Yesterday, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired from the Board of Directors of OpenAI. Following, all of Tech Twitter was abuzz with one question: wait a moment, who was on the Board? And after they found out, they asked: who on earth are Tasha McCauley
- The Open Phil seat deal was only for 3 years, and has long since expired, so while Karnofsky may have nominated Toner, he couldn't've forced her in nor can Toner pass it on to a person of her choice, so when Altman began saying she should be fired for criticizing OA, the seat was up for grabs. (AFAICT, OpenPhil has been a bystander to all this.)
- I haven't come across any evidence that Hurd's departure is other than it seems: political campaigns are short & brutal, so the fact that he dropped out a few months later means simply that his campaign didn't take off but crashed & burned. Hurd's departure is pretty much forced - one of the only red lines for a 501(c)3 like OA nonprofit is touching a political campaign or specific elected official: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization#Limitations_on_political_activity So as soon as he decided to run, he needed to leave.
It should be noted the primary financier of Open Philanthropy is multi-billionaire co-founder of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz, who also participated in Angel and Series A rounds of Anthropic.
Dustin may be a true believer in AI safety and Effective Altruism ideology as is the stated mission of Open Philanthropy, but the skeptic in me would not rule out him using those public positions to cynically further his own private objectives, whatever they may be, as is common among many billionaire philanthropists. If anything, it's worth a further look.
It's intriguing how Adam, the founder of Quora, has essentially been building the Poe chatbot for Quora, which leverages OpenAI's APIs. All this time, there was an impression that large language models had utilized all the Quora search answers. However, with Adam on the board and Sam being an investor in Quora since 2018, the spotlight is on the board dynamics of a non-profit company (apparently).
Some additions:
- Hoffman didn't resign voluntarily, Altman forced him out: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-privately-unhappy-about-leaving-openais-board
- Shivon Zilis stepped down not over the twins, which was old news, but only after Musk broke Twitter's contract with OA and began heavily criticizing it: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-history-of-elon-musk-sam-altman-and-openai
- The Open Phil seat deal was only for 3 years, and has long since expired, so while Karnofsky may have nominated Toner, he couldn't've forced her in nor can Toner pass it on to a person of her choice, so when Altman began saying she should be fired for criticizing OA, the seat was up for grabs. (AFAICT, OpenPhil has been a bystander to all this.)
- The lack of board nominations was due to a stalemate: see https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-board-fight.html https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/altman-firing-openai-520a3a8c
- I haven't come across any evidence that Hurd's departure is other than it seems: political campaigns are short & brutal, so the fact that he dropped out a few months later means simply that his campaign didn't take off but crashed & burned. Hurd's departure is pretty much forced - one of the only red lines for a 501(c)3 like OA nonprofit is touching a political campaign or specific elected official: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization#Limitations_on_political_activity So as soon as he decided to run, he needed to leave.
Who defines "highly ideological AI governance organization"? I don't think it's nearly that simple.
This is incredibly informative!
It should be noted the primary financier of Open Philanthropy is multi-billionaire co-founder of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz, who also participated in Angel and Series A rounds of Anthropic.
Dustin may be a true believer in AI safety and Effective Altruism ideology as is the stated mission of Open Philanthropy, but the skeptic in me would not rule out him using those public positions to cynically further his own private objectives, whatever they may be, as is common among many billionaire philanthropists. If anything, it's worth a further look.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362
It's intriguing how Adam, the founder of Quora, has essentially been building the Poe chatbot for Quora, which leverages OpenAI's APIs. All this time, there was an impression that large language models had utilized all the Quora search answers. However, with Adam on the board and Sam being an investor in Quora since 2018, the spotlight is on the board dynamics of a non-profit company (apparently).