FWIW, I am skeptical of the interpretation you put on that graph. I considered the same issue in my original analysis, but went with Strenze 2007's take that there doesn't seem to be much steeper IQ/income slope and kept returns constant. Seb objects that the datapoints have various problems and that's why he redoes an analysis with NLS to get his number, which is reasonable for his use, but he specifically disclaims projecting the slope out (which would make ES more profitable than it seems) like you do:
If the estimate were only based on the more recent cohort (NLSY97), the estimated effect between the ages of 25 and 65 would be $74,508, and adding the rough estimates for the additional years (18-24 and 66-80) increases it to $90,208. I think this estimate is too high; this projection relies on the assumption that the increases in the mean and variance of wages will hold for the future, which may not be the case.
And it's not hard to see why the slope difference might be real but irrelevant: people in NLSY79 have different life cycles than in NLSY97, and you would expect a steeper slope (but same final total lifetime income / IQ correlation) from simply lengthening years of education - you don't have much income as a college student! The longer you spend in college, the higher the slope has to be when you finally get out and can start your remunerative career. (This is similar to those charts which show that Millennials are tragically impoverished and doing far worse than their Boomer parents... as long as you cut off the chart at the right time and don't extend it to the present.) I'm also not aware of any dramatic surge in the college degree wage-premium, which is hard to reconcile with the idea that IQ points are becoming drastically more valuable.
So quite aside from any Inside View takes about how the current AI trends look like they're going to savage holders of mere IQ, your slope take is on shaky, easily confounded grounds, while the Outside View is that for a century or more, the returns to IQ have been remarkably constant and have not suddenly been increasing by many %.
Did it even occur to you that saying some things in some countries is illegal and your doxxing victim could go to prison for saying something that looks innocuous to you? Do you know where Mark is from and what all his country’s speech laws are?
If Mark is in such a situation (which he was not, and I knew he was not), then the real culprit is whoever implemented such a completely broken and utterly unfixable 'anonymous' comment, and himself for being a security researcher and yet believing that retroactively making comments 'anonymous' on a publicly-scrape-able website would protect him against nation-state actors when anonymity was neither the goal nor a documented promise of the account deletion feature he was abusing and then crying 'dox!' about it not doing what it wasn't supposed to do and didn't do.
I don't think it's odd at all. As the Bloomberg article notes, this was in response to the martyrdom of Saint Altman, when everyone thought the evil Effective Altruists were stealing/smashing OA for no reason and destroying humanity's future (as well as the fortune of many of the individuals involved, to a degree few of them bothered to disclose) and/or turning it over to the Chinese commies. An internal memo decrying 'Effective Altruism' was far from the most extreme response at the time; but I doubt Gomez would write it today, if only because so much news has come out since then and it no longer looks like such a simple morality play. (For example, a lot of SV people were shocked to learn he had been fired from YC by Paul Graham et al for the same reason. That was a very closely held secret.)
Good report overall on tacit knowledge & biowarfare. This is relevant to the discussion over LLM risks: the Aum Shinrikyo chemist could make a lot of progress by reading papers and figuring out his problems as he went, but the bacteriologist couldn't figure out his issues for what seems like what had been a viable plan to weaponize & mass-produce anthrax but where lack of feedback led it to fail. Which does sound like something that a superhumanly-knowledgeable (but not necessarily that intelligent) LLM could help a lot with simply by pattern-matching and making lists of suggestions for things that are to the human 'unknown unknowns'.
If a crazy person wants to destroy the world with an AI-created bioweapon
Or, more concretely, nuclear weapons. Leaving aside regular full-scale nuclear war (which is censored from the graph for obvious reasons), this sort of graph will never show you something like Edward Teller's "backyard bomb", or a salted bomb. (Or any of the many other nuclear weapon concepts which never got developed, or were curtailed very early in deployment like neutron bombs, for historically-contingent reasons.)
There is, as far as I am aware, no serious scientific doubt that they are technically feasible: multi-gigaton bombs could be built or that salted bombs in relatively small quantities would render the earth uninhabitable to a substantial degree, for what are also modest expenditures as a percentage of GDP etc. It is just that there is no practical use of these weapons by normal, non-insane people. There is no use in setting an entire continent on fire, or in long-term radioactive poisoning of the same earth on which you presumably intend to live afterwards.
But you would be greatly mistaken if you concluded from historical data that these were impossible because there is nothing in the observed distribution anywhere close to those fatality rates.
(You can't even make an argument from an Outside View of the sort that 'there have been billions of humans and none have done this yet', because nuclear bombs are still so historically new, and only a few nuclear powers were even in a position to consider whether to pursue these weapons or not - you don't have k = billions, you have k < 10, maybe. And the fact that several of those pursued weapons like neutron bombs as far as they did, and that we know about so many concepts, is not encouraging.)
Hm, maybe it was common knowledge in some areas? I just always took him for being concerned. There's not really any contradiction between being excited about your short-term work and worried about long-term risks. Fooling yourself about your current idea is an important skill for a researcher. (You ever hear the joke about Geoff Hinton? He suddenly solves how the brain works, at long last, and euphorically tells his daughter; she replies: "Oh Dad - not again!")
Ilya has always been a doomer AFAICT, he was just loyal to Altman personally, who recruited him to OA. (I can tell you that when I spent a few hours chatting with him in... 2017 or something? a very long time ago, anyway - I don't remember him dismissing the dangers or being pollyannaish.) 'Superalignment' didn't come out of nowhere or surprise anyone about Ilya being in charge. Elon was... not loyal to Altman but appeared content to largely leave oversight of OA to Altman until he had one of his characteristic mood changes, got frustrated and tried to take over. In any case, he surely counts as a doomer by the time Zilis is being added to the board as his proxy. D'Angelo likewise seems to have consistently, in his few public quotes, been concerned about the danger.
A lot of people have indeed moved towards the 'doomer' pole but much of that has been timelines: AI doom in 2060 looks and feels a lot different from AI doom in 2027.
I haven't seen any coverage of the double structure or Anthropic exit which suggests that Amodei helped think up or write the double structure. Certainly, the language they use around the Anthropic public benefit corporation indicates they all think, at least post-exit, that the OA double structure was a terrible idea (eg. see the end of this article).
You don't know that. They seem to have often had near majorities, rather than being a token 1 or 2 board members.
By most standards, Karnofsky and Sutskever are 'doomers', and Zillis is likely a 'doomer' too as that is the whole premise of Neuralink and she was a Musk representative (which is why she was pushed out after Musk turned on OA publicly and began active hostilities like breaking contracts with OA). Hoffman's views are hard to characterize, but he doesn't seem to clearly come down as an anti-doomer or to be an Altman loyalist. (Which would be a good enough reason for Altman to push him out; and for a charismatic leader, neutralizing a co-founder is always useful, for the same reason no one would sell life insurance to an Old Bolshevik in Stalinist Russia.)
If I look at the best timeline of the board composition I've seen thus far, at a number of times post-2018, it looks like there was a 'near majority' or even outright majority. For example, 2020-12-31 has either a tie or an outright majority for either side depending on how you assume Sutskever & Hoffman (Sutskever?/Zilis/Karnofsky/D'Angelo/McCauley vs Hoffman? vs Altman/Brockman), and with the 2021-12-31 list the Altman faction needs to pick up every possible vote to match the existing 5 'EA' faction (Zilis/Karnofsky/D'Angelo/McCauley/Toner vs Hurd?/Sutskever?/Hoffman? vs Brockman/Altman) although this has to be wrong because the board maxes out at 7 according to the bylaws so it's unclear how exactly the plausible majorities evolved over time.
EDIT: this is going a bit viral, and it seems like many of the readers have missed key parts of the reporting. I wrote this as a reply to Wei Dai and a high-level summary for people who were already familiar with the details; I didn't write this for people who were unfamiliar, and I'm not going to reference every single claim in it, as I have generally referenced them in my prior comments/tweets and explained the details & inferences there. If you are unaware of aspects like 'Altman was trying to get Toner fired' or pushing out Hoffman or how Slack was involved in Sutskever's flip or why Sutskever flip-flopped back, still think Q* matters, haven't noticed the emphasis put on the promised independent report, haven't read the old NYer Altman profile or Labenz's redteam experience etc., it may be helpful to catch up by looking at other sources; my comments have been primarily on LW since I'm not a heavy EAF user, plus my usual excerpts.
Or even "EA had a pretty weak hand throughout and played it as well as can be reasonably expected"?
It was a pretty weak hand. There is this pervasive attitude that Sam Altman could have been dispensed with easily by the OA Board if it had been more competent; this strange implicit assumption that Altman is some johnny-come-lately where the Board screwed up by hiring him. Commenters seem to ignore the long history here - if anything, it was he who screwed up by hiring the Board!
Altman co-founded OA. He was the face in initial coverage and 1 of 2 board members (with Musk). He was a major funder of it. Even Elon Musk's main funding of OA was through an Altman vehicle. He kicked out Musk when Musk decided he needed to be in charge of OA. Open Philanthropy (OP) only had that board seat and made a donation because Altman invited them to, and he could personally have covered the $30m or whatever OP donated for the seat; and no one cared or noticed when OP let the arrange lapse after the initial 3 years. (I had to contact OP to confirm this when someone doubted that the seat was no longer controlled by OP.) He thought up, drafted, and oversaw the entire for-profit thing in the first place, including all provisions related to board control. He voted for all the board members, filling it back up from when it was just him (& Greg Brockman at one point IIRC). He then oversaw and drafted all of the contracts with MS and others, while running the for-profit and eschewing equity in the for-profit. He designed the board to be able to fire the CEO because, to quote him, "the board should be able to fire me". He interviewed every person OA hired, and used his networks to recruit for OA. And so on and so forth
Credit where credit is due - Altman may not have believed the scaling hypothesis like Dario Amodei, may not have invented PPO like John Schulman, may not have worked on DL from the start like Ilya Sutskever, may not have created GPT like Alec Radford, may not have written & optimized any code like Brockman's - but the 2023 OA organization is fundamentally his work.
The question isn't, "how could EAers* have ever let Altman take over OA and possibly kick them out", but entirely the opposite: "how did EAers ever get any control of OA, such that they could even possibly kick out Altman?" Why was this even a thing given that OA was, to such an extent, an Altman creation?
The answer is: "because he gave it to them." Altman freely and voluntarily handed it over to them.
So you have an answer right there to why the Board was willing to assume Altman's good faith for so long, despite everyone clamoring to explain how (in hindsight) it was so obvious that the Board should always have been at war with Altman and regarding him as an evil schemer out to get them. But that's an insane way for them to think! Why would he undermine the Board or try to take it over, when he was the Board at one point, and when he made and designed it in the first place? Why would he be money-hungry when he refused all the equity that he could so easily have taken - and in fact, various partner organizations wanted him to have in order to ensure he had 'skin in the game'? Why would he go out of his way to make the double non-profit with such onerous & unprecedented terms for any investors, which caused a lot of difficulties in getting investment and Microsoft had to think seriously about, if he just didn't genuinely care or believe any of that? Why any of this?
(None of that was a requirement, or even that useful to OA for-profit. Other double systems like Mozilla or Hershey don't have such terms, they're just normal corporations with a lot of shares owned by a non-profit, is all. OA for-profit could've been the same way. Certainly, if all of this was for PR reasons or some insidious decade-long scheme of Altman to 'greenwash' OA, it was a spectacular failure - nothing has occasioned more confusion and bad PR for OA than the double structure or capped-profit. See, for example, my shortly-before-the-firing Twitter argument with well-known AI researcher Delip Rao who repeatedly stated & doubled down on the claim that the OA non-profit legally owned the OA for-profit was not just factually wrong but misinformation. He helpfully linked to a page about political misinformation & propaganda campaigns online in case I had any doubt about what the term 'misinformation' meant.)
What happened is, broadly: 'Altman made the OA non/for-profits and gifted most of it to EA with the best of intentions, but then it went so well & was going to make so much money that he had giver's remorse, changed his mind, and tried to quietly take it back; but he had to do it by hook or by crook, because the legal terms said clearly "no takesie backsies"'. Altman was all for EA and AI safety and an all-powerful nonprofit board being able to fire him, and was sincere about all that, until OA & the scaling hypothesis succeeded beyond his wildest dreams†, and he discovered it was inconvenient for him and convinced himself that the noble mission now required him to be in absolute control, never mind what restraints on himself he set up years ago - he now understands how well-intentioned but misguided he was and how he should have trusted himself more. (Insert Garfield meme here.)
No wonder the board found it hard to believe! No wonder it took so long to realize Altman had flipped on them, and it seemed Sutskever needed Slack screenshots showing Altman blatantly lying to them about Toner before he finally, reluctantly, flipped. The Altman you need to distrust & assume bad faith of & need to be paranoid about stealing your power is also usually an Altman who never gave you any power in the first place! I'm still kinda baffled by it, personally.
He concealed this change of heart from everyone, including the board, gradually began trying to unwind it, overplayed his hand at one point - and here we are.
So, what could the EA faction of the board have done? ...Not much, really. They only ever had the power that Altman gave them in the first place.
* I don't really agree with this framing of Sutskever/Toner/McCauley/D'Angelo as "EA", but for the sake of argument, I'll go with this labeling.
† Please try to cast your mind back to when Altman et al would be planning all this in 2018-2019, with OA rapidly running out of cash after the mercurial Musk's unexpected-but-inevitable betrayal, its DRL projects like OA5 remarkable research successes but commercially worthless, and just some interesting results like GPT-1 and then GPT-2-small coming out of their unsupervised learning backwater from Alec Radford tinkering around with RNNs and then these new 'Transformer' things. The idea that OA might somehow be worth over ninety billion dollars, yes, that's 'billion' with a 'b' in scarcely 3 years would have been insane, absolutely insane, not a single person in the AI world would have taken you seriously if you had suggested that and if you emailed any of them asking about how plausible that was, they would have added an email filter to send your future emails to the trash bin. It is very easy to be sincerely full of the best intentions and discuss how to structure your double corporation to deal with windfalls like growing to a $1000b market cap when no one really expects that to happen, certainly not in the immediate future... Thus, no one is also sitting around going, 'well wait, we required the board to not own equity, but if the company is worth even fraction of our long-term targets, and it's recruiting with stock options like usual, then each employee is going to have, like, $10m or even $100m of pseudo-equity in the OA for-profit. That seems... problematic. Do we need to do something about it?'
FWIW, I am skeptical of the interpretation you put on that graph. I considered the same issue in my original analysis, but went with Strenze 2007's take that there doesn't seem to be much steeper IQ/income slope and kept returns constant. Seb objects that the datapoints have various problems and that's why he redoes an analysis with NLS to get his number, which is reasonable for his use, but he specifically disclaims projecting the slope out (which would make ES more profitable than it seems) like you do:
And it's not hard to see why the slope difference might be real but irrelevant: people in NLSY79 have different life cycles than in NLSY97, and you would expect a steeper slope (but same final total lifetime income / IQ correlation) from simply lengthening years of education - you don't have much income as a college student! The longer you spend in college, the higher the slope has to be when you finally get out and can start your remunerative career. (This is similar to those charts which show that Millennials are tragically impoverished and doing far worse than their Boomer parents... as long as you cut off the chart at the right time and don't extend it to the present.) I'm also not aware of any dramatic surge in the college degree wage-premium, which is hard to reconcile with the idea that IQ points are becoming drastically more valuable.
So quite aside from any Inside View takes about how the current AI trends look like they're going to savage holders of mere IQ, your slope take is on shaky, easily confounded grounds, while the Outside View is that for a century or more, the returns to IQ have been remarkably constant and have not suddenly been increasing by many %.
If Mark is in such a situation (which he was not, and I knew he was not), then the real culprit is whoever implemented such a completely broken and utterly unfixable 'anonymous' comment, and himself for being a security researcher and yet believing that retroactively making comments 'anonymous' on a publicly-scrape-able website would protect him against nation-state actors when anonymity was neither the goal nor a documented promise of the account deletion feature he was abusing and then crying 'dox!' about it not doing what it wasn't supposed to do and didn't do.
I don't think it's odd at all. As the Bloomberg article notes, this was in response to the martyrdom of Saint Altman, when everyone thought the evil Effective Altruists were stealing/smashing OA for no reason and destroying humanity's future (as well as the fortune of many of the individuals involved, to a degree few of them bothered to disclose) and/or turning it over to the Chinese commies. An internal memo decrying 'Effective Altruism' was far from the most extreme response at the time; but I doubt Gomez would write it today, if only because so much news has come out since then and it no longer looks like such a simple morality play. (For example, a lot of SV people were shocked to learn he had been fired from YC by Paul Graham et al for the same reason. That was a very closely held secret.)
Good report overall on tacit knowledge & biowarfare. This is relevant to the discussion over LLM risks: the Aum Shinrikyo chemist could make a lot of progress by reading papers and figuring out his problems as he went, but the bacteriologist couldn't figure out his issues for what seems like what had been a viable plan to weaponize & mass-produce anthrax but where lack of feedback led it to fail. Which does sound like something that a superhumanly-knowledgeable (but not necessarily that intelligent) LLM could help a lot with simply by pattern-matching and making lists of suggestions for things that are to the human 'unknown unknowns'.
Or, more concretely, nuclear weapons. Leaving aside regular full-scale nuclear war (which is censored from the graph for obvious reasons), this sort of graph will never show you something like Edward Teller's "backyard bomb", or a salted bomb. (Or any of the many other nuclear weapon concepts which never got developed, or were curtailed very early in deployment like neutron bombs, for historically-contingent reasons.)
There is, as far as I am aware, no serious scientific doubt that they are technically feasible: multi-gigaton bombs could be built or that salted bombs in relatively small quantities would render the earth uninhabitable to a substantial degree, for what are also modest expenditures as a percentage of GDP etc. It is just that there is no practical use of these weapons by normal, non-insane people. There is no use in setting an entire continent on fire, or in long-term radioactive poisoning of the same earth on which you presumably intend to live afterwards.
But you would be greatly mistaken if you concluded from historical data that these were impossible because there is nothing in the observed distribution anywhere close to those fatality rates.
(You can't even make an argument from an Outside View of the sort that 'there have been billions of humans and none have done this yet', because nuclear bombs are still so historically new, and only a few nuclear powers were even in a position to consider whether to pursue these weapons or not - you don't have k = billions, you have k < 10, maybe. And the fact that several of those pursued weapons like neutron bombs as far as they did, and that we know about so many concepts, is not encouraging.)
That was covered in my 2023-11-25 comment.
Hm, maybe it was common knowledge in some areas? I just always took him for being concerned. There's not really any contradiction between being excited about your short-term work and worried about long-term risks. Fooling yourself about your current idea is an important skill for a researcher. (You ever hear the joke about Geoff Hinton? He suddenly solves how the brain works, at long last, and euphorically tells his daughter; she replies: "Oh Dad - not again!")
Ilya has always been a doomer AFAICT, he was just loyal to Altman personally, who recruited him to OA. (I can tell you that when I spent a few hours chatting with him in... 2017 or something? a very long time ago, anyway - I don't remember him dismissing the dangers or being pollyannaish.) 'Superalignment' didn't come out of nowhere or surprise anyone about Ilya being in charge. Elon was... not loyal to Altman but appeared content to largely leave oversight of OA to Altman until he had one of his characteristic mood changes, got frustrated and tried to take over. In any case, he surely counts as a doomer by the time Zilis is being added to the board as his proxy. D'Angelo likewise seems to have consistently, in his few public quotes, been concerned about the danger.
A lot of people have indeed moved towards the 'doomer' pole but much of that has been timelines: AI doom in 2060 looks and feels a lot different from AI doom in 2027.
I haven't seen any coverage of the double structure or Anthropic exit which suggests that Amodei helped think up or write the double structure. Certainly, the language they use around the Anthropic public benefit corporation indicates they all think, at least post-exit, that the OA double structure was a terrible idea (eg. see the end of this article).
You don't know that. They seem to have often had near majorities, rather than being a token 1 or 2 board members.
By most standards, Karnofsky and Sutskever are 'doomers', and Zillis is likely a 'doomer' too as that is the whole premise of Neuralink and she was a Musk representative (which is why she was pushed out after Musk turned on OA publicly and began active hostilities like breaking contracts with OA). Hoffman's views are hard to characterize, but he doesn't seem to clearly come down as an anti-doomer or to be an Altman loyalist. (Which would be a good enough reason for Altman to push him out; and for a charismatic leader, neutralizing a co-founder is always useful, for the same reason no one would sell life insurance to an Old Bolshevik in Stalinist Russia.)
If I look at the best timeline of the board composition I've seen thus far, at a number of times post-2018, it looks like there was a 'near majority' or even outright majority. For example, 2020-12-31 has either a tie or an outright majority for either side depending on how you assume Sutskever & Hoffman (Sutskever?/Zilis/Karnofsky/D'Angelo/McCauley vs Hoffman? vs Altman/Brockman), and with the 2021-12-31 list the Altman faction needs to pick up every possible vote to match the existing 5 'EA' faction (Zilis/Karnofsky/D'Angelo/McCauley/Toner vs Hurd?/Sutskever?/Hoffman? vs Brockman/Altman) although this has to be wrong because the board maxes out at 7 according to the bylaws so it's unclear how exactly the plausible majorities evolved over time.
EDIT: this is going a bit viral, and it seems like many of the readers have missed key parts of the reporting. I wrote this as a reply to Wei Dai and a high-level summary for people who were already familiar with the details; I didn't write this for people who were unfamiliar, and I'm not going to reference every single claim in it, as I have generally referenced them in my prior comments/tweets and explained the details & inferences there. If you are unaware of aspects like 'Altman was trying to get Toner fired' or pushing out Hoffman or how Slack was involved in Sutskever's flip or why Sutskever flip-flopped back, still think Q* matters, haven't noticed the emphasis put on the promised independent report, haven't read the old NYer Altman profile or Labenz's redteam experience etc., it may be helpful to catch up by looking at other sources; my comments have been primarily on LW since I'm not a heavy EAF user, plus my usual excerpts.
It was a pretty weak hand. There is this pervasive attitude that Sam Altman could have been dispensed with easily by the OA Board if it had been more competent; this strange implicit assumption that Altman is some johnny-come-lately where the Board screwed up by hiring him. Commenters seem to ignore the long history here - if anything, it was he who screwed up by hiring the Board!
Altman co-founded OA. He was the face in initial coverage and 1 of 2 board members (with Musk). He was a major funder of it. Even Elon Musk's main funding of OA was through an Altman vehicle. He kicked out Musk when Musk decided he needed to be in charge of OA. Open Philanthropy (OP) only had that board seat and made a donation because Altman invited them to, and he could personally have covered the $30m or whatever OP donated for the seat; and no one cared or noticed when OP let the arrange lapse after the initial 3 years. (I had to contact OP to confirm this when someone doubted that the seat was no longer controlled by OP.) He thought up, drafted, and oversaw the entire for-profit thing in the first place, including all provisions related to board control. He voted for all the board members, filling it back up from when it was just him (& Greg Brockman at one point IIRC). He then oversaw and drafted all of the contracts with MS and others, while running the for-profit and eschewing equity in the for-profit. He designed the board to be able to fire the CEO because, to quote him, "the board should be able to fire me". He interviewed every person OA hired, and used his networks to recruit for OA. And so on and so forth
Credit where credit is due - Altman may not have believed the scaling hypothesis like Dario Amodei, may not have invented PPO like John Schulman, may not have worked on DL from the start like Ilya Sutskever, may not have created GPT like Alec Radford, may not have written & optimized any code like Brockman's - but the 2023 OA organization is fundamentally his work.
The question isn't, "how could EAers* have ever let Altman take over OA and possibly kick them out", but entirely the opposite: "how did EAers ever get any control of OA, such that they could even possibly kick out Altman?" Why was this even a thing given that OA was, to such an extent, an Altman creation?
The answer is: "because he gave it to them." Altman freely and voluntarily handed it over to them.
So you have an answer right there to why the Board was willing to assume Altman's good faith for so long, despite everyone clamoring to explain how (in hindsight) it was so obvious that the Board should always have been at war with Altman and regarding him as an evil schemer out to get them. But that's an insane way for them to think! Why would he undermine the Board or try to take it over, when he was the Board at one point, and when he made and designed it in the first place? Why would he be money-hungry when he refused all the equity that he could so easily have taken - and in fact, various partner organizations wanted him to have in order to ensure he had 'skin in the game'? Why would he go out of his way to make the double non-profit with such onerous & unprecedented terms for any investors, which caused a lot of difficulties in getting investment and Microsoft had to think seriously about, if he just didn't genuinely care or believe any of that? Why any of this?
(None of that was a requirement, or even that useful to OA for-profit. Other double systems like Mozilla or Hershey don't have such terms, they're just normal corporations with a lot of shares owned by a non-profit, is all. OA for-profit could've been the same way. Certainly, if all of this was for PR reasons or some insidious decade-long scheme of Altman to 'greenwash' OA, it was a spectacular failure - nothing has occasioned more confusion and bad PR for OA than the double structure or capped-profit. See, for example, my shortly-before-the-firing Twitter argument with well-known AI researcher Delip Rao who repeatedly stated & doubled down on the claim that the OA non-profit legally owned the OA for-profit was not just factually wrong but misinformation. He helpfully linked to a page about political misinformation & propaganda campaigns online in case I had any doubt about what the term 'misinformation' meant.)
What happened is, broadly: 'Altman made the OA non/for-profits and gifted most of it to EA with the best of intentions, but then it went so well & was going to make so much money that he had giver's remorse, changed his mind, and tried to quietly take it back; but he had to do it by hook or by crook, because the legal terms said clearly "no takesie backsies"'. Altman was all for EA and AI safety and an all-powerful nonprofit board being able to fire him, and was sincere about all that, until OA & the scaling hypothesis succeeded beyond his wildest dreams†, and he discovered it was inconvenient for him and convinced himself that the noble mission now required him to be in absolute control, never mind what restraints on himself he set up years ago - he now understands how well-intentioned but misguided he was and how he should have trusted himself more. (Insert Garfield meme here.)
No wonder the board found it hard to believe! No wonder it took so long to realize Altman had flipped on them, and it seemed Sutskever needed Slack screenshots showing Altman blatantly lying to them about Toner before he finally, reluctantly, flipped. The Altman you need to distrust & assume bad faith of & need to be paranoid about stealing your power is also usually an Altman who never gave you any power in the first place! I'm still kinda baffled by it, personally.
He concealed this change of heart from everyone, including the board, gradually began trying to unwind it, overplayed his hand at one point - and here we are.
So, what could the EA faction of the board have done? ...Not much, really. They only ever had the power that Altman gave them in the first place.
* I don't really agree with this framing of Sutskever/Toner/McCauley/D'Angelo as "EA", but for the sake of argument, I'll go with this labeling.
† Please try to cast your mind back to when Altman et al would be planning all this in 2018-2019, with OA rapidly running out of cash after the mercurial Musk's unexpected-but-inevitable betrayal, its DRL projects like OA5 remarkable research successes but commercially worthless, and just some interesting results like GPT-1 and then GPT-2-small coming out of their unsupervised learning backwater from Alec Radford tinkering around with RNNs and then these new 'Transformer' things. The idea that OA might somehow be worth over ninety billion dollars, yes, that's 'billion' with a 'b' in scarcely 3 years would have been insane, absolutely insane, not a single person in the AI world would have taken you seriously if you had suggested that and if you emailed any of them asking about how plausible that was, they would have added an email filter to send your future emails to the trash bin. It is very easy to be sincerely full of the best intentions and discuss how to structure your double corporation to deal with windfalls like growing to a $1000b market cap when no one really expects that to happen, certainly not in the immediate future... Thus, no one is also sitting around going, 'well wait, we required the board to not own equity, but if the company is worth even fraction of our long-term targets, and it's recruiting with stock options like usual, then each employee is going to have, like, $10m or even $100m of pseudo-equity in the OA for-profit. That seems... problematic. Do we need to do something about it?'