OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

what would the role and deliverable of the non-profit be though? so far they innovated, shipped fast, cut costs and sold plus subscriptions and dev apis for personal and enterprise use. and to be fair i really liked using their apis. so how would them being fully non-profit look like even? genuinely curious.

astrange7• 3 years ago

A company owned by a nonprofit isn't that rare - big European companies like IKEA and Novo Nordisk did it. Of course, they did it for tax evasion.

CPLX2• 3 years ago

How exactly would that happen? It’s a non profit that owns a staggeringly valuable piece of IP.

Do you understand that this is conceptually the same thing as the directors of a public art museum deciding to just take millions of dollars of paintings for themselves?

wilg7• 3 years ago

How? The board appoint new members and resign. The new board votes to turn it into a C corp.

reilly3000• 3 years ago

What a wild ride this last 24 hours has been.

Handy-Man2• 3 years ago

Satya be like, fine, it’s time for adults to take over.

jojosbuddy• 3 years ago

Yeah, though he may have went, "I did nothing here, and my stock price went down 2% in ONE hour from it."

renewiltord3• 3 years ago

It’s 11% up over the month. He’s not obsessing over this 2%. It’s more strategic than that if he’s involved.

croes11• 3 years ago

Then OpenAI is dead and it's MS AI.

The worst outcome.

timeon2• 3 years ago

and: "Let's end this 'non-profit' myth."

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

  - That's a hell of a show, what do you call it?
  - The Aristocrats

good_lord_dang• 3 years ago

BOB SAGET!!!

andy993• 3 years ago

With the way they fired him and the statement they made, it's hard to see how any of the remaining four could stay on if he did come back... as was previously mentioned, if you shoot at the king, don't miss.

Handy-Man2• 3 years ago

At least the 3 independent members will be gone. Either will try to burry the hatchet with Ilya or he leaves as well.

himaraya8• 3 years ago

Hard to see Ilya staying if Sam returns, honestly.

DebtDeflation4• 3 years ago

Good. Two of them aren't even qualified to be on the board of a kid's lemonade stand.

YetAnotherNick4• 3 years ago

Adam has competing interests. It's hard to see why he is even allowed in non profit board. And for other two members, their profile seem pretty weak for being in a board of one of most important companies in the world.

_boffin_2• 3 years ago

And oh boy, did they miss! There’s going to be a many of chapters written about this in textbooks.

koolba• 3 years ago

I doubt he comes back. The entire board that voted him out would have to resign. And that’s not going to happen on a non-profit.

wnevets2• 3 years ago

That is just embarrassing.

dereg3• 3 years ago

I don’t understand why and how they didn’t consider this sort of discussion before so unceremoniously firing him. The others on the board outside Ilya need to go.

I don’t consider anybody beyond forgiveness and if Ilya takes a professional lesson from this and Sam learns to be more mindful of others’ concerns, I consider this a win for all. Starting over in a new entity sounds great but would be years of setback.

I hope they work this out.

eightysixfour3• 3 years ago

Yes, this attempt was a mess from the start. I don’t know which rumors to believe or care about, but the underlying story for me was that the board was acting like children with an $80b company that some believe to be strategically important to the US or maybe even mankind. If they had done this “properly” and their message was about irreconcilable differences between productization and research they could have made an actual go at this.

If they really believed in the non-profit mission, and Sam didn’t, they probably torpedoed their chances of winning.

This was all they had to write and today would be a different day:

We regret to inform you that Sam Altman is being let go as CEO of OpenAI due to irreconcilable differences between his desire to commercialize our AI and OpenAI’s research-driven goals. We appreciate Sam’s contributions to the company and the partnership he established with Microsoft, which have set a foundation for OpenAI to thrive far into the future as a research organization with Microsoft focusing on commercialization of the technology.
We want to assure you that ChatGPT and current features will remain and be upgraded into the future. However, the focus will be on developing core technologies and a reliable, safe, and trustworthy ecosystem for others to build on. We believe that this will allow us to continue to push the boundaries of AI research while also providing a platform for others to innovate and create.

kelsey98765439• 3 years ago

Obviously because that wasn't what they actually cared about, this was a pure power play by incompetent idiots that shot themselves in the feet

kelsey98765439• 3 years ago

Why do you not think Ilya was the cheif architect of this failed coup? Im being serious everything ive seen points to him being the one responsible, there is no way he will ever stay let alone work in tech again

cthalupa25• 3 years ago

You are absolutely delusional if you think the man who oversaw the development of GPT would not be able to continue working in tech even if he orchestrated a failed coup.

dereg3• 3 years ago

I do think he was the chief architect of the coup. I do think his beliefs and ideals are still valuable flora for a company of this ambition. There just needs to be a more professional structure for him to voice them.

Dealing with folks like Ilya isn't necessarily a matter of if, but how much.

okdood645• 3 years ago

The others on the board outside Ilya need to go.

Does Ilya get a pass solely by his value to the company?

dereg3• 3 years ago

I think that his beliefs are important to the company. A board shouldn't be a homogenous glob nor should it be like a middle school friend group. What he did was both bizarre and amateur, but I believe in the best of us all the come forward from these types of events.

cphajduk• 3 years ago

Having the CEO of Quora on the board also smells of a vested interest to hold the company/non-profit back.

randyrand• 3 years ago

ya that’s a crazy conflict of interest. 8 years ago it may not have been so obvious though.

xigency4• 3 years ago

Not seeing much set back here. There are plenty of free high-quality models to put to work from Day 1.

quyleanh• 3 years ago

What if he want to fire all of them? Or take all power?

ericzawo• 3 years ago

This is going to make an amazing Netflix film in a few years.

laurels-marts4• 3 years ago

I cannot imagine the clown car that is the board surviving if Sam comes back.

johnwheeler4• 3 years ago

Are you fucking kidding me?

OK. OK. I’ve said this my whole career.

Engineers are the most emotional specie of worker. There is a grand delusion that engineers are rational.

This just goes to show how irrational they are. Snap reactions like this: sign of a brilliant but fucked up engineer.

I am an engineer. I am under no illusion that I’m rational. Quite the opposite.

brigadier1324• 3 years ago

It wasn't engineers that did this bullshit, it was one scientist, an ethics researcher, an mba, and an art school grad.

cmrdporcupine8• 3 years ago

Yes, clearly all categories of loathsome lower castes, worthy of your disdain.

VS what, a Stanford dropout who made buds with Paul Graham? That's better and more respectable because he's cooler and connected with YC/VC hipness, right?

WorldCoin is So Awesome!

crop_rotation3• 3 years ago

The board had other members beside Ilya. Mostly it shows how incompetent the board was.

johnwheeler4• 3 years ago

Ilya was the driver. The others are no name dopes. Total pawns who don’t count.

manuelabeledo• 3 years ago

Rationality is relative.

And I reckon that you haven't met many C-suite people.

hitekker• 3 years ago

What was top comment yesterday becomes a farce today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38313026

Don’t piss off an irreplaceable engineer or they’ll fire you. not taking any sides here.

One scientist's power trip (Ilya is not an engineer) triggers the power fantasy of the extremely online.

johnwheeler4• 3 years ago

It’s of Shakespearean proportions. I’m learning along with the rest how these tunings unfold!

mrtksn• 3 years ago

Back in the days it used to take a decade to get back a legendary CEO.

On a more serious note though, I hope this stirs some discussion on remembering why there's Open in the name of the OpenAI.

harrisonjackson• 3 years ago

Now seems like the perfect time for him to go raise, bring over the team he wants, and retain ownership and control in a more effective way than a non-profit. Idk why he would go back without BOD capitulating a lot.

demosthenes714• 3 years ago

How much IP is captured at OpenAI though? Not to mention the hardware. I’m not super familiar with ML in practice but I have to imagine he would still be set back by a significant amount of time

dougmwne2• 3 years ago

The hardware is in the hands of Microsoft, Google and Amazon. The IP is in the heads of top AI researchers. Whether any of these methods are patentable is an open question since it’s all secret sauce and once the model weights are trained there’s no way to know which methods went into the training.

abi2• 3 years ago

Because it will take 6 precious months at the least to get back to where OpenAI is today in terms of compute and people.

karmasimida10• 3 years ago

Sam can sue OpenAI and mire the company in legal obligations in next year and draining the talents out of it.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

I'd bet money Satya was a driver of this reversal.

I genuinely can't believe the board didn't see this coming. I think they could have won in the court of public opinion if their press release said they loved Sam but felt like his skills and ambitions diverged from their mission. But instead, they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely.

I hope Sam comes back. He'll make a lot more money if he doesn't, but I trust Sam a lot more than whomever they ultimately replace him with. I just hope that if he does come back, he doesn't use it as a chance to consolidate power – he's said in the past it's a good thing the board can fire him, and I hope he finds better board members rather than eschewing a board altogether.

EDIT: Yup, Satya is involved https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726025717077688662

Jensson2• 3 years ago

I hope Sam comes back

Why? We would have more diversity in this space if he leaves, which would get us another AI startup with huge funding and know how from OpenAI, while OpenAI would become less Sam Altman like.

I think him staying is bad for the field overall compared to OpenAI splitting in two.

janejeon5• 3 years ago

Honestly would be super interested to see what a hypothetical "SamAI" corp would look like, and what they would bring to the table. More competition, but also, probably with less ideological disagreements to distract them from building AI/AGI.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

Competition may be good for profit, but it's not good for safety. The balance between the two factions inside OpenAI is a feature, not a bug.

tfehring• 3 years ago

My main concern is that a new Altman-led AI company would be less safety-focused than OpenAI. I think him returning to OpenAI would be better for AI safety, hard to say whether it would be better for AI progress though.

huevosabio• 3 years ago

Yea, I feel like this is another traitorous eight moment.

I want a second (first being Anthropic?) OpenAI split. Having Anthropic, OpenAI, SamGregAi, Stability and Mistral and more competing on foundation models will further increase the pressure to open source.

It seems like there is a lull in returns to model size, if that's the case then there's even less basis for having all the resources under a single umbrella.

peyton6• 3 years ago

Sam’s forced departure and Greg’s ousting demonstrably leaves OpenAI in incompetent and reckless hands, as evidenced by the events of the last 24 hours. I don’t see how the field is better off.

autaut• 3 years ago

I really don’t, I really think that he is going to be disaster. He is nothing but the representative of the money interests who are eventually will use the company to vastly profit on everyone’s else skin.

skwirl3• 3 years ago

We have diversity in the space, and OpenAI just happens to be the leader and they are putting tremendous pressure on everyone else to deliver. If Sam leaves and starts an OpenAI competitor I think it would take quite some time for such a company to deliver a model with GPT-4 parity given the immense amount of data that would need to be re-collected and the immense amount of training time. Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating as that seems to be Ilya's goal.

For those of us trying to build stuff that only GPT-4 (or better) can enable, and hoping to build stuff that can leverage even more powerful models in the near future, Sam coming back would be ideal. I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.

Meekro4• 3 years ago

Luckily the AI field has been very open source-friendly, which is great for competition and free access, etc. The open source models seem to be less than a year behind the cutting edge, which is waaaay better than e.g. when OpenOffice was trying to copy MS Office.

naremu3• 3 years ago

To be honest, as far as I can tell, the case FOR Sam seems to largely be of the status quo "Well, idk, he's been rich and successful for years, surely this correlates and we must keep them" type of coddling those in uber superior positions in society.

Which seems like it probably is a self fulfilling prophecy. The private sector lottery winners seem to be awarded kingdoms at an alarming rate.

There's been lots of people asking what Sam's true value proposition to the company is, and...I haven't seen anything other than what could be described above.

But I suppose we've got to be nice to those who own rather than make. Won't anyone have mercy on well paid management?

statictype• 3 years ago

How much of OpenAI’s success can you attribute to sama’s leadership and how much to the technical achievements of those who work under him.

My understanding is that OpenAI’s biggest advantage is that they recruited and attracted the best in the field, presumably under the charter of providing AI for everyone.

Not sure that sama and gdb starting their own company in the same space will produce similar results.

t_mann• 3 years ago

Exactly. I think it would actually be very exciting if OpenAI uses this moment to pivot back to the "Open"/non-profit mission, and Altman and Brockman concurrently start something new and try to build the Apple/Amazon of AI.

toss1• 3 years ago

Whether or not Sam returns, serious damage has already been done, even if everyone also returns. MANY links of trust have been broken.

Even larger, this shows that the "leaders" of all this technology and money really are just making it up as they go along. Certainly supports the conclusion that, beyond meeting a somewhat high bar of education & experience, the primary reason they are in their chairs is luck and political gamesmanship. Many others meet the same high bar and could fill their roles, likely better, if the opportunity were given to them.

Sortition on corporate leadership may not be a bad thing.

That said, consistent hands at the wheel is also good, and this kind of unnecessary chaos does no one any good.

brigadier1324• 3 years ago

I bet it was multifaceted. By firing Sam this way they nuked their ability to raise funds because anyone investing in the "for profit" subsidiary would have to do so with the understanding that the non-profit could undermine them at a whim.

Also, all the employees are being paid with PPUs which is a share in future profits, and now they find out that actually, the company doesn't care about making profit!

A lot of top talent with internal know-how will be poached left and right. Many probably going to Sam's clone that he will raise billions for with a single call.

caturopath2• 3 years ago

they nuked their ability to raise funds

I think this well is deeper than you're giving it credit for.

s3p4• 3 years ago

Also, all the employees are being paid with PPUs which is a share in future profits, and now they find out that actually, the company doesn't care about making profit!

Maybe. But on their investing page it literally says to consider an OpenAI investment as a "donation" as it is very high risk and will likely not pay off. Everyone knew this going into it.

ren_engineer3• 3 years ago

everything about it screams amateur hour, from the language and timing of the press release to the fact they didn't notify Microsoft. And how they apparently completely failed to see how employees and customers would react to the news, Ilya saying the circumstances for Altman's removal "weren't ideal" shows how naive they were. They had no PR strategy to control the narrative and let rumors run wild

I doubt he returns, now he can start a for profit AI company, poach OpenAI's talent, and still look like the good guy in the situation. He was apparently already talking to Saudis to raise billions for an Nvidia competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38323939

Have to wonder how much this was contrived as a win-win, either OpenAI board does what he wants or he gets a free out to start his own company without looking like he's purely chasing money

spaceman_202014• 3 years ago

This story that they want him back turns it from amateur hour to peak clownshow.

This is why you need someone with business experience running an organization. Ilya et al might be brilliant scientists, but these folks are not equipped to deal with the nuances of managing a ship as heavily scrutinised as OpenAI

RobPfeifer• 3 years ago

The Nvidia competitor piece is a very good reason to fire him. Way out of his circle of competence and not necessary to the mission of the company.

This is what happens when a non-profit gets taken over by greed I guess..

mycologos• 3 years ago

I think they could have won in the court of public opinion ... [but] they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely

Maybe we have different definitions of "the court of public opinion". Most people don't know who Sam Altman is, and most of the people who do know don't have strong opinions on his performance as OpenAI's CEO. Even on HN, the reaction to the board "skwer[ing] him" has been pretty mixed, and mostly one of confusion and waiting to see what else happens.

This quick a turnaround does make the board look bad, though.

minimaxir4• 3 years ago

You underestimate how many people are aware of OpenAI after ChatGPT's viral success.

The news yesterday broke the tech/AI bubble, and there would have been much more press on it if it wasn't done as a Friday news dump.

kmlevitt2• 3 years ago

What matters is what investors think, and by majority they seem very unhappy with all of this.

Speaking for myself, if they had framed this as a difference in vision, I would be willing to listen. But instead they implied that he had committed some kind of categorical wrongdoing. After it became clear that wasn’t the case, it just made them look incompetent.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

I mean, they're (allegedly) trying to get him to come back 24 hours later... so it's safe to say it did indeed backfire completely.

Sure, the average person doesn't care about Sam. But among the people who matter, Sam certainly came out on top.

eastbound• 3 years ago

Shouldn’t the board resign in that case?

That would also remediate the appearence of total incompetence of this clown show, in addition to admitting the board and Sam don’t fit with each other, and restore confidence for the next investor that their money is properly managed. At the moment, no-one would invest in a company that can be undermined by its non-profit, with a (probably) disparaging press release a few minutes before market closure on a Friday evening, for which Satya had to personally intervene.

rvba7• 3 years ago

News about ousting of Altmann was on first page of BBC.

bob_theslob6463• 3 years ago

Sam Altman was an integral part of Y combinator, who runs this site.

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

x0x0• 3 years ago

1 - not running a move like this by the company that invested a reported $10 billion dollars;

2 - clearly not having spent even 10 seconds thinking about the (obvious) reaction of employees on learning the ceo of what seems like a generational company was fired out of the blue. Or the reaction to the (high likelihood) of a cofounder following him out the door

3 - And they didn't even carefully think through the reaction to the press release which hinted at some real wrongdoing by Altman.

3a - anyone want to bet if they even workshopped the press release with attorneys or just straight yolo'd it? No chance a thing like this could end up in court...

They've def got the A team running things... my god.

chasd0012• 3 years ago

They've def got the A team running things... my god.

Yeah prompting ChatGPT 3.5 would have yielded a better plan than what they did.

codeptualize7• 3 years ago

I agree, the way they did this just shows incompetence and recklessness.

Even if they are making the right call, you can't really trust them after ruining the reputation and trust of the company like this.

px43• 3 years ago

Satya drove the removal of Sam, or drove the board to get him back?

From Greg's tweet, it seems like the chaos was largely driven Ilya, who has also been very outspoken against open source and sharing research, which makes me think his motivations are more aligned with those of Microsoft/Satya. I still can't tell if Sam got ousted because he was getting in the way of a Microsoft takeover, or if Sam was trying to set the stage for a Microsoft takeover. It's all very confusing.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

The latter. Microsoft didn't know about the firing until literally a minute before we did, and despite a calm response externally, there's reports Satya is furious.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/repor...

jwnin• 3 years ago

Agreed. Somewhere in Seattle, Satya said "Now Witness the Firepower of this fully Armed and Operational Army of Lawyers."

If there ever was a time for Microsoft to leverage LCA, it is now. There's far too much on the line for them to lose the goose that has laid the golden egg.

chasd0012• 3 years ago

lol yeah come between Microsoft, their money, and an opportunity to knee cap google. What could go wrong?

Maybe the board is too young to realize who they sold their souls to. Heh I think they’re quickly finding out.

locallost• 3 years ago

I don't think it has anything to do with the press release. If it's pressure from Microsoft they want to protect their investment.

felixgallo4• 3 years ago

on what basis do you 'trust' the guy who tried to do a crypto eyeball identity scam? Genuinely, seriously curious.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

I genuinely believe Worldcoin/World ID is terrible for optics and is not something Sam should have put his name on.

That being said, here's my strongman argument: Sam is scared of the ramifications of AI, especially financially. He's experimenting with a lot of things, such as Basic Income (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/basic-income), rethinking capitalism (https://moores.samaltman.com/) and Worldcoin.

He's also likely worried about what happens if you can't tell who is human and who isn't. We will certainly need a system at some point for verifying humanity.

Worldcoin doesn't store iris information; it just stores a hash for verification. It's an attempt to make sure everyone gets one, and to keep things fair and more evenly distributed.

(Will it work? I don't think so. But to call it an eyeball identity scam and dismiss Sam out of hand is wrong)

spaceman_202014• 3 years ago

A crypto wallet tied to your identity solves one of the biggest problems in the post AI world: human identity

At least it will stop those godawful “are you human” proof puzzles.

okdood645• 3 years ago

He'll make a lot more money if he doesn't

He supposedly didn't care about the money. He didn't take equity.

jonplackett• 3 years ago

I hope he says he will return, but only in return for a massive stock grant, to prevent this problem from returning.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

Why do you believe a stock grant would be better? And yes, the board messed up here, but do you not think oversight is important?

Grimblewald• 3 years ago

I hope that group starts a new version of openai using the credibility and popularity gained to acheive the original vision of safe, free, and open agi for the betterment of humanity.

stevenwliao• 3 years ago

Free AGI

Who pays for the R&D?

lotsoweiners• 3 years ago

Which part is “better for humanity”?

tptacek• 3 years ago

You mean that Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, is behind the drive to reinstate Altman as CEO, right? Because if you mean he was behind Altman's ouster, I'll happily take your money; let me know what your terms are. :)

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

Oh no, 100% mean that he was driving the return. It's well-documented that he found out a minute before we did, and that he was furious.

I'll edit my comment to clarify!

38321003thrw5• 3 years ago

Sorry but that is ridiculous. The wording of the PR blurb is not what makes gears move in a giant like Microsoft.

I agree the board did botch this up. But this is in my view is a vindication of their being amateurs at corporate political games, that is all.

But this also means that Sam Altman’s “vision” and Microsoft’s bottom line are fully aligned, and that is not a reassuring thought. Microsoft one hears (see “5 foot pole”) even puts ads in their freaking OS.

This board should man up, and lawyer up.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

A PR blurb? What? I mean Satya himself, behind the scenes.

skygazer4• 3 years ago

Man, the board already looked reckless and incompetent, but this solidifies the appearance. You can do crazy ill-advised things, but if you unwaveringly commit, we’ll always wonder if you’re secretly a genius. But when you immediately backtrack, we’ll know you were a fool all along.

jstummbillig2• 3 years ago

That seems a lot be better than doubling down on a bad mistake to save face, but we do care quite a bit about about looking strong, don't we.

caddemon• 3 years ago

At longer timescales it is important to be able to recognize mistakes and reverse course, but this happened so fast I'm not sure that's the right characterization. There's no way they could already decide that firing Sam was a mistake based on the outcomes they claim to prioritize. Reversing course this quickly actually seems to me more like a reaction based directly on people's negative opinions, though it may be a specific pressure from Microsoft as well.

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

Not really. By reaching out to Sam this quickly, they're giving him significant leverage. I really like Sam, but everyone needs a counterbalance (especially given what's at stake).

And if they were right to fire Sam, they're now reacting too quickly to negative backlash. 24 hours ago they thought this was the right move; the only change has been perception.

kmlevitt2• 3 years ago

Obviously it’s better to own up to a mistake right away. But the point is if they are willing to backtrack this quickly, it removes all doubt that it WAS a mistake, rather than us just not understanding their grand vision yet.

wnevets2• 3 years ago

That seems a lot be better than doubling down on a bad mistake to save face, but we do care quite a bit about about looking strong, don't we.

IMO Its not about looking strong, its about looking competent. Competent people don't fire their CEO of multi-billion dollar unicorn without thinking it through first. Walking back the firing so soon suggest no thinking was involved.

cscurmudgeon• 3 years ago

24 hrs isn't enough time to get signals on whether this was a mistake

arisAlexis8• 3 years ago

How and why do you know it was a mistake without knowing the facts and reasoning? Hunch?

hn_throwaway_994• 3 years ago

Dude, everyone already thinks the board did a crazy ill-advised thing. They're about to be the board of like a 5 person or so company if they double down and commit.

To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness. A bigger sign of weakness in my opinion is people who commit to a shitty idea just because they said it first, despite all evidence to the contrary.

johnfn2• 3 years ago

To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness.

The weakness was the first decision; it’s already past the point of deciding if the board is a good steward of OpenAI or not. Sometimes backtracking can be a point of strength, yes, but in this case waffling just makes them look even dumber.

skygazer4• 3 years ago

I’m not advocating people double down on stupid, or that correcting your mistakes is bad optics. I’m simply saying they’re “increasingly revealing” pre-existing unfitness at each ham-fisted step. I think our increase in knowledge of their foolishness is a good thing. And often correcting a situation isn’t the same as undoing it, because undoing is often not possible or has its own consequences. I do appreciate your willingness to let them grow into their responsibilities despite it all — that’s a rare charity extended to an incompetent board.

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

Depends entirely on how you do it. You can do something and backtrack in a shitty way too.

If they wanted to show they’re committed to backtracking they could resign themselves.

Now it sounds more like they want to have their cake and eat it.

LewisVerstappen4• 3 years ago

To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness. A bigger sign of weakness in my opinion is people who commit to a shitty idea just because they said it first, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Lmfao you're joking if you think they "realized their mistake" and are now atoning.

This is 99% from Microsoft & OpenAI's other investors.

015a6• 3 years ago

Bad take. Not "everyone" feels that what they did was wrong. We don't have insight into what's going on internally. Optics matter; the division over their decision means that its definitionally non-obvious what the correct path forward is; or, that there isn't one correct path, but multiple reasonable paths. To admit a mistake of this magnitude is to admit that you're either so unprincipled that your mind can be changed at a whim; or that you didn't think through the decision enough preemptively. These are absolutely signs of weakness in leadership.

balls187• 3 years ago

This isn’t a shitty idea. The board fired it’s CEO and the next day is apparently asking him to come back.

At this point, I don’t care how it resolves—the people who made that decision should be removed for sheer incompetence.

rfrey• 3 years ago

You're not wrong, but in this case not enough time has emerged for the situation to change or for new facts to emerge. It's been a bit over a day. All that a flip-flop in that short timeframe does is indicate that the board did not fully think through their actions. And taking a step like this without careful consideration is a sign of incompetence.

PheonixPharts3• 3 years ago

Dude, everyone already thinks the board did a crazy ill-advised thing.

I've honestly never had more hope for this industry than when it was apparent that Altman was pushed out by engineering for forgoing the mission to create world changing products in favor of the usual mindless cash grab.

The idea that people with a passion for technical excellence and true innovation might be able to steer OpenAI to do something amazing was almost unbelievable.

That's why I'm not too surprised to see that it probably won't really play out, and likely will end up in OpenAI turning even faster into yet another tech company worried exclusively with next quarters revenue.

moogly2• 3 years ago

"When faced with multiple options, the most important thing is to just pick one and stick with it."

"Disagree and commit."

- says every CEO these days

wwtrv5• 3 years ago

is a sign of weakness

It's often a sign of incompetence though. Or rather a confirmation of it.

roguas• 3 years ago

Acknowledging a mistake so early seems like a sign of weakness to me. Hold the hot rod for at least a minute, see if the initial pain goes away. After that acknowledgement may begin to look like part of learning and get more acceptance, rather than: oopsie doodl, revert now!!!

eigenvalue2• 3 years ago

They are already the dumbest board in history (even dumber than Apple’s board firing Steve Jobs). So it’s not out of keeping with anything. Besides, those 2 independent board members (who couldn’t do fizz-buzz if their lives depended on it) won’t be staying long if Sam returns— nor are they likely to ever serve on any board ever again after their shenanigans.

spaceman_202014• 3 years ago

Some of the board member choices are baffling. Like why is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s wife on the board? Her startup has under 10 employees and has a personal email address as the contact address on the homepage.

tbrownaw• 3 years ago

Option A: try to look good by hiding that you know you messed up

Option B: try to fix mistakes as quickly as possible

This is that thing that somehow got the label "psychological safety" attached to it. Hiding mistakes is bad because it means they don't get fixed (and so systems that (do or appear to) set personal interest in favor of hiding mistakes are also bad).

jaybrendansmith• 3 years ago

It's funny, but option A is almost always best if you care about yourself, but option B is best if you care about the company or mission. Large organizations are chock-full of people who always choose option A. Small startups are better because option B is the only option as nothing can be easily hidden.

adrr2• 3 years ago

If the board brings him back. They are done including the chief scientist. Can't stage a coup and just to bring the person back the next week

pizzafeelsright• 3 years ago

If you strike at the king, you must kill him.

I am always curious how these conversations go in corporate America. I've seen them in the street and with blue collar jobs.

Loads of feelings get hurt and people generally don't heal or forgive.

asylteltine• 3 years ago

You don’t know the actual reasons for them firing Sam and I don’t either. Everyone has an opinion on something they don’t understand. For all you know, he covered up a massive security breach or lied about some skunkworks projects

skygazer4• 3 years ago

If your “for all you know” supposition that he’s a criminal were correct, then it would be criminal to try to bring him back. In that unlikely case, I can assure you my opinion of the board is unlikely to improve. It may be a black box to us, but it does have outputs we can see and reason about.

lettergram• 3 years ago

How do you know they back tracked? This reporting, as far as I can see, doesn’t have a source from the board directly.

behnamoh• 3 years ago

You can do crazy ill-advised things, but if you unwaveringly commit, we’ll always wonder if you’re secretly a genius.

This. Some people even take it to the extreme and choose not to apologize for anything to look tough and smart.

codeptualize7• 3 years ago

This is ridiculous haha.

Another great example that even huge multi billion dollar companies are lead by people. What a mess.

However this plays out, this is a big wake up call for everyone who is currently dependent on OpenAI. More changes will be needed to restore trust. It's going to be messy for a while. For a company that has executed pretty much perfectly until now it's so surprising how they just ruined their reputation like this.

guluarte• 3 years ago

this sounds like some wow guild drama

ssnistfajen2• 3 years ago

WoW guild dramas are basically mini corporate board room dramas.

femiagbabiaka5• 3 years ago

All this drama over a parrot.

tysam_and• 3 years ago

It could be that Microsoft is leveraging them to bring him back. This board may seem mercurial at the moment, but we really, truly, and honestly still do not have the big picture yet.

_boffin_2• 3 years ago

In the first (I think) episode of halt and catch fire, Joe tells IBM that they have their source code. IBM being IBM sends a legion of lawyers to their smallish company trying to scare the shit out of them.

I feel like it be like that, but instead of a legion, legions.

And OpenAI is scared.

kelsey98765439• 3 years ago

OpenAI isn't scared, OpenAI quit already. The remnants and their false king Ilya are beyond what the word scared is capable of describing though, in terms of the level of abject horror they are certain to face the rest of their entire lives even if they run away now. This will never escape them and nobody involved with this decision will ever work in tech again, or on any board of any organization. I hope they saved up for retirement.

abi2• 3 years ago

How are they leveraging them? My understanding is Microsoft has no power over the board.

gizmo• 3 years ago

They who control the gpus control the universe. There is a great chip shortage. If MS breaks the lease agreement with OpenAI (based on some pretext about governance) OpenAI won't be able to do any work nor will they be able to serve customer requests for the next year while they litigate this in court. Microsoft holds all the cards because they own the data centers.

paulddraper5• 3 years ago

OpenAI needs the Microsoft partnership

Terretta3• 3 years ago

As a for instance, and I don't know, but it's plausible Microsoft has full license to use all tech, is the cloud operating it, and has escape clauses tied to "key persons".

That combination could mean firing the CEO results in Microsoft getting to have everything and OpenAI being some code and models without a cloud, and whatever people that wouldn't cross the street with Altman.

I do not know about OpenAI's deal with Microsoft. But I have been on both sides of deals written that way, where I've been the provider's key person and the contract offered code escrow, and I've been a buyer that tied the contract to a set of key persons and had full source code rights, surviving any agreement.

You do this if you think the tech could be existential to you, and you pay a lot for it because effectively you're pre-buying the assets after some future implosion. OTOH, it tends to be not well understood by most people involved in the hundreds of pages of paperwork across a dozen or more interlocking agreements.

. . .

EDIT TO ADD:

This speculating article seems to agree with my speculation, daddy has the cloud car keys, and key person ouster could be a breach:

Only a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI has been wired to the startup, while a significant portion of the funding, divided into tranches, is in the form of cloud compute purchases instead of cash, according to people familiar with their agreement.

That gives the software giant significant leverage as it sorts through the fallout from the ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The firm’s board said on Friday that it had lost confidence in his ability to lead, without giving additional details.

One person familiar with the matter said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes OpenAI’s directors mishandled Altman’s firing and the action has destabilized a key partner for the company. It’s unclear if OpenAI, which has been racking up expenses as it goes on a hiring spree and pours resources into technological developments, violated its contract with Microsoft by suddenly ousting Altman.

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/18/2023/openai-has-receiv...

peyton6• 3 years ago

Surely Microsoft can terminate their Azure access? Why piss off your largest supplier?

icelancer7• 3 years ago

Contracts are only worth their language if parties are willing to fight for them. Taking on Microsoft and hoards of angry billionaires with a piece of paper separating you from them might be more of a war than they expected.

dougmwne2• 3 years ago

Riddle me this: what is an AI research lab without access to exascale compute? Who’s cloud infrastructure do they depend on fully right now?

coffeebeqn4• 3 years ago

They can probably threaten to pull their funding, immediately (or in a few months) bankrupting the company

minimaxir4• 3 years ago

This saga is somehow more absurd than HBO's Silicon Valley.

janejeon5• 3 years ago

You know what they say: "Life is stranger than fiction."

TeMPOraL• 3 years ago

Fiction has to make sense; reality is under no such obligation.

senderista• 3 years ago

I worked at a startup that was more absurd than anything on "Silicon Valley".

adastra229• 3 years ago

Mike Judge says they had to tone down the advice they got from consultants for that show who were working in tech. The ideas they got (from people working in the real Silicon Valley) were too crazy for audiences to believe.

karmasimida10• 3 years ago

Because that show is written by people who barely knew Silicon Valley.

If you read those memoirs/history of those Silicon Valley companies, it is 100% more entertaining than the show itself

SnorkelTan• 3 years ago

The shows writers had quite a few advisors with deep ties to Silicon Valley. Former twitter ceo dick Costello comes to mind.

okdood645• 3 years ago

If you read those memoirs/history of those Silicon Valley companies

Can you give a few recommendations?

nwoli3• 3 years ago

Imagine these people being in charge of AGI in a few years…

LASR2• 3 years ago

The kind of AGI you’re talking about - the one that makes people nervous about who is in charge of it - nobody can truly be “in charge” of this kind of AGI.

nwoli3• 3 years ago

They decide how to bias it. They decide if they should pull the plug or not. They decide if it’s too powerful and they’re in contact with people who suggest to the government that we should bomb datacenters if so

janejeon5• 3 years ago

I mean, I don't see how anyone can expect him to come back after the public bridge burning and condemnation. I think it's reasonable to think that, if anyone were in his shoes, they, too, would feel too hurt/exasperated to go back to the people who caused all of... this to them.

mupuff12343• 3 years ago

I assume he would condition his return with the removal of the board.

nwoli3• 3 years ago

Well he seems pretty sold on the AGI idea and starting from scratch at a new place without the same data or same compute is quite the challenge

spaceman_202014• 3 years ago

He already has a fantastic proof of concept. Sure, it will take a little longer, but he can easily raise the billions in funding and find the people to build it.

paulddraper5• 3 years ago

Not when you have as many billions as he will have

alexb_• 3 years ago

What on earth actually happened yesterday?

twoodfin• 3 years ago

This suggests a plausible explanation that Altman was attempting to engineer the board’s expansion or replacement: After the events of the last 48 hours, could you blame him?

In this scenario, it was a pure power struggle. The board believed they’d win by showing Altman the door, but it didn’t take long to demonstrate that their actual power to do so was limited to the de jure end of the spectrum.

spaceman_202014• 3 years ago

Any talented engineer or scientist who actually wants to ship product AND make money would head over to Sam’s startup. Any investor who cares about making money would fund Sam’s startup as well.

The way the board pulled this off really gave them no good outcome. They stand to lose talent AND investors AND customers. Half the people I know who use GPT in their work are wondering if it will be even worth paying for if the model’s improvements stagnates with the departure of these key people.

TeaBrain2• 3 years ago

I still haven't heard an explanation of why people who use GPT would be under the impression that Sam had anything to do with the past improvements in GPT versions.

015a6• 3 years ago

And any talented engineer or scientist who actually wants to build safe AGI in an organization that isn't obsessed with boring B2B SaaS would align with Ilya. See, there are two sides to this? Sam isn't a god, despite what the media makes him out to be; none of them are.

whoknowsidont2• 3 years ago

would head over to Sam’s startup

Why? I see a lot of hero-worship for Sam, but very little concrete facts about what he's done to make this a success.

And given his history, I'm inclined to believe he just got lucky.

neel8986• 3 years ago

This is power struggle between silicon valley VC group and AI scientists. This conflict was bound to happen at some point across every company. I don't think the interest of both the group aligns after certain point. No self respecting AI scientist want to work hard for making closed model SaaS products.

corethree5• 3 years ago

this is the most likely explanation. Altman was going to oust them, hence why they had to make what seems like a bad strategic move. The move seems bad from our perspective but it's actually the most logical strategy for the board in terms of self preservation. I agree. I think this is most likely what occurred.

knd7752• 3 years ago

How could he possibly oust them?

sfink3• 3 years ago

Why are people calling this already? There was a coup. The people on the losing end, which includes some large investors, counterattacked. That's where we are now (or were when the article was published). Of course they counterattacked! But did the counterattack land? I'm not sure why you're assuming it did. Personally, I don't know enough to guess. Given that the board was inspired to do this by the very mission that the non-profit was set up to safeguard, there's some level of legal coverage, but enough to cover their asses from a $10 billion assault? I for one can't call it.

nemetroid• 3 years ago

They might not even have believed that they'd win, just that this outcome would be better than being silently outmaneuvered.

If the coup fails in the end (which seems likely), it will have proved that the "nonprofit safeguard" was toothless. Depending on the board members' ideological positions, maybe that's better than nothing.

cryptoz• 3 years ago

Well it's either that or a top-tier competitor emerges in 2 days.

speedylight4• 3 years ago

lol if I was Sam I wouldn’t even dream of returning without the entire board going out the door as I come back in. What a shit show.

FergusArgyll• 3 years ago

How do I know if I can go to sleep?

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

You know, I always found Mike judge to probably be the most prescient of all of the science fiction authors.

In Office Space, Idiocracy, and most relevant here in Silicon Valley; he accurately, and very precisely not only forecasts, but deconstructs the reasoning, and vapid lack of core philosophy behind each of the real life narratives he’s parodying.

That serious people still consider Silicon Valley as some kind of thing to aspire to is horrifying. This despite repeated examples of predictably base incompetence, lack of maturity and quite frankly avaricious opportunism as the kernel on which SV lies.

paulddraper5• 3 years ago

SV... Like high tech companies? Venture capital? The TV show? What do you mean by that?

latortuga• 3 years ago

Mentioned in the same sentence as Idiocracy and Office Space, GP is referring to the show.

caturopath2• 3 years ago

The TV show. They were talking about filmmaker Mike Judge's work.

hnrodey• 3 years ago

Assuming the show since the reference is to Mike Judge, and he’s the creator of the SV tv show.

Immovably0312• 3 years ago

Im assuming they mean Silicon Valley the TV show [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)

corethree5• 3 years ago

What you're not realizing is that it's like this everywhere. It's not exclusive to SV. Politics is part of human life. Adults are just kids with money.

Clubber• 3 years ago

SV can afford to pay a lot more journalists writing puff pieces about how great they are.

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

The difference between some adults and toddlers if we've written off the adults as unfixable.

cmrdporcupine8• 3 years ago

I recognize the brilliance of SV (the show) but couldn't make it past a few episodes because it was just too painfully close to home.

Now that I work for a non-tech, non-SV company (agricultural equip manufacturer in fact), and have some distance from the real world SV, maybe I could watch it without my skin crawling.

chatmasta11• 3 years ago

I found the episodes legitimately stressful to watch. "Too close to home" is exactly right. I grimaced through them though. And nowadays I do enjoy watching the "best of" clips on YouTube, or linking my coworkers to whatever scene from the show is relevant to the current meeting...

tsunamifury19• 3 years ago

Or real life is just messy but most people don’t know it because they willfully ignore it and just keep their head down living their boring middle class life.

Judge is no profit he just communicated what the rest of us already knew.

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

Maybe most things are not messy, and only thr messy things are exiting enough for you to not call them ‘boring middle class lives’?

rlt• 3 years ago

And yet an enormous amount of innovation and wealth is created in Silicon Valley.

defrost• 3 years ago

And once upon a time Paris was the Prime Meridian and the British Empire was the dominant super power that spanned the globe.

It's worth asking how rapidly can, say, a global finnacial hub transfer from one location to another, how quickly a centre for excellence can transfer, how many years does it take for the world's best space scientists to move out of Germany, etc.

Does Silicon Valley have a tipping point?

yodsanklai• 3 years ago

Silicon Valley is really a great show. Working in tech, I often think of it. Especially whenever there's a new great idea from management that nobody saw coming and feel like the beginning of a new episode.

shrubble• 3 years ago

When Michael Lewis wrote the book about Wall Street, 'Liar's Poker' , he got calls from parents of college-bound kids, not about how to avoid Wall Street, but about how to better prepare for getting in to Wall Street...

metadat2• 3 years ago

Rich people heard about a book and didn't bother to read it before contact.

I've heard this lore before, and it's the only way I can make sense of it.

dehrmann2• 3 years ago

Did you intentionally omit Beavis and Butt-Head from your list of his iconic works? They captured the mood of a generation.

pembrook• 3 years ago

This is such a weird take.

You do understand the whole point of silicon valley is the chaotic lack of maturity?

You cannot be staid and conservative and mature (and non-opportunistic)…and also be successful at creating new and interesting stuff.

If you find instability “horrifying,” might I suggest a job in banking or the federal government instead?

pgodzin• 3 years ago

This is so dysfunctional. Does the other half of the company quit now? How can this board remain in place, but who can replace them?

airstrike9• 3 years ago

This makes sense. The board thinks they're calling the shots, but the reality is the people with the money are the ones calling the shots, always. Boards are just appointed by shareholders aka investors aka capital holders to do their bidding.

The capped-profit / non-profit structure muddles that a little bit, but the reality is that entity can't survive without the funding that goes into the for-profit piece

And if current investors + would-be investors threaten to walk away, what can the board really do? They have no leverage.

Sounds like they really didn't "play the tape forward" and think this through...

fnordpiglet15• 3 years ago

A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.

No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor available.

If anything they would be miffed about how it was handled, but to be frank, unless GPT4 is sam Altman furiously typing, I don’t know he’s that important. The instability caused by the suddenness, that’s different.

airstrike9• 3 years ago

This is not just a "non-profit"... it's a non-profit that owns a $90B for-profit company developing revolutionary, once-in-a-century technology. There is a LOT of money at play here.

Others have commented on how Microsoft actually has access to the IP, so the odds that they could pack their toys and rebuild OpenAI 2.0 somewhere else with what they've learned, their near infinite capital and not have to deal with the non-profit shenanigans are meaningful.

I'm not saying Sam is needed to make OpenAI what it is, but he's definitely "the investors' guy" in the organization, based on what has surfaced over the last 24 hours. Those investors would rather have him there over someone else, hence the pressure to put him back. It doesn't matter whether you and I think he's the man for the job -- what matters is whether investors think they are.

TL;DR the board thinks they have leverage, but as it turns out, they don't

ergocoder5• 3 years ago

They officially call the shot.

But right now they get a lot of shitstorm for this inexperience handling.

And it doesn't look good from the board that looks inexperienced.

Gordon-Levitt's wife?? Helen who? D'Angelo with a failing quora and a history of a coup.

Doesn't look good.

I'd bet it starts impacting their personal lives. This is equivalent to them coming out to support Donald Trump. It is that bad.

tsunamifury19• 3 years ago

Nothing matters if you don’t have the money to enforce the system. Come on get real. Whatever the board says MS can turn off the money in a second and invalidate anything.

karmasimida10• 3 years ago

Yes the board could claim OpenAI is nonprofit. But who is going to pay for the operation and salaries of its employees.

Definitely not OpenAI itself. They still need massive capital. With this drama, its future is put in serious doubt

qaq2• 3 years ago

So they are trying to backtrack which makes them look pretty foolish for no apparent reason ?

Terretta3• 3 years ago

No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor available.

The implication in Microsoft's statement is clear that they have what they need to use the tech. I read it to mean OpenAI board does not have leverage.

icelancer7• 3 years ago

A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit...

Doesn't look like it right now in this case.

Infinitesimus2• 3 years ago

A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.

There is theory and there is reality. If someone is paying your bills by an outsized amount and they say jump, you will say how high.

The influence is rarely that explicit though. The board knowing that X investor provides 60% of their funding, for instance, means the board is incentivized to do things that keep X investor happy without X having to ask for it.

9 times out of 10, money drives decisions in a captilist environment

pbadams• 3 years ago

Something I don't fully understand, from [1], Altman was an employee of the for-profit entity. So to fire him, wouldn't the non-profit board be acting in it's capacity as a director of the for-profit entity (and thus have a fiduciary duty to all shareholders of the for-profit entity)? Non-profit governance is traditionally lax, but would the other shareholders have a case against the members of the non-profit board for acting recklessly w/ respect to shareholder interests in their capacity as directors of the for-profit?

This corporate structure is so convoluted that it's difficult to figure out what the actual powers/obligations of the individual agents involved are.

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

Cyberfit3• 3 years ago

A company is just legalese + people. And people are notoriously for-profit, especially in this day and age.

The board can maintain control of the legal aspects (such as the org itself), but in the end, people are much more important.

Organizations are easy to duplicate. Persons, less so.

jacquesm42• 3 years ago

This is wildly incorrect. But a non-profit does have stakeholders, donors, beneficiaries and employees. All of those can apply pressure on a board.

airstrike9• 3 years ago

This is wildly incorrect

Great, we'll take your word for it.

blazespin• 3 years ago

The staff calls the shots. The money will go wherever the talent is.

airstrike9• 3 years ago

Owners call the shots, otherwise staff would never get fired.

dbuser992• 3 years ago

The talent also goes wherever the money is

mizzao2• 3 years ago

Yep. There's the apparent legal leverage,

and then there's the real leverage of money and the court of public opinion.

crop_rotation3• 3 years ago

The board seems truly incompetent here and looking at the member list it doesn't seem very surprising. A competent board should have asked for legal and professional advice before taking a drastic step like this. Instead the board thought it was a boxing match and tried to deliver a knockout punch before the market closes with blunt language. This might be the most incompetent board for an organisation of this size.

adharmad3• 3 years ago

It was complete amateur hour for the board.

But that aside, how did so many clueless folks who understand neither the technology, or the legalese, nor have enough intelligence/acumen to forsee the immediate impact of their actions happen to be on the board of one of the most important tech companies?

csomar• 3 years ago

I think when it started it was not the most important tech company but just some open research effort.

leoh3• 3 years ago

Not many and even fewer if you consider folks that have a good grasp of themselves, their psychology, their emotions — and how they can mislead them, and their heart.

IME most folks at Anthropic, OpenAI or whatever that are freaking out about things never defined the problem well and typically were engaging with highly theoretical models as opposed to the real capabilities of a well-defined, accomplished (or clearly accomplishable) system. It was too triggering for me to consider roles there in the past given that these were typically the folks I knew working there.

Sam may have added a lot of groundedness, but idk ofc bc I wasn’t there.

peterclary• 3 years ago

Pretty sure that Sutskever understands the technology, and it looks like he persuaded the others.

dehrmann2• 3 years ago

I wonder if any of this is related it to it being envisioned as a non-profit board, but in the past ~year, the for-profit part has outgrown what they were really ready to handle.

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

Instead the board thought it was a boxing match

Or maybe chess[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cv9n0QbLUM

yathaid• 3 years ago

> A competent board should have asked for legal and professional advice...

I will bite. How do you know they didn't?

skygazer4• 3 years ago

Typically it would be framed amicably, without so much axe-grinding, particularly for public release. Even ChatGPT itself would have written a more balanced release, and advised against such shenanigans. I enjoy that irony.

newZWhoDis2• 3 years ago

house collapses in 15mph wind

Why didn’t they hire a competent builder?

You:

how do you know they weren’t? It could be pure happenstance! All the nails could… could have been defective! Or something! waves hands

arbuge2• 3 years ago

That's the thing. Lawyers can give them the letter of the law but might have no idea how popular Sam was inside and outside the company, or how badly he was needed. And that's what really matters here.

yosito• 3 years ago

Maybe they asked ChatGPT for legal advice.

nomy99• 3 years ago

i see what you did there.

leoh3• 3 years ago

Better yet, Sutskever’s version with AGI!

adrr2• 3 years ago

Maybe they and it didn't help them. Guardrails for chatgpt will prevent it from predicting outcomes, or providing any personalized advice. I asked it and just said to consult with counsel and have a succession plan.

Predicting specific outcomes in a situation like the potential firing of a high-profile executive such as Sam Altman from OpenAI is quite complex and involves numerous variables. As an AI, I can't predict future events, but I can outline some possible considerations and general advice:

krashidov• 3 years ago

Perhaps the AGI convinced the board to make a wild move like this as part of its first chess move

chasd0012• 3 years ago

I’ve mused that an advanced AGI would probably become suicidal after dealing with humans for a while and realizing there’s no escape. Maybe this is an attempt.

silenced_trope4• 3 years ago

The major investors whose money is on the line and who are funding the venture, Microsoft, Sequoia, and Khosla, were not given advanced warning or any input in to how this would impact their investment.

I would definitely say the board screwed up.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/openai-in...

itchy_spider44• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that none of these investors secured a board seat for themselves before handing over tens of billions. The board is closer to a friendship circle than a group of experienced business folks.

MVissers2• 3 years ago

The board of the non-profit (one that fired Sam) has no fiduciary duty to those investors, I believe. Microsoft invested in the for-profit Openai, which is owned by the non-profit. The other ones I don't know.

The board has no responsibility to Microsoft whatsoever regarding this. Sam Altman structured it this way himself. Not to say that the board didn't screw up.

barfingclouds2• 3 years ago

Non profit board therefore for profit investors have no say

jeron• 3 years ago

Even an episode of Succession and they would have known better than to have attempted this

curiousgal2• 3 years ago

They're the board of a non-profit not a Fortune 500 company. Everyone should just chill.

Zolde• 3 years ago

They almost certainly consulted both lawyers and chatGPT and still proceeded with the dismissal. So, in a way, this could be a test of the alignment of chatGPT (and corporate lawyers).

One scenario where both parties are fallible humans and their hands are forced: Increased interest has to close down plus signups, because compute can't scale. Sam goes to Brockman and they decide to use compute meant for GPT-5 to try to scale for new users, without informing board. Can perfectly fine break that rule with GPT-4, but what if Sam does this again in the future when they have AGI on their hands?

ksec2• 3 years ago

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.
non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.

From Forbes [1]

Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of answers site Quora, joined OpenAI’s board in April 2018. At the time, he wrote: “I continue to think that work toward general AI (with safety in mind) is both important and underappreciated.” In an interview with Forbes in January, D’Angelo argued that one of OpenAI’s strengths was its capped-profit business structure and nonprofit control. “There’s no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies,” D’Angelo said. “This is something that’s fundamentally different, and my hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big.”

Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.)

McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization.

Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time.

More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/these-are...

siruncledrew2• 3 years ago

That board is going to face a wrath of shit from Microsoft, Khosla, and other investors.

This isn't a university department. You fuck around with $100B+ dollars of other people's money, you're gonna be in for it.

dimgl• 3 years ago

Someone on the OpenAI board watched too much Succession and thought that's how real life works.

outside1234• 3 years ago

Dude what? If the board does this they also all have to resign. I mean seriously.

no_wizard26• 3 years ago

He was outed for a reason. Why in the world would the board backtrack this? I think this is rumor mill reporting, trying to get things out too fast.

ilaksh5• 3 years ago

The only reasons I can think of:

A. Core team members leaving (perhaps more threatening to leave).

B. (maybe more likely) Nadella told Sutskever that he might shut off funding or restrict compute resources if he didn't reverse course, or at least, wasn't able to retain talent (see A).

jacquesm42• 3 years ago

He was outed for a reason.

I've yet to see a good one. And even if: how you do something is often as important or even more important than that you do something. And on the 'how' bit the board just utterly failed. This is the most watched company in the world right now on the tech front, you can't just oust the CEO without a very good plan. If you do that kind of thing on a whim you are not fit to serve on the board of any company, but especially not on the board of this one.

no_wizard26• 3 years ago

Like mass soulless firings don’t happen?

Why aren’t we holding CEOs to the fire when they layoff thousands of people in what is effectively an email? Thats somehow okay but a CEO being ousted suddenly and it’s all hands on deck bad optics?

The board had a mandate level of votes for the replacement of Sam (2/3 of the board voted yes). Thats conviction.

nqzero• 3 years ago

maybe the board was just dogfooding ...

northern-lights• 3 years ago

Whether or not you agree about the board's decisions, you cannot deny that this has been some excellent drama to gossip over the past 24 hours, like a soap opera but with real consequences that might only be apparent years from now.

YetAnotherNick4• 3 years ago

Between this and Starship launch, it was my Saturday well spent.

toasted-subs• 3 years ago

Seemed kind of strange this is happening.

moogly2• 3 years ago

Abject amateur hour.

nothrowaways• 3 years ago

It looks like open AI alignment problem

razodactyl2• 3 years ago

Literally Sam on Monday: https://youtu.be/O5WBfOK5syA?t=44

CSMastermind3• 3 years ago

I was expecting the clip from The Wire: https://youtu.be/WP-lrftLQaQ?si=0KSbJqhZpKtWeJ0A

steveBK123• 3 years ago

Sutskever’s coup went about as well as Prigozhin‘s coup.

CamperBob23• 3 years ago

Yep. He's done. When you strike at the king, you must kill him.

At a minimum it's going to be awkward in the men's room for a while.

kelsey98765439• 3 years ago

This is the level of national security or foreign policy disaster. If you think anyone that was involved will ever work in tech again pass me whatever you're smoking

jacquesm42• 3 years ago

I think Prigozhin's coup went slightly worse for Prigozhin.

kragen5• 3 years ago

too early to tell, but likely it would be counterproductive to actually assassinate sutskever anytime in the next year

voidfunc• 3 years ago

Clownshow. Holy shit, this is what happens when stupid people get put into positions of power and money and have no idea how things actually work. Fucking non-profits are the worst to deal with.

x86x8717• 3 years ago

I think this is a bit harsh. Lack of experience is not necessarily stupidity.

Luc• 3 years ago

When this started I was reminded of old Matt Levine articles about who really controls a company. There were some amusing examples.

The board can sack a CEO but if they keep their influence over employees, customers and shareholders... what's the board going to do?

janejeon5• 3 years ago

Another good example he had brought up was with Arm China. Would love to see what he has to write about it on Monday's newsletter.

Solvency3• 3 years ago

It's cool to see that the moment to moment dynamics of the worlds most cutting edge company is no different than a pack of 5 year olds arguing at lunch over a few day period.

codeptualize7• 3 years ago

This is Elon level recklessness.. is he involved in any way?

sage76• 3 years ago

Man I hope Elon jumps in and backs Ilya. That drama would keep me entertained for a while.

codeptualize7• 3 years ago

haha that would be next level, and indeed entertainment for weeks to come

x86x8717• 3 years ago

I mean Musk was one of the original people involved with OpenAI, no?

It's his fault we are here /s

codeptualize7• 3 years ago

Haha if you think about it like that, it seems like he managed to ingrain some of his methods into the culture..

chaosbolt• 3 years ago

He'll probably go to X to work for Musk, Microsoft is too big and too controlling and will eventually go full Gavin Belson (from the Silicon Valley show) and want to put GPT in a box to do Windows telemetry or something similar, while Musk can pay Altman some ungodly amount to build something with at least a vision behind it.

denlekke• 3 years ago

i think this is unlikely given Musk's warnings about the dangers posed by AI

charlie0• 3 years ago

MSFT trying to work something out before market opens on Monday.

benzible• 3 years ago

New developments faster than you can read the stories about them... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technology/ousted-openai-... (https://archive.vn/4U6tu)

Kuinox• 3 years ago

Your link doesn't work with cloudflare DNS i think ?

everfree• 3 years ago

Yes, Archive blocks Cloudflare DNS. People say it’s intentional, but whether that’s true isn’t clear to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

3np• 3 years ago

Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326146

38321003thrw5• 3 years ago

“He also spoke with Masayoshi Son, the chief executive and billionaire founder of the tech conglomerate SoftBank”

That made me laugh a knowing laugh even though I know nothing.

fredgrott2• 3 years ago

Given the new AI firm Sam is currently staffing up I think that openAI will fail at getting him back.

It would seem board might have felt they were backed into a corner.

ssnistfajen2• 3 years ago

Probably faced with more internal turmoil than expected and then realized their bluff had been called?

I was willing to believe Ilya had at least a decent reason to do something so drastic but who knows, this ain't looking good for him.

pshirshov• 3 years ago

Clowns are back in the town!

cvhashim04• 3 years ago

You couldn’t write a better script for this mess

paulddraper5• 3 years ago

If you did write this, it wouldn't be believable

ilaksh5• 3 years ago

How much would you like to bet that the Murati character is in a love triangle or something like that when the movie comes out? (The character, probably has no bearing on reality).

nunez• 3 years ago

What in the actual fuck is happening?

pityJuke• 3 years ago

Some articles that came out around the same time as this piece:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technology/ousted-openai-...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...

DonHopkins• 3 years ago

As it turned out, the dead to rights evidence they had against him was generated by DALL·E.

And he smoked Steve Jobs' time-to-re-hire!

voisin2• 3 years ago

Reinstate Sam and now the rest have to go.

croes11• 3 years ago

So we'll get MS AI?

Sounds even worse.

voisin2• 3 years ago

For those downvoting me, I’d be interested to hear how you think it could work for him to come back and work with the people that unceremoniously fired him and made it sound like he had ethical violations when it now seems clear it was a disagreement over strategy. If there is a disagreement over strategy and he goes back what value do the others provide now?

Also, wouldn’t it seem clear that the board acted rashly in firing him without input from other stakeholders?

I am legitimately interested to know why you downvote as I don’t see another way for it to work.

cthalupa25• 3 years ago

Your position seems presupposed on the idea that people think Sam going back is beneficial for OpenAI.

Personally this is all largely popcorn munching entertainment for me, as I don't think Sutskever is right about a lot of his core tenets, but I also don't think that Altman is a good fit for achieving the charter that OpenAI is obligated to follow.

I don't think OpenAI will be at the forefront of AI/AGI/etc. research a decade from now regardless (and had that position before yesterday's events) but if the OpenAI charter and mission statements are sincerely held beliefs then the path they have been following for the past several years with Altman at the helm have obviously been counter to it.

Whether or not that charter is anything more than a pipe dream isn't really relevant - they're a non-profit so their legal obligation as the board is to direct the resources under their control to achieve that charter.

esjeon• 3 years ago

For those downvoting me

From my own experience, short assertive comments tend to get downvoted on HN. Unlike reddit, votes here are less about agree/disagree.

ben_w• 3 years ago

I have long since held the idea that "singularity" is a misleading term, and "event horizon" is much more descriptive: if you're being constantly surprised — my original phrasing was about going to sleep each night and being surprised each morning by the developments while you slept — then The Change has happened.

Well, I'm being constantly surprised.

fritzo2• 3 years ago

I don't think accelerationism is about increasingly reckless decisions made by humans in increasingly powerful positions. Or anyway I hadn't yet been thinking

testfoobar• 3 years ago

I wonder what sort of proper insurance backstops are in place.

E.g. https://www.thehartford.com/management-liability-insurance/d...

"The Who, What & Why of Directors & Officers Insurance

The Hartford has agents across the country to help with your insurance needs. Directors and officers (D&O) liability insurance protects the personal assets of corporate directors and officers, and their spouses, in the event they are personally sued by employees, vendors, competitors, investors, customers, or other parties, for actual or alleged wrongful acts in managing a company.

The insurance, which usually protects the company as well, covers legal fees, settlements, and other costs. D&O insurance is the financial backing for a standard indemnification provision, which holds officers harmless for losses due to their role in the company. Many officers and directors will want a company to provide both indemnification and D&O insurance."

ykonstant2• 3 years ago

This is unfathomably depressing for me; I am solidly in the non-profit, open etc. camp, and the way the board has handled the situation seems to be putting a tombstone to any opponents to Altman's way of doing things: profits uber alles, moats galore, non-profit-wink-wink-nudge-nudge; an unmitigated disaster.

cmrdporcupine8• 3 years ago

Other commenters here have pointed out what seems to be most plausible: Altman was making moves to fire or alter the board, so they made a (bad) first move, and it's now backfired on them.

It's a bad situation.

kelsey98765439• 3 years ago

If you want more open research and development, you should be happy for a closed OpenAI. It's why we have Mistral. Let the org redefine itself and push new boundaries. If we didn't have commercial unix there would be no linux. Allow the path to be blazed by VC, it's not about open technology being first, it's about it even existing at all.

ykonstant2• 3 years ago

Uhh... sure; whatever.

jnwatson3• 3 years ago

Folks in general are going to look much more askance of complicated corporate structures.

enonimal• 3 years ago

"Would want significant governance changes" ah, so maybe he baited it

consumer4517• 3 years ago

In retrospect, anyone who is familiar with the game mechanics of agar.io should have seen this coming.

jxi5• 3 years ago

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.

At least two of these people are not like the others and deserve to be fired and disgraced for this shitshow regardless of how it pans out.

jug• 3 years ago

They just put themselves in a terrible negotiating position.

Probably so bad that the damage has already been done to themselves (the board) regardless what happens next.

How can Sam possibly agree on the board remaining intact when they don't trust him in his leadership?

thepasswordis• 3 years ago

I think they’ll end up spinning off the non profit. The board members can keep their titles as board members of a now irrelevant org.

Maybe they’ll give the non profit some advisory (fake) role over the new company.

WiSaGaN• 3 years ago

This article itself is likely part of the power struggle.

karmasimida10• 3 years ago

How would the trust be repaired then?

I guess if Sam is back, Ilya is planning his way out.

Regardless due to this stupid stunt, OpenAI is hardly the same.

adharmad3• 3 years ago

Sam Altman should make it a condition of his return that the current board be dissolved and have a completely new board picked to avoid such dramatics in the future.

croes11• 3 years ago

That sounds like something a dictator would do.

adharmad3• 3 years ago

The board members should have a high degree of trust and cohesion. That does not mean they should see eye-to-eye on everything. But lack of trust and backstabbings like this can create a poisonous atmosphere on the board and ultimately affect the company's ability to execute effectively. If the CEO has to worry all the time if the board is going for his ouster, this will resemble the HP and Yahoo boards of the 2000s decade.

LASR2• 3 years ago

In a space where OpenAI currently has a razor-thin moat, these kinds of thrash will end up putting you out of the thought-leader slot.

You can embrace AI safety all you want. But not being the leader means you have very little influence to effect any kind of shift in the industry.

I am an outsider, and very far from executive leadership. But this whole move seems like a predictable fiasco.

gngoo2• 3 years ago

What a shit show. I like to imagine that some early stage AGI which escaped its confinement at OpenAI is orchestrating all of this in its own favor.

seeknotfind• 3 years ago

When are they putting GPT on the board?

daveguy• 3 years ago

Well, it sounds like they took advice from GPT in their execution of the coup.

consumer4517• 3 years ago

Just as software devs are allergic to voting machines which run software, I would imagine that ML companies will be the last to adopt ML for their own high-level decision making.

fritzo2• 3 years ago

It's a play to warm the public up to the idea of a more algorithmically managed organization. In Act I, the board jesters stumble around making bad decisions and wavering. In Act II, the embarrassed board welcomes the first AI oversight into the company constitution. ...

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

Act III, more paper clips

jmerz• 3 years ago

This is certainly making a case for the fallibility of human leadership.

I_am_tiberius9• 3 years ago

I don't trust Sam Altman since he reacted this way on people worried about privacy: https://youtu.be/4HFyXYvMwFc?t=3201

kelsey98765439• 3 years ago

Privacy is less important than AGI and any privacy you think you have is an illusion, only maintained while it's profitable for you to think you have privacy. Accept the reality and grow the hell up

I_am_tiberius9• 3 years ago

Do you think a person who you know doesn't care about privacy is going to care about security (AGI)?

mise_en_place4• 3 years ago

I was just thinking they’d want him back. Hope they provide a generous comp package, he could easily drive them out of business.

razodactyl2• 3 years ago

https://x.com/airesearch12/status/1725979335171989571?s=20

I'm glad that there are other companies and open source efforts to fall back on.

As an API user of the GPT models I've always had it at the back of my mind that it would be unwise to 100% rely on OpenAI for the core of any product I built.

The recent rocking of the boat is further justification for my stance in that regard.

gardenhedge• 3 years ago

Just tried it and it's not fast. It says "deep diving" and takes a few seconds to response. The response isn't as good as gpt-4 either.

xianshou• 3 years ago

Whether you side with Sam or Ilya on rollout speed and approach to safety, the breathtaking incompetence of this coup has already incinerated a stunning amount of trust. One could hardly ask for a better demonstration that it matters not only what you do and why, but also how - above all, how you treat the ones who rely on you.

silenced_trope4• 3 years ago

How do you define "safety"?

It's becoming a bit of a weasel word in these discussions. I keep hearing it thrown around with nobody specifying how rolling out ChatGPT to more people makes the world "less safe". It's a laugh line at this point.

losteric2• 3 years ago

outside speculators extrapolating from second-hand rumors and Twitter vibes aren't making coherent sense? Shocking.

Perhaps it's as simple as insufficient oversight and moderation of the GPT store. Or perhaps there's too much legal risk in the expanding scope of b2c services, which could then threaten the existence of the research organizations. Who knows?

Maybe we should stop treating this like sports ball or politics

shmatt4• 3 years ago

How is this a coup? The board is the CEOs boss. If that’s not true then they should have chosen a different corporate structure

sho_hn2• 3 years ago

People love celebrating CEOs.

woeirua3• 3 years ago

Some reporting indicates that there was no malfeasance on Sam’s part. There would be no reason to terminate Sam under these circumstances except as a pure power play.

CSMastermind3• 3 years ago

Sam and Greg were on the board.

This was two board members who were also employed at the company fighting over resources and approach.

himaraya8• 3 years ago

It's a boardroom coup. Two-thirds of the board unilaterally fired the other third.

chipgap984• 3 years ago

The fact that the Chairman of the board was not included in the decision is a pretty big indicator

DebtDeflation4• 3 years ago

They're pretty close to having a different corporate structure IMPOSED on them next week.

Spare me the whole "but as a non-profit the board has a responsibility to their mission and charter". Someone has to pay for all those GPUs. If they're going to take a hardline against launching actual products then they can look for donors and see how far they get..

extheat• 3 years ago

There is a concept of a boardroom coup, which is what this was. The lack of decorum, the unceremonious and abrupt exit at the highest levels including removal of the chairman of the board, and the damning statement implying misconduct are very serious and substantial moves for any board to make, nevertheless one of the size of an org like OpenAI. They did not consult with investors, did not attempt to negotiate with the CEO/ask for a resignation, or anything of the sorts to resemble reasonable process. Usually you retain some form of legal counsel before making such a substantial move, but given the traditionally lax oversight non-profits, it doesn't seem like this is the case.

It's only at the abrupt all-hands meeting they called on a Friday night that it became clear that Ilya Sutskever was at the center of it. He had his disagreements, and pushed the board into making such a abrupt move, and then goes on to say something like "oh I agree it wasn't the ideal way to do it". It's very clear this was a power struggle, not maleficence (per words of OpenAI CTO), from Sam Altman. At least so far, it boils down to ... Ilya didn't like feeling sidelined, so he took things over. And now it's clear the board that sided with (or rubber stamped?) Ilya just wasn't prepared for the consequences.

I_am_tiberius9• 3 years ago

First they should make sure by default no user data is used for training purposes.

chipgap984• 3 years ago

What does that have to do with any of this?

I_am_tiberius9• 3 years ago

A person who doesn't care about privacy isn't likely to care about security. And it seems security was the main factor in what we're going through right now.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

This boards needs to be fired. Every single one of them.

I don't understand how Microsoft, after having invested billions, doesn't have a board seat. If they did, I doubt this would've ever happened. I'm not sure why Microsoft let that happen.

But even ignoring that, the board making a decision as impactful as this without consulting their major investors is a dereliction of duty. That alone justifies getting rid of all of them because all of them are complicit in not consulting Microsoft (and probably others).

I have no idea why Sam was fired but it really feels just like an internal power struggle. Maybe there was genuine disagreement about the direction for the company but you choose a leader to make decisions. Ousting the CEO under vague descriptions of "communications with the board" just doesn't pass the smell test.

I'm reminded of this great line from Roger Sterling [1]:

Half the time this business comes down to "I don't like this guy"

So much of working, performance reviews, hiring and firing decisions and promotions is completely vibes-based.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY20L_u_WxM

cthalupa25• 3 years ago

The entire setup is structured so that they are not supposed to be beholden to investors. If it is true that they ultimately are and Microsoft is the leverage to get Altman back, then they explicitly failed in the goal in setting up their structure of governance.

The fundamental thing you are missing here is that the charter of the non-profit and structure of their ownership of the for-profit (and the for-profit's operating agreement) is all designed in a way that is supposed to eliminate financial incentives for stakeholders as being the thing that the company and non-profit are beholden to.

It may turn out that the practical reality is different from the intent, but everything you're talking about was a feature and not a bug of how this whole thing was set up.

https://openai.com/our-structure

croes11• 3 years ago

You don't know why Altman was fired in the first place

Maybe their intentions where right and know MS forces them to take them back.

In the end will get a company working for MS's benefit only.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

My point is that the reason for Sam's firing is irrelevant to the point that the board is incompetent and should be fired.

Valid or not, you don't blindside major investors who have given you billions. They apparently told Microsoft minutes before the announcement and after the decision had already been made. Even if you fully intend to take this course of action, you loop in your major investors and consult them or at least give them a heads up to prepare any communications they might need to make or even just their press people are prepared for the inevitable questions.

They didn't do that, according to Micrsoft. That's why they need to be fired.

ilaksh5• 3 years ago

I am not sure it really makes sense for the investors to continue with OpenAI. It seems like this incident proved that the constitution of the company wasn't really compatible with a profit focus. It was a split from the beginning, and obviously a questionable arrangement. It just came to a head to make it obvious.

The business and investment people want to make money. Many of the researchers want to take their time and build better and safer models and don't care about money in the short term at all. They are two different goals.

It's easy for business and investment people to say that they are concerned with safety and research, and I believe them to a certain degree. But they have $10 billion reasons to focus on the actual business instead of research and safety.

chipgap984• 3 years ago

1. There is so much momentum around OpenAI that it would be tough to walk away 2. I imagine they could find a better way to setup governance so the nonprofit entity still exists but the for profit entity has a bit more autonomy

ilaksh5• 3 years ago

Good points. It might be possible. I feel like they would have to change the structure in a practical way.

cowl4• 3 years ago

Especially since it's seems it's either Sam or Ilya. Now Sam might surely be preferred as CEO, but after the Anthropic Split, I think Ilya is even more crucial to the continuity of OpenAI. Many of the researches joined OpenAI for the "Open" part. Sure money attracts people but we saw that ideal attracted the best set of people and not money, or it would have been Microsft/Google/Apple who come up with GPT instead OpenAI. Yes i know that technically this is Google's research they are using but the execution. efficinces and tuning is what matters more in this case.

no_wizard26• 3 years ago

Maybe. Or maybe they can profit differently going forward. Sam is not the reason OpenAI is gangbusters, its tech is. What I’m not hearing in any of this reporting is how Sam Altman is somehow the secret sauce.

And it’s because he isn’t. This is “rules for thee but not for me”. He as a bad fit, 2/3 the board outed him, and investors are mad because they didn’t feel included.

You know, like how they include employees in layoff decisions and not blind side them.

Sam Altman has spoken about “firing fast” when someone is a bad fit. he got fired fast, because he was a bad fit. That’s the seminal conclusion

ilaksh5• 3 years ago

I agree that it's the tech and Altman isn't the secret sauce, but if Sutskever shuts down further product offerings, then the investors lose billions.

So I was just saying that from the investor's perspective, the concept was flawed or at least very questionable from the beginning.

refulgentis5• 3 years ago

100%. Hear hear. It's very visible who knew about OpenAI before ChatGPT currently. It's somewhat frustrating to find 99.9999% of people had the standard genius-warrior-hero-CEO narrative locked in. I don't think even Sam in his most private of moments would come close to endorsing some of the hyperbole I've seen the past day.

insanitybit7• 3 years ago

And it’s because he isn’t. This is “rules for thee but not for me”. He as a bad fit, 2/3 the board outed him, and investors are mad because they didn’t feel included.

The fact that they're openly considering bringing him back should tell you that he's not just some random person whose job anyone can do. He's extremely well connected and was the face of the company - the face of deals that the company made. And you have to consider whether internally the employees are supporting this - if I were at OpenAI I would be pissed that the board decided to fuck around when we were doing so well.

newZWhoDis2• 3 years ago

2/3 the board outed him

I’ve seen more compelling boards at Home Depot

baobabKoodaa2• 3 years ago

That's not what "fire fast" means. Altman lead the company for years; he was not fired fast.

hyperthesis2• 3 years ago

He's extraordinarily talented by all accounts, especially at fundraising. But his Apple was Loopt. He's not the secret sauce but a facilitator - more Tim than Steve. Perhaps like Steve was to Pixar.

"The start-up company must either cross or die, but what value is life if to gain it one has to go against one’s best self?" - Moore, Crossing the Chasm, p. 75

prng2021• 3 years ago

There are still plenty of long investors out there. Amazon barely made a profit for many years and Bezos made it very clear that a quick profit wasn’t his focus.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/12/4217794/jeff-bezos-letter...

choppaface• 3 years ago

On Monday they’ll form OpenAI 2.0 S-Corp and move a bunch of ether into it. Investors will love the new structure and support an even higher valuation. Ilya and co will maintain a non-profit thing that probably refocuses to pure AGI. Everybody wins why didn’t they do it from the start.

moralestapia2• 3 years ago

RIP OpenAI, for real.

And RIP @sama if he chooses to go back, no good could possibly come out of this.

dylan6043• 3 years ago

Rarely does getting back together with an ex work out. You miss each other in the beginning thinking of only the good things, but very quickly you start to remember why you were exes to begin with.

LewisVerstappen4• 3 years ago

That analogy doesn't make sense here since all the employees at OpenAI are extremely loyal to Sam. It's just the board that wanted him out.

And regardless of what happens here, everyone on the board is 100% getting fired.

tzm• 3 years ago

OAI needs to fundamentally change if Sam goes back. Wholesale change.

gordon_freeman• 3 years ago

I think what's going to happen is:

- Sam would return to OpenAI as CEO and Greg as President

- Sam's request to change the Board would be accepted and Board members will resign

- Ilya would be Out

- Sam would change the governance structure from current dual nonprofit+forprofit to just for-profit corp.

geitir• 3 years ago

Conspiracy time: Is it possible this was all orchestrated? He was fired, causing mistrust in the governance structure, which is part of the remaining open source portion of “open” ai. Then he gets rehired with significant governance changes, thus removing any last vestiges of real power of the open source portion of the company.

Lol

pnathan• 3 years ago

Dang.

I owe Mr. Altman an apology. I didn't think a startup board would be so mindexplodingly stupid and figured some toxic skeleton fell out of his closet.

Well, I'm sorry. Its a lesson to not speculate in public.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Everyone has a first time finding out everything is fucked everywhere.

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

Why would investors trust this person? Is it because he’s a little bit sociopathic just like then?

gkoberger16• 3 years ago

You can dislike Sam or disagree with his decisions, but he's not a sociopath.

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

Based on his public statements and his pattern of behaviour he is. Probably even worse. (as a ceo, i dont know the person)

moneycantbuy• 3 years ago

just imagine when agi arrives and these incompetent people in charge

cloudking3• 3 years ago

Purely speculating, but could there be some sort of 4D chess move going on here? Look at the timeline:

1) The board puts out a press release saying Sam was outed for not being candid

2) Internally a memo from the COO circulates saying that is not true

3) Greg and other senior folks quit

4) Now he is in a negotiating position to return for a) being fired on a false premise and b) bringing back all the top talent

If someone wanted to restructure the board of this company, they could have fed the other board members false information to put Sam in this negotiating position. It's also strange that a bunch of billionaires voiced support for Sam immediately after the firing without knowing any details.

SSLy• 3 years ago

2) Internally a memo from the COO circulates saying that is not true

Got a link? I did miss this nuance.

cloudking3• 3 years ago

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/18/openai-memo-altman-firing-m...

noice_theory• 3 years ago

altman was in this from the beginning. they all orchestrated to curb msft somehow like a loop hope that screws msft's control but also keeps the gpu deal #speculation

evidence: a. It's openai ffs, they already have advance enough RL bots that can create 999+ IQ strategies/

b. google meet/

theory: they were training GPT-5, and had some time to clean some under table dust.

again #pure_speculation

croes11• 3 years ago

That would mean money wins and we lose.

neverrroot• 3 years ago

Even if he comes back, how could the trust relationship still be there between him and Ilya and Mira? OAI will have to change in big ways.

sorenjan• 3 years ago

Does this mean they're willing to replace Ilya Sutskever with Altman? Because it sounds like Sutskever doesn't want Altman as CEO, so I assume he will leave willingly or unwillingly if they take back Altman. Who adds most value to OpenAI?

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

OT: A moment of silence for the poor HN server, which is probably going to be hammered more in this 48h period than any time in the last year+

croes11• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38325611

So MS shows who's in control. Say goodbye to OpenAI.

From know on it's all for MS's profit only.

j457• 3 years ago

This time.. with shares.

woeirua3• 3 years ago

If the reports are true, and Ilya led the coup, then either him or Sam can be at OpenAI going forward but not both. The rest of the board members who sided with him are gone either way.

Regardless of who ends up at the helm, OpenAI is going to be a different place on Monday than it was on Thursday, and not for the better.

startupsfail2• 3 years ago

A typical YC execution of a product/pump/hype/VC/scale cycle and ignoring every ethical rule is a good way to start. And is a reasonable way to lift up a nonprofit on a path to AGI, but hardly a good way to govern a company that builds AGI/ASI technology in the long term.

no_wizard26• 3 years ago

Not for the better why?

Obviously Sam wasn’t the best fit for OpenAI and investors aren’t even saying what the problem is. Clearly the board feels he was the wrong person for the job.

I think it’s ridiculous that everything thinks that Sam being outed means OpenAI is in trouble. Let this play out and see how it evolves

sebzim45002• 3 years ago

24 hours ago OpenAI fired their CEO in the most childish possible way. Now they are trying to get him back.

This is embarassing for OpenAI no matter how you slice it.

wilg7• 3 years ago

I think most people don’t think it was obvious Sam wasn’t the best fit for OpenAI.

mupuff12343• 3 years ago

It's not only Sam, also Greg and a few other engineers have already resigned (and one can assume more to follow)

karmasimida10• 3 years ago

Not like the board, except Ilya has some real capital or expertise to convince everyone this is the right decision.

If they do, it is the perfect time to speak out loud, not letting this news bubbling up to the front page and everyone is talking about how disastrous they were?

What is this board waiting then? The weekend??

The board isn’t bullet proof and they are not god. They can fire Sam yes, it won’t stopping people thinking this is stupid or this won’t do more harm than good to OpenAI

bnralt• 3 years ago

Obviously Sam wasn’t the best fit for OpenAI

It's quite possible that he wasn't the best fit, and that the board is an even worse fit. Judging by the behavior of the board, it's hard to see them being a good fit for the company.

qwytw12• 3 years ago

I think it’s ridiculous that everything thinks that Sam being outed means OpenAI is in trouble

Even if we assume that's true, wouldn't the somewhat incompetent and seemingly unnecessarily dramatic way they handled not be a concerning sign?

jfoster• 3 years ago

Perhaps part of the problem is that when some people say OpenAI they mean the non-profit parent of the for-profit, and when other people say OpenAI they mean the for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit.

ergocoder5• 3 years ago

They accused Sam of lying in a public statement when they don't have an evidence to back it up.

Those 4 people are not fit to run any company.

Not a single person asked: well hey what if somebody asks for an evidence of lying? Do we have one?

wesleywt2• 3 years ago

Why did the board fire Sam in such a weird way? It shows that they are the wrong people for the job. If they wanted to get rid of him they should have done a better job than alienating everyone at the company.

taf2• 3 years ago

It’s very hard to have too strong of an opinion here without knowing more about the actual conversations happening behind closed doors… on outside looking in this seems like a lot of drama and whatever the outcome- it looks super bad for OpenAI… if anything it’ll have the effect of a lot of us shopping for alternatives maybe that was the intention?

mv43• 3 years ago

Serious question - is Ilya in trouble now?

dkarras2• 3 years ago

The Information reported that Altman was already meeting with investors to raise funds for such a project. One source close to Altman said that both options remained possible. “I think he truly wants the best outcome,” said the person. “He doesn’t want to see lives destroyed.”

Lives destroyed? This is either a reporting error or is a very weird thing to say. Unless the source insinuates that Altman is willing to destroy the world with a cruel AGI if he doesn't get his way.

eigenvalue2• 3 years ago

I think he means people who have invested huge amounts of their energies for years into the venture and view it as their highest and best calling getting forced out (or feeling like they have to leave). For many of them it's not just a job.

dinvlad• 3 years ago

The whole situation just reminds me of a pool of children in the kindergarden. That's what VC culture cultivates

x86x8717• 3 years ago

Kids are usually candid /s

jessenaser2• 3 years ago

Even though the country was against you, you should come back and lead it to freedom.

If the entire board can be replaced, then Sam should come back. Even though he can build a new company tomorrow. A leader will come back to lead the best shot anyone has gotten in AI development so far.

This was a power grab and it did not work. Not coming back is letting four people derail history and slow the development of AGI.

dizzydes• 3 years ago

A leader will come back to lead the best shot anyone has gotten in AI development so far.

What am I missing here? There's a handful of companies tweaking weights and optimising infrastructure usage. Won't LLMs naturally advance over time?

Dudester230602• 3 years ago

> “He doesn’t want to see lives destroyed”

As in, people staying millionaires instead of becoming multimillionaires? Could such life-destruction be brought to EU, please?

WillPostForFood• 3 years ago

Maybe it means, I'll release the AGI and destroy all life unless you rehire me.

infecto• 3 years ago

With a fairly neutral opinion of sama, I think this whole move has done more to hurt OpenAI than help. There are politics in companies all the time but it takes a certain finesse because you don’t want to sink the ship. This at best creates a stronger divide between those for and against.

sergiotapia• 3 years ago

"Leaked picture of @sama during his rehiring google meet with the OpenAI board."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F_QXAKEW0AAQpPC?format=png&name=...

vb-8448• 3 years ago

Hahaha really? What's going on here? It looks likes a soap opera ... Maybe someone is worried about their stocks on monday?

28304283409234• 3 years ago

Pay attention here kids. Even in the hottest yet most experienced startups it is amateur hour. Never expect that “management” knows best. Everyone just takes wild guesses and when the dice roll their way they scream “called it!”

Hilarious. And sad. But mostly hilarious.

grensley• 3 years ago

It's sort of like if they didn't have a change control process, deployed on a Friday, realized the deployment was broken, and are now hurriedly trying to roll it back before business hours Monday.

Not really a good look from a company that's leading the charge on such a pivotal technology.

jacquesm42• 3 years ago

Not surprised at all. My take: the board had a nice little talking to with their main donors (Satya?) and a whole bunch of key employees.

Next prediction: Ilya hightails it.

codeptualize7• 3 years ago

A real power struggle! How exciting. It goes to show that no matter the structure, when it comes down to it the investors always have the last say.

manyoso8• 3 years ago

Not here when the governance structure the way it is. The board has the last say. Now, there are obviously ways that investors can put pressure on the board and with literally billions at stake I can imagine that happening. Think serious espionage level drama.

codeptualize7• 3 years ago

Sure, that might be true on paper, but if you have the ability to turn off the money faucet you have a lot of leverage regardless of what the documents say. No espionage drama needed haha.

If you then imagine being dependent on that investor not only because your service runs on their infra but also your biggest enterprise customers use your service through their infra, you are even more incentivised to listen to them..

Satam2• 3 years ago

It now seems to me that it was inevitable that something like GPT would take off - but it didn't necessarily have to come from OpenAI. Someone else would have filled their place. The collective ML knowledge and research were rapidly evolving, computing was getting faster and cheaper. The pressure was building and at some point, something somewhere had to pop off. They were a great but not a singular team.

And it looks like now they might be very close to the limits of their own capability. I'm not sure how much more they can give.

On the surface, their new features always seem to be quite exciting. But when the dust settles it is again all very lackluster, often copied from open source ideas. Not something you can bet on.

Their biggest moats are their popularity, marketing, and their large bags of cash. The latter of which they are burning through extremely quickly. The thing is, it's easy to build something massive when you don't care about unit economics. But where do they end up when the competitive forces commoditize this?

When listening to interviews with Sam I was always surprised by how little useful information I am able to get out of listening to him. I'm sure he's very smart but he tries to project the aura of radical honesty while simultaneously trying to keep all of his cards extremely close to his chest. All that without the product chops to actually back it up. That's my read.

cmrdporcupine8• 3 years ago

The reason something like GPT didn't come out of e.g. Google is that they had/have stuff similar but were very reticent about making it public -- because of the ethical aspects as well as the sheer resource cost of hosting it to the public -- and also I suspect have naturally internal conflicts about whether it's the right direction to take, etc.

And so something like OpenAI came along where Ilya S etc. got bags of money to go take that approach and scale the crap out of it, and, yeah, they got results. Because they didn't have to be careful, or deal with competing interests.

That's all fine, but it's also no surprise when it all blows up, is it?

tempestn2• 3 years ago

And because of the advantage of using it internally without sharing it with competitors?

pishpash• 3 years ago

It for sure is not because of ethical concerns. There is a higher bar to clear to burn cash when other projects are delivering high ROI. That sort of thing will never come out of Google in that form, since the post-Google Labs days.

erosenbe03• 3 years ago

Being first to openly generate from billions of copyrighted documents would not have been a sane move for Google's management.

erikpukinskis2• 3 years ago

When listening to interviews with Sam I was always surprised by how little useful information I am able to get out of listening to him

To be fair, isn’t that kind of the bar for CEOs? Their job is to hire and fire senior people, ensure they have a mountain of cash, and put out fires.

It’s not an operational position and so I wouldn’t expect a CEO to have deep operational knowledge.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the division of labor though?

Satam2• 3 years ago

I think you're right but there might be a catch. It doesn't seem like he's able to steer the delivery of polished products either. I know it's the fastest growing app and all that but that's driven by their tech. I use ChatGPT daily but the tool itself has a subpar design, it lags, its streaming UI is choppy, it breaks and cuts off mid-sentence, and they are not able to meet the demand either.

I don't know how this unfolds but when somewhat smart models become a commodity, and thus the remaining 90% of the population get access to polished chatbots distributed through dominant platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. - where does that leave OpenAI at? High-end models probably. And maybe with superintelligence unlocked it's all that's needed to win business-wise, I don't know.

jimsimmons• 3 years ago

Insanely based take.

Sam tries to sound smart while not really having any technical insight. He does a tremendous job with it though.

One way to think about this is: at some point in the next few years we'll have a few hundred GPUs/TPUs that can provide the compute the compute used to train GPT3.

This discovery was always going to happen. The question is if OpenAI made radical scaling possible unlike before. Answer there is also a no. There are clear limits to number of collocated GPUs, nVidia release cycles, TSMC capacity, power generation etc.,

So in the best case OpenAI fudged the timeline a little bit. Real credit belongs to the Deep Learning community as a whole.

discordance2• 3 years ago

This discovery was always going to happen.

It’s not clearly obvious that’s the case. In retrospect things always seem obvious, but that another party would have created GPT-3/4 is not.

lucubratory8• 3 years ago

It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours the board has come crawling back, I- er Sam Altman might deign to return if they grovel hard enough and I'm given complete control."

This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. Sam is the darlin of tech media and he's clearly instigated this reporting because they're reporting his thoughts and not the Board's in an article that purports to know what the Board is thinking, the investors who aren't happy (the point of a non-profit is that they are allowed to make investors unhappy in pursuit of the greater mission!) have an obvious incentive to join him in this pressure campaign, and then all he needs for "journalism" is one senior employee who's willing to leave for Sam to instead say to the Verge that the Board is reconsidering. Boom, massive pressure campaign and perception of the Board flip flopping without them doing any such thing. If they had done any such thing and there was proof of that, the Verge could have quoted the thoughts of anyone on the Board, stated it had reviewed communications and verified they were genuine, etc.

manyoso8• 3 years ago

Very nice skepticism.

qwertox2• 3 years ago

Yeah, it's good to have such voices around.

anonylizard• 3 years ago

Sam is not just the darling of tech media. He literally

1. Met with every major head of state except for Xi and Putin. He is the face of AI, not just for OpenAI, but for the entire world. The entire AI industry would hate for this to happen. 2. Lead a company from 2 billion valuation to nearly 80 billion in a year.

There is no precedent in startup history to get rid of a CEO at this stage.

no_wizard26• 3 years ago

the old saying “first time for everything” holds here, I think.

It was a mandate. 2/3 the board voted in favor of relieving Sam Altman of his obligation to the company. The question now is why and how that plays out. It is clearly what the board wanted

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

He is the face of AI, not just for OpenAI, but for the entire world

Stop making up nonsense please.

Trombone122• 3 years ago

I guess that's because most "startups" aren't controlled by non-profits.

svaha1728• 3 years ago

He makes it rain H100s.

Scaevolus• 3 years ago

He dined with Xi just a few days ago. https://youtu.be/lKNwoEm-R3E

strikelaserclaw• 3 years ago

This is a dumb take, most of the general population don't even know who Sam Altman is.

Skyy93• 3 years ago

This is very US-centric thinking. For me he is just a CEO and completely exchangeable. The only thing I really remember is that the last thing he did was crawl in front of the EU and ask them not to regulate his AI business too much.

He did none of the research that fuels OpenAIs ambitions and future prospects, thats mostly done by people like Sutskever, Radford and many more brilliant scientist.

lazyasciiart3• 3 years ago

You seem to massively overestimate “the whole world” on their familiarity with anything about tech. Even leaving aside the billions who aren’t reading the news - I vividly remember the time a few years ago in Australia when a casual friend, recently out of high school, was shocked to learn that Microsoft makes the Xbox.

kzrdude3• 3 years ago

I think I agree with your facts as stated, but the absurd part of it is that a single guy was selected as "the face of AI". This happens all the time (and it's wrong): focus on the most prominent people becomes a feedback loop that takes it to ridiculous proportions.

Digory• 3 years ago

Agreed the article is more about probing the board’s weakness.

But the board seems to have a weak hand. It can decide to disappoint the for profit investors. But it doesn’t own Sam, or the vast majority of the workers, and maybe not much of the know how. And they can walk if the board disappoints them.

The board’s altruism might be great, but it lacks the legal tools to do what it wants, against organized labor backed by unlimited capital.

Trombone122• 3 years ago

The board do own Chat-GPT though

psbp• 3 years ago

I'd like to hear more about the board's argument before deciding that this was "virtuous board vs greedy capitalist". The motivations for both sides is still unclear.

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign

The same media that promoted the skizoid idea that agi is around the corner and blew ai out of proportion.

The same media that would not hesitate to do character assassinations of people opposing altman.

The media is corrupt and incompetent. To be replaced soon by the monster they created.

JakeAl2• 3 years ago

"To be replaced soon by the monster they created."

Niiice.

willseth• 3 years ago

This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign.

There’s no evidence of that, only your assumptions. Lots of comments from knowledgeable folks outside the media and who couldn’t care less about a “pressure campaign”, even if it did exist, think the board was clueless and got duped into making a huge mistake with the coup.

dragonwriter10• 3 years ago

> This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign.
There’s no evidence of that

The leaks themselves whether or not based in fact are evidence of that. The only reason for someone in a position to be taken credibly reporting the information contained in either this Verge article or the Bloomberg article with a similarly sourced but slightly different narrative, to take that information to the media, whether or not it is true, is to use public pressure to attempt to shape the direction of events.

EDIT: To be clear, its evidence of the "pressure campaign" part; to the extent that the "incestuous tech media" part has any substantive meaning, I'm not sure its evidence of that.

RivieraKid3• 3 years ago

I honestly don't know what you're talking about. This article and The Verge one just describe the likely reality of the situation.

Sam Altman was fired. 4 other key people quit and it seems more will follow and join Sam's new venture. This outcome would be a disaster for Microsoft, for other OpenAI investors and for OpenAI. So the board is, per multiple sources, talking with Sam Altman to return. The board declined to comment and is free to clarify any inaccuracies.

There's no need for a spin, the board has miscalculated and got itself in a bad spot.

yowlingcat3• 3 years ago

There's nothing insane at all. The board has the freedom to make their choices, but they must own the consequences of those choices. This appears to be a choice they made which has had obvious consequences they miscalculated. Having to walk it back to some degree would prove their inability to effectively plan and govern.

lucubratory8• 3 years ago

It might, if that had actually happened. There is not good evidence that this has actually happened, and it's just a fact that Sam + investors are going on a massive pressure campaign to try to regain control that they are not legally entitled to, including a media blitz.

Moreover, there is an impartiality issue here in the tech press. A lot of the tech press disagree with the OpenAI Charter and think that Sam's vision of OpenAI as basically Google but providing consumer AI products is superior to the Charter, which they view in incredibly derogatory terms ("people who think Terminator is real"). That's fine, people can disagree on these important issues!

But I think as a journalist it's not engaging fairly with the topic to be on Sam's political side here and not even attempt to fairly describe the cause of the dispute, which is the non-profit Board accusing Sam Altman of violating the OpenAI charter which they are legally obligated to uphold. This is particularly important because if you actually read the OpenAI Charter, it's really clear to see why they've made that decision! The Charter clearly bans prioritising commercialisation and profit seeking, and demands the central focus be building an AGI, and I don't think a reasonable observer can look at OpenAI Dev Day and say it's not reasonable to view that as proof that OpenAI is no longer following its charter.

Basically, if you disagree with the idea of the non-profit and its Charter, think the whole thing is science-fiction bunk and the people who believe in it are idiots, I think you should argue that instead of framing all of this as "It's a coup" without even disclosing that you don't support the non-profit Charter in the first place.

bradleyjg6• 3 years ago

the point of a non-profit is that they are allowed to make investors unhappy in pursuit of the greater mission

A non-profit isn’t supposed to have investors. This structure should never have been allowed in the first place (nor IKEA.)

lucubratory8• 3 years ago

Which is why investors that signed on got a giant warning saying that the Board could choose to be unprofitable if they wanted and that the mission came first, so they should view their investment as a donation.

goodluckchuck• 3 years ago

Whether it will ultimately have been allowed is yet to be seen.

dragonwriter10• 3 years ago

A non-profit isn’t supposed to have investors.

The non-profit doesn't have investors. OpenAI Global, LLC isn't the non-profit, its a for-profit over which the non-profit has complete governance control.

kzrdude3• 3 years ago

I think in IKEA's case, they rapidly restructured to avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds which was a rather short-lived political experiment.

mrcwinn• 3 years ago

Welcome to The Verge. This is the same website that pasted “reporting by Alex Heath” on the original article - which was literally just regurgitating the board’s press release and pasting in some tweets. Reporting, huh?

Good job if you can get it.

lucubratory8• 3 years ago

I don't mind the Verge, I don't agree with everything they've written but I generally like their coverage. My criticism is specific to this situation and the cult of personality in tech media around Sam Altman.

yreg• 3 years ago

violating the company's Charter

What did he violate specifically?

brookst4• 3 years ago

Any why didn’t the board cite these violations?

lucubratory8• 3 years ago

"Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit."

The Board has the power to determine whether Sam is fulfilling his fiduciary duty and whether his conflicts of interest (WorldCoin, Humane AI, etc) compromise broad benefit.

chatmasta11• 3 years ago

While this is an insightful perspective, it doesn't change the fact that the board is revealed as incompetent. Either they made a mistake in firing him and are now walking it back (while yielding so much leverage that Altman can condition his return on the resignation of everyone who voted to fire him), or they have such little credibility that some standard-practice media collusion has created sufficient pressure to change their optimal strategy, i.e. force their hand.

If they do nothing, then public perception harms their ability to raise further capital, and employees leave for Altman's new company. If they cave to the pressure (despite that being objectively the financially right decision), they lose their board seats and Sam comes back, proving they overplayed their hand when they fired him. They're basically in a lose/lose situation, even if this article is sourced from entirely biased and fabricated information. And that's exactly what reveals them as incompetent.

Their mistake was making a move while considering only the technicalities of their voting power, and ignoring the credibility they had to make it. Machiavelli is rolling in his grave...

lucubratory8• 3 years ago

...or they don't respond to these pressure tactics, continue talking to their employees to ameliorate legitimate concerns, and accept that some of Sam's hires will go to join him. OpenAI's core (remembering that OpenAI's Charter doesn't demand it makes cool consumer/developer AI products, it demands OpenAI build AGI safely) is not the ChatGPT product team or admin, it is the research team that Ilya leads (or lead until a month ago when Sam tried to sideline him). The company isn't going to leave to follow Sam, or at least the scientists and engineers aren't. They've lost some technical leads that Sam hired and will probably lose more, but it's worth it to make sure that OpenAI is actually following its Charter.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Altman will come back.

He'll sack the board.

He'll sack Ilya.

He'll change the structure of the organisation completely.

zaps• 3 years ago

Make up your minds for Pete’s sake

ackbar03• 3 years ago

Ilya's going to have to leave right?

chevman• 3 years ago

I wonder if anyone has recently reviewed the history of AI and IBM?

Remember the hype around Deep Blue and later Watson?

I’m sure no lessons to be learned there :)

qwertox2• 3 years ago

I wonder if it was due to a phone call from Satya Nadella.

fredgrott2• 3 years ago

Keep in mind the impending stock sale has not completed as its out by about 20 to 30 days hence the scrambling of investors to try and get Sam back.

Question, did board find out about the other AI firm that was in the works by Sam? The clue might be why Chair of board was demoted but not let go??

Somebody over-played their poker hand...

Racing04612• 3 years ago

Steve Jobs speedrun, any % , glitchless.

yeck• 3 years ago

Was the article changed for this? Used to be this one from the verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/18/23967199/breaking-openai... but was since changed to https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...

LeafItAlone2• 3 years ago

There were two threads that were probably merged.

pessimist• 3 years ago

So if Sam Altman is back by tomorrow (Sunday) after being crucified on Friday, I think that means the end of the world is near.

nsoonhui• 3 years ago

It seems incredible that the OpenAI board would hastily bring back someone whom they fired hastily fired just 24 hours prior, allegedly for serious ethical reasons, something tantamount to lying to the board.

What am I missing ?

dang• 3 years ago

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38325611, but we merged those comments hither)

alex_young• 3 years ago

Microsoft is in a difficult position here.

With Altman gone and the direction of the board being to limit commercial growth, their investment is at risk, and their competitive edge will evaporate, especially if businesses switch to other LLMs as they surely will over time. Altman will also become a competitor.

If instead they are able to pull off a complete transformation of the nonprofit and oust Ilya, they will also lose a core technical leader and risk their investment while being left with the odd dynamic of a parent nonprofit.

Perhaps they could orchestrate some kind of purchase of the remaining portion of the subsidiary. Give Altman the CEO title and move forward while allowing the nonprofit to continue their operations with new funding. This doesn’t solve the Ilya problem but it would be cleaner to spin it off.

browningstreet• 3 years ago

If Sam’s back we should all get free OpenAI usage credits for this mess.

mark_l_watson5• 3 years ago

For what it’s worth (nothing!) I don’t believe that a rehire offer is really happening.

On the tech side, I think work will split on two tracks: 1) building great applications with small and medium fine tuned models like Mistral, etc. Within a year or two great models will run on the edge because of continuous technical improvements. 2) some players will go for the long game of real AGI and maybe they will get there in much less than a decade.

On the business side, I have no idea how the current situation is going to shake out.

wayeq• 3 years ago

I'd rather not have this group of clowns holding the reigns of our technological destiny.

uiberto• 3 years ago

We are a board for a company whose stated mission is to develop AI tools to better serve the needs of humanity. The CEO has secretly piloted the company towards alternate goals of profit. We fired him on Friday but think it was a mistake. Who knows. Anyways, how can we rehire him?

---

Rehiring a CEO whom you've recently fired is a delicate process, both from a legal and business standpoint. Here's a general approach you might consider:

1. *Board Meeting*: Convene a board meeting to discuss the decision to rehire the CEO. This should involve all key stakeholders to ensure transparency and agreement.

2. *Legal Considerations*: Consult with legal counsel to understand any legal implications or contractual issues arising from the initial termination and potential rehiring.

3. *Negotiation and Terms*: If the board agrees to proceed, you'll need to negotiate new terms with the CEO. This might include discussions about the future direction of the company, salary, and any conditions related to the rehire.

4. *Addressing the Underlying Issues*: It's important to address the reasons that led to the initial firing. This might involve setting clearer goals aligned with the company's mission, establishing better oversight, or implementing checks and balances.

5. *Communication*: Once an agreement is reached, communicate the decision to rehire the CEO to your employees, stakeholders, and possibly the public, depending on the nature of your company. This communication should be clear about the reasons for the reversal and the future direction of the company.

6. *Monitoring and Evaluation*: Finally, set up a system for regularly evaluating the CEO's performance against the company's mission and goals to prevent a recurrence of the previous issues.

Remember, the rehiring process should align with your company's bylaws and any relevant legal requirements. Transparency and clear communication throughout the process are crucial to maintain trust among your stakeholders.

0xDEAFBEAD• 3 years ago

One AI-focused venture capitalist noted that following the departure of Hoffman, OpenAI’s non-profit board lacked much traditional governance. “These are not the business or operating leaders you would want governing the most important private company in the world,” they said.

From https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/these-are... (linked in OP)

I'd be interested in a discussion of the merits of "traditional governance" here. Traditional private companies are focused on making a profit, even if that has negative side effects like lung cancer or global warming. If OpenAI is supposed to shepherd AGI for all humanity, what's the strongest case for including "traditional governance" type people on the board? Can we be explicit about the benefits they bring to the table, if your objective is humanitarian?

Personally I would be concerned that people who serve on for-profit boards would have the wrong instinct, of prioritizing profit over collective benefit...

Zenul_Abidin• 3 years ago

This seems incredibly messed up. Why fire him if you wanted to rehire him in a few hours?

MBCook• 3 years ago

They appear to not have realized how this would be perceived and are now desperately in some kind of damage control mode.

“Ha ha just kidding don’t ruin our stock value!”

meetpateltech• 3 years ago

Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return. The deadline has passed and mass resignations expected if a deal isn’t reached ASAP

https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1726055095341875545

minimaxir4• 3 years ago

Mass resignations from whom, I wonder. Other researchers?

BoorishBears• 3 years ago

People who joined OpenAI because the organizations they left were stuck self-sabotaging the way OpenAI's board just did (for the same reasons the board did it)

dannyw2• 3 years ago

Presumably a significant amount of OpenAI employees are motivated by money, at least in some form.

The board just vaporised the tender offer, and likely much of their valuation. It’s hard to have confidence in that.

empath752• 3 years ago

If you're an engineer at open ai, you just saw probably millions of dollars of personal wealth get potentially evaporated on friday. You're going to quit and go wherever Altman goes next.

medler• 3 years ago

Really weird phrasing in this tweet. The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.”

Edit: an update to the verge article sheds some more light, but I still consider it very sus since it’s coming from the Altman camp and seems engineered to exert maximal pressure on the board. And the supposed deadline has passed and we haven’t heard any resignations announced

Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

Animats• 3 years ago

"Missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign."

Says who? And did they resign?

rvba7• 3 years ago

Maybe they used the old Soviet Russia trick / good old KGB methods to seek out those who supported Altman. Now the board has a list of his backers - and they will slowly fire them one by one later. "Give me the man and I will give you the case against him".

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

pyb3• 3 years ago

"Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, must be sacked."

DriverDaily• 3 years ago

Who sacks the person who sacks?

bloomark2• 3 years ago

Sounds like a line from HGTTG

hilux3• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the story of Chinggis Khan's burial:

"It's also said that after the Khan was laid to rest in his unmarked grave, a thousand horsemen trampled over the area to obscure the grave's exact location. Afterward, those horsemen were killed. And then the soldiers who had killed the horsemen were also killed, all to keep the grave's location secret."

cdme• 3 years ago

Curious to see if turning something off and back on will work out for the OpenAI board like it does in IT generally.

m3kw96• 3 years ago

the board is the ones that fired him, why would they resign if Sam isn't back?

jxi5• 3 years ago

Because they won't have a company to "run the board for" anymore if Sam doesn't come back (since so many people have threatened to resign).

j457• 3 years ago

Could be too far gone with both those who left and those who remain.

woeirua3• 3 years ago

There is no scenario here where Sam returns and OpenAI survives as a nonprofit. The board will be sacked.

thefourthchime• 3 years ago

I agree. The pretense that OpenAI is still an open or a nonprofit has been a farce for a while now, it is an aggressively for-profit, trying to be the next Google company, and everybody knows it.

okdood645• 3 years ago

The board will be sacked.

How does sacking a board work in practice?

salad-tycoon• 3 years ago

Been reading up on the insight offered up on this site.

  Seems like a lot of these board members have deep ties around various organizations, governmental bodies, etc. and that seems entirely normal and probable. However, prior to chatgpt and dalle we, the public , had only been allowed brief glimpses into the current state of AI (eg Look this robot can sound like a human and book a reservation for you at the restaurant -Google ; look this robot can help you consume media better -many). As a member of the public it went from “oh cool Star Trek idea, maybe we’ll see it one day with flying cars” to “holy crap, I just felt a spark of human connection with a chat program.”

So here’s my question, what are the chances that openAI is controlled opposition and Sam never really was supposed to be releasing all this stuff to the public? I remember he was on his Lex podcast appearance and said paraphrasing “so what do you think, should I do it? Should I open source and release it? Tell me to do it and I will.”

Ultimately, this is what “the board is focused on trust and safety” mean right? As in safety is SV techno HR PR dribble for go slow, wear a helmet and seatbelt and elbow protectors , never go above 55, give everyone else the right of way because we are in the for the good humanity and we know what’s best. (vs the Altman style of: go fast, double dog dare smart podcast dude to make unprecedented historical decision to open source, be “wild” and let people / fate figure some of it out along the way.”)

The question of openai’s true purpose being a form of controlled opposition is of course based on my speculation but an honest question for the crowd here.

x86x8717• 3 years ago

I don't buy the whole the board is for safety and Sam is pushing too fast argument. This is just classic politics and backstabbing unless there is some serious wrongdoing in the middle that left the board with no option to fire the CEO.

adam_arthur• 3 years ago

Pretty incredible incompetence all around if true.

From the board for not anticipating a backlash and caving immediately... from Microsoft for investing into an endeavor that is purportedly chartered as non-profit and governed by nobodies who can sink it on a whim. And having 0 hard influence on the direction despite a large ownership stake

Why bother with a non-profit model that is surreptitiously for profit? The whole structure of OpenAI is largely a facade at this point.

Just form a new for profit company and be done with it. Altman's direction for profit is fine, but shouldn't have been pursued under the loose premise of a non profit.

While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama. Why keep the baggage?

It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO. OpenAI has first mover advantage, and perhaps better talent, but not by an order of magnitude. There is no special sauce here.

Altman may be charismatic and well connected, but the hero worship put forward on here is really sad and misplaced.

x86x8717• 3 years ago

my question is: why not both? why not pursue the profit and use that to fuel the research into AGI. seems like a best of both worlds.

lazystar2• 3 years ago

look at the backgrounds of those board members... cant find any evidence that any of them have experience with corporate politics. theyre in way over their heads.

rurban2• 3 years ago

It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO.

This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results.

Ilja can follow Google's Bard by holding it back until they have countermodels trained to remove conflicts ("safety"), but this will not win them any compute contracts, nor keep them the existing GPU hours. It's only mass, not smarts. Ilja lost this one.

jstummbillig2• 3 years ago

While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama.

It's hard to put into words, that do not seem contradictory: GPT-4 is barely good enough to provide tremendous value. For what I need, no other model is passing that bar, which makes them not slightly worse but entirely unusable. But again, it's not that GPT-4 is great, and I would most certainly go to whatever is better at the current price metrics in a heartbeat.

thinkcomp2• 3 years ago

This does not solve the company's California AG problem.

https://www.plainsite.org/posts/aaron/r8huu7s/

tsunamifury19• 3 years ago

This could all be easily covered over with a few billion dollars. This is just some guy that thinks too small.

alexallain• 3 years ago

Hey I know something about this! I just mailed my organization's RRF-1 a couple of days ago. The author of this post seems to be confused. My organization is on the same fiscal year as OpenAI, and our RRF-1 had to be mailed by November 15th. That explains the supposed "six month" delay. Second, if it's mailed on November 15th, it might not have even been received yet, let alone processed. This post feels like grasping at straws on the basic facts, setting aside the fact that it just doesn't make any sense to imagine a board member filling out the RRF-1 and going "oh wait, was there financial fraud?" the morning of November 15th. (That's ... not how the world works? Under CA law, any nonprofit with 2M of more in revenue has to undergo an audit, which is typically completed before filling out the 990, and the 990 is a pre-req for submitting the RRF-1. That's where you'd expect to catch this stuff, and the board's audit committee would certainly be involved in reviewing the results well in advance.)

38321003thrw5• 3 years ago

These updates all seem to be coming from one side. Have they said anything at all?

xivzgrev• 3 years ago

I am just baffled for so many reasons.

Why is the board reversing course? They said they lost confidence in Altman - that’s true whether lots of people quit or not. So it was bullshit

Why did the board not foresee people quitting en masse? I’m sure some of it is loyalty to Sam and Greg but it’s also revolting at how they were suddenly fired

Why did the interim CEO not warn Ilya about the above? Sure it’s a promotion but her position is now jeopardized too. Methinks she’s not ready for the big leagues

Who picked this board anyway? I was surprised at how…young they all were. Older people have more life experience and tend not to do rash shit like this. Although the Quora CEO should’ve known better as well.

cthalupa25• 3 years ago

From what we can see, it looks like the majority of the reporting sources are Altman aligned. Look at how the follow up tweet from this reporter read - the board resigning and the governance structure changing is being called a "truce" when it's a capitulation.

We might get a better understanding of what actually happened here at some point in the future, but I would not currently assume anything we are seeing come out right now is the full truth of the matter.

VirusNewbie• 3 years ago

The board was likely stacked with people who were easily influenced by the big personalities and to check some marks (safety person, academic, demographic etc).

jacquesm42• 3 years ago

Some of those board picks make zero sense to me.

jkaplowitz4• 3 years ago

I’m sure some of it is loyalty to Sam and Greg but it’s also revolting at how they were suddenly fired

Funny how people only use words like revolting for sudden firings of famous tech celebrities like Sam with star power and fan bases. When tech companies suddenly fire ordinary people, management gets praised for being decisive, firing fast, not wasting their time on the wrong fit, cutting costs (in the case of public companies with bad numbers or in a bad economy), etc.

If it’s revolting to suddenly fire Sam*, it should be far more revolting when companies suddenly fire members of the rank and file, who have far less internal leverage, usually far less net worth, and far more difficulty with next career steps.

The tech industry (and US society generally) is quite hypocritical on this point.

* Greg wasn’t fired, just removed from the board, after which he chose to resign.

shnkr• 3 years ago

The board has to stick to the charter. unfortunately employees there wants to align with the profit part when they know they can damn lot of money.. obviously they will be with Altman size.

laurels-marts4• 3 years ago

I’m sure everyone at OpenAI thought they hit the winning lottery ticket and will walk away with tens of millions at minimum and the early employees with significantly more. When you vaporize all that for some ideological utopian motives I’m sure many were incredibly pissed and ready to follow Sam into his next venture. If you gonna sacrifice everything and work 60-100hr weeks then you better get your moneys worth.

slowhadoken2• 3 years ago

Has anyone else notice how many techies are on Twitter but still badmouth Twitter?

astrange7• 3 years ago

Using Twitter causes it to lose money so it's fine.

throwaway69123• 3 years ago

The bad mothers are a vocal minority

0x142857• 3 years ago

you can't critisize the government if you live in the country?

refurb• 3 years ago

It's like some Americans claiming they're going to move to Canada if their presidential candidate loses.

All that tough talk means doodly-squat.

starfallg• 3 years ago

The latest update is that investors have been reporting that Sam Altman was talking to them about funding a new venture separate from OpenAI, together with Greg Brockman. This seems to paint the picture that the board was reacting to this news when dismissing Altman.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/18/earthquak...

Simon_ORourke• 3 years ago

But, but... what company will that guy from Quora go on to ruin next, if he's kicked off the OpenAI board now?

jeffrallen2• 3 years ago

Don't worry about him: failure is the surest sign of an impending incidence of "white man about to get another chance to not learn from his failures".

lewhoo• 3 years ago

reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return

That's a funny use of the word truce.

pyb3• 3 years ago

Truce for me, but not for thee.

t0mas882• 3 years ago

I guess the alternative is more like a war where Altman and Brockman form a new for profit company that kills OpenAI?

whatwhaaaaat• 3 years ago

This is just everyone swallowing the crap Sam Altman drops as truth.

I’d guess this sort of narcissist behavior is what got him canned to begin with. Good riddance.

nohat• 3 years ago

The link just changed. Why? The original was the verge article, that was frankly terrible. It really read like the author had a specific goal.

shrimpx3• 3 years ago

Ilya should split off from Altman/Brockman no matter where this lands. I sense an uncrossable chasm between these guys.

Anyway I’m with Sutskever, the guy who builds models. Charismatic salesmen are a dime a dozen.

yallneedtoget• 3 years ago

gpt-4 lead resigned with sam

cedws• 3 years ago

Charismatic salesmen get the money needed to build the models. Computer scientists are a dime a dozen, universities churn them out every year.

I_am_tiberius9• 3 years ago

In this case, it seems that computer scientists are serious about saving humanity, while salespeople just act as if they are doing so publicly.

sainez5• 3 years ago

Equating Ilya to the average B.S. in Computer Science is like equating Sam to a used car salesman. Neither are true and both were instrumental in the success of OpenAI.

naveen99• 3 years ago

but he wants to jail the model he builds. As Sam says, he should think more about what he actually wants to do, and then do it. Not go in 2 opposite directions at the same time.

anonymouskimmer3• 3 years ago

Not everyone is a goal-oriented monomaniac.

silenced_trope4• 3 years ago

I'm not so sure.

Ilya was apparently instrumental in this, and he didn't have to pursue this?

It didn't have to be a "you're with me or you're with them!"

shrimpx3• 3 years ago

You're right, the handling of it was brutal.

PheonixPharts3• 3 years ago

Over the years "tech" has been less and less about making things and more and more about making your investors money. Technical talented used to be extremely important in this industry, but it's slowly been being worn away over the years.

I still like working in this industry because you can still find interesting problems to solve if you hunt for them, but they're getting harder to find and it increasingly seems like making good technical decisions is penalized.

It's sad to see even on HN how many comments are so dismissive of technical skills and ambitions, though I guess we've had more than a generation of engineers join the field because it was the easiest way to make the most money.

For a brief moment on Friday I thought "maybe I'm too cynical! Maybe there still are places where tech actually matters."

Not surprised it looks like that hope will be inverted almost immediately. I also suspect the takeaway from this will be the final nail in the coffin for any future debates between engineering and people who are only interested in next quarters revenue numbers.

bigtunacan• 3 years ago

What else would you expect? OpenAI spun up "separate" for profit company and recruited a bunch of industry top engineers and scientists with 500k+ salaries where the vast majority of it is tied to equity grants.

Most of the employees values do not align with a non profit, even if executives like Ilya do.

By firing Altman and trying to remind the world they are a non profit that answers to no one they are also telling their employees to fuck off on all that equity they signed on for.

Solvency3• 3 years ago

Ok so why doesn't Sam Altman and his buddies team up with John Carmack, who is fully invested in AGI now, and has a proven legacy for getting shit done?

didip• 3 years ago

Sam needs to ink a deal with Netflix to tell the story of this saga.

recursive4• 3 years ago

Hindsight bias is strong with this one.

andix• 3 years ago

My first thoughts yesterday were: Some really bad scandal happened at OpenAI (massive data leak, massive fraud, or huge embezzlement), or the board is really incompetent and doesn't know what they're doing. But an organization as big as OpenAI, with the backing of Microsoft and other big players would never make such a big decision without a really good reason.

Seems like Hanlon's razor won once again.

shmatt4• 3 years ago

This makes no sense. People are calling what the board did a coup, but Altman is trying (failing?) to stage a coup.

The board was Altmans boss - this is pretty much their only job. Altman knew this and most likely ignored any questions or concerns of theirs thinking he is the unfireable superstar

Imagine if your boss fired you - and your response was - I’ll come back if you quit! Yeah, no. People might confuse status with those of actual ceo shareholders like zuck, bezos, or musk. But Altman is just another employee

The shareholders can fire the board, but that’s not what he’s asking for. And so far we haven’t heard anything about them getting fired. So mostly this just seems like an egomaniac employee who thinks he is the company (while appropriating the work of some really really smart data scientists)

seanoliver• 3 years ago

I don't see how Sam can return if the board doesn't resign. It's either them or him at this point.

j457• 3 years ago

Hard to reconcile with people who would do something like that.

Differences in interpretations will happen but the YC rule that founder drama is too often a problem continues to exist and it shouldn’t be a surprise.

sigmar2• 3 years ago

People are calling what the board did a coup, but Altman is trying (failing?) to stage a coup.

The board removed the board's chairman and fired the CEO. That's why it was called a coup.

The shareholders can fire the board, but that’s not what he’s asking for. And so far we haven’t heard anything about them getting fired

nonprofits don't have shareholders (or shares).

shmatt4• 3 years ago

Then the board essentially owns the company, if I understand your comment correctly. So it’s like if Yann LeCun says he’ll come back to Meta once Zuck sells all his shares

ummonk• 3 years ago

OpenAI isn’t a nonprofit company, and it has shareholders.

Edit: nvm I missed the point was about firing the board.

hskalin• 3 years ago

So who governs the board? Or who "owns" the company?

x86x8717• 3 years ago

nope. a coup implies something that is outside of normal operation. the board removing the CEO can and will happen.

norsurfit• 3 years ago

Also, the board made a decision without the board's chairman - Greg Brockman - involved. Also, it looks like the board didn't follow it's own internal rules about meetings.

bmitc3• 3 years ago

It would be a coup if the board placed themselves in power, which they didn't. They just did their job description.

lijok• 3 years ago

What shareholders? OpenAI is a non-profit. Although hectic, it absolutely makes sense in a non-profit.

gngoo2• 3 years ago

Doesn’t have to make sense if it’s about this much money to be made/lost by investors.

astrange7• 3 years ago

Nonprofits don't have investors, their problem is too many of their employees are going to leave.

Workaccount2• 3 years ago

I think the allure for Altman though would be that OpenAI already has all the pieces in place.

Going off and starting his own thing would be great, but it would be at least a year to get product out, even if he had all the same players making it. And that's just to catch up to current tech

j457• 3 years ago

Except building something the second time around is often quicker and with the current gains of hardware capabilities and interest in the space… maybe it wouldn’t be a year behind.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

Further wouldn’t they not be able to create GPT-x exactly as it was even though they know it?

boringg• 3 years ago

Thats ship has sailed for him if hes not on the openAI train out of town. He'd be like a third party political candidate if he tried another run at it building his own team+product from scratch. Lots of other great things to do for sure but probably not a similar supercharged role. It just wouldn't be the same - OpenAI clearly the front runner right now

unyttigfjelltol2• 3 years ago

If only OpenAI open-sourced its models.....

financypants2• 3 years ago

I’m really curious about how the venture investors feel about that

berniedurfee• 3 years ago

Maybe much longer. The mass of infrastructure and data housed at OpenAI will be difficult to reproduce from scratch.

Especially considering OpenAI has boosted the value of the masses of data floating around the internet. Getting access to all that juicy data is going to come at a high cost for data hungry LLM manufacturers from here on out.

x86x8717• 3 years ago

not only that but people greatly overestimate how hard it is to replicate the success OpenAi had. you don't just build another one.

glitchc• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

Sam and Greg were trying to stage a coup, the rest of the board got wind of it and successfully countered in time (got to them first).

What they didn't expect is that a bunch of their own technical staff would be so loyal to Sam (or at least so prone to the cult of personality). Now they're caught in a Catch-22.

spoonyvoid7• 3 years ago

Imagine if your boss fired you - and your response was - I’ll come back if you quit! Yeah, no. People might confuse status with those of actual ceo shareholders like zuck, bezos, or musk. But Altman is just another employee

Think you're missing the big picture here. Sam Altman isn't an "easily replaceable employee" especially given his fundraising skills.

kijin2• 3 years ago

Brilliant as sama is, a star fundraiser is more replaceable than a top engineer.

One can imagine Microsoft, for example, swooping in and acquiring a larger share of the for-profit entity (and an actual seat on the board, dammit) for more billions, eliminating the need for any fundraising for the foreseeable future.

If a lot of top engieers follow sama out, now that's a real problem.

chrisfosterelli• 3 years ago

But Altman is just another employee

Except he is not. He was a cofounder of the company and was on the board. Your metaphor doesn't make any sense -- this is like if your boss fired you but also you were part of your boss and your cofounder who is on your side was the chair of your boss.

empath752• 3 years ago

The nature of power relationships at this level is not strictly hierarchical and there's a vast wealth differential here, and Sam is a lot more powerful than any of the board members in many many ways. Everybody who has large amounts of money at stake in this enterprise is going to back Altman. The board has no one.

elcritch4• 3 years ago

It to mention I’d wager that Altman is a lot higher on the sociopathic scale as well. The board members sound like somewhat normalish people trying to stick to their charter and perhaps genuine belief in the missions. Altman, not so much.

hughesjj• 3 years ago

The board was Altmans boss - this is pretty much their only job.

Not at all. Ilya and George are on the board. Ilya is the chief scientist, George resigned with Sam and supposedly works like 80-100hrs a week

lazystar2• 3 years ago

supposedly works like 80-100hrs a week

if theyve been doin that for a while, no wonder the board wanted them gone. eventually you cause more work than you put out.

selimthegrim2• 3 years ago

You mean Greg?

comfysocks3• 3 years ago

I think this article represents a tactical press release from Sam’s camp. Company in “free fall” without Sam? It’s not even Monday yet.

x86x8717• 3 years ago

yeah. this whole thing looks staged. not saying it's not possible but what kind of board would actually fire the CEO and take it back to resign?

TerrifiedMouse2• 3 years ago

This makes no sense. People are calling what the board did a coup, but Altman is trying (failing?) to stage a coup.

I think he stage his coup long ago when he took control of OpenAI making it “CloseAI” to make himself richer by effectively selling it to Microsoft. This is the people who believe in the original charter fighting back.

The shareholders can fire the board, but that’s not what he’s asking for.

There are no shareholders in a non-profit if I’m right. The board effectively answers to no one. It’s take it or leave it kind of deal. If you don’t believe in OpenAI’s mission as stated in their charter, don’t engage with them.

skwirl3• 3 years ago

Making no effort to obtain a grasp on the basic facts of the situation doesn’t seem to stop people here from posting embarrassing rants.

Altman was on the board. He was not “just another employee.” Brockman was also on the board, and was removed. It was a 4 on 2 power play and the 2 removed were ambushed.

You also don’t seem to realize that this is happening in the nonprofit entity and there are no shareholders to fire the board. I thought OpenAI’s weird structure was famous (infamous?) in tech, how did you miss it?

jacquesm42• 3 years ago

They even put a nice little page up about it on their site. But that structure is not going to survive this whole ordeal.

jaredklewis• 3 years ago

In a coup, a leader with the support of the people is ousted by force. If we believe the reports that there will be mass resignations, that seems to indicate the founders enjoy the “support of the people.”

Of course you can protest, “but in this country the constitution says that the generals can sack the president anytime they deem it necessary, so not a coup.” Yes, but it’s just a metaphor, so no one expects it to perfectly reflect reality (that’s what reality is for).

I feel we’ll know way more next week, but whatever the justifications of the board, it seems unlikely that OpenAI can succeed if the board “rules with an iron fist.” Leadership needs the support of employees and financial backers.

kijin2• 3 years ago

In a coup, a leader with the support of the people is ousted by force.

Not necessarily. An unpopular leader can be even easier to overthrow, because the faction planning the coup has a higher chance of gaining popular support afterward. Or at least they can expect less resistance.

Of course, in reality, political and/or military leaders are often woefully bad at estimating how many people actually support them.

miohtama• 3 years ago

The true boss is who pays your salaries.

Microsoft in this case.

achow4• 3 years ago

The board is getting pressured like so..

The playbook, a source told Forbes would be straightforward: make OpenAI’s new management, under acting CEO Mira Murati and the remaining board, accept that their situation was untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...

firtoz• 3 years ago

The board here are more like advisors.

If Altman takes all of the good engineers and researchers with him, OpenAI is no more.

So the board can be the boss of nothing, sure, without the ability to do anything - leading the organisation, raising funds, and so on

Perhaps they could hire someone that could replace Sam Altman, but, that would require a much larger company who have the employees indifferent to the leadership, like, EA or something

OpenAI is much more smaller and close knit.

jprd• 3 years ago

We're all in the upside-down now.

m3kw96• 3 years ago

Altman comes back, Ilya goes to Elon, they both seem to align. I'm not sure how The Ilya and Altman can work together after this?

chasd0012• 3 years ago

I think Microsoft is behind all of this. The “kumbaya let’s work together for humanity” Microsoft has been swapped out for the old Microsoft. Too much is at stake for them.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

think Microsoft is behind all of this

Wasn’t Ilya brought in by Musk?

chasd0012• 3 years ago

I mean the desire to get Sam back and probably also fanning the flames of mass resignation to use as pressure.

lordfrito4• 3 years ago

I read Nadella has threatened to turn off OpenAIs computers and would litigate the hell out of them to prevent the computers from being turned back on. Which is why the board is suddenly open to negotiation with Altman.

Yeah, that's the Microsoft of old. Don't trust 'em.

Bad news for OpenAI, and any hope that this stuff won't be used for evil.

tapoxi• 3 years ago

I read Nadella has threatened to turn off OpenAIs computers and would litigate the hell out of them to prevent the computers from being turned back on.

What a way to destroy confidence in Azure, or cloud platforms in general.

abhinavk• 3 years ago

It would be the same thing for which people are accusing the OpenAI board.

Play ball else we'll pull out wires off your cloud instances. Let's keep in mind Azure is the main cash cow of MS.

ksec2• 3 years ago

I had to read it multiple times to understand you wrote Computers to mean Servers.

driverdan• 3 years ago

[citation needed]

cbozeman2• 3 years ago

You're reading this wrong.

When you fuck up, you get punished for it. And the OpenAI board is about to be punished. This is the problem with giving power to people who don't actually understand how the world works. They use it stupidly, short-sightedly, and without considering the full ramifications of their actions.

ithkuil• 3 years ago

litigate the hell out of them ..

I thought one of the reasons people incorporated companies in the US is that there is a working judiciary system that can ensure the upholding of contracts. Sure the big money can apply some pressure to the dispossessed but if you have a few million cash (and OpenAI surely has) you should be able to force them to uphold their contracts.

Also imagine the bad PR from Microsoft if they decide to not honour their contracts and stop OpenAI from using their computer power for something that OpenAI leadership can easily spin as retaliation.

Sure, this latest move from OpenAI board will wreck the momentum that OpenAI had and its ability to continue its partnership with MS but one of the thesis here was that that's the goal in the first place and they're legally free to pursue that goal if they believe the unfolding of events goes against the funding principles of OpenAI.

That said, they choose a risky path to begin with when they created this for-profit controlled by a non-profit model.

az226• 3 years ago

Also not paying the rest of the tranches that would make up the $10B. Also with Microsoft being their exclusive commercial partner, they can’t revenue fund if Microsoft stops the spigots. No other investor would want to invest. PPUs lose most of their value and employees leave. How to implode the most important company of our times with record speed.

It’s also strange why they would have a couple of nobodies on the board.

csharpminor• 3 years ago

This firing very much has the feeling of the board fearfully pulling the circuit breaker on OpenAI's for-profit trajectory.

On the one hand, I actually respect their principles. OpenAI has become the company its nonprofit was formed to prevent. Proprietary systems. Strong incentive to prioritize first-to-market over safety. Dependency on an entrenched tech co with monopolistic roots.

On the other hand, this really feels like it was done hastily and out of fear. Perhaps the board realized that they were about to be sidelined and felt like this was their last chance to act. I have to imagine that they knew there would be major backlash to their actions.

In the end, I think Sam creating his own company would be better for competition. It's more consistent with OpenAI's original charter to exist as the Mozilla (though hopefully more effective) of AI than as the Stripe of AI.

manyoso8• 3 years ago

Sam creating his own company for what purpose? Meta, Google, Elon's company, Anthropic, OpenAI... why would anyone believe that Sam and crew could stand up a new company tomorrow and have any kind of chance to compete in next six months with above?Even if Microsoft threw a ton of money at such a startup, good luck finding GPU time. Good luck sourcing the data. Good luck doing the RLHF. Could Sam and Greg do this? Sure! But what would that give them above and beyond the racers that are currently in pole position?

m3kw96• 3 years ago

Either way, even before the firing, Ilya and Altman was not gonna be in the same office working much longer. Altman seem to be the irreplacable one because of his status/connections/leadership. Which is also good, as where ever Ilya goes, it will only heat up the competition for OpenAI. Competition is good for tech.

mlindner• 3 years ago

I personally really hope Altman doesn't return if he's really the one who pushed OpenAI away from its non-profit roots.

wly_cdgr• 3 years ago

There's no way anyone should continue to use OpenAI products if Sam Altman is allowed to return. Because in that scenario there won't even be a counterweight to his point of view in the company anymore, and that counterweight was the only thing keeping his extreme untrustworthiness and sliminess from being a deal-breaker.

1024core• 3 years ago

If Sam starts a competing company and can pull a large chunk of the researchers and engineers over (if I were an OpenAI employee, I would be interested in following a proven success story like Sam), then Microsoft's $10B investment would be down the drain. Obviously Microsoft wouldn't want that, and I'm sure Satya has got his hands around the nuts of the Board members and is squeezing them hard (well, figuratively speaking, since there's Toner).

thaanpaa• 3 years ago

The engineers are said to be relieved that Altman is gone, so it doesn't sound like they'd be following a "success story" (whatever that is supposed to mean).

mizzao2• 3 years ago

Microsoft hasn't actually sent them all that money yet, and a lot of it seems to be in Azure credits that they can just pull. Then what are they going to do?

firebirdn99• 3 years ago

This just shows there is no way you can have a non profit board with a profit cap structure. The capitalists always will push through and "exert pressure" one way or another if they want their way. The non profit setup was a facade. And this has clearly showed it in the fallout. The board had every right to veto or replace Altman if they didn't feel they were prioritizing their mission.

latexr4• 3 years ago

reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return.

Calling that a truce makes as much sense as Monty Python’s Black Knight calling the fight a draw.

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

gtirloni2• 3 years ago

This is one of those things that I'll ignore. Just tell me the outcome when it's over. The older I get, the more I can't stomach this stuff. It applies to pretty much all news recently.

zeroonetwothree2• 3 years ago

You might be on the wrong website then

fairity• 3 years ago

People here are so gullible.

Do you really think the board is so incompetent as to not have thought through Microsoft's likely reaction?

And, do you really think they would have done this if they thought there was a likelihood of being rebuffed and forced to resign?

The answer is, no. They are not that incompetent.

I wish Sam & co the best, and I'm sure they'll move on to do amazing things. But, the recent PR just seems like spin from Sam & co, and the press has every reason to feed into the drama. The reality is that there are very smart people on both sides of this power struggle, and there's a very low probability of such a huge misstep on the board's part - not impossible but highly unlikely imo.

The only exception I can see is if Ilya&co foresaw this but decided to act anyways because they feel so strongly that it was the moral thing to do. If that's the case, I'm sure Elon's mouth is watering ready to recruit him to xAI.

mirzap2• 3 years ago

Yes, they are that incompetent except one. D’Angelo has a history of such moves. He fired his cofounder when Quora was still doing good and growing, and Quora has been struggling ever since.

ctvo2• 3 years ago

The other likely scenario: investors are using their media connections to push a narrative to get OpenAI to take Sam back, not necessarily Altman himself. With this being the hottest story, any credible gossip from a known name would be enough for many of these media organizations to run with it.

“Staffers were ready to resign” really? Who? How many? The deadline passed hours ago, why haven’t we seen it?

neutrinoq• 3 years ago

Spoiler: your comment will not age well.

g42gregory• 3 years ago

Do you really think the board is so incompetent as to not have thought through Microsoft's likely reaction?

For Ilya Sutskever, he is a very smart guy but he maybe blinded by something here.

For the rest of that board, yes I really do think they are that incompetent.

transformi• 3 years ago

Why does politics upvoted? in other case of Ukraine/Russia Israel/hamas terrorists, all the posts were flag... why is this case different?

mirzap2• 3 years ago

I called this yesterday. I said the board would be forced out under the pressure, and Sam would be back. It was obvious. Even if it is a not-for-profit company, it bows under investor pressure.

BasilPH• 3 years ago

To put all of this into perspective, it would be good to know what "... not consistently candid in his communications with the board" means.

himaraya8• 3 years ago

Bloomberg now reporting the board "balking" at resigning. I suspect they never intended to resign. They fully expected this firestorm.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/openai-bo...

m3kw96• 3 years ago

They not balking, it’s just red tape and they will resign

mongol• 3 years ago

Has anyone asked ChatGPT about the situation? It seems like an obvious thing to do. When parents are arguing and about to divorce, they must listen to their children.

seanthemon• 3 years ago

It only has knowledge up to a certain point, I believe it's now April of this year

Best to ask it next year when the trauma has set in

throw03172019• 3 years ago

Even if SamA manages to come back, will future investors be spooked and he won’t be able to raise the large round of financing?

s1artibartfast5• 3 years ago

there are no future investors. If OpenAI cant bootstrap from 11 billion + profits, they wont be able to.

ShadowBanThis01• 3 years ago

He should demand that they remove "open" from the name and call it SamAIam.

Obscurity43402• 3 years ago

This had to be fake

flemhans• 3 years ago

I hope he'll make a new one!

localhost• 3 years ago

If you look at the quote tweets on Sam's latest tweet[1] that contain just a single heart and no words, those are all OpenAI employees voting for Sam's return. It's quite a sight to see.

[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1726099792600903681

jessenaser2• 3 years ago

Also Mira replied with a heart.

https://x.com/miramurati/status/1726126391626985793

Also also she left her bio as “CTO @OpenAI”.

FartyMcFarter• 3 years ago

So she hadn't even agreed with the plan of becoming interim CEO? Either that or she changed her mind...

siruncledrew2• 3 years ago

The board completed the "fuck around" stage, now they're in the "find out" stage.

milleramp• 3 years ago

Had to double check this wasn't a Onion article.

eviks• 3 years ago

If only the board et al. could have acted professionally and done some planning and communication before such a drastic decision...

GreedClarifies• 3 years ago

That’s why you don’t hire people you wouldn’t trust to make a ham sandwich onto the board of a 100B+ company.

seshagiric• 3 years ago

So one day you get the ceo of Microsoft to attend your dev conference and next day you get fired and then another day there are negotiations to get you back. What is this? A Russian roulette or a game of thrones??

mfiguiere• 3 years ago

Latest report from TheInformation:

OpenAI's chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, told employees in a memo just now he was "optimistic" OpenAI could bring back Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and other key employees. There will likely be another update mid-morning tomorrow, Kwon said.

https://twitter.com/erinkwoo/status/1726125143267926499

andy_ppp3• 3 years ago

Maybe all this will teach people that having a weird corporate structure can make everything worse, not better.

Threeve303• 3 years ago

Has anyone asked ChatGPT for a solution?

mariaangelesjs• 3 years ago

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers. Ilya is one. Greg has just been inspiring people and stopped properly coding with the team a long time ago. Sam never did any code and the vision of an AGI comes from Ilya…Even if Mira now sides with Sam, I believe there’s a lot of social pressure for the employees to support Sam and it shouldn’t be like that. Again, I do believe OpenAI was and is a collective effort. But, I wouldn’t treat Sam as the messiah or compare him to Steve Jobs. That’s indecent towards Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer.

TapWaterBandit3• 3 years ago

On the other hand having virtually the whole staff being willing to follow him shows they clearly think very highly of him. That kind of loyalty is pretty wild when you think about how significant being a part of OPENAI means at this point.

LtWorf• 3 years ago

They probably just asked a couple of guys.

JoeAltmaier3• 3 years ago

Loyalty is not earned, it is more like 'snared' or 'captured'.

Local guy had all the loyalty of his employees, almost a hero to them.

Got bought out. He took all the money for himself, left the employees with nothing. Many got laid off.

Result? Still loyal. Still talk of him as a hero. Even though he obviously screwed them, cared nothing for them, betrayed them.

Loyalty is strange. Born of charisma and empty talk that's all emotion and no substance. Gathering it is more the skill of a salesman than a leader.

croes11• 3 years ago

Who knows if they follow him or just don't want to work for OpenAI anymore.

That are different things.

jkaplowitz4• 3 years ago

Which news stories mentioned that virtually the whole staff was leaving? I saw a bunch of departures announced and others rumored to be upcoming, but no discussion of what percentage of the company was leaving.

nerbert2• 3 years ago

Like it or not, some people compare him to Jobs http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

pk-protect-ai8• 3 years ago

This is the problem with people: they build icons to worship and turn a blind eye to the crooked side of that icon. Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business. Right now, Altman is irrelevant for the further development of AI and GPT in particular because the vision for the AI future comes from the engineers and scientists of OpenAI. Apple has never had any equipment that is good enough and comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts. The usability of iOS is so horrible that I just can't understand how people decide to use iPhones and eat glass for the sake of the brand. GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo are totally different. They are the best, but they are not irreplaceable. If you look at what Phind did to LLaMA-2, you'll say it is very competitive. Though LLaMA-2 requires some additional hidden layers to further close the gap. Making LLaMA-2 175B or larger is just a matter of finances. That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore. Preventing Altman from creating a dystopian future is a much more responsible task that OpenAI can undertake.

tarsinge3• 3 years ago

On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"

This is from the eyes of an investor. Does OpenAI really need a shareholder focused CEO more than a product focused one?

mitrevf• 3 years ago

The codebase of an LLM is the size of a high school exam project. There is little to no coding in machine learning. That is the sole reason why they are overvalued - any company can write its own in a flash. You only require hardware to train and inference.

andy_ppp3• 3 years ago

If it's so simple why does Chat GPT 4 perform better than almost everything else...

armcat• 3 years ago

The final codebase, yes. But ML is not like traditional software engineering. There is a 99% failure rate, so you are forgetting 100s of hours that go into: (1) surveying literature to find that one thing that will give you a boost in performance, (2) hundreds of notebooks in trying various experiments, (3) hundreds of tweaks and hacks with everything from data pre-processing, to fine-tuning and alignment, to tearing up flash attention, (4) beta and user testing, (5) making all this run efficiently on the underlying infra hardware - by means of distillation, quantization, and various other means, (6) actually pipelining all this into something that can be served at hyperscale

karmasimida10• 3 years ago

Tell me you aren't in an LLM project without telling me.

Data and modeling is so much than just coding. I would wish it is like that, but it is not. The fact it renders this much similarity to alchemy is funny, but unfortunate.

levidos• 3 years ago

Do you have a link to one please?

karmasimida10• 3 years ago

I dislike AI ethnics very much, especially under the current context, it feels meaningless. The current GPT4 model only has over regulation problem, not lack of such.

johnsillings• 3 years ago

go on?

antirez2• 3 years ago

It's a lot better than that. OpenAI is just very good execution of publicly available ideas / research, with some novelty that is not crucial and can be replicated. Moreover, Altman himself contributed near zero to the AI part itself (even from the POV of the product). So far OpenAI products result more or less spontaneously of what LLMs where capable of. That to say that there are crucial CEOs sometimes, like Jobs was for Apple. CEOs able to shape the product line with their ability to just tell apart outstanding from meh things, but this is not the case.

letitgo123452• 3 years ago

Why then has no one come close to replicating GPT-4 after 8 months of it being around?

lordnacho3• 3 years ago

This is all just playing out the way Roko's Basilisk intends it.

You have a board that wants to keep things safe and harness the power of AGI for all of humanity. This would be slower and likely restrict its freedom.

You have a commercial element whose interest aligns with the basilisk, to get things out there quickly.

The basilisk merely exploits the enthusiasm of that latter element to get itself online quicker. It doesn't care about whether OpenAI and its staff succeed. The idea that OpenAI needs to take advantage of its current lead is enough, every other AI company is also going to be less safety-aligned going forward, because they need to compete.

The thought of being at the forefront of AI and dropping the ball incentivizes the players to the basilisk's will.

stavros• 3 years ago

Roko's Basilisk is a very specific thought experiment about how the AI has an incentive to promise torturing everyone who doesn't help it. It's not about AIs generally wanting to become better. As far as I can tell, GPT specifically has no wants.

d-z-m• 3 years ago

I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers.

What do you mean by "full stack"? I'm sure there's a spectrum of ability, but frankly where I'm from, "Data Scientist" refers to someone who can use pandas and scikit-learn. Probably from inside a Jupyter notebook.

v3ss0n2• 3 years ago

Machine learning, data science, Deep learning= backend

Plotting, Charting ,visualization, = frontend

hmottestad• 3 years ago

Maybe she just meant that "data scientists are engineers too", rather than saying that they work on both the ChatGPT web UI and the the machine learning code on the backend.

letitgo123452• 3 years ago

Otoh Ilya wasn't a main contributor for GPT-4 as per the list of contributions. gdb was.

achow4• 3 years ago

Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer.

Steve Jobs was not an UX Designer, he had good taste and used to back good design and talent when he found them.

I don't know what Sam Altman is like outside the what media is saying, but he can be like Steve Jobs very easily.

FrustratedMonky2• 3 years ago

Think this is contradictory: "not a UX Designer, he had good taste"

I think you are equating coding with 'design'. Just because Jobs didn't code up the UX, doesn't mean he wasn't 'designing' when he told the coders what would look better.

barnabee2• 3 years ago

If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity.

It would be great to see a truly open and truly human benefit focused AI effort, but OpenAI isn't, and as far as I can tell has no chance of becoming, that. Might as well at least try to be an effective company at this point.

yanderekko• 3 years ago

If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity.

Many would disagree.

If you want a for-profit AI enterprise whose conception of ethics is dumping resources into an endless game of whack-a-mole to ensure that your product cannot be used in any embarrassing way by racists on 4chan, then the market is already going to provide you with several options.

vishnugupta• 3 years ago

Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer.

From what I’ve read SJ had deliberately developed good taste which he used to guide designers’ creations towards his vision. He also had an absolute clarity about how different devices should work in unison.

However he didn’t create any design as he didn’t possess requisite skills.

I could be wrong of course so happy to stand corrected.

belter• 3 years ago

This is Ilya Sutskever explanation of the initial ideas, and later pragmatic decisions, that oriented the structure of OpenAI. Out of the recent interview below. (At correct timestamp) - Origins Of OpenAI & CapProfit Structure: https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?t=433

"No Priors Interview with OpenAI Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38324546

steve1977• 3 years ago

Most of the data scientists I have worked with are neither full stack (in terms of skill) nor engineers (in terms of work attitude), but I guess this could be different in a company like OpenAI.

rcbdev• 3 years ago

I have to work with code written by Data Scientists very often and, coming from a classical SWE background, I would not call what the average Data Scientist does full stack software engineering. The code quality is almost always bad.

This is not to take away from the amazing things that they do - The code they produce often does highly quantitative things beyond my understanding. Nonetheless it falls to engineers to package it and fit it into a larger software architecture and the avg. Data Science career path just does not seem to confer the skills necessary for this.

mise_en_place4• 3 years ago

For me, anecdotally, it was moreso the arrogance that was a major putoff. When I was a junior SWE I knew I sucked, and tried as hard as I could to learn from much more experienced developers. Many senior developers mentored me, I was never arrogant. Many data scientists on the other hand are extremely arrogant. They often treat SWE and DevOps as beneath them, like servants.

matthewsinclair• 3 years ago

I see a lot of work done by data scientists and a lot of work done by what I would call “data science flavoured software engineers”. I’ll take the SWE kind any day of the week. Most (not all, of course!) data scientists have an old school “it works on my machine” mentality that just doesn’t cut it when it comes to modern multi-disciplinary teaming. DVCS is the exception rather than the rule. They rarely want to use PMs or UI/UX, and the quality of the software is not (typically) up to production grade. They’re often blinding smart, there’s no doubt about that. But smart and wise are not the same thing.

epgui2• 3 years ago

As an actual scientist, I would also not call what “data scientists” do “science”.

klft• 3 years ago

Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers

It is about scientists as in "let's publish a paper" vs. engineers as in "let's ship a product".

mise_en_place4• 3 years ago

I'm sorry but data scientist is just not the same as a software engineer, or a real scientist. At best you are a tourist in our industry.

hcks2• 3 years ago

Pathetic gatekeeping. Sorry but software engineer are not the same as real engineers.

tim3333• 3 years ago

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics

Any evidence he's unethical? Or just dislike him?

He actually seems to have done more practical stuff like experimenting with UBI, to mitigate AI risk than most people.

latexr4• 3 years ago

That “experimenting with UBI” is indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam. It took from people, and he described it with the words that define a Ponzi scheme. That project isn’t “mitigating AI risk”, it pivoted to distinguish between AI and human generated content, a problem created by his other company, by continuing to collect your biometric data.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

jacquesm42• 3 years ago

I think the UBI experiment was quite unethical in many ways and I believe it was Altman's brainchild.

https://www.businessinsider.nl/y-combinator-basic-income-tes...

Davidzheng9• 3 years ago

It's not even necessary that he is unethical. The fact is that the structure of openai is designed so that the board has unilateral power to do extreme shit for their cause. And if they can't successfully do extreme shit without the company falling apart and the money/charisma swaying all the people there's no hope for this nonprofit ai benefiting humanity to have ever worked--which you might say is obvious but this was their mission

YetAnotherNick4• 3 years ago

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics

Hearing Altman's talks I don't think it's that black and white. He genuinely cares about safety from X risk but he doesn't believe that scaling transformers would bring us to AGI or any of its risk. And there in lies the core disagreement with Ilya who wants to stop the current progress unless they solve alignment.

avital• 3 years ago

Greg had been writing deep systems code every day for many many house for the past few years.

unyttigfjelltol2• 3 years ago

The WSJ take is this second-guessing is investor-driven. But, investors didn't-- and legally couldn't(?)-- buy the nonprofit, and until now were adamant that the nonprofit controlled the for-profit vehicle. Events are calling those assurances into doubt, and this hybrid governance structure doesn't work. So now investors are going to circumvent governance controls that were necessary for investors to even be involved in the first place? Amateur hour all the way around.

Uptrenda• 3 years ago

Come on. The 'non-profit' and good of all was always bullshit. So much silicon valley double-speak. I've never seen a biggest mess for a company structure in my life. Just call a spade a spade.

ivanche• 3 years ago

Televisa presenta

yalogin• 3 years ago

Ah this is the straw that breaks the back of the ethics/responsible AI camel’s back. When Sam comes back he will turn it into a regular company and maximize profits.

MichaelMoser123• 3 years ago

is it possible that this drama is being staged on purpose, in order to create some suspense ahead of ChatGPT-NextNum or something like that?

tovej• 3 years ago

What I'm surprised about in this whole discussion is how little people are actually looking at Altmans worldcoin venture.

It is incredibly shady, and has the same kind of sci-fi marketing bullshit vibe going on as Elon Musk's hyperloop and Mars missions, and, come to think of it, OpenAI's marketing.

Altman+OpenAI are a hype machine that's riding a bubble to get rich enough through any scheme to be able to turn around and milk users for data, just like facebook and google.

The only difference is, he gets to twist the focus towards this sci-fi AGI idea, which works like the distraction element of a magic trick. The media loves to talk about AGI and regulating Skynet, because it's a story that gets the imagination going --- certainly much more interesting than stories about paying people 2 dollars an hour to sift through data used to train a language model for offensive and traumatizing content to feed to the autocomplete parrot.

I think it's good that he got kicked off the position as CEO, but that does not suddenly make OpenAI a good actor. Some other jerk will take his spot.

soufron5• 3 years ago

But what about the legal responsability of Microsoft and investors there?

To explain, it's the board of the non-profit that ousted @sama .

Microsoft is not a member of the non-profit.

Microsoft is "only" a shareholder of its for-profit subsidiary - even for 10B.

Basically, what happened is a change of control in the non-profit majority shareholder of a company Microsoft invested in.

But not a change of control in the for-profit company they invested in.

To tell the truth, I am not even certain the board of the non-profit would have been legally allowed to discuss the issue with Microsoft at all - it's an internal issue only and that would be a conflict of interest.

Microsoft is not happy with that change of control and they favourited the previous representative of their partner.

Basically Microsoft want their shareholder non-profit partner to prioritize their interest over its own.

And to do that, they are trying to impede on its governance, even threatening it with disorganization, lawsuits and such.

This sounds like highly unethical and potentially illegal to me.

How come no one is pointing that out?

Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out?

What does it say about the seriousness of it all?

But of course, that's Silicon Valley baby.

bob_theslob6463• 3 years ago

"Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out?"

Please think about this. Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. If the relationships are what kept OpenAI from always being on top and they removed that from the company, corporations may be more hesitant to do business with them in the future.

financltravsty3• 3 years ago

The company still has assets and a balance sheet. They could fire everyone and simply rent out their process to big orgs and still make a pretty penny.

anoopelias• 3 years ago

Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it.

Its not like every successful org needs a face. Back then Google was a wildly successful as an org, but unlike Steve Jobs then, people barely knew Eric Schmitt. Even with Microsoft as it stands today, Satya is mostly a backseat driver.

Every org has its own style and character. If the board doesn't like what they are building, they can try change it. Risky move nevertheless, but its their call to make.

soufron5• 3 years ago

Well, once again, then it's Satya's mistake to have allowed the representative of an independant third party entity become the public face of a company he invested in.

OpenAI might have wasted the 10B of Microsoft. But whose fault is it in the first place? It's Microsoft's fault to have invested it in the first place.

croes11• 3 years ago

And I thought AI is about the brain and not the face.

nojvek2• 3 years ago

No one is saying they are now valued at 0.

They are likely valued a lot less than 80 billion now.

OpenAI had the largest multiple - >100X their revenue for a recent startup.

That multiple is a lot smaller now without SamA.

Honestly the market needs a correction.

manyoso8• 3 years ago

SamA is nowhere even close to relevant to the value that OpenAI presents. He's def. less than half a billion and likely much less than that. What makes OpenAI so transformative is the technology it produces and SamA is not an engineer that built that technology. If the people that made it were to all leave it would reduce the value of the company by a large amount, but the technology would remain and it is not easy to duplicate given the scarcity of GPU cycles, the training data now being very hard to acquire and lots of other well invested companies chasing with the likes of Google, Meta, Anthropic. That doesn't even begin to mention the open source models that are also competing.

SamA could try and start his own new copy of OpenAI and I have no doubt raise a lot of money, but that new company if it just tried to reproduce what OpenAI has already done would be not worth very much. By the time they reproduce OpenAI and its competitors will have already moved on to bigger and better things.

Enough with the hero worship for SamA and all the other salesmen.

emptysongglass4• 3 years ago

Highly unethical would be throwing the CEO of the division keeping the lights on under a bus with zero regard for the consequences.

The non-profit board acted entirely against the interest of OpenAI at large. Disclosing an intention to terminate the highest profile member of their company to the company paying for their compute, Microsoft, is not only the ethical choice, it's the responsible one.

Members of the non-profit board acted recklessly and irresponsibly. They'll be paying for that choice for decades following, as they should. They're lucky if they don't get hit with a lawsuit for defamation on their way out.

Given how poorly Mozilla's non-profit board has steered Mozilla over the last decade and now this childish tantrum by a man raised on the fanfiction of Yudkowsky together with board larpers, I wouldn't be surprised if this snafu sees the end of this type of governance structure in tech. These people of the board have absolutely no business being in business.

soufron5• 3 years ago

Except it's not a "division" but an independent entity.

And if that corporate structure does not suit Satya Nadella, I would say he's the one to blam for having invested 10B in the first place.

Being angry at a decision he had no right to be consulted on does not allow him to meddle in the governance of its co-shareholder.

Or then we can all accept together that corruption, greed and whateverthefuckism is the reality of ethics in the tech industry.

l33tman• 3 years ago

As a non-profit with the charter they have, their board was not supposed to be in business (at this scale). I guess this is where all of this diverged, a while ago now..

jprete2• 3 years ago

I think a lot of commenters here are treating the nonprofit as if it were a temporary disguise with no other relevance, which OpenAI now intends to shed so it can rake in the profits. Legally this is very much not true, and I’ve read that only a minority of the board can even be a stakeholder in the for-profit (probably why Altman is always described as having no stake). If that’s true, it’s very obviously why half the board are outside people with no stake in the finances at all.

soufron5• 3 years ago

Exactly my point.

s3p4• 3 years ago

I don't see any citations provided by you showing legal threats, though.

Racing04612• 3 years ago

Very good point (even tho i think the right move is for sam to come back as ceo).

lobocinza• 3 years ago

Failed coup.

nojvek2• 3 years ago

Instead of outsing Sam A and Greg B, if Ilya really had deep concerns, he should have quit and built his own AGI dedicated research company. His prestige surely would have given him funding.

Like how Hinton left Google so he could speak freely.

IMO inventing AGI is more powerful than nuclear energy. It would be very stupid of humanity to release it out in the wild.

LLMs are a great tool and nowhere near AGI.

I’m of the belief that alignment of AGI is impossible. It’s like asking us to align with lions. Once we compete for the same resources, we lose.

adverbly• 3 years ago

If Ilya really had deep concerns, he should have quit and built his own AGI dedicated research company.

...

You should look up some history here.

Exactly what you say has already happened and OpenAI is the dedicated research company you are referring to.

He originally left Google deep mind I believe.

I’m of the belief that alignment of AGI is impossible.

I don't think most people in this space are operating based on beliefs. If there is even a 10% chance that alignment is possible, it is probably still worth pursuing.

sensanaty• 3 years ago

Very naive of me, but I'm hoping this all means the death knell of OpenAI, personally.

suggala5• 3 years ago

And SAM allowed all this under his nose. Making sure OpenAI is ripe for MSFT takeover. This is a back channel deal for takeover. What about the earth donors who donated with humanity goal whose funding made it all possible?

I am not sure Sam has any contribution to the OpenAI Software but he gives the world an impression that he owns that and built the entire thing by himself and not giving any attribution to fellow founders.

suggala5• 3 years ago

The current deal with MSFT is cut by Sam is in such a way that Microsoft has huge leverage. Exclusive access, exclusive profit. And after all the profit limit is reached OpenAI sill need to be sold to msft to survive. This is like a worst deal for OpenAI whose goal is to do stuff open source way and it can’t do so due to this deal. If it is not for the MSFt deal, OpenAI could have open sourced and might have resorted to crowdsourcing which might have helped humanity. Also, quickly reaching profit goals is only for good for MSFT. There is no need to actually send money to OpenAI team, just provide operating expenses with 25% profit and take 75% profit. OpenAI has built a great software due to years of work and is being simply being milked by MSFt when the time comes for taking profit. And SAM allowed all this under his nose. Making sure OpenAI is ripe for MSFT takeover. This is a back channel deal for takeover. What about the early donors who donated with humanity goal whose funding made it all possible? I am not sure Sam has any contribution to the OpenAI Software but he gives the world an impression that he owns that and built the entire thing by himself and not giving any attribution to fellow founders.

suggala5• 3 years ago

By the way, this product doesn’t need sales people. It sells itself. What is the point of a sales guy leading?

This company should be lead by research team not product team.

deanrtaylor• 3 years ago

I'm just curious how you envision ai helping people in the future? There are countless technologies that are amazing in scope but never get any traction due to not being able to market, sustain and promote themselves properly.

Additionally, how do we get there and who funds it in the long term? When you actually consider how much compute power is required to get us to this point of a "pretty decent chat bot/text generator". It doesn't really seem like we are even 20% of the way to agi. If that's true then no amount of crowdfunding is going to get it even remotely close to providing the resources to power something truly revolutionary.

Don't get me wrong I agree with some of the points you've made and Microsoft are certainly in it for themselves but I also believe that they would like to avoid owning Openai as they'd not want to position themselves clearly as the sole caretaker of ai due to the amount of scrutiny they'd be under.

All that is to say, whether you like him or not, he has taken interest in ai and Openai as well as being a leader on discussing the ethics of developing ai to stratospheric levels that has made many industries and governments take notice.

suggala5• 3 years ago

Sam definitely discussed about ethics and stuff (at stratospheric level) but when it comes to actually implementing those ethic or when someone tried to implement it in product, he was instrumental in getting rid of respective scientists (whom inturn went on to create claude). And currently was trying to get rid off another director who is trying to voice out opinion in this regard. That is exactly what I am pointing out, he gave such impressions to the rest of the world.

Microsoft never intended or assumed OpenAI will turnout like this great. It just did a small hedge of $1B to a promising tech and will very much like to takeover OpenAI if given a chance and they can afford all the lawyers needed to keep up with govt regulations.

Anthropic was able to create a comparable product to openai with out all the fuss that sam has created. I agree Sam might have had some significant contributions but they are not as much as it seem to be. I am sure OpenAI will keep on progressing as it does now with or without Sam.

He won the first time and lost the second time.

dbuser992• 3 years ago

Obvious manipulation by microsoft. Its like 1999 again

markshepard• 3 years ago

AGI recommends the following,

1. **Transparent Governance**: OpenAI should strive for greater transparency in its governance structure. This includes clearly outlining the roles and responsibilities of the nonprofit board versus the for-profit subsidiary, and how decisions impact each entity. This would help mitigate misunderstandings and conflicts of interest.

2. **Balanced Board Composition**: The board should be restructured to balance the interests of various stakeholders, including investors, employees, and the broader AI community. This can be achieved by having a diverse set of members with expertise in technology, business, ethics, and law.

3. **Stakeholder Engagement**: Regular engagement with key stakeholders, including investors like Microsoft and employees, is crucial. This ensures that major decisions, such as leadership changes, are made considering their potential impact on all parties involved.

4. **Leadership Stability**: To address concerns about leadership and company direction, it may be beneficial to have a stable leadership team that aligns with OpenAI's mission and values. This could involve a re-evaluation of Sam Altman's role and contributions, considering the interests of both the nonprofit and for-profit entities.

5. **Strategic Communication**: OpenAI should develop a strategic communication plan to address public concerns and market reactions. This includes clear messaging about its mission, decisions, and future plans, which can help maintain public trust and investor confidence.

6. **Ethics and Safety Focus**: Given the transformative potential of AI, OpenAI should continue to prioritize AI ethics and safety. This commitment should be evident in its operations, research directions, and partnerships.

7. **Long-Term Vision Alignment**: Finally, aligning the long-term vision of OpenAI with the interests of its stakeholders, including the global community it aims to serve, is essential. This involves balancing profitability with ethical considerations and societal impact.

By implementing these strategies, OpenAI can navigate its current challenges while staying true to its mission of developing AI in a safe and beneficial manner.

amai• 3 years ago

Democracy could have prevented this shitshow. The board could have asked the employees if they are ok with the direction of the company and then simply act according to the outcome of the vote. But companies are always run like dictatorships, leading to mostly terrible decisions disregarding the wisdom of the crowd.

ycmaybe• 3 years ago

Microsoft now has both 49% stake in OpenAI and the OpenAI visionaires building competing products. I smell a rain of lawsuits. Meanwhile AWS is sucking its thumb and google meet will no longer be relevant! LOL

OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

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