And it is easy to see how the board’s view of the mission could conflict with the staff’s views of their jobs...<p>From the board’s perspective ... will have a staffing problem ... those staff will probably be more enthusiastic about AI, generally, than the mission calls for.<p>From the staff’s perspective, the board is a bunch of outsiders ... driven by an abstract sense of mission. Which kind of is the job of a nonprofit board, but which will reasonably annoy the staff.<p>Yesterday virtually all of OpenAI’s staff signed an open letter to the board ... the letter claims that the board “informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’” Yes! I mean, the board might be wrong about the facts, but in principle it is absolutely possible that destroying OpenAI’s business would be consistent with its mission. If you have built an unsafe AI, you delete the code and burn down the building. The mission is conditional — build AGI if it is safe — and if the condition is not satisfied then you go ahead and destroy all of the work. That is the board’s job. It’s the board’s job because it can’t be the staff’s job, because the staff is there to do the work, and will be too conflicted to destroy it. The board is there to supervise the mission.
It’s great to see Matt Levine chime in, he often has an incredible well thought out and informed view that is also just incredibly funny to read. That said I am disappointed that he latched on the the entirely imagined idea that this was “profit va safety” which isn’t in any way supported by anything and is just baseless speculation cooked up by spectators.<p>It’s even directly contrary to the statements from the board and the new CEO, and there is no reason to believe they would lie and keep it hidden if this was in fact their reasoning.