Thanks, this makes more sense than anything else I’ve seen, but one thing I’m still confused about:
If the factions were Altman-Brockman-Sutskever vs. Toner-McCauley-D’Angelo, then even assuming Sutskever was an Altman loyalist, any vote to remove Toner would have been tied 3-3. I can’t find anything about tied votes in the bylaws—do they fail? If so, Toner should be safe. And in fact, Toner knew she (secretly) had Sutskever on her side, and it would have been 4-2. If Altman manufactured some scandal, the board could have just voted to ignore it.
So I still don’t understand “why so abruptly?” or why they felt like they had to take such a drastic move when they held all the cards (and were pretty stable even if Ilya flipped).
Other loose ends:
Toner got on the board because of OpenPhil’s donation. But how did McCauley get on the board?
Is D’Angelo a safetyist?
Why wouldn’t they tell anyone, including Emmett Shear, the full story?
I can’t find anything about tied votes in the bylaws—do they fail?
I can’t either, so my assumption is that the board was frozen ever since Hoffman/Hurd left for that reason.
And there wouldn’t’ve been a vote at all. I’ve explained it before but—while we wait for phase 3 of the OA war to go hot—let me take another crack at it, since people seem to keep getting hung up on this and seem to imagine that it’s a perfectly normal state of a board to be in a deathmatch between two opposing factions indefinitely, and so confused why any of this happened.
In phase 1, a vote would be pointless, and neither side could nor wanted to force it to a vote. After all, such a vote (regardless of the result) is equivalent to admitting that you have gone from simply “some strategic disagreements among colleagues all sharing the same ultimate goals and negotiating in good faith about important complex matters on which reasonable people of goodwill often differ” to “cutthroat corporate warfare where it’s-them-or-us everything-is-a-lie-or-fog-of-war fight-to-the-death there-can-only-be-one”. You only do such a vote in the latter situation; in the former, you just keep negotiating until you reach a consensus or find a compromise that’ll leave everyone mad.
That’s not a switch to make lightly or lazily. You do not flip the switch from ‘ally’ to ‘enemy’ casually, and then do nothing and wait for them to find out and make the first move.
Imagine Altman showing up to the board and going “hi guys I’d like to vote right now to fire Toner—oh darn a tie, never mind”—“dude what the fuck?!”
As I read it, the board still hoped Altman was basically aligned (and it was all headstrongness or scurrilous rumors) right up until the end, when Sutskever defected with the internal Slack receipts revealing that the war had already started and Altman’s switch had apparently flipped a while ago.
So I still don’t understand “why so abruptly?” or why they felt like they had to take such a drastic move when they held all the cards (and were pretty stable even if Ilya flipped).
The ability to manufacture a scandal at any time is a good way to motivate non-procrastination, pace Dr Johnson about the wonderfully concentrating effects of being scheduled to hang. As I pointed out, it gives Altman a great pretext to, at any time, push for the resignation of Toner in a way where—if their switch has not been flipped, like he still believed it had not—still looking to the board like the good guy who is definitely not doing a coup and is just, sadly and regretfully, breaking the tie because of the emergency scandal that the careless disloyal Toner has caused them all, just as he had been warning the board all along. (Won’t she resign and help minimize the damage, and free herself to do her academic research without further concern? If not, surely D’Angelo or McCauley appreciate how much damage she’s done and can now see that, if she’s so selfish & stubborn & can’t sacrifice herself for the good of OA, she really needs to be replaced right now...?) End result: Toner resigns or is fired. It took way less than that to push out Hoffman or Zillis, after all. And Altman means so well and cares so much about OA’s public image, and is so vital to the company, and has a really good point about how badly Toner screwed up, so at least one of you three have to give it to him. And that’s all he needs.
(How well do you think Toner, McCauley, and D’Angelo all know each other? Enough to trust that none of the other two would ever flip on the other, or be susceptible to leverage, or scared, or be convinced?)
Of course, their switch having been flipped at this point, the trio could just vote ‘no’ 3-3 and tell Altman to go pound sand and adamantly refuse to ever vote to remove Toner… but such an ‘unreasonable’ response reveals their switch has been flipped. (And having Sutskever vote alongside them 4-2, revealing his new loyalty, would be even more disastrous.)
Why wouldn’t they tell anyone, including Emmett Shear, the full story?
How do you know they didn’t? Note that what they wouldn’t provide Shear was a “written” explanation. (If Shear was so unconvinced, why was an independent investigation the only thing he negotiated for aside from the new board? His tweets since then also don’t sound like someone who looked behind the curtain, found nothing, and is profoundly disgusted with & hates the old board for their profoundly incompetent malicious destruction.)
If the factions were Altman-Brockman-Sutskever vs. Toner-McCauley-D’Angelo, then even assuming Sutskever was an Altman loyalist, any vote to remove Toner would have been tied 3-3.
A 3-3 tie between the CEO founder of the company, the president founder of the company, and the chief scientist of the company vs three people with completely separate day jobs who never interact with rank-and-file employees is not a stable equilibrium. There are ways to leverage this sort of soft power into breaking the formal deadlock, for example: as we saw last week.
I note that the articles I have seen have said things like
New CEO Emmett Shear has so far been unable to get written documentation of the board’s detailed reasoning for firing Altman, which also hasn’t been shared with the company’s investors, according to people familiar with the situation
(emphasis mine).
If Shear had been unable to get any information about the board’s reasoning, I very much doubt that they would have included the word “written”.
I have envisaged a scenario in which the US intelligence community has an interagency working group on AI, and Toner and McCauley were its defacto representatives on the OpenAI board, Toner for CIA, McCauley for NSA. Maybe someone who has studied the history of the board can tell me whether that makes sense, in terms of its shifting factions.
Why would Toner be related to the CIA, and how is McCauley NSA?
If OpenaI is running out money, and is too dependent on Microsoft, defense/intelligence/government is not the worst place for them to look for money. There are even possible futures where they are partially nationalised in a crisis. Or perhaps they will help with regulatory assessment. This possibility certainly makes the Larry Summers appointment take on a different’t light with his ties to not only Microsoft, but also the Government.
Toner’s employer, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), was founded by Jason Matheny. Matheny was previously the Director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and is currently CEO of the RAND Corporation. CSET is currently led by Dewey Murdick, who previously worked at the Department of Homeland Security and at IARPA. Much of CSET’s initial staff was former (or “former”) U.S. intelligence analysts, although IIRC they were from military intelligence rather than the CIA specifically. Today many of CSET’s researchers list prior experience with U.S. civilian intelligence, military intelligence, or defense intelligence contractors. Given the overlap in staff and mission, U.S. intelligence clearly and explicitly has a lot of influence at CSET, and it’s reasonable to suspect a stronger connection than that.
Why would Toner be related to the CIA, and how is McCauley NSA?
Toner’s university has a long history of association with the CIA. Just google “georgetown cia” and you’ll see more than I can summarize.
As for McCauley, well, I did call this a “scenario”… The movie maker Oliver Stone rivals Chomsky as the voice of an elite political counterculture who are deadly serious in their opposition to what the American deep state gets up to, and whose ranks include former insiders who became leakers, whistleblowers, and ideological opponents of the system. When Stone, already known as a Wikileaks supporter, decided to turn his attention to NSA’s celebrity defector Edward Snowden, he ended up casting McCauley’s actor boyfriend as the star.
My hunch, my scenario, is that people associated with the agency, or formerly associated with the agency, put him forward for the role, with part of the reason being that he was already dating one of their own. What we know about her CV—robotics, geographic information systems, speaks Arabic, mentored by Alan Kay—obviously doesn’t prove anything, but it’s enough to make this scenario work, as a possibility.
Thanks, this makes more sense than anything else I’ve seen, but one thing I’m still confused about:
If the factions were Altman-Brockman-Sutskever vs. Toner-McCauley-D’Angelo, then even assuming Sutskever was an Altman loyalist, any vote to remove Toner would have been tied 3-3. I can’t find anything about tied votes in the bylaws—do they fail? If so, Toner should be safe. And in fact, Toner knew she (secretly) had Sutskever on her side, and it would have been 4-2. If Altman manufactured some scandal, the board could have just voted to ignore it.
So I still don’t understand “why so abruptly?” or why they felt like they had to take such a drastic move when they held all the cards (and were pretty stable even if Ilya flipped).
Other loose ends:
Toner got on the board because of OpenPhil’s donation. But how did McCauley get on the board?
Is D’Angelo a safetyist?
Why wouldn’t they tell anyone, including Emmett Shear, the full story?
I can’t either, so my assumption is that the board was frozen ever since Hoffman/Hurd left for that reason.
And there wouldn’t’ve been a vote at all. I’ve explained it before but—while we wait for phase 3 of the OA war to go hot—let me take another crack at it, since people seem to keep getting hung up on this and seem to imagine that it’s a perfectly normal state of a board to be in a deathmatch between two opposing factions indefinitely, and so confused why any of this happened.
In phase 1, a vote would be pointless, and neither side could nor wanted to force it to a vote. After all, such a vote (regardless of the result) is equivalent to admitting that you have gone from simply “some strategic disagreements among colleagues all sharing the same ultimate goals and negotiating in good faith about important complex matters on which reasonable people of goodwill often differ” to “cutthroat corporate warfare where it’s-them-or-us everything-is-a-lie-or-fog-of-war fight-to-the-death there-can-only-be-one”. You only do such a vote in the latter situation; in the former, you just keep negotiating until you reach a consensus or find a compromise that’ll leave everyone mad.
That’s not a switch to make lightly or lazily. You do not flip the switch from ‘ally’ to ‘enemy’ casually, and then do nothing and wait for them to find out and make the first move.
Imagine Altman showing up to the board and going “hi guys I’d like to vote right now to fire Toner—oh darn a tie, never mind”—“dude what the fuck?!”
As I read it, the board still hoped Altman was basically aligned (and it was all headstrongness or scurrilous rumors) right up until the end, when Sutskever defected with the internal Slack receipts revealing that the war had already started and Altman’s switch had apparently flipped a while ago.
The ability to manufacture a scandal at any time is a good way to motivate non-procrastination, pace Dr Johnson about the wonderfully concentrating effects of being scheduled to hang. As I pointed out, it gives Altman a great pretext to, at any time, push for the resignation of Toner in a way where—if their switch has not been flipped, like he still believed it had not—still looking to the board like the good guy who is definitely not doing a coup and is just, sadly and regretfully, breaking the tie because of the emergency scandal that the careless disloyal Toner has caused them all, just as he had been warning the board all along. (Won’t she resign and help minimize the damage, and free herself to do her academic research without further concern? If not, surely D’Angelo or McCauley appreciate how much damage she’s done and can now see that, if she’s so selfish & stubborn & can’t sacrifice herself for the good of OA, she really needs to be replaced right now...?) End result: Toner resigns or is fired. It took way less than that to push out Hoffman or Zillis, after all. And Altman means so well and cares so much about OA’s public image, and is so vital to the company, and has a really good point about how badly Toner screwed up, so at least one of you three have to give it to him. And that’s all he needs.
(How well do you think Toner, McCauley, and D’Angelo all know each other? Enough to trust that none of the other two would ever flip on the other, or be susceptible to leverage, or scared, or be convinced?)
Of course, their switch having been flipped at this point, the trio could just vote ‘no’ 3-3 and tell Altman to go pound sand and adamantly refuse to ever vote to remove Toner… but such an ‘unreasonable’ response reveals their switch has been flipped. (And having Sutskever vote alongside them 4-2, revealing his new loyalty, would be even more disastrous.)
How do you know they didn’t? Note that what they wouldn’t provide Shear was a “written” explanation. (If Shear was so unconvinced, why was an independent investigation the only thing he negotiated for aside from the new board? His tweets since then also don’t sound like someone who looked behind the curtain, found nothing, and is profoundly disgusted with & hates the old board for their profoundly incompetent malicious destruction.)
A 3-3 tie between the CEO founder of the company, the president founder of the company, and the chief scientist of the company vs three people with completely separate day jobs who never interact with rank-and-file employees is not a stable equilibrium. There are ways to leverage this sort of soft power into breaking the formal deadlock, for example: as we saw last week.
I note that the articles I have seen have said things like
(emphasis mine).
If Shear had been unable to get any information about the board’s reasoning, I very much doubt that they would have included the word “written”.
I have envisaged a scenario in which the US intelligence community has an interagency working group on AI, and Toner and McCauley were its defacto representatives on the OpenAI board, Toner for CIA, McCauley for NSA. Maybe someone who has studied the history of the board can tell me whether that makes sense, in terms of its shifting factions.
Why would Toner be related to the CIA, and how is McCauley NSA?
If OpenaI is running out money, and is too dependent on Microsoft, defense/intelligence/government is not the worst place for them to look for money. There are even possible futures where they are partially nationalised in a crisis. Or perhaps they will help with regulatory assessment. This possibility certainly makes the Larry Summers appointment take on a different’t light with his ties to not only Microsoft, but also the Government.
Toner’s employer, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), was founded by Jason Matheny. Matheny was previously the Director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and is currently CEO of the RAND Corporation. CSET is currently led by Dewey Murdick, who previously worked at the Department of Homeland Security and at IARPA. Much of CSET’s initial staff was former (or “former”) U.S. intelligence analysts, although IIRC they were from military intelligence rather than the CIA specifically. Today many of CSET’s researchers list prior experience with U.S. civilian intelligence, military intelligence, or defense intelligence contractors. Given the overlap in staff and mission, U.S. intelligence clearly and explicitly has a lot of influence at CSET, and it’s reasonable to suspect a stronger connection than that.
I don’t see it for McCauley though.
Toner’s university has a long history of association with the CIA. Just google “georgetown cia” and you’ll see more than I can summarize.
As for McCauley, well, I did call this a “scenario”… The movie maker Oliver Stone rivals Chomsky as the voice of an elite political counterculture who are deadly serious in their opposition to what the American deep state gets up to, and whose ranks include former insiders who became leakers, whistleblowers, and ideological opponents of the system. When Stone, already known as a Wikileaks supporter, decided to turn his attention to NSA’s celebrity defector Edward Snowden, he ended up casting McCauley’s actor boyfriend as the star.
My hunch, my scenario, is that people associated with the agency, or formerly associated with the agency, put him forward for the role, with part of the reason being that he was already dating one of their own. What we know about her CV—robotics, geographic information systems, speaks Arabic, mentored by Alan Kay—obviously doesn’t prove anything, but it’s enough to make this scenario work, as a possibility.