More about Sam Altman

Recently, I told a brief story here about how Sam Altman got fired by the board of his artificial-intelligence oriented company, then days later returned in triumph to the head of the company, and with a re-jiggered subservient board. Now I return to that subject with further thoughts.

Why did the board attempt to fire Altman? They weren't at all specific about it.

On November 17, 2023, noon on the west coast OpenAI's board of directors announced they were firing him, effective immediately, because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications." Nothing more. That lack of particulars smelled to some people like a lack as well of ... candidness.

One prominent theory that has developed over the subsequent weeks is that Altman was playing hardware against software. OpenAI is a software concern, but Altman apparently had aspirations to, and even raised money for, the founding of an AI chip company.

THAT sounds like the sort of thing that might create conflicts, or that directors at any rate might expect would cause conflicts. In some imagined near future, will Altman be trying to do deals that play off the real or possible synergy between the two companies? Might that turn out to be something that fails to maximize the value of OpenAI equity?

Furthermore, the possibility of surreptitious work to create a complementary chip company sounds like the sort of thing that might cause the unhappy directors to say the company's CEO has been less than consistently candid.

On the other hand, there ARE other theories. Heck,. IIRC (I'm not going to research this) Elon Musk is floating a theory that OpenAI may be onto something that constitutes an existential threat to humanity. Altman was trying to cover up the threat, the Board was trying to expose it, but now the Board has decided it has to go along with the cover-up.

Musk should try harder to be a good steward of his own companies, including what is left of X, fka Twitter instead of inventing random theories about random other peoples' motivations.

If you love conspiracy theories, go with Musk on this. And maybe add a theory about how the aliens at area 51 (imaged above) might save us from the AI monster that Altman's underlings at OpenAI are creating with his complicity and cover.

I suspect it is just the hardware/software thing, personally.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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