OpenAI: The Battle of the Board

[-]aphyer2y*9556

The board had a choice.
If Ilya was willing to cooperate, the board could fire Altman, with the Thanksgiving break available to aid the transition, and hope for the best.
Alternatively, the board could choose once again not to fire Altman, watch as Altman finished taking control of OpenAI and turned it into a personal empire, and hope this turns out well for the world.
They chose to pull the trigger.

I...really do not see how these were the only choices? Like, yes, ultimately my boss's power over me stems from his ability to fire me. But it would be very strange to say 'my boss and I disagreed, and he had to choose between firing me on the spot or letting me do whatever I wanted with no repercussions'?

Here are some things I can imagine the board doing. I don't know if some of these are things they wouldn't have had the power to do, or wouldn't have helped, but:

Consolidating the board/attempting to reduce Altman's control over it. If Sam could try to get Helen removed from the board (even though he controlled only 2/6 directors?) could the 4-2 majority of other directors not do anything other than 'fire Sam as CEO'?
1. Remove Sam from the board but leave

... (read more)

[-]ryan_b2y5316

I think the central confusion here is: why, in the face of someone explicitly trying to take over the board, would the rest of the board just keep that person around?

None of the things you suggested have any bearing whatsoever on whether Sam Altman would continue to try and take over the board. If he has no board position but is still the CEO, he can still do whatever he wants with the company, and also try to take over the board. If he is removed as CEO but remains on the board, he will still try to take over the board. Packing the board has no bearing on the things Sam can do to expand his influence there, it just means it takes longer. The problem the board had to solve was not the immediacy of Sam taking over, but the inevitability of it. The gambit with removing Helen Toner failed, but other gambits would follow.

Also notice that the 4-2 split is not a fixed faction: Ilya switched sides as soon as the employees revolted putting us at 3-3, and it appears Adam D’Angelo was instrumental in the negotiation to bring Sam back. What looks at first like a 4-2 split and therefore safe was more like a 2-1-1-2 that briefly coalesced into a 4-2 split in response to Sam trying to make it a 1-1-1-3 split instead. Under those conditions, Sam would be able to do anything that wasn't so egregious it caused the other three to unify AND one of his team's seats to defect.

[-]mishka2y3313

In principle, the 4 members of the board had an option which would look much better: to call a meeting of all 6 board members, and to say at that meeting, "hey, the 4 of us think we should remove Sam from the company and remove Greg from the board, let's discuss this matter before we take a vote: tell us why we should not do that".

That would be honorable, and would look honorable, and the public relation situation would look much better for them.

The reason they had not done that was, I believe, that they did not feel confident they could resist persuasion powers of Sam, that they thought he would have talked at least one of them out of it.

But then what they did looked very unreasonable from more than one viewpoint:

Should you take a monumental decision like this, if your level of confidence in this decision is so low that you think you might be talked out of it on the spot?
Should you destroy someone like this before letting this person to defend himself?

They almost behaved as if Sam was already a hostile superintelligent AI who was trying to persuade them to let him out of the box, and who had superpowers of persuasion, and the only way to avoid the outcomes of letting him out of the box was to close one's ears and eyes and shut him down before he could say anything.

Perhaps this was close to how they actually felt...

6ryan_b2y

I agree with this, and I am insatiably curious about what was behind their decisions about how to handle it. But my initial reaction based on what we have seen is that it wouldn’t have worked, because Sam Altman comes to the meeting with a pre-rallied employee base and the backing of Microsoft. Since Ilya reversed on the employee revolt, I doubt he would have gone along with the plan when presented a split of OpenAI up front.

0[comment deleted]2y

[-]jefftk2y3015

Speculating of course, but it reads to me like the four directors knew Altman was much better at politics and persuasion than they were. They briefly had a majority willing to kick him off, and while "Sam would have found a basilisk hack to mind-control the rest of the board" is phrased too magically to me I don't think it's that far off? This sort of dynamic feels familiar to me from playing games where one player is far better than the others at convincing people.

(And then because they were way outclassed in politics and persuasion they handled the aftermath of their decision poorly and Altman did an incredible job.)

[-]Linch2y2519

In the last 4 days, they were probably running on no sleep (and less used to that/had less access to the relevant drugs than Altman and Bockman), and had approximately zero external advisors, while Altman seemed to be tapping into half of Silicon Valley and beyond for help/advice.

8frontier642y

This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn't do it, that's it. They can't do it themselves, they can't tell the CEO's underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI's board had less control even than this. Tweeting "Altman is not following our directions and we don't want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask" is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It's admitting that you won't use the one tool that you actually do have. I'm certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I'm certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.

[-]ChristianKl2y1012

I'm certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I'm certain Sam never made all of those X changes.

From where do you get that certainty?

If they would have made those threats, why didn't someone tell the New York Times journalists who were trying to understand what happened about it?

Why didn't they say so when they fired him? It's the kind of thing that's easy to say to justify firing him.

2MikkW2y

The board's statement doesn't mention them having made such a request to Altman which was denied, that's a strong signal against things having played out that way.

3HiddenPrior2y

I feel like this is a good observation. I notice I am confused at their choices given the information provided.... So there is probably more information? Yes, it is possible that Toner and the former board just made a mistake, and thought they had more control over the situation than they really did? Or underestimated Altman's sway over the employees of the company? The former board does not strike me as incompetent though. I don't think it was sheer folly that lead them to pick this debacle as their best option. Alternatively, they may have had information we don't that lead them to believe that this was the least bad course of action.

2Roland Pihlakas2y

The following is meant as a question to find out, not a statement of belief. Nobody seems to have mentioned the possibility that initially they did not intend to fire Sam, but just to warn him or to give him a choice to restrain himself. Yet possibly he himself escalated it to firing or chose firing instead of complying with the restraint. He might have done that just in order to have all the consequences that have now taken place, giving him more power. For example, people in power positions may escalate disagreements, because that is a territory they are more experienced with as compared to their opponents.

[-]Rebecca2y6953

Most of this is interesting, and useful, speculation, but it reads as a reporting of facts…

[-]David Hornbein2y6232

I really don't think you can justify putting this much trust in the NYT's narrative of events and motivations here. Like, yes, Toner did publish the paper, and probably Altman did send her an email about it. Then the NYT article tacitly implies but *doesn't explicitly say* this was the spark that set everything off, which is the sort of haha-it's-not-technically-lying that I expect from the NYT. This post depends on that implication being true.

[-]1a3orn2y2717

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect seems pretty operative, given the first name on the relevant NYT article is the same guy who did some pretty bad reporting on Scott Alexander.

If you don't think the latter was a reliable summary of Scott's blog, there's not much reason to think that the former is a reliable summary of the OpenAI situation.

5xpym2y

I'd say that, on conflict theory terms, NYT adequately described Scott. They correctly identified him as a contrarian willing to entertain, and maybe even hold, taboo opinions, and to have polite interactions with out-and-out witches. Of course, we may think it deplorable that the 'newspaper of record' considers such people deserving to be publicly named and shamed, but they provided reasonably accurate information to those sharing this point of view.

[-]Rebecca2y2510

The assertion is that Sam sent the email reprimanding Helen to others at OpenAI, not to Helen herself, which is a fundamentally different move.

I can’t conceive of a situation in which the CEO of a non-profit trying to turn the other employees against the people responsible for that non-profit (ie the board) would be business-as-usual.

2[comment deleted]2y

[-]Linch2y4510

Someone privately messaged me this whistleblowing channel for people to give their firsthand accounts of board members. I can't verify the veracity/security of the channel but I'm hoping that having an anonymous place to post concerns might lower the friction or costs involved in sharing true information about powerful people:

https://openaiboard.wtf/

[-]jbash2y2712

Alternatively, the board could choose once again not to fire Altman, watch as Altman finished taking control of OpenAI and turned it into a personal empire, and hope this turns out well for the world.

I think it's pretty clear that Altman had already basically consolidated de facto control.

If you've arranged things so that 90+ percent of the staff will threaten to quit if you're thrown out against your will, and a major funding source will enable you to instantly rehire many or most of those people elsewhere, and you'll have access to almost every bit of the existing work, and you have massive influence with outside players the organization needs to work with, and your view of how the organization should run is the one more in line with those outside players' actual interests, and you have a big PR machine on standby, and you're better at this game than anybody else in the place, then the organization needs you more than you need it. You have the ability to destroy it if need be.

If it's also true that your swing board member is unwilling to destroy the organization^[1], then you have control.

I read somewhere that like half the OpenAI staff, probably constituting the committed cor... (read more)

9dr_s2y

I honestly think the Board should have just blown OpenAI up. The compromise is worthless, these conditions remain and thus Sam Altman is in power. So at least have him go work for Microsoft, it likely won't be any worse but the pretense is over. And yeah, they should have spoken more and more openly, at least give people some good ammo to defend their choices though the endless cries of "BUT ALL THAT LOST VALUE" would have come anyway.

[-]Odd anon2y252

Concerning. This isn't the first time I've seen a group fall into the pitfall of "wow, this guy is amazing at accumulating power for us, this is going great - oh whoops, now he holds absolute control and might do bad things with it".

Altman probably has good motivations, but even so, this is worrying. "One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp with too much force is to be taken over by power, thus becoming its victim" to quote the Bene Gesserit.

[-]ryan_b2y1811

Well gang, it looks like we have come to the part where we are struggling directly over the destiny of humanity. In addition to persuasion and incentives, we'll have to account for the explicit fights over control of the orgs.

Silver lining: it means we have critical mass for enough of humanity and enough wealth in play to die with our boots on, at least!

[-]O O2y3622

The last few days should show it's not enough to have power cemented in technicalities, board seats, or legal contracts. Power comes from gaining support of billionaires, journalists, and human capital. It's kind of crazy that Sam Altman essentially rewrote the rules, whether he was justified or not.

The problem is the types of people who are good at gaining power tend to have values that are incompatible with EA. The real silver lining to me, is that while it's clear Sam Altman is power-seeking, he's also probably a better option to have there than the rest of the people good at seeking power, who might not even entertain x-risk.

8dr_s2y

Until stakes get so high that we go straight to the realm of violence (threatened, by the State or other actors, or enacted), yes, it does. Enough soft power becomes hard. Honestly can't figure how anyone thought this setup would work, especially with Altman being a deft manipulator as he seems to be. I've made the Senate vs Caesar comparison before but I'll reiterate it, because ultimately rules only matter until personal loyalty persuades enough people to ignore them.

8ryan_b2y

I agree in the main, and I think it is worth emphasizing that power-seeking is a skillset, which is orthogonal to values; we should put it in the Dark Arts pile, and anyone involved in running an org should learn it at least enough to defend against it.

6[anonymous]2y

What would be your defense? Agents successful at seeking power have more power.

9ryan_b2y

Power seeking mostly succeeds by the other agents not realizing what is going on, so it either takes them by surprise or they don’t even notice it happened until the power is exerted. Yet power seeking is a symmetric behavior, and power is scarce. The defense is to compete for power against the other agent, and try to eliminate them if possible.

3[anonymous]2y

I agree. For power that comes from (money/reputation/military/hype) developing AI systems, this is where I was wondering where the symmetry is for those who wish to stop AI being developed. The 'doomer' faction over time won't be benefitting from AI, and thus their relative power would be weaker and weaker with time. Assuming at least initially, AI systems have utility value to humans, if the AI systems treacherous turn it will be later, after initially providing large benefits. With this corporate battle right now, Altman is going to announce whatever advances they have made, raise billions of dollars, and the next squabble will have the support of people that Altman has personally enriched. I heard a rumor it works out to be 3.6 million per employee with the next funding round, with a 2 year cliff, so 1.8 million/year on the line. This would be why almost all OpenAI employees stated they would leave over it. So it's a direct example of the general symmetry issue mentioned above. (leaving would also pay: I suspect Microsoft would have offered more liquid RSUs and probably matched the OAI base, maybe large signing bonuses. Not 1.8m but good TC. Just me speculating, I don't know the offer details and it is likely Microsoft hadn't decided) The only 'obvious' way I could see doomers gaining power with time would be if early AI systems cause mass murder events or damage similar to nuclear meltdowns. This would give them political support, and it would scale with AI system capability, as more powerful systems cause more and more deaths and more and more damage.

1Thane Ruthenis2y

Off the top of my head: evading notice, running away (to a different jurisdiction/market, or in some even more abstract sense), appearing to be a poisoned meal (likely by actually being poisoned, such that eating you will be more harmful to their reputation or demand more of their focused attention than you're worth to them), or seeking the protection of dead-player institutions (who'd impose a steep-but-flat cost on you, and then won't actively try to take you over).

0Boris Kashirin2y

I think it is not even goals but means. When you have big hammer every problem looks like a nail, if you good at talking you start to think you can talk your way out of any problem.

[-]jacquesthibs2y*171

Someone else reported that Sam seemingly was trying to get Helen off of the board weeks prior to the firing:

[-]trevor2y162

From Planecrash page 10:

On the first random page Keltham opened to, the author was saying what some 'Duke' (high-level Government official) was thinking while ordering the east gates to be sealed, which, like, what, how would the historian know what somebody was thinking, at best you get somebody else's autobiographical account of what they claim they were thinking, and then the writer is supposed to say that what was observed was the claim, and mark separately any inferences from the observation, because one distinguishes observations from inferences.

This post generally does well on this point (obviously written by a bayesian, Zvi's coverage is generally superior), except for the claim "Altman started it". We don't know who started it, and most of the major players might not even know who started it. According to Alex A:

Smart people who have an objective of accumulating and keeping control—who are skilled at persuasion and manipulation —will often leave little trace of wrongdoing. They’re optimizing for alibis and plausible deniability. Being around them and trying to collaborate with them is frustrating. If you’re self-aware enough, you can recognize that your

... (read more)

2jbash2y

I was actually surprised that the new board ended up with members who might reasonably be expected, under the right circumstances, to resist something Microsoft wanted. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had ended up all Microsoft employees and obvious Microsoft proxies. Probably that was a concession in return for the old board agreeing to the whole thing. But it's also convenient for Altman. It doesn't matter if he pledges allegiance. The question is what actual leverage Microsoft has over him should he choose to do something Microsoft doesn't like. This makes a nonzero difference in his favor.

5followthesilence2y

If Sam is as politically astute as he is made out to be, loading the board with blatant MSFT proxies would be bad optics and detract from his image. He just needs to be relatively sure they won't get in his way or try to coup him again.

1Tristan Wegner2y

The former boards only power was to agree/fire to new board members and CEOs. Pretty sure they only Let Altman back as CEO under the condition of having a strong influence over the new board.

[-]titotal2y164

If Ilya was willing to cooperate, the board could fire Altman, with the Thanksgiving break available to aid the transition, and hope for the best.
Alternatively, the board could choose once again not to fire Altman, watch as Altman finished taking control of OpenAI and turned it into a personal empire, and hope this turns out well for the world.

Could they not have also gone with option 3: fill the vacant board seats with sympathetic new members, thus thwarting Altman's power play internally?

[-]Zvi2y1517

My presumption is that doing this while leaving Altman in place as CEO risks Altman engaging in hostile action, and it represents a vote of no confidence in any case. It isn't a stable option. But I'd have gamed it out?

3quailia2y

The way I see it, Altman likely was not giving great board updates and may have been ignoring what they told him to do for months. Board removal was not a credible threat then, adding more board members would not do anything to change him.

[-]jacquesthibs2y*151

Here's a video (consider listening to the full podcast for more context) by someone who was a red-teamer for GPT-4 and was removed as a volunteer for the project after informing a board member that (early) GPT-4 was pretty unsafe. It's hard to say what really happened and if Sam and co weren't candid with the board about safety issues regarding GPT-4, but I figured I'd share as another piece of evidence.

[-]jam_brand2y111

Here's a video

It's also written up on Cognitive Revolution's substack for those that prefer text.

[-]followthesilence2y92

This is a great post, synthesizing a lot of recent developments and (I think) correctly identifying a lot of what's going on in real time, at least with the limited information we have to go off of. Just curious what evidence supports the idea of Summers being "bullet-biting" or associated with EA?

[-]Askwho2y60

I've created an ElevenLabs AI narrated version of this post. I know their is already a voice option on this page, but I personally prefer the ElevenLabs output. https://www.patreon.com/posts/93392366?utm_campaign=postshare_creator

[-]Tristan Wegner2y51

Just in 5h ago:

Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for what's known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/

Could relate to this Q* for Deep Learning heuristics:

https://x.com/McaleerStephen/status/1727524295377596645?s=20

[-]the gears to ascension2y3-8

New way of putting it after the other thread got derailed:

re Larry Summers - my read of his wiki page and history of controversies is that he's a power player who keeps his cards close to his chest and is perfectly willing to wear political attire that imply he's friendly, but when it comes down to it, he's inclined towards not seeing all humans as deserving a fair shake; the core points of evidence for this concern are his association with epstein and his comments about sending waste to low income countries. He's also said things about other things, but t... (read more)

3ChristianKl2y

Wikipedia describes those as: Generally, judging people by what they said over three decades ago is not very useful. In this case, there seems to be a suggestion that it was a joke. Hanging out with Epstein is bad, but it does not define a person who does lots of different things. infer his intentions only from what policies he's advocated and implemented relative to counterfactual for who else could have filled the positions he's held. So what did he advocate lately? Things like: Especially given that he's on the board of a VC firm advocating for closing the carried interest loophole suggests that does not only see his own economic self-interests as important.

[-]River2y3-71

From my perspective, even rebuking Toner here is quite bad. It is completely inconsistent with the nonprofit’s mission to not allow debate and disagreement and criticism.

I can't imagine any board, for-profit or non-profit, tolerating one of its members criticizing its organization in public. Toner had a very privileged position, she got to be in one of the few rooms where discussion of AI safety matters most, where decisions that actually matter get made. She got to make her criticisms and cast her votes there, where it mattered. That is hardly "not allow[... (read more)

[-]habryka2y381

Lightcone definitely tolerates (and usually encourages) criticism of itself by its members. Many other organizations do too! This is absolutely not in any way a universal norm.

3River2y

By members of the board of directors specifically?

[-]habryka2y251

I mean, yes, definitely (Zvi is on the board of our fiscal sponsor, and it would be crazy to me if we threatened remotely any consequences of him expressing concerns about us publicly, and my best guess is Zvi would move to fire me or step down pretty immediately if that happened).

4River2y

Interesting. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "fiscal sponsor", and I don't really want to go down that road. My understanding of nonprofit governance norms is that if a board member has concerns about their organization (and they probably do - they have a shit tone more access and confidential information than most people, and no organization is perfect) then they can express those concerns privately to the rest of the board, to the executive director, to the staff. They are a board member, they have access to these people, and they can maintain a much better working relationship with these people and solve problems more effectively by addressing their concerns privately. If a board member thinks something is so dramatically wrong with their organization that they can't solve it privately, and the public needs to be alerted, my understanding of governance norms is that the board member should resign their board seat and then make their case publicly. Mostly this is a cached view, and I might not endorse it on deep reflection. But I think a lot of people involved in governance have this norm, so I don't think that Sam Altman's enforcement of this norm against Toner is particularly indicative of anything about Sam.

5followthesilence2y

Like many I have no idea what's happening behind the scenes, so this is pure conjecture, but one can imagine a world in which Toner "addressed concerns privately" but those concerns fell on deaf ears. At that point, it doesn't seem like "resigning board seat and making case publicly" is the appropriate course of action, whether or not that is a "nonprofit governance norm". I would think your role as a board member, particularly in the unique case of OpenAI, is to honor the nonprofit's mission. If you have a rogue CEO who seems bent on pursuing power, status, and profits for your biggest investor (again, purely hypothetical without knowing what's going on here), and those pursuits are contra the board's stated mission, resigning your post and expressing concerns publicly when you no longer have direct power seems suboptimal. Seems to presume the board should have no say whether the CEO is doing their job correctly when, in this case, that seems to be the only role of the board.

1River2y

Oh, I agree that utilitarian considerations, particularly in the case of an existential threat, might warrant breaking a norm. I'm not saying Toner did anything wrong in any objective sense, I don't have a very strong view about that. I'm just trying to question Zvi's argument that Sam and OpenAI did something unusually bad in the way they responded to Toner's choice. It may be the case that Toner did the right and honorable thing given the position she was in and the information she had, and also that Sam and openAI did the normal and boring thing in response to that. You do seem to be equivocating somewhat between board members (who have no formal authority in an organization) and the board itself (which has the ultimate authority in an organization). To say that a dissenting board member should resign before speaking out publicly is very different from saying that the board itself should not act when it (meaning the majority of its members) believe there is a problem. As I am reading the events here, Toner published her article before the board decided that there was something wrong and that action needed to be taken. I think everyone agrees that when the board concludes that something is wrong, it should act.

2Linch2y

Yes, here is GPT-4's reasoning.

1mishka2y

This is not a link to shared chat, this is a link which is private to you

2Linch2y

Apologies, I've changed the link.

1mishka2y

Thanks!

[-]jefftk2y185

I'm in the process of joining a non-profit board, and one of the things I confirmed with them was that they were ok with me continuing to say critical things about them publicly as I felt needed.

[-]Radford Neal2y1513

On the contrary, I think there is no norm against board members criticizing corporate direction.

I think it is accepted that a member of the board of a for-profit corporation might publicly say that they think the corporation's X division should be shut down, in order to concentrate investment in the Y division, since they think the future market for Y will be greater than for X, even though the rest of the board disagrees. This might be done to get shareholders on-side for this change of direction.

For a non-profit, criticism regarding whether the corporation is fulfilling its mandate is similarly acceptable. The idea that board members should resign if they think the corporation is not abiding by its mission is ridiculous - that would just lead to the corporation departing even more from its mission.

Compare with members of a legislative body. Legislators routinely say they disagree with the majority of the body, and nobody thinks the right move if they are on the losing side of a vote is to resign.

And, a member of the miltary who believes that they have been ordered to commit a war crime is not supposed to resign in protest (assuming that is even possible), allowing the crime to be committed. They are supposed to disobey the order.

[-]AlexMennen2y1414

If board members have an obligation not to criticize their organization in an academic paper, then they should also have an obligation not to discuss anything related to their organization in an academic paper. The ability to be honest is important, and if a researcher can't say anything critical about an organization, then non-critical things they say about it lose credibility.

1River2y

"anything related to", depending how it's interpreted, might be overly broad, but something like this seems like a necessary implication, yes. Is that a bad thing?

8dr_s2y

This is only evidence for how insane the practices of our civilization are, requiring that those who most have the need and the ability to scrutinise the power of a corporation do so the least. OpenAI was supposedly trying to swim against the current, but alas, it just became another example of the regular sort of company.

1River2y

I have no idea how you got that from what I said. The view of governance I am presenting is that the board should scrutinize the corporation, but behind closed doors, not out in public. Again, I'm not entirely confident that I agree with this view, but I do think it is normal for people involved in governance and therefor doesn't indicate much about Altman or openAI one way or the other.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke2y20

It is interesting to read the Common misconceptions about OpenAI one year later.

[-]Martin Vlach2y20

what happened at Reddit

could there be any link? From a small research I have only obtained that Steve Huffman praised Altman's value to the Reddit board.

[-]O O2y20

Brad Taylor

Bret* Taylor

[-]Burny2y20

Merging with Anthropic may have been a better outcome

2the gears to ascension2y

it's unlikely, even had amodei agreed in principle, that this could have been legally possible.

1HiddenPrior2y

I believe that power rested in the hands of the CEO the board selected, the board itself does not have that kind of power, and there may be other reasons we are not aware of that lead them to decide against that possibility.

[-]orthonormal2y122

Prior to hiring Shear, the board offered a merger to Dario Amodei, with Dario to lead the merged entity. Dario rejected the offer.

[-]Review Bot1y10

The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

[-]the gears to ascension2y*10

[-]Linch2y*170

Besides his most well-known controversial comments re: women, at least according to my read of his Wikipedia page, Summers has a poor track record re: being able to identify and ouster sketchy people specifically.

-8the gears to ascension2y

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

281

OpenAI: The Battle of the Board

281

281

This is a Fight For Control; Altman Started it

OpenAI is a Non-Profit With a Mission

Sam Altman’s Perspective

The Outside Board’s Perspective

Ilya Sutskever’s Perspective

Altman Moves to Take Control

One Last Chance

Botched Communications

The Negotiation

What Now for OpenAI?