One excerpt stuck out for me – on Brockman’s idea to play China, Russia, and other world powers against each other:
In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI’s policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology was deployed safely. As Hedley recalled it, Brockman didn’t understand how this would help the company beat its competitors. “No matter what I said,” Hedley told us, “Greg kept going back to ‘So how do we raise more money? How do we win?’
According to several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world powers—including China and Russia—against one another, perhaps by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for A.I.? He was aghast: “The premise, which they didn’t dispute, was ‘We’re talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented—what if we sold it to Putin?’”
Brainstorming sessions often produce outlandish ideas. Hedley hoped that this one, which came to be known internally as the “countries plan,” would be dropped. Instead, according to several people involved and to contemporaneous documents, OpenAI executives seemed to grow only more excited about it. Brockman’s goal, according to Jack Clark, OpenAI’s policy director at the time, was to “set up, basically, a prisoner’s dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding,” and that “implicitly makes not giving us funding kind of dangerous.” A junior researcher recalled thinking, as the plan was detailed at a company meeting, “This is completely fucking insane.” Executives discussed the approach with at least one potential donor. But later that month, after several employees talked about quitting, the plan was abandoned. Altman “would lose staff,” Hedley said. “I feel like that was always something that had more weight in Sam’s calculations than ‘This is not a good plan because it might cause a war between great powers.’ ”
Note that one of the authors is Ronan Farrow, son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who previously did influential investigative reporting on Harvey Weinstein, and on the links between Jeffrey Epstein and the MIT Media Lab, and a bunch of other good things. He was also on HN answering questions about the piece earlier today, and came out well. So this is far from the usual “journalistic broken telephone” kind of thing; from what I can tell, this is good reporting.
This is very concerning as stated, but I’ve had enough experience with journalists misrepresenting situations that I have personal information of that I’m at least taking this with a big grain of salt.
I’m not ruling out that this is basically a fair and accurate portrayal of events, but it is also plausible that this is an exaggerated version of a more tame series of events, or even that this never happened at all.
I think the most interesting part of the piece is the secondhand confirmation that Altman was pushed out of YC for (basically) dishonesty:
Certainly you can do a lot with selective quotations, such that “Sam had been lying to us all the time” might not mean exactly what it sounds like. But given Paul Graham’s caginess in previous statements on the subject, as well as all of the other available information, I think the correct update to make here is to reduce your trust in Paul Graham as someone who reliably communicates in a way that leads you believe true things. It seems like the only sense in which they (maybe) did not fire Sam is that they couldn’t legally fire him (somehow), they merely employed all other means at their disposal to get him to leave.
Paul Graham disputes this, on twitter.
https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353?s=20
With a further claim about the origin of the “Sam had been lying to us all the time” bit: https://x.com/paulg/status/2041459514634060093
I’ve now done ~15 minutes of research on Ronan Farrow’s previous reporting to check how much bounded distrust to be exercising, and have updated to “slightly more”.
My modal belief is still that Sam Altman’s parting from YC was both causally downstream[1] of other people involved reacting to various forms of deceptive behavior, and that the “YC Chairman” shenanigans were in fact shenanigans.
In non-trivial part, not necessarily in total or even mostly.
I started reading this article with the questions “what evidence do we have that Altman is untrustworthy?” and “why does he lie?” (having accepted the premise that he regularly lies from past info). I ended up with the impression that he lies to get what he wants, and in his mind he blurs the distinction between what is true and what he would want to be true (as evidenced from the ping-pong anecdote). So the only remaining argument for ‘he is a good CEO’ is that he has good intentions. But we don’t know what he wants, and there’s no way to know.
You should not trust someone who has a track record of regularly lying to people, regardless of wether their intentions are good! A well intentioned person who is lying to you is still giving you false information!
I stand by this characterization, FWTW.