[telltruth]

While most of the interview is boring and nothing new has been said by Toner, to me, it feels like huge political fight where sama tried to overthrow her first and then Toner went in attack mode trying to overthrow him. It's clear she was the lead instigator and accidently found Illya as sympathetic co-conspirator. Board was obviously ok and took no action when they weren't informed about release of ChatGPT. It also didn't took action when sama didn't told them about startup fund. Only after Toner's paper and sama's move, all these became important.

Overall, I genuinely believe that the board needs to get out of way. They are not the founder, they are not even technical. They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings but politics and brewing up secret coups is not their job.

[slg]

> They should do oversight for intentional and significant wrong doings

Would lying to the board not count as "intentional and significant wrong doings"?

[sage76]

> they are not even technical

Sama is also not technical.

[jfoster]

I've seen this mentioned a few times, but is this true? I could swear I've heard him mention that he uses ChatGPT for programming stuff. He might not be a super technical software engineer, but is he "non-technical" in that he can't even write some simple python or something equivalent?

[ZiiS]

He did two years computer science at Stanford before dropping out. I don't think "simple python" is the benchmark.

[KptMarchewa]

So, probably epitome of Dunning-Kruger.

[doktrin]

> He might not be a super technical software engineer, but is he "non-technical" in that he can't even write some simple python or something equivalent?

1. that's a very low bar, almost to the point of making any distinction meaningless

2. imho, "technical" and "non-technical" are context dependent, and not intrinsic human qualities. Speaking for myself : I'm a technical individual contributor on my current team, but there are plenty of domains (bleeding edge AI research likely being one of them) where my technical acumen would fall short of expectations for an IC, and hence where my most logical role would be non-technical in nature.

[jfoster]

OK, so what's the bar by which Altman would be considered "non-technical"?

[doktrin]

You tell me. Did he make meaningful technical contributions to OAI?

[marcinzm]

> They are not the founder, they are not even technical

OpenAI can't have it both ways. Either it's not a company owned by it's founders (as Sam claims) or it is. A board that does nothing ever is equivalent to the former.