Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding 在阿特曼被驱逐之前，OpenAI的董事会就已经分裂并且争斗不休

Sam Altman confronted a member over a research paper that discussed the company, while directors disagreed for months about who should fill board vacancies.
Sam Altman与一名成员就一篇讨论公司的研究论文进行了对峙,而董事们对谁应该填补董事会空缺的问题争论了数月。

By Cade Metz, Tripp Mickle and Mike Isaac
由Cade Metz,Tripp Mickle和Mike Isaac撰写

Reporting from San Francisco
报道来自旧金山

Before Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI last week, he and the company’s board of directors had been bickering for more than a year. The tension got worse as OpenAI became a mainstream name thanks to its popular ChatGPT chatbot.
在上周被OpenAI开除之前,萨姆·阿特曼和公司的董事会已经争执了一年多。随着OpenAI因其受欢迎的ChatGPT聊天机器人而成为主流名字,紧张关系变得更加严重。

At one point, Mr. Altman, the chief executive, made a move to push out one of the board’s members because he thought a research paper she had co-written was critical of the company.
在某一时刻,首席执行官阿特曼先生试图将董事会的一名成员排挤出去,因为他认为她共同撰写的一篇研究论文对公司进行了批评。

Another member, Ilya Sutskever, thought Mr. Altman was not always being honest when talking with the board. And some board members worried that Mr. Altman was too focused on expansion while they wanted to balance that growth with A.I. safety.
另一位成员Ilya Sutskever认为Altman先生在与董事会交谈时并不总是诚实的。而一些董事会成员担心Altman先生过于专注于扩张,而他们希望在这种增长与AI安全之间找到平衡。

The news that he was being pushed out came in a videoconference on Friday afternoon, when Mr. Sutskever, who had worked closely with Mr. Altman at OpenAI for eight years, read him a statement. The decision stunned OpenAI’s employees and exposed board members to tough questions about their qualifications to manage such a high-profile company.
他被赶出去的消息是在周五下午的一个视频会议中公布的,当时与Altman先生在OpenAI紧密合作了八年的Sutskever先生,向他宣读了一份声明。这个决定震惊了OpenAI的员工,并让董事会成员们面临关于他们是否有资格管理这样一个高调公司的严峻问题。

Those tensions seemingly came to an end late Tuesday when Mr. Altman was reinstated as chief executive. Mr. Sutskever and others critical of Mr. Altman were jettisoned from the board, whose members now include Bret Taylor, an early Facebook officer and former co-chief executive of Salesforce, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury Department secretary. The only holdover is Adam D’Angelo, chief executive of the question-and-answer site, Quora.
周二晚些时候,阿特曼先生被重新任命为首席执行官,似乎结束了这些紧张关系。批评阿特曼的苏茨克弗等人被从董事会中剔除,现在的董事会成员包括早期Facebook员工、Salesforce前联席首席执行官布雷特·泰勒,以及前财政部长拉里·萨默斯。唯一的留任者是问答网站Quora的首席执行官亚当·德安吉洛。

The OpenAI debacle has illustrated how building A.I. systems is testing whether businesspeople who want to make money from artificial intelligence can work in sync with researchers who worry that what they are building could eventually eliminate jobs or become a threat if technologies like autonomous weapons grow out of control.
OpenAI的困境揭示了如何构建AI系统,这是在测试那些想从人工智能中赚钱的商人是否能与那些担心他们所构建的可能最终消除工作岗位或者如果像自主武器这样的技术失控可能成为威胁的研究人员同步工作。

OpenAI was started in 2015 with an ambitious plan to one day create a superintelligent automated system that can do everything a human brain can do. But friction plagued the company’s board, which hadn’t even been able to agree on replacements for members who had stepped down.
OpenAI于2015年启动,其雄心勃勃的计划是有朝一日创建一个超级智能的自动化系统,能够做到人脑能做的一切。但是,该公司的董事会却受到了困扰,甚至无法就替换已经辞职的成员达成一致。

Before Mr. Altman’s return, the company’s continued existence was in doubt. Nearly all of OpenAI’s 800 employees had threatened to follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft, which asked him to lead an A.I. lab with Greg Brockman, who quit his roles as OpenAI’s president and board chairman in solidarity with Mr. Altman.
在阿特曼先生回归之前,公司的持续存在都处于怀疑之中。OpenAI的近800名员工几乎都威胁要跟随阿特曼先生去微软,微软邀请他与格雷格·布洛克曼一起领导一个人工智能实验室,布洛克曼为了与阿特曼先生保持团结,放弃了他在OpenAI的总裁和董事会主席的职务。

The board had told Mr. Brockman that he would no longer be OpenAI’s chairman but invited him to stay on at the company — though he was not invited to the meeting where the decision was made to push him off the board and Mr. Altman out of the company.
董事会告诉布洛克曼,他将不再担任OpenAI的主席,但邀请他留在公司。然而,他并未被邀请参加做出将他从董事会中排除,将阿特曼先生赶出公司的决定的会议。

OpenAI’s board troubles can be traced to the start-up’s nonprofit beginnings. In 2015, Mr. Altman teamed with Elon Musk and others, including Mr. Sutskever, to create a nonprofit to build A.I. that was safe and beneficial to humanity. They planned to raise money from private donors for their mission. But within a few years, they realized that their computing needs required much more funding than they could raise from individuals.
OpenAI的董事会问题可以追溯到该初创公司的非营利性质的起源。2015年,阿特曼先生与埃隆·马斯克和其他人,包括苏茨克弗先生,联手创建了一个非营利性组织,旨在构建对人类安全且有益的AI。他们计划从私人捐赠者那里筹集资金来完成他们的使命。但是在几年内,他们意识到他们的计算需求需要的资金远远超过他们能从个人那里筹集的。

After Mr. Musk left in 2018, they created a for-profit subsidiary that began raising billions of dollars from investors, including $1 billion from Microsoft. They said that the subsidiary would be controlled by the nonprofit board and that each director’s fiduciary duty would be to “humanity, not OpenAI investors,” the company said on its website.
在2018年马斯克先生离开后,他们创建了一个营利性子公司,开始从投资者那里筹集数十亿美元,包括来自微软的10亿美元。他们表示,这个子公司将由非营利性董事会控制,每位董事的受托责任将是“对人类,而不是对OpenAI投资者”,公司在其网站上说。

Among the tensions leading up to Mr. Altman’s ouster and quick return involved his conflict with Helen Toner, a board member and a director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. A few weeks before Mr. Altman’s firing, he met with Ms. Toner to discuss a paper she had co-written for the Georgetown center.
在Altman先生被解雇并迅速返回的紧张气氛中,他与董事会成员、乔治敦大学安全与新兴技术中心战略总监Helen Toner的冲突引人注目。在Altman先生被解雇的几周前,他与Toner女士会面,讨论了她为乔治敦中心共同撰写的一篇论文。

Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, a company that has become OpenAI’s biggest rival, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times.
Altman先生在一封给同事的电子邮件中抱怨,这篇研究论文似乎在批评OpenAI保护其AI技术安全的努力,同时赞扬了Anthropic的做法,这是OpenAI最大的竞争对手,这封邮件被《纽约时报》看到。

In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.
在邮件中,阿尔特曼先生表示,他已经对陶纳女士的论文进行了批评,并认为这对公司来说是危险的,特别是在他补充说,联邦贸易委员会正在调查OpenAI使用的构建其技术的数据的时候。

Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.
陶纳女士为其辩护,称其为一篇学术论文,分析了公众在试图理解开发AI的国家和公司的意图时所面临的挑战。但阿尔特曼先生并不同意。

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”
“我觉得我们对这一切的破坏程度并没有达成共识,”他在邮件中写道。“来自董事会成员的任何批评都会产生很大的影响。”

Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity, later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed, a person involved in the conversations said.
包括深感担忧人工智能有朝一日可能毁灭人类的Sutskever先生在内的OpenAI高级领导层,后来讨论了是否应该解雇Toner女士,一位参与这些讨论的人说。

But shortly after those discussions, Mr. Sutskever did the unexpected: He sided with board members to oust Mr. Altman, according to two people familiar with the board’s deliberations. The statement he read to Mr. Altman said that Mr. Altman was being fired because he wasn’t “consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
但是在那些讨论之后,Sutskever先生做出了出人意料的举动:他站在董事会成员一边,赶走了Altman先生,这是根据两位熟悉董事会讨论的人士的说法。他向Altman先生宣读的声明中说,Altman先生被解雇是因为他在与董事会的沟通中并不“始终坦诚”。

Mr. Sutskever’s frustration with Mr. Altman echoed what had happened in 2021 when another senior A.I. scientist left OpenAI to form Anthropic. That scientist and other researchers went to the board to try to push Mr. Altman out. After they failed, they gave up and departed, according to three people familiar with the attempt to push Mr. Altman out.
苏茨克弗先生对阿尔特曼先生的不满,反映了2021年发生的一件事,当时另一位高级AI科学家离开OpenAI,成立了Anthropic。那位科学家和其他研究人员试图推翻阿尔特曼先生,但失败后,他们放弃并离开了,据了解这次试图推翻阿尔特曼先生的三个人说。

“After a series of reasonably amicable negotiations, the co-founders of Anthropic were able to negotiate their exit on mutually agreeable terms,” an Anthropic spokeswoman, Sally Aldous, said. In a second statement, Anthropic added that there was “no attempt to ‘oust’ Sam Altman at the time the founders of Anthropic left OpenAI.”
Anthropic的发言人Sally Aldous说:“经过一系列相当友好的谈判,Anthropic的联合创始人能够以双方都能接受的条件协商离开。”在第二份声明中,Anthropic补充说,当Anthropic的创始人离开OpenAI时,“并没有试图‘驱逐’Sam Altman。”

Vacancies exacerbated the board’s issues. This year, it disagreed over how to replace three departing directors: Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and a Microsoft board member; Shivon Zilis, director of operations at Neuralink, a company started by Mr. Musk to implant computer chips in people’s brains; and Will Hurd, a former Republican congressman from Texas.
空缺加剧了董事会的问题。今年,董事会在如何替换三位即将离任的董事上产生了分歧:LinkedIn的创始人、微软董事会成员Reid Hoffman;Neuralink的运营总监Shivon Zilis,这是一家由马斯克创办的公司,旨在在人脑中植入计算机芯片;以及德克萨斯州的前共和党国会议员Will Hurd。

After vetting four candidates for one position, the remaining directors couldn’t agree on who should fill it, said the two people familiar with the board’s deliberations. The stalemate hardened the divide between Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman and other board members.
在为一个职位审查了四个候选人后,剩下的董事无法就应该由谁来填补这个职位达成一致,这两个熟悉董事会讨论的人说。这种僵局加剧了Altman先生和Brockman先生与其他董事会成员之间的分歧。

Hours after Mr. Altman was ousted, OpenAI executives confronted the remaining board members during a video call, according to three people who were on the call.
在Altman先生被赶出后的几个小时里,根据参与视频通话的三个人的说法,OpenAI的高管们在视频通话中质问了剩下的董事会成员。

During the call, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said the board was endangering the future of the company by pushing out Mr. Altman. This, he said, violated the members’ responsibilities.
在通话中,OpenAI的首席策略官Jason Kwon表示,董事会通过赶走Altman先生,正在危及公司的未来。他说,这违反了成员们的责任。

Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission was to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission. In the board’s view, OpenAI would be stronger without Mr. Altman.
托纳女士不同意。她表示,董事会的使命是确保公司创造出“造福全人类”的人工智能,如果公司被摧毁,那可能与其使命相符。在董事会看来,没有阿特曼先生,OpenAI会更强大。

On Sunday, Mr. Sutskever was urged at OpenAI’s office to reverse course by Mr. Brockman’s wife, Anna, according to two people familiar with the exchange. Hours later, he signed a letter with other employees that demanded the independent directors resign. The confrontation between Mr. Sutskever and Ms. Brockman was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
周日,根据两位熟悉此次交流的人士,布洛克曼先生的妻子安娜在OpenAI的办公室敦促苏茨克弗先生改变方向。几小时后,他与其他员工签署了一封要求独立董事辞职的信。苏茨克弗先生和布洛克曼女士之间的对峙早些时候被《华尔街日报》报道。

At 5:15 a.m. on Monday, he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions.”
周一早上5:15,他在X(原Twitter)上发布说:“我深深后悔参与了董事会的行动。”