“The OpenAI Board Member Who Clashed With Sam Altman Shares Her Side: In an Interview, AI Academic Helen Toner Explains Her Posture in OpenAI’s Power Struggle”, 2023-12-07 (; backlinks):
…Before his ousting, Sam Altman and Helen Toner had clashed. In October, Toner, who is director of strategy at a think tank [CSET] in Washington, D.C. co-wrote a paper on AI safety. The paper said OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT sparked a “sense of urgency inside major tech companies” that led them to fast-track AI products to keep up. It also said Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, avoided “stoking the flames of AI hype” by waiting to release its chatbot. After publication, Altman confronted Toner, saying she had harmed OpenAI by criticizing the company so publicly. Then he went behind her back, people familiar with the situation said.
Altman approached other board members, trying to convince each to fire Toner. Later, some board members swapped notes on their individual discussions with Altman. The group concluded that in one discussion with a board member, Altman left a misleading perception that another member thought Toner should leave, the people said. [Reported the day before by Time]
By this point, several of OpenAI’s then-directors already had concerns about Altman’s honesty, people familiar with their thinking said. His efforts to unseat Toner, parts of which were previously reported by the New Yorker, added to what those people said was a series of actions that slowly chipped away at their trust in Altman and led to his unexpected firing on the Friday before Thanksgiving. The board members weren’t prepared for the fallout from their decision.
…Before he was reinstated, Altman offered to apologize for his behavior toward Toner over her paper, according to people familiar with the matter. [Er, so what?]
…“Our goal in firing Sam was to strengthen OpenAI and make it more able to achieve its mission”, she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Toner held on to that belief when, amid a revolt by employees over Altman’s firing, a lawyer for OpenAI said she could be in violation of her fiduciary duties if the board’s decision to fire him led the company to fall apart, Toner said. “He was trying to claim that it would be illegal for us not to resign immediately, because if the company fell apart we would be in breach of our fiduciary duties”, she told the Journal. “But OpenAI is a very unusual organization, and the nonprofit mission—to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity—comes first”, she said, referring to artificial general intelligence…At one point during the heated negotiations, a lawyer for OpenAI said the board’s decision to fire Altman could lead to the company’s collapse. “That would actually be consistent with the mission”, Toner replied at the time, startling some executives in the room. [Toner is correct. See the OA Charter, which apparently that OA lawyer had not.] In the interview, Toner said that comment was in response to what she took as an “intimidation tactic” by the lawyer. She says she was trying to convey that the continued existence of OpenAI isn’t, by definition, necessary for the nonprofit’s broader mission of creating artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity at large. A simultaneous concern of researchers is that AGI, an AI system that can do tasks better than most humans, could also cause harm. “In this case, of course, we all worked very hard to ensure the company could continue succeeding”, she added. OpenAI has an unusual structure where a nonprofit board, on which Toner served, oversees the work of a for-profit arm. The board’s mandate is to “humanity”, not investors.
…In the interview, Toner declined to provide specific details on why she and the 3 others voted to fire Altman from OpenAI.