Brad Lightcap, an OpenAI executive, told employees on Saturday morning that the company had been talking with the board to “better understand the reason and process behind their decision,” according to an internal message I obtained.
“We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety or security/privacy practices,” he wrote. “This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.”
If this is true, then I think the board has made a huge mess of things. They’ve taken a shot without any ammunition, and not realised that the other parties can shoot back. Now there are mass resignations, Microsoft is furious, seemingly all of silicon valley has turned against EA, and it’s even looking likely that Altman comes back.
It seems like they didn’t think they had to act like the boards of other billion dollar companies (notifying your partners of big decisions, being literal instead of euphemistic when discussing reasons for firing, selling your decisions with PR, etc). But often norms and customs happen for a reason, and corporate governance seems to be no exception.
I think it’s premature to judge things based on the little information that’s currently available. I would be surprised if there weren’t reasons for the board’s unconventional choices. (I’m not ruling it out though, that what you say ends up being right)
If this is true, then I think the board has made a huge mess of things. They’ve taken a shot without any ammunition, and not realised that the other parties can shoot back. Now there are mass resignations, Microsoft is furious, seemingly all of silicon valley has turned against EA, and it’s even looking likely that Altman comes back.
How much of this is “according to anonymous sources”?
The Board was deeply aware of intricate details of other parties’s will and ability to shoot back. Probably nobody was aware of all of the details, since webs of allies are formed behind closed doors and rearrange during major conflicts, and since investors have a wide variety of retaliatory capabilities that they might not have been open about during the investment process.
The board must have thought things through in detail before pulling the trigger, so I’m still putting some credence on there being good reasons for their move and the subsequent radio silence, which might involve crucial info they have and we don’t.
If not, all of this indeed seems like a very questionable move.
I agree. At first I thought there must be a sex scandal or embezzlement or something. But if there’s no malfeasance here, the board has made a huge mess of things.
It’s embarassing for the EA movement, too. It’s another SBF situation. Some EAs get control over billions of dollars, and act completely irresponsibly with that power.
It’s embarassing for the EA movement, too. It’s another SBF situation. Some EAs get control over billions of dollars, and act completely irresponsibly with that power.
Probably disagree? Hard to say for sure since we lack details, but it’s not obvious to me that the board acted irresponsibly, let alone to the degree that SBF did. I guess one, it seems fairly likely that Ilya Sutskever initiated the whole thing, not the EAs on the board. And two, the board members have fiduciary duties to further the OAI nonprofit’s mission, i.e., to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. (They do not have a duty to ensure OAI is valued at billions of dollars, except in so far as that helps further its mission.)
If the board members had reason to believe that Sam Altman was acting contrary to OAI’s mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all humanity, perhaps moving to fire him was the responsible thing to do (even if it turns out to be bad ex post), and what has been irresponsible are the efforts of investors and others to try to reinstate him. I guess we will know better within the next weeks, but I think it’s premature to say that the board acted irresponsibly right now.
This could end up also having really bad consequences for the goals of EA, so it’s perhaps similar to FTX in that way (but things are still developing and it might somehow turn out well).
Or maybe you feel like the board displayed inexperience and that they were in over their heads. I can probably get behind that based on how things look right now (but there’s a chance we learn more details later that put things into a different light).
Still, I feel like inexperience is only unforgivable if it comes combined with hubris. Many commenters seem to think that there must have been hubris involved on the board’s part. To me, that feels like it’s why people seem so mad about this. “Why else would the board have the audicity to oust such a successful and respected CEO, if they cannot point to any smoking-gun-type thing that justifies firing him to the world?”
But notice how that attitude – being risk averse and inclined to just let the experienced tech CEO do his thing without pushback (and possibly amass leverage over the rest of the company and the board by starting or investing into compute startups or stuff like that, as some of the rumors seem to indicate) – is also dangerous and potentially “irresponsible.” It’s not the by-default safe option, after forming concerns about his suitability, to let Sam Altman continue to cash in from the reputational benefits of running OpenAI with the seal of approval from this public good, non-profit, beneficial-mission-focused board structure that OpenAI has installed. This board structure has, from the very start, served as a kind of seal of approval that guarantees a significant amount of goodwill to people who would look at OpenAI skeptically and think “these tech people put the world at risk to attain power/money/the top spot in history.” EAs were arguably quite crucial (via getting Elon Musk to think about AI risk as well as some other pathways) in helping to set up OpenAI with such a board structure and the reputational protection against scrutiny from a concerned public (especially now that AI risk is gaining traction after chat-gpt spooked a bunch of people) that comes with that. So, I mainly want to point out that it’s not obviously “the responsible choice” to not step in when Sam Altman would otherwise de facto keep benefitting from this board structure’s seal of approval, especially if the board that was put in place no longer feels comfortable with his leadership.
To be clear, even if I’m right about the above, this isn’t saying that there wouldn’t have been better ways to handle this. Also, I want to flag that I don’t know what the board members were actually thinking – maybe they did think of this more as coup and less as a “if we put on our board members hats and try to serve our role as well as possible, what should we do?.” In that case, I would disapprove. I don’t know which one applies.
From this article:
If this is true, then I think the board has made a huge mess of things. They’ve taken a shot without any ammunition, and not realised that the other parties can shoot back. Now there are mass resignations, Microsoft is furious, seemingly all of silicon valley has turned against EA, and it’s even looking likely that Altman comes back.
It seems like they didn’t think they had to act like the boards of other billion dollar companies (notifying your partners of big decisions, being literal instead of euphemistic when discussing reasons for firing, selling your decisions with PR, etc). But often norms and customs happen for a reason, and corporate governance seems to be no exception.
I think it’s premature to judge things based on the little information that’s currently available. I would be surprised if there weren’t reasons for the board’s unconventional choices. (I’m not ruling it out though, that what you say ends up being right)
How much of this is “according to anonymous sources”?
The Board was deeply aware of intricate details of other parties’s will and ability to shoot back. Probably nobody was aware of all of the details, since webs of allies are formed behind closed doors and rearrange during major conflicts, and since investors have a wide variety of retaliatory capabilities that they might not have been open about during the investment process.
What is your current view given how things have developed? Why do you keep putting forward strong views that are based on very bad information?
The board must have thought things through in detail before pulling the trigger, so I’m still putting some credence on there being good reasons for their move and the subsequent radio silence, which might involve crucial info they have and we don’t.
If not, all of this indeed seems like a very questionable move.
I agree. At first I thought there must be a sex scandal or embezzlement or something. But if there’s no malfeasance here, the board has made a huge mess of things.
It’s embarassing for the EA movement, too. It’s another SBF situation. Some EAs get control over billions of dollars, and act completely irresponsibly with that power.
Probably disagree? Hard to say for sure since we lack details, but it’s not obvious to me that the board acted irresponsibly, let alone to the degree that SBF did. I guess one, it seems fairly likely that Ilya Sutskever initiated the whole thing, not the EAs on the board. And two, the board members have fiduciary duties to further the OAI nonprofit’s mission, i.e., to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. (They do not have a duty to ensure OAI is valued at billions of dollars, except in so far as that helps further its mission.)
If the board members had reason to believe that Sam Altman was acting contrary to OAI’s mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all humanity, perhaps moving to fire him was the responsible thing to do (even if it turns out to be bad ex post), and what has been irresponsible are the efforts of investors and others to try to reinstate him. I guess we will know better within the next weeks, but I think it’s premature to say that the board acted irresponsibly right now.
This could end up also having really bad consequences for the goals of EA, so it’s perhaps similar to FTX in that way (but things are still developing and it might somehow turn out well).
Or maybe you feel like the board displayed inexperience and that they were in over their heads. I can probably get behind that based on how things look right now (but there’s a chance we learn more details later that put things into a different light).
Still, I feel like inexperience is only unforgivable if it comes combined with hubris. Many commenters seem to think that there must have been hubris involved on the board’s part. To me, that feels like it’s why people seem so mad about this. “Why else would the board have the audicity to oust such a successful and respected CEO, if they cannot point to any smoking-gun-type thing that justifies firing him to the world?”
But notice how that attitude – being risk averse and inclined to just let the experienced tech CEO do his thing without pushback (and possibly amass leverage over the rest of the company and the board by starting or investing into compute startups or stuff like that, as some of the rumors seem to indicate) – is also dangerous and potentially “irresponsible.” It’s not the by-default safe option, after forming concerns about his suitability, to let Sam Altman continue to cash in from the reputational benefits of running OpenAI with the seal of approval from this public good, non-profit, beneficial-mission-focused board structure that OpenAI has installed. This board structure has, from the very start, served as a kind of seal of approval that guarantees a significant amount of goodwill to people who would look at OpenAI skeptically and think “these tech people put the world at risk to attain power/money/the top spot in history.” EAs were arguably quite crucial (via getting Elon Musk to think about AI risk as well as some other pathways) in helping to set up OpenAI with such a board structure and the reputational protection against scrutiny from a concerned public (especially now that AI risk is gaining traction after chat-gpt spooked a bunch of people) that comes with that. So, I mainly want to point out that it’s not obviously “the responsible choice” to not step in when Sam Altman would otherwise de facto keep benefitting from this board structure’s seal of approval, especially if the board that was put in place no longer feels comfortable with his leadership.
To be clear, even if I’m right about the above, this isn’t saying that there wouldn’t have been better ways to handle this. Also, I want to flag that I don’t know what the board members were actually thinking – maybe they did think of this more as coup and less as a “if we put on our board members hats and try to serve our role as well as possible, what should we do?.” In that case, I would disapprove. I don’t know which one applies.