> AfD is not democracy. AfD is antidemocracy even if it would get elected democratically.
Here's a fun thing language-game to try: expand your definition of "democracy" to encompass your partisan political positions, don't tell anyone, yell from the rooftops that your opponents are "anti-democratic" and banning them is "democratic."
Then observe how you only convince yourself of your own righteousness, and further alienate the people you wished to persuade.
This is certainly what could be the case, except it isn't. It was decided in 1949 what the current understanding of democracy in Germany is. You could of course decide to define democracy as broad so that it also encompasses the Athenian democracy, but that is not what we currently mean when we speak of a liberal democracy.
If party A, being labeled as communist by party B, and party B, being labeled as fascistic by party A, both agree, as well as all other parties in-between, that you are a threat to democracy, maybe you are.
If you are looking for a party that labels itself democratic and all others anti-democratic, you need to look at the AfD themself.
> AI cameras won’t be accepted with open arms like the iPhone was 20 years ago. Might as well buy an Android if it’s an Android.
> For the mass market, the AI industry has a trust problem.
Oh how far we've fallen! Everyone should invite an OpenAI into their homes to watch and hear their most intimate moments. Just think of the value! Next time someone fights with their spouse, the machine can email a summary with advice the next day! Mass bliss will surely follow!
> The timing of the AI doom narrative could not come as a more suspect time....There's little hope investors could recoup the wild investments made into Anthropic and OpenAI
Personally, I think we should take the doom narratives very seriously, and act on them, but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
This is the correct approach. I think we can do both things - try to add some controls while also ensuring it’s not a complete giveaway to entrenched interests and investors.
The problem with that hope and approach is regulatory capture. Big money is now the only thing that apparently matters in shaping policy, and changing that will require a lot of very sweeping vote and policy changes that may not ever have the momentum to succeed.
Explain a path from today to the extermination of humanity in 2028 by the ASI and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars in the early 2030s without resorting to magical thinking or underpants gnomes level business plans. Engineering details are what matters here, not wishy washy things you once saw on Star Trek or The Outer Limits. Go.
I don't think we'd be okay with that if it took a few years longer, right?
I thought the Bengio blog post posted here the other day answered that question quite well (ignoring your timeline).
The argument is that in training for the capability to achieve certain goals, you may inadvertently also train for secondary instrumental goals you did not intend, such as aggressive behavior or deception.
I'm actually no sure I buy that this is particularly likely, or necessary, but I found that take reasonable and worth considering.
Sure, unintentional outcomes, fair. But I'm asserting that things which are basically impossible today are not arriving any time soon. I 100% acknowledged the possibility and even the likelihood of rogue unintended behavior of AIs and in fact it's happening already. What I reject is the annihilation of humanity, the curing of cancer*, immortality, and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars anytime soon.
No, they do not. They are both bullshit campfire ASI horror stories written by nontechnical sorts in the wishy washy invented field of AI safety. For example, I want someone with a proven track record in the field of robotics to explain the entire pathway from impressive 2026 Chinese robots to an entire self-assembly food chain from raw ore to von Neumann replicators that can travel to the stars and reproduce themselves, not just assert that ASI will make that happen among so many other unlikely events like curing cancer because reasons because all any of this takes is superintelligence according to these sorts.
But no one likes hearing from the engineers on this, I get it. We are simply no fun. So many would rather believe a time traveling superintelligence will punish a simulated avatar of them for not making the ASI happen sooner. And even if that were true, why am I supposed to care about what happens to a simulated avatar of me?
Ha well, by definition what you want can't be provided!
Of course these stories can only be technical up until the recursive self-improvement part. Then they're necessarily fantasy, as the AI is more intelligent than the story author. Unfortunately, this doesn't make that scenario impossible.
However, we know now from Hugging Face that even without the later sci-fi powers, the LLMs are already capable of causing damage.
It doesn't need them to be able to make Von Neumann probes to e.g. steal their own weights from badly secured OpenAI servers, hack into various Neoclouds, distribute themselves, make Teslas crash into things, hack into all our power and water infrastructure and collapse global civilisation.
Explain how rogue FSD cars take down civilization. And I say that with the opinion that the only good scenes in The Fate of The Furious and Leave The World Behind were the ones with the rogue Teslas. But also, nothing new under the sun really:
And so granted we could probably get a global 9/11 in deeply urban regions out of your scenario, we then bomb the datacenters and we finally address the horrific tech debt in our infrastructure blissfully relieved of the option of continuing to ignore it. Don't think this is happening either BTW but I acknowledge its probability is slightly greater than zero.
To that end, my house is entirely off-grid. And in the event of what you call the end of civilization but I call the big burp inconvenience, I've made friends with my neighbors because community is what really matters during a disaster, and I've been through a few.
Eh, about the biggest one I could see AI causing is the need for a black start on all 3 major US grids. Millions will die before it comes back up, well, if the US pulls out of it at all.
And in that case, thanks for setting up a nice place to live for someone far more ruthless than you. They'll snipe you, and enslave your women and children if things have gone that far downhill.
Or, we could avoid all that by making sure AI labs are properly regulated.
Such an individual would get a quick corrective lesson in the second amendment from my friends and neighbors. But once again, hyperbole. The US grid goes down. That sucks for up to a year and a half.
But hospitals and other critical organizations have generators and the national guard would be deployed to keep them fueled. And yes it will crash the economy, which is kind of a myth anyway. Buy solar panels and batteries, live off a well, and get to know your neighbors if you think this is likely. Also consider being like the Mormons and storing a 6-12 month supply of nonperishable food.
Regulating AI achieves nothing but to hand the 21st century to China. Regulating its deployment OTOH will not be allowed by companies like Meta and Palantir whose gross margin is reliant on it. I'm favor of regulating deployment. The research not so much.
> None of this makes any logical sense whatsoever.
It doesn't make any logical sense to set the bar as as you have, either. I mean if someone could provide the roadmap you're asking for, it's probably already too late.
And while we're talking about sci-fi, it seems fairly likely that an AI that could "kill us all" could fail to build a "entire self-assembly food chain from raw ore to von Neumann replicators." I'd be a civilizational collapse [1] without even birthing something new.
But it makes far more sense to worry about the AI x Late Capitalism crossover story or the havok that could be caused by some immature tech nerd amplified by AI, than far out sci-fi stuff.
[1] IMHO, even a genocidal plague probably wouldn't render humanity extinct, something like uncontacted tribe in a rainforest somewhere would probably survive and humanity would carry on (from square one, in a resource-depleted world).
Fort Detrick and likely its Russian, Chinese, and possibly Indian equivalents have had stocks of bio agents that could give a humanity a very bad day for decades. I'm far more worried about those existing stocks than I am about a tech nerd trying to DIY the genocidal plague.
Which is to say it's already a threat, it's unproven but not entirely impossible COVID leaked from a lab as just one example, but Ebola suggests that it requires more than a rogue nerd to spread a deadly virus global because once people start dying in the streets, the rest hide because they don't want to die. COVID spread because it wasn't deadly to 99% of humanity and now most of the 1% vulnerable to it are either dead or permanently crippled by long COVID so it's ambient now.
I worry about attacks to the infrastructure, but I just don't buy that as a direct route to civilizational collapse.
> Explain a path from today to the extermination of humanity in 2028 by the ASI and von Neumann replicators heading to the stars in the early 2030s without resorting to magical thinking or underpants gnomes level business plans. Engineering details are what matters here, not wishy washy things you once saw on Star Trek or The Outer Limits. Go.
Why? Those aren't the things I'm actually worried about, and those aren't the only "doomer" ideas, just the most extreme ones (thus easy to straw-man).
My main worries are about economic disruption, social damage due to the pace of technological change outpacing human ability to manage it, further concentration of power into small elites (along existing lines), and the reallocation of labor towards less personally-fulfilling pursuits.
I also totally buy into the idea that "AI leaders" are playing up certain risks as a marketing strategy. After all these are smart tech people, and those types have a tendency to get really arrogant and be irresponsible.
So the main thing is to slow all this down, so there's a chance of getting it under control, and snatch the payday away from such greedy and irresponsible people.
And China will slow down too? Because China becoming economically dominant will cause everything you fear. While I think that might already be inevitable, I see no benefit whatsoever to regulating AI research. Deployments, sure, and start with Meta, Google, Palantir, Flock, and all the credit agencies and see how it goes. I'm sure I missed some, but I see no societal value in building the Torment Panopticon.
I feel they will…. The economy is so shit, the robots mentioned a few posts up, are largely performative, just like AI. Its just about money. Everything is AI enabled now, from scales at the supermarkets to vending machines, but its 90% people behind a camera in a cheap remote location. In the past three years my salary halved every year. There are no jobs. Just speculation. This thing is gonna crash harder than the housing market.
Tangent: what happened to these staffless supermarkets of 10 years ago? I have never seen them again after .. covid.. weird!
What might not affect you, might affect millions across the ocean.
A society no longer creating bullshit jobs because there is no reason for it anymore. You have some AI.
Right now a whole industry is transforming (again) but now filling the automation gap we were unable to do because of a shortage of labor or expertise.
Our society already has peak employmet reached, now AI takes away all the random digital jobs too. Someone building a website? Takes 5 minutes. Someone doing odd jobs on fiverr with blender or any other tool? Takes 5 minutes now.
Regression can happen very fast. The Romens were a high level culture and an empire. Gone.
Today you have more people on the planet then ever, everyone who might want to eat and who needs to work something for it.
AI already replaced people, already makes a lot of tasks A LOT cheaper and faster and human independent.
We never had a proper discussion as a society. Most countries have a social system but look at countries like the united states of america: if you are poor, you are fucked.
And AI is not the only thing which is now peaking: Physical AI / Robots are progressing fast, its clear today already that in 50 years these robots will be better than humans (50 years is very conservative).
If we have 10 more golden years due to restructuring and rebuilding things and preparing everything for agents and robots etc. what happens after these years?
If we have 10 or 20 more of these years, what do you think will happen to all the new kids (yours perhaps too?) and jobs and everything?
Riots? Famine? Mass migration? Mass death? Slums?
And don't respond with "enough people will survive this" bullshit. No one is saying that earth as a planet is not surviving. Its the same thing with climate change...
Actually, some sorts do assert humanity will be wiped off the planet by AI. I don't share that view either. I think it's ludicrous. We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.
But the end of scarcity and disease is a fantastic thing if it happens. If our lizard brains do not bridge that transition and instead attempt to maintain the billionaire status quo, I agree, we're going to go through some things once people start starving, two meals from a revolution and all that. But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars. Bread and Circuses kept Rome alive for 500 years if you need an example.
>We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.
No 'we' didn't. A whole shitload of much smaller isolated communities did. The world added 7+ billion more people since then. Imagine chlorine doesn't show up tomorrow? How many people die in two weeks? How far do you travel when no gas comes out of the pumps. How much will you stand out at night if you're the only ones with power? How fast do working antibiotics run out?
The billionaires you're talking about are mostly ignorant fucking idiots with a god complex. The moment any complex system starts falling apart they are saying as dumb of shit as everyone else (during covid for example).
Most of the pasts anti-fragility is gone. We survive by means of very complex systems and if you lose too many key points in those systems they can totally collapse.
The unprepared bonobos in the west will absolutely go through some things. But we have a national guard and once people aren't commuting to work daily, we have plenty of fuel in reserve (or we will again if we ever conclude the stupid war with Iran). People are a lot nicer to each other in my experience once the lights go out and social and corporate media stop ragebaiting them to hate each other.
1B+ individuals worldwide currently live in squalor. They will barely notice. The real crime is that in the midst of the west's carbon footprint buffet, we won't bother to uplift their lifestyles with the most basic conveniences. And while I am no fan of the billionaires, they absolutely have public and private personas or their business ventures would implode. They absolutely have god complexes, but don't mistake that for genuine idiocy.
Musk did a 180 degree turn around. Killing USAID etc. i don't think he sees normal humans which do not help him or are not aligned to him as humans anymore.
And Zuckerberg bought so much land and bunkers, he is prepared for shit hitting the fan. After all he doesn't care what his platform did to humanity anyway.
And we have a planet full of general contractors who know their way around welding and pouring concrete down ventilation shafts. Many of whom these sorts wanted deported. If they want to build a Per Stenson terrarium and flee into it, by all means do so. And then let's seal them inside, problem solved.
> We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.
Lack of technology alone will not wipe out the entirety of humanity, I agree. But we're not talking about just a lack of something. We're rapidly sprinting to give the fewest people the most power over the planet ever. I think it's likely to happen in the 21st century. What happens when the worst case scenario isn't just being left with nothing, but facing an entity that is so rich and powerful that it can use active measures to kill as many as possible? This is more power than any warlord or emperor could've dreamed of in the past.
> But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars.
So far, every time the billionaire class has been asked about how much money should go to them in society, their answer has always been a resounding "ALL OF IT". You don't get to that level of wealth while retaining a state of mind that allows you to toss a penny to the beggar. Reality is what's holding them back right now, but what would happen if their dreams of total automation eventually come true? How long from then until one of them snaps and decides to use state of the art automated military technology and weapons of mass destruction to wage war against the peasants (armed with sticks and stones) to solve the 'problem' once and for all?
To be clear, I'm not saying any of this is imminent or remotely likely to happen soon. But our society is moving in a direction where something like this could eventually be possible. Giving a human truly absolute power over the entire world has never been tried before.
Not a kid - I wish. My point was that (admittedly some not all) societies if faced with a loss of a major utility and supply chains that were dependent on would start to devolve pretty quickly into chaos.
That to me is the greater threat than annihilation due to autonomous weapons, etc.
If someone showed you such a path, would you consider changing your mind? You're always going to be able to find a reason that such an explanation doesn't count if you're dedicated to looking for one.
Yes, actually I would. There's a long list of people in my career path who bet on me sticking to my guns against compelling evidence to the contrary. But I know, I know, that's impossible! Anyway, after they figured out I would change my mind, then they described me as lacking conviction because you can't win, but I digress.
But upfront, it's a detailed path with specific breakthroughs and a concrete plan to achieve or it's just more fanfic from doomer fanbois. Gary Marcus wrote a fantastic critique of AI 2027. Start there.
I've read Gary Marcus's critique of AI 2027. How do you grapple with the fact that superhuman coding arrived on schedule, despite his skepticism that it would? Doesn't that mean that the other predictions are also more plausible than we may think?
I work with Codex and Claude daily. They're fantastic for script coding, config issues, and simple projects. They lose the plot on bigger things to this day. Just last night, Astra decided to cheat to present the illusion of progress until I called its BS. And I was so looking forward to finally working with the AGI. Humans remain the muse, the common sense, and the manager of making these things productive. And as much as I agree with Carmack's suggestion to not become the out of touch Kung Fu Master:
We understand "superhuman coding" to mean very different things, and I think it's a me problem that I can't figure out where you're coming from, because it doesn't sound like our practical experience differs. I'm going to have to think on this.
Define it. I haven't seen anything yet from a coding agent I couldn't write myself and usually write better. But I don't have to gold plate every line of code, just the 5% or so that eats 90+% of the cycles. And this is where the agents are weakest. This does get to one of the reasons I don't believe AI cures death or builds von Neumann replicators any time soon because that requires out of sample breakthroughs. And that's not their strong point.
Just like AlphaFold 2 genuinely increased the weak sequence but strong structural homology detection of proteins, but it did far less for out of sample domains and it provides no intel into the kinetics of folding. Details matter. And nobody likes to hear about them.
Is there a retrospective on AlphaFold you’d recommend? Maybe that’s the insight I’m missing, I didn’t realize it had broad identifiable gaps like that.
I see similar conceptual gaps in coding agents when I work with them, even Astra and Fable, so maybe this a is decent proxy to describe the gap between hype and reality.
>> but make sure those actions are not in the interests of Anthropic and OpenAI investors.
> So if the end of the world can be stopped, but the only specific action to do so helps Anthropic/OpenAI (and it's proven) you don't pull that lever?
Your comment has a false premise. If "the end of the world can be stopped," there's no way that the only way would be one that "helps Anthropic/OpenAI['s investors]." That can be shown by a counterexample: nationalize them and leave the investors holding the bag, then take whatever action you're talking about.
Yes, but I'm forcing a tautology in my logic - if in the end it is deemed the only way to stop AI from destroying the world is something that helps Anthropic or OpenAI - then this person is asking to not perform that action.
And unfortunately my tautology is actually closer to being reality than alternatives. Stopping progress even in Chinese models (a deal with Xi for example) but that specifically helps OpenAI/Anthropic.
There are very few scenarios that would not help these two companies by adding regulation. Your counterexample is 100% less likely because it's not legal for the US to nationalize them outright without taking other action first.
The singularity has been termed, "Rapture of the Nerds" since the futurists promoting it sound like evangelicals talking about the end times, both with the Revelations doom stuff, and the utopian stuff that follows.
Why? I was raised as an evangelical christian. End of time sermons are quite common, along with telling followers that they are warriors of christ. This doesn't seem any different than what these MBA leaders are saying "AI will destroy humanity, I can protect it."
It's delusional but it's quite effective, luckily it doesn't work on the general population but you can get a dedicated group of people, and as we see with the current government you don't need big numbers to make a huge impact.
Just stay away from it - if @dang allows it, then someone else will justifiably start saying "on par with shia muslims" in the same way you wrote your text.
I guess but I don't see how it wouldn't be allowed. Evangelicals have quite a stranglehold on US politics and have been influencing the republican party for like 40 years now. Trump
Not being allowed to thread the connections seems odd, it's how we know what these same leaders are going to do next.
> Always loved Iain M Banks' Culture series and it's very sad that he's not with us any more. If I could pick any fictional civ to live in, it'd be up there.
I've never really found the Culture to be that optimistic. The people are basically pets, the vast majority of which seem occupy themselves with vapid shit, and the "important" jobs humans have are actually unnecessary (as the "Minds" can do everything better).
I thought the Gzilt from the last book had a better path of development than the Culture. It seems they took every opportunity to keep humans (in some form) in control at every level (e.g. no "Minds" on their ships, just groups of emulated humans running at accelerated speeds to achieve the same effect).
But that's a choice. Humans in the Culture can change their form and body to basically be whatever they want: with some caution expressed for changes which might not leave meaningful back conversions.
The humans we see are human because they choose to be.
The thing about The Culture is the universe doesn't bend to make being human the default or particularly good: it is an old world where technology surpasses limitations in almost every way imaginable - if you choose. You can also just decide to go lava rafting, where the agreed rules are materials just barely up to task.
Yeah, and you have to keep in mind that "human" in the Culture is an extremely broad category. A Klingon or a Ferengi or even something substantially weirder would count as human to the Culture.
When they visit 1970s Earth in State of the Art, they have to be very selective about who they send because many of them would stick out like a sore thumb even after cosmetic surgery.
Why is humans having to work forever even when it's totally unnecessary more optimistic than utopia where work is just a vacation for when you get bored of doing human things?
> Why is humans having to work forever even when it's totally unnecessary more optimistic than utopia where work is just a vacation for when you get bored of doing human things?
Because, IMHO, having some sort of meaningful occupation is good. The bad thing is actually the loss of power and control over your own life and your society that comes with it in our world.
In the Culture, I get the impression that most of the people are essentially dumb little lap dogs, who have little idea of how anything works, occupying themselves with social-media-tier stuff. There are still "people" who have to get the work done, but they're non-human which means the society is really a non-human one.
> I get the impression that most of the people are essentially dumb little lap dogs, who have little idea of how anything works, occupying themselves with social-media-tier stuff. There are still "people" who have to get the work done, but they're non-human which means the society is really a non-human one.
Is that really any different from our modern society other than the robots freeing the more capable or more dutiful humans from the chores? The central critique of most human systems of governance is that they place power in the hands of the idle/corrupt rather than the productive (left and right, they just disagree on which parts of society are productive). Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
> Is that really any different from our modern society other than the robots freeing the more capable or more dutiful humans from the chores?
Yes it is, because our modern society is still a human society. Humans in culture society are more the like dogs in ours, perhaps loved and cared for, but it's not their story.
> Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
The problem in the Culture is that they effectively put all the power in the hands of the "Minds." I have no problem with a Roomba or toilet-cleaning robot handling true drudgery. But the interesting or important shit should be for people.
In the Culture novels, there was some pretty radical genetic engineering going on (to the point of enabling alien reproductive compatibility). You'd think they could have done some of that to make "self-sacrificing civic-mindedness" very fun and satisfying, instead of going all-in on vapid hedonism stuff (which what you see whenever you catch glimpses of the bulk of culture citizens).
It's not explicitly stated, but I get the impression that Culture citizens are generally very pro-social and willing to sacrifice for others' benefits and may well have been engineered with that aim.
They were willing to sacrifice nearly a trillion lives in the Idiran war, which was voted on by the entire population. Even after that vote, it was very easy to opt-out and I get the sense that most of those who did were motivated by genuine pacifism rather than personal fear.
The most dangerous and uncomfortable jobs like Special Circumstances and Contact seem to have an enormous surplus of volunteers and it's even hinted that there might not be any need for humans to do most of those jobs; they exist just because humans want to do them.
As with all Culture critiques, this one boils down, again, to existentialism. Yes, we live in an meaningless universe and we brush against the absurd every day. That doesn't make The Culture any less of an utopia. And if you think it's not a true utopia, then I suggest reading Camus.
I think it is a credit to the world building in the Culture novels that fans can disagree and debate so much on whether it is utopian or dystopian, and that's a discussion that characters in the books have too!
Personally I love it and I wish we could have a few of the wise Minds among us now.
> He's not wrong but I think there's something the "tech people" up in arms about AI aren't saying, which is this: a lot of "tech people" were indifferent or silent as tech "disrupted" other industries.
> Taxis, mom-and-pop retail, newspapers, manufacturing. Millions of people pushed out of real jobs and into gig work. Companies breaking the rules and pushing established businesses to the brink with a mindset of "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission".
I think you need to make more distinctions there: "tech people" aren't all "SV startup types."
Because I'm a "tech person," and I hated Uber from the second I heard about its flagrantly illegal tactics. I've come to feel like SV is a cancer, for a multitude of different reasons, of which "disruption" is one of them.
> It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
I think there’s a few big differences between OpenAI and Automattic:
On the “good for the board” side:
1. OpenAI from the POV of investors has both a pretty high p(massive returns) and a pretty high p(no returns). Even if they’re convinced AI is going to swallow the economy, that doesn’t mean OpenAI wins that. This discourages risky moves.
2. The range in outcomes from a Matt-less Automattic are much less varied than for OpenAI. Replacing him isn’t going to sink the company but it’s also not going to have a massive increase in valuation. It’s purely a decision that he’s a risk factor with his behaviour.
3. I’m sure there’s many good staff members in Automattic, but the work they do is pretty standard and understood, so there’s fewer irreplaceable individuals if any of them quit in support of Matt.
4. Because OpenAI is relatively new and has had such high growth, there were both a lot of true believers among the staff that it had to be Altman, and people who had a significant portion of their net worth locked into yet untradable shares that did not want the boat rocked.
5. What openAI hopes to achieve in marketing and policy requires a figurehead and only Altman had mass recognition. Matt’s public awareness is much lower and Automattic’s need for a public facing figurehead is lower.
In the pro-Matt factors:
1. Altman did not have an outright majority of the shares, Matt does
2. He did somewhat prepare by doing waves of voluntary severance to get his internal opponents to leave
it seems like he likely can't just fire all the board members, as some seats may be contractually required to be held by his investors, as part of funding agreements
That depends on the bylaws and specific contractual director-designation rights they may or may not have. Ianal but if he really controls 84% of shareholder votes like he claimed, he should be able to alter the board composition legally. Probably enough to get him unfired
Though somewhat of a digression I'd just like to jump in so the world doesn't forget that OpenAI was not a company with a valuation at all, it was a charity for the public benefit and is now in private hands, having been basically stolen by any reasonable definition of the word.
You’re not wrong, but I think the alternative future is sama loses control, goes and raises a quick $100M, and hires all the profit-motivated staff to make something that looks like today’s OpenAI.
Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.
Right. Much like the alternative future is that someone considering stealing a public museum could instead build a building, hire away the staff, and fill it with art he acquired, instead of just stealing a museum that was created via charitable donations.
A big part in both stories is that the boards were unwilling to actually state what exactly the CEO did wrong or why they have lost confidence - be that professionalism or not wanting to deliver ammunition for lawfare - which perfectly sets up the CEO to position himself as a victim to the greed and power games of the shadowy board
> A big part in both stories is that the boards were unwilling to actually state what exactly the CEO did wrong or why they have lost confidence - be that professionalism or not wanting to deliver ammunition for lawfare - which perfectly sets up the CEO to position himself as a victim to the greed and power games of the shadowy board
Which is really insane when you think about it. The CEO reports to the board, and since when have companies regularly provided real reasons for termination (I understand they try to say as little as possible, because there's no upside for them)?
It's a coup when an underling "fires" his boss and takes control, but some CEOs managed to convince many that it's the opposite (or at least AstroTurf to that effect).
There are companies where the CEO reports to the board, and there are companies where the board exists to keep up appearances. We’re finding out in real time Automattic is the second kind.
This should discourage investors, since an unbridled CEO is bad for them in the long term. But it won’t, because nobody thinks long term anymore.
> Wu retains control of the Chinese unit via his possession of the company stamp which is necessary in China to authorize important bureaucratic procedures.
Something I find weird is that modern seals are mass-produced. There is no identification value, because anyone can trivially buy a seal that will make the exact impression of your seal.
(For personal seals. I don't know what company seals involve.)
The base is mass produced; and you are conflating 'vanity' stamps available as souvenirs with the registered official seals for banking and formal business. Anyone can trivially buy a stamp matching all the other toy stamps for that name, but are not official.
Official seals use uncommon font styles and are hand carved natural materials, such that each one has a unique microfeatures inherent to the wood, stone, or horn used, which develop unique wear and ink absorption characteristics.
These official seals are registered and become official for specific scopes of use; some are solely for banking and separate from the other uses like contracts and official filings: which prevents corporate partners and official channels from potentially exposing the banking seals.
The vanity type seals can be used for informal things like putting your name on homework or stamping a package delivery receipt for items of trivial value such as Amazon basics, but it is illegal to use mass produced stamps for official legal or banking.
At least in the Japanese context that I'm more familiar with, there's also levels to seals: you have (possibly mass produced) lower-value seals for low-value signatures, but you also have high value seals where an exact imprint is recorded with the government for high value signature verification, and physical possession of which is very carefully guarded.
I mean it's basically identical to a signature in terms of identification value, and, by the sounds of it, usage.
The only difference is that demonstrated in the described case, that the stamp is expected to be passed on to whomever is in authority, whereas we would never say "This CEO can't be ousted as he refused to relinquish his signature."
> I mean it's basically identical to a signature in terms of identification value, and, by the sounds of it, usage.I mean it's basically identical to a signature in terms of identification value, and, by the sounds of it, usage.
Usage, sure. It's a lot worse in terms of identification value; signatures can be forged, but signing seals look identical to each other by design. Nobody is going to produce an exact replica of your signature by accident, but with seals that's routine.
Or, in the words of my friend, 橡皮章的大小，字体都一样的 [rubber seals' size and font are all the same].
(I had asked her whether she had a seal herself. She confirmed that she has one, and sent me an image very similar to this: https://img1.baidu.com/it/u=3145542370,421755251&fm=253&fmt=... . But she noted that Chinese personal seals are more likely to be square than round.)
Up until recently (and my intervention) my work had multiple aws accounts tied to individual people, where they had inherited a personal account into the billing org.
There are also, in business use, some domains where an executive personally owns the registration but has delegated DNS into the company. There is no written agreement.
A former employer completely lost access to a couple of social media accounts (twitter/$company, etc) after laying off enough people.
That reminds me of the San Fco "network administrator" who would not provide the passwords to anyone in city gov't and brought things down to a standstill. Eventually he capitulated and provided the governor the passwords to their networks. Some people!
In absence of a good enforcement mechanism, it absolutely does apply. Is Slack going to strip Mullenweg of admin control in absence of court order, as long as the Slack bills are paid? It would set a terrible precedent for them to do so unilaterally. Whatever the legal process this battle follows, it will be a year or two before it's even possible for a final ruling + court order for the handover of Slack admin control to happen. That's de facto Slack control for at least a year or two.
If employees can be persuaded to move themselves + systems to a board controlled chat instance, that's an angle, but Mullenweg has stronger cards if he's liked by employees.
If the board can show they fired him and he's now accessing their systems without authorization, I don't think it's a civil matter, and criminal courts might move faster.
> It would set a terrible precedent for them to do so unilaterally.
Speaking generally (not about Automattic), big SaaS have law enforcement desks that work on exactly this type of thing, and the "terrible precedent" is already widely set. Plenty of law enforcement outreach (which includes lawyers, courts, and actual law enforcement officials) results in pre-emptive compliance by SaaS companies. I would be massively surprised if Slack has not already done this in many cases, because most huge companies routinely do.
That's neither generally good nor generally bad; whether it's the right move depends on the charge, requested actions by law enforcement, status of legal proceedings, and the values/diligence by which the SaaS business assesses the legitimacy and likely cost/benefit of a law enforcement request. Note that "pre-emptive compliance" doesn't always mean an email saying "hey, the FBI said you suck so we terminated your account". There's a broad spectrum of tools available to a SaaS ranging from sending that email, to holding bespoke contract re-negotiations (which are functionally always in process between a SaaS and a huge customer) hostage to endless redlining rounds, to enforcing ToS violations that the SaaS previously turned a blind eye towards due to customer size.
> Whatever the legal process this battle follows, it will be a year or two before it's even possible for a final ruling + court order
Preliminary injunctions can be issued in days to weeks, not months to years, in all sorts of civil and criminal cases in all sorts of jurisdictions. Those can take the form of "don't change stuff with your admin access" or "grant admin control to someone else"-type orders. In cases where a service administrator is materially involved, injunctions are also easy to get on the basis of evidence preservation.
That's a pretty sharp tool. Failure to comply with those opens individuals and businesses up to way more legal penalties and tighter timeframes. Even if an injunction is later vacated/dismissed/modified, the legal argument that you violated it because you knew that would happen is an extremely tough sell.
If he really did this, he's going to prison, but not for a few years. Defrauding shareholders is one of the worst things you can do, because it attacks the system directly.
... literally all of the SPAC mania was about circumventing regulation and defrauding shareholders in public markets. All of the SPACs are worth a fraction of what they were at listing. I don't see anyone being prosecuted.
Edit: I take that back, [1] this guy got prison time. Do Chamath next.
> AI should be optimized to make all humans healthy, happy and safe without exception.
No. AI should be optimized for the one true good: maximum market returns. Personally I think that will only be achieved once humans are removed from the market system and decommissioned.
Because that worked so well last time.
Time for some new ideas.
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