I feel ambivalent and complicated about this. In some objective sense, I think that the Attorneys General enabled a huge theft and (I think more importantly) made humanity a lot less safe than it could have been if they had acted in a different way that was also totally within their power. So in an objective sense they enabled great harm.
On the other hand I get the sense that they did a lot more than they could have and than most people who are more knowledgeable about this kind of thing expected them to, and the negotiation seems complicated enough that it seems like they at least tried to engage on the issue (an area they were probably unfamiliar with and not well-staffed to adjudicate) in a pretty deep way. They were probably under enormous pressure. I also get the sense that Attorney General Jennings is less susceptible to pressure from companies and more concerned with the rule of law than most attorneys general. And so in a relative sense, I think that it’s possible that they did a pretty good job.
I feel worse about the board members, both because I think this was much more directly their responsibility, and because I generally get the sense that they allow or even encourage a lot of egregious behavior from OpenAI in general that’s contrary to OpenAI’s mission. Compared to the reference class of nonprofit board members, I think they perform much more poorly than Jennings does to the reference class of attorneys general.
Even for the attorneys general, I think you could make a case that there ought to be some sort of social punishment, even if the way that they acted was in some sense normal or above-average. That could be both because we want to change the norm / incentivize better behavior in the future and for decision theory reasons (even if what they did was normal or above-average compared to how most attorneys general handle most cases, we might want it to be the case that people think that they’ll be remembered badly by history if they so suboptimally in such important circumstances)
I feel ambivalent and complicated about this. In some objective sense, I think that the Attorneys General enabled a huge theft and (I think more importantly) made humanity a lot less safe than it could have been if they had acted in a different way that was also totally within their power. So in an objective sense they enabled great harm.
On the other hand I get the sense that they did a lot more than they could have and than most people who are more knowledgeable about this kind of thing expected them to, and the negotiation seems complicated enough that it seems like they at least tried to engage on the issue (an area they were probably unfamiliar with and not well-staffed to adjudicate) in a pretty deep way. They were probably under enormous pressure. I also get the sense that Attorney General Jennings is less susceptible to pressure from companies and more concerned with the rule of law than most attorneys general. And so in a relative sense, I think that it’s possible that they did a pretty good job.
I feel worse about the board members, both because I think this was much more directly their responsibility, and because I generally get the sense that they allow or even encourage a lot of egregious behavior from OpenAI in general that’s contrary to OpenAI’s mission. Compared to the reference class of nonprofit board members, I think they perform much more poorly than Jennings does to the reference class of attorneys general.
Even for the attorneys general, I think you could make a case that there ought to be some sort of social punishment, even if the way that they acted was in some sense normal or above-average. That could be both because we want to change the norm / incentivize better behavior in the future and for decision theory reasons (even if what they did was normal or above-average compared to how most attorneys general handle most cases, we might want it to be the case that people think that they’ll be remembered badly by history if they so suboptimally in such important circumstances)