There's a vast ocean of difference between 'growth at all costs' and 'good corporate governance'. OpenAI is bleeding cash. Sama knows that you need to bring money in to build important new technology, especially in this non-frothy high interest rate economy. So while it's not critical to make a profit, you need to keep the lights on to keep the new research and development going. What Ilya and the board have done is completely wrecked OpenAI's momentum at a critical time. Unless they are sitting on world-changing AGI, this move made no sense and they don't have the company's best interests at heart.
It could also be cynicism and not naivete? It'd be pretty amazing if OpenAI actually wrested away control for the betterment of humanity. That'd be the good news of the decade... just hard to imagine in this world.
That’s a broad, uncharitable brush with which to paint everyone else. Maybe we need a razor: hesitate to attribute to sociopathy that which can reasonably be explained by a benign difference of opinion.
In two decades of tech booms, when have we seen a huge company actually do what's good for society? Our economy and society elevates sociopathy by design.
The "difference of opinion" is a fundamental difference in ideology and motivations, not to mention day to day operating differences.
I think the opinion that the grand parent identifies as sociopathic wasn’t the board’s or even Altman’s, but of the masses on HN shocked by the event. The opinions of the majority here are the “sociopathy.”
You don’t need to be a sociopath to be conditioned into holding sociopathic views. Plus, I think your objection is relying really heavily on “benign” — in a situation of this gravity, who’s to say what’s benignly relative and what’s worth arguing about?
Perhaps HN visitors are not benign, I have no idea. They mostly seem reasonable and friendly to me. I’m only saying calling groups of people you don’t know any particular thing, who are not homogeneous, is fraught and uncharitable. Not to mention thinking you’re the only person with moral clarity amongst your heathen peers, is, well, not a recipe for a great time. Why even come here then?
People with non-benign views are still worth talking to :). I bet some of my current views turn out to be harmful and regrettable in hindsight. Definitely didn’t mean to attack the inherent/essential character of Hacker News Residents, just defend the original point and point out the inherent validity of calling a particular belief set “sociopathic”