the subtle struggles for influence between these three.
I'm not sure what faction Bret and Larry will be on. Sam will still have power by virtue of being CEO and aligned with the employees.
The staff never mutinied. They threatened to mutiny. That's a big difference!
Yesterday, I compared these rebels to Shockley's "traitorous eight" [1]. But the traitorous eight actually rebelled. These folk put their name on a piece of paper, options and profit participation units safely held in the other hand.
The safest option was to sign the paper, once the snowball started rolling. There was nothing much to lose, and a lot to gain.
The biggest sticking point was Sam being on the board. Ultimately, he conceded to not being on the board, at least initially, to close the deal. The hope/expectation is that he will end up on the board eventually."
(https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727216818648134101)
> We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project
That wasn't the case. So it may be not so far fetched to call her actions borderline as it is also very easy to hide personal motives behind altruistic ones.
The statement "it would be consistent with the company mission to destroy the company" is correct. The word "would be" rather than "is" implies some condition, it doesn't have to apply to the current circumstances.
A hypothesis is that Sam was attempting to gain full control of the board by getting the majority, and therefore the current board would be unable to hold him accountable to follow the mission in the future. Therefore, the board may have considered it necessary to stop him in order to fulfill the mission. There's no hard evidence of that revealed yet though.