Text from article (along with follow-up paragraphs):
Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years.” (A person familiar with Altman’s perspective said that he acknowledges having been “ham-fisted in the way he tried to get a board member removed,” but that he hadn’t attempted to manipulate the board.)
Altman was known as a savvy corporate infighter. This had served OpenAI well in the past: in 2018, he’d blocked an impulsive bid by Elon Musk, an early board member, to take over the organization. Altman’s ability to control information and manipulate perceptions—openly and in secret—had lured venture capitalists to compete with one another by investing in various startups. His tactical skills were so feared that, when four members of the board—Toner, D’Angelo, Sutskever, and Tasha McCauley—began discussing his removal, they were determined to guarantee that he would be caught by surprise. “It was clear that, as soon as Sam knew, he’d do anything he could to undermine the board,” the person familiar with those discussions said.
The unhappy board members felt that OpenAI’s mission required them to be vigilant about A.I. becoming too dangerous, and they believed that they couldn’t carry out this duty with Altman in place. “The mission is multifaceted, to make sure A.I. benefits all of humanity, but no one can do that if they can’t hold the C.E.O. accountable,” another person aware of the board’s thinking said. Altman saw things differently. The person familiar with his perspective said that he and the board had engaged in “very normal and healthy boardroom debate,” but that some board members were unversed in business norms and daunted by their responsibilities. This person noted, “Every step we get closer to A.G.I., everybody takes on, like, ten insanity points.”
I wish people would stop including images of text on LW. I know this practice is common on Twitter and probably other forums, but we aspire a higher standard here. My reasoning: (1) it is more tedious to compose a reply when one cannot use copying-pasting to choose exactly which extent of text to quote (2) the practice is a barrier to disabled people using assistive technologies and people reading on very narrow devices like smartphones.
That’s fair to ‘aspire to a higher standard,’ and I’ll avoid adding screenshots of text in the future.
However, I must say, the ‘higher standard’ and commitment to remain serious for even a shortform post kind of turns me off from posting on LessWrong in the first place. If this is the culture that people here want, then that’s fine and I won’t tell this website to change, but I don’t personally like the (what I find as) over-seriousness.
I do understand the point about sharing text to make it easier for disabled people (I just don’t always think of it).
Eh, random people complain. Screenshots of text seems fine, especially in shortform. It honestly seems fine anywhere. I also really don’t think that accessibility should matter much here, the number of people reading on a screenreader or using assistive technologies are quite small, if they browse LessWrong they will already be running into a bunch of problems, and there are pretty good OCR technologies around these days that can be integrated into those.
I have some idea about how much work it takes to maintain something like LW.com, so this random person would like to take this opportunity to thank you for running LW for the last many years.
More information about alleged manipulative behaviour of Sam Altman
Source
Text from article (along with follow-up paragraphs):
Already posted at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-facts-from-a-weekend?commentId=AHnrKdCRKmtkynBiG
I wish people would stop including images of text on LW. I know this practice is common on Twitter and probably other forums, but we aspire a higher standard here. My reasoning: (1) it is more tedious to compose a reply when one cannot use copying-pasting to choose exactly which extent of text to quote (2) the practice is a barrier to disabled people using assistive technologies and people reading on very narrow devices like smartphones.
That’s fair to ‘aspire to a higher standard,’ and I’ll avoid adding screenshots of text in the future.
However, I must say, the ‘higher standard’ and commitment to remain serious for even a shortform post kind of turns me off from posting on LessWrong in the first place. If this is the culture that people here want, then that’s fine and I won’t tell this website to change, but I don’t personally like the (what I find as) over-seriousness.
I do understand the point about sharing text to make it easier for disabled people (I just don’t always think of it).
Eh, random people complain. Screenshots of text seems fine, especially in shortform. It honestly seems fine anywhere. I also really don’t think that accessibility should matter much here, the number of people reading on a screenreader or using assistive technologies are quite small, if they browse LessWrong they will already be running into a bunch of problems, and there are pretty good OCR technologies around these days that can be integrated into those.
I have some idea about how much work it takes to maintain something like LW.com, so this random person would like to take this opportunity to thank you for running LW for the last many years.
Thank you! :)