Until Friday, OpenAI had a board of only six people: Greg Brockman (chairman and president), Ilya Sutskever (chief scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and outside members Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner.
Sutskever, the researcher who got OpenAI going in 2015, is deep into “AI safety” in the sense of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Toner and McCauley are Effective Altruists — that is to say, part of the same cult.
Eliezer Yudkowsky founded a philosophy he called “rationality” — which bears little relation to any other philosophy of such a name in history. He founded the site LessWrong to promote his ideas. He also named “Effective Altruism,” on the assumption that the most effective altruism in the world was to give him money to stop a rogue superintelligent AI from turning everyone into paperclips.
The “ethical AI” side of OpenAI are Yudkowsky believers, including Mira Murati, the CTO who is now CEO. They are AI doomsday cultists who say they don’t think ChatGPT will take over the world — but behave like they do think that.
D’Angelo doesn’t appear to be an AI doomer — but presumably Sutskever convinced him to kick Altman out anyway.
Yudkowsky endorsed Murati’s promotion to CEO: “I’m tentatively 8.5% more cheerful about OpenAI going forward.”
We’ve written before about how everything in machine learning is hand-tweaked and how so much of what OpenAI does relies on underpaid workers in Africa and elsewhere. This stuff doesn’t yet work as any sort of product without a hidden workforce of humans behind it, pushing. The GPT series are just powerful autocomplete systems. They aren’t going to turn you into paperclips.
Sam Altman was an AI doomer — just not as much as the others. The real problem was that he was making promises that OpenAI could not deliver on. The GPT series was running out of steam. Altman was out and about in the quest for yet more funding for the OpenAI company in ways that upset the true believers.
A boardroom coup by the rationalist cultists is quite plausible, as well as being very funny. Rationalists’ chronic inability to talk like regular humans may even explain the statement calling Altman a liar. It’s standard for rationalists to call people who don’t buy their pitch liars.
So what from normal people would be an accusation of corporate war crimes is, from rationalists, just how they talk about the outgroup of non-rationalists. They assume non-believers are evil.
It is important to remember that Yudkowsky’s ideas are dumb and wrong, he has zero technological experience, and he has never built a single thing, ever. He’s an ideas guy, and his ideas are bad. OpenAI’s future is absolutely going to be wild.