But the discussion of “repercussions” before there’s been an investigation goes into pure-scapegoating territory if you ask me.

Just to be clear, OP themselves seem to think that what they are saying will have little effect on the status quo. They literally called it "Very Spicy Take". Their intention was to allow them to express how they felt about the situation. I'm not sure why you find this threatening, because again, the people they think ideally wouldn't continue to have influence over AI safety related decisions are incredibly influential and will very likely continue to have the influence they currently possess. Almost everyone else in this thread implicitly models this fact as they are discussing things related to the OP comment.

There is not going to be any scapegoating that will occur. I imagine that everything I say is something I would say in person to the people involved, or to third parties, and not expect any sort of coordinated action to reduce their influence -- they are that irreplaceable to the community and to the ecosystem.

“Keep people away” sounds like moral talk to me.

Can you not be close friends with someone while also expecting them to be bad at self-control when it comes to alcohol? Or perhaps they are great at technical stuff like research but pretty bad at negotiation, especially when dealing with experienced adverserial situations such as when talking to VCs?

If you think someone’s decisionmaking is actively bad, i.e. you’d better off reversing any advice from them, then maybe you should keep them around so you can do that!

It is not that people people's decision-making skill is optimized such that you can consistently reverse someone's opinion to get something that accurately tracks reality. If that was the case then they are implicitly tracking reality very well already. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

But more realistically, someone who’s fucked up in a big way will probably have learned from that, and functional cultures don’t throw away hard-won knowledge.

Again you seem to not be trying to track the context of our discussion here. This advice again is usually said when it comes to junior people embedded in an institution, because the ability to blame someone and / or hold them responsible is a power that senior / executive people hold. This attitude you describe makes a lot of sense when it comes to people who are learning things, yes. I don't know if you can plainly bring it into this domain, and you even acknowledge this in the next few lines.

Imagine a world where AI is just an inherently treacherous domain, and we throw out the leadership whenever they make a mistake.

I think it is incredibly unlikely that the rationalist community has an ability to 'throw out' the 'leadership' involved here. I find this notion incredibly silly, given the amount of influence OpenPhil has over the alignment community, especially through their funding (including the pipeline, such as MATS).

I downvoted this comment because it felt uncomfortably scapegoat-y to me.

Enforcing social norms to prevent scapegoating also destroys information that is valuable for accurate credit assignment and causally modelling reality.

If you start with the assumption that there was a moral failing on the part of the grantmakers, and you are wrong, there’s a good chance you’ll never learn that.

I think you are misinterpreting the grandparent comment. I do not read any mention of a 'moral failing' in that comment. You seem worried because of the commenter's clear description of what they think would be a sensible step for us to take given what they believe are egregious flaws in the decision-making processes of the people involved. I don't think there's anything wrong with such claims.

Again: You can care about people while also seeing their flaws and noticing how they are hurting you and others you care about. You can be empathetic to people having flawed decision making and care about them, while also wanting to keep them away from certain decision-making positions.

If you think the OpenAI grant was a big mistake, it’s important to have a detailed investigation of what went wrong, and that sort of detailed investigation is most likely to succeed if you have cooperation from people who are involved.

Oh, interesting. Who exactly do you think influential people like Holden Karnofsky and Paul Christiano are accountable to, exactly? This "detailed investigation" you speak of, and this notion of a "blameless culture", makes a lot of sense when you are the head of an organization and you are conducting an investigation as to the systematic mistakes made by people who work for you, and who you are responsible for. I don't think this situation is similar enough that you can use these intuitions blandly without thinking through the actual causal factors involved in this situation.

Note that I don't necessarily endorse the grandparent comment claims. This is a complex situation and I'd spend more time analyzing it and what occurred.

"ETA" commonly is short for "estimated time of arrival". I understand you are using it to mean "edited" but I don't quite know what it is short for, and also it seems like using this is just confusing for people in general.

Wasn't edited, based on my memory.

You continue to model OpenAI as this black box monolith instead of trying to unravel the dynamics inside it and understand the incentive structures that lead these things to occur. Its a common pattern I notice in the way you interface with certain parts of reality.

I don't consider OpenAI as responsible for this as much as Paul Christiano and Jan Leike and his team. Back in 2016 or 2017, when they initiated and led research into RLHF, they focused on LLMs because they expected that LLMs would be significantly more amenable to RLHF. This means that instruction-tuning was the cause of the focus on LLMs, which meant that it was almost inevitable that they'd try instruction-tuning on it, and incrementally build up models that deliver mundane utility. It was extremely predictable that Sam Altman and OpenAI would leverage this unexpected success to gain more investment and translate that into more researchers and compute. But Sam Altman and Greg Brockman aren't researchers, and they didn't figure out a path that minimized 'capabilities overhang' -- Paul Christiano did. And more important -- this is not mutually exclusive with OpenAI using the additional resources for both capabilities research and (what they call) alignment research. While you might consider everything they do as effectively capabilities research, the point I am making is that this is still consistent with the hypothesis that while they are misguided, they still are roughly doing the best they can given their incentives.

What really changed my perspective here was the fact that Sam Altman seems to have been systematically destroying extremely valuable information about how we could evaluate OpenAI. Specifically, this non-disparagement clause that ex-employees cannot even mention without falling afoul of this contract, is something I didn't expect (I did expect non-disclosure clauses but not something this extreme). This meant that my model of OpenAI was systematically too optimistic about how cooperative and trustworthy they are and will be in the future. In addition, if I was systematically deceived about OpenAI due to non-disparagement clauses that cannot even be mentioned, I would expect that something similar to also be possible when it comes to other frontier labs (especially Anthropic, but also DeepMind) due to things similar to this non-disparagement clause. In essence, I no longer believe that Sam Altman (for OpenAI is nothing but his tool now) is doing the best he can to benefit humanity given his incentives and constraints. I expect that Sam Altman is entirely doing whatever he believes will retain and increase his influence and power, and this includes the use of AGI, if and when his teams finally achieve that level of capabilities.

This is the update I expect people are making. It is about being systematically deceived at multiple levels. It is not about "OpenAI being irresponsible".

I still parse that move as devastating the commons in order to make a quick buck.

I believe that ChatGPT was not released with the expectation that it would become as popular as it did. OpenAI pivoted hard when it saw the results.

Also, I think you are misinterpreting the sort of 'updates' people are making here.

I mean, if Paul doesn't confirm that he is not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI like Cullen O' Keefe did, we have our answer.

In fact, given this asymmetry of information situation, it makes sense to assume that Paul is under such an obligation until he claims otherwise.

I just realized that Paul Christiano and Dario Amodei both probably have signed non-disclosure + non-disparagement contracts since they both left OpenAI.

That impacts how I'd interpret Paul's (and Dario's) claims and opinions (or the lack thereof), that relates to OpenAI or alignment proposals entangled with what OpenAI is doing. If Paul has systematically silenced himself, and a large amount of OpenPhil and SFF money has been mis-allocated because of systematically skewed beliefs that these organizations have had due to Paul's opinions or lack thereof, well. I don't think this is the case though -- I expect Paul, Dario, and Holden all seem to have converged on similar beliefs (whether they track reality or not) and have taken actions consistent with those beliefs.

If your endgame strategy involved relying on OpenAI, DeepMind, or Anthropic to implement your alignment solution that solves science / super-cooperation / nanotechnology, consider figuring out another endgame plan.