OpenAI’s Misalignment and Microsoft’s Gain. ⇒
22 November 2023, mid-afternoon
The preamble to this post is already out of date, but it’s otherwise a good discussion of the tension at the heart of everything happening at OpenAI right now.
Whether or not you agree with the Sutskever/Shear tribe, the board’s charter and responsibility is not to make money. This is not a for-profit corporation with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders; indeed, as I laid out above, OpenAI’s charter specifically states that it is “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”. From that perspective the board is in fact doing its job, as counterintuitive as that may seem: to the extent the board believes that Altman and his tribe were not “build[ing] general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits humanity” it is empowered to fire him; they do, and so they did.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.