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The Board was in a lose-lose situation, either they could let Altman continue unchecked, or pick a fight they'd lose.
He's already consolidated personal power and has the loyalty of most of the employees, even if I'm sure many of them are pissed at their equity going up in smoke, and the Board, able to exercise power only through hiring and firing CEOs, was powerless to do much about it. They only had the option to C4 a problem where the occasional use of a scalpel might have helped.
The whole thing is both a farce and a tragedy, I have no confidence anymore that anybody will be able to halt the deployment of an AGI on any grounds, profit motive will continue going brrr. The only saving grace is that Altman is still x-risk pilled, so the potential increase in risk isn't unbounded.
I agree. The big takeaway from this weekend was that humanity as a species is in deep trouble because, when the chips are down, people will care more about money than principles.
I also think the criticism of the board is bizarre. They took their shot. They lost, ultimately because the employees didn't want to lose their huge salaries and bonuses. But what is power if you don't try to use it? This wasn't a strategic blunder, it was merely a board that never had any power in the first place.
Had they not taken action, they would have been swept aside anyway.
Perhaps their action will have some residual value in revealing previously hidden information. If anyone had any illusions about OpenAI before, they shouldn't now. We know what OpenAI is - a company that seeks power and money above all else. The news of research breakthroughs coming from OpenAI is deeply troubling.
The board badly fucked up their shot. I think they had a chance at persuading at least a fraction of OpenAI that sam did some things wrong, if indeed he had. A number of OpenAI employees care about AI safety, and some even expressed online that, initially after Altman's firing, they were open to the possibility that it was deserved. But when the board said nothing for days, even to the first and second interim CEOs, that left the employees with nothing to think about but concerns about their future income and whatever Sam told them.
They also could've spent the preceding months building up a case against sam, maybe picking a replacement CEO who the openai team would be amenable to, etc. But they didn't!
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We're in agreement on this one. I do think the idealists (including the EA faction which went all-in on X-risk and unaligned AI) are sincere and genuinely want to help humanity, but they're never going to succeed in our current climate.
Between those who are more interested in playing with the technology, moving fast and breaking things and seeing what they hope will be the technocratic future where they get their hearts' desires, and hence ending up accusing any opposition or disagreement as Luddites (also the go-to 'but if we don't do it, China will first, and you don't want China to rule the future, do you?' appeal), and the good old profit motive (by working to halt AI progress I am working against my own interests since that will make the equity go up in smoke, hence despite ostensibly being pro-safety and pro-slowdown, I'm not really) - begging for a moratorium has a snowball in Hell's chance of actually being listened to, never mind taken seriously.
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