Major corporate boards are rife with "on paper" conflicts on interest - that's what happens when you want people with real management experience to sit on your board and act like responsible adults. This happens in every single industry and has nothing to do with tech or with OpenAI specifically.
In practice, board bylaws and common sense mean that individuals recuse themselves as needed and don't do stupid shit.
I get a lostredditor vibe way too often here. Oddly more than Reddit.
I think people forget sometimes that comments come with a context. If we are having a conversation about Deep Water Horizon someone will chime in about how safe deep sea oil exploration is and how many failsafes blah blah blah.
>I think people forget sometimes that comments come with a context.
I mean, this is definitely one of my pet peeves, but the wider context of this conversation is specifically a board doing stupid shit, so that's a very relevant counterexample to the thing being stated. Board members in general often do stupid/short-sighted shit (especially in tech), and I don't know of any examples of corporate board members recusing themselves.
It happens a lot. Every big company has CEOs from other businesses on its board and sometimes those businesses will have competing products or services.
That's what I would term a black-and-white case. I don't think there's anyone with sense who would argue in good faith that a CEO should get a vote on their own salary. There are many degrees of grey between outright corruption and this example, and I think the concern lies within.
I get what you're saying, but I also live in the world and see the mechanics of capitalism. I may be a person who's interested in tech, science, education, archeology, etc. That doesn't mean that I don't also have political views that sometimes overlap with a lot of other very-online people.
I think the comment to which you replied has a very reddit vibe, no doubt. But also, it's a completely valid point. Could it have been said differently? Sure. But I also immediately agreed with the sentiment.
Oh I wasn’t complaining about the parent, I was complaining it needed to be said.
We are talking about a failure of the system, in the context of a concrete example. Talking about how the system actually works is only appropriate if you are drawing specific arguments up about how this situation is an anomaly, and few of them do that.
Instead it often sounds like “it’s very unusual for the front to fall off”.
No, this is the part of the show where the patronizing rhetoric gets trotted out to rationalize discarding the principles that have suddenly become inconvenient for the people with power.
No worries. The same kind of people who devoted their time and energy to creating open-source operating systems in the era of Microsoft and Apple are now devoting their time and energy to doing the same for non-lobotomized LLMs.
Look at these clowns (Ilya & Sam and their angry talkie-bot), it's a revelation, like Bill Gates on Linux in 2000:
No, its the part of the show where they go back to providing empty lip service to the principles and using them as a pretext for things that actually serve narrow proprietary interests, the same way they were before the leadership that has been doing that for a long time was temporarily removed until those sharing the proprietary interests revolted for a return to the status quo ante.
Yes, and we were also watching the thousands and thousands of companies where these types of conflicts are handled easily by decent people and common sense. Don't confuse the outlier with the silent majority.
And we're seeing the result in real-time. Stupid shit doers have been replaced with hopefully-less-stupid-shit-doers.
It's a real shame too, because this is a clear loss for the AI Alignment crowd.
I'm on the fence about the whole alignment thing, but at least there is a strong moral compass in the field- especially compared to something like crypto.
You need to be able to separate macro-level and micro-level. GP is responding to a comment about the IRS caring about the conflict-of-interest on paper. The IRS has to make and follow rules at a macro level. Micro-level events obviously can affect the macro view, but you don't completely ignore the macro because something bad happened at the micro level. That's how you get knee-jerk reactionary governance, which is highly emotional.
A corporation acting (due to influence from a conflicted board member that doesn't recuse) contrary to the interests of its stockholders and in the interest of the conflicted board member or who they represent potentially creates liability of the firm to its stockholders.
A charity acting (due to the influence of a conflicted board member that doesn't recuse) contrary to its charitable mission in the interests of the conflicted board member or who they represent does something similar with regard to liability of the firm to various stakeholders with a legally-enforceable interest in the charity and its mission, but also is also a public civil violation that can lead to IRS sanctions against the firm up to and including monetary penalties and loss of tax exempt status on top of whatever private tort liability exists.
Reminds me of the “revolving door” problem. Obvious risk of corruption and conflict of interest, but at the same time experts from industry are the ones with the knowledge to be effective regulators. Not unlike how many good patent attorneys were previously engineers.
501c3's also have governing internal rules, and the threat of penalties and loss of status imposed by the IRS gives them additional incentive to safeguard against even the appearance of conflict being manifested into how they operate (whether that's avoiding conflicted board members or assuring that they recuse where a conflict is relevant.)
If OpenAI didn't have adequate safeguards, either through negligence or becauase it was in fact being run deliberately as a fraudulent charity, that's a particular failure of OpenAI, not a “well, 501c3’s inherently don't have safeguard” thing.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a 501c3 and I'd expect that even the most techno-futurist free-market types on HN would agree that no matter what alleged impact it has, it is also in practice creating profitable overseas contracts for US corporations that ultimately provide downstream ROI to the Gates estate.
Most people just tend to go about it more intelligently than Trump but "charitable" or "non-profit" doesn't mean the organization exists to enrich the commons rather than the moneyed interests it represents.
In practice, board bylaws and common sense mean that individuals recuse themselves as needed and don't do stupid shit.