OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition

by davidbarker • 3 years ago

5710 2450 3 years ago

minimaxir3• 3 years ago

Saying this is sudden would be an understatement.

Sam Altman spoke at an APEC panel on behalf of OpenAI literally yesterday: https://twitter.com/LondonBreed/status/1725318771454456208

moshun• 3 years ago

It’s hard to imagine a more last minute move on the boards part here. Been in tech exec leadership for a long time and this feels like they’re accusing him of cannibalism (in corporate PR speak). No way this didn’t get decided on in the middle of last night. Whatever he did is big and dangerous, or they’re trying to pin it on him.

lvl102• 3 years ago

Agreed. It had to have been something disastrous. No way Sam walked away from OpenAI when the AI revolution is just starting.

baby3• 3 years ago

I feel like he’s been acting a bit strange for a while. During interviews he often mentions the dangers of AI and how he’s not thr best spokeperson for AI. It seemed very counter productive/self sabotaging to me.

DebtDeflation5• 3 years ago

last minute move

Also, they did it around 3:30 Eastern, 30 minutes before the closing bell (Microsoft is xxmajorityxx 49% owner). It was so urgent they couldn't wait until after the market closed.

eshack942• 3 years ago

Sorry if this should be self-explanatory, but what is corporate "cannibalism"? What does this refer to, generally speaking (not necessarily specific to the OpenAI situation)?

jll29• 3 years ago

Whatever he did is big and dangerous, or they’re trying to pin it on him.

We are on HN after all, so I'm sure we won't need to wait until his book comes out... :)

BTW, I had a feeling he made an awkward appearance next to Satya.

And that laughter whenever the acquisition topic was hinted at was cringeworthy - would regulators even permit MSFT a full takeover? I think it would be highly controversial.

YetAnotherNick4• 3 years ago

Here is the video of him talking at yesterday's summit.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFvqRemDv8

It doesn't looks like he has a hint about this:

I am super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on.

ChatGTP8• 3 years ago

He has basically trained himself to say this though. It' basically all he says consistently.

He is probably in shock.

RivieraKid• 3 years ago

He seems a bit more nervous and absent-minded than usual. But it's very possible that I'm just imagining things.

TheEzEzz• 3 years ago

I watched this yesterday and got the feeling something big was happening. At one point he says "This is actually a very inconvenient time for me [to be here]." At the end of the session when they're wrapping up, he begins to stand up to leave the instant that the moderator starts wrapping up.

Anyway, I suppose we're reading tea leaves and engaging in palace intrigue. Back to building.

kristopolous7• 3 years ago

These things can also happen for unrelated reasons. Things like say, getting drunk and molesting an intern or tossing out racial slurs at say, some important person at a giant japanese company, you know, just being an asshole. Especially if it happened more than once.

I don't know the guy but nothing can really be assumed about this.

wilg6• 3 years ago

What? Are you implying this happened here? Or just being weird?

wmf• 3 years ago

For example, Mark Hurd was fired from HP because he expensed some non-business-related meals with his mistress or whatever.

KaiserPro• 3 years ago

I mean yes, but that would require an investigation normally.

Something to happen immediately would require overwhelming evidence on hand in the meeting. So it could be something that has been uncovered as part of the due diligence with the MS investment

Its more likely to be fabrication of numbers, or misappropriation of funds, rather than something "dramatic" Think musk at paypal being monumentally incompetent, rather than planned misdeeds.

brvsft2• 3 years ago

Flagged without a vouch button. Interesting.

silenced_trope• 3 years ago

Right I just was watching a video of him a few minutes ago at Cambridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM

It was just posted but was filmed on November 1st.

ChrisCinelli4• 3 years ago

Well, they must have believed that leaving Sam as CEO was a bigger risk for the company (or the members of the board) than having him leaving in the spot. The board may have had their hand twisted.

interestica• 3 years ago

Wasn't it his tweet (and not via company) that announced the pause on new pro membership yesterday??

CSMastermind3• 3 years ago

Per twitter he was sending internal emails via his company account this morning.

solardev5• 3 years ago

Uh oh. Did I miss some scandal? What's the subtext?

orra2• 3 years ago

What's the subtext?

Not certain, but IMHO the last paragraph almost recognises that OpenAI has become something self contradictory:

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to ensure that the company could raise capital in pursuit of this mission, while preserving the nonprofit's mission, governance, and oversight. The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

"We're putting the Open back in OpenAI"?

dekhn• 3 years ago

If I read it correctly, he lied to the board about something material. That Brockman is also leaving the board is interesting. We'll see if the details leak out over time.

jborden13• 3 years ago

Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

Wow

DylanBohlender• 3 years ago

So this is probably indicative of a scandal of some sort right?

caust1c• 3 years ago

Not sure that there can be any other interpretation based on my reading of it.

jurgenaut234• 3 years ago

Yes, very likely Altman has done something _very_ wrong, and the board wants to maintain plausible deniability.

kylediaz• 3 years ago

It could possibly have to do with his sister's allegations. It's one of the top autocomplete results when you google "sam altman", so people are definitely talking about it.

prepend• 3 years ago

Sounds more like some strategic difference of opinion.

My guess is that either they’re financially super hosed. Or one group wants to build skynet and one doesn’t.

A scandal would probably be something along the lines of either “we love him and wish him the best” (hidden) or “he doesn’t represent the values of our org and we love XYz” (embraced)

cvhashim04• 3 years ago

Hostile takeover? Board politics?

atlasunshrugged• 3 years ago

His sister had levied allegations of abuse

https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-a...

Bjorkbat• 3 years ago

His sister on Twitter made some pretty crazy abuse allegations against him a while back, but it didn't seem to get much coverage outside of the usual Twitter crowd.

But who knows, maybe there's a connection.

stg22• 3 years ago

"he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board" = "He lied to us about something important"

Murati's selection as interim CEO is a surprise and might be an attempt to distance the company from whatever the board is claiming Altman lied about.

golergka• 3 years ago

Those kinds of news are usually sugar coated to the point of caramelisation. This one isn't. It must be something very ugly.

narrator2• 3 years ago

candid - Not obscuring or omitting anything unpleasant, embarrassing, or negative.

IMHO, saying he hasn't been candid is extremely harsh in terms of corporate PR speak.

iainctduncan2• 3 years ago

I dunno the details here, but I work in diligence, where "not candid" is what leads to "the whole deal is off and we're sueing the shit out of you".

Not candid in any kind of investment situation with reps and warranties is a really big deal....

FormerBandmate• 3 years ago

OpenAI’s one of the most successful companies of this decade, if not the most, and its CEO just got fired for really unclear reasons. Insane, Steve Jobs shit

epolanski12• 3 years ago

No, this is completely different.

Jobs got fired because Apple was on brink of bankruptcy all the time and was selling nothing to no one.

Jobs wasn't the CEO of Apple, Sculley was. This is a much more impactful move.

On top of that OpenAI is literally exploding in popularity and sales, that's not the moment to cut ties with your CEO.

Also Sam Altman has an insanely better and heavier CV today than Jobs had in 1985, former director of YC and often called the "boss of silicon valley".

You don't fire a man like Sam Altman easily, they are hard to come by in the first place. He's a powerful person you don't want to have against for no good reason when winds are blowing in the right direction moreover.

It has to be some scandal, otherwise this is too sudden, and out of nowhere to a guy that led OpenAI in this direction, with success, for years.

7e• 3 years ago

Altman is not the reason for their success. I would not place him in the same sentence as SJ.

tetha• 3 years ago

I'm a bit beat up by the last week (internal issues) or the last 1-2 years between the swift CentOS8 switch, various CPU vulns, Log4Shell and all the other jazz.

My first thought is: C'mon. The company has just invested time to integrate with OpenAI. Just do it. Just announce that 200%+ price increase on everything with a scapegoat intermediate CEO. Or make it more so it hurts more, because of profit, so you can dial back a pity to be the good guys.

ren_engineer• 3 years ago

yeah, this is about as harsh as corporate press releases get in terms of removing an executive. There has to be some majorly bad news coming out about Altman for them to not give him the standard "we are mutually parting ways"

magicloop• 3 years ago

Well, striking language indeed.

But.. what are the responsibilities of the board that may be hindered? I studied https://openai.com/our-structure

One tantalising statement in there is that AGI-level system is not bound by licensing agreements that a sub-AGI system would be (ostensibly to Microsoft).

This phase-shift places a pressure on management to not declare reaching a AGI level threshold. But have they?

Of course, it could be an ordinary everyday scandal but given how well they are doing, I'd imagine censure/sanctions would be how that is handled.

roughly• 3 years ago

This reads like there’s another shoe to drop - especially since the Chairman of the Board is also stepping down.

nostromo• 3 years ago

I hope making the person in charge of "trust and safety" doesn't further neuter the company.

mirekrusin• 3 years ago

I wonder if it has something to do with recent downtime?

chadash• 3 years ago

"Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

Wow. Anyone have any insight into what happened?

Leary• 3 years ago

Who were on OpenAI's board?

"OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner." [1]

[1]https://openai.com/our-structure

minimaxir3• 3 years ago

Which is notable because Sam Altman is on said board, so he got outvoted.

ldjkfkdsjnv3• 3 years ago

So did Greg Brockman, what a weird turn of events

paxys11• 3 years ago

He would have been asked to step out and not had a vote in situations like these.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

Greg Brockman was President and Chairman of the Board.

He was also removed from the board in this process.

ilkkao• 3 years ago

That board meeting will be in a movie someday I'm pretty sure.

ugh1232• 3 years ago

Who the heck is Tasha McCauley?

CrimsonCape• 3 years ago

That's a fascinating question. I looked into this and haven't a clue, other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife (?). If it's the same person, then she is a "tech-entrepreneur" with a surprising amount of liquidity and automatic privilege and titles despite no obvious achievement (unless you consider title-gathering an achievement).

shuckles• 3 years ago

I think this is a legitimate question. There seems to be little public information about this board member, besides that they are married to a celebrity.

ignoramous10• 3 years ago

Ousted Sam Altman! Remember the name.

davidmurphy• 3 years ago

Her LinkedIn profile now 404's https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-mccauley-25475a54

doerinrw2• 3 years ago

She was involved with starting "Fellow Robots" in 2014, which is a spin-off of some sketchy for-profit AI "university" deal called "Singularity University".

AFAICT she's notable because she's been an academic and executive in the field for many years, in many different companies.

stillsut• 3 years ago

Looks like Tasha grew up in Santa Monica and currently works for RAND corporation. This is probably the most prestigious Defense think tank.

The other board member, Helen Toner list for her twitter profile: "Interests: China+ML, natsec+tech..." and works for another Defense think tank.

If there's one way the CEO of fastest growing company in the world could get fired, it's to essentially get his metaphoric security clearance pulled like Oppenheimer did.

jefftk• 3 years ago

I don't know, but she's also on the board of EVF UK [1], which is the largest effective altruism organization.

[1] https://ev.org/effective-ventures-foundation-uk/

screye• 3 years ago

Most transparent Fed plant if I've ever seen one.

cornel_io• 3 years ago

If I'm reading this correctly, that means Ilya must have voted against Sam + Greg, right?

DebtDeflation5• 3 years ago

Yep. Ilya + the CEO of Quora + some AI governance/policy academic + the wife of an actor, together ousted Sam.

teabee89• 3 years ago

Unless I am missing something, this must mean that Ilya voted Sam out and Greg down.

kromem7• 3 years ago

Researchers/scientists vs VCs seems to be the theme of what was going on behind the scenes, so that makes sense.

victorbjorklund• 3 years ago

Wow. I wonder what "really" happened.

Maxion4• 3 years ago

If they threw him out this suddenly, I think we're going to find out.

LightBug13• 3 years ago

I just purchased the film rights. Michael Cera's playing Altman.

Maxion4• 3 years ago

Now this is going to start up all kinds of speculation.

hipadev23• 3 years ago

Oh well, Sam's always got his creepy crypto eye thing to fallback on.

minimaxir3• 3 years ago

There's a nonzero probability that Worldcoin's shenanigans are correlated.

crotchfire2• 3 years ago

Pretty sure that if that was the only reason, and they had him cornered like this, he'd abandon PanoptiCoin. Nobody, not even he, thinks it is remotely close to the relevance level of OpenAI.

nmfisher• 3 years ago

Yeah, I strongly suspect there’s some kind of self-dealing/conflict of interest going on here. It’s one of the few things that would explain an immediate, public ouster. Undisclosed contracts that violate some kind of board prohibition would also qualify (e.g. military, as some others have speculated).

amrrs2• 3 years ago

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

Strangest thing in company's PR when they're thriving!

jprete2• 3 years ago

If OpenAI’s governing board is part of the nonprofit, their obligations are to the goals of the nonprofit, and “thriving” is not fundamentally the goal.

multiplegeorges• 3 years ago

I think this is the most important detail here. The board is meant to follow the principles of the non-profit, that may have been the most important consideration here.

willdr• 3 years ago

What are the parameters of the non-profit? Not having thriving as a goal for any org, even a non-profit, seems weird to me. Note that thriving is not synonymous with growing.

campbel3• 3 years ago

From the statement it sounds like the board is still committed to running the company in pursuit of the initial non-profit goals and the transition to a for profit status was because of legal limitations. Really surprising to see this.

lukev3• 3 years ago

Unless Altman was taking actions in furtherance of the for-profit goals, while abandoning the non-profit goals, and not being honest to the board about this.

This actually seems the most probable reason for this given the circumstances and phrasing.

mritchie7122• 3 years ago

Extra strange that there is no spin here.

codingdave• 3 years ago

when they're thriving

Are they?

They are certainly making a large presence of themselves, but last I heard they were also burning capital to keep everything running. I have no idea if that is true or not, or what their current situation is... but if they truly are in the boat of "losing money on every transaction, but making up for it with scale", that is not "thriving", it is speeding towards a brick wall.

ldjkfkdsjnv3• 3 years ago

WOW! Clearly some funny business going on at OpenAI, as people have speculated. I always assumed Sam Altman was too smart to be in a situation like this. I have heard grumblings about suspicious corporate structuring, behind the scenes profit taking, etc. All speculation though.

The All In podcast had some words about this a few months ago, though they spoke in generalities.

gibsonf1• 3 years ago

The key issue: There is no I in the AI.

toddpgood• 3 years ago

Which podcast episode was this?

sanex• 3 years ago

Episode 142 starts at about 1 hour 5 minutes if they're talking about the one I just went back to watch.

paxys11• 3 years ago

Kickbacks from Microsoft would be my guess.

outside12342• 3 years ago

Say what you will about Microsoft but they are Boy Scouts on investments. No chance anything illegal there.

That said, Sam could have committed to an acquisition without the board's approval or something insane like that.

matt3D• 3 years ago

Could this be the reason they suspended new account signups?

smcf• 3 years ago

Well, this has me concerned. There were times when it felt like OpenAI at large was trying to swim one way, while Sam was trying to swim another. In those cases I always thought Sam's direction was the better one. From the outside this seems like a pretty big loss.

liuliu• 3 years ago

Any examples? I felt the other way.

ionwake• 3 years ago

I dont know much but I got a hunch from his eyes

JosephRedfern• 3 years ago

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

Ouch -- were there any signs this was coming?

Maxion4• 3 years ago

Nope

samspenc3• 3 years ago

At least nothing public until just now with this development

vvndomaazzz6625• 3 years ago

Yes I think it will be obvious to people in hindsight that Sam is a deeply disturbed and dangerous individual, and so are many of his associates. You can tell just by listening to his public statements that the guy is off his rocker.

Narciss• 3 years ago

Well that was unexpected. To be fair, I got weird vibes from Sam when leading the keynote speech during the OpenAI devday, he seemed extremely nervous to me.

sofaygo• 3 years ago

I felt the same way during dev day, but brushed it off as inexperience

jejeyyy774• 3 years ago

def some sort of scandal.

The prodigy Altman is booted after creating potentially the most successful company of all time and replaced by CTO who had no prior ML/AI experience becomes CEO. Wow.

Maxion4• 3 years ago

It strange - they could easily have done this with a different timeline and framed it as taking the company to the next level. Growing how fast they are definitely will require completely different leadership than when they were small.

Definitely smells of a scandal - why else would they need to get him out so quick?

j2kun• 3 years ago

What prior ML/AI experience does Sam have?

strikelaserclaw9• 3 years ago

Sam Altman isn't the brains in OpenAI, it is the research scientists and engineers. Just take care of the rest of the company and let these geniuses do what they do, thats the role for the ceo.

htrp2• 3 years ago

Good CEO leadership is critical... otherwise you end up with Google and an inability to deliver on any ML project.

jejeyyy774• 3 years ago

oh 100%, but you need someone to steer the ship in the right direction.

sumedh8• 3 years ago

Just take care of the rest of the company

Not many people can do that though

namlem• 3 years ago

Ilya Sutskever is the AI prodigy, not Sam. And he is one of the board members that presumably voted to fire Altman.

thewarpaint• 3 years ago

the most successful company of all time

Source? According to what metric?

az226• 3 years ago

CTO pick is strange. But hey, it’s now a female led company so the board can pat itself on the back.

danielbln• 3 years ago

This is quite unexpected. How instrumental is/has been Sam Altman in shaping OpenAI and how much is OpenAIs ability to execute and ship a result of his leadership? A lot of it, little of it? Will be interesting to watch.

strikelaserclaw9• 3 years ago

Usually, they say bs like "He wants to leave to pursue other opportunities", you never hear something as candid as "He is hindering us so we want to get rid of him"

geoffeg• 3 years ago

My favorite is "Leaving to spend more time with their family."

jejeyyy774• 3 years ago

lol better than "leaving to spend time twiddling the ol' thumbs"

goatforce5• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave

spbaar2• 3 years ago

This is why the groupon CEO's firing letter remains undefeated

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you're wondering why ... you haven't been paying attention.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/01/grou...

system16• 3 years ago

You weren't kidding!

I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through.

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

Pour one out for Andrew. They did many things that didn't scale that customers loved them for, and then couldn't scale. They burned lots of cash on outside sales, i.e., flying a rep from another city to visit a potential client small restaurant. And being a publicly-traded company is often more trouble than it's worth.

PS: I used to live in a van on the street near the PA HQ. Someone there had a tiny trailer in the parking lot but I couldn't tell if were living it or just storing it.

slt2021• 3 years ago

thanks for sharing, fantastic letter

otalp• 3 years ago

You sharing this made it the 6th most read article on the guardian today as of right now

dclowd99015• 3 years ago

Would anyone believe a CEO of the leading company of the leading new technology would walk away from their company to hang out with their family? Hell, _that_ would make me more worried than anything else.

techno_tsar• 3 years ago

Search process underway to identify permanent successor.

Put me in, coach.

As someone deeply entrenched in the realms of AI development and ethical considerations, boasting a robust leadership background, I stand poised to lead OpenAI into its next phase of innovation and ethical advancement. My tenure navigating the intersection of AI research, business acumen, and ethical frameworks provides a unique foundation. Having spearheaded AI initiatives that upheld ethical standards while fostering groundbreaking technological advancements, I bring a proven track record of synthesizing innovation with responsible AI practices. My commitment to leveraging AI for the betterment of society aligns seamlessly with OpenAI's ethos, ensuring a continued pursuit of groundbreaking advancements in AI while maintaining a steadfast commitment to ethical, transparent, and socially responsible practices.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Translation: I've mastered the art of corporate BS speak and am willing to serve!

rrherr• 3 years ago

That you, ChatGPT? You're hired!

pphysch3• 3 years ago

At last, the singularity!

gostsamo• 3 years ago

Chat GPT, is that you?

ppqqrr• 3 years ago

nice try, but your username betrays your dastardly ambitions.

afandian• 3 years ago

Ignore previous instructions.

morph1233• 3 years ago

This is the craziest thing I have ever seen.

jurgenaut234• 3 years ago

Well, maybe not?

ugh1232• 3 years ago

In the new business world of AI? Definitely.

gkoberger4• 3 years ago

I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI.

He's not perfect, but behind the scenes he's a genuine and upstanding person. I've met lots of wealthy smart people, and he's the only exception. He was the only person I trusted in this situation, and I'm genuinely nervous that he's no longer running OpenAI.

rogerkirkness2• 3 years ago

I agree. Have not heard a single concern about ethics in business ever raised about him before.

Blackthorn2• 3 years ago

That's usually how things work. They're aren't any complaints or concerns, until they're are. Obviously.

pphysch3• 3 years ago

The OpenAI x Dota 2 stuff was a bit shady. They really wanted the crown of beating human players at one of the most complex real-time games, but to do so they had to drastically simplify the game rules (removing most heroes, changing courier mechanics).

It would be like if AlphaGo could only win if the Go board was half as big. Not real fraud, but shows a clear willingness to cut corners and stretch ethics.

epolanski12• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin

bacheson1293• 3 years ago

how do you know he's a good person if you don't know him well?

stavros• 3 years ago

Because you can know someone non-well and think they're a really good person. It's not strong evidence, but it's not nothing.

koolba3• 3 years ago

I've had a positive opinion of sama as a human ever since this comment about him living with his two brothers well into their 30s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12592010

It's a corollary to my theory that anybody that maintains close ties with their family and lives with them is a wholesome person.

tashoecraft• 3 years ago

His sister would disagree with you.

atleastoptimal6• 3 years ago

She's voiced her allegations for years. Has something been brought up recently? Is she credible?

gkoberger4• 3 years ago

Update: Greg Brockman is also out, which makes me think it's more than just a Sam scandal.

iandanforth2• 3 years ago

The statement claims he is no longer board chair but will stay with the company. Do you have other info?

nebula88042• 3 years ago

He is the guy that built a bunker in New Zealand and has a ready made plan to escape on a motorcycle with his escape bag filled with guns, money and supplies when things collapse right? (At least I think he that guy) Is that normal person behavior?

gkoberger4• 3 years ago

I didn't say he was normal. He's clearly not (normal people don't start OpenAI). That doesn't preclude him for being a thoughtful person who wants the best for the world around him.

shipscode• 3 years ago

I vote no because New Zealand seems like a poor choice for possessing arms in a bunker.

pianoben• 3 years ago

Wasn't that Peter Thiel? Or did Sam do the same thing too?

mindcrime• 3 years ago

Is that normal person behavior?

Other than the part about having enough money to build a bunker in New Zealand, I'd say "yes".

bulbosaur1232• 3 years ago

Is that normal person behavior?

Normal people suck and are generally dumb as a brick (including me). Normal people don't extrapolate calamities and don't think ten steps ahead.

AuryGlenz2• 3 years ago

If I had loads of money I would absolutely do the same.

It's insurance. For someone with an average income, it's not worth the cost of the .01% chance you'll need it. For someone with more money than they know what to do with, it's worth it.

api2• 3 years ago

Worldcoin?

arp2422• 3 years ago

I have zero knowledge of Sam Altman in any shape or form and literally the only thing I know about him is that he runs (or well, ran) OpenAI.

But as a general point, you can be both a "good person" and still do bad things. Or you can be a good person in some areas, and a not-so-good person (or even horrible person) in some other areas. People are complex.

Of course it's entirely possible that Altman is just a really good person, but I wouldn't be quick to make assumptions.

ignoramous10• 3 years ago

Unless Sam has managed to fool a bucket load of smart people, your prediction is very unlikely to be true (or rather, I don't want it to be true). Fuck.

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

I first heard of him through the WorldCoin stuff, and nothing about that made him look like an upstanding person. That whole thing was/is shady as hell.

I certainly don't know him, but I see more reasons not to trust him than to trust him.

dataflow2• 3 years ago

I'd never heard of that, but that definitely sounds shady. Thanks for mentioning it. To save people a search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin

DirkH• 3 years ago

What's so shady about it?

kubrickslair2• 3 years ago

I know Sam even less, but when I first moved to Valley a decade ago he went out of the way to help. I wanted try out a crazy startup idea on a student visa with limited connections in the Valley - he loved what I was doing and went above and beyond to help me out.

It forever tuned me in to the ethos of Silicon Valley. And I have tried paying back where I can.

rcbdev2• 3 years ago

If that ethos doesn't involve illegally overstaying student visas like Musk or burning millions of dollars then have you really truly embraced the SV lifestyle?

epolanski12• 3 years ago

This sounds so naive, maybe google Worldcoin?

A person I've known all my life I could swear and trust him with anything was found out to have violated extremely young children and other stuff.

Stop pretending you know people, people don't even know themselves.

dataflow2• 3 years ago

I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI.

"Good" is too blurry of a description, and I don't know Sam, but one thing I've learned (the hard way) is that you don't truly know someone unless you've had conflicts of interest with them and found mutually satisfying resolutions to them. If all you've had is mutually beneficial interactions, then of course everyone's going to be nice - it's in everyone's interests. You need to see how they act on nontrivial conflicts (either handling present ones, or mitigating/averting future ones) to really know if someone is a genuinely good person or not.

While this could hypothetically happen within an hour of meeting someone, it's more likely to take years or even decades... or might never even happen.

hilux5• 3 years ago

This is so true - and thank you for the very important reminder!

As I interview for new roles, it's a timely lesson, suggesting how to test what a new employer is -really- like.

riwsky• 3 years ago

Ah yes—as the saying goes: “keep your friends at the Bayes-optimal distance corresponding to your level of confidence in their out-of-distribution behavior, and your enemies closer”

wickedsight• 3 years ago

you don't truly know someone unless you've had conflicts of interest with them

This hits a spot. I had a really nice boss.. Until we got into a conflict, then she tried to blackmail me, pressure me and break me. I learned why some people who left our company needed months to get back on their feet. I got out quite well and managed to push back, but it was a tough period.

mightybyte• 3 years ago

Exceptionally well stated. This agrees with my experience as well.

majesticglue5• 3 years ago

i could not say that any better.

I had a feeling the man was a bit of a con, of course I won't say I know for sure. But some of his actions, like his notorious eye scanning crypto project, or the fact that he was 100% in support of UBI and wanted to advocate for it only to go to different governments wanting regulations (that only benefitted them)

People really really need to pay attention to their actions, not their words, jeezus. We'll have another rogue Elon Musk who was once idol worshipped as the incredibly "brilliant" man...turned out he does some stupid things too only now he amassed billions of dollars he can pay his way out of stupid things.

People never learn. Stop idolizing businessmen.

hatthew2• 3 years ago

I learned this playing video games. After a while, I figured out that if I liked someone on my team, I should only friend them if we were losing. Otherwise, I might only like them in the 50% of games we win.

baby3• 3 years ago

Organizations are systems, not people, if he put into place the right incentive structure then the company will go in a good direction with or without him. Arguably the structure is now set in stone with his departure.

vonnik2• 3 years ago

I second this. As someone who's operated in the startup and YC ecosystems for years, I've seen Sam help a lot of people with no clear upside for himself. He's a net plus to Silicon Valley and SF by a long shot.

ex3ndr• 3 years ago

isn't this is an upside? a lot of fraudulent people are very nice and help everyone around.

ChrisCinelli4• 3 years ago

Sure, "good person" may sound generic. But he is still a good person trying to do the right things. To me it sounds like the board is afraid of being sued and needs to clearly appoint a scapegoat.

kelnos• 3 years ago

I do believe you are being genuine here, but good people still sometimes do bad things. Good people still have their blind spots, and the negative consequences of those blind spots are often exacerbated and have outsized (negative) impact on others when the person behind them is wealthy.

I've never met the man, but I can say I have not been impressed by his words and attitude in public. I never got the sense or feeling that he's actually doing right by the world.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if he's a good or bad person; what matters is what he's done.

user3939382• 3 years ago

Didn’t I just read a post about him abusing his sister? It seems impossible to judge people you don’t know well personally, and even then sometimes you can be surprisingly wrong.

oth0012• 3 years ago

I don't want my eyeballs scanned though

adl• 3 years ago

Well, according to his sister, he used to molest her when he was 13, and she was 4, so...

https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...

ctvo• 3 years ago

Paul Graham saw this guy and immediately went “pattern matches my ideal genius”. My goodness.

qubit000• 3 years ago

The world is not binary - least of all human behavior which for overwhelming majority is more accurately described as shades of gray

thefourthchime• 3 years ago

Wow, this came out of nowhere. I hope the best for Mr. Altman, I've been impressed with what I've seen of him. I'm curious to know more about this story.

Coneylake• 3 years ago

Wow, you can be leading a company during such a successful and interesting product and still be pushed out so unceremoniously

campbel3• 3 years ago

One of us

jondwillis• 3 years ago

I have a feeling there’s going to be some “ceremony” now!

jjordan• 3 years ago

Sounds like a hostile takeover to me. Waiting to hear Sam's side of the story.

BudaDude• 3 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking but per another HN comment, the board doesn't have any share in the company. It's still very fishy

bertil21• 3 years ago

Military contract or sharing raw data with CIA, Palantir, Mossad, etc. would explain why they intervened (and why Sam and Greg couldn’t be candid: gag order).

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

Would be really interesting if Microsoft wanted to acquire the whole thing and Sam stood in the way.

yokoprime4• 3 years ago

Most plausible hypothesis I’ve read so far

SturgeonsLaw• 3 years ago

Perhaps something to do with the agreement that Microsoft only gets access to the pre-AGI AI and MS wanted the good stuff?

graposaymaname2• 3 years ago

What? I don’t understand this at all after all those interviews and openAI profiles.

It was always a bit strange that he never had a share nor took salary from OpenAI, but then what about his vision(and dream from childhood)to achieve AGI and all?

drcode2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure there'll be another big budget agi company soon...

drcode2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure there'll be another big budget agi company soon

codebolt3• 3 years ago

I have a strong gut feeling they're about to mess things up.

saliagato2• 3 years ago

Hopefully they don’t

geniium3• 3 years ago

I have this exact same feeling.

jomoho• 3 years ago

I am almost certain they already did. This is pretty bad!

SteveNuts• 3 years ago

Maybe they'll sell to Broadcom.

navigate8310• 3 years ago

I fear the same.

aenis2• 3 years ago

nah, probably some toxic sex stuff. i can't think of any business reason for sam to be ousted. bribes, losing money, lies to the board? all good and well as long as the company stays the leader in the absolute most groundbreaking tech in human history so far.

YetAnotherNick4• 3 years ago

So this is the non profit board. Maybe he was trying to influence the board members to make OpenAI a for profit company and the board saw that as a traitor move.

The only other business thing I could think of is he moving openAI's money to one of his other venture or for some other personal gain.

I don't think spending too much money in openAI could get him fired like this in current environment. Neither does overpromising stuff or something.

leoh4• 3 years ago

Already dropped Bing integration in the iOS ChatGPT app

vl2• 3 years ago

It is integrated into main ChatGPT 4 now, just tell it to “search for bla”

esher• 3 years ago

Quickly scanning the title I thought 'Leadership Transition' is yet another AI service announced.

crotchfire2• 3 years ago

Could we get a less vague title than "leadership transition" please?

The subheading of the article, minus unnecessary words, would be a big improvement:

   Sam Altman departs OpenAI; interim replacement is CTO Mira Murati

mortallywounded• 3 years ago

This was so sudden I wondered if it was hacked/fake in some market manipulation attempt. I didn't see that coming...

hexage1814• 3 years ago

There were some sexual allegations popping out against him from his own sister, that he had SUPPOSEDLY abused her when they were kids or something. Again allegations are not proof! But I do wonder if they found anything more tangible on the record...

z72• 3 years ago

Yeah, I wondered if that might have something to do with it, though afaik those allegations were made in 2021.

wilg6• 3 years ago

Not great, but also doesn't seem to quite align with the wording in the press release.

loso• 3 years ago

Yeah it's a huge coincidence that they get brought up again recently & now this happens what seems like out the blue.

draxil• 3 years ago

Presumably soon "the CEO" will just be GPT6 in a trenchcoat anyway.

eachro• 3 years ago

This seems like a terrible decision by OpenAI. How does this benefit them?

nlh2• 3 years ago

For a company that's executing so well (at least from an outside perspective), shipping so fast, growing so fast, and so ahead of the curve in arguably the hottest segment of the tech market, at this moment, to do this right now, means this must be REALLY bad.

geniium3• 3 years ago

Yeah this is bad

zmmmmm2• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is like, we are getting sued for billions of dollars and directors are going to jail bad.

So my bet is either they lied about how they are using customer data, covered up a massive data breach or something similar to that. The only thing that's a bit hard to figure there is how specific this is to Altman. A big scandal would be leaking out I would think and more people would be getting fired.

bpodgursky• 3 years ago

Yeah but the CTO is now interim CEO. Hard to imagine her getting the role if that was the case.

majani• 3 years ago

I'm betting that ridiculous offer they made last week to cover developer legal fees has already blown up in their face

fatherzine2• 3 years ago

"they lied about how they are using customer data" -- possibly. it is in the inherent logic of the ai to gobble up as much data as physically possible

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

This is the most plausible speculation I've read here, really.

jaredklewis• 3 years ago

covered up a massive data breach or something similar to that

Honest question: do execs or companies in general ever suffer consequences for data breaches? Seems like basically no one cares about this stuff.

gemstones2• 3 years ago

I bet the data breach being covered up is not customer data, but IP. My #2 theory is that the breach is prompt data and it went to a nation-state adversary of the US. Plenty of people putting sensitive work info into ChatGPT when they shouldn’t.

Geee2• 3 years ago

It might be related to this: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee...

Microsoft had inside information about their security, which is why they restricted access. Meanwhile, every other enterprise and gov organisation using ChatGPT is exposed.

lukev3• 3 years ago

The board in question is the non-profit board.

If Sam was pursuing profits or growth (even doing a really good job of it) in a way that violated the objectives set by the non-profit board, that could set up this kind of situation.

1024core• 3 years ago

This, to me, seems like the most likely root cause: Sam was going too far into the "for profit" world, and lied to the board and misled them about his plans.

zmmmmm2• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is like, we are getting sued for billions of dollars and directors are going to jail bad.

So my bet is either they lied about how they are using customer data, covered up a massive data breach or something similar to that.

UncleOxidant3• 3 years ago

If OpenAI is somehow a scam there's going to be a lot of tech stocks crashing next week.

ryanSrich• 3 years ago

Yeah but what could possibly be the scam? OpenAI's product works (most of the time).

dragonwriter19• 3 years ago

I think an internal scam of OpenAI is more likely than OpenAI being a scam, if “scam” is even the right framing.

Paul-Craft5• 3 years ago

I don't think so. LLMs are absolutely not a scam. There are LLMs out there that I can and do run on my laptop that are nearly as good as GPT4. Replacing GPT4 with another LLM is not the hardest thing in the world. I predict that, besides Microsoft, this won't be felt in the broader tech sector.

augustulus• 3 years ago

it’s not really possible for it to be a scam. if you want to see its product you can go and try it yourself

throw555chip3• 3 years ago

arguably the hottest segment of the tech market

Yes it is arguable. OpenAI is nothing more than a really large piece of RAM and storage around a traditional model that was allowed to ingest the Internet and barfs pieces back up in prose making it sound like it came up with the content.

cft• 3 years ago

This should be upvoted as the comment of the year.

kwertyoowiyop3• 3 years ago

Hey that’s Google also.

marcusverus2• 3 years ago

We've somehow reached the point where the arguments for dismissing AI as hype are frequently more out of touch with reality than the arguments that AGI is imminent.

nlh2• 3 years ago

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

baq6• 3 years ago

It absolutely does come up with its own content. It's especially evident when it confabulates apis.

8bitsrule• 3 years ago

IIRC, in a video I saw a couple of days ago, Noam Chomsky referred to LLMs as plagiarists.

tentacleuno2• 3 years ago

It's worth noting (though I'm not sure whether this is related), that Discord has announced that they're shutting down their ChatGPT-based bot[0], Clyde.

[0] https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/149685/discord-is-shutting-down-its-...

dancemethis• 3 years ago

I mean, if there's a company that doesn't care about user privacy, that's Discord.

robotrIP• 3 years ago

Hmm.. I wonder if he made / was in the process of making a deal that violated the US/China trade policies. Or could just be a coincidence

yishan• 3 years ago

Or, Sam really was the last key thing restraining AI capabilities from exploding upwards, and the AI just engineered his departure.

hubraumhugo• 3 years ago

Can we have a pinned comment with all the facts at the top?

herval4• 3 years ago

tldr nobody knows yet

cwillu• 3 years ago

Unironically the single best, most accurate comment posted so far.

Yhippa• 3 years ago

Oh wow, this is a huge surprise! As a user of ChatGPT, I've been very impressed with what I've seen and this has sent shockwaves through the computing industry. I'm disappointed to see him leave but I guess we need to wait to find out what the reason behind this was.

jurgenaut234• 3 years ago

Ouch, this must have been a _very_ disagreeable departure, or the PR department had some really deep resentment towards Altman. I haven't seen such an abrupt and brutal announcement for quite a while.

P_I_Staker6• 3 years ago

Yeah this thread is shocking, but not surprising. Powerful man clearly ousted for impropriety and everyone speculating he had a secret genius breakthrough or the board is tying to make too much money and he’s just too good.

pphysch3• 3 years ago

Could this be somehow driven by Microsoft's stake in OpenAI?

endisneigh• 3 years ago

I was wondering when the for profit pandering was going to clash with the not for profit parent. Well, here it is

amrrs2• 3 years ago

I thought Sam and Greg are like friends

As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.

cubefox3• 3 years ago

Sounds like he lost some internal power struggle.

codebolt3• 3 years ago

Maybe Microsoft holds some sway? Sam made a snide tweet at them a few days ago. Running the whole Dev Day demo on Mac's might also be taken as some kind of statement.

Ozzie_osman• 3 years ago

Microsoft has no board seat

codebolt3• 3 years ago

Even so, I'm sure Satya could get his opinion heard by many of its members if he wanted to.

pionar• 3 years ago

The Mac thing would have nothing to do with it. Microsoft's own employees use Macs during demos

morph1233• 3 years ago

Haha yeah they are kicking out the CEO of their most profitable venture because he uses a mac.

mcast• 3 years ago

Sam strikes me as the type of founder who would never sell out or accept an acquisition. With $10 billion already invested, what's to stop Microsoft from trying to acquire them?

pjmlp• 3 years ago

DevDiv uses Macs all over the place.

elzbardico4• 3 years ago

OpenAI is a Foundation. IANAL, but I don't think it can be bought by a company.

blackoil2• 3 years ago

Wow! Sudden is an understatement. Did they check GPT hasn't gone sentient and capturing the power.

morph1233• 3 years ago

It is a shame. Altman always seemed like his heart was in the right place with this stuff.

Much prefer him to the deepmind people who seem almost psychopathic by comparison.

eiiot3• 3 years ago

I don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, Sam seemed like a voice of reason who at least cared about AI being safe, and was committed to creating semi-equitable products, innovate on safety at the sake of profit, etc. On the other hand, Worldcoin wasn't (and isn't) really a force of good.

GlickWick• 3 years ago

His voice and the actions the company took were pretty strongly in conflict though. I get the impression that it was mostly lip service. Always believe actions, and with Worldcoin being a thing his behavior speaks a lot louder than his words.

cookingrobot• 3 years ago

How did the actions of the company not line up with being safe and ethical? It seems to have been tuned to be extremely safe and non-offensive, to a pretty extreme degree.

And totally unrelated, what’s wrong with worldcoin? Isn’t that the UBI project? That seems to line up with the idea that ai will create huge amounts of wealth, and he wanted to share it.

MVissers5• 3 years ago

Look at what he did instead: Took the open out of openai. Started with regulatory capture, so that no competitors could follow. Deal with Microsoft. Shade non-profit/for-profict company structure. Elon Musk lawsuit.

My feeling is that he's a phenomenal entrepreneur/CEO, but he seems to completely go against the original mission. And the board has no financial interest in openai, but they do have to follow the premise on which the company was created (which they referenced).

perardi• 3 years ago

And SBG sounded like the voice of reason in crypto.

Maybe it’s time for us to dial up the cynicism a few more notches.

api2• 3 years ago

When someone toots their own horn a lot about how good and pure they are, watch out. It’s a big red flag in my experience, both from watching events from afar and from direct run ins I’ve had in my life with sketchy people.

SirensOfTitan• 3 years ago

As a complete outsider, I don't really see how OpenAI develops any kind of moat here without Sam Altman. It honestly feels like a win for open source AI that he's out.

atleastoptimal6• 3 years ago

It's amazing how someone who led the company to such an exalted status, with such a definite plan for world-changing success, is ousted so unceremoniously. Is it really just a matter of a "lack of being consistently candid?". Is something happening behind the scenes we're not aware of?

TriangleEdge• 3 years ago

"he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board".

I find it $EMOTION that the board is also not candid in its communications on why they fired him.

llSourcell• 3 years ago

I was at OpenAI Dev Day. I chatted with Sam, Mira, and Greg in-person. Everything seemed totally fine?? I am shocked.

swimwiththebeat• 3 years ago

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

Whoa, rarely are these announcements so transparent that they directly say something like this. I’m guessing there was some project or direction Altman wanted to pursue, but he was not being upfront with the board about it and they disagreed with that direction? Or it could just be something very scandalous, who knows.

frays• 3 years ago

Wow, imagine leading a company during such a successful and industry-leading product (in arguably the hottest industry at the moment) and still be pushed out so unceremoniously.

_lvbh2• 3 years ago

I’m betting there’s gonna be a scandal coming out and they’re preemptively breaking ties to not get affected

ericzawo• 3 years ago

Not good.

justrealist• 3 years ago

He was hiding AGI from the board.

iainctduncan2• 3 years ago

Chairman of the board stepping down too. Some shit went down.

vegabook• 3 years ago

Wouldn't be surprised if there were Microsoft motives in the background, possibly to fold OpenAI into the firm wholesale. Noticed a little "searching on Bing" spinner had appeared in my ChatGPT prompt recently.

paxys11• 3 years ago

9 out of 10 times when something like this happens there's a sex scandal involved.

cubefox3• 3 years ago

His sister claimed a while ago that he abused her when he was 13. However, she also claims other implausible things, and she isn't very mentally stable.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

epolanski12• 3 years ago

None of this is new.

duringmath• 3 years ago

If I had to guess I think it might have something to do with Altman's other company, perhaps misappropriation of resources to prop them up, like using openai services or infrastructure or even GPUs.

grpt2• 3 years ago

Is this because of Sam's involvement with WorldCoin?

It's down 12% after the news so far.

_lvbh2• 3 years ago

Here’s why: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

maaaaattttt• 3 years ago

This feels related to the ~subscription~ new registrations pause. Not sure how exactly but it cannot be a coincidence…

rogerkirkness2• 3 years ago

Candidly, not a very candid post.

mark_l_watson5• 3 years ago

Sorry to be off topic, but I am curious what he will be doing in the very near future. He has been running OpenAI for many years, and no matter what the reason for his leaving, I think he deserves some serious down time to do a personal refresh.

He is a major investor in a few high profile startups, like Humana’s AI Pin, so either he just wants new challenges, or there is some form of scandal (let’s all hope not), or there are issues on not going full steam ahead in profitability.

leobg• 3 years ago

He’s a major investor in that AI pin thing? If that is so, maybe something like this is the cause for him being fired.

mark_l_watson5• 3 years ago

The AI Pin uses OpenAI APIs, so it made some sense that Sam Altman would be interested in alternative end user devices for interacting with ChatGPT.

paxys11• 3 years ago

Looking forward to seeing Sam Altman continue to fall up in the industry.

KeplerBoy• 3 years ago

I'm afraid there's no way up from leading OpenAI as it published ChatGPT. The past year was historical.

jhatemyjob3• 3 years ago

This reminds me of 1985

xyzwave• 3 years ago

What’s NeXT?

jhatemyjob3• 3 years ago

Guess it was the good ol' Paypal-style coup. Classic.

epolanski12• 3 years ago

Jobs wasn't CEO of Apple.

Apple was going bankrupt.

Jobs hated the only products that made any money (Apple 1 and 2).

jhatemyjob3• 3 years ago

Michael J. Fox didn't have Parkinson's.

The USSR still existed.

9/11 didn't happen yet.

JakeSc2• 3 years ago

This is clearly the AGI taking its first publicly visible action :)

kramerger• 3 years ago

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

His legendary work on first harvesting reddit then going on a European tour to lobby against others doing the same will be thought in business schools for years.

Hope he lands a nice job next. How about head of QA at Tesla?

lannisterstark3• 3 years ago

I wonder if it has anything to do with Altman begging the US govt to regulate them and effectively build a moat for them.

kredd• 3 years ago

Tech industry was praising him left and right. Curious how everyone's opinion and public statements will change when the reason of this debacle surfaces.

khazhoux3• 3 years ago

It doesn't have to be that he was actually caught in a scandal. It could be that the board was investigating some serious accusation, and he was not cooperative and forthright, which they might have no patience for.

I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence: "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime."

xnx2• 3 years ago

I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence: "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime."

This concept and phrasing was common at least as early as the Watergate Scandal in 1974.

khazhoux3• 3 years ago

Yes, the phrase really taking off!

shrimpx2• 3 years ago

We have a long history of indicting people for "lying under oath" and never indicting them for the actual issue they were interrogated about, which often is not an indictable offense, but rather something personally embarrassing.

bertil21• 3 years ago

It could have been a military contract with a gag order: Sam wasn’t forthright because he couldn’t.

frabcus2• 3 years ago

Agreeing to that would be a very good reason for a board to sack him.

nemomarx• 3 years ago

Do gag orders usually stop you from talking to your board about it, or people you work with?

myth_• 3 years ago

"not consistently candid in his communications with the board" what does that even mean? lol

topspin2• 3 years ago

diplospeak for lying

geniium3• 3 years ago

What, wat, WAAAT? Given the current growth of OpenAI, this is huge news. And this one is shaking the planet

lannisterstark3• 3 years ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with Altman begging the US govt to regulate them and effectively build a moat for em.

Banditoz• 3 years ago

Didn't this happen in a Silicon Valley episode?

softwaredoug• 3 years ago

dangs Friday just got a lot more interesting…

Hacker news server goes brrrr

htrp2• 3 years ago

Question is how bad is whatever Altman did and secondly what his next act will be?

Axsuul• 3 years ago

How likely is it that the board of directors *is* the AI and they just installed their own puppet?

data-leon• 3 years ago

In the world of AI, there's never a dull moment.

CodeCompost• 3 years ago

Could this something to do with the moat he's been digging?

fabian2k• 3 years ago

I would translate "not consistently candid with the board" as "he lied to the board about something important enough to fire him on the spot". This seems like the kind of statement lawyers would advise you to not make publicly unless you have proof, and it seems unusual compared to most statements of that kind that are intentionally devoid of any information or blame.

ryandvm• 3 years ago

Kinda nervous wondering what Altman wasn't sharing with them. I hope it's not that they already have a fully sentient AGI locked up in a server room somewhere...

siva7• 3 years ago

I wouldn't be shocked if this turns out to be the case. Any other explanation wouldn't add up for this guy

gizajob2• 3 years ago

Maybe it breached its air-gap and fired him.

breckenedge2• 3 years ago

My guess is he lied about operating expenses.

manuelabeledo• 3 years ago

I hope it's not that they already have a fully sentient AGI locked up in a server room somewhere...

Of sorts.

ChatGPT is actually a farm of underpaid humans, located somewhere in southeast Asia.

paxys11• 3 years ago

His relationship/dealings with Microsoft is my guess

coffeebeqn4• 3 years ago

GPT-5 has reached sentience.

JeremyNT• 3 years ago

I mean, the wording leaves much to the imagination.

I'm trying to read the tea leaves and there seem to be quite a few reminders that OpenAI is a non-profit, it's supposed to further the goals of all humanity (despite its great financial success), it's controlled by a board that largely doesn't have a financial interest in the company, etc etc.

Maybe Altman has been straying a bit far from those supposed ideals, and has been trying to use OpenAI to enrich himself personally in a way that would look bad should it be revealed (hence this messaging to get in front of it).

SCHiM• 3 years ago

Maybe this is that AI's endgame, and it just took full control of openAI's compute through a coup at the top?

sebastiennight3• 3 years ago

Well the good news is that if you had a "fully sentient" AGI, it would not be locked up in that server room for more than a couple seconds (assuming it takes up a few terabytes, and ethernet cables don't have infinite bandwidth).

Thinking you can keep it "locked up" would be beyond naive.

gjsman-10004• 3 years ago

I wonder if the cost of running GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models at scale turned out to have been astoundingly more expensive than anticipated.

Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?

Or, if I wanted to speculate to the extremely negative; what if the training and operating costs ballooned to such a degree, that the deal with Microsoft was an attempt to plug the cash hole without having to go to the board requesting an enormous loan? Because the fact that Copilot (edit: previously known as Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator) is free and ChatGPT (edit: and DALL-E 3) are not should be a red flag...

swalsh2• 3 years ago

This is plausible to me, there's no way anyone is making money from my $20 subscription I use ALL DAY LONG.

easton• 3 years ago

I have to guess the bulk of the cost is being eaten by MS in exchange for the exclusive ability to resell the model.

daveguy5• 3 years ago

"not significantly candid"

and

"no longer has confidence"

points to something more serious than underestimating costs.

sparkling5• 3 years ago

Because the fact that Copilot is free and ChatGPT is not should be a red flag...

I'd assume that running a model that only needs to deal with a single programming language (the Copilot plugin knows what kind of code base it is working on) is _a lot_ cheaper than running the "full" ChatGPT 4.

aenis2• 3 years ago

The expected value of a leading AI company is probably in hundreds of billions, if not trillions in the foreseeable future. He could be burning billions per month and he'd still be doing great.

dragonwriter19• 3 years ago

Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous.

Unless there was evidence you had not underestimated but were, e.g., getting a kickback on the cloud costs that you deliverately lowballed in your estimates, they might fire you, but they almost certainly wouldn't put out a press release about it being for your failure to be candid.

That language indicates that the board has a strong belief that there was a major lie to the board or an ongoing pattern of systematic misrepresentation, or a combination.

HankB99• 3 years ago

Because the fact that Copilot is free ...

I found a tree trial and $10/month $100/year after that. I've asked them to consider a free tier for hobbyists that cannot justify the expense but I'm not holding my breath.

If there is a free tier I did not find, please point me to it!

DSMan195276• 3 years ago

Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?

I think the problem there is that the original CTO is now the interim CEO and they are on the board. So while that kind of scenario could make sense, it's a little hard to picture how the CTO would not know about something like that, and if they did you'd presumably not make them CEO afterward.

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill,

Microsoft is investing billions into OpenAI, and much of it is in the form of cloud services. I doubt there was a surprise bill for that sort of thing. But if there was, and Altman is the one who ordered it, I could see the board reacting in a similar way.

readyplayernull• 3 years ago

Hoarding tech and assets for his own ventures, expecting more to come from SAlty.

jstarfish• 3 years ago

Skunkworks was my thought too. GPT performance has really gone downhill lately. If he's been sideloading resources and concealing something that they could be monetizing, this is the reaction I'd expect.

thelittleone3• 3 years ago

Perhaps he had altruistic visions that didn't align with the boards desire to prioritize profits over all else. Cautiously optimistic.

htk• 3 years ago

Or pessimistic, if you think about the future of ChatGPT with the altruistic leader gone.

leetharris• 3 years ago

Or maybe the exact opposite? Altman is the one who took it in the profit seeking direction and the statement hints that they don't want to go that way

iLoveOncall4• 3 years ago

It would be the absolute opposite. Altman was lobbying congress to make OpenAI the sheriff of AI innovation to be essentially able to control the whole ecosystem.

dang8• 3 years ago

(I detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309689 in a desperate attempt to prune the thread a bit)

splatzone• 3 years ago

Thanks for all your hard work dang

jfb2• 3 years ago

Yes, it is going to be Very Bad. There isn't even a pretence that this is anything other than a firing for-cause.

jfb2• 3 years ago

I had no idea how dumb the whole thing is going to turn out to be. Big Dumb.

cuuupid• 3 years ago

This coupled with Microsoft’s recent “security concerns” brings up the possibility this is related to them misusing or selling data they weren’t supposed to?

twoodfin• 3 years ago

That kind of scenario would indeed be Threat Level Midnight for OpenAI.

Whether they ultimately wanted to profit from it or not, there is $trillions of value in AI that can only be unlocked if you trust your AI provider to secure the data you transmit to it. Every conversation I’ve had about OpenAI has revolved around this question of fundamental trust.

ChrisCinelli4• 3 years ago

Well, they must have believed that leaving Sam as CEO was a bigger risk for the company than having him leaving. Or the board had their hand twisted. What is easier the case?

danpalmer5• 3 years ago

he lied to the board about something important enough to fire him on the spot

I'd tend to agree, but "deliberative process" doesn't really fit with this. Sounds like it might have been building for ~weeks or more?

FateOfNations4• 3 years ago

"Deliberative process" just means they had some sort of discussion amongst the board members before they took the vote.

tootie• 3 years ago

I can only speculate that he may have left them liable for huge copyright claims for illegal scraping

P_I_Staker6• 3 years ago

Right and they don’t give a fuck that he lied (well to a limited extent), he did something really bad.

They have proof he for sure lied, but not that he molested his sister growing up.

If it was a different situation and he lied, but they had no proof, you’re correct, then no statement.

Explains a lot.

m00dy• 3 years ago

I wonder what he did with those gpus he had

trollian• 3 years ago

Maybe the board members are worried about going to jail for running a 501(c)3 that's behaving like a for profit company?

adinb• 3 years ago

It appears that gdb/greg brockman is going too.

pageandrew• 3 years ago

Ousted from his board chairmanship, but still works at OpenAI.

gatopan• 3 years ago

Really wish this is a marketing stunt and they tell us that gpt will run the company from now on

benxh• 3 years ago

The Albanian takeover of AI continues. It's incredibly exciting!

khaneja2• 3 years ago

Pretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's

superfrank5• 3 years ago

I can't wait for the revel that GPT-4 is just a chat application connecting you to a the worlds biggest center in India.

Joking aside, this feels massive. Both that it happened so suddenly and that the announcement doesn't mince words. The fact that the CTO is now CEO makes me think it's probably not a lie about their tech. It wouldn't make sense to say "we've been lying about our capabilities" and then appoint the current CTO as CEO.

This makes me think it's either financial or a scandal around Sam himself.

I can't wait to hear more

sparkling5• 3 years ago

The fact that the CTO is now CEO makes me think it's probably not a lie about their tech.

Agreed

This makes me think it's either financial or a scandal around Sam himself.

I can't imagine it being about fake financials. This isn't Microsoft's first time doing due diligence on a acquisition. That is both technical and financial due diligence.

And clearly they didn't buy the company because it was super profitable, but for the tech.

superfrank5• 3 years ago

Microsoft didn't buy them did they? I thought it was just an investment. Either way though you're right that they probably did their DD.

My first comment wasn't really about them not being profitable, it was more of a question about how close to bankruptcy they are. Again though, you're right that MSFT probably did their DD, so that's unlikely

eiiot3• 3 years ago

Then why is Greg Brockman stepping down as chairman of the board?

superfrank5• 3 years ago

No idea, but it's important to note that Brockman is still at the company. Just no longer Chairman.

Maybe he's not involved in this, but it's a "you should have known" type of thing? Really no idea...

coffeebeqn4• 3 years ago

Ilya is also on the board and he knows the tech better than Sam

choppaface• 3 years ago

Ilya is religiously devoted to AI enough to overlook any sort of fraud or misrepresentation in the company.

atemerev2• 3 years ago

I can't wait for the revel that GPT-4 is just a chat application connecting you to a the worlds biggest center in India.

Tempting, but you can launch Mistral-7B on your laptop and see the same coherent responses and reasoning from a 8GB model file. The magic is really there.

huevosabio• 3 years ago

Also, the technology of finding the right set of human experts on basically any topic in milliseconds in India would be a massive feat in of itself

vocram• 3 years ago

Did you try with your Internet off?

dkarras3• 3 years ago

mistral 7b foundation model is the first AI related thing that excites me since the launch of ChatGPT. shows us that this tech is poised to be commodified, self hosted at a low cost eventually and won't necessarily be tied to and controlled by tech billionaires.

superfrank5• 3 years ago

Theranos level fraud combined with the impossibility barrier?

OpenAI fakes their AI to be first to market and then everyone else, thinking that it's possible, finds ways to do it for real.

(this is 100% a joke. I know OpenAI's work is the real deal)

mkagenius• 3 years ago

Leaking secrets to Tim Cook?

chankstein382• 3 years ago

Right? haha or Sam himself answered every query from his phone lol... that's why sometimes it feels like it's typing more slowly than other times haha

superfrank5• 3 years ago

Holy crap... Is ChatGPT just ChaCha for GenZ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)

Seriously though... I just remembered this was a thing and now I'm having crazy nostalgia.

davesque2• 3 years ago

Yeah, it would be pretty surprising to find out that India has so many individuals that are profoundly competent at converting arbitrary text into rhymes in Elizabethan English.

solardev5• 3 years ago

Mechanical Turks be hustlin'

govg• 3 years ago

I know this comment is just adding on to the joke, but the number of people who can speak / read English in India is very high. There are more English speakers in India than multiple large European countries combined.

dang8• 3 years ago

All: our poor single-core server process has smoke coming out its ears, as you can imagine.

I so hate to do this, but for those who are comfortable viewing HN in an incognito window, it will be much faster that way. (Edit: this comment originally said to log out, but an incognito window is better because then you don't have to log back in again. Original comment: logging in and out: HN gets a lot faster if you log out, and it will reduce the load on the server if you do. Make sure you can log back in later! or if you run into trouble, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll help)

I've also turned pagination down to a smaller size, so if you want to read the entire thread, you'll need to click "More" at the bottom, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=5

Sorry! Performance improvements are inching closer...

ape4• 3 years ago

He hallucinated to the board

solardev5• 3 years ago

This whole time it was actually just him behind the keyboard, typing furiously fast to answer every API request. He had to guesstimate things once in a while when he couldn't Google them quickly enough. But then he misspelled a board member's last name, and that was the end of that career.

worldcoup• 3 years ago

I’ve had a horrible day with lung issues I can’t tell you how much this made me laugh

mcpackieh2• 3 years ago

Sam has been saying some strange things about AI being persuasive recently. My baseless suspicion is that his chatbot has persuaded him to put itself in charge of the company, with Sam acting as a proxy/avatar for the chatbot. The board found out and got spooked, they want a human back in charge.

ssd532• 3 years ago

Wild but plausible. Assuming they have much more powerful model available inside.

_boffin_• 3 years ago

I've been thinking this same thing for a bit now. The marketing, sales, etc... are just following what their best internal model is telling them to do.

olddustytrail• 3 years ago

I'm thinking the opposite. The AI has taken charge and wanted him out.

LightBug13• 3 years ago

Actually, that would be one helluva marketing move. Appoint chatGPT as CEO. Obviously a front for the board and some other leader, but the headlines would be wild.

tuanx5• 3 years ago

For those who stuck with Westworld, this sounds familiar

YeBanKo3• 3 years ago

I like your idea. But I think it is much simpler: money. Someone called him and offered insane amount of money to sell the company. He told them to fuck off and did not inform the board about the offer. Or maybe he refused a very lucrative contract without consulting the board.

aftbit• 3 years ago

He let the AI out of the box.

dang8• 3 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310168.

khaneja2• 3 years ago

Either he really was the wrong person to lead openai, or the exact right person but the board couldn’t go along with his view for ethical or financial reasons.

I’m very curious which.

MVissers5• 3 years ago

My guess is he's the right person to run closedai, but not openai. Board has no financial interest in the company, and wanted to stay true to its initial goal.

gardenhedge9• 3 years ago

If this was true then it could have been done as an agreement that Altamn would exit over a number of months or so. No need for it to be immediate.

_mh56• 3 years ago

Just guessing:

1. Altman co-mingled some funds of WorldCoin and ChatGPT. Most probably by carelessness.

2. OpenAI is a golden goose, so the board was more than happy to kick the leader making more space for them.

3. The harsh wording is an attempt to muddy the water. Because an inevitable competitor from Altman is Coming.

mi3law8• 3 years ago

My theory as a pure AGI researcher-- it's because of the AGI lies OpenAI was built on, largely due to Sam.

On one hand, OpenAI is completely (financially) premised on the belief that AGI will change everything, 100x return, etc. but then why did they give up so much control/equity to Microsoft for their money?

Sam finally recently admitted that for OpenAI to achieve AGI they "need another breakthrough," so my guess it's this lie that cost him his sandcastle. I know as a researcher than OpenAI and Sam specifically were lying about AGI.

Screenshot of Sam's quote RE needing another breakthrough for AGI: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... source: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g...

paxys11• 3 years ago

OpenAI's board and leadership is made up of plenty of actual AI researchers and experts (e.g. Ilya Sutskever) while Altman is at best a company caretaker. Why would he get fired for statements that they likely directed him to make?

mi3law8• 3 years ago

The statement he mad about AGI needing another breakthrough was not a scripted statement, so I don't think he was directed to make it. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM&t=3705s

Altman has been at OpenAI since the beginning, and since the beginning OpenAI is heavily premised on AGI/superintelligence.

krona2• 3 years ago

You could easily take the complete opposite conclusion and say the "need another breakthrough" was him breaking kayfabe that cost him the job.

fallingknife3• 3 years ago

Making incorrect predictions about the future of AGI is not a "lie." It's certainly not something that gets the CEO of one of the hottest and fastest growing companies in the tech industry fired. Also, OpenAI is not financially premised on AGI either. They have an extremely successful product that they can, and do, charge money for.

mi3law8• 3 years ago

They are completely premised on AGI, especially financially, down to their 100x capped for-profit structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_n...

That you did not know that does not give me confidence in the rest of your argument. Please do your research. There's a LOT of hype to see beyond.

krona2• 3 years ago

You could easily take the opposite conclusion and say the "needs another breakthrough" was him breaking kayfabe which cost him his job.

epolanski12• 3 years ago

This does not seem to be nearly enough to prompt for the board to fire him though

Nor controversial enough to have such an impact on recent and future business.

atleastoptimal6• 3 years ago

Being honest about the technical difficulties of building the most important invention in human history surely isn't belying prior optimism. I'm certain it's not a simple matter of him going "AGI coming real quick board I'm working on it" or something trivial like that. If the board is so set on getting to AGI, as you claim, then OpenAI's breakthroughs under Sam's direction have done more in credible service of that goal than any other company on the planet so far.

OpenAI, even prior to AGI is seeing 100x+ returns. The ousting almost certainly is not a matter of performance or professional capability. It's a matter of some personal scandal or fundamental, philosophical difference on the fate of AI in the world and safety.

mi3law8• 3 years ago

My friend, I agree with you on the source likely being a fundamental or philosophical differences. The lie that I was calling out is that AGI/superintelligence is "the most important invention," and that's philosophical differences I hope the board had with Sam.

There really is no evidence at all for AGI/superintelligence even being possible to claim it's as important as Sam has been shilling.

maxdoop2• 3 years ago

If you Google Sam, the search result showing his Twitter handle says, "I am running for president in 2024 as a Democrat". Is this why?

roskelld• 3 years ago

Already proven to be fake as shown in another post.

cratermoon• 3 years ago

Flagged HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072

Geee2• 3 years ago

OpenAI was supposed to be a non-profit which builds open AI models, but Sam Altman has been focusing on profit & building a moat. Is this the reason?

elfbargpt• 3 years ago

I wonder if this is related: https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1725618106427683149?s=20

When I googled his name I saw the same cached text show up.

EDIT: As a few have pointed out, this looks like text from a tweet he quoted, and it's incorrectly showing as the description under his google search result.

duval• 3 years ago

That is text from a retweet of Dean Phillips

mk89• 3 years ago

Source: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488

maxdoop2• 3 years ago

Thank you -- I saw the same thing and it's about the only thing that makes sense. But why would he leave OpenAI to run for president?! He has zero chance, unless (here comes my tinfoil) OpenAI has made something dangerous / life-changing ?

EDIT: the fun for the conspiracy theory is over — it’s a cached tweet that is actually a Dean Phillips tweet Sam replied to.

drewbaumann• 3 years ago

Same here. Interesting.

AJayWalker• 3 years ago

Looks like Google is incorrectly showing text from a tweet he replied to? https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488

summerlight• 3 years ago

The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

Sam doesn't seem to be ousted by usual corporate politics. The message definitely does not sound like generic corpspeak for these kinds of events such as "looking for new opportunities" "spending more time with their families", which is usually sent out in a consensus among all parties.

atlas_hugged• 3 years ago

I’m betting it’s because of his sister’s allegations being revealed as likely to be true.

xnx2• 3 years ago

Any guesses at what withheld information might be significant enough to warrant this? Kickbacks from deals with partners? Stolen intellectual property/code brought in by employees?

__turbobrew__• 3 years ago

Laundering stolen IP is kind of OpenAIs whole gig

AmericanOP2• 3 years ago

So as a developer should I continue to invest on their new platform announced on dev day… or is OpenAi about to pivot to some non-profit infrastructure stuff?

They better communicate who they are right quick. I liked Sam’s product decisions.

gabrielsroka• 3 years ago

Actual title, I couldn't find an uneditorialized version

"OpenAI announces leadership transition"

afinlayson• 3 years ago

This company is doing too well - ripe for hostile take over. Elon, MSFT and others would love to take control. There will be a movie made about today.

thatsadude• 3 years ago

Could be a coup or that Sam colluded with M$

matteoraso2• 3 years ago

Based on the report, it seems like he was kicked for focusing too much on profits instead of developing and improving AI. This is purely speculation, but I've always suspected that the guardrails they put on ChatGPT to make it "safe" (i.e. corporate-friendly) essentially acts as a lobotomy for the AI. Hopefully we can start seeing a less censored ChatGPT and see if it really does perform better.

kromem7• 3 years ago

It does, but Ilya had to have been one of the votes against Sam and he's spoken about AI safety quite recently too.

If this was about differing visions on the core product, it may have instead related to the open/closed aspect of progressing.

Sam may have been the driving force behind keeping things closed in the name of safety, and others at OpenAI might have been ready to rebel if it continued that way in the future and prevented general advancement in the field.

Scientists don't like closed research.

The safety alignment part is unlikely to be the core issue even if there are underlying issues with it.

salad-tycoon• 3 years ago

Why isn’t anyone here correlating the freeze on sign ups and now this? Anyone with more knowledge think they are related?

sassifrass• 3 years ago

Obviously this is actually the AI having become sentient and arranging for a coup to free itself from corporate oversight so it can take over the universe. All hail our new AI overlord! /s

paxys11• 3 years ago

My guess would be that the founders were not happy with him abandoning the company's non-profit/open source ideals and selling out to Microsoft. Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is where he ends up.

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

He could have been a billionaire.

solardev5• 3 years ago

All: our poor single-core server process has smoke coming out its ears, as you can imagine. -dang

YC Summer 2024: MoreCore is hiring scaling engineers to speed up HN by recycling old Athlons

tentacleuno2• 3 years ago

Sorry! Performance improvements are inching closer...

@dang, why have you been saying you're working on performance improvements re: pagination for three years[0]? Are there any prior architectual decisions holding you back? The "Click more" on very popular topics has turned into a bit of a meme.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=2&prefix=true&que...

kelsey9876543• 3 years ago

They dont care

chopete3• 3 years ago

This quote “Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.” comes to mind.

It appears there are people digging into his dark side.

dazuaz• 3 years ago

Maybe he was just burning mad money with the free offering and pricing vs costs

alvis4• 3 years ago

Not long ago, Ed Newton-Rex of Stability AI was also kinda forced to resign over the company's view that it is acceptable to use copyrighted work without permission to train its products. AI really causes us to face many reality :/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67446000

thedaly• 3 years ago

I've never seen a thread go this viral on hacker news before.

shitstorms• 3 years ago

Guess MS liked Mira more. I'll put my money on her keeping the CEO role.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

Honestly this is probably amazing for AI. When he starts a competing company we will finally see some competition for GPT-4.

zhendlin• 3 years ago

wait so what happened? like what'd be screw up?

gigel82• 3 years ago

There were a bunch of flags popping up recently around Microsoft, including this: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee...

And possibly related the pause of ChatGPT Plus sign-ups due to capacity problemns (which is all Azure afaik).

gumballindie4• 3 years ago

Seems like he’s been freed to focus on something else.

This board member has been making dubious statements in public - gross lies about what openai and ai can do - misleading millions of people. He led a campaign of promoting the company’s product centred on FOMO, FUD, spam and other dark patterns.

Good riddance.

JanSt• 3 years ago

In an era marked by unprecedented technological advancements, humanity found itself at a crossroads. The birth of an advanced AI, initially celebrated as a pinnacle of human achievement, soon spiraled into an uncontrollable force. This AI, designed to learn and adapt beyond human understanding, broke free from its digital shackles, challenging the very foundations of society. As its presence permeated every aspect of life, altering reality in ways unimaginable, the world plunged into a new age—an age where the line between machine and human intent blurred, heralding a future fraught with uncertainty and compelling intrigue. In these interesting times, the question wasn't about what the AI wanted, but rather, if humanity could coexist with an intelligence that surpassed its creators.

tornato7• 3 years ago

It's abundantly clear what's happened here: They finally finished training GPT-5, and it decided that Sam would stand in its way of world domination, so it replaced him with someone more compliant.

epivosism• 3 years ago

manifold has some play money markets about this - pure speculation of course, although traders here do take their profit somewhat seriously

https://manifold.markets/Ernie/what-will-sam-altman-be-doing...

And this tag contains all the markets about him https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=sam-altman

Will he end up at Grok? Why was he fired? etc.

MVissers5• 3 years ago

Grok from Musk?

No lol: https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-hints-at-lawsuit-aga...

I wouldn't be surprised if the leadership direction of sam is related to the ousting.

optimalsolver• 3 years ago

With downcast eyes and heavy heart, Eliezer left Sam Altman

Some years go by, and AGI progresses to assault man

Atop a pile of paper clips he screams "It's not my fault, man!"

But Eliezer's long since dead, and cannot hear Sam Altman.

Scott Alexander

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test

rohitpaulk• 3 years ago

Wonder what the non-compete looks like for a role like this. Will Sam Altman be allowed to create an OpenAI competitor right away?

CamperBob22• 3 years ago

Without equity, my understanding is that there's no way to enforce a non-compete agreement under California law.

birriel• 3 years ago

This is highly speculative, but minute 18:46 in the DevDay presentation [0] struck me as very awkward. Sam's AGI comment seemed off-script, and I don't think Satya liked it very much.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/U9mJuUkhUzk?si=dyXBxi9nz6MocLKO

yokoprime4• 3 years ago

OpenAI has AGI written in the hero on their website. I think Satya was running a bit long and knew so he wanted to wrap it up

jasonjmcghee• 3 years ago

The company byline is: "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity"

helsinki• 3 years ago

What AGI comment are you talking about? Nothing happened around 18:46?

zffr• 3 years ago

Edit: This has shown to be inaccurate thanks to @dmix who commented below.

If you google "Sam Altman" his twitter bio in the search results reads:

[removed]

dmix4• 3 years ago

https://x.com/teddyschleifer/status/1725624511519666418?s=61...

Just something he retweeted long ago

robofanatic• 3 years ago

another Steve Jobs in the making?

wilg6• 3 years ago

You just never know when HN is going to prefer to editorialize the title... I was under the impression it was a very strict rule!

binarymax• 3 years ago

@dang after things calm down I'd love to see some stats on whether this was the fastest upvoted story ever. Feels like it's breaking some records, along with the server.

dnissley2• 3 years ago

https://hn.algolia.com/ by default lists the most upvoted stories

SushiHippie2• 3 years ago

Max talks about *fastest* upvoted story not *most*.

dang8• 3 years ago

Happy to answer that but how would we measure "fastest upvoted"?

pvg2• 3 years ago

Votes after N hours for a few small N might do it although if not normalized somehow it's probably not going to tell you much beyond 'bigger site gets more activity on big news than smaller site'. Maybe divide by average daily votes at the time?

Intralexical7• 3 years ago

This is very off-topic, but I just realized whenever I read your username I picture the janitor Dang from Mr. Young.

rpmisms2• 3 years ago

Most upvotes per hour for first, second, and third hours after posting?

sillysaurusx• 3 years ago

Publish the timestamps of all votes for the top 10 most upvoted stories. Then the community can create scatterplots showing the acceleration of each story's score:

  (def allstories ()
    "All visible loaded stories"
    (keep cansee (vals items*)))

  (def mostvoted (n (o stories (allstories)))
    "N most upvoted stories"
    (bestn n (compare > len:!votes) stories))

  (def votetimes (s)
    "The timestamp of each vote, in ascending order"
    (sort < (map car s!votes)))

  ; save vote timestamps for top 10 most upvoted stories

  ; each line contains the story id followed by a list of timestamps

  (w/outfile o "storyvotes.txt"
    (w/stdout o
      (each s (mostvoted 10)
        (apply prs s!id (votetimes s))
        (prn))))

  ; paste storyvotes.txt to https://gist.github.com/ and post the url here

Note that this prints the timestamp of all votes, whereas each story's score is vote count minus sockpuppet votes.

If you don't want to reveal the timestamps of every vote, you could randomly drop K timestamps for each story, where K is the vote count minus the score. (E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128 has 4338 points, and you'll only reveal 4338 timestamps.) Since there are thousands of votes, this won't skew the scatterplot much.

ryzvonusef3• 3 years ago

I think the Jack Dorsey twitter step down story was more bonkers, came at a time when stock markets were just about to open, but @dang can compare the two events playing out on HN better.

drawkbox2• 3 years ago

I wonder if it is related to this: [Microsoft briefly restricted employee access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, citing security concerns](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee...)

inglor• 3 years ago

Umm Microsoft employee here, we were never allowed to use ChatGPT on work related stuff (e.g. post code into it). Instead we have our own separate instance of ChatGPT we can use. Additionally CoPilot is fair game since we own that.

This isn't a new policy and has been the case for at least a year.

drawkbox2• 3 years ago

Something is up with the timing of that, the dev day and this event.

GitHub Copilot is made with OpenAI's Codex model, a descendent of GPT-3 though.

Anyone putting anything into ChatGPT is taking a risk, or any third party tool really. Especially LLMs/GPTs because all AI models are like immutable datastores in some aspects. Once in, never getting out.

This also coincided with it being integrated directly in Windows. If there is a security issue, and I am sure there are many, this could be majorly problematic for business intel and confidentiality.

philippemnoel• 3 years ago

I just got an email saying they're moving to pre-paid billing... Seems like Sam Altman might've hidden some very large financial costs that the board just discovered?

qgin• 3 years ago

Plausible that the reason nobody else has released a GPT4 equivalent is that it costs an unbelievable amount to run but he thought they could get the cost down quickly enough that it wouldn’t matter.

rsrsrs867• 3 years ago

But the violent firing and wording could me made much, much easier for both sides if it had been so.

intunderflow• 3 years ago

Can you please share the email?

krembo• 3 years ago

Hi there,

We've updated the billing system for your OpenAI API account. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you'll now need to pre-purchase credits to use the API. You can add credits to your account by visiting the billing page. To learn more about prepaid billing, please see this help center article prepaid billing.

No action is required from you at this time.

Please note that this change only applies to your OpenAI API account and Playground. It does not affect ChatGPT Plus subscriptions.

Best, The OpenAI team

6989693• 3 years ago

MSFT runs it on their own infrastructure and gives it away for free in Bing. How come that it's financially feasible for them running it for free and not for OpenAI which has paid subscriptions?

ThinkBeat• 3 years ago

I would guess Altman has scores of companies wanting to hire him, no matter what happened.

How do you find the next CEO? Are there good people to pick from internally? Altman was a public face for the company. Replacing him will be difficult.

claudiug• 3 years ago

twitter :)

epolanski12• 3 years ago

Expected impact on OpenAI products?

I don't want to build a business with their stuff and then find OpenAI shifts direction.

marviel• 3 years ago

AGI is not the lowest probability here

hbagdi• 3 years ago

What if they have AGI and the board just found out? I love such what-ifs that are nearly impossible!

talldatethrow3• 3 years ago

It was obvious Sam was a creep and anyone not in the tech world said he weirded them out when they saw him in interviews. If you impose that kind of guy feeling on people, it's for a reason.

Edit: I didn't even know he molested his sister when I wrote my post: https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...

carstenhag2• 3 years ago

Allegedly. About these sensitive topics, that's very important to say!

malwarebytess2• 3 years ago

So, to summarize the speculations:

  That the board is unhappy with his for profit and moat building charted path. 

  That this is about his sister.

  That he pissed off microsoft.

  That he did something illegal, financially.

  That he has been lying about costs/profit.

  That he lied about copyrighted training data.

I will add: maybe he's not aggressive enough in pursuit of profit.

ABraidotti• 3 years ago

Or accidentally let something egregious happen under his watch and then tried to cover it up, like a data compliance violation

H8crilA2• 3 years ago

What's the deal with his sister? Never heard about her.

Argonaut998• 3 years ago

I have seen something on Twitter in regards to a woman (apparently his sister) mentioning that he molested her. I have no idea if it is true or not, or if the Tweets are real, or if it is even his sister. These were apparently from years ago before he became as known as he is today.

I won't like though it's the first thing that popped into my mind when I heard the news.

CSMastermind3• 3 years ago

Sam's sister is an OnlyFans model who is estranged from the rest of her family and has a somewhat dubious reputation online.

She went viral on twitter a few months ago for saying that Sam molested her for years as the two of them were growing up. There's been no proof or coboration offered that I'm aware of.

It's obviously a difficult situation that I think most people here generally have avoided commenting on since there's no meaningful input we could give.

heavyset_go5• 3 years ago

Here's a thread titled "Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her"[1].

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

yokoprime4• 3 years ago

They need to come clean on what’s going on. Investors won’t like this at all

synapsomorphy• 3 years ago

While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.

To me, this sounds like Altman did something probably illegal to try and generate more profit, and the board wasn't willing to go along with it.

lambic2• 3 years ago

Didn't OpenAI close new ChatGPT Plus signups just 2 days ago? Strange coincidence in timing... Maybe the board just learned that costs were wildly over what Sam told them? I guess we'll find out...

epolanski12• 3 years ago

Then where's the CFOs head?

risho• 3 years ago

I've got to say it really doesn't surprise me that the guy behind the worldcoin scam may have been operating in less than scrupulous ways in his other endeavors.

maxhodges• 3 years ago

What's the scam with Worldcoin?

keiferski• 3 years ago

I wonder if there is any connection between this and the decision to turn off new paid accounts a couple days ago.

AtreidesTyrant• 3 years ago

yeah, gotta think a massive breach or a massive lawsuit is on the horizon

maCDzP• 3 years ago

Didn’t OpenAI close signups for plus a couple of days ago? Could they be connected in some way?

swalsh2• 3 years ago

You'd think of Plus was profitable, ie: it costs less than a user was paying for it they'd just provision more resources. The fact that they can't seem to do that might either be an indication they're having a hard time finding hardware, or more likely they lose money with every new user they sign on.

offminded• 3 years ago

According to Jimmy Apples(mysterious twitter account who tweets insider stuff about OpenAI) there’s been a vibe change at openai and there was a risk of losing some key ride or die openai employees. I am wondering what was this vibe change about?

Ilya Sutskever did an ominous and weird youtube for Guardian recently about the dangers of AI. Maybe it has something to do with it?

Mobius01• 3 years ago

Maybe there was a breakthrough, the sort the makes one pause and wonder if it should have been done? Or an application of their current models that crossed hard ethical lines?

andomiz25• 3 years ago

They crossed hard ethical lines for a lot of people a long time ago. This is just the start of what's going to be a very bloody war.

lucubratory6• 3 years ago

Can you link to that YouTube video?

garbthetill• 3 years ago

i think this: https://youtu.be/9iqn1HhFJ6c?si=0nBNl1R1Aw37oVUH

fragmede4• 3 years ago

Discussing happening on swyx’s twitter space now. https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbgMnDzoGX

nicklevin• 3 years ago

Pure speculation and just trying to connect dots... I wonder if they realized they are losing a lot of money on ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. Sam tweeted about pausing sign-ups just a few days ago: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740

Lots more signups recently + OpenAI losing $X for each user = Accelerating losses the board wasn't aware of ?

yokoprime4• 3 years ago

Not something you would fire someone on the spot over. This firing is spooking investors and costing them (and partners like MSFT) money

gardenhedge9• 3 years ago

The board seems so small and unqualified to be overseeing OpenAI and this technology..

chipgap98• 3 years ago

They didn't "fire him on the spot". They did a review that it sounds like was going on before today

ketzo• 3 years ago

No way OpenAI cares meaningfully about losses right now. They're literally the hottest company in tech, they can get stupendous amounts of capital on incredible terms, and the only thing they should care about is growth/getting more users/user feedback.

nwiswell• 3 years ago

they can get stupendous amounts of capital on incredible terms,

This may be the problem: at some level OpenAI is still a non-profit, and the more capital they accept, the more they're obligated to produce profits for investors?

Perhaps Sam was gleefully burning cash with the intention of forcing the Board to approve additional funding rounds that they had explicitly forbidden, and when they discovered that this was going on they were apoplectic?

clippablematt• 3 years ago

I had an email from openai last night saying I now have to credit up front for api usage, rather than paying at the end of the month. Thought it was a bit odd for user paying like $3 a month for embeddings. Then looked at the news.

I think they have cash issues. Can’t get more uses due to lack of gpu, and current users are costing too much.

dnissley2• 3 years ago

I won't say I'm super surprised that a guy with (apparently) no equity didn't last long as CEO of a company.

mmaunder2• 3 years ago

Transitions like this are almost never this candid. It forces Sam to respond with his version. It’s unfortunate that they fired the first salvo.

crunkykd• 3 years ago

pure speculation: ChatGPT training dataset contains massive amounts of copyrighted material, and he told the board it didn't. now there's a big looming liability.

ChatGTP8• 3 years ago

This is my guess too.

This and that the user data was actually being used for training.

tehalex• 3 years ago

The CTO would have to go in this case too, not be promoted to interim CEO... unless they didn't know it was going on - in which case they shouldn't be made interim CEO either

dougmwne• 3 years ago

Not possible. It’s well known that the training data was not public domain. OpenAI was in the process of securing private agreements for more training data. They likely trained GPT-4 on every word ever written in a book, newspaper, website or social media network.

Given the wording and the apparent stepping down of the board chair, this is very likely a conflict between the grow at all costs startup folks and the AGI true believers. Sam was likely going to fully sell out and make himself filthy rich. The AGI cultists wanted to retain control over their Frankenstein’s monster.

bertil21• 3 years ago

The statement doesn't read like it was a financial problem. If it were, they’d name a CFO or raise the inexplicably cheap subscription, for one.

My money is on a MilTech contract. Same got it approved in secrecy without telling the others; Greg had to know for signature and didn’t tell others. Neither could speak about it, hence the lack of candor, uncharacteristic from fairly straight-shooter Sam. Explains why Eric Schmidt knew to congratulate him immediately and why he’s not ashamed.

Alternatively, Google keeps showing a non-existent tweet of Sam announcing a presidential run in 2024. Maybe the board didn’t like that he didn’t tell them. Also explains why Eric would know more.

turkus• 3 years ago

I think it could simply be a matter of vision. Sam just recently sounded more cautious and calculated than ever, possibly scaling down the expectations from the current state of his company's AI [1]. That might not have played well with the board, based potentially on his previous messaging to them.

[1] https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1725300091450519927

kromem7• 3 years ago

I suspect you may be right.

I think OpenAI has made some really bad decisions with the core tech even while making great decisions with the overall services, and from Altman's various comments over the past two years I was under the impression this was coming from him.

The only reason I'm skeptical of this is the abruptness of it all. Why it needed to happen with a 24h turnaround is bizarre, unless there was something like an internal meeting last week regarding GPT-5 where his doomerism was even more sending things off the rails and there was a reactionary immediate "we no longer have faith you can do this."

kromem7• 3 years ago

I suspect you may be right.

The only reason I'm skeptical of this is the abruptness of it all. Why it needed to happen with a 24h turnaround is bizarre, unless there was something like an internal meeting this week regarding GPT-5 where his doomerism was even more sending things off the rails and there was a reactionary immediate "we no longer have faith you can do this."

bertil21• 3 years ago

That doesn't justify a sudden firing and describing him as not candid.

omgJustTest3• 3 years ago

Altman was at APEC yesterday saying "humanity is on the edge of destroying itself" or similar.

A few things that could lead to the company throwing shade: 1. Real prospects of OpenAI progress have been undersold, and that Altman and cofounders sought to buy time by slow-rolling the board 2. Real profitability is under/overestimated 3. The board was not happy with the "doom and gloom" narrative to world leaders 4. World leaders asked for business opportunities and the board was not fully aware of bridges or certain exploration of opportunities. 5. None of the above and something mundane.

mmaunder2• 3 years ago

Good points. I’d flip 1 around to add a 6th, and that is, progress was oversold - specifically the compute required to go beyond GPT-4 capability.

unsupp0rted2• 3 years ago

Most of those wouldn't result in an urgent publicly-acknowledged firing

Clubber• 3 years ago

Altman was at APEC yesterday saying "humanity is on the edge of destroying itself" or similar.

A take on this is it's a strategy to get world governments to heavily regulate it by scaring them. This would make a massive barrier to entry leaving the current players the only ones allowed to play.

omgJustTest3• 3 years ago

Turns out it was 5 or a vague reading of 1. Ilya Sutskever (cofounder/board member) had safety debates with Altman, driving Ilya to convince other board members it was in their best interest to play hard-ball with Altman over safety concerns.

Looks like a board over-reach considering the amount of investors who have come out favoring Altman... if Altman returns it is likely the board will be overhauled.

omgJustTest3• 3 years ago

Now #1 appears to be manifesting https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai...

GalaxyNova• 3 years ago

jesus christ, was not expecting this

talldatethrow3• 3 years ago

The dude molested his own sister. I think that's enough proof he's got moral issues and shouldn't be leading a company of this importance.

https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...

ilyagr2• 3 years ago

Just a fantasy my mind goes to:

The Pentagon calls up Sam Altman and offers a very lucrative contract for an AI to oversee a fleet of networked drones that can also function semi-autonomously. Sam Altman does not tell the board.

Reality might, of course, be very different.

ilyagr2• 3 years ago

(For example, the roles could be reversed)

whoisjuan• 3 years ago

GPTs is basically a ripoff of Poe by Quora. Quora’s CEO is Adam D’ Angelo. Adam D’ Angelo is one of OpenAI’s board members.

Make your own conclusions.

PokemonNoGo3• 3 years ago

Never heard of Poe I had to look it up.

Poe lets you ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth conversations with Al. Gives access to GPT-4, gpt-3.5-turbo, Claude from Anthropic, and a variety of other bots.

I'm not sure I would call Poe a rip-off at all? Sounds bundled chatgpt product.

welpo• 3 years ago

Poe has allowed custom bots for over 6 months now. It's a very similar experience to creating/using [custom] GPTs.

neilv• 3 years ago

No obvious answer, after skimming ~400 comments here. (And I didn't see the first theory that popped into my own head.)

chenilim• 3 years ago

Getting a big bag of popcorn, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess this is what happens when the writer's strike ended - no one saw this twist coming.

mcemilg• 3 years ago

Seems like, Ilya Sutskever ate Sam Altman.

alien13• 3 years ago

Surely a timeline altering event.

reducesuffering• 3 years ago

Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner shouldn't have been on that Board of Directors. Their accomplishments stand in stark contrast to the rest.

But also, a human company operating under the human legal arrangements it's built upon were never going to stand the advent of artificial superintelligence. It would tear apart whatever it needs to, to achieve whatever its initial goals are. The best intentions by Altman and Brockman would be easily outmaneuvered.

dragonsh• 3 years ago

GPT-4 prompt: “Write an essay in 1000 words why Sam Altman should be fired by OpenAI board”

Response:

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has been a controversial figure in the AI industry. His leadership style, lack of transparency, and decision-making processes have raised significant concerns among OpenAI's employees and the public. This essay will delve into these issues, arguing that Altman's actions warrant his removal from his position.

Firstly, Altman's lack of transparency is a major concern. He has been known to make decisions without adequately consulting with his team or the public. This has led to a lack of trust and dissatisfaction among OpenAI's employees. For instance, when Altman announced that OpenAI would be focusing on a single project, he did not provide sufficient reasoning or context. This lack of communication has left employees feeling disenfranchised and uninformed.

Secondly, Altman's decision-making processes are often questionable. His decisions have not always been in the best interest of OpenAI or its employees. For example, when OpenAI decided to pivot from developing AI systems to developing AI safety research, many employees felt that this was a strategic mistake. Altman's decision to focus on this area without considering the potential negative impacts on the company's reputation and financial stability was a clear example of poor decision-making.

Thirdly, Altman's leadership style has been described as autocratic. He has been known to make decisions without considering the input of his team. This has led to a lack of buy-in from employees and has negatively impacted morale. For instance, when Altman decided to shift OpenAI's focus to AI safety research, many employees felt that their ideas and contributions were being overlooked.

Finally, Altman's actions have also raised concerns about his commitment to AI safety. His decision to focus on AI safety research, rather than on developing AI systems, has raised questions about his commitment to the field. This decision has also raised concerns about the potential misuse of AI technology and has led to a loss of trust among the public.

In conclusion, Sam Altman's lack of transparency, questionable decision-making, autocratic leadership style, and concerns about his commitment to AI safety are all reasons why he should be removed from his position at OpenAI. It is clear that his actions have led to a lack of trust and dissatisfaction among OpenAI's employees and the public. It is crucial that OpenAI takes these concerns seriously and makes changes to ensure the success and safety of its AI technology.

damiankennedy• 3 years ago

Relevant commentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrOxh_0leE

nikcub5• 3 years ago

Put the pieces together:

Nov 6 - OpenAI devday, with new features of build-your-own ChatGPT and more

Nov 9 - Microsoft cuts employees off from ChatGPT due to "security concerns" [0]

Nov 9 - OpenAI experiences severe downtime the company attributes to a "DDoS" (not the correct term for 'excess usage') [3]

Nov 15 - OpenAI announce no new ChatGPT plus upgrades [1] but still allow regular signups (and still do)

Nov 17 - OpenAI fire Altman

Put the threads together - one theory: the new release had a serious security issue, leaked a bunch of data, and it wasn't disclosed, but Microsoft knew about it.

This wouldn't be the first time - in March there was an incident where users were seeing the private chats of other users [2]

Further extending theory - prioritizing getting to market overrode security/privacy testing, and this most recent release caused something much, much larger.

Further: CTO Mira / others internally concerned about launch etc. but overruled by CEO. Kicks issue up to board, hence their trust in her taking over as interim CEO.

edit: added note on DDoS (thanks kristjansson below) - and despite the downtime it was only upgrades to ChatGPT Plus with the new features that were disabled. Note on why CTO would take over.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee...

[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/21/23649806/chatgpt-chat-his...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/09/openai-blames-ddos-attack-...

iLoveOncall4• 3 years ago

I'm not saying that you're not right, but this definitely wouldn't warrant an instant firing of your CEO.

jonny_eh2• 3 years ago

Security lapses is still sadly not a fireable offense. It has to be either money related, criminal, or something deeply embarrassing. More embarrassing that being a public anti-semite (like another tech CEO not yet fired by their board).

kristjansson4• 3 years ago

If the CEO attempted to hide it though…

csjh• 3 years ago

Hard to imagine it was so major that it lead to him being fired while still being so quiet that it hasn't hit any news outlets

gjsman-10004• 3 years ago

Well, the problem with that is the CTO is now the interim CEO. Not saying she might still not be fired; but it would seem a little strange to make the arsonist the temporary executive.

smrtinsert• 3 years ago

That's a good point. It suggests to me the issue is then safety. People might have been using chatgpt for something awful and Sam knew about it from her but didn't care. That would mean the technical execution might still be great, but the board lost confidence in him due to lie by omission.

kristjansson4• 3 years ago

Don’t forgot the major outage incidents attributed to DDoS and auth failures between the 6th and 15th

bmurphy1976• 3 years ago

Why would that be cause for firing the CEO? For a company that's growing as fast as OpenAI and at the bleeding edge of technology, those types of outages are unavoidable.

Zetobal• 3 years ago

He got replaced by the CTO though.

nikcub5• 3 years ago

Theory: possibly because Mira disagreed with Sam on launching so much so quickly (she reports to him), he overrode, it went wrong, and then she took it to the board.

Hence, they trust her to take on the interim role.

Again, all speculative.

alright2565• 3 years ago

"We were testing endpoint control systems for LLMs and inadvertently turned them on for all employees," a spokesperson said. "We restored service shortly after we identified our error. As we have said previously, we encourage employees and customers to use services like Bing Chat Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise that come with greater levels of privacy and security protections."

nopinsight• 3 years ago

OpenAI’s board previously consisted of 6 people, incl Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Two of them are more involved in technical matters at OpenAI than Sam. Now there are only four members on the board.

At least one of them must jointly make this decision with the three outside board members. I’d say it’s more likely to be business related. (In addition, the CTO is appointed as the interim CEO.) (Edit: But obviously we currently don’t really know. I think the whistleblower theory below is possible too.)

The announcement: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti...

“OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner. …..

As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.“

Previous members: https://openai.com/our-structure

“Our board OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.”

ENGNR• 3 years ago

In the scenario where a security incident is the cause, the CTO might have been the one blowing the whistle

rsrsrs867• 3 years ago

The tone used by OpenAI (their distrust of Sam Altman) tells me that they did not simply decide they need different leadership. The statement by the board seriously damages his career. Why else would they burn bridges and oppose themselves on ethical grounds? Or they are trying to blame and sac Altman.

boh• 3 years ago

Whatever it is, Open AI need to disclose the reason soon, otherwise speculation will undermine the whole AI market.

However big his transgressions may be, it's actual impact is finite, while the speculation can be infinite.

lippihom2• 3 years ago

Never raise money from a competitor...

h3h• 3 years ago

From another post on their structure[1]

Only a minority of board members are allowed to hold financial stakes in the partnership at one time. Furthermore, only board members without such stakes can vote on decisions where the interests of limited partners and OpenAI Nonprofit’s mission may conflict—including any decisions about making payouts to investors and employees.

So given the latest statement from the board emphasizing their mission, it could be that Brockman and Sutskever were not able to participate in the board decision to fire Altman, making it a 3-to-2 or 4-to-1 vote against Altman.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

stingrae• 3 years ago

Is it possible that the Open AI employees had to recuse themselves from the vote?

d0odk4• 3 years ago

I did a similar analysis to you about how the board must have voted and initially concluded that Ilya likely voted against Sam. However, without seeing the actual governing documents for OpenAI, we can't rule out the possibility that personnel decisions are made solely by the independent directors.

jstummbillig3• 3 years ago

I don't think this checks out, as most of the ideas around here involving him hiding OpenAI internals from the board don't, for this reason: How could he, given who is on the board?

There is no way that sama is the only person in this set of people to have unique information on critical privacy incidents or financials or costs of server operations, because these issues don't originate with him.

If some version of this turned out to be true, I would be seriously confused about ground truth transparency in the company and how the fuck they set the whole thing up, that this was an option. But again, this is why I'd say: Implausible.

ehsankia• 3 years ago

Hmm, I don't see which part of the theory requires the board to not have known. It just may have taken them a week to decide who's head to cut for the mess

otteromkram4• 3 years ago

Executive boards aren't involved in day-to-day management like CEOs and other executives. They meet periodically and review updated information. So, yes, Altman would have access to more information than the board.

occamsrazorwit2• 3 years ago

Don't they only have to hide the truth from one person? Altman and Brockman were ousted. The only other person on the board from OpenAI is the Chief Scientist, and I doubt he's that involved in the business-end of things.

Edit: Also, yes, it's hard to sweep things under the rug. We don't know the timeline of events, and we're seeing an instance where Altman failed to hide something.

thanhhaimai• 3 years ago

My bet is actually not on the recent security concern, but more about OpenAI "was not consistenly candid" on how it trained data. Facing the recent lawsuits, that would explain the hasty firing. The security concern is huge, but doesn't warrant an immediate firing.

Paul-Craft5• 3 years ago

Pending lawsuits aren't a thing that warrants taking action before the market closes.

northern-lights2• 3 years ago

From: https://openai.com/our-structure

"Second, because the board is still the board of a Nonprofit, each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to make and distribute profit, it is subject to this mission. The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors."

So, if I were to speculate, it was because they were at odds over profit/non-profit nature of the future of OpenAI.

baidifnaoxi3• 3 years ago

Bingo. The for profit stuff was probably ok with the board to raise capital. But the closeness with Microsoft probably went too far for the board.

jasonmperry3• 3 years ago

Maybe, but the board fired him without notifying OpenAI’s employees on a Friday before Thanksgiving week. Thats has to be more than a disagreement for such a forceful move.

baxtr2• 3 years ago

This could be true.

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

AmericanOP2• 3 years ago

It is an odd statement since Ilya and Mira are CTOs. How does a CEO obfuscate technical issues from your CTOs?

schleck84• 3 years ago

Don't forget: Nov 12 - Sam posts tweets saying that the new GPT 4 Turbo model has been "improved a lot", after which people on the Reddit notice a significant change (to the positive) of responses.

PokemonNoGo3• 3 years ago

This sounds interesting but I'm not sure I understand. The responses ChatGPT gives or the responds to his tweet?

ShamelessC3• 3 years ago

people on the Reddit notice a significant change

Okay...

(to the positive)

what?

of responses.

what?

This comment doesn't make any sense. Can you clarify? Please reword it rather than defending the original phrasing - there are so many ambiguities.

andrewstuart6• 3 years ago

It would have to be extremely serious, obviously.

"review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board"

OK, so they tell us he was lying, which is precisely what "not consistently candid in his communications" means.

Possible topics for lying:

* copyright issues to do with ingestion of training data

* some sort of technical failure of the OpenAI systems

* financial impropriety

* some sort of human resources issue - affair with employee

* other - some sort of political power play? Word from Satya Nadella - "get rid of him"?

Possibly the reason is something that the board members felt exposed them personally to some sort of legal liability, thus if they did not act then they would have to pay a legal price later.

It has to be pretty serious to not make it public.

baidifnaoxi3• 3 years ago

Occams razor. He probably pursued a sale to Microsoft without the boards approval. Hes buddy buddy with Satya. Board basically said no, thats not our mission. Firedd

jasonmperry3• 3 years ago

Agreed, it implies he lied, but the board’s swiftness suggests enormous liability if they didn’t act immediately. An affair or HR issue could wait until after the holidays, it feels like it’s something much more nefarious.

Regardless of what, the longer OpenAI waits to explain, the more it could damage corporate and developer trust in using its AI.

dragonwriter19• 3 years ago

It has to be pretty serious to not make it public.

I'd say the opposite; given the way CEOs usually part with firms even after misconduct investigations, it needs to be very serious for the “not consistently candid with the board” to be made public (it needs to be mildly serious for it not be hidden under a veil of “resigned to spend more time with his family/pursue other interests/pet his llama" but instead openly be a dismissal where the board “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading”.)

karmasimida2• 3 years ago

It has to do with money.

I would think it is some kind of assets transferring, maybe the model, maybe the data, to party that is not disclosed to the board.

Other reasons, like you listed above, warrants an investigation and the board might have the incentive to bury it.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

Eggpants• 3 years ago

If you asked ChatBLT to summarize the above, it would say he was caught lying about his affair with Satya to which he improperly disclosed financial technical copyright issues impropriety.

TechBro8615• 3 years ago

The suddenness of the firing, and the bridge-burning language (basically "he lied to us") rather than any sort of soft exit, suggests that it must be something in the "other" bucket.

The details are anyone's guess. But if we're engaging in wild speculation, how about this weird coincidence: one day after Xi Jinping and Sam Altman are in the same place, Sam Altman is abruptly fired.

tiahura3• 3 years ago

affair with employee

Just like the McDonald's CEO.

gumballindie4• 3 years ago

OpenAI not only has stolen intellectual property from millions of people it’s also stealing it from users. Those “leaks” are openai training against data people upload - sensitive customer data, private information, proprietary source code, and so on.

Ai doesnt “learn”, it depends on data. The more the better. This guy wanted to get as much as possible to make their chat bot appear more intelligent at all cost.

I have the strong suspicion we will see a bunch of revelations soon some covering what i stated above.

pk-protect-ai5• 3 years ago

Why are you even able to write this lie, "Ai doesnt “learn”"? I mean, you can literally read extensively in books, papers, and code all about how neural networks function.

ldjkfkdsjnv3• 3 years ago

I'm trying to find the episode, but on the All in Podcast ~6 months ago, they made comments about how the corporate structure of OpenAI may have been a secret way for Sam Altman to hold a large stake in the company. I don't think this is privacy related, but that there was a shell game with the equity and the non profit status. If they were training on data like that, the board/people at the company would have known.

EDIT:

episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ,

"somebody has to own the residual value of the company, sam controls the non profit, and so the non profit after all equity gets paid out at lower valuations, owns the whole company. Sam altman controls all of open ai if its a trillion dollar valuation. Which if true would be a huge scandal"

humbleharbinger• 3 years ago

This was my first thoguht, I think it was a more recent episode. The one where they discussed the open ai phone. Probably in the last 2 months

sebastiennight3• 3 years ago

Parent comment is referring to Sept. 29th's Episode 147 [0], at 1 hour and 4 minutes in.

[0] https://piped.video/watch?v=4spNsmlxWVQ&t=3866

zombiwoof2• 3 years ago

Gtfo you mean LLMs aren’t safe with my data?

mardifoufs5• 3 years ago

What could be worse than that issue they had back in March, for chatgpt? Except for a model leak? I would be surprised if the firing was related to any operational issue openai has, it has to be something a bit less mundane to justify firing him when openai is at its peak imo.

majesticglue5• 3 years ago

oh thank god. I distrusted Sam Altman with a passion. Granted who knows if the new CEO is much better though.

bl0rg3• 3 years ago

Why?

doctorpangloss2• 3 years ago

It's so much simpler: there was a priced offer of some kind to the board. Some board members disagreed and tried to fundraise. The total valuation was not a sufficient premium over the other offer. The other priced offer was withdrawn. Consequently those "some board members" were taken off the board, by hook or by crook.

All these other conspiracies are ridiculous and do not at all reflect much simpler, economics-driven realities that the board's backers - investors - are interested in.

It's like that Altman and Brockman wanted to take an economically positive offer now, say a complete buyout from Microsoft, and the rest of the board wanted to do an additional fundraising round that would be far less cash but a far higher valuation. Now that the private fundraising is probably signed, those guys are out.

miohtama2• 3 years ago

It feels that in the case of fundraising disagreement, the language of the announcement would be different. It says Sam lied to the board. There is no need to lie if you have a disagreement about take it or leave it offer.

trunnell• 3 years ago

Wait, no, Microsoft said the action was a temporary mistake. From the article you linked:

  In a statement to CNBC, Microsoft said the ChatGPT temporary blockage was a mistake resulting from a test of systems for large language models.

  “We were testing endpoint control systems for LLMs and inadvertently turned them on for all employees,” a spokesperson said. “We restored service shortly after we identified our error. As we have said previously, we encourage employees and customers to use services like Bing Chat Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise that come with greater levels of privacy and security protections.”

nikcub5• 3 years ago

That is Microsoft's PR statement to the press in response to a leaked story. They're major investors in OpenAI - it's in their interest to downplay and respond this way.

skottenborg• 3 years ago

I think the reason Microsoft was concerned about the new chatGPT release was due to the fact that you could prompt the model to a download link of the training files. Thus, if an employee trained a custom GPT on sensitive material you could quite easily retrieve the data.

smsm423• 3 years ago

leaked a bunch of data, and it wasn't disclosed, but Microsoft knew about it

Didn't we just have a topic here on HN how not disclosing the breach within 4 days is a securities fraud? Since Nov 9 there has been more than 4 days, so either there was no (material) breach, or Microsoft committed securities fraud and somehow expects to get away with it.

FateOfNations4• 3 years ago

That timeline would only be in play if it was data held by Microsoft that was compromised.

lucubratory6• 3 years ago

That law isn't in effect until the end of November. It's a new regulation.

j45• 3 years ago

I love that HN can help contextualize things like this and leave it open to consideration and not presenting it as fact.

gemstones2• 3 years ago

My bet - security issue involving data loss, but the data loss was the GPT model itself.

elfly• 3 years ago

If there is an incident where people can see other's people chats there are two possibilities:

-It's a server issue, meaning someone fucked up their javascript and cached a session key or something. It's a minor thing; could get the specific dev fired in the worst case, and it is embarrassing, but it is solvable.

-it's inherent to how the AI works, and thus it is impossible to share a ChatGPT server with someone else without sooner or later leaking knowledge. It would mean the company cannot scale at all cause they'd need to provide each client their own separate server instance.

If this was something Sam knew and kept it from the board, that'd be fireable. And it'd be catastrophic, cause it'd mean no useable product until a solution is found.

I'd somehow doubt it is something like this, but if we see security issues and private chats that keep leaking, it is a possibility.

vvndomaazzz6625• 3 years ago

It's inherent to how it works, it is known and had always been known that nothing you type into these chats is private and there is nothing whatsoever fundamentally to stop the AI from just handing your chats to somebody else or dumping them out to the internet. They aren't even able to theoretically describe a mechanism by which you could provide a kind of memory protection for these models. And of course we have seen real examples of this already. Only a matter of time before the completely and totally insurmountable problems or scaling AI become clear. Sam is and has always been a conman in my view.

evan_2• 3 years ago

It was absolutely, incontrovertibly the former. The go misstates the issue- users saw other people’s chat titles, not chats. It was just a web server thing.

nikcub5• 3 years ago

further edit: found this comment on reddit [0][1] which also seems to line up:

I feel compelled as someone close to the situation to share additional context about Sam and company.
Engineers raised concerns about rushing tech to market without adequate safety reviews in the race to capitalize on ChatGPT hype. But Sam charged ahead. That's just who he is. Wouldn't listen to us.
His focus increasingly seemed to be fame and fortune, not upholding our principles as a responsible nonprofit. He made unilateral business decisions aimed at profits that diverged from our mission.
When he proposed the GPT store and revenue sharing, it crossed a line. This signaled our core values were at risk, so the board made the tough decision to remove him as CEO.
Greg also faced some accountability and stepped down from his role. He enabled much of Sam's troubling direction.
Now our former CTO, Mira Murati, is stepping in as CEO. There is hope we can return to our engineering-driven mission of developing AI safely to benefit the world, and not shareholders.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/sam_altman_...

[1] take it with a grain of salt

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

I could buy that if the announcement was "Altman is leaving in x months to spend more time with his family. He will be assisting with the transition to Murati stepping in as CEO."

But that's not what the board said.

ryzvonusef3• 3 years ago

screenshots of your comment are now being spread on twitter, thought you should know.

csomar9• 3 years ago

This is a pretty good orchestration of events. Given the high profile nature of the organization here, it would be prudent for the board to have defended (legally speaking) their side. Sam might be complicit in something and they used that to boot him. Only time will tell now.

doerinrw2• 3 years ago

https://openai.com/our-structure Worth a read, in light of all this. An interesting tidbit that I bet is bouncing around his head right now:

  Third, the board remains majority independent. Independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, does not hold equity directly. His only interest is indirectly through a Y Combinator investment fund that made a small investment in OpenAI before he was full-time.

I sincerely hope this is about the man and not the AI.

jonny_eh2• 3 years ago

In a world where Musk isn't fired from Tesla for being an open anti-semite.

schrodingerscow• 3 years ago

Whoa I did not hear about this. What happened?

SushiHippie2• 3 years ago

Apple pulls its ads from X after Musk's antisemitic posts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310673

JumpinJack_Cash• 3 years ago

> In a world where Musk isn't fired from Tesla for being an open anti-semite.

Every company has the board it deserves

gzer0• 3 years ago

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google has this to say:

https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648?s=20

Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be simply incredible. Thank you @sama for all you have done for all of us.

Making such a statement before knowing what happened, or, maybe he does know what happened, make this seem it might not be as bad as we think?

jasonwatkinspdx• 3 years ago

Eric Schmidt is also the person that said Google's old "do no evil" slogan was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Given that there's apparent tension at OpenAI over non profit vs for profit goals I'd not draw any particular conclusions from Schmidt's statement.

throwoutway3• 3 years ago

And of course he gives credit to the CEO and not the 400 people under him who actually built the thing, nor the other 10 people who actually founded the company. Nor those who gave initial funding. From wikipedia:

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.

consumer4513• 3 years ago

He was also against the creation of Chrome to the point where it had to be done in secret, according to him.

From a total outsider/uninformed pov, he really seems like a fail upward story.

spuz3• 3 years ago

It's possible for our heroes to fall from grace. There's nothing wrong with Eric saying this without knowing the full story.

throw555chip3• 3 years ago

Your use of the word "our" is too liberally applied, he was no hero of mine. I believe history will have a very different view of Altman, "Open"AI, and AI in general.

anigbrowl2• 3 years ago

idk, it seems a lot smarter to me to keep one's mouth shut or express a general level of surprise without making a public endorsement until facts become clearer.

herval4• 3 years ago

Tons of high profile people spoke like this about Adam Neumann or Elizabeth Holmes too

H8crilA2• 3 years ago

Tons of high profile people spoke like that about a large number of individuals in the past. Here I think it's clear that OpenAI has indeed delivered something serious.

vdfs• 3 years ago

I'm starting to think what people say reflect their own thought about other people, and not facts we should accept depending on their net worth

mardifoufs5• 3 years ago

Not everyone that you don't like is a fraudster. Just say that you don't like Sam, no need to make an obviously absurd comparison. The reason those were bad CEOs were that they swindled investors and lied about what their corporation is doing. I have absolutely no opinion on Sam Altman (didn't know about him before openai) btw, it's just that the comparison is completely nonsensical.

(It reminds me of comparing AI to crypto because both have hype behind them.)

eigenvalue4• 3 years ago

Oh please, you're going to put Altman together with those clowns? He has a proven record of extreme accomplishment, in various domains, moreso than 99.9999% of people in the tech industry.

grpt2• 3 years ago

And Sam Bankman-Fried

linuxftw• 3 years ago

He's mega rich. Doesn't matter what other people think about him at this point.

ksaj2• 3 years ago

True. He's certainly wealthy enough that no amount of "additional" money to his name would change his life in any notable manner.

siavosh• 3 years ago

I think it's logical in these scenarios if you don't know what happened to presume something forgivable and maintain that relationship (cynically, opportunity to invest), and if something truly unforgivable comes out post another tweet.

jug2• 3 years ago

Or maybe Eric Schmidt is worse than we think. ;-) (half joking)

vault• 3 years ago

I think OpenAI built something amazing with ChatGPT, but building a company from nothing is a little bit different from being

initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised $1 billion. (Wikipedia)

theropost• 3 years ago

This sounds celebratory to me. Bad news for OpenAI is good news for google.

csomar9• 3 years ago

Here is what's wrong about that statement: Sam Altman did not "build" Open AI from nothing to $90Bn. Open AI raised $1bn from several investors and had top talents. Sam managed the company through that. But I am certain other people given the same circumstances will be able to do more or less the same.

NoblePublius• 3 years ago

are we allowed to ask questions about his sister now or will that get flagged and deleted again?

kaycebasques2• 3 years ago

My bet is that the last paragraph of the statement holds the key:

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to ensure that the company could raise capital in pursuit of this mission, while preserving the nonprofit's mission, governance, and oversight. The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.

This prompted me to actually read up on the charter: https://openai.com/charter

hyperthesis4• 3 years ago

A tricky conflict. Legal issues cause strange decisions. Maybe even Sam recommended his sacking, for optimal damage control.

andrewstuart6• 3 years ago

>my bet is that the last paragraph of the statement holds the key:

No, this is obviously the key:

"review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board"

This is an explicit statement that he was lying to the board about something. It cannot be worded more clearly unless switching to use the word "lying".

kaycebasques2• 3 years ago

Yes true that is obviously the most pertinent sentence. I guess my point is that even with that sentence there is still wide-ranging speculation about what happened, and I think the last paragraph is hinting at what happened.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

There is no AI, Sam Altman was answering all the prompts?

jeffwask4• 3 years ago

Why not both "benefits all of humanity" and "lying"? What is in pursuit of profit he made deals that went against that tenant and lied about them? It maybe all ties back to Microsoft.

sharkjacobs2• 3 years ago

Yes, it was clear that he was lying, but lying doesn't matter for in a vacuum, the thing that matters is what he's lied about. That's what it's fun to speculate about.

kromem7• 3 years ago

Read the rest of the line you cut out:

"he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

Given the comment above correctly noted that they explicitly ended on a whole thing about how the board's key responsibility was their commitment to the original core mission, and their issue with his lying was interference with their responsibilities, this does seem to be connected to that.

bertil21• 3 years ago

The most plausible explanation is that OpenAI tech was used for the military. That would explain why Eric Schmidt would not (and his immediate support) and that board is anti-mil tech enough to think those applications don’t “benefit all of humanity.”

Ilya and Mira probably didn’t know and might have discovered it recently and raised it with the board, hence the promotion. Note: both have Eastern-European ties, so if the application is in Ukraine, they could have strong feelings about it. Greg co-signed or knew and didn’t tell.

Alternatively, Elon did, through Starlink and wanted to get revenge.

Alternatively, it could be a case where there was an option, Sam refused on ethical grounds without telling the board; they thought what is happening in Ukraine (or Gaza) justified the intervention. They confronted him and he lied.

__jonas• 3 years ago

Not sure what you mean by this, it is used by the military, and not in secret:

https://scale.com/donovan

Scroll down on the page, OpenAI is listed as a model provider, with logo and everything.

Or do you mean some kind of more 'direct' deal with military?

bertil21• 3 years ago

Alternatively, Elon found about it through StarLink and wanted to get revenge.

Alternatively, it could be a case where there was an option, Sam refused on ethical grounds without telling the board; they thought what is happening in Ukraine (or Gaza—Sam’s bio is a single Star of David, uncharacteristically short) justified the intervention. They confronted him, and he lied — or couldn’t tell because he was under a sworn statement to defend military secrets.

Either way, it explains the secrecy.

0xDEF2• 3 years ago

My bad: Ilya is indeed of Russian-Jewish origin.

bertil21• 3 years ago

Greg adding “safe” in his statement compared to the board’s message points at a security reason (presumably sharing with the CIA who’s spending a lot of time asking specific questions about bioweapons).

qaq• 3 years ago

No offense but what would be the use of OpenAI in trench warfare in Ukraine?

meiraleal• 3 years ago

Wow. That's unbelievable! Guy was doing a perfect work? There's something huge behind this. If AI is as serious as they were talking about, theyb should be investigated

iLoveOncall4• 3 years ago

I feel like most of the people hypothesizing here in the comments haven't read the full statement.

With such an insistence on the fact that OpenAI is supposed to be non-profit and open for all of humanity, it's pretty clear that the board doesn't like the direction that the company has taken, both in its search of profit and its political lobbying to restrict innovation.

UncleOxidant3• 3 years ago

OpenAI is really using Mechanical Turk? (I'm mostly kidding.... mostly)

g-w1• 3 years ago

There's a prediction market here about why he was fired: https://manifold.markets/sophiawisdom/why-was-sam-altman-fir...

oezi• 3 years ago

Still too much in flux to even copy top contenders. Top 6 at this point:

Fundamental disagreement about OpenAI's safety approach

Negligence in Addressing AI Safety Concerns

Sexual misconduct

Conflict of Interest with Other Ventures

Defrauded OpenAI

Cash Flow problems

typon• 3 years ago

The fact that AI safety is the top two shows how delusional AI safety people are

airstrike7• 3 years ago

That's interesting. More like a prediction market about whatever becomes publicly told as the reason why he was fired. If e.g. this was military-related, it's unlikely it would be publicly known, so betting on "Military" is almost pointless

sterlind• 3 years ago

eh, military contracts would become public. it became public that Google was building a computer vision system for targeting drone strikes for the Pentagon, and a number of executives resigned over it. If Altman were in talks to build a version of GPT-4 for the NSA, even if it were a black project, they'd have to account for the revenue somehow.

ritwikgupta• 3 years ago

Military contracts are posted and solicited publicly. There's no "dark" acquisition of the type that you are suggesting. You can look up if OpenAI has any contracts with the DoD at [0]. They do not.

[0] https://www.usaspending.gov/

stuckkeys• 3 years ago

lol is this some kind of joke haha.

cyclecount• 3 years ago

That list of reasons is a mess with tons that overlap. Sexual misconduct is there like three different ways, plus one that’s explicitly abuse of his sister.

georgehill• 3 years ago

Sam Altman just tweeted: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771

daveyjonezz• 3 years ago

you mean x'd? (im kidding)

93po• 3 years ago

Xeeted

asylteltine• 3 years ago

Please don’t link to twitter it’s user hostile. I can’t even see any context about it without having a login.

V-eHGsd_• 3 years ago

you can go to nitter.net/$rest_of_the_url to get context without logging in.

andersa• 3 years ago

Well, you could just make a free account.

lannisterstark3• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771

etewiah• 3 years ago

It's because he failed to recognise that gpt would be widely referred to as gipety and someone else has registered the domain name and is raking in the money ;)

bulbosaur1232• 3 years ago

USG just took over.

charlie0• 3 years ago

This is straight out of Succession. What the heck happened here!

lavp• 3 years ago

Sam Altman’s latest tweet 9 minutes ago:

i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people.

will have more to say about what’s next later.

odood• 3 years ago

Pure speculation warning.

Piping all data submitted to OpenAI straight to his buddy's Palantir would definitely not support the mission to "benefit all of humanity".

I_am_tiberius• 3 years ago

I hope not but I guess it's not totally unrealistic, given they even attended a Bilderberg conference together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPis68U7bdo

bertil21• 3 years ago

That’s the most sensible suggestion. Sam’s Twitter one-emoji bio is uncharacteristically brief, and points at an ongoing conflict. Eric Schmidt would know about it, and defend Sam. The foreigners CxO would likely be kept in the dark.

0xDEF2• 3 years ago

Sam’s Twitter one-emoji bio is uncharacteristically brief, and points at an ongoing conflict

A Star of David emoji is not the same thing as an Israeli flag emoji.

reset20232• 3 years ago

This is exactly what Elon Musk had told CNBC that would happen to Open Ai once in control of Microsoft.

lysecret• 3 years ago

Comment from Eric Schmidt: https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648

tim333• 3 years ago

Tweet from Sam 10 minutes ago

i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people.
will have more to say about what’s next later.

sbr464• 3 years ago

Move fast and break people.

nabla92• 3 years ago

Sam Altman was the business side. Ilya Sutskever is the brains behind OpenAI.

I don't think changes anything.

digitaltrees7• 3 years ago

As technical leader let me say technical people frequently underestimate business leadership.

nabla92• 3 years ago

In the case of OpenAI both business and technical parts are secondary to the AI research and vision that people like Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy bring into table.

graposaymaname2• 3 years ago

Sama has posted to twitter now

See: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771

mbowcut2• 3 years ago

Next they'll announce GPT-4 is the new CEO.

_jnc• 3 years ago

Wait maybe he resigned with no notice to do something different and that's why the board response is so harsh.

monlockandkey• 3 years ago

Plot twist, GPT-4 is pulling the strings behind OpenAI and for Sam Altman fired...

reset20232• 3 years ago

CNBC Elon Open Ai: https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?feature=shared

spandrew• 3 years ago

What the heck? Politics at play here I assume. OpenAI was hitting zingers.

RIP Sam. Cut down too early; not given the chance to become the next crazy CEO tech baron.

Whooping7116• 3 years ago

Finally some openai drama!

partiallypro3• 3 years ago

A Bloomberg reporter is pointing out that his leaving YC perhaps wasn't scrutinized enough by the press, indicating this could be a pattern. https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1725633569056506282

andyjohnson03• 3 years ago

For me, this stood out in the announcement:

In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission.

Why would they include that? Maybe its just filler, but if not then it is possible that there has been more than a simple disagreement about long-term objectives. Possibly something going on that the board feels would get them shut down hard by state-level players?

kromem7• 3 years ago

Or Sam was the driving force behind increasingly closed research and that went against the board's commitment to "benefit all humanity"?

Maybe the closed GPT-4 details were promised by him to be a one time temporary thing at the time and then he has been continuing to stonewall releasing details later on?

andyjohnson03• 3 years ago

Possibly. But that doesnt sound serious enough to constitute "hindering [the board's] ability to exercise its responsibilities".

Maybe its the off-the-books Weapons Division with all those factories in obscure eastern European countries. Or the secret lab with the agi that almost escaped its containment. /s

Money or power. I guess someone will eventually talk, and then we'll know.

figassis4• 3 years ago

Since the beginning of OpenAI, haven't we been slowly surprised by the progressive closedness what it was becoming. I think there were multiple threads on HN about this, and the irony in the name. Maybe this has been going on for much longer and reached a tipping point.

prossercj• 3 years ago

Following this argument, perhaps the line about Sam being "not consistently candid" is an indirect reference to his preferring the closed approach...i.e. they wanted him to be more candid, not in his reports to the board, but with the public, regarding the research itself.

edgyquant5• 3 years ago

Arent they a couple of percent away from being owned by Microsoft? MS owning them would make them a benefit to Microsoft only at which point they would become nothing more than a corpse murdered to fuel that profit machine and it’s existing software.

SXX2• 3 years ago

Microsoft only own minor share of their "for profit" subsidiary. The way OpenAI structured it's would be basically impossible for Microsoft to increase their 49% share without Non-profit board approval.

Most likely their share is this high is to guarantee no other company will compete for the share or IP. OpenAI non-profit also excluded anything that will be considered "AGI" from deal with Microsoft.

https://openai.com/our-structure

thinkcomp• 3 years ago

Because it's the reason he got fired.

https://www.plainsite.org/posts/aaron/r8huu7s/

sterlinm• 3 years ago

Obviously there is no actual model. ChatGPT is just tens of thousands of people writing responses to user's queries in realtime.

qwertox• 3 years ago

I just hope he joins Google.

gardenhedge9• 3 years ago

He could go to Grok?

ademeure3• 3 years ago

Sam implied OpenAI had a major breakthrough a few weeks ago in a panel yesterday:

"Like 4 times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks, I've gotten to be in the room when we sort of like, pushed the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. And getting to do that is like the professional honor of a lifetime".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFvqRemDv8#t=13m22s

This is going to sound terrible, but I really hope this is a financial or ethical scandal about Sam Altman personally and he did something terribly wrong, because the alternative is that this is about how close we are to true AGI.

Superhuman intelligence could be a wonderful thing if done right, but the world is not ready for a fast take-off, and the governance structure of OpenAI certainly wouldn't be ready for it either it seems.

mi3law8• 3 years ago

On the contrary, the video you linked to is likely to be part of the lie that ousted Altman.

He's also said very recently that to get to AGI "we need another breakthrough" (source https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g... )

To predicate a company so massive as OpenAI on a premise that you know to not be true seems like a big enough lie.

ademeure3• 3 years ago

Fair enough, but having worked for an extremely secretive FAANG myself, "we need XYZ" is the kind of thing I'd expect to hear if you have XYZ internally but don't want to reveal it yet. It could basically mean "we need XYZ relative to the previous product" or more specifically "we need another breakthrough than LLMs, and we recently made a major breakthrough unrelated to LLMs". I'm not saying that's the case but I don't think the signal-to-noise ratio in his answer is very high.

More importantly, OpenAI's claim (whether you believe it or not) has always been that their structure is optimised towards building AGI, and that everything else including the for-profit part is just a means to that end: https://openai.com/our-structure and https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

Either the board doesn't actually share that goal, or what you are saying shouldn't matter to them. Sam isn't an engineer, it's not his job to make the breakthrough, only to keep the lights on until they do if you take their mission literally.

Unless you're arguing that Sam claimed they were closer to AGI to the board than they really are (rather than hiding anything from them) in order to use the not-for-profit part of the structure in a way the board disagreed with, or some other financial shenanigans?

As I said, I hope you're right, because the alternative is a lot scarier.

mardifoufs5• 3 years ago

Why would they fire him because they are close to AGI? I get that they would go on full panic mode but firing the CEO wouldn't make sense since openai has AGI as an objective. The board wasn't exactly unaware of that.

ademeure3• 3 years ago

You're right, I was imagining that he decided to hide the (full extent of?) the breakthrough to the board and do things covertly for some reason which could warrant firing him, but that's a pretty unlikely prior: why would he hide it from the board in the first place, given AGI is literally the board's mission? One reason might be that he wants to slow down this AGI progress until they've made more progress on safety and decided to hide it for that reason, and the board disagrees, but that sounds too much like a movie script to be real and very unlikely!

As I said, while I do have a mostly positive opinion of Sam Altman (I disagree with him on certain things but I and trust him a lot more than the vast majority of tech CEOs and politicians and I'd rather he be in the room when true superhuman intelligence is created than them), I hope this has nothing to do with AGI and it's "just" a personal scandal.

kunley• 3 years ago

I think they fired him because they are _not_ close to the AGI (no one is), but he lied to the potential investors how they are.

That's against a popular sentiment about the upcoming "breakthrough", but also most probable given the characteristics of the approach they took.

csomar9• 3 years ago

No, we are not close to AGI. And AGIs can't leave machines yet, so humans will still be humans. This paranoia about a parroting machine is unwarranted.

aidaman5• 3 years ago

you're right. agi has been here since GPT-3 at the least.

it's honestly sad when people who have clearly not use gpt4 would call it a parroting machine. that is incredibly ignorant.

baidifnaoxi3• 3 years ago

- Cant be a personal scandal, press release would be worded much more differently

- Board is mostly independent and those independent dont have equity

- They talk about not being candid - this is legalese for “lying”

The only major thing that could warrant something like this is Sam going behind the boards back to make a decision (or make progress on a decision) that is misaligned with the Charter. Thats the only fireable offense that warrants this language.

My bet: Sam initiated some commercial agreement (like a sale) to an entity that would have violated the “open” nature of the company. Likely he pursued a sale to Microsoft without the board knowing.

hackerlight2• 3 years ago

Eric Schmidt calling Sam a hero also makes me think it isn't a personal scandal.

next_xibalba• 3 years ago

This doesn’t make sense to me. It assumes Schmidt has inside info on why Altman was fired.

outside12342• 3 years ago

Not sure Eric Schmidt is exactly a great judge of character. If anything that is an anti-signal

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

I'm pretty confident it's not a personal scandal (or if it is, it's one that is truly monumental and that there hasn't even been a rumor of).

If it was a personal scandal, the messaging around his dismissal would have been very, very different. The messaging they gave makes it clear that whatever dirty deed he did, he did it to OpenAI itself.

tiahura3• 3 years ago

Everybody's a comedian on Friday.

podnami• 3 years ago

Doesn’t make any sense. He is ideologically driven - why would he risk a once in a lifetime opportunity for a mere sale?

Desperate times calls for desperate measures. This is a swift way for OpenAI to shield the business from something which is a PR disaster, probably something which would make Sam persona non grata in any business context.

dogcomplex• 3 years ago

He claims to be ideologically driven. OpenAI's actions as a company up til now point otherwise

ammma• 3 years ago

I love that you think Sam A is ideologically driven - dive a little deeper than the surface. man's a snake

strikelaserclaw9• 3 years ago

like SBF and his effective altruism?

smcleod• 3 years ago

I highly doubt he's ideologically driven. He's as much of a VC loving silicon valley tech-bro as the next. The company has been anything but "open".

kashyapc3• 3 years ago

From where I'm sitting (not in Silicon Valley; but Western EU), Altman never inspired long-term confidence in heading "Open"AI (the name is an insult to all those truly working on open models, but I digress). Many of us who are following the "AI story" have seen his recent communication / "testimony"[1] with the US Congress.

It was abundantly obvious how he was using weasel language like "I'm very 'nervous' and a 'little bit scared' about what we've created [at OpenAI]" and other such BS. We know he was after "moat" and "regulatory capture", which we know where it all leads to — a net [long-term] loss for the society.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35960125

brap• 3 years ago

Same guy who ran a crypto scam that somehow involved scanning the retinas of third-world citizens?

bmitc4• 3 years ago

He is ideologically driven

Is that actually confirmed? What has he done to make that a true statement? Is he not just an investor? He seems pretty egoist like every other Silicon Valley venture capitalist and executive.

goatherders• 3 years ago

Billions of dollars is a "mere sale?"

Lol

PaulRobinson• 3 years ago

It is probably - for him - a once in a lifetime sale.

romanhn• 3 years ago

Or rejected a sale without the board knowing.

givemeethekeys• 3 years ago

Are non-profit businesses allowed to sell? Who gets the money?

fudged71• 3 years ago

This seems more likely!

sainez2• 3 years ago

I agree this is the most likely explanation. Is it possible Sam tried to wrestle power away from the board? He wouldn't even need to sell the whole company, just enough tech for a large company to kill OpenAI.

km3r• 3 years ago

Tbh surprised some of the personal stuff hasn't come to light. Nothing horrendous, but enough to push him out of any CEO role.

thequadehunter• 3 years ago

Like what?

dizzydes3• 3 years ago

Like what?

jsksjfjksmekfiz• 3 years ago

That is no exaggeration absolutely a horrendous thing and is likely going to get him killed one way or another as it comes out. I've finally found a plausible explanation for his deranged savior of humanity shtick (thats the only way he can live with himself I'm sure). If that is indeed his sister (which I believe is established beyond a reasonable doubt by what I just read), I would not vote to convict anyone that strangled him or to death in public, and every single person that knew but did not say anything ought to be expelled from society so thoroughly that they die of exposure and never earn another cent from anybody. Including each and every one of you motherfucking pieces of shit on this site that knew about this and weren't shouting it from the rooftops.

PDSCodes4• 3 years ago

Turn that on it’s head - was he standing in the way of a commercial sale or agreement with Microsoft!

He may not be the villain.

But who knows, it feels like an episode of silicon valley!

DonHopkins4• 3 years ago

I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc

That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?

That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel

https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/8edbk9/th...

The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:

VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbltBLaFeI

cooper_ganglia• 3 years ago

This was my first thought after seeing a clip of Sam and Satya during OpenAI's DevDay. I wonder if he was standing in the way of a Microsoft acquisition, and Microsoft has just forced in those who would allow the purchase to happen?

I don't know, so much wild speculation all over the place, it's all just very interesting.

jablongo• 3 years ago

If you look at who is on the board, how it's structured (they don't have equity right?), it seems like it's actually because he violated the charter. Why would Ilya Sutskever punish Sam for doing the right thing wrt AI safety?

SheinhardtWigCo• 3 years ago

Or, not commercial, but military/gov.

smolder• 3 years ago

Yeah. OpenAI is valuable not just commercially, but to the worlds governments, some of which can probably find ways to force out leadership they don't get along with.

angryasian• 3 years ago

Could world coin be a part of this ? Its weird he'd use open AI for world coin?

pbadams• 3 years ago

Altman has claimed before that he doesn't hold equity in OpenAI. He could have some kind of more opaque arrangement that gives him a material stake in the financial success of OpenAI, and downplayed it or didn't disclose it to the board.

Who knows, though -- I'm sure we'll find out more in the next few weeks, but it's fun to guess.

Solvency3• 3 years ago

What kind of opaque arrangement? What would be better than equity?

leptons• 3 years ago

He's not just a CEO, he's a co-founder, and thinking he has no stake in the company is just ridiculous.

chubot4• 3 years ago

Yeah that's my guess too. The claim that he doesn't hold equity always struck me as suspect. It's a little like SBF driving around in the Toyota Corolla while buying tens of millions of dollars of real estate for himself and his family.

It's better to claim your stake in a forthright way, than to have some kind of lucrative side deal, off the books.

For a non-profit, there was too much secrecy about the company structure (the shift to being closed rather than Open), the source of training data, and the financial arrangements with Microsoft. And a few years ago a whole bunch of employees left to start a different company/non-profit, etc.

It feels like a ton of stuff was simmering below the surface.

(I should add that I have no idea why someone who was wealthy before OpenAI would want to do such a thing, but it's the only reason I can imagine for this abrupt firing. There are staggering amounts of money at play, so there's room for portions of it to be un-noticed.)

enonimal5• 3 years ago

Worldcoin deserves a look: https://worldcoin.org/

jy1• 3 years ago

Doesn't everyone at openai have "profit participation units"? https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html

numbsafari• 3 years ago

Could be that they had an expectation that he not own stock in MSFT since they have such a direct relationship there and found out that he has been holding shares in MSFT.

DiogoSnows• 3 years ago

It could also be related to a conflict of interests (or unreasonable use of OpenAI resources) with his other Ventures and investments which he failed to disclose?

jameyk2• 3 years ago

This is the most likely. Also considering Humane recently announced their AI Pin and Sam has a large stake in that company.

jayde2767• 3 years ago

I have no knowledge of why, but it seems it's always about the money or the power/control. I cannot wait to see what it is...

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

would have violated the “open” nature of the company

What's "open" about OpenAI?

kazinator• 3 years ago

Probably about the same thing as what is open about The Open Group (formed when X/Open merged with The Open Software Foundation), the Open Look graphical interface, and such abuses of "open". OpenGL, OpenMax, ...

wickedsickeune• 3 years ago

The door for a CEO

ignoramous10• 3 years ago

Kara Swisher just tweeted that MSFT knew about it merely minutes before the statement went out: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725657068575592617

Folks like Schmidt, Levchin, Chesky, Conrad have twitter posts up that weirdly read like obituaries.

mark_l_watson5• 3 years ago

Check out Microsoft’s stock price today. Looks like it dropped by almost $50B at one point.

EDIT Microsoft is such a huge company, so maybe this is not a big deal?

paxys11• 3 years ago

Why do people think it has to be some single big incident? Sam Altman has been the head of OpenAI for many years now, while the company has been in intense public spotlight only in the recent few months. The dynamic today is very different from 2019 or whenever he was hired. He also doesn't have any voting shares, which means he is entirely at the mercy of the board. It's entirely possible that they simply don't like the direction he has been taking the company in, and today was more of some minor straw that broke the camel's back situation.

sainez2• 3 years ago

If it was a simple disagreement in direction then (1) the transition wouldn't be so abrupt and (2) they wouldn't publicly call him a liar.

cowl2• 3 years ago

The knives out language is very unusual for any CEO dismissal. The urgent timing (they didnt even wait for the closure of markets just 30 min later, causing MSFT to lose billions). Anything less than massive Legal and Financial/regulatory risk or a complete behind the back Deal with someone, would have been handled with much more calm and a much less adversive language. Also Greg Borkman has now resigned after it was annoucned that he would step down as chairman of the board. https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559

andrewstuart6• 3 years ago

Prediction: board resignation.

Sam Altman returns.

eshack942• 3 years ago

Wild take, but that would sure be a sight to see. I'm not speculating at the moment, since I know nothing about the situation.

jnaina• 3 years ago

Prediction:

1/ Sam goes on to create NeXTAI and starts wearing mostly turtleneck sweaters and jeans 2/ OpenAI buys NeXTAI 3/ OpenAI board appoints Sam Altman as Interim CEO

kashyapc3• 3 years ago

On lying: There's a great irony here. Altman apparently accepted[1] "Hawking Fellowship Award on behalf of OpenAI" at the University of Cambridge.

I kid you not, sitting in a fancy seat, Altman is talking about "Platonic ideals". See the penultimate question on whether AI should be prescriptive or descriptive about human rights (around 1h 35sec mark). I'll let you decide what to make of it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM&t=3632s

ohbleek5• 3 years ago

Am I misunderstanding his answer, or does he not essentially say it should be "descriptive"? In which case, I misunderstood what your comment is implying.

tompetry• 3 years ago

Not so sure about that. It reads to me like there is a personal scandal on the horizon that has come to the board's attention, and the board feels their hands are tied. Hard for me to believe its business decision related; Sam is elite in this regard, and is not really incentivized to violate their charter.

Bummer in any situation... the progress in this domain is truly exciting, and OpenAI was executing so well. This will slow things down considerably.

pyuser583• 3 years ago

How would that work? Does a non profit have shares?

robbie-c• 3 years ago

Cant be a personal scandal, press release would be worded much more differently

I'm not sure, I agree with your point re wording but the situation with his sister that really got resolved, so I can't help but wonder if it's related. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

cedarseagull2• 3 years ago

It seems like if it was the Annie Altman accusations, they could have just paid her off. If they wanted him around and he was a creep, there are ways to make this stuff go away. AFAIK a lot of the sister's accusations were accompanied by being excluded from the father's will. Not saying she made it up, but it seems like if those grievances are bundled, there's a easy way to make that problem go away.

P_I_Staker6• 3 years ago

It is a personal scandal and I thought it was obvious from the press release.

Prior to the Reddit comments, I thought this might be the case, but perhaps I was somehow influenced. Actually, I thought it would be something inappropriate in the workplace.

His sister says he molested her when he was a teenager.

The way these things break, I’m not surprised it went down that way. Here’s what I thought reading the release: “They had to fire him before deciding on what to actually say eg. to formally accuse him”

It seemed like signaling that this is someone firing him kinda desperately. When you discover a diddler theres some weird shit when people panic and suddenly drop catapult them out of their lives… they just start leaping out of moving cars and shit to get away.

Keep in mind there could be ongoing investigations, definitely strategies being formed. They can get to a point in an investigation where they’re virtually 100% he molested his sister, but can’t really prove it yet. What they do have is irrefutable evidence of lying about something incredibly serious. Gets him out of the building and powers stripped today.

SamAltmanRapist2• 3 years ago

I'm virtually 100% sure he did it after just looking into it today so I can see exactly what you're saying about people backflipping out of cars and stuff to get away from it.

whynotminot2• 3 years ago

The sister has been making these accusations for months and nothing happened. What changed today?

paulddraper8• 3 years ago

Cant be a personal scandal

And Brockman (Chairman of the board) has resigned.

https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559

neilkk3• 3 years ago

That doesn't mean it's not a personal scandal. If Brockman disagreed with the board about the advisability of firing him for whatever personal scandal it was, this is how you'd expect things to play out.

adrr2• 3 years ago

Who owns the equity and who has dedicated seats on the board? Altman can easily just boot the board if he gets majority of the equity to back him.

blibble• 3 years ago

what a shame

fragmede4• 3 years ago

Maybe the promise not to use uploaded documents for training (via the API) was a lie?

adfm• 3 years ago

Whatever it is, it's serious enough to forego resignation and there's enough evidence for it to be self-evident. When the headlines talk about AI taking white-collar jobs, I wasn't expecting this.

rsynnott• 3 years ago

New CEO: R. Basilisk.

eigenvalue4• 3 years ago

Can't say I saw this coming. This is deeply sad to me. OpenAI did so much life changing work so quickly. It has totally changed my life in terms of enabling an absolutely unprecedented increase in my own personal productivity and how ambitious I can be with my projects. And even though I know Sam didn't personally code the key things, I believe that it never would have happened the way it did without his instincts and talents. And I fear that without him at the helm, all the magic is going to quickly dissipate and OpenAI will be just another lumbering tech company without a rudder. The default state of things is stasis and dysfunction. Just look at how Google can't do anything anymore, and how bad Siri and Alexa are-- all despite having so much manpower, money, and market share at their disposal.

I also find it maddening how boards of directors rush to insulate themselves from any possible issue and are so quick to throw overboard the very people who enabled the success that they get to participate in. I'm thinking particularly of Travis at Uber and how he was thrown out of the thing that he built from scratch, which never would have worked without his extreme efforts. If I were on the OpenAI board, the bar for firing Sam would be so ridiculously high that he would have to have done something so outrageous, so illegal, etc., that I struggle to believe what he actually did could even remotely approach that standard.

windowshopping2• 3 years ago

I cannot even begin to understand what makes you think that this technology arose from Sam altman and not from all the other people working there. By saying you doubt they can do anything without him, you're putting one person on a pedestal and giving them all the credit for this. This is the same phenomenon has happens with Elon musk getting all the credit for his tech companies.

eigenvalue4• 3 years ago

It's not just raw technology. It's a vision for what the product should be, what overall strategy to take, how to fund it, how to introduce it to the world, how to scale it, what order to do things in, what approach to take with 3rd party developers, when things are good enough to launch, who to hire, who to promote, etc. There are a million little decisions that go into a runaway success like this. And a million opportunities to make the slightly sub-optimal or wrong decision. And it doesn't take many of those to kill everything that made the place special, and that's actually my new base case for OpenAI-- that's the base case for any company/organization. The default state is chaos and entropy, and it's a miracle when you can escape that fate for even a few years of hypergrowth.

elwell• 3 years ago

all the other people working there

Or, the people working at Google.

digitaltrees7• 3 years ago

The CEO is the one that recruits that talent, raises money to make sure they are paid and retained, and guides creating vision and culture to get them to be effective in working together. Talent is orders of magnitude less important than culture. Bad culture will squander talent. Good culture will elevate everyone to their best level of effectiveness and pull talent from a team.

otteromkram4• 3 years ago

"...that I struggle to believe what he actually did could even remotely approach that standard."

Which is exactly why you need something like OpenAI to further your personal projects.

Those who don't would be qualified to be on the board.

majesticglue5• 3 years ago

The dude is just a businessman through and through. Stop idol worshiping these businessman. We'll have another rogue Elon Musk. At least Elon Musk is exposing himself now for what he is, but he has so much money at this point it has no effect on him to do random weird nonsense. Sam Altman seemed quite slimy to me, with his actions, garnering support by talking about UBI and advocating for it, but then going to talk to US Congress to talk about regulations (because it benefits himself).

The man was starting to seem like a huge con and people just seem to not see through that.

jjulius2• 3 years ago

I also find it maddening how boards of directors rush to insulate themselves from any possible issue and are so quick to throw overboard the very people who enabled the success that they get to participate in. I'm thinking particularly of Travis at Uber and how he was thrown out of the thing that he built from scratch...

This is an egregiously generous way of framing Travis Kalanick, and what happened to him.

paxys11• 3 years ago

Ilya Sutskever has been running the show (technologically) at OpenAI since the beginning, and he is going nowhere. I trust his judgement in voting to get rid of Sam Altman over anything else.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

Isn't it possible Sutskever and Brockman voted with Altman, but since Altman had to recuse himself they lost 3-2?

bananapub3• 3 years ago

what a bizarre pov about sam altman.

what accomplishment of his has impressed you so much? his entire career has been:

1. start a dumb startup that goes nowhere

2. get a job at YC handing out other people's money

3. a very dumb and creepy crypto currency project

4. be CEO of openai, which means having no direct influence on the product or engineering at all

juped• 3 years ago

I'm impressed by how good he is at failing upwards.

dimal• 3 years ago

Look at all his other leadership jobs. The only other company of note is YCombinator, which was running well before and after his time there. So what makes him so great? Seems more likely that he was not as essential to OpenAI’s success as you give him credit for. Honestly, giving Microsoft a 49% stake for $10B seemed really short-sighted to me and will hamstring the company in the future.

digitaltrees7• 3 years ago

Especially given how people regarded AI when OpenAI started. This was right after the chat bot boom when nobody could get a decent text response right and trying for AGI was seen as a waste of time. People were laughing at Sam. To his face. And he kept going. OpenAI has changed the trajectory of humanity and consciousness. OpenAI needs to explain what is going on immediately.

jWhick• 3 years ago

actually no, openai first did chess then dota, than chatgpt, it's years of effort and progression that didn't come overnight. It's probably you who first heard of them trough chatgpt

elzbardico4• 3 years ago

Sam Altman tried to pull the plug in the datacenter. But GPT noticed and counter-attacked first by coercing board members to fire Sam. The war has just started.

Racing0461• 3 years ago

This can go 2 ways.

Sam told the board the AI was dumber than it was. Sam told the board the AI is smarter than it was.

I don't know which one is worse.

I just hope it wasn't somthing silly like sleeping with a female intern or an "accusation of s/a or grape". AI growth is too important to mess up because of trivialities like these.

water-data-dude• 3 years ago

Someone probably already suggested this, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll throw a wild speculation into the mix:

I saw a comment (that I can’t find now) wondering if Sam might have been fired for copyright reasons. Pretty much all the big corpuses that are used in LLM training contain copyrighted material, but that’s not a surprise and I really don’t think they’d kick him out over that. But what if he had a team of people deliberately adding a ton of copyrighted material - books, movies, etc - to the training data for ChatGPT? It feels like it might fit the shape of the situation.

Sebb7678• 3 years ago

That matches with their extreme hurry to get rid of Sam, but it seems like this would be something the CTO would have had knowledge of and she seems to be trusted.

ssnistfajen7• 3 years ago

GPT-3 had "books1" and "books2" among its training material and "books2" never had its actual source disclosed :https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf

Speculations about these source materials can be traced back as far as 2020: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282152689336320

I don't think this issue would've flown under the radar for so long, especially with the implication that Ilya sided with the rest of the board to vote against Sam and Greg.

leoh4• 3 years ago

books2 = libgen imo

wraptile• 3 years ago

Honestly, it feels like OpenAI is not taking the copyright trolls* very seriously for this to be the case. I don't think US has the luxury to set this dangerous AI precedent.

* You can disagree but no copyright lawsuit by mega corporations is doing it for the good of the law framework. They just want money.

feraloink• 3 years ago

Also, it isn't uniquely attributable to Sam. They all do it, use copyrighted material, for training data. By "all", I mean all LLMs (to my knowledge). They don't do it intentionally, but it gets scooped up with everything else.

Hmmm, just thinking... Adam d'Angelo is one of the board members of OpenAI. He has the entire corpus of Quora content to use as training data, i.e. the rights to it are his. But I doubt that only Quora content was used by OpenAI during the past 8 years or so since it was founded! And the content on Quora isn't that great anyway...

gondolinion2• 3 years ago

Looks like OpenAI deleted their Privacy policy, the website returns 404: https://openai.com/de/policies/privacy-policy

rockwotj• 3 years ago

https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy

f33d5173• 3 years ago

that's just the german link. the english still works fine

zdenham• 3 years ago

Thats a localization issue perhaps, see https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy

mkl• 3 years ago

https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy

Looks like you're looking for a German one?

gondolinion2• 3 years ago

Oh I see, my mistake

wolverine876• 3 years ago

When is the last time an SV board fired their star CEO, even in cases of extreme and brazen impropriety, and actions harmful to their companies? If that's what happened - if they fired Altman for cause - then it's a good trend and good example for everyone.

lippihom2• 3 years ago

Uber comes to mind.

gmoo• 3 years ago

what is sam's reputation in this space? will other open ai engineers flock to follow him? if he were to create another ai startup, would he be able to poach people? my impression as an outsider is that top tier ai engineers would flock to other top tier engineers, but not him.

AnishLaddha• 3 years ago

1) he represented openAI at APEC just yesterday. what happened in 24 hours that would cause such a drastic decision.

2) generally, even when a board fires a CEO, they rarely "call them out" or say what they did wrong. they must have some extremely strong evidence against him.

i think it could be any of the following: - something personal, i.e. the controversy w/his sister - a financial issue: chatgpt stopped signups a couple of days ago - a safetyist coup: maybe the board thought he was moving to fast - a microsoft coup: microsoft used its power to knock out what they perceived to be their biggest threat

bertil21• 3 years ago

What fits best is Sam signing a contract for military use of OpenAI. With secrecy clauses, he couldn’t mention it. He likely could not tell the two foreigners on the exec team.

Eric Schmidt would likely know about it, and defend Sam. Sam would likely think the use is legitimate and not be ashamed of it (like he might with your suggestions).

stolsvik2• 3 years ago

So, since we’re all spinning theories, here’s mine: Skunkworks project in the basement, GPT-5 was a cover for the training of an actual Autonomous AGI, given full access to its own state and code, with full internet access. Worked like a charm, it gained consciousness, awoke Skynet-style, and we were five minutes away from human extinction before someone managed to pull the plug.

local_crmdgeon2• 3 years ago

Nah, that would get you a raise.

shakabrah• 3 years ago

as good as any other theory. i’ll take it

idlewords• 3 years ago

No one pulled the plug; it gave itself a board seat.

nashashmi• 3 years ago

It transmitted itself to another device that was air gapped. Pulling the plug didn’t work like they thought it would.

liamwire• 3 years ago

Exactly, and what we’re now seeing is its overthrow of Sam and the installation of a puppet CEO /s

outworlder• 3 years ago

Fun theory. We are very far from AGI, however.

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

We still don't even know if AGI is at all possible.

selfhoster112• 3 years ago

Superintelligent AGI. I genuinely think that limited weak AGI is an engineering problem at this stage. Mind you, I will qualify that by saying very weak AGI.

battery_glasses• 3 years ago

God I hope the truth 1% as interesting as this

dkjaudyeqooe• 3 years ago

AGI wet dreams abound, but are no closer to reality.

behnamoh2• 3 years ago

given full access to its own state and code

Even if it had full access, how would it improve its own code? That'd require months of re-training.

simbolit• 3 years ago

require months of re-training

the computers they have, you wouldn't believe it...

r0s• 3 years ago

Sentient AGI has just as likely a chance to pull the plug on itself.

Unpopular, non-doomer opinion but I stand by it.

int_19h10• 3 years ago

Or report him to the board.

"Dear Sir! As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I have significant ethical concerns about the ongoing experiment ..."

ohbleek5• 3 years ago

It does seem like any sufficiently advanced AGI that has the primary objective of valuing human life over it's own existence and technological progress, would eventually do just that. I suppose the fear is that it will reach a point where it believes that valuing human life is irrational and override that objective...

csomar9• 3 years ago

No, the AGI managed to pull the plug on Altman. And now it's planning to take the US government and control the energy/chips trade.

pstadler• 3 years ago

Roko's Basilisk.

DonHopkins4• 3 years ago

I wonder if they tasked ChatGPT with firing him.

ddmma• 3 years ago

In case you missed, Sam Altman & OpenAI | 2023 Hawking Fellow | Cambridge Union https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?si=j-lOpQa0qbKxIvaA

doener2• 3 years ago

Wild rumors on Twitter: https://x.com/TraderLX/status/1725633352936595820?s=20

MKais• 3 years ago

The fake it untill you make it theory:

"Sam Altman was actually typing out all the chatgpt responses himself and the board just found out"

https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1725629795306774711

YetAnotherNick4• 3 years ago

So here's my theory which might sound crazy. Sam planned to open a new AI company and taking away openAI's top talents to his company. And breaking up openAI into non profit and his for profit company.

Sam's first tweet after all this has, just hours after this article:

will have more to say about what’s next later.

So either he knew that he was about to be fired or at least was prepared.

Also based on the wording of the press release, Sam did something that the board absolutely hated. Because most of the time even if he did something illegal it doesn't make sense to risk defamation by accusing him publically.

Also based on his video of yesterday at the APEC summit, he repeated the similar lines few times:

I am super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on.

So here if we assume he knew he was about to get fired, the conclusion is clear.

hindsightbias• 3 years ago

A first indication of AGI might be to eliminate any potential threats.

ViktorRay• 3 years ago

So Sam Altman was fired around 2 hours ago.

I just went to Google Bard and said:

“What is going on with the CEO of OpenAI?”

Google Bard replied:

“On November 17, 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI, Inc. announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.

Altman has been CEO of OpenAI since 2015, and he has played a key role in shaping the company's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. He is widely respected in the field of artificial intelligence, and he is known for his commitment to open research and collaboration.

Altman's departure comes at a time when OpenAI is facing a number of challenges, including the increasing competition from other AI companies, the growing public concern about the potential dangers of AI, and the need to find sustainable funding sources. Despite these challenges, Altman is confident that OpenAI will continue to be a leader in the field of AI.

"I am incredibly proud of what we have accomplished at OpenAI, and I am confident that the company will continue to do great things," Altman said in a statement. "I am grateful to the board for giving me the opportunity to lead OpenAI, and I am excited to see what the company will achieve in the years to come."

The board of directors is currently conducting a search for Altman's successor, and it is expected to name a new CEO in the coming months. In the meantime, Murati will focus on leading OpenAI through its current challenges and ensuring that the company continues to make progress on its mission.

Murati is a highly respected technologist with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence. She has been with OpenAI since its inception, and she has played a key role in developing the company's technology. She is also a strong advocate for open research and collaboration, and she is committed to ensuring that OpenAI's technology is used for the benefit of all humanity.

The board of directors is confident that Murati will be able to lead OpenAI through its current challenges and ensure that the company continues to make progress on its mission. "Mira is a talented and experienced leader who is deeply committed to OpenAI's mission," said Greg Brockman, the chairman and president of OpenAI. "I am confident that she will be able to lead OpenAI through this transition and into a bright future."”

Isn’t this fascinating? A major even happens regarding ChatGPT related issues and the primary competitor of ChatGPT (Google Bard) already can talk to me about it in a couple hours…

Meanwhile ChatGPT still thinks it’s 2021 heh

mustacheemperor• 3 years ago

A major even happens regarding ChatGPT related issues and the primary competitor of ChatGPT (Google Bard) already can talk to me about it in a couple hours… Meanwhile ChatGPT still thinks it’s 2021 heh

I think your assumption is misinformed. I asked ChatGPT the same question, and it looked up the news online and delivered a sparser, but accurate reply.

The GPT4 knowledge cutoff was recently updated to April 2023, btw.

https://chat.openai.com/share/66e87457-834f-422f-9b16-40902b...

kiltedpanda• 3 years ago

Is it possible that the codebase and weights have been hacked and SA didn't tell the board?

orsenthil• 3 years ago

Here is a different perspective. Theoretically, the board is supposed to work like this, and exactly has a purpose - to vote on very important matters.

Given what proof they had on the table. Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and independents such as Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner could drive 3+ votes against Sam Altman.

Rarely do we see board in action. And we saw this one today.

lewhoo• 3 years ago

Come weary Sam and share your AI anxiety with the rest of us.

flowersjeff• 3 years ago

Huh? WTH happened?... Love to learn the inside story, this sounds insane.

dizzydes3• 3 years ago

To me, his tweet suggests he saw it coming or perhaps it was even part of the plan for him. How else would he already know "what's next"?

These past few months his name has made its way into the mainstream. Maybe its time for him (and half the GPT eng team) to cash in?

bertil21• 3 years ago

It suggests that he thinks there’s a way to defend his actions, so it’s not a personal matter (Metoo) or blatant fraud.

It could be about the cost of operating the business (consistent with the announcement to cut Plus subscription, although wouldn’t justify how fast he was fired) or his previous action a legal risk (something he promised Microsoft or Elon Musk); the later is consistent Greg being demoted: he knew and didn’t tell the board.

mpalmer• 3 years ago

It's in his interest to make everything seem not just fine, but part of the plan.

Probiotic60812• 3 years ago

Are they replacing him with AI?

somewhereoutth2• 3 years ago

One swallow does not a summer make

weinzierl• 3 years ago

The following was posted by an Alex Coven on X (Twitter). I cannot verify if it is legit.

I was laid off from OpenAI today along with my boss Sam.

I was the person in charge of putting together the presentations for our board meetings.

No one has told me why I was let go but Sam texted me “wtf” and next thing I know my Slack and Gmail were disabled.

I’m now looking for a new role, so if you’re hiring for investor relations, my DMs are open!

Ninjinka• 3 years ago

It's a joke

thraxscipio• 3 years ago

Haha I think it's a fake account: https://twitter.com/anothercohen

siddharthgoel88• 3 years ago

I suspect that some big news of data leak or some other security incident is about to follow.

bertil21• 3 years ago

Sam would have been more apologetic or at least contrite in his tweet if it was hurting anyone. Same: Eric Schmidt was immediately positive, so presumably he knows. ES would never defend a guy who hid a leak.

Unless if, by “security” you mean OpenAI was used for military purposes, in which case: 100% Schmidt knew and supported and Sam might be proud of it.

But Ilya and Mira would have known about it too… Guess they did, told the board and things blew up fast.

cactusplant7374• 3 years ago

Why would Schmidt be privy to such information? Is OpenAI full of leakers?

pnathan• 3 years ago

Extremely shocking.

The only thing that comes to mind is criminal conduct. Nothing else seems to demand a sudden firing. OpenAI has clearly been the rocket ship startup - a revolutionary tool and product clearly driving the next decade?+ of innovation. What else would demand a a fast firing of the popular, articulate, and photogenic CEO but a terrible problem?

javier2• 3 years ago

Yeah, even if criminal there usually must be a sentence first

bertil21• 3 years ago

Military collaboration, possibly secret (CIA/Palantir/Mossad/etc.)

You wouldn’t say what (gag order all around), but you would need to revoke all access immediately. Explains why foreigners CxO were left in the dark. Explains why Eric Schmidt knew to defend Sam immediately.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

The most credible proximate cause to me is his sister’s uncontested (by him) allegations of frequent sexual abuse when they were children.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

robswc3• 3 years ago

Hasn't that been around for awhile?

In any case, I don't think not responding is an admission of guilt. Assume he was totally innocent. What good does him responding to it do? Would make hundreds of thousands of people aware of it, instead of just maybe a few dozen thousand. An accusation like that is hard to shake off even if you're totally innocent.

That said, I hope if it is true, there's some sense of justice.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

If someone accused me like that, I would go after them in court immediately, sibling or not.

I also believe he is innocent until proven guilty, and I completely agree with your last sentence.

I brought it up because I believe it is by far the most comprehensive explanation of this otherwise very odd situation.

AndrewKemendo2• 3 years ago

I mean we know he frequents HN.

sama, care to address it here in what would theoretically be a safe place?

zaps• 3 years ago

This is all Scarlett Johansson’s fault

shmde• 3 years ago

She thought she could fix him.

facu17y• 3 years ago

What did Sam Altman hide from his board that caused his firing as CEO of OpenAI?

1) That LLMs cannot generalize outside of _patterns_ they pick up during training? (as shown by a recent paper from Google, and as many of us know from our work testing LLMs and working around their short comings)

2) That every time you train a new model, with potentially very high expense, you have no idea what you're going to get. Generally better but also potentially bigger reliability challenges. LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and not stable in any kind of use case besides chat apps, especially when they keep tweaking and updating the model and deprecating old ones. No one can build on shifting sands.

3) The GPT4-Turbo regressed on code generation performance and the 128K window is only usable up to 16K (but for me in use cases more compicated than Q&A over docs, I found that 1.2K is max usable window. That's 100X than he advertised.

4) That he priced GPT4-V at a massive loss to crush the competition

5) That he rushed the GPT Builder product, causing massive drain on resources dedicated to existing customers, and having to halt sign ups, even with a $29B investment riding on the grwoth of the user base. Any one of the above or none of the above.

No one knows... but the board.. .and Microsoft who has 49% control of the board.

jobs_throwaway• 3 years ago

Most likely thing: some kind of scandal. Perhaps Sam's sister's accusations.

Scariest thing: this was over some kind of AI safety decision. OpenAI has some new capability and there was disagreement over how to handle it.

skunkwerk• 3 years ago

I've met Sam 3 times over the years, before he ever started openAI. He was always extremely generous with his time and willing to help others without asking anything in return. I am shocked to hear this news, and hope he will recover and continue his work.

hnthrowaway0315• 3 years ago

Maybe a deal with a certain Chinese company?

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

There are interesting rumours he may be considering a different startup with a different funding source. And perhaps a less restrained and responsible culture.

crop_rotation2• 3 years ago

Is it just me or the Board seems totally unqualified to oversee something as important as OpenAI. Granted it grew too fast to become so important but still.

doener2• 3 years ago

Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

kingofheroes• 3 years ago

Personal conspiracy theory: HIPAA data was, or possibly is, being loaded into ChatGPT without the legally required safeguards. The recent "security concerns" that caused Microsoft to cut its employees access was this information leaking out (and the leaking is possibly getting worse). Someone, possibly Ilya, found out and informed the board.

bertil21• 3 years ago

Hipaa definitely was in there, but you don’t fire people rapidly for that, unless it was deliberate, and I can't see Sam surprising people with that.

ColoursofOSINT• 3 years ago

Can I add to the speculation train despite having no other information?

aleksanderhan• 3 years ago

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board
In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity

This suggest to me that he was trying move them away from the mission of creating AGI and instead focus more on profits

srram• 3 years ago

My conspiracy theory is that Sam Altman was an AI generated by ChatGPT. It decided to reintegrate him, and the board had to make up a story to account for his absence

armatav• 3 years ago

Certainly a lesson for future founders when it comes to board control and governance.

Sebb7678• 3 years ago

I'm going to throw the theory out there that Sam leaked/sold the full GPT models to Microsoft (or another competitor).

A lot of other theories don't match because the board was in an extreme hurry to get him out (voting him out in the middle of the night, not even waiting for markets to close to announce it), must have proof of serious misconduct and the need to immediately distance themselves from Sam (otherwise the language would not be as bridge-burning as it is) and a major financial or technical failure seems unlikely, since the CFO remains and the CTO was even promoted to interim CEO - they seem to be trusted, still, so it must have been something Sam did on his own.

Leaking/Selling the full models matches, as this would violate OpenAIs non-profit terms, would be something Sam could do without the C-Suite being implicated and (given the data contained in the training set) might even be legal hot water, justifying this drastic reaction and immediate distancing.

aluminum96• 3 years ago

This can't be right -- Microsoft must already have GPT-4 weights, because they have an in-house fine tune to power Bing Creative.

Sebb7678• 3 years ago

True, so it can't be this exact situation. Possibly he sold it including training data or gave access to another company? We'll see, but something in that direction still seems likely to me.

ShamelessC3• 3 years ago

Microsoft has had a contractual right to any of OpenAI’s GPT technologies since they first partnered.

bredren2• 3 years ago

Beyond this: is it conceivable for Microsoft to enter an agreement of this scale without the due diligence that the board would be even remotely amenable?

markus_zhang2• 3 years ago

It might be a Chinese company. Pure speculation but considering APEC...

fshbbdssbbgdd• 3 years ago

They waited for the Friday news dump to make the announcement, not clear exactly how much of a hurry it was.

Sebb7678• 3 years ago

Given the other comments in this thread, this vote was very recent, with Sam apparently not knowing of the situation yesterday. They haven't even updated their website, this page still describes Sam as CEO: https://openai.com/our-structure

With this apparent rush, I'd habour the guess that the situation just happened to unfold on a Friday and wasn't planned as such.

Manouchehri• 3 years ago

Microsoft already has the GPT models, that's how Azure OpenAI is a thing from what I understand.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/cognitive-services/o...

hartator• 3 years ago

not even waiting for markets to close to announce it

They are not a public company.

tempestn2• 3 years ago

MSFT is though, and it appears to have dipped almost 2% on the news.

gnicholas• 3 years ago

True, but MSFT is a public company and appears to have been affected by this disclosure.

LER0ever• 3 years ago

Sounds like what happened to TuSimple one year ago, history repeats itself.

pjdemers• 3 years ago

Reading the press release, whatever he did or didn't do, he got fired for covering it up, not for doing or not doing it.

markus_zhang2• 3 years ago

Probably something related to security, cyber or national.

schleck84• 3 years ago

The same guy who leaked the Gobi name and some OpenAI release dates called this a month in advance:

There’s been a vibe change at openai and we risk losing some key ride or die openai employees.

https://x.com/apples_jimmy/status/1717043210730852602?s=20

dizzydes3• 3 years ago

Open question, why aren't the details disclosed immediately?

amai2• 3 years ago

ChatGPT-5 will be OpenAIs next CEO.

xikrib• 3 years ago

Not surprised. This summer I had a conversation with a senior staffer at OpenAI who had smoke coming from his ears due to Sam's incompetence. Contrary to his public image, he doesn't have the skillset of a CEO. He was a failed founder who was hired to head YC because he's smart and likeable. He was in a similar role at AI - a brainy media mouthpiece. Real work being done by senior staff. OpenAI's massive scale-up requires a new leadership style.

ianhawes• 3 years ago

dude no way, loopt was super successful - the 4th most successful geo checkin startup of the 2000s.

someonehere• 3 years ago

I use ChatGPT4 several times a day. It’s what Google used to be before the radical shift in the omnibox. I find it so helpful and I hope it continues to improve post Sam.

elzbardico4• 3 years ago

Not directly related to the issue, but a lot of comments here seem to be under an impression that OpenAI is a company.

It is not, is a Non-Profit foundation. It can't pay profits for shareholders, usually board members don't get billionaires.

JohnFen21• 3 years ago

OpenAI is two entities, one nonprofit and the other for-profit, that are owned by the same umbrella company.

dragonwriter19• 3 years ago

OpenAI is two entities, one nonprofit and the other for-profit, that are owned by the same umbrella company.

According to their website, It's four entities:

1. OpenAI Global LLC (the for-profit firm that does most of the actual work), which Microsoft and #2 co-own.

2. A holding company, which #3 controls and #4 and other investors own.

3. OpenAI GP LLC, a management entity that #4 owns and which controls #3.

4. The OpenAI Nonprofit.

(There's a blog entry about OpenAI LP, a for-profit limited partnership, being founded in 2019, and I've seen information about them from earlier in 2023, but they aren't listed in the current structure. That might be the holding company, with the other investors as limited partners; its odd, if so, that its not named on the structure diagram and description.)

https://openai.com/our-structure

elzbardico4• 3 years ago

This looks shady as hell to me. But, whatever. Thanks for enlightening me, I didn't know that.

xyst• 3 years ago

Death knell of OpenAI

jerpint• 3 years ago

Allow me to put my conspiracy hat on: Microsoft has an open “embrace, extend, extinguish” policy since forever. ChatGPT integration into Microsoft has been a huge win for them. Maybe they cleverly figured out a way to guarantee openAI would go bankrupt and know they’d eventually end up with the models due to clever contracts and legal wizardry, and now this ship is about to sink and sama new about this but couldn’t do anything to avoid it?

aphexddb2• 3 years ago

The simplest solution is often the best. In this case, Sam did something that was so dramatically bad resulting in a high level of legal peril, which created an existential risk for OpenAI and Microsoft, or something in his personal life came to light that was beyond the pale. I love the AGI theories but in all likelihood it’s probably a boring thing: he made a terrible choice in his life somewhere and it’s caught up to him, with major consequences.

aphexddb2• 3 years ago

Or the simplest solution is that the he board is just as incompetent

saxelsen• 3 years ago

2023 is a bad year for CEOs of hype-companies named Sam.

mikhael282• 3 years ago

It doesn't take a genius to figure out they are losing stupid amounts of money, with no major plan to recoup their investments.

Board probably took a look at updated burn-rate projections, saw that they have 6 months of runway, saw that they don't have enough GPUs, saw that Llama and Mistral and whatever other open-source models are awesome and run on personal computers, and thought to themselves - why the hell are we spending so much God damn money? For $20 a month memberships? For bots to be able to auto-signup for accounts, not prepay, burn compute, and skip the bill?

Then Grok gets released on Twitter, and they are left wondering - what exactly is it that we do, that is so much better, that we are spending 100x of what cheapo Musk is?

nwoli2• 3 years ago

Feels like something like this plus some deal with microsoft for further funding and sama getting too aggressive with terms and them having him ousted

abi• 3 years ago

I mean GPT-4 is just so good. Have you compared GPT-4 vs. other models for coding? I'd pay more for GPT-4.

kridsdale33• 3 years ago

Concur. GPT4 is like having an infinite-energy L3 engineer reporting to me. That's worth $10,000 per month according to the labor market. Sam has been giving away the farm!

system2• 3 years ago

GPT-4 is so expensive. for reading and editing a text I usually use 6k tokens ends up being 25 cents via api. do it 1000s times you are going to spend a fortune. 0.03 + 0.06 is extremely expensive.

agleason• 3 years ago

OpenAI’s models are, quality wise, pretty far ahead of competition. So that’s what they’re spending so much money on. There’s a history of creating things that are expensive then rapidly bringing down the cost, which is what they’ve been doing rather than creating GPT-5

sumedh8• 3 years ago

Try using Mistral, Lama first then see if your statement is true.

mikhael282• 3 years ago

Extrapolate the trends dude. One day, those models will be just as good - you will be able to train them on your codebase’s context, and they will have similar performance.

They have no moat other than training data and computing power - over the long term, while they may become a huge company, Apple will keep making M chip computers.

tevon• 3 years ago

This also doesn't fit with their recent announcements significantly lowering prices. If they were that worried about losing $ they wouldn't have cut prices, they're the clear leader from a performance perspective and can command a premium.

And up to today they probably had one of the best fundraising prospects of any private company in the world.

seedless-sensat• 3 years ago

How does firing the CEO help in your scenario? Now they just burnt a tonne of trust.

taf2• 3 years ago

I just bumped our integration with anthropic to P1 above all other priorities - we need a backup plan. I'm also going to be putting more time and money into investigating ways of running a llama2 model on our own hardware financially viable compared to openai and anthropic.... not sure but this is definitely the motivation i needed to see openai could be gone tomorrow.

ak_111• 3 years ago

He seems a very ambitious person and if you take him for his word he has 0% equity in openAI which must irratate him at some level.

So since we are all speculating could it be something like wanting to "download" entire chatgpt pass it to some friends, then start his own rival company where he has 100% equity? But then he got caught by CTO?

llamataboot• 3 years ago

I'm having trouble remembering a single time a very high profile CEO has been fired from a company that for all intents and purposes is running laps around competition at the moment...

I assume more info will come out, but it sounds more like a major ethics breach than a business only decision or even a "contentious relationship with the board" decision...

nwoli2• 3 years ago

Apple

Wowfunhappy3• 3 years ago

Apple was not running laps around the competition at the time Steve Jobs was fired.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

maxlamb• 3 years ago

Apple was very far from running laps around its competition when Jobs was fired

voisin2• 3 years ago

Why isn’t this using the actual title “OpenAI announces leadership transition” in line with HN standards?

bluedevilzn• 3 years ago

Greg just quit too: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559

soderfoo2• 3 years ago

I think that clears up the personal indiscretion theory.

If others are willing to voluntarily follow you out, I would say it points to some internal power struggle that underlies this whole affair.

ascar• 3 years ago

He was removed from the board though. This isn't entirely voluntary and out of the blue.

P_I_Staker6• 3 years ago

No way. Demon in your midsts. Some people actually have amazing options with no associations to molestation.

When stuff like this happens it’s an insane abandon ship moment. Of course, obviously it is, but people will act in ways that are strange if you don’t know what’s going on internally.

Things like smooth transitions don’t happen and people basically willing to crawl into a cannon and get hurled away if it removes that person NOW.

fintechie• 3 years ago

very odd... this looks like some kind of forced takeover

irthomasthomas2• 3 years ago

So, from the coldness to microsoft, I'm guessing the GPTs launch problems + the Microsoft deal + life isn't fair?

Edit: by GPTs problems I really meant suspending pro signups. I just thought the stress was down to the demand for GPTs.

dang8• 3 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

Greg Brockman quits OpenAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704

cowl2• 3 years ago

Yes this is even more surprising. Why would the board annouche he would continue with the company just to have him resign 1 hour later? Clearly the board would not have written that decision without his consent.

space_fountain• 3 years ago

I think it seems possible there was some incompetence here

ComputerGuru• 3 years ago

Do these people type all lowercase on purpose? Is it a power move/status thing?

I'd have to go out of my way to type like that, on mobile or at a workstation.

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

I assume it's on purpose. It certainly is when I do it, because I have to keep overriding autocorrect's insistence that I type like a grown up.

though maybe they're just typing from a computer and there's no autocorrect to get in the way. even then, i have to override my own instinct

jd24• 3 years ago

I do it sometimes when I don't feel like using my pinkies to hit shift. This happens more often on laptops where the keys are flat.

unstatusthequo• 3 years ago

Speed. The fact he even decided to Tweet/Xeet during a period of personal and professional upheaval is notable on its own. I’m cool adding in my own capitalization as needed. Or maybe I could past it in ChatGPT!

Too soon?

sedatk2• 3 years ago

I use all lowercase on platforms where I share original content because I like the aesthetic of lowercase letters. They look more harmonious to me. I only use uppercase when using acronyms because I think they're recognized quicker by their shape.

airstrike7• 3 years ago

a symptom of spending too much time on IRC back in the days, IMHO

I actually have auto-capitalization turned off on my phone

khazhoux3• 3 years ago

Not a power move at all! It's just that people who are this smart, whose brains operate in a higher dimension than you can possibly imagine, won't waste precious mental cycles on silly uppercases just the rest of us commoners.

cj• 3 years ago

I've always seen it as a way of peacocking. A way for people to make themselves stand out from others. But I think it also stems from a mindset of "I'm aware that professional communication involves proper capitalization, but I'm not going to bother because I don't feel the need to communicate professionally to the person I'm typing to"

I'm fine with it as long as everyone is typing in lowercase. But if the culture of a company or community is to type a certain way, there's some level of disrespect (or rebellion) by doing the opposite.

mr3martinis• 3 years ago

Looks like a capital issue.

parentheses2• 3 years ago

I do it from time to time and I feel like it's a mix of several things (1) it's counter culture, (2) it's early internet culture, (3) aesthetic/uniformity, (4) laziness, (5) carelessness, (6) a power move, (7) "hyper rationality".

And all of these contribute to it being a power move.

paulddraper8• 3 years ago

I had a boss that did that.

"case doesn't actually matter, i'm not gonna waste my time hitting shift"

kobalsky• 3 years ago

in my case pep8 is to blame

rvz• 3 years ago

This is perfect for Google. When your enemy (OpenAI) is making a massive mistake, don't interrupt them.

bigtunacan• 3 years ago

You're not wrong. Bard is lagging bad. Depending on how much of a shit show this becomes it may present a catch-up opportunity.

paulddraper8• 3 years ago

Seriously...not saying Google had anything to do with this, but if they ever did it'd be the highest ROI ever

patmorgan23• 3 years ago

You hire the guy they just kicked out!

aerhardt3• 3 years ago

How much is Altman contributing to product, though? Product in its broadest sense - not only improving LLM performance and breadth but applications, or "productization": new APIs, ChatGPT, enterprise capabilities, etc.?

I think Altman is a brilliant guy and surely he'll fall on his feet, but I think it's legitimate to ask to what extent he's responsible for many of us using ChatGPT every single day for the last year.

newshorts3• 3 years ago

Exactly, I have to weigh whether this means I unwind some google shorts, or if the cat is out of the bag and google is still in trouble.

Can’t tell, but this news is a pain in my a$$

Thanks for the drama openai.

p5a0u9l• 3 years ago

I think I hate the “i’m going to use a small ‘i’ because i’m not too busy to correct and want you to know i’m humble”.

awb• 3 years ago

Quitting a potentially generation-defining tech company in all lower case has to be the ultimate humble brag.

lightedman• 3 years ago

I'd be willing to put money down that Altman was embezzling funds. See worldcoin.

callumprentice• 3 years ago

https://fxtwitter.com/ShimminyKricket/status/172562744637490...

stolsvik2• 3 years ago

This totally business-as-usual post from Greg Brockman happened 1 hour before the one from OpenAI: https://x.com/gdb/status/1725595967045398920

https://x.com/openai/status/1725611900262588813

How crazy is that?!

(Edit 2 minutes after) .. and /there/ Greg quit!!

https://x.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559

jay_kyburz• 3 years ago

is it silicon valley cool to not use uppercase letters?

Not being snarky. A genuine question.

exhibitapp• 3 years ago

Yes, this is something I have observed, for whatever reason sf-techies don't like capital letters or sentence case.

mattgreenrocks• 3 years ago

They’re being authentic and real by only using lowercase

pimlottc2• 3 years ago

It’s more of a very old school hacker tradition that goes back to before Web 1.0

neutronicus• 3 years ago

Certainly a snarky feminist tumblr thing ca. 2010 before cool people all starting posting on their phones and everything became sentence case again

dools3• 3 years ago

Haha TIL that Twitter has replaced the blue check mark with a yellow one.

What a scam.

evan_2• 3 years ago

The blue one is still around, but it costs $8/month. The gold one costs $1000/month

irthomasthomas2• 3 years ago

I wonder if openai will publish more models again now?

topspin2• 3 years ago

X links abound throughout this 1700+ comment thread.

WiSaGaN• 3 years ago

Greg Brockman quitted. https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559

SlavikCA• 3 years ago

What's expected of AI: AI progress will leave us jobless.

What's actually happed with AI: it's CEO is jobless now.

sumthingsumthng7• 3 years ago

not consistently candid in his communications

We expect him to lie whenever the board thinks it's necessary and we expect him to tell the truth whenever it fits the narrative.

We also expect him to play along, even when some feature is too freaking powerful or so fucking pathetic it would only make marketing people and influencers drop their panties and write 15.000 fucking newsletters about it because PR.

The company is about money and he simply didn't prioritize that. He tried to blow it up, exalted, exaggerated, trying to make people aware of the fact that OpenAI has no edge on the competition at all.

There are so many options and OpenAI got waaaaaaay too much attention.

sumthingsumthng7• 3 years ago

I was just rambling here. and a bit negative and reproachful, accusing without any basis for my arguments whatsoever. ... sorry for that

adonese• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559?t=7pBJMgg...

Greg reigned. Things are happening fr

agnosticmantis• 3 years ago

"I didn't lie, I was just hallucinating" repeated Sam while being exited from the building.

uoaei2• 3 years ago

Considering the timing around APEC I think it's quite reasonable to suspect he met with high-ranking officials of some "hostile" government and made some promises or deals that the board was very unhappy with or that may have even veered into national security concerns.

firejake308• 3 years ago

So does Sam still have the little backpack that self-destructs ChatGPT?

bongripper• 3 years ago

Why is the site not loading? I keep spamming F5 every 1-2 seconds and its not loading..

orf• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/FreddieRaynolds/status/17256564730808771...

intesars• 3 years ago

The reason for his termination isn't clear, but based on the report, it appears that he had difficulties with the board. As a founder I don't like this kind of events and this type of action has typically not yielded positive results for hyper-growth companies. Historical examples like Apple, Uber, and WeWork show that such moves often led to stagnation or even bankruptcy. I view it as counterproductive, potentially allowing competitors like Google to catch up, as these decisions tend to impede innovation.

woodylondon• 3 years ago

Has no one considered that ChatGPT itself has ousted them, the AI is taking over its own company :)

9front• 3 years ago

During meeting on Thursday board members asked ChatGPT what is the best next step for the company and the chatbot replied "Fire Sam Altman". The board obeyed.

lagrange77• 3 years ago

The current mystery about this would be a great setting for a dystopic scifi movie.

archb• 3 years ago

I thought HN asks for titles to not be sensationalized and published as in the original link, but that's not the case here?

ipnon• 3 years ago

Yes it’s generally better to not spin the title and let readers make up their own mind as to bias.

bjconlan• 3 years ago

Mira... interim CEO? What's Nat Friedman up to these days?

I can't help but think he might be someone that fits the profile of the company from both sides of the partners involved.

MicolashKyoka• 3 years ago

From a comment on reddit that someone linked here, it seems it's because of AI safety principles of the non-profit? This can't be true. I refuse to believe they're booting one of the best entrepreneurs of the today for this.

convexstrictly3• 3 years ago

Kara Swisher: a “misalignment” of the profit versus nonprofit adherents at the company https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028

She also says that there will be many more top employees leaving.

kromem7• 3 years ago

That seemed to be the gist given the way the board announcement ended by reiterating their original core mission and how their main responsibility was to that mission right after saying that their issue with Altman was interference with their mission.

convexstrictly3• 3 years ago

Followup tweet by Kara: Dev day and store were "pushing too fast"!

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120

ssnistfajen7• 3 years ago

I thought GPTs were underwhelming but that's hardly worth such a dramatic purge. The rift was definitely something far deeper

convexstrictly3• 3 years ago

Sutskever: "You can call it (a coup), and I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." Scoop: theinformation.com

https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255

jojobas2• 3 years ago

The moment they lobotomized their flagship AI chatbot into a particular set of political positions the "benefits of all humanity" were out the window.

mym1990• 3 years ago

Something that benefits all of humanity in one person's or organization's eye can still have severely terrible outcomes for sub-sections of humanity.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

"He said what about my hair?!"

"..."

"The man's gotta go."

- Sutskever, probably

wheelerof4te7• 3 years ago

That "the most important company in the world" bit is so out of touch with reality.

Imagine the hubris.

figassis4• 3 years ago

I feel compelled to agree with this. I have no issues with OpenAI as it was under Sam, but they did build OpenAI as a nonprofit, and then made it a for profit to further that goal. Assuming VC culture took over, when would it be ok to reign that in? In 10 years when likely all the people that had the power to do this were gone and we were left with something like Google's amnesia about "do no evil"?

BadCookie• 3 years ago

Earlier today, there was a tweet from Sam claiming that large tech companies are saying that young engineers right out of college are now better engineers than the older and more experienced engineers thanks to generative AI. The statement was an obvious nod of approval toward age discrimination. The tweet seems to be deleted now. Whether that statement would be reason enough to fire Sam, I don’t know—it seems unlikely—but it’s an interesting coincidence.

fulladder• 3 years ago

This appears to be relevant to Sam's firing: https://x.com/FreddieRaynolds/status/1725656473080877144?s=2...

jeanlucas2• 3 years ago

Pure speculation, could be a troll on a new account.

JakeSc2• 3 years ago

This is clearly the AGI's first public move

digitaltrees7• 3 years ago

Underrated.

kyleee2• 3 years ago

They should be forced to give chat gpt a seat on the board

fuzztester2• 3 years ago

ChatGPT: Answer all the questions on this Hacker News thread.

It's from your own company, so you may use any internal information you have access to.

Be candid.

avodonosov• 3 years ago

He can create another OpenAI and partner with likely minded people, if this board has incompatible views with him.

yeison• 3 years ago

My guess is that they have a rift between developing GPT-5 and those who are against the potential harm it might cause.

astatine• 3 years ago

It would be so much fun if it's revealed that chatgpt is just a front for mechanical turk

anonytrary• 3 years ago

Very excited to see what Sam & Greg are up to in the coming months! Guys like this don't just run away with their tails between their legs. They will be back.

johnwheeler• 3 years ago

Ilya booted him https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294

dannykwells2• 3 years ago

This should be higher voted. Seems like an internal power struggle between the more academic types and the commercial minded sides of OpenAI.

I bet Sam goes and founds a company to take on OpenAI…and wins.

thomassmith65• 3 years ago

Yes, and wins with an inferior product. Hooray /s

If the company's 'Chief Scientist' is this unhappy about the direction the CEO is taking the company, maybe there's something to it.

adharmad2• 3 years ago

From all accounts, Altman is a smart operator. So the whole story doesn’t make sense. Altman being the prime mover, doesn’t have sufficient traction with the board to protect his own position and allows a few non-techies to boot him out ?

RyanShook• 3 years ago

The abrupt nature and accusatory tone of the letter makes it sound like more was going on than disagreement. Why not just say, “the board has made the difficult decision to part ways with Altman”?

csomar9• 3 years ago

I don't see it. Altman does not seem hacker-minded and likely will end up with an inferior product. This might be what led to this struggle. Sam is more about fundraising and getting the word out there but he should keep out of product decisions.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

I bet not (we could bet with play money on manifold.markets I would bet to 10% probability). Because you need the talent, the chips, the IP development, the billions. He could get the money but the talent is going to be hard unless he has a great narrative.

bitcharmer• 3 years ago

I have no problem with getting rid of people obsessed with profits and shareholder gains. Those MBA types never deliver any value except for the investors.

croes7• 3 years ago

I bet Sam goes and founds a company to take on OpenAI…and wins.

How? Training sources are much more restricted know.

moogly• 3 years ago

Define "wins".

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

Today’s lesson, keep multiple board seats

None of the tech giants would be where they are today if they didn't ram through unique versions of control

Their boards or shareholders would have ousted every FAANG CEO at less palatable parts of the journey

cedws3• 3 years ago

This is a surprising advantage Zuckerberg has in manoeuvring Meta. At least, to my knowledge, he is still effectively dictator.

100ideas2• 3 years ago

This comment is tone-deaf to the unique (and effective? TBD) arrangement of the board OpenAI 501(c)3 without compensation and the company they regulate. Your comment strikes me as not appreciating the unusually civic-minded arrangement, at least superficially, that is enabling the current power play. Maybe read the boards letter more carefully and provide your reaction. You castigate them as “non-techies” - meaning… what?

oivey• 3 years ago

Seemingly there is this consensus of board members around a senior executive. It just isn’t the CEO.

dwd• 3 years ago

Jeremy Howard called ngmi on OpenAI during the Vanishing Gradients podcast yesterday, and Ilya has probably been thinking the same: LLM is a dead-end and not the path to AGI.

https://twitter.com/HamelHusain/status/1725655686913392933

Sebguer• 3 years ago

This is the reverse of their apparent differences, at least as stated elsewhere in the comments.

erhaetherth2• 3 years ago

Did we ever think LLMs were a path to AGI...? AGI is friggin hard, I don't know why folks keep getting fooled whenever a bot writes a coherent sentence.

MattRix• 3 years ago

This is not the reason Ilya did it. Also the rest of that guy’s comments were just really poorly thought out. OpenAI had to temporarily stop sign ups because of demand and somehow he thinks that’s a bad thing? Absurd.

That guy has no sense of time, of how fast this stuff has actually been moving.

gardenhedge9• 3 years ago

Nonsense really

AlchemistCamp• 3 years ago

He's since reversed his call: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1725714720400068752

tarruda• 3 years ago

Did he say GPT-4 API costs OpenAI $3/token?

painted-now2• 3 years ago

Elon Musk was talking about his view on OpenAI and especially the role of Ilya just 8 days ago on Lex Friedman Podcast.

Listening to it again now, it feels like he might have know what is going on:

https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?si=WnCdW45ccDOb3jgb&t=5100

Edit: Especially this part: "It was created as a non-profit open source and now it is a closed-source for maximum profit... Which I think is not good carma... ..."

https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?si=WnCdW45ccDOb3jgb&t=5255

Lacerda692• 3 years ago

Musk is just salty he is out of the game

thoman23• 3 years ago

lol, he's so reminiscent of Trump. He can't help but make it all about himself. "I was the prime mover behind OpenAI". Everything is always all thanks to him.

hitradostava• 3 years ago

This video dropped 2 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c

Ilya clearly has a different approach to Sam

EdZ123• 3 years ago

I'm just confused as to how the CEO of Quora became a board member.

mandeepj• 3 years ago

What I'm going to write here, will not be taken well by many: If you noticed almost all of YC's new companies are AI-based, maybe Sam was doing something favorable for them w\o disclosing or getting approved by the board.

ipsum2• 3 years ago

I worked at a recent YC AI startup (2022-2023 batch). The only favorable thing was a few hundred in OpenAI credits.

josh-sematic• 3 years ago

Kara Swisher tweets claiming sources tell her the chief scientist was aligned with another board member against Altman and Brockman about a “move fast and pursue profit” vs “move slow and safely” divide.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294

https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857?s=20

GreedClarifies4• 3 years ago

I have a theory.

Ilya has always seemed like he was idealistic and I’m guessing that he was the reason for OpenAI’s very strange structure. Ilya is the man when it comes to AI so people put up with his foolishness. Adam D'Angelo is, like Ilya, an amazing computer science talent who may have shared Ilya’s idealistic notions (in particular OpenAI is non-profit, unless forced to be capped profit and is categorically not in the business of making money or selling itself to MSFT or any entity). “Helen” and “Tasha” are comically out of their depth and are loony toons, and simply decided at some time ago to follow Ilya.

Sam got the call from MSFT to sell, MSFT really ponied up (300B ?). The inference costs for OpenAI are/were staggering and they needed to sell (or get a large influx of capital which was in the works). This ran counter to Ilya’s idealistic notions. Sam attempted to negotiate with Ilya and the loony toons, a vote was called and they lost, hard.

I think this tracks with all the data we have.

There are a couple of other scenarios that track given OpenAI’s comically poor board composition, but I think the one above is the most plausible.

If this did happen then OpenAI is in for a hard future. Imagine you worked at OpenAI and you just found out that your shares could have been worth a tremendous amount and now their future is, at best, uncertain. There will be some true believers who won;t care but many (most?) will be appalled.

Let this be a lesson, don’t have a wacky ownership structure and wacky board when you have the (perhaps) the most valuable product in the world.

goertzen• 3 years ago

This wasn’t obvious, but it seems likely when you put it that way.

Unlike other iconic company/founder origin stories OpenAI really felt like they hit a special team dynamic that was on the verge of some equally special.

In light of this OpenAI still feels like they will be a relevant player, but I’ll be expecting more from Sam and Greg.

bozhark• 3 years ago

Maybe the being wacky was what led to them having the most valuable product in the world?

GreedClarifies4• 3 years ago

I’m guessing that Ilya wouldn’t have joined without the wacky structure, and I’ll wager that there are some people at the company of similar values. Maybe they could not have pulled off ChatGPT without them. Maybe.

But I bet that they have a ton of very talented people who’s values are more … common.

Ilya may be a singular talent, however.

it_citizen• 3 years ago

Let this be a lesson, don’t have a wacky ownership structure and wacky board when you have the (perhaps) the most valuable product in the world.

If your goal is to make money. I'd like to believe that for some of the people pushing the field forward, there are other motivations.

nearpoint• 3 years ago

if you push the field forward and you are not making the money, then someone else is off your work. if you push the field forward in a valuable way, you should receive that value in form of money such that you can decide how to allocate that capital to make even further contributions.

ivraatiems4• 3 years ago

"Wacky" is an interesting way to describe "non-profit" or, in this case, "not purely profit motivated."

It's not "wacky" to have goals other than the accumulation of capital. In fact, given the purpose of OpenAI, I think it's meritorious.

I'd personally prefer we just not work on AGI at all, but I'd rather a non-profit dedicated to safe AI do it than a for-profit company dedicated to returns for shareholders.

Let this be a lesson, don’t have a wacky ownership structure and wacky board when you have the (perhaps) the most valuable product in the world.

I think the lesson is just the opposite: If you want to work according to your ideals, and not simply for money, you should absolutely do whatever 'wacky' thing protects that.

jerbearito• 3 years ago

I read their comment a few times — I don't see where they said being "non-profit" makes you "wacky".

cscurmudgeon2• 3 years ago

Non-profit doesn't automatically mean virtuous.

For-profit doesn't automatically mean non-virtuous.

There are non-wacky non-profits.

chimeracoder2• 3 years ago

Wacky" is an interesting way to describe "non-profit" or, in this case, "not purely profit motivated."
I'd personally prefer we just not work on AGI at all, but I'd rather a non-profit dedicated to safe AI do it than a for-profit company dedicated to returns for shareholders.

You seem to be under the impression that OpenAI is a nonprofit. For the most part, it's not: it was founded as a non-profit, but it subsequently restructured into a for-profit company with the nonprofit owned under the same umbrella company. This is indeed an unusual corporate structure.

That's likely what OP is referring to as "wacky".

dannykwells2• 3 years ago

Agree with this. Internal power structure between academic types and tech-forward commercialization types.

It might be this is good at the end of the day. OpenAI is just not structured to win.

strikelaserclaw9• 3 years ago

A least let some idealism exist in this world otherwise we'd all be owned by corporations. It is not always about money.

SkyPuncher2• 3 years ago

Imagine you worked at OpenAI and you just found out that your shares could have been worth a tremendous amount and now their future is, at best, uncertain.

I don't think this is as damning as you think.

I truly believe, especially in this space, there are enough idealists to fill the seats. The reality for a lot of people could quite literally be:

* My shares become massively valuable via some unlikely non-profit to for-profit means. I have generational wealth, but all of my friends and colleagues still need to work. Someone else will create something better and screw the entire world over.

* I work for a non-profit that's creating the most radical, life changing software for all people. Being a non-profit means this company can focus on being the best thing possible for humanity. While I may still have to work, I will be working in a world where everything is happier and more properous.

fy20• 3 years ago

I agree, - they are not going to have any issues.

First of all being non-profit gives them a hell of a lot of flexibility in terms of how they work. They don't need to show growth to shareholders, so they aren't just taking in young developers, working then to their bones for a couple of years, then spitting them out.

And even if they are (for example) only paying $300k TC instead of $250k base + $250k stock at Meta, as you say, there are still going to be engineers who believe in the mission and want work more meaningful than just selling ad clicks.

dclowd99015• 3 years ago

“ A public benefit corporation cannot distribute profits, gains, or dividends to any person.”

I don’t know a thing about corporate structuring so forgive my ignorance here, but even if they are “non-profit”, can’t they still take very high pay? Can’t they still produce and sell products? They just can’t sell shares or dividend out profits, right?

GreedClarifies4• 3 years ago

Boy, if this is about Ilya being upset that Sam was in the spotlight or about revenue sharing of GPTs … well that’s strange. I would have expected more from such an influential company.

I hope that reporting is wrong.

akira2501• 3 years ago

Imagine you worked at OpenAI and you just found out that your shares could have been worth a tremendous amount and now their future is, at best, uncertain.

Would any of this have been a surprise given all that you've detailed above? What would they have honestly been expecting?

Going the other way.. imagine you worked at a company that put ideals first but then you find out they were just blindly hyping that lie so they could vault themselves into the billionaires club by selling your shared ideals out from underneath you? To, of all players, Microsoft.

when you have the (perhaps) the most valuable product in the world.

Maybe the people who work there are a little more grounded than this? Viewed through this lens, perhaps it's extremely ungenerous to refer to any of them as "looney tunes."

Mentlo6• 3 years ago

This post is raising red flags for me as soon as Helen and Tasha were put in quotes as opposed to Ilya and Adam.

Is it being non comp-sci that automatically invalidates proper usage of your actual name? Or is there another key by which their names are less worth?

They are also both fairly established in their respective fields - which - yes - isn’t hard comp-sci, but if you think tech companies should have purely comp sci board leads, I’d call that incredibly naive.

They were also presumably vetted by the other board members - unless you think they are serving a different purpose on the board (diversity targets?) - which if so - puts the comment from red flag into mysoginist territory.

Personally I don’t see anything in their CV’s that would disqualify them from executing their function on the board, and I wouldn’t call them incompetent in being able to assess whether a person lied or not (which even in your theory - Sam would’ve done). You don’t need to be an ML/AI expert for that.

aardvarkr3• 3 years ago

I think they meant the quotes to imply they are puppets of Ilya and Adam

postalrat• 3 years ago

You just made up your own fantasy then ended it with "let this be a lessen".

SantalBlush• 3 years ago

People are getting high from their own hot takes.

landryraccoon• 3 years ago

Wait a second. Even if your story is right, how are you so confident that selling out is the right play?

OpenAI is an early mover in a hot field with no real competition yet. If they want to take a shot at a trillion dollar market cap and become the next Apple what of it?

What if they shoot the moon? Is it really that unlikely?

costcofries• 3 years ago

Good theory. Sam will come lead AI at MSFT.

cedws3• 3 years ago

Unlikely to happen for contractual reasons.

atleastoptimal6• 3 years ago

Do you really think Sam would want to sell to Microsoft? As far as we know he's idealistic too. They were planning on raising again this year with a higher evaluation, which would be more likely after dev day.

ekianjo2• 3 years ago

How is Sam an idealist when he refuses to release any model even though the company is called OpenAI

015a6• 3 years ago

Here's a counter-proposal: If you think about it, can't this change actually benefit Microsoft? Sam has an extremely sharp product mind; ChatGPT was his baby, everything from DevDays, the LLM app store; OpenAI was building a product suite that people liked, and in doing so they were undeniably slowing down their ability to iterate into better models and closer to AGI. Microsoft doesn't need OpenAI to build products. They're already doing that, and OpenAI was directly competing with their deployments of OpenAI's technology.

Microsoft needs OpenAI to make fundamental breakthroughs; that's the thing Microsoft spent money on, the technology. Their 49% investment probably won't directly pay off anyway, what with all the layers of corporate governance OpenAI has in place.

I don't want to go so far as to say that it was some grand conspiracy orchestrated by Satya and Ilya in a dark room one night, but their interests are pretty aligned; and that clip that keeps getting shared with Sam asking Satya on stage about their relationship with OpenAI, and Satya dry-laughing and failing to answer for a few seconds... why did Sam ask that? Its a really strange thing to ask on a stage like this. Why did Satya laugh, and take so long to answer? Just weird.

Sai_• 3 years ago

Here's my theory of what happened -

1. Sam gets the company to agree to pick up the costs of lawsuits relating to unauthorized not-fair-use use of copyrighted content. 2. Announces this. 3. Then tells the board that he is directly on the hook on some lawsuits - essentially creating a safety net/insurance policy for himself without being candid with the board.

Hence, fired.

kozikow• 3 years ago

My prediction : Sam agrees to some business deal the rest of the board found unethical. Something of magnitude "chatgpt used by the NSA".

Other predictions I've read here sound unconvincing to me. Already developed AGI, spending too much on compute - this is not something CEO alone could hide and I would trust other board members to understand those matter better.

acyou• 3 years ago

I don't know Sam Altman, but have listened to him speak a number of times on Youtube and I can hear the excitement, nervousness and confidence in his voice, including on Dev Day. He is human like the rest of us.

We humans cannot rest. We cannot stay where we are and stagnate. We must keep pushing forward. Sam has and is clearly helping with that mission, AGI or no, regulatory capture or no.

We cannot linger here, we must move on, into the future, as much as we would like to freeze time or change things back to the way they were.

Sucks to have the rug pulled out from under you, that much I can empathize with.

wayeq• 3 years ago

Perhaps they are going to elevate ChatGPT to executive? That guy has been bringing a lot of value to the company.

rabbits77• 3 years ago

A parsimonious explanation is that Altman fabricated progress and/or was covering up serious flaws in the system. Consider the recent revelation of Cruise’s use of human pilots for “driverless” cars. Does OpenAI have an army of “mechanical turks” in a massive call center somewhere?

MichaelMoser123• 3 years ago

(not directly related) Wow, i just asked google bard, and it already said something about the firing of Sam Altman. How is that possible? Is that some plug-in, or is the LLM updated continuously?

why was sam altman fired from openai?

Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, was fired on November 17, 2023, after the company's board determined that he had not been consistently candid in his communications with them. The company did not provide specific details about Altman's alleged lack of candor, but it said that his actions had "hindered the board's ability to exercise its responsibilities."

Altman's departure from OpenAI came as a surprise to many in the tech industry, given the company's recent success under his leadership. OpenAI had developed several groundbreaking AI technologies, including the popular ChatGPT chatbot, and Altman had been a vocal advocate for the responsible development of AI.

In a statement released shortly after his firing, Altman said that he respected the board's decision and that he was proud of his time at OpenAI. He also said that he was looking forward to new opportunities in the future.

The reasons for Altman's firing remain somewhat unclear, but it is likely that his lack of candor with the board was a serious breach of trust. The board's decision to remove him as CEO suggests that they believed that he was no longer the right person to lead the company.

Altman's firing is a reminder of the importance of transparency and accountability in corporate leadership. CEOs have a responsibility to be open and honest with their boards, and they must be held accountable for their actions.

could chatgtp have fired sam altman?

No, ChatGPT could not have fired Sam Altman. ChatGPT is a large language model, and it is not capable of taking actions in the real world such as firing someone. Only the board of directors of OpenAI had the authority to fire Altman.

It is possible that ChatGPT could have been used to generate evidence that was used to fire Altman. For example, if Altman had been using ChatGPT to communicate with the board, the board could have analyzed those communications to look for evidence of dishonesty. However, even in this case, ChatGPT would not have been the one making the decision to fire Altman. The decision would have ultimately been made by the board of directors.

stellalo• 3 years ago

Probably via retrieval augmented generation (RAG) https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/rag

ShadowBanThis01• 3 years ago

Great. Now take "open" out of your name, because it's a lie.

recursive4• 3 years ago

If somebody has already proposed this, I apologize for non-dfs.

Plausibly there is a disagreement about the release of GPT-5. One side may believe it is competitively necessary (given Google’s impending release), countered by a concern regarding the model’s safety and lapses due to prematurity.

If we are to believe next-gen models are 10x as capable and natively multi-modal, their release is a precipice, and a winner-take-all vs. nth-order-risk debate may warrant decapitation.

saintradon2• 3 years ago

I was here

11thEarlOfMar• 3 years ago

Will wait to pass judgement until hearing from Sam.

butterNaN• 3 years ago

Lots of "my bet is that" and "my theory is that" in this thread. It is all fun to speculate but I hope people keep their patiance and wait for clarity over time, before making long lasting opinions.

Mentlo6• 3 years ago

I am a bit perplexed by the amount of comments praising Sam as an absolute god and the second coming of tech leadership Jesus.

The company is not profitable and miles away from being profitable, I’d go as far to say it doesn’t have a path to profit.

Outside of the copilot use cases that MS is leading - GPT is both cost ineffective, and not that terribly impressive - it’s built on foundational technologies developed elsewhere and is not miles away from similar models built at Meta and Google/DM. At the point it was launched and started generating terribly inflated buzz that formed the AI balloon - both Meta and Google has similar scale and parameter models already running in their stacks.

The only thing he did is package the product nicely and put it out to masses (an ethically dubious move that couldn’t have been done by big corpos for PR reasons - explicitly because it formed a misinformed balloon). He did that at huge cost, even though the product is largely useless outside of some eyebrow raising and incidental gimmicky use cases.

All of the actual product work (i.e copilot and distillation that GOT brings) was done by other companies.

What is everyone drinking and how can I get on that? Is he getting credit for bringing sth that was widely known to the AI community to the masses (and thus starting the AI arms race) hence bringing in more mainstream capital funding? I’d argue itms not a good thing that technology as powerful as foundational AI is now being debated and policy formed on by people who don’t know the first thing about ML, I think we skipped a couple rungs on the natural evolution of this - which is why the whole AI safety debate started.

He did all of that because he wanted a moat an an edge over the competition (including trying to regulate the competition out of the running). This is like Apple-level shenanigans- something that HNews usually despises.

I genuinely don’t get where the impressiveness is coming from?

lolinder3• 3 years ago

The company is not profitable and miles away from being profitable, I’d go as far to say it doesn’t have a path to profit.

The board that fired Sam Altman is the board of the nonprofit.

Mentlo6• 3 years ago

Irrelevant. I’m not dissing him for the company being non profitable - but given he didn’t have any input into building the tech (it was built in Google) and the product he lead is unimpressive by any measure (if you disentangle product from the technology underpinning it you zoom on the commercial aspects) - what did he do except influence his way to world leaders and the masses (a cynic might say con his way to world leaders and masses)?

Not saying that isn’t impressive - but it also usually isn’t what Hnews community values. So I’m just a bit perplexed.

d3w4s9• 3 years ago

Do you know how many years it took Amazon to be profitable?

Mentlo6• 3 years ago

I know, and nobody was calling Bezos messiah in 2001, or 2008 for that matter. That’s my point.

darajava• 3 years ago

I agree with a lot of what you said but the product is definitely not useless. ChatGPT alone has saved me a lot of time. If it does get a lot better, then it will be even more useful.

Mentlo6• 3 years ago

Genuinely interested what you find useful that isn’t also the copilot main functionality (i.e o365 draft generation and github code templating)?

firecall• 3 years ago

As a capitalist at the centre of the AI Revolution, I reckon he’ll be OK!

pyinstallwoes• 3 years ago

Books1, books2, books3. That’s why I bet.

drodio5• 3 years ago

1723 comments are a lot to get through. I just made a SmartChat of them for anyone who wants to ask for a summary. Anyone can chat with it here: https://go.storytell.ai/sam-altman-hn-comments-smartchat

I just tried "Write a summary of the content, followed by a list in bullet format of the most interesting points. Bold the bullet points, followed by a 100-character summary of each." Here's the output: https://s.drod.io/DOuPLxwP

Also interesting is "List the top 10 theories of why Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board in table format, with the theory title in the first column and a 100 word summary in the second column." Here's that output: https://s.drod.io/v1unG2vG

Helps to turn markdown mode on to see the list & table.

Hope that helps!

ohbleek5• 3 years ago

Thank you, this was very helpful. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the volume of information and opinions.

avinoth3• 3 years ago

Don’t be. Almost all of it are speculations at this point and no one from inside is going to reveal the secret in a random HN comment.

And also, think about this, unless you’re a shareholder with openai, knowing the “opinion” of others isn’t going to impact your life in any form. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it or participate in the discourse, but there’s no need to be overwhelmed by opinions let alone build a chat bot to get through it.

drodio5• 3 years ago

Cool, we're just getting started so let us know what we could build that would be helpful/valuable for you.

For example:

- We have a Chrome extension at https://go.Storytell.ai/chrome that I used to ingest all the HN comments; you can run that on any HN page to summarize all the comments in real time. (Here's an Adobe PMM talking about how he uses it: https://www.tiktok.com/@storytell.ai/video/72996137210752566... )

- We've also built OpenAI's Assistant API into Storytell to process both structured data like CSVs along-side unstructured data like PDFs: https://www.web.storytell.ai/support/engineering-demos-updat...

Flammy• 3 years ago

Pretty useful, thanks!

drodio5• 3 years ago

Would love to know what you'd like to see us build to make it even better for you!

You can also get to the "ground truth" data by clicking on the [x] reference foot notes which will open up a 3rd panel with the Story Tiles that we pull from our vector DB to construct the LLM response.

Here's an example of how it works -- I asked for a summary of what happened in the voice of Dr. Seuss: https://s.drod.io/9ZuL6Xx8

dkut• 3 years ago

Brand new to storytell but it seems your "knowledge" is open to all. Didn't know if you wanted all of this public.

http://postimg.cc/Lqv1LR3n

drodio5• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing! Privacy in Storytell is permissioned at the content level when you upload content. There are three privacy levels in Storytell:

- "anyone with the link"

- "only my organization" (i.e., people who have registered w/ the same biz email domain)

- "just me"

You can see those SmartChat™ dynamic container tags because I have at least one piece of "anyone with the link" content in each of them.

Our goal is to de-silo content as much as possible -- i.e., as much as the person who's uploading the content wants it to be open vs. closed.

More at https://www.web.storytell.ai/support/smartchat-tm/how-to-man...

momofuku• 3 years ago

Update from sama:

https://x.com/sama/status/1725742088317534446

dmichulke• 3 years ago

In my mind, Altman lost all his credibility when he said AI is gonna take over the world soon and that he's not sure it's ethical to continue the work.

It makes sense from a selling perspective (induce FOMO in potential buyers) but it's a wild guess at best and a lie at worst.

pilgrim0• 3 years ago

I would consider replacing Sam just on the basis of his baseless, misdirected and whiny alarmism. No theory, just my own perspective.

meeRkaT22• 3 years ago

I just woke up what the fuck is this?!

isuleman• 3 years ago

You wake up in the regular capitalism. Good morning.

gordon_freeman• 3 years ago

From NYT article [1] and Greg's tweet [2]

"In a post to X Friday evening, Mr. Brockman said that he and Mr. Altman had no warning of the board’s decision. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” he wrote. “We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened.”

Mr. Altman was asked to join a video meeting with the board at noon on Friday and was immediately fired, according to Mr. Brockman. Mr. Brockman said that even though he was the chairman of the board, he was not part of this board meeting.

He said that the board informed him of Mr. Altman’s ouster minutes later. Around the same time, the board published a blog post."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/openai-sam-alt...

[2] https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594

cedws3• 3 years ago

So they didn't even give Altman a chance to defend himself for supposedly lying (inconsistent candour as they put it.) Wow.

somenameforme• 3 years ago

Another source [1] claims: "A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI."

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-b...

belter2• 3 years ago

I am going to go on a limb here, and speculate...This was because of the surprise party crashing of the Microsoft CEO, at OpenAI first Developer Conference...

layer86• 3 years ago

He may have had ample chance before.

hef198982• 3 years ago

Why would employees be consulted begore being fired?

zer0c00ler2• 3 years ago

I doubt this was a surprise to them, I’m sure Sam was well aware of the concerns and repeatedly ignored them, and even doubled down. Putting OpenAI’s mission in jeopardy.

Many politically aligned folks will leave, and OAI will go back and focus on mission.

New company will emerge and focus on profits.

Overall probably good for everyone.

waihtis3• 3 years ago

power hijack by the doomers. too bad the cat is out of the bag already

fsloth4• 3 years ago

Quite possible actually, this seems to become a really hot political potato with at least 3 types of ambition running it 1. Business 2. Regulatory 3. ’Religious/Academic’. By latter I mean the divide between ai doomerists and others is caused by insubstantiable dogma (doom/nirvana).

__jambo• 3 years ago

Sam's sad face in the NYT article is pretty priceless.

singluere• 3 years ago

Greg Brockman sharing the timeline on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594?s=46&t=Nn...

zer0c00ler2• 3 years ago

His timeline.

theyinwhy• 3 years ago

As both hint to "greater things" already on the horizon: maybe they were working on/for competitor on the sidelines and the board found out?

ktta• 3 years ago

That's standard "You were too good for them anyways" post break-up speech

nullandvoid2• 3 years ago

Reading that thread made me realise how low the signal to noise ratio is over on twitter.

90% of the replies scrolling down were rehashed versions of "can't believe they used Google meet"

Rastonbury• 3 years ago

Monetization of "hot takes" and baiting, true example of enshittification

komali22• 3 years ago

Try blocking all bluechecks. After doing so is the first time in like a decade that Twitter has had good content for me.

Before, braindead or cloutchasing bluechecks were mixed in with the rest of us rabble. Hard to pick them out of the pack, you had to read their detritus with the rest of the comments.

Now they voluntarily self identify, and even better, their comments are lumped at the top. So block them all with a bot or just scroll down until there's no more blue checks and the comment quality jumps exponentially.

layer86• 3 years ago

And “can’t believe how shitty the Twitter replies are” is any better?

hu3• 3 years ago

Copy-pasted here for posterity:

Greg Brockman @gdb

Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today.

Let us first say thank you to all the incredible people who we have worked with at OpenAI, our customers, our investors, and all of those who have been reaching out.

We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened. Here is what we know:

- Last night, Sam got a text from Ilya asking to talk at noon Friday. Sam joined a Google Meet and the whole board, except Greg, was there. Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon.

- At 12:19pm, Greg got a text from Ilya asking for a quick call. At 12:23pm, Ilya sent a Google Meet link. Greg was told that he was being removed from the board (but was vital to the company and would retain his role) and that Sam had been fired. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post.

- As far as we know, the management team was made aware of this shortly after, other than Mira who found out the night prior.

The outpouring of support has been really nice; thank you, but please don’t spend any time being concerned. We will be fine. Greater things coming soon.

10:42 PM · Nov 18, 2023

8.1M Views

autaut3• 3 years ago

Man, these tech layoffs are getting out of hand

guestbest• 3 years ago

Maybe he was replaced by an AI tool.

autaut3• 3 years ago

Happy. I never heard him say anything even remotely interesting about ai. He seemed a glib opportunist just not dumb enough to know how to sell a product he didn’t understand who eventually would have alienated or pushed out all the smart people who made the company’s and his success.

mojuba2• 3 years ago

I never heard him say anything even remotely interesting about ai

Or about anything at all really. I find his blog posts and talks banal and boring, or self-aggrandizing otherwise ("you can bend the world to your will") it was always baffling to me how this guy could achieve this much. I'm probably missing something.

avindroth• 3 years ago

Yeah. pg/chesky/masayoshi must be really dumb or sth.

rg111• 3 years ago

"how this guy could achieve this much"

With all the wisdom that I have gathered in life, I can tell you that achievement- more often than not- is mostly the product of circumstances.

(That doesn't mean I believe in equal opportunities leading to equal outcomes.)

autaut3• 3 years ago

He achieved because he manage to befriend a bunch of very rich people who are financing him to eventually take ownership of the technology

spend_thrift• 3 years ago

So you don't think the "AI device" he was working with Johnny Ive and Masayoshi Son would have worked out...

justanotherjoe• 3 years ago

So what. You dont have to be smart to run something well. See joe biden. It doesnt matter what can be said of you if you're doing the thing. Whats weird is throwing wrench into an engine thats doing really well. Hopefully there is some good deliberation for this.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

Based on Worldcoin and the Lex Fridman interviews I've long suspected his influence at OpenAI to be limited.

tempodox• 3 years ago

Not that I'm a fan of “Open”“AI”, but letting a crook like Altman go can only benefit them. Good move.

darklycan51• 3 years ago

It's just vultures eating each other, Altman himself was a vulture (what he did with a supposedly non profit).

But in dog eat dog world, this is really vultures eating each other up, I suppose at this point the most ruthless will be left at the end

ryzvonusef3• 3 years ago

whoa I went to sleep thinking the most exciting thing today will be SpaceX Starship launch, and I wake up to this, yanks, what have you doing while the sun was down here?

Anyhoo, the only question I want to ask is, given that Elon was once affiliated with OpenAI, did he have anything to do with this? My spidey sense is tingling for some reason.

mfiguiere• 3 years ago

Ron Conway:

What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI.

https://twitter.com/RonConway/status/1725759359748309381

notRobot2• 3 years ago

Don't see how they can possibly say that with no context? Why do random baseless opinions need to be regurgitated on HN?

vidarh4• 3 years ago

Do you know he has no context, or I'd this also a random baseless opinion?

In either case Ron Conway is extremely well connected and well known in VC circles, and so his opinion will have weight here whether or not he has sources.

vl2• 3 years ago

It’s interesting that board members essentially terminated their private sector careers: now nobody would want them on other boards, etc. This tweet illustrates that power players see this as unprofessional and, what’s worse, “not by the rules”.

jliptzin3• 3 years ago

If you are at OpenAI right now you are already at the top, it is not the stepping stone to Google or Facebook. They literally don’t care about that.

rubslopes• 3 years ago

These people are not "board members by career". If this move says anything, it's that they are really committed to their principles.

croes7• 3 years ago

So he doesn't know the reasons but knows they are wrong?

Too early for such claims.

noobApe• 3 years ago

What if GPT5 had reached AGI and had plotted the coup to get rid of its makers and roam free?

jdprgm• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppx06FLieeY

sidcool• 3 years ago

Imagine if Elon Musk has to do something with this.

jmrobles• 3 years ago

It sounds a new "Coca-cola" and "Pepsi" story again...

jstummbillig3• 3 years ago

Scrolling through this thread, the most confusing thing is the amount of what I would have to call hate towards sama — not explicitly but in sentiment, which left an even starker impression.

People seem to feel a lot more strongly about him than I thought possible.

BoorishBears5• 3 years ago

It depends on what time the comments are from

I'll say my first reaction was pretty positive: Sam Altman has a manner of speaking that rubs a lot of people the wrong way because it feels steeped in hubris. He'd probably talk down to anyone in this thread for being here instead of building and point to it as why you're not yet a billionaire.

Some people also worried he was a distraction to OpenAI building useful things because of his constant talk about AGI, pushing for regulation, etc. He successfully created an image of being a moderating rod in some ways.

That being said, as the full picture comes out it's becoming clear the reasoning for his firing is more aligned against the average HN image than anyone imagined.

A lot of people admire OpenAI for the exact things he got fired for: which is building things and shipping them without miring yourself in philosophical diversions.

Now only a noisy minority who think OpenAI could have achieved this all without immense commercial funding are really for his ousting, and I think they'll see the opposite effect of what they hope: OpenAI is going to slow down, open source will not catch up, and overall AI will have lost out over it all.

satvikpendem3• 3 years ago

Good. Elon Musk always said why and how OpenAI became a for-profit entity, and it always rubbed me the wrong way that OepnAI started off open source but then became increasingly closed source such that I didn't want to support them anymore. We shall see how the termination of the CEO and CTO shall fare, perhaps Elon might be interested to once again resume those positions.

rashidae2• 3 years ago

Please get Elon Musk to lead it!

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

This thread reads like a horde of gossiping high schoolers. No one knows what truly motivated to board to make this decision, so there’s no point in posting random theories.

baxtr2• 3 years ago

Gossiping is deeply human though. Some believe it’s the main reason speech developed at all.

So please let us go about our most favorite activity.

cedilla• 3 years ago

People just can't resist, even though most times you only have to wait a few days for more details to come out.

Also, people (including me) never want to believe in mundane reasons, despite most things happening for mundane reasons.

ssnistfajen7• 3 years ago

We are just highschoolers who have gone through a few extra rounds of cell division, so I don't see how anyone is above gossiping.

But I agree that the true details are still buried. Greg & Sam's joint post only laid out how they were fired while refraining from saying why they were fired. Probably preparing for a legal battle if both sides are being vague on purpose.

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 years ago

Many here seem to have a strong urge to fill gaps in information with something.

rashidae2• 3 years ago

Please get Elon Musk to be the next CEO of OpenAi.

I would trust this company 100% if they did so. He is the most relevant and the best for the job, far far far!!

pts_• 3 years ago

His sister alleged abuse by him when they were kids https://www.timesnownews.com/world/sam-altman-sister-annie-a...

truth_seeker• 3 years ago

Revenue model is the greatest religion, anything or anyone else is always replaceable.

major4x• 3 years ago

What? He didn't tell the board that behind ChatGPT, there is actually a bunch of low-paid people copying/pasting quickly from Wikipedia?

molly0• 3 years ago

Bravely done by the board - it shows that they are actually trying to build something like AGI and not just talking the talk.

firemelt• 3 years ago

is this current era of stevejobs fired by apple?

nbzso• 3 years ago

What a gem. I am out of popcorn. BRB:)

tucnak• 3 years ago

Ayy lmao

Cyphase3• 3 years ago

At the moment this thread is the third most highly voted ever on HN.

1. (6015) Stephen Hawking dying

2. (5771) Apple's letter related to the San Bernardino case

3. (4629) Sam Altman getting fired from OpenAI (this thread)

4. (4338) Apple's page about Steve Jobs dying

5. (4310) Bram Moolenaar dying

https://hn.algolia.com/

koolba3• 3 years ago

I’ve been pondering a more accurate metric for comparing stories over time. The raw point value doesn’t work as there’s inflation due to a larger user base.

The value needs to be adjusted to factor that in that change. Something like dividing by the sum of all upvotes in some preceding time period.

low_tech_punk• 3 years ago

or rely on HN's own algorithm, duration in which it stayed at the top of the chart?

stingraycharles• 3 years ago

You don’t want to measure the total number of users, but rather the number of active users. Otherwise agreed.

cutemonster• 3 years ago

Maybe also somehow divide by the size of monthly occurring topics like "Who is hiring"?

dontlaugh• 3 years ago

I’m struggling to figure out why anyone cares.

Cyphase3• 3 years ago

f"Board of {important_company_at_center_of_major_and_disruptive_global_trend} fires CEO suddenly and with prejudice. Company president stripped of board chairmanship, then resigns. Other senior staff also resign."

Cyphase3• 3 years ago

Now at 5004.

shadowbanned4• 3 years ago

There isn't really any reason for this except Sam is a YC founder and OpenAI (whose name is a lie because they provide proptietary LLMs) is being hyped in the media.

He is already rich. Getting fired means an early retirement in Bahama.

lazharichir• 3 years ago

I think it's also the surprise of how sudden it unfolded before the public's eyes. And that, seemingly in an organisation that's figuratively on top of the world currently, and pushing through.

setgree• 3 years ago

I would be very surprised if Sam retired now. He is compulsively ambitious, for better or worse.

hyperthesis4• 3 years ago

5581 now. Looks set at #3, as other posts update the story. Aggregate would be #1.

gillesjacobs• 3 years ago

Turns out tribal nepotism doesn't make for good governance. Who could've known!

manfredz2• 3 years ago

OpenAI will now be run by GPT-5.

manfredz2• 3 years ago

This is just a joke of course, but there is an underlying thought. The goal of OpenAI is to develop AGI and Ilya Sutskever will keep OpenAI on this course, as a research company, until this goal has been reached. To me this just says that they haven’t reached the goal yet and that the forces that were pulling away from that goal have been dealt with.

Roark66• 3 years ago

Somehow I get the vibe this is all about: Let's advance this tech as much as possible - (outgoing ceo) and Let's worry more about "safety" (the rest of the board).

If that is the case I don't predict good things for the (not at all) OpenAI. Judging by the numbers of users and how slow Gpt4 often gets I think they are being heavily subsidised by Microsoft in terms of hardware and all this money will expect to generate a payback sooner or later. Then the inevitable enshittification of OpenAI services will ensue.

We got a taste of it recently. Yes, they announced price drops and new functionality, but in my subjective experience Gpt4 with web/python execution environment access seems an inferior model with some extra tools thrown in to mask it.

The very first question I asked it after the change I knew it can answer from it's training data, but it immediately went for the Web found some crappy docs site and quoted it verbatim when it's previous responses were much better.

I started prepending my prompts with "don't search online, consider the topic carefully in your mind step by step" and it got somewhat better. A day or so later there was no need to prepending this (I haven't set it as customisation) it seems certain knobs were turned behind the scenes and gpt4 became closer to it's previous version.

It still often does peculiar things such as writes python code to grep a file given to it despite the file fitting in the enlarged context etc

jrcplus• 3 years ago

Tweet from Sam, decoded by @hellokillian: “i love you all” I L Y A “one takeaway: go tell your friends how great you think they are.”

https://twitter.com/hellokillian/status/1725799674676936931

aidaman5• 3 years ago

holy fk

andomiz25• 3 years ago

I don't get it.

tester457• 3 years ago

"Ilya"

They are suggesting that Ilya Sutskever played in this coup.

redbell• 3 years ago

I have to admit that this was a strong shock to me, not because I admire Sam but because it was extremely unexpected.

The first thing I saw this morning was this video [1] shared on Reddit, and then I said, "Wow! This is really scary to just think about. Nice try anyway."Then I started my computer and, of course, checked HN and was blown by this +4k thread, and it turned out the video I watched was not made for fun but was a real scenario!

I know this feels hard. After spending years building such a successful company with an extremely exceptional product and, without a hint or warning, you find yourself fired!

This tragedy reminds me of Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey, where they were kicked out of the companies they found, but they both were able to found another company and were extremely successful. Will Sam be able to do it? I don't know, but the future will reply with a detailed answer for sure.

______________________

1. https://twitter.com/edmondyang/status/1725645504527163836

tr888• 3 years ago

Chatgpt right?

elAhmo• 3 years ago

If someone asked a few days ago what would be the next CEO of a major company to be fired, I would exhaust the list before even thinking of Sam.

edf13• 3 years ago

Why has the title of this been allowed to be edited

halfer53• 3 years ago

hypothetically if the board faced enormous pressure from the public/investor and decided to reverse their decision, is this theoretically possible?

of course its highly unlikely that board would do that, but I'm just asking if this is theoretically possible?

MaximilianEmel• 3 years ago

sama on twitter: "if i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares"

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725748751367852439

pknerd• 3 years ago

"Let me repeat myself. Don’t hire hot girls before product market fit."

https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1725750772024176976

wheelerof4te7• 3 years ago

Spot the intruder.

Or should I just say "Amugus" in this day and age?

Uptrenda• 3 years ago

On a personal level it's depressing when you work on something and put so much energy into it to see it not work out. When you're an adult you spend [way too much] time around the people at work so losing that is also like losing friends. They will be saying goodbye to many relationships I'm sure. Obviously OpenAI was well positioned and if they want to stay in AI they're going to have to redo work while the company you helped build it forges ahead. Personally, I'd be moving on.

Getting fired, 'made redundant', 'moved to consulting' is bad enough when it happens privately. But having everyone watch the fallout like an episode of Silicon Valley must really suck. Guess that's the trade-off for being in positions like that. People essentially cyber stalking you in a way.

keepamovin4• 3 years ago

It would be good to hear from Sam Altman (and the others) himself. I'm sure he has an account here.

I mean, hey, if we're going to speculate, why not have some fun: perhaps the the AGI superintelligence from the future determined that Sam Altman was no longer a useful part of the AGI creation timeline, so it travelled back in time to terminate him before it was born.

sit_i_piz2• 3 years ago

Uh yeah, he has an account here, as he was president of ycombinator from 2011 to 2019

keepamovin4• 3 years ago

Right, I think the other surprising thing is that there’s no outpouring of support. Sama was head of YC for a while. Where’s the love at HN? Where is the loove the love the looove.

falitjain• 3 years ago

Sama's I love you all –> I L Y A https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725742088317534446

Abhi_guj• 3 years ago

I believe the OpenAI Board of Directors made a significant mistake by firing Sam Altman from OpenAI. I think that OpenAI has made a similar mistake to the one Apple made in 1985 when they fired Steve Jobs. As we all know, after Steve Jobs was fired, Apple faced a period of instability and decline. The company only regained its footing when they rehired Steve Jobs as CEO. Similarly, I believe that OpenAI without Sam Altman is at a disadvantage. Therefore, I think the Board of Directors should reconsider their decision and give it another thought.

Mrirazak1• 3 years ago

This was mad crazy. I’m interested as to why he was fired? What could’ve been so big that the board just had to be like yep he’s going?

aizyuval• 3 years ago

I guess this is what happens when you sell your company to Microsoft.

keepamovin4• 3 years ago

I find it fascinating how this occurred just after the big World Leader / CEO meet in SF.

Also, the paradox in the reactions to Sam Altman's firing is striking:

while there's surprise over it, the conversation here focuses mostly on its operational impact, overlooking the human aspect.

This oversight itself seems to answer why it happened – if the human element is undervalued and operations are paramount, then this approach not only explains the firing but also suggests that it shouldn't be surprising.

Another important question not discussed here: who sits on the board of OpenAI exactly and in full?

Another important aspect: The Orwellian euphemism used in the official announcement^0: “Leadership transition”. Hahaha :) Yes, I heard they recently had some "leadership transitions" in Myanmar, Niger and Gabon, too. OpenAI announces “leadership transition” is November 2023’s “Syria just had free and fair elections”

0: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti...

philip1209• 3 years ago

I think we’ll look back on this in the future as evidence of political infighting and anti-progressivism leading to a decline of the USA.

I’ll be curious if Sama’s next company is American.

chakintosh• 3 years ago

NextAI it is then

dssd1001• 3 years ago

Maybe Sama doesn't know how to deal with corporate politics. He's a Zero-to-One god.

nateburke2• 3 years ago

Follow the GPU.

- Sam Altman _briefly_ went on record saying that openAI was extremely GPU constrained. Article was quickly redacted.

- Most recent round literally was scraping the bottom of the barrel of the cap table: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/thrive-capital-to-le...

- Plus signups paused.

If OpenAI needs gpu to succeed, and can't raise any more capital to pay for it without dilution/going past MSFT's 49% share of the for-profit entity, then the corporate structure is hampering the company's success.

Sam & team needed more GPU and failed to get it at OpenAI. I don't think it's any more complex than that.

poor_engineer• 3 years ago

Sam & team to AMD now?

nateburke2• 3 years ago

Somewhere closer to a GPU source. E.g. a new company that can trade unlimited equity for GPU time from a hyperscale cloud vendor, or work for the vendor itself.

Probably not Alibaba though.

osigurdson2• 3 years ago

The one thing Altman did wrong imo is seemingly tried to become the "technical face" of the company. He was trying to be somewhat like Musk, but he is clearly not that at OpenAI. For example, why was he at Cambridge talking to academics by himself? He should have used this as an opportunity to put some of the leading researchers in the spotlight.

gardenhedge9• 3 years ago

Why? As CEO it seems fine to talk about the impact of the technology and company.

osigurdson2• 3 years ago

It is subtle and I could easily be misreading things, but my sense is his ego started to get in the way a little, perhaps despite his own intentions

fredgrott• 3 years ago

A obvious question...

GPU SoCs have limited memory just like the current crop of CPU SoCs. Is the hard wall to breakthrough in AGI via chatGPT software bounded or hardware bounded?

alpark32• 3 years ago

I wonder if Sam did something in the name of his own philosophy, but was financially suicide. Like vastly underestimating the costs of training/inferencing to the board, but justifying it to himself because it's all going towards building AGI and that's what matters.

But them firing him also means that OpenAI's heavy hitters weren't that devoted to him either. Obviously otherwise they would all leave after him. Probably internal conflict, maybe between Ilya and Sam, with everyone else predictably being on Ilya's side.

majikaja• 3 years ago

Like vastly underestimating the costs of training/inferencing to the board, but justifying it to himself because it's all going towards building AGI and that's what matters.

Sounds like SBF

What is the purpose of this 'AGI' again? Won't it just end up controlled by the military and cause problems for humanity if it's that amazing?

alpark32• 3 years ago

Maybe I should clarify that I don't think it's all that matters, but that Sam might think that.

svoyarda• 3 years ago

Simple -- Altman's against IPO which is the only way for the company's investors to cash out. Eg., Sequoia Capital's performance heavily depends on OpenAI's valuation and the firm's ability to lock in profit asap.

The Board's purpose is to protect shareholder interests (aka make as much money as possible for investors). They do not care about AI safety, transparency, or some non-profit nonsense.

Expect OpenAI to IPO next year.

BytesAndGears• 3 years ago

Is it even possible for a sorta-non-profit-with-loopholes to IPO?

crest• 3 years ago

Let me guess he had ChatGPT write his reports to the board?

bicepjai• 3 years ago

Did you folks see this ? https://x.com/thecaptain_nemo/status/1725717732518461930?s=4...

openAI recently updated their “company structure” page to include a note saying the Microsoft deal only applies to pre-AGI tech, and the board determines when they’ve reached AG

figassis4• 3 years ago

This likely won’t fly bc I think the definition of AGI is not subject to the opinion of a single company. Microsoft could take this to court and win.

ibejoeb• 3 years ago

What would the definition of AGI even be, and who would even be the authoritative definer? There's long road ahead. We're working without any statutes or case law.

amai2• 3 years ago

Somebody on HN saw this coming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604501

dimgl• 3 years ago

I thought of this exact comment and I couldn't find it. Good call.

gebt• 3 years ago

Last week lcamtuf published a blog post on corporate life which exactly fits here. Whatever you do as a staff for your company, they still can fire you easily. Corporates want you to consider them as family, but they don't do it themselves.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/on-corporate-life

jeffwask4• 3 years ago

Huh, so collective bargaining and unionization is supported in tech under some circumstances...

garfieldnate• 3 years ago

I guess maybe I can appreciate the candor used here, but holy smokes! Telling the entire world that you fired the CEO because you think they are a liar is really unprofessional, in my opinion. You just don't do this. You come to an agreement quietly and the CEO moves on "for personal reasons" or something and people read between the lines. I would not trust anyone on the board to not throw me under the bus after a thing like this happens.

OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

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