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?
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
Just to clarify: ~700 out of ~770 OpenAI employees have signed the letter (~90%)
Out of the 10 authors of the autointerpretability paper, only 5 have signed the letter. This is much lower than the average rate. One out of the 10 is no longer at OpenAI, so couldn’t have signed it, so it makes sense to count this as 5⁄9 rather than 5⁄10. Either way, it’s still well below the average rate.
The only evidence I’ve seen that this is real, so far, is Kara Swisher’s (who?) word, and not having heard a refutation yet, but neither of those things are very reassuring given that Kara’s thread bears The Mark:
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 ]
There 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
Cammarata says he quit OA ~8 weeks ago, so therefore couldn’t’ve signed it: https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1725939131736633579
Ah, nice catch, I’ll update my comment.
So it’s been falsified? Isn’t that a pretty big deal against the source, or whoever purports the letter to be 100% genuine?
I believe Nick was initially mentioned as someone who wasn’t on the letter
Apparently I read too quickly and didn’t understand the point that the parent has added explicitly.
No, the letter has not been falsified.
Just to clarify: ~700 out of ~770 OpenAI employees have signed the letter (~90%)
Out of the 10 authors of the autointerpretability paper, only 5 have signed the letter. This is much lower than the average rate. One out of the 10 is no longer at OpenAI, so couldn’t have signed it, so it makes sense to count this as 5⁄9 rather than 5⁄10. Either way, it’s still well below the average rate.
The only evidence I’ve seen that this is real, so far, is Kara Swisher’s (who?) word, and not having heard a refutation yet, but neither of those things are very reassuring given that Kara’s thread bears The Mark:
I am also confused. It would make me happy if we got some relevant information about this in the coming days.