Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What Sam Altman’s firing and rehiring reveals about OpenAI | TechCrunch Minute”.
An open, aai board member says the CEO was fired for outright lying. You probably remember a dramatic story from November of last year, when open ai’s board fired the CEO Sam Alman, What followed was an incredibly complicated power struggle that ultimately saw Alman returning to the role of CEO and the board that opposed him pushed out since then, there’s Been a lot of reporting about what was happening behind the scenes, but, what’s remained pretty vague, is why the board felt they had to take such a drastic step in the first place at the time. The only thing the board said was that Alman had not been consistently candid in his communication with the board and that they did not trust him to lead the company, so anyone outside the company was probably thinking. What does that mean? Now, one of those former board members, the AI researcher, Helen toner, has given an interview with the Ted AI podcast, Where She lays out her side of the story. She accuses Alman of outright lying.
In fact, she said that when chat, GPT launched the board members weren’t told and they had to find out from Twitter. Toner also said, Alman gave the board inaccurate information about the safety measures that were in place at the company and he didn’t disclose his ownership of the open, aai startup fund. Lastly, she said these aren’t new issues for Alman that, in fact, he’d been fired from his job running the accelerator Y combinator and that there were also management issues at his last startup looped. As for why the board then chose to act so quickly and decisively, toner said it was clear that quote as soon as Sam had any inkling that we might do something that went against him. He would pull out all the stops.
Do everything in his power to undermine the board to prevent us from even getting to the point of being able to fire him in response to all this? The current open, AI board, chair Brett Taylor, said we are disappointed that Miss Taylor continues to revisit these issues. He pointed to the fact that there was an independent review of the board’s decision to fire Altman and that 95 % of open AI employees supported his reinstatement Beyond satisfying our curiosity does any of this matter to open AI today. Well, it is more bad publicity right as the company is facing criticism over allegedly imitating the voice of Scarlett Johansson without a permission, and also for losing several team members who were focused on safety.
In addition, toner and another former open AI board member just published a column in The Economist, arguing that self-governance isn’t enough for AI companies and that regulation is needed. So toner’s latest comments are adding more F to that debate. I’Ll see you tomorrow, .