OpenAi Corporate Structure
OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend (Zvi Mowshowitz - DWAV)
Images: OpenAI
[ed. This might have been one of the most consequential weekends for shaping our collective futures as any in our lifetimes. Not to be overly hyperbolic but I'm glad AI alignment/safety is getting center stage. The sooner the better. [ed. But, is it really? Larry Summers now on the Board? Definitely not good.]. For a detailed and fascinating summary of how and why everything happened, and where we are now (40 bullet points!), See: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend:]
"Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI’s founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created.
Now we are engaged in a great corporate war, testing whether that entity, or any entity so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
"Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI’s founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created.
Now we are engaged in a great corporate war, testing whether that entity, or any entity so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
- Other than that, the board said nothing in public. I am willing to outright say that, whatever the original justifications, the removal attempt was insufficiently considered and planned and massively botched. Either they had good reasons that justified these actions and needed to share them, or they didn’t.
- There had been various clashes between Altman and the board. We don’t know what all of them were. We do know the board felt Altman was moving too quickly, without sufficient concern for safety, with too much focus on building consumer products, while founding additional other companies. ChatGPT was a great consumer product, but supercharged AI development counter to OpenAI’s stated non-profit mission.
- OpenAI was previously planning an oversubscribed share sale at a valuation of $86 billion that was to close a few weeks later.
- Board member Adam D’Angelo said in a Forbes in January: There's no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies. This is something that's fundamentally different, and my hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big.
- Sam Altman on October 16: “4 times in the history of OpenAI––the most recent time was in the last couple of weeks––I’ve gotten to be in the room when we push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. Getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime.” There was speculation that events were driven in whole or in part by secret capabilities gains within OpenAI, possibly from a system called Gobi, perhaps even related to the joking claim ‘AI has been achieved internally’ but we have no concrete evidence of that.
- Thus we are now answering the question: What is the law? Do we have law? Where does the power ultimately lie? Is it the charismatic leader that ultimately matters? Who you hire and your culture? Can a corporate structure help us, or do commercial interests and profit motives dominate in the end?
