After the news broke that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had tried and failed to convince Scarlett Johansson to lend her voice to ChatGPT, one of my favorite writers went on a tear. “The people killing the internet have names,” Ed Zitron tweeted. “Sam Altman, Steve Huffman, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella — these men believe they’re the new Leonardo Da Vincis, but they’re little more than petty kings and rent-seekers creating useless clones of useful things.”
Two other names who, perhaps a bit surprisingly, jumped into the fray include Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley — former OpenAI board members, cut loose from the organization as part of Altman’s remake of the board in his favor following his whirlwind ouster and return to the AI research lab. Writing in an op-ed for The Economist, the only two women who were on OpenAI’s board make the point that third-party legislation is the only thing that will save the company from itself and from its excesses.
Moreover, while OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever would later change his mind about supporting Altman’s removal, Toner and McCauley write that they still stand by their decision that Altman needed to be pushed out of the company. He was fired, they write, because multiple senior leaders at the company shared “grave concerns” with the board, including that they believe Altman has cultivated “a toxic culture of lying” and engaged in behavior that “can be characterized as psychological abuse.”
They continue: “In OpenAI’s specific case, given the board’s duty to provide independent oversight and protect the company’s public-interest mission, we stand by the board’s action to dismiss Mr. Altman.”
Tech. Entertainment. Science. Your inbox.
Sign up for the most interesting tech & entertainment news out there.
Email: SIGN UP
By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use and have reviewed the Privacy Notice.
And they don’t stop there. “We also feel that developments since he returned to the company — including his reinstatement to the board and the departure of senior safety-focused talent — bode ill for the OpenAI experiment in self-governance.”
OpenAI has been beset by a wave of departures in the last several days, with the exists including safety experts as well as Jan Leike (who led the alignment team) and Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s cofounders. The concerns cited generally revolved around the company prioritizing finances ahead of safety issues. The company is also in the hot seat at the moment for appearing to use Scarlett Johansson’s likeness without her consent, despite Altman trying and failing more than once to convince her to let OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT use her voice.
The post Ex-OpenAI board members have no regrets and still think Sam Altman needs to go appeared first on BGR.
