This is a linkpost for https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/
OpenAI Staff (including Sutskever) Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns
32Robert_AIZI
15arabaga
7gwern
1arabaga
-5M. Y. Zuo
5mako yass
1arabaga
4mako yass
2ryan_b
15mako yass
-6Mitchell_Porter
17trevor
2Gerald Monroe
4Mitchell_Porter
5Seth Herd
8ErickBall
5trevor
2ryan_b
5trevor
1Mitchell_Porter
2the gears to ascension
-7O O
4the gears to ascension
3Seth Herd
6trevor
2RHollerith
-12GodHead
7RomanHauksson
New Comment
28 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 4:45 AM
I'm noticing my confusion about the level of support here. Kara Swisher says that these are 505/700 employees, but the OpenAI publication I'm most familiar with is the autointerpretability paper, and none (!) of the core research contributors to that paper signed this letter. Why is a large fraction of the company anti-board/pro-Sam except for 0/6 of this team (discounting Henk Tillman because he seems to work for Apple instead of OpenAI)? The only authors on that paper that signed the letter are Gabriel Goh and Ilya Sutskever. So is the alignment team unusually pro-board/anti-Sam, or are the 505 just not that large a faction in the company?
[Editing to add a link to the pdf of the letter, which is how I checked for who signed https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24172246/letter-to-the-openai-board-google-docs.pdf ]
2There is an updated list of 702 who have signed the letter (as of the time I'm writing this) here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/technology/letter-to-the-open-ai-board.html (direct link to pdf: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f31ff522a5b1ad7a/9cf7eda3-full.pdf)
Nick Cammarata left OpenAI ~8 weeks ago, so he couldn't have signed the letter.
Out of the remaining 6 core research contributors:
- 3/6 have signed it: Steven Bills, Dan Mossing, and Henk Tillman
- 3/6 have still not signed it: Leo Gao, Jeff Wu, and William Saunders
Out of the non-core research contributors:
- 2/3 signed it: Gabriel Goh and Ilya Sutskever
- 1/3 still have not signed it: Jan Leike
That being said, it looks like Jan Leike has tweeted that he thinks the board should resign: https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1726600432750125146
And that tweet was liked by Leo Gao: https://twitter.com/nabla_theta/likes
Still, it is interesting that this group is clearly underrepresented among people who have actually signed the letter.
Edit: Updated to note that Nick Cammarata is no longer at OpenAI, so he couldn't have signed the letter. For what it's worth, he has liked at least one tweet that called for the board to resign: https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/likes
I was annoyed by the lack of actual proof that the petition to follow sam was signed by anyone from OpenAI, all it would really take is linking a single endorsement (or just an acknowledgement of its existence) from a signatory. So I asked around and here is one such tweet: https://twitter.com/E0M/status/1726743918023496140
More drama. Perhaps this will prevent spawning a new competent and funded AI org at MS?