[ertgbnm]

The botched firing of Sam Altman proves that fancy governance structures are little more than paper shields against the market.

Whatever has been written can be unwritten and if that fails, just start a new company with the same employees.

[ben_w]

> The botched firing of Sam Altman proves that fancy governance structures are little more than paper shields against the market.

The things I saw didn't make any sense, so I can't say that it proves anything other than the existence of hidden information.

The board fired him, and they chose a replacement. The replacement sided with Altman. This repeated several times. The board was (reportedly) OK with closing down the entire business on the grounds of their charter.

Why didn't the board do that? And why did their chosen replacements, not individually but all of them in sequence, side with the person they fired?

My only guess is the board was blackmailed. It's just a guess — it's the only thing I can think of that fits the facts, and I'm well aware that this may be a failure of imagination on my part, and want to emphasise that this shouldn't be construed as anything more than a low-confidence guess by someone who has only seen the same news as everyone else.

[baking]

You obviously have no experience with non-profit governance. OpenAI is organized as a public charity which is required to have an independent board. Due to people leaving the board, they were down to six members, three independent directors plus Sam and two of his employees. They had been struggling to add more board members because Sam and the independent directors couldn't agree on who to add. Then Sam concocted an excuse to remove one of the independent directors and lied to board members about his discussions with other board members.

I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.

Also, I am not surprised the new board isn't being completely open because they are still probably trying to figure out how to fix their governance problems.

[ben_w]

> You obviously have no experience with non-profit governance.

Correct!

> I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.

As someone with no experience with non-profit governance, this does not seem coherent with (1) they didn't just say that, (2) none of their own choices for replacement CEO were willing to go along with this, and this happened with several replacements in a row.

For (1) I'd be willing to just assume good faith on their part, even though it seems odd; but (2) is the one which seems extremely weird to the point that I find myself unable to reconcile.

It would also not be compatible with the reports they were willing to close the company on grounds of it being a danger to humanity, but I'm not sure how reliable that news story was.

[baking]

Yes, ideally you would have a succession plan and a statement reviewed by lawyers, but in this case, you had a deadlocked board that suddenly had a majority to act and did so in the moment. If they had waited, they would have probably lost the opportunity because Ilya Sutskever would have switched his vote again. But the end result is that Sam is off the board and that is the important thing.

Maybe you should explain your blackmail theory and we could see which idea makes the most sense.

[ben_w]

Ok, I'll give it a go.

1. Some party, for some reason, wants to slow down AI development. There are many people motivated to do this. Assume one of them had means and opportunity.

2. The board members wake up to a malicious message ordering them to do ${something} "or ${secret} will be revealed!" (this ${something} could have been many things, so long as it happened to be compatible with firing Altman).

3. The board fires Altman.

4. The board cannot reveal the true reason why they fired Altman, because that would reveal the thing(s) they're being blackmailed over, so they have to make up a different excuse to give to the CEOs they've named as a replacement. As this is done in a hurry under high stress, the story the board arrives at is fundamentally not very good.

5. The replacement CEO does not buy the story given by the board because it's not very well thought-out, and sides with Altman. This repeats a few times.

6. When it becomes clear the board is not capable of winning this battle, because none of the CEOs they hire will carry out their orders, the blackmailer becomes convinced there's no point even trying to hold the board to this threat (there doesn't need to be communication between the board and the blackmailer for this to work, but it's not ruled out either).

While it does seem to fit the observables, I do want to again emphasise that I don't put high probability on this scenario — it's just marginally less improbable than the other ones I've heard, which is a really low bar because none made sense.

[baking]

That's wild. I think we will eventually hear more of the story.

[AndrewKemendo]

Because at some point, the plurality of employees do not subordinate their personal desires to the organizational desires.

The only organizations for which that is a persistent requirement are typically things like priest hoods

[romwell]

The plurality of employees are not the innovators that made the breakthrough possible in the first place.

People are not interchangeable.

Most employees may have bills to pay, and will follow the money. The ones that matter most would have different motivation.

Of course, of your sole goal is to create a husk that milks the achievement of the original team as long as it lasts and nothing else — sure, you can do that.

But the "organizational desires" are still desires of people in the organization. And if those people are the ducks that lay the golden eggs, it might not be the smartest move to ignore them to prioritize the desires of the market for those eggs.

The market is all too happy to kill the ducks if it means more, cheaper eggs today.

Which is, as the adage goes, why we can't have the good things.

[curiousgal]

> Most employees may have bills to pay, and will follow the money.

It always rubs me the wrong way when people justify going for more money as "having bills to pay". No they don't, this makes it seems as if they're down on their luck and have to hustle to pay bills which is far from reality. I am not shaming people for wanting more money of course, but after a certain threshold, framing it as an external necessity is dishonest.

[romwell]

>It always rubs me the wrong way when people justify going for more money as "having bills to pay". No they don't, this makes it seems as if they're down on their luck and have to hustle to pay bills which is far from reality.

What reality do you live in?

I'm a software engineer with Google on my resume (among others); my wife is a software engineer in the chipmaking industry; we both have PhDs and work in Silicon Valley, and have no children.

We work because we have bills to pay. We can't afford to not work. Our largest expenses are still housing, groceries, transportation, medical, etc. - i.e., bills.

We are paying a mortgage on a 3B townhouse, which is also our home office, and where my mother-in-law is living too as a war refugee from Kyiv, Ukraine. I'm helping my mother with her bills too (she's renting a studio in San Diego).

When I don't work, our savings start draining.

It would be nice to get to the point where paying the bills is not something I ever think about. But we haven't reached that threshold.

Neither have most of our friends (also engineers with PhDs). I haven't spoken to my friend in OpenAI in a while, so I hope they've crossed that threshold; but it's not something I know for sure.

[mlrtime]

The problem is that you are equating "bills to pay" as living paycheck to paycheck at the minimum level.

It is a metaphor that they are still working class. You can earn 500k-1M/year in salary and be working class. Your monthly expenses may be > than your salary and you need it to keep working to get at the same QOL.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is absurd and totally out of touch with reality

I live in an exurb of DC, in one of the highest cost of living areas with one of the highest median income in the world.

I have 3 kids who are all in middle and early high school (the most expensive time) and a mortgage and literally just did the math on what my MINIMUM income would need to be in order to maintain a extremely comfortable lifestyle and it’s between $80-100k a year.

Anyone making more than ~100k a year isn’t living paycheck to paycheck unless they are spending way more than their means - which is actually most people

[AndrewKemendo]

Yeah we agree here, but the problem lies with the team

If you hire people who want to cash out then you’ll get people who prioritize prospects for cashing out

Set another way they did not focus on the theoretical public mission enough that it was core to the every day being of the organization much like it is for Medicins San Frontiers etc.

[insane_dreamer]

Most of the people they hired were to work for OpenAI.com which was a pure profit-driven tech company just like any other (and funded by Microsoft). Those who joined the original OpenAI (including its independent board members) were driven by different motivations more in line with research and discovery.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is my point

In a political direct action context a really effective way to take over an organization from the inside is called “salting.”

I believe that’s what Altman very effectively did and while a few people called it out at the time, Altman was able to realign the org by amplifying and then exploiting everyones greed.

[xwolfi]

Medecins Sans Frontieres

[vdddv]

Médecins Sans Frontières

[boringuser2]

I wonder if your lesson is "Sam Altman should/would have been fired but for market forces".

[ohwellhere]

The lesson is that "should have been fired" was believed by the people who had power on paper; "should not have been fired" was believed by the people actually had power.

[boringuser2]

That just simplifies things a hair too much. Remember, the people who worked at OpenAI, subject to market forces, also supported the return of Altman.

Market forces are broad and operate at every level of power, hard and soft.

[xdavidliu]

> Remember, the people who worked at OpenAI, subject to market forces, also supported the return of Altman.

I believe that's what your parent comment was actually talking about. I read it saying the people in power on paper was the previous board, and the people actually in power were the employees (which by the way is an interesting inversion of how it usually is)

[insane_dreamer]

> the people who worked at OpenAI, subject to market forces, also supported the return of Altman.

that's because most of those people did not work for the mission-focused parent OpenAI company (which the board oversaw) but it's highly-profit-driven-subservient-to-Microsoft child company (who were happy to jump to Microsoft if their jobs were threatened; no ding against them as they hadn't signed up to the original mission-driven company in the first place).

it's important to separate the two entities in order to properly understand the scenario here

[ertgbnm]

I don't know whether Sam should be fired because no one has published the reason that he was in the first place.

All I know is that the first time that the authority of the board was used to make an unpopular decision in what presumably the board members thought was in the interest of protecting the values of OpenAI, there was an insurrection that succeeded in having the board reverse the decision. The board exists to make unpopular decisions that further the core mission of OpenAI as opposed to furthering the bottom line. But the second that the core mission and the bottom line came into conflict with one another, it became clear which one actually controls OpenAI.

[samstave]

>>>"The botched firing of Sam Altman proves that fancy governance structures are little more than paper shields against the _market_."

-

...Or rather ( $ ) . ( $ ) immediate hindsight eyes...

[marcosdumay]

    λ>:t ( $ ) . ( $ )
    ( $ ) . ( $ ) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b

I really didn't expect the type to be simple, but in hindsight, it's obvious.

[Cacti]

Is this a boob joke or a money joke?

[dev_hugepages]

A haskell one

[samstave]

For great justice!

[gooseus]

"Cease quoting bylaws to those of us with yachts"

[corethree]

It was botched because the public was too stupid to see how much of a snake Sam Altman is. He was fired from Y-combinator and people were still Universally supporting him on HN.

IF people hated him he would've been dropped. Microsoft and everybody else only moved forward because they knew they wouldn't get public backlash. Seems everyone fails to remember their own mob mentality. People here on HN were practically worshipping the guy.

Statistically most people commenting here right now were NOT supporting his firing and now you've all flipped and are saying stuff like: "yeah he should've been fired." Seriously?

I don't blame the governance. They tried their best. It's the public that screwed up. (Very likely to be YOU, dear reader)

Without public support the leadership literally only had enemies at every angle and they have nowhere to turn. Imagine what that must have felt like for those members of the board. Powerful corporations threatening aspects of their livelihoods (of course this happened, you can't force a leader to voluntarily step down without some form of a serious threat) and the entire world hating on them for doing such a "stupid" move as everyone thought of it at the time.

I'm ashamed at humanity. I look at this thread and I'm seriously thinking, what in the fuck? It's like everyone forgot what they were doing. And they still twist it to blame them as if they weren't "powerful" enough to stop it. Are you kidding?

[mhitza]

It's a mistake to claim that Altman has/had universal support in here. I'm neutral towards him for example, and in all this firing minidrama the only thing I was interested in was to learn the motives of his firing.

[corethree]

For these types of things of course there's alternative opinions. It's like measuring voting... No candidate literally gets 100 percent of the vote.

But to characterize it as something other then overwhelming support to reinstate Sam altman would be false.

Hence why I said most people (key word: most) are just flip flopping with the background trends. Mob mentality.

[christianqchung]

Genuine question, what did he do that was so unforgivable? If it's so obvious, you should be able to list what happened in an unambiguous way.

[latexr]

We can start with the crypto scam that he’s now trying to pivot to the AI space as the “solution” to the problem he created.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

[corethree]

I can't. Even this company policy being talked about in this thread is ambigiuose. That's the problem.

He was fired from y combinator and the entire board wanted to fire his ass too.

Therefore by this logic he should have universal support for reinstatement and the entire board should be vilified? Makes no sense. But this is exactly the direction of the Mob and was the general reaction on HN.

It was ambigiuose whether Sam was a problem and that makes ambigiuose treatment and investigation warranted. The proper reaction is: "wtf is going on? Let's find out" Instead what he got was hero worship. The public was literally condemning the board and worshipping the guy with no evidence.

And now with even more ambiguous and suspicious facts everyone here is suddenly "level headed." Yeah that's bs. What's going on is mostly everyone here is just going with the flow and adopting the background trends and sentiments. Mob mentality all the way.

[christianqchung]

Yes, I see. I wrote ambiguously myself, I meant to say what justifies calling him a snake. I assume that it was past incidents pre-OpenAI involving ycomb and other things? I understand that you feel the mob mentality is unfair and overwhelming, so please don't keep retreading that.

[corethree]

Insider info. I know people who know people who terminated Sam Altman from Y combinator. In general there's no solid evidence about Sams character on the surface but you can glean details. There's other people on HN who know of his character as well. Maybe you can find them when sifting through the posts.

It's like Trump. Is trump really a snake? depends on who you ask but there's controversy around trump and in direct parallel there's controversy about Sam as well.

[mrcode007]

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/self-dealing.asp

In lesser known places such as Wall St, practices like self dealing are considered illegal. In venture they’re often celebrated. Go figure.

I think there’s a general distaste towards setting up networks of companies B, C, D, planning to profit from a success of another company A where a single person controls all the companies and there’s a reasonable expectation of plans to divert business from A towards B, C, D.

I don’t know the details but there seems to be some gripe about it. I’m speculating.

[insane_dreamer]

> I don't blame the governance. They tried their best. It's the public that screwed up.

Yes, the public was to blame, but inherently the board was doomed because OpenAI had morphed from a public benefit mission-driven company to a profit-driven one heavily funded by MSFT which expected its due return. Once the for-profit "sub"-company, the parent mission-driven company was doomed, because most people were going to be working for the profit-driven child company and therefore had different goals (i.e., salary, options) than the mission-driven parent company (scientific breakthroughs, responsible creation/development of AI). This is why the employees (of the child company) revolted and supported Sam (who had reneged on OpenAI's mission and gone full capitalist like any other tech mogul out there). The only question in my mind was whether "Open"AI was always a scam from the start to get attention or a genuine pivot (which the board unsuccessfully tried to stop).

And now responsible AI development is gone and everyone is chasing the money, just like the social media companies did, and well, we know how that ended up (Facebook, Twitter).

Sad day indeed.

[x0x0]

I'm not sure why you attribute that as a shield against the market. That seemed much more like an open employee revolt. And I can't think of a governance structure that is going to stop 90% of your employees from saying, for example, we work for Sam Altman, not you idiots...

[mousetree]

An employee revolt due to the market. The employees wanted to cash out in the secondary offering that Sam was setting up before the mess. It was in (market) interest to get him back and get the deal on track.

[x0x0]

Employees care about their pay is so reductive as to be meaningless. Any action any employee takes can be labelled as such.

[dmix]

Broad speculation

[iojrgao]

Yes, they wanted to work for Sam... because he was arranging a deal to give them liquidity and make them rich.

The board was not going to make them rich.