"it's interesting that someone with a 2014 bachelor's and a 2021 master's, with no experience other than a few years as a low-level employee at Open Philanthropy and then a strategy position at a Georgetown center, somehow leapfrogged onto the board of one of the most important organizations in the world."
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Helen Toner is brilliant. This dude has never met her, yet somehow has the gall to proclaim he'd be better at her job than he is.
People shouldn't get board roles based on what degree they have, but based on how well they can do the job.
Please expand on that. Details would be helpful.
Copy-pasting from another thread where I posted this:
Helen Toner is famous among the AI safety community for being one of the main people working to halt and reverse any sort of "AI arms race" between the US & China. The recent successes in this regard at the UK AI Safety Summit and the Biden/Xi talks are due in large part to her advocacy.
She is well-connected with Pentagon leaders, who trust her input. She also is one of the hardest-working people among the West's analysts in her efforts to understand and connect with the Chinese side, as she uprooted her life to literally live in Beijing at one point in order to meet with people in the budding Chinese AI Safety community.
Here's an example of her work: AI safeguards: Views inside and outside China (Book chapter) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97810032...
She's also co-authored several of the most famous "survey" papers which give an overview of AI safety methods: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22h...
She's at roughly the same level of eminence as Dr. Eric Horvitz (Microsoft's Chief Scientific Officer), who has similar goals as her, and who is an advisor to Biden. Comparing the two, Horvitz is more well-connected but Toner is more prolific, and overall they have roughly equal impact.
Exactly one year ago OpenAI was nowhere near as known as today.
And that person's tweet chain reeks of speculative elitism.
"one of the most important organizations in the world"
lol
I am a frequent critic of both overhype of LLMs, and OpenAI specifically, but.....that is an indisputable statement.
Really? What would happen if OpenAI dissapeared tomorrow and ChatGPT closed down? In practice, nothing. Ask yourself the same question about the truly important organizations in the world.
Hype might die down and some of the hundreds to thousands (yeah…) of doomed (because, even optimistically, most are plainly never gonna be worth the resources going into them) AI boondoggles at various startups and bigcos might get cancelled sooner than they’re otherwise gonna be.
Which might be bad for my personal short-term employment prospects, so here’s hoping that doesn’t happen. We can ride this BS to the next speculation bubble if we believe in ourselves. And don’t look down.
This is like saying that Jeff Bezos leapfrogged into being the CEO of one of the biggest and most successful startups in the world.
Maybe he had something to do with it? Maybe, just maybe, it didn't just randomly happened to him.
The board member in question is not one of the founders.