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...
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.
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...
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.