[jxi]

Was this really motivated by AI safety or was it just Helen Toner’s personal vendetta against Sam?

It doesn’t feel like anything was accomplished besides wasting 700+ people’s time, and the only thing that has changed now is Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley are off the board.

[hn_throwaway_99]

As someone who was very critical of how the board acted, I strongly disagree. I felt like this Washington Post article gave a very good, balanced overview. I think it sounds like there were substantive issues that were brewing for a long time, though no doubt personal clashes had a huge impact on how it all went down:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt...

[jkaplan]

> was it just Helen Toner’s personal vendetta against Sam

I'm not defending the board's actions, but if anything, it sounds like it may have been the reverse? [1]

> In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company... “I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight." Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever... later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

[jxi]

Right, so getting Sam fired was retaliation for that.

[cbeach]

Curious how a relatively unknown academic with links to China [1] attained a board seat on America's hottest and most valuable AI company.

Particularly as she openly expressed that "destroying" that company might be the best outcome. [2]

> During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities. Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission was to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission.

[1] https://www.chinafile.com/contributors/helen-toner [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

[hn_throwaway_99]

Oh lord, spare me with the "links to China" idiocy. I once ate a fortune cookie, does that mean I have "links to China" too?

Toner got her board seat because she was basically Holden Karnofsky's designated replacement:

> Holden Karnofsky resigns from the Board, citing a potential conflict because his wife, Daniela Amodei, is helping start Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor, with her brother Dario Amodei. (They all live(d) together.) The exact date of Holden’s resignation is unknown; there was no contemporaneous press release.

> Between October and November 2021, Holden was quietly removed from the list of Board Directors on the OpenAI website, and Helen was added (Discussion Source). Given their connection via Open Philanthropy and the fact that Holden’s Board seat appeared to be permanent, it seems that Helen was picked by Holden to take his seat.

https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

[cbeach]

Perhaps you're not aware. Living in Beijing is not equivalent to "once eating a fortune cookie"

> it seems that Helen was picked by Holden to take his seat.

So you can only speculate as to how she got the seat. Which is exactly my point. We can only speculate. And it's a question worth asking, because governance of America's most important AI company is a very important topic right now.

[Zpalmtree]

Wow, very surprised this is the first I'm hearing of this, seems very suspect