I wish I could signal boost this comment more. D’Angelo, Toner, and McCauley had a reason which was enough to persuade Ilya to take the drastic move of summarily removing Brockman from the board and then firing Sam, without any foresight and no communication whatsoever to the rest of the company, OpenAI stakeholders, or even Emmett (he threatened to resign unless they told him,[1] though not sure where that left off), which lost them legitimacy both internally and externally, and eventually lost them everything.
I honestly don’t have a plausible reason for it, or an belief they might have had which would help to square this circle, especially since I don’t buy the “AGI has been achieved internally” stuff. I honestly think that your explanation of not realising it was going to go so nuclear,[2] and then just doing whatever the lawyers told them, is what happened. But if so, the lawyers’ strategy of “say nothing, do nothing, just collect evidence and be quiet” was just an absolute disaster both for their own strategy and EA’s reputation and legitimacy as a whole.[3] It honestly just seems like staggering incompetency to me,[4] and the continued silence is just the most perplexing part of the entire saga, and I’m still (obviously) exercised by it.
Toner and McCauley remain as 2 members of the 5 person advisory board for The Centre for the Governance of AI. Any implications are left as an exercise for the reader.
The dangers of policy set by lawyers reminds me of the Heads of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT having a disaster in front of Congress about the Israel/Palestine/free-speech/genocide hearing, possibly because they were repeating some legally cleared lines about what the could say to limit liability instead of saying “genocide is bad and advocating it is against our code of conduct”
I wish I could signal boost this comment more. D’Angelo, Toner, and McCauley had a reason which was enough to persuade Ilya to take the drastic move of summarily removing Brockman from the board and then firing Sam, without any foresight and no communication whatsoever to the rest of the company, OpenAI stakeholders, or even Emmett (he threatened to resign unless they told him,[1] though not sure where that left off), which lost them legitimacy both internally and externally, and eventually lost them everything.
I honestly don’t have a plausible reason for it, or an belief they might have had which would help to square this circle, especially since I don’t buy the “AGI has been achieved internally” stuff. I honestly think that your explanation of not realising it was going to go so nuclear,[2] and then just doing whatever the lawyers told them, is what happened. But if so, the lawyers’ strategy of “say nothing, do nothing, just collect evidence and be quiet” was just an absolute disaster both for their own strategy and EA’s reputation and legitimacy as a whole.[3] It honestly just seems like staggering incompetency to me,[4] and the continued silence is just the most perplexing part of the entire saga, and I’m still (obviously) exercised by it.
Toner and McCauley remain as 2 members of the 5 person advisory board for The Centre for the Governance of AI. Any implications are left as an exercise for the reader.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-21/altman-openai-board-open-talks-to-negotiate-his-possible-return
But how could they not realise this???
The dangers of policy set by lawyers reminds me of the Heads of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT having a disaster in front of Congress about the Israel/Palestine/free-speech/genocide hearing, possibly because they were repeating some legally cleared lines about what the could say to limit liability instead of saying “genocide is bad and advocating it is against our code of conduct”
Nothing has really changed my mind here