Sam Altman made comments on X to members of the e/acc community that it was a real shame that he couldn’t reveal his secret account, because it would blow their minds. He also made comments like, “you can’t outaccelerate me”.
The most powerful person on the board is Ilya Sutskever. If he saw Sam making those comments on Twitter, maybe that’s what lead them to kick Sam off the board? Maybe they were worried that they couldn’t trust someone who had a secret presence and role in urging the e/acc community toward unsafe AI acceleration?
Additional context:
Note: I will resolve this as “yes” if any official news comes out that Sam’s participation in the acceleration movement was part of why he was fired by the board (as opposed to their current stance, which is just that he wasn’t being candid)
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@TheBayesian Yes, title has been updated to give it more clarity, and so that it reflects the longer description
Ilya switched to team Sam, and apparently Helen Toner was one of the key board members who disagreed with Sam on his desire to accelerate. News came out that she wrote a paper expressing desire to decelerate. She is no longer a member of the new board, now that Sam is back, so it’s reasonable to deduce that Sam’s desire to accelerate was a big factor in why he was fired.
@ThomasC I think it's not reasonable to deduce this, given that many people involved have otherwise implied AI safety wasn't a major reason for the board's decision. People can be for deceleration and still not fire their CEO because he disagrees. Moreover, altman has many times mentioned concerns related to the dangers of AI, as has ilya and many other openai members
@TheBayesian Here is the article by Helen Toner:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/illusion-chinas-ai-prowess-regulation
@FlyingBlender these do not at all address my comment, nor refute my previous criticism, nor support your point in the wake of said criticism
@TheBayesian It demonstrates that Helen was not aligned with Sam about the acceleration of at OpenAI under his leadership (she stated in the article that she favored Anthropic’s slower approach). And then insiders stated that Sam was very unhappy about her publishing that article, which would seem to further prove the rift between them over the issue? Helen was then one of the three board members who held their line against him. They still haven’t given a valid reason for why, but this is the most logical deduction. We still haven’t had any type of officially verifiable confirmation, though, which is why this question is still unresolved.
@FlyingBlender Again, they can have disagreements (which, yes, they did have) without the firing being caused by these disagreements. I suppose verifiable confirmation, that hasn’t been directly contradicted by other verifiable confirmation (otherwise it’s put into question) would def work. However, according to the original question and description, as earlier mentioned, this clearly resolves NO (it was very likely not about his secret e/acc twitter account)
