Thread by @geoffreyirving

I have no details of OpenAI's Board’s reasons for firing Sam, and I am conflicted (lead of Scalable Alignment at Google DeepMind). But there is a large, very loud pile on vs. people I respect, in particular Helen Toner and Ilya Sutskever, so I feel compelled to say a few things.

First, these are my personal views, not those of my employer. But still, a big grain of salt due to conflicts of interest.

Second, my prior is strongly in favor of Helen and Ilya (I know the other two less well). Ilya is a terrific ML researcher, I had a first-hand seat for two years of his views around safety improving, and my sense from others is that they kept improving after I left in 2019.

Helen is a terrific strategic and generalist researcher, is extremely thoughtful, and my interactions since I met her in 2018 have been uniformly great. She took the board seat with reservations...

...I advised against it at the time as I thought the governance structure was broken, but she and other people I trust felt it was important to have more independent members on the Board (I’m not yet sure who was right in hindsight).

Third, my prior is strongly against Sam after working for him for two years at OpenAI:

1. He was always nice to me.
2. He lied to me on various occasions
3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons)

The “always nice to me” part puts me in a weird situation: most of the negative stuff I know about happened to others, and even when he lied to me it was about other people to try to drive wedges. So it feels rough for me to unilaterally share it.

As I mentioned, I don’t have any details of the Board’s reasons for their action, besides what is publicly known. I am very confused about what happened on Friday and over the weekend: from public information it seems like big tactical and strategic mistakes were made...

...but that seems inconsistent with the thoughtfulness of the people involved. At this point, mostly what feels right is withholding complete judgment until more information lands. I appreciate that will seem unreasonable to a lot of people, but it’s the best suggestion I have.