Anything that I judge to be a significant factor for why Sam Altman was fired will resolve true. These all include "and then lied about it to the board" because that's what they list as the specific thing he was fired for ("lack of candor").
My current hope for reasonable resolution of this market is that there's an internal investigation completed which then leaks. There seems to be indications this will happen in 30 days, so call it by the end of the year. If this never happens (or never leaks) I'm not totally sure how to resolve this market.
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Nice, the top answer
Btw, a non-paywalled link to the NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/technology/openai-altman-inside-crisis.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ek0.l1R2.QJHek4el-CjI&smid=url-share
@ms Ah this is a new nyt story, different from the first one they did that I linked below! It mentions a few other miscellaneous things like Sam's Chip company and lya's reduced role, so I've bought a bit in those but I'd really like to hear Sophia's opinion on how much coverage something needs to resolve yes. The Toner stuff is in all 5 (now 6) of the comprehensive articles on this so I'm certain that's enough, but not sure how Sophia will judge the Chip Company/Ilya stuff. 🤷
On the Toner situation, this new NYT article gives us even more specifics than we had before:
So it was Tasha McCauley that he misrepresented, and an OpenAI spokeswoman says that Sam now contests this but we know from TIME that he offered to apologize for it during the negotiations.
And this ties a direct link between Sam pitting the board against each other(in general, not just the Toner incident) and them deciding to act.
Right after that quote:
Wow, what a terrible lawyer! Sam pitting the board against each other so he could remove one of them is a totally valid reason to try to remove him, they should have just given that from the beginning as an example of him being not candid. Did they really think Sam would sue them over giving specifics?
Anyways, I'm buying the NDA option down more now, I haven't heard anything about an NDA anywhere.
Yet more coverage of Sam trying to oust Toner from Bloomberg now:
This again reinforces to me that:
Sam was dishonest in trying to oust Toner
The ousting of Toner was a significant factor, so much so that Sam offered to publicly apologize
The board maintains that this was part of a longer pattern of similar behavior, and not ONLY about Toner and still not about Safety/Profit
Like the New Yorker, WSJ, and TIME reporting before it I consider this bullish for all the top answers about ousting toner and being generally manipulative/dishonest/good at corporate politics depending on how you want to frame it:
I think that we have a straightforward case at this point, so I expect that answer at 17% to resolve no. "Disagreement about board vacancies" is from the New York Times' coverage of Sam's firing Here:
The NYT piece was one of the first to cover the fact that Sam's trying to oust Toner was a significant factor. If they say that there were similar incidents in the past where Sam and board were opposed to each other about who should or should not be on the board, then I think we should believe them.
I am buying up "disagreements on filling board vacancies" accordingly.
This is also part of the "good at becoming powerful" answer, which I am still bullish on but not sure how Sophia will judge.
We have heard nothing about an NDA, I'm buying that down.
"Interpersonal squabbles not related to AI Safety" will depend on Sophia's judgement. One could argue that literally everything at OpenAI is related to safety, but I think that's dumb. Toner said explicitly in her latest interview that it was not about safety, it was about trust. I am buying Squabbles up.
^"Frequently dishonest about minor decisions" seems totally true according to the reporting we have gotten, except that it is vaguely phrased. @Balasar did you intend that Sam has to literally be a pathological liar for this to resolve yes? Or is that just one was to phrase it, as an alternative to the first two options in this answer?
^this happened and is part of the general ousting attempt that we know was a significant factor, but I am not sure how Sophia will judge it.
@sophiawisdom if all the flagship coverage I've linked about the ousting in general being a significant factor is correct, would this resolve yes as being part of that ousting or resolve no because it hasn't received as much emphasis in the coverage as the lying to board members during the ousting attempt?
@sophiawisdom if you haven't kept up with these, then here's the major articles consolidated, in order of their release:
New York Times
In my opinion, the coverage in these 5 articles is definitive enough that some answers could be resolved yes already. Especially since in the latest Bloomberg article we have Sam offering to publicly apologize for the Toner incident.
Waiting for the internal investigation is understandable, and I am hopeful that it will leak and we'll get more detail about the incidents similar to the Toner incident that the Board says happened. But we don't know how long the investigation will take, and we don't know if it will leak.
I would personally resolve the Toner/General Pattern of Dishonesty answers to Yes right now based on the unanimous reporting, and wait for the end of the year to try to judge the other answers.
It is of course up to you(Sophia) as the market creator, but I think these answers are only below 99% because we don't know if you've read this reporting and which exact wordings you think it supports.
From Time: https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman
- "“four people who have worked with Altman over the years also say he could be slippery—and at times, misleading and deceptive. Two people familiar with the board’s proceedings say that Altman is skilled at manipulating people, and that he had repeatedly received feedback that he was sometimes dishonest in order to make people feel he agreed with them when he did not.”
On the “making the board think other board members’ wanted Toner out” allegation: “This episode did not spur the board’s decision to fire Altman, those people say, but it was representative of the ways in which he tried to undermine good governance, and was one of several incidents that convinced the quartet that they could not carry out their duty of supervising OpenAI’s mission if they could not trust Altman.”
“In a lot of ways, Sam is a really nice guy; he’s not an evil genius. It would be easier to tell this story if he was a terrible person,” says one of them. “He cares about the mission, he cares about other people, he cares about humanity. But there’s also a clear pattern, if you look at his behavior, of really seeking power in an extreme way.”"
@Joshua @sophiawisdom How will this resolve if the first sentence is correct, the second and third sentences are mostly false?
I wrote this answer in an attempt to give pro-sam people something accurate they could bet on without calling him a liar.
The first sentence was my attempt to capture Sam's proficiency for beating rivals at corporate politics without explicitly condemning him as dishonest. The second was my attempt to sum up the Anthropic drama, the drama over previously vacated board seats, and the attempted ousting of Toner. The third sentence was was again an attempt to rephrase Ezra's sentiment here:
They felt they couldn't control Sam. If you like Sam, you say that's because he's a very effective CEO and the board was power-hungry. If you don't like Sam, you say it was the board being responsible and that Sam was a sociopath. I don't think either of those is exactly true, but we had a lot of answers representing the later perspective so I thought adding one that represented the former was a good idea.
Up to Sophia how she wants to judge it, but that was my intention.
@Joshua on the opposite side of the spectrum we have these answers:
I think this is totally how anti-sam people would sum up the power struggle, while pro-sam people would say the board were just sore losers. But these answers are arguably describing the same thing as my answer, just from different points of view.
Found this buried low, I consider this true. Just bc an answer is redundant with other true answers doesn't mean it should be bet down. This is completely consistent with Ezra's summary, Toner's confirmation that it was about trust in general, and the New Yorker's statement that "things like this had been happening for years" in reference to his being manipulative to try to oust Toner.
Lying to board members about other board members' opinions is the specific instance of Sams' general pattern of dishonesty that we have specific flagship reporting on. The answers about Sam being generally dishonest should resolve Yes, in addition to the answers about him specifically being dishonest about Helen.
@Joshua I kind of love that this was the reason they first gave us, before this market was made, and we didn't even mentally parse it as qualifying as a reason.
Like we thought the content of the dishonesty surely has to matter, rather than just dishonesty itself. In hindsight that was silly, of course dishonesty in the abstract might be a reason someone gets fired.
@chrisjbillington I think most people did parse it as qualifying? They just thought it was sus there were no examples provided.
@jskf Ah, that certainly could be. I'll rephrase, I didn't initially mentally parse it as qualifying.
@chrisjbillington Same, I assumed they were giving a bland answer and hiding some serious wrongdoing by Sam or some nefarious motive of their own. This entire market is kind of built on that premise, which is why it's been such a mess when that premise is false.
@Joshua Also if anyone wants to talk about this in the manifold discord, click this link. WSJ confirming everything in the New Yorker is a big deal IMO.
@chrisjbillington It seems like the content really did matter, though. Like sure a lack of trust built up over time, but when they actually fired him it was because he was being less than candid in an attempt to manipulate the composition of the board.
The TIME piece says the ousting was one of several significant incidents.
If we knew everything, I'd think that all of those "several incidents" would resolve yes in this market, along with the general answers about dishonesty.
I consider this ironclad after it was reported by both the New Yorker and the WSJ, the only two articles where Toner has given on the record interviews.
This also seems obviously confirmed to me. The only reason it wouldn't be is if the entire line of "not consistently candid" had been a total lie by the board and they actually fired him for sexual misconduct or being too e/acc etc. Obviously at this point his dishonestly/manipulation was a significant factor in firing him, as Toner re-asserts in the WSJ.
It's so vague that imo Sophia should have already N/A-ed it, but at this point I predict she'll just resolve it yes.
And this one should be the inverse of the highest option, right? If any option resolves yes, then we knew at least one significant factor so this can't resolve yes, unless I'm misunderstanding?
This seems the same as "Sam tried to manipulate the board"? Is it lower because people think that a very strict definition of "lying" will be used? Or that we'll require explicit confirmation of specific instances? This again seems generally identical to "not consistently candid", and in my view should have been N/A-ed but at this point resolves yes after Toner has said that indeed, they were telling the truth the whole time and Sam was not consistently candid.
Ignore my mod hat by the way, I'm just speaking as a trader who read the wsj article. I don't think there's another shoe waiting to drop. They fired him because he wasn't consistently candid.
I'll repost the summary by Ezra Klein as well, based on his own interviews of people on both sides:
@Joshua Personally, I've given up on bidding on this market because it's very unclear how the different options are going to be resolved. And there's not likely to be any new information anytime soon that will clarify things - everyone who actually knows what's going on has said as much as they're willing to.
I think the right approach is to resolve everything right now as best as possible. Personally, I would prefer that only a few specific options with the best evidence get resolved as YES, and the ones that are true by virtue of being vague should be resolved (e.g., "caught lying") should be resolved as N/A. Based on the description, though, it sounds like Sophia might prefer to resolve everything that seems vaguely true to YES.
It's unfortunate for a question with millions of mana riding on it to be so ambiguous. But a situation like this might still be unclear how to resolve even if we knew everything (for example, if different people on the board had different reasons for their decision).
@Mira Up to Sophia there, I admit. The New Yorker's language is much stronger though, and a direct quote from an insider:
Here we also see an insider from Altman's side contest that he had lied, and heck maybe that's true! But this is about why the board fired him, even if they were wrong. And the insider on the board's side used the word lying, and said it had been happening for years.
Also, Sophia previously said that the intent of the person who submittted the answer matters. so if @chrisjbillington and @firstuserhere could weigh in on lying vs manipulating vs dishonestly vs lies of omission that would be helpful.
@Joshua Thanks for the prompting.
I am not thinking too hard about the distinctions between being dishonest, lying, by omission or otherwise. The spirit of what I am going for is that the board's initial statements about him "not being consistently candid" are an accurate summary of a pattern of behaviour, without which they would not have fired him, and that the contexts in which or topics about which he was dishonest aren't important compared to the fact that the behaviour was a pattern which crossed a threshold causing them to lose trust in him.
In that vein, I think "lying and dishonestly", is best interpreted as including any behaviours that caused the board members to feel that they couldn't come away from a conversation with Sam reasonably confident that they had been privy to an understanding of the truth as he knew it. So anything that misled them, lies, half-truths, omissions, selective commissions, would be consistent with what I am going for.
@chrisjbillington To add: crucially, the point of my answer is the "and not any other reason" bit.
That he wasn't candid about something is a given in this market's resolution criteria, but this answer is distinct from some others in that it says the firing was about the dishonesty per se, without which he would not have been fired.
E.g. if he did try to oust Helen Toner (and it sounds like he did), then this answer should resolve NO if we think that he would have been fired anyway for trying to oust her. It only resolves YES if we think the dishonesty involved in the attempted ousting was what mattered, as the straw that broke the camel's back (on top of a history of dishonesty) and caused the board to no longer trust him.
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