Technology

If you ever needed a lesson in the difference between power and authority, this is a good one.

The leaders of this coup read the rules and saw that they could use the board to remove Altman, they had the authority to make the move and “win” the game.

It seems that they, like many fools mistook authority for power. The “rules” said they could do it! Alas they did not have the power to execute the coup. All the rules in the world cannot make the organization follow you.

Power comes from people who grant it to you. Authority comes from paper. Authority is the guidelines for the use of power, without power, it is pointless.

It’s rather interesting here that the board, consisting of a fairly strong scientific presence, and not so much a commercial one, is getting such hate.

People are quick to jump on for profit companies that do everything in their power to earn a buck. Well, here you have a company that fires their CEO for going too much in the direction of earning money.

Yet every one is all up in arms over it. We can’t have the cake and eat it folks.

You're not going to develop AI for the benefit of humanity at Microsoft. If they go there, we'll know "Open"AI's mission was all a lie.

I'd like to know why exactly the board fired Altman before I pass judgment one way or the other, especially given the mad rush by the investor class to re-instate him. It makes me especially curious that the employees are sticking up for him. My initial intuition was that MSFT convinced Altman to cross bridges that he shouldn't have (for $$$$), but I doubt that a little more now that the employees are sticking up for him. Something fucking weird is going on, and I'm dying to know what it is.

It's supposed to be a nonprofit benefiting humanity, not a pay day for owners or workers. The board isn't making money off of it.

Giving microsoft control is a bad idea. (duh?)

Giving a single person control is a bad idea, per sam altman.

You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed "would be consistent with the mission."

You are God damned right that shutting everything down is one of the roles of a non-profit Board focused on AI safety.

Later: All 195 employees of OpenAI in support of board of directors.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.

OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta and Microsoft. Sama markets itself as an “ethical AI” company and claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty.

The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance. For this story, TIME reviewed hundreds of pages of internal Sama and OpenAI documents, including workers’ payslips, and interviewed four Sama employees who worked on the project. All the employees spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their livelihoods.

[...]

Documents reviewed by TIME show that OpenAI signed three contracts worth about $200,000 in total with Sama in late 2021 to label textual descriptions of sexual abuse, hate speech, and violence. Around three dozen workers were split into three teams, one focusing on each subject. Three employees told TIME they were expected to read and label between 150 and 250 passages of text per nine-hour shift. Those snippets could range from around 100 words to well over 1,000. All of the four employees interviewed by TIME described being mentally scarred by the work. Although they were entitled to attend sessions with “wellness” counselors, all four said these sessions were unhelpful and rare due to high demands to be more productive at work. Two said they were only given the option to attend group sessions, and one said their requests to see counselors on a one-to-one basis instead were repeatedly denied by Sama management.

[...]

One Sama worker tasked with reading and labeling text for OpenAI told TIME he suffered from recurring visions after reading a graphic description of a man having sex with a dog in the presence of a young child. “That was torture,” he said. “You will read a number of statements like that all through the week. By the time it gets to Friday, you are disturbed from thinking through that picture.” The work’s traumatic nature eventually led Sama to cancel all its work for OpenAI in February 2022, eight months earlier than planned.

[...]

That month, Sama began pilot work for a separate project for OpenAI: collecting sexual and violent images—some of them illegal under U.S. law—to deliver to OpenAI. The work of labeling images appears to be unrelated to ChatGPT.

Gonna leave this here.

The biopic on this whole thing is going to be hilarious. The rumors are that the board didn’t like how fast the CEO is moving with AI and they’re afraid of consequences of possible AGI (which I don’t think these new LLMs are even close to) but that doesn’t feel like what modern boards of directors are so I don’t trust it.

It’s just baffling how this golden goose was half way strangled in the nest.

I feel like this is Satya's wet dream. He woke up on Friday like normal and went to bed on Sunday owning what, 85% of OpenAI's top people? Acquisitions aren't usually that easy.

It seems obvious Sam would want to grow his company to infinity. That's what VC people do. The board expecting otherwise is strange in hindsight. Now they can oversee the slow, measured adoption of much smaller business while the rest of the team shoots for the stars.

Anyways, RIP y'all. Skynet launches next year.

Muuuhahahaha.... What a shitshow this organisation has become.

:grabs popcorn:

Nothing more entertaining than employees standing up against management.

Image Text:

To the Board of Directors at OpenAl,

OpenAl is the world's leading Al company. We, the employees of OpenAl, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on Al safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position.

The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAl.

When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAl acted swiftly to stabilize the company. They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties, and were negotiating in bad faith.

The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward - the one that would best serve our mission, company, stakeholders, employees and the public - would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that could lead the company forward in stability. Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed "would be consistent with the mission."

Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAl. We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgement and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAl and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

1. Mira Murati
2. Brad Lightcap
3. Jason Kwon
4. Wojciech Zaremba
5. Alec Radford
6. Anna Makanju
7. Bob McGrew
8. Srinivas Narayanan
9. Che Chang
10. Lillian Weng
11. Mark Chen
12. Ilya Sutskever

This whole situation happened so fast and it confuses me

Ain't that simply a curtain drama for practical acquisition of OpenAI by Microsoft, circumventing potential legal issues?

This started months ago.

Seeing as Sam and Greg now work for microsoft I'd say this is late

Title gore.

I don’t know enough about why the board did this, or what Altman was up to, to form a meaningful opinion about what happened. However, I do know that anything that empowers Microsoft in this industry is a bad thing. Microsoft is a bad actor in every regard and will always behave in ways that ultimately produce worse products than we would get otherwise. Given the potential implications of these technologies, and all the reasons to not trust Microsoft to protect public interests, this news is terrible.