> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.
Yea, check out his presentations on YT. Incredible talent.
What strikes me is that he wrote the regretful participation tweet after witnessing the blowback. He should have written it right with the initial news. And clearly explain employees. This is not a smart way to conduct board oversight.
500 employees are not happy. I’m siding with the employees (esp early hires), they deserve to be part of once in a lifetime company like OpenAI after working there for years.
Microsoft isn't going to give the employees in HR equivalent offers. There are a lot of people in the company that wouldn't provide much value to the new team at MS.
Yeah, I also started out believing this must be a principle thing between Ilya and Sam. But no, this smells more and more like a corporate clusterfuck and Ilya was just an easy to manipulate puppet. This alleged statement from the board that destroying the company is an acceptable outcome is completely insane, but somewhat reasonable when combined with the fact that half the board has some serious conflict of interest going on.
It's nothing like it. What common people use is ChatGPT, many of them never heard about OpenAI, not even mention who sits on the board etc. And their core offering is more popular than ever. With Twitter, Musk started to damage the product itself, step by step. As far as I can tell ChatGPT continues to work just fine, as opposed to X.
> sell to Microsoft without the regulatory scrutiny
I keep hearing this, principally from Silicon Valley. It’s based on nothing. Of course this will receive both Congressional and regulatory scrutiny. (Microsoft is also likely to be sued by OpenAI’s corporate entity, on behalf of its outside investors, as are Altman and anyone who jumps ship.)
> non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California, so what exactly are they suing for?
Part of suing is to ensure compliance with agreements. There is a lot of IP that Microsoft may not have a license to that these employees have. There are also legitimate questions about conflicts of interests, particularly with a former executive, et cetera.
> pretty sure Satya consulted with an army of lawyers over the weekend regarding the potential issue
Sure. I'm not suggesting anyone did anything illegal. Just that it will be litigated over from every direction.
Such as? Unless they are in the habit of downloading multiterraby copies of the trained model and taking.g it home what IP would they have? The training data is the open internet and various licensed archives far to much for them to take and arguably isn't OAI IP anyway. The background is all bases on openly published research much of it released by Google. And Microsoft already has licensed pretty much everything from OAI as part of that multi billion dollar deal.
Microsoft can buy the company in parts, as it “fails” in a long drawn out process. By the end, whatever they are buying will have little value, as it will already be outdated.
Sue Sam for what? They fired him and he got amother job with another company. thats on them for firing him in a state with law prohibiting noncompete clauses
The OpenAI board's messaging around this has been absolutely atrocious. The reporting had Ilya at the center of getting rid of Altman, and how he's signing a letter asking the board to resign? Maybe he was trying to do the right thing, but he's absolutely destroyed his credibility as a leader.
Ilya is much less active on Twitter than the others. The rumors that blamed him emerged and spread like wildfire and he did nothing to stop it because he probably only checks Twitter once a week.
More like spending time in calls with board members, coworkers, investors, partners, ... and often it is better not to say something, than saying something which then is misinterpreted overtaken by other reality.
He says he regrets his action, so he's not blameless. and it wouldn't have been possible for 3/6ths of the board to oust Brockman and Altman without his vote. My bet (entirely conjecture) is that Ilya now realizes the other three will refuse to leave their board seats even if it means the company melts to the ground.
The signatories want Bret Taylor and Will Hurd running the new Board, apparently.
> We will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
Please not another Eric Smith NSA shill running the show. on the other hand it was inevitable. either the government controls the most important companies secretly as in China or openly as in the US.
None of it makes sense to me now. Who is really behind this? How did they pull this off? Why did do it? Why do it so suddenly, in a terribly disorganized way?
If I may paraphrase Churchill: This has become a bit of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
I still think 'Altman's Basilisk' is a thing: I think somewhere in this mess there's actions taken to wrest control of an AI from somebody, probably Altman.
Altman's Basilisk also represents the idea that if a charismatic and flawed person (and everything I've seen, including the adulation, suggests Altman is that type of person from that type of background) trains an AI in their image, they can induce their own characteristics in the AI. Therefore, if you're a paranoid with a persecution complex and a zero-sum perspective on things, you can through training induce an AI to also have those characteristics, which may well persist as the AI 'takes off' and reaches superhuman intelligence.
This is not unlike humans (perhaps including Altman) experiencing and perpetuating trauma as children, and then growing to adulthood and gaining greatly expanded intelligence that is heavily, even overwhelmingly, conditioned by those formative axioms that were unquestioned in childhood.
Watching all this drama unfold in the public is unprecedented.
I guess it makes sense. There has never been a company like OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.
Probably trying to shift the blame to the other three board members. It could be true to some degree. No matter what, it's clear to the public that they don't have the competency to sit on any board.
I don’t know about OpenAI, but Ive been in a few similar business situations where everyone is in a good situation and greed leads to an almighty blowup. It’s really remarkable to see.
And the ironic part of the greed is that it seems there is far more (at least potential) earnings to be spread around and make everyone there wealthy enough to not have to think about it ever again.
Yet they start this kind of nonsense.
Not exactly focusing on building a great system or product.
What? Greed is the backbone of our startup landscape. As soon as you get VC backing all anyone cares about is a big payday. This is interesting because there is something going on beyond the typical pure greed shitshow.
Perhaps it was just that original intention for openai to be a nonprofit, but at some point somewhere it wasn't pure $ and that's what makes it interesting. Also more tragic because now it looks like it's heading straight to a for profit company one way or another.
We’re seeing our generation’s “traitorous eight” story play out [1]. If this creates a sea of AI start-ups, competing and exploring different approaches, it could be invigorating on many levels.
> Doesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen though?
Going from OpenAI to Microsoft means ceding the upside: nobody besides maybe Altman will make fuck-you money there.
I’m also not sure as some in Silicon Valley that this is antitrust proof. So moving to Microsoft not only means less upside, but also fun in depositions for a few years.
Fuck you money was always a lottery ticket based on OpenAI's governance structure and "promises of potential future profit." That lottery ticket no longer exists, and no one else is going to provide it after seeing how the board treated their relationship with Microsoft and that $10B investment. This is a fine lifeboat for anyone who wants to continue on the path they were on with adults at the helm.
What might have been tens or hundreds of millions in common stakeholder equity gains will likely be single digit millions, but at least much more likely to materialize (as Microsoft RSUs).
No. OpenAI employees do not have traditional equity in the form of RSUs or Options. They have a weird profit-sharing arrangement in a company whose board is apparently not interested in making profits.
Employee equity (and all investments) are capped at 100x, which is still potentially a hefty payday. The whole point of the structure was to enable competitive employee comp.
Ha! One of my all-time favourites, the fuck-you position. The Gambler, the uncle giving advice:
You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you.
NN/ai concepts have been around for a while. It is just computers had not been fast enough to make it practical. It was also harder to get capital back then. Those guys put the silicon in silicon valley.
It really depends on what you're researching. Rad AI started with only 4m investment and used that to make cutting edge LLMs that are now in use by something like half the radiologists in the US. Frankly putting some cost pressure on researchers may end up creating more efficient models and techniques.
I don’t believe startups can have successful exits without extraordinary leadership (which the current board can never find). The people quitting are simply jumping off a sinking ship.
So essentially, OpenAI is a sinking ship as long as the board members go ahead with their new CEO and Sam, Greg are not returning.
Microsoft can absorb all the employees and switch them into the new AI subsidiary which basically is an acqui-hire without buying out everyone else's shares and making a new DeepMind / OpenAI research division inside of the company.
So all along it was a long winded side-step into having a new AI division without all the regulatory headaches of a formal acquisition.
> OpenAI is a sinking ship as long as the board members go ahead with their new CEO and Sam, Greg are not returning
Far from certain. One, they still control a lot of money and cloud credits. Two, they can credibly threaten to license to a competitor or even open source everything, thereby destroying the unique value of the work.
> without all the regulatory headaches of a formal acquisition
>Far from certain. One, they still control a lot of money and cloud credits.
This too is far from certain. The funding and credits was at best tied to milestones, and at worst, the investment contract is already broken and msft can walk.
I suspect they would not actually do the latter and the ip is tied to continual partnership.
The value of OpenAI's own assets in the for-profit subsidiary, may drop in value due to recent events.
Microsoft is a substantial shareholder (49%) in that for-profit subsidiary, so the value of Microsoft's asset has presumably reduced due to OpenAI's board decisions.
OpenAI's board decisions which resulted in these events appear to have been improperly conducted: Two of the board's members weren't aware of its deliberations, or the outcome until the last minute, notably the chair of the board. A board's decisions have legal weight because they are collective. It's allowed to patch them up after if the board agrees, for people to take breaks, etc. But if some directors intentionally excluded other directors from such a major decision (and formal deliberations), affecting the value and future of the company, that leaves the board's decision open to legal challenges.
Hypothetically Microsoft could sue and offer to settle. Then OpenAI might not have enough funds if it would lose, so might have sell shares in the for-profit subsidiary, or transfer them. Microsoft only needs about 2% more to become majority shareholder of the for-profit subsidiary, which runs ChatGPT sevices.
but money has intrinsic value. It is directly tied to the economy of a country. So if a country was to collapse, so would it's money.
The point here is that if a country collapses, then you got bigger problems than the loss of whatever stored currency you got. Even if your money is in the hypothetically useful crypto, you got far bigger problems that the money you own is useless to you, you need to survive.
But aside from that extreme scenario, money is not the same thing.
Another way to think of it:
There is nothing in the world that would prevent the immediate collapse of crypto if everyone who owns it just decided to sell.
If everyone in the world stops accepting the US Dollar, the US can still continue to use it internally and manufacture goods and such. It'll just be a collapse of trade, but then even in that scenario people can just exchange the dollar locally for say gold, and trade gold on the global market. So the dollar has physical and usable backing. Meanwhile crypto has literally nothing.
There were many currencies in history that have lost all or almost all its value upon serious economical crisis in respective countries. It seems you wouldn't call that money? Crypto is simply an alternative currency.
Right, INTERNAL economical crisis is what causes the collapse of currency. But just because the rest of the world doesn't recognize it, doesn't mean it is worthless, it simply converts.
Bitcoin has nothing in and of itself.
Also private currency like script was awful, please don't take the worst financial examples in history and claim that bitcoin is similar as an argument as to why it is valid.
again, nobody has shown even a glimmer of the board operating with morality being their focus. we just don't know. we do know that a vast majority of the company don't trust the board though.
To be fair, that is a stupid first move to make as the CEO who was just hired to replace the person deposed by the board. (Though I’m still confused about Ilya’s position.)
If you know the company will implode and you'll be CEO of a shell, it is better to get board to reverse the course. It isn't like she was part of decision making process
If your job as a CEO is to keep the company running it seems like the only way to do that was hire them back because look at the company now it's essentially dead unless the board resigns and with how stupid the board is they might not lol.
So her move wasn't stupid at all. She obviously knew people working there respected the leadership of the company.
If 550 people leave OpenAI you might as well just shut it down and sell the IP to Microsoft.
It's a lot easier to sign a petition than actually walk away from a presumably well-paying job in a somewhat weak tech job market. People assuming everyone can just traipse into a $1m/year role at Microsoft is smoking some really good stuff.
> can just traipse into a $1m/year role at Microsoft
Do you not trust Microsoft's public statement that jobs are waiting for anyone that decides to leave OpenAI? Considering their two decade adventure with Xbox and their $72bln in profits last year, on top of a $144bln in cash reserves, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is able (and willing) to match most comp packages considering what's at stake. Maybe not everyone, but most.
Well it is "somewhat weak tech job market" for your average Joe. I think for most of those guys finding a 0,5kk/year job wouldn't be such a problem especially that the AI hype has not yet died down.
Actually for MS this might be much better cause they would get direct control over them without the hassle of talking to some "board" that is not aligned with their interests.
But wouldn’t the coup have required 4 votes out of 6 which means she voted yes? If not then the coup was executed by just 3 board members? I’m confused.
Maybe someone thinks Sam was “not consistently candid” about mentioning one of the feature bullets in latest release was dropping d'Angelo's Poe directly into the ChatGPT app for no additional charge.
Given dev day timing and the update releasing these "GPTs" this is an entirely plausible timeline.
in my experience these things will typically go hand in hand. There is also an argument to be made that being smart at building ML models and being smart in literally anything else have nothing to do with each other.
IQ and EQ are different things. Some people are very technically smart to know a trillion side effects of technical systems. But can be really bad/binary/shallow at knowing side order effects of human dynamics.
Ilya's role is a Chief Scientist. It may be fair to give at least some benefit of doubt. He was vocal/direct/binary, and also vocally apologized and worked back. In human dynamics – I'd usually look for the silent orchestrator behind the scenes that nobody talks about.
I'm fine with all that in principle but then you shouldn't be throwing your weight around in board meetings, probably you shouldn't be on the board to begin with because it is a handicap in trying to evaluate the potential outcome of the decisions the board has to make.
I don't think this is necessarily about different categories of intelligence... Politicking and socializing are skills that require time and mental energy to build, and can even atrophy. If you spend all your time worrying about technical things, you won't have as much time to build or maintain those skills. It seems to me like IQ and EQ are more fundamental and immutable than that, but maybe I'm making a distinction where there isn't much of one.
Specialized learning and focus often comes at the cost of generalized learning and focus. It's not zero sum, but there is competition between interests in any person's mind.
Most people who sympathized with the Board prior to this would have assumed that the presumed culprit, the legendary Ilya, has thought through everything and is ready to sacrifice anything for a course he champions. It appears that is not the case.
I think he orchestrated the coup on principle, but severely underestimated the backlash and power that other people had collectively.
Now he’s trying to save his own skin. Sam will probably take him back on his own technical merits but definitely not in any position of power anymore
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die
Just because you are a genius in one domain does not mean you are in another
What’s funny is that everyone initially “accepted” the firing. But no one liked it. Then a few people (like greg) started voting with their feet which empowered others which has cumulated into this tidal shift.
It will make a fascinating case study some day on how not to fire your CEO
This was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone, especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of it (staff that already function well as a team).
> In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join," they write.
In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board. Initially it seemed Sam may have committed some inexcusable financial crime but doesn't look so anymore.
Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.
While Activision makes much more money I imagine, acquiring a whole division of productive, _loyal_ staffers that work well together on something as important as AI is cheap for 13B.
There's acquihires and then I guess there's acquifishing where you just gut the company you're after like a fish and hire away everyone without bothering to buy the company. There's probably a better portmanteau. I seriously doubt Microsoft is going to make people whole by granting equivalent RSUs, so you have to wonder what else is going on that so many seem ready to just up and leave some very large potential paydays.
I feel like that's giving them too much credit; this is more of a flukuisition. Being in the right place at the right time when your acquisition target implodes.
If the change in $MSFT pre-open market cap (which has given up its gains at the time of writing, but still) of hundreds of billions of dollars is anything to go by, shareholders probably see this as spending a dime to get a dollar.
>, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year.
For investment deals of that magnitude, Microsoft probably did not literally wire all $13 billion to OpenAI's bank account the day the deal was announced.
More likely that the $10b to $13 headline-grabbing number is a total estimated figure that represents a sum of future incremental investments (and Azure usage credits, etc) based on agreed performance milestones from OpenAI.
So, if OpenAI doesn't achieve certain milestones (which can be more difficult if a bunch of their employees defect and follow Sam & Greg out the door) ... then Microsoft doesn't really "lose $10b".
> In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board
surely the really self-destructive gamble was hiring him? he's a venture capitalist with weird beliefs about AI and privacy, why would it be a good idea to put him in charge of a notional non-profit that was trying to safely advance the start of the art in artificial intelligence?
> Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone
Exactly. I'm curious about how much of this was planned vs emergent. I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists.
Equally, it's not entirely unpredictable. MS is the easiest to read: their moves to date have been really clear in wanting to be the primary commercial beneficiary of OAI's work.
OAI itself is less transpararent from the outside. There's a tension between the "humanity first" mantra that drove its inception, and the increasingly "commercial exploitation first" line that Altman was evidently driving.
As things stand, the outcome is pretty clear: if the choice was between humanity and commercial gain, the latter appears to have won.
"I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists."
From our outsider, uninformed perspective, yes. But if you know more sometimes these things become completely plannable.
I'm not saying this is the actual explanation because it probably isn't. But suppose OpenAI was facing bankruptcy, but they weren't telling anyone and nobody external knew. This allows more complicated planning for various contingencies by the people that know because they know they can exclude a lot of possibilities from their planning, meaning it's a simpler situation for them than meets the (external) eye.
Perhaps ironically, the more complicated these gyrations become, the more convinced I become there's probably a simple explanation. But it's one that is being hidden, and people don't generally hide things for no reason. I don't know what it is. I don't even know what category of thing it is. I haven't even been closely following the HN coverage, honestly. But it's probably unflattering to somebody.
(Included in that relatively simple explanation would be some sort of coup attempt that has subsequently failed. Those things happen. I'm not saying whatever plan is being enacted is going off without a hitch. I'm just saying there may well be an internal explanation that is still much simpler than the external gyrations would suggest.)
They might not be able to if the legal department is involved. Both in the case of maybe-pending legal issues, and because even rich people get employment protections that make companies wary about giving reasons.
I said nothing contrary to this. I'm not sure what your goal is with this comment. If anything is implied in "even rich people," it's contempt for them, so I'm clearly on the pro-making legal protections more accessible side.
I'm assuming it's a combination of researchers, data scientists, mlops engineers, and developers. There are a lot of different areas of expertise that come into building these models.
> Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone
Sounds like that's what someone wants and is trying to obfuscate what's going on behind the scenes.
If Windows 11 shows us anything about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, having them be the ring of power for LMM's makes the future of humanity look very bleak.
> it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyon
Didn't follow this closely, but isn't that implicitly what an ex-CEO could have possibly been accused off ie. not acting in the company's best interest but someone else's? Not unprecedented either eg. the case of Nokia/Elop.
That's because they're the only adult in the room and mature company with mature management. Boring, I know. But sometimes experience actually pays off.
Presumably some will resign and some won't. They aren't going to get 550 people to make a hard commitment to resign, especially when presumably few concrete contracts have been offered by MSFT.
It's easier to get the support of 500 educated people at a moments notice by using sane words like 'may'. This is rational given the lack of public information as well as a board that seems to be having seizures. Using the word 'may' may seem empty-handed; but it ensures a longer list of names attached to the message -- allowing the board a better glimpse of how many dominoes are lined up to fall.
The board is being given a sanity-check; I would expect the signers intentionally left themselves a bit of room for escalation/negotiation.
How often do you win arguments by leading off with an immutable ultimatum?
Right, but the absolute last thought you want in the board's head is: "they're bluffing."
200 people or even 50 of the right people who are definitely going to resign will be much stronger than 500+ who "may" resign.
Disclaimer that this is a ludicrously difficult situation for all these folks, and my critique here is made from far outside the arena. I am in no way claiming that I would be executing this better in actual reality and I'm extremely fortunate not to be in their shoes.
This is the point where I've realized I just have to wait until history is written, rather than trying to follow this in real time.
The situation is too convoluted, and too many people are playing the media to try to advance their version of the narrative.
When there is enough distance from the situation for a proper historical retrospective to be written, I look forward to getting a better view of what actually happened.
Hah. I think you may be duped by history - the neat logical accounts are often fictions - they explain what was inexplicable with fabrications.
Studying revolutions is revealing - they are rarely the invevitable product of historical forces, executed to the plans of strategic minded players... instead they are often accidental and inexplicable. Those credited as their masterminds were trying to stop them. Rather than inevitible, there was often progress in the opposite direction making people feel the liklihood was decreasing. The confusing paradoxical mess of great events doesn't make for a good story to tell others though.
It's a pretty interesting point to think about. Post-hoc explanations are clean, neat, and may or may not have been prepared by someone with a particular interpretation of events. While real-time, there's too much happening, too quickly, for any one person to really have a firm grasp on the entire situation.
On our present stage there is no director, no stage manager; the set is on fire. There are multiple actors - with more showing up by the minute - some of whom were working off a script that not everyone has seen, and that is now being rewritten on the fly, while others don't have any kind of script at all. They were sent for; they have appeared to take their place in the proceedings with no real understanding of what those are, like Rosencranz and Guildenstern.
This is kind of what the end thesis of War and Peace was like - there's no possible way that Napoleon could actually have known what was happening everywhere on the battlefield - by the time he learned something had happened, events on the scene had already advanced well past it; and the local commanders had no good understanding of the overall situation, they could only play their bit parts. And in time, these threads of ignorance wove a tale of a Great Victory, won by the Great Man Himself.
Written history is usually a simplification that has lost a lot of the context and nuance from it.
I don't need to follow in real-time, but a lot of the context and nuance can be clearly understood at the moment and so it stills helps to follow along even if that means lagging on the input.
That's not how history works. What you read are the tellings of the people and those aren't all facts but how they perceived the situation in a retrospective. Read the biographies of different people telling the same event and you will notice that they are quite never the same, leaving the unfavourable bits usually out.
And for so-called tech influencers to rapidly blanket the field of discourse with their theories so they can say their theory was right later on, or making “emergency podcasts/blog posts/etc.” to get more attention and followers. It’s so exhausting.
I agree. Although the story is fascinating in the way that a car crash is fascinating, it's clear that it's going to be very difficult to get any kind of objective understanding in real-time.
This breathless real-time speculation may be fun, but now that social media amplifies the tiniest fart such that it has global reach, I feel like it just reinforces the general zeitgeist of "Oh, what the hell NOW? Everything is on fire." It's not like there's anything that we peasants can do to either influence the outcome, or adjust our own lives to accomodate the eventual reality.
Makes sense in a conspiracy theory mindset. AGI takes over, crashed $MSFT, buys calls on $MSFT, then this morning the markets go up when Sam & co join MSFT and the AGI has tons of money to spend.
3 board members (joined by Ilya Sutskever, who is publicly defecting now) found themselves in a position to take over what used to be a 9-member board, and took full control of OpenAI and the subsidiary previously worth $90 billion.
Speculation is just on motivation, the facts are easy to establish.
> 3 board members (joined with Ilya Sutskever, who is publicly defecting now) found themselves in a position to take over what used to be a 9-member board, and took full control of OpenAI and the subsidiary previously worth $90 billion.
er...what does that even mean? how can a board "take full control" of the thing they are the board for? they already have full control.
the actual facts are that the board, by majority vote, sacked the CEO and kicked someone else off the board.
then a lot of other stuff happened that's still becoming clear.
It says 3 board members found themselves in a position to take over OpenAI.
Do they mean we've seen Sam Altman and allies making a bid to take over the entire of OpenAI, through its weird Charity+LLC+Holding company+LLC+Microsoft structure, eschewing its goals of openness and safety in pursuit of short-sighted riches.
Or do they mean we've seen The Board making a bid to take over the entire of OpenAI, by ousting Glorious Leader Sam Altman, while his team was going from strength to strength?
The board had 3 positions empty, people who left this year, leaving it as a 6-member board. Both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were on the board; Ilya Sutskever's vote (which he now states he regrets) gave them the votes to remove both, and bring it down to a 4 member board controlled by 3 members that started the year as a small minority.
> Introduced in June of 2017, the act amends the Revenue Code to allow private foundations to take complete ownership of a for-profit corporation under certain circumstances:
The business must be owned by the private foundation through 100 percent ownership of the voting stock.
The business must be managed independently, meaning its board cannot be controlled by family members of the foundation’s founder or substantial donors to the foundation.
All profits of the business must be distributed to the foundation.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but didn't Mozilla Foundation do that a dozen or so years earlier with their wholly owned subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation? (...and I doubt that's the first instance; just the one that immediately popped into my head.)
It begs the question: why was OpenAI structured this way? For what purposes besides potentially defrauding investors and the government exist for wrapping a for-profit business in a nonprofit? From a governance standpoint it makes no sense, because a nonprofit board doesn't have the same legal obligations to represent shareholders that a for-profit business does. And why did so many investors choose to seed a business that was playing such a cooky shell game?
the impression I got was that they started out with honest intentions and they were more or less infiltrated by Microsoft. this recent news fits that narrative
Everything on social media (and general news media) pointed to Ilya instigating the coup. Maybe Ilya was never the instigator, maybe it was Adam + Helen + Tasha, Greg backed Sam and was shown the door, and Ilya was on the fence, and perhaps against better judgment, due to his own ideological beliefs, or just from pure fear of losing something beautiful he helped create, under immense pressure, decided to back the board?
We can certainly believe Ilya wasn't behind it if he joins them at Microsoft. How about that? By his own admission was involved, and he's one of 4 people on the board. While he has called on the board to resign, he has seemingly not resigned which would be the one thing he could certainly control.
At this point, after almost 3 days of non-stop drama, and we still have no clue what has happened to a 700 employees company under million of people watching. Regardless the outcome, the art of keeping secrets at OpenAI is truly far beyond human capability!
I agree. I'm already sick of reading through political hit pieces, exaggeration, biased speculations and unfounded bold claims. This all just turned into a kind of TV sports, where you pick a side and fight.
Likely Ilya and Adam swayed Helen and Tasha. Booted Sam out. Greg voluntarily resigned.
Ilya (at the urging of Satya and his colleagues including Mira) wanted to reinstate Sam, but the deal fell through with the Board outvoting Sustkever 3 to 1. With Mira deflecting, Adam got his mate Emmett to steady the ship but things went nuclear.
How likely is that the API will change (from specs, to pricing, to being broken)? I am about to finish some freelance work that uses GPT api and it will be a pain in the ass if we have to switch or find an alternative (even creating a custom endpoint on Azure...)
OpenAI may just be a couple having an angry fight, and M$ is just the neighbor with cash happy to buy all the stuff the angry wife is throwing out for pennies on the dollar.
In this case, it means that what happened is: “OpenAI board is incompetent”, instead of “Microsoft planned this to take over the company.”
A conspiracy like the one proposed would basically be impossible to coordinate yet keep secret, especially considering the board members might loose their seats and their own market value.
He is saying that what might seem like a sophisticated, well-planned strategy could actually be just the outcome of basic errors or poor decisions made by someone else.
The most plausible scenario here is that the board is comprised of people lacking in foresight who did something stupid. A lot of people are generating a 5D chess plot orchestrated by Microsoft in their heads.
I highly doubt this was a coordinated plan from the start by Microsoft. I think what we're seeing here is a seasoned team of executives (Microsoft) eating a naive and inexperienced board alive after the latter fumbled.
I'm extremely confused by this. It seems absurd that he could sign a letter seemingly demanding his own resignation, but also not resign? There must be some missing information.
Or possibly some misinformation. It does seem very strange, and more than a little confusing.
I have to keep reminding myself that information ultimately sourced from Twitter/X threads can't necessarily be taken at face value. Whatever the situation, I'm sure it will become clearer over the next few days.
By the end of the week is over-optimistic. Foe the last 3 days feels like million year. I bet the company will be gone by the time Emmett Shear wakes up
It's not over until the last stone involved in the avalanche stops moving and it is anybody's guess right now what the final configuration will be.
But don't be surprised if Shear also walks before the week is out, if some board members resign but others try to hold on and if half of OpenAI's staff ends up at Microsoft.
Seems more damage control than power move. I'm sure their first choice was to reinstate Altman and get more control over OpenAI governance. What they've achieved here is temporarily neutralizing Altman/Brockman from starting a competitor, at the cost of potentially destroying OpenAI (who they remain dependent on for next couple of years) if too many people quit.
Seems a bit of a lose-lose for MSFT and OpenAI, even if best that MSFT could do to contain the situation. Competitors must be happy.
Disagree. MSFT extending an open invitation to all OpenAI employees to work under sama at a subsidiary of MSFT sounds to me like it'll work well for them. They'll get 80% of OpenAI for negative money - assuming they ultimately don't need to pay out the full $10B in cloud compute credits.
Competitors should be fearful. OpenAI was executing with weights around their ankles by virtue of trying to run as a weird "need lots of money but cant make a profit" company. Now they'll be fully bankrolled by one of the largest companies the world has ever seen and empowered by a whole bunch of hypermotivated-through-retribution leaders.
AFAIK MSFT/Altman can't just fork GPT-N and continue uninterrupted. All MSFT has rights to is weights and source code - not the critical (and slow to recreate) human-created and curated training data, or any of the development software infrastructure that OpenAI has built.
The leaders may be motivated by retribution, but I'm sure none of leaders or researchers really want to be a division of MSFT rather than a cool start-up. Many developers may chose to stay in SF and create their own startups, or join others. Signing the letter isn't a commitment to go to MSFT - just a way to pressure for a return to status quo they were happy with.
Not everyone is going to stay with OpenAI or move to MSFT - some developers will move elsewhere and the knowledge of OpenAI's secret sauce will spread.
1,335 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadWhat in the world is happening at OpenAI?
We the unsuspecting public?
Ilya FO (in process)
What strikes me is that he wrote the regretful participation tweet after witnessing the blowback. He should have written it right with the initial news. And clearly explain employees. This is not a smart way to conduct board oversight.
500 employees are not happy. I’m siding with the employees (esp early hires), they deserve to be part of once in a lifetime company like OpenAI after working there for years.
What an utterly bizarre turn of events, and to have it all played out in public.
A $90 billion valuation at stake too!
Microsoft has a $2.75T market value and over $140B of cash.
But it doesn’t have to. And the politics suggest it very likely won’t.
It’s like they distressed the company to make an acquisition one of mercy instead of aggression, knowing they already had their buyer lined up.
I keep hearing this, principally from Silicon Valley. It’s based on nothing. Of course this will receive both Congressional and regulatory scrutiny. (Microsoft is also likely to be sued by OpenAI’s corporate entity, on behalf of its outside investors, as are Altman and anyone who jumps ship.)
I'm pretty sure Satya consulted with an army of lawyers over the weekend regarding the potential issue.
Part of suing is to ensure compliance with agreements. There is a lot of IP that Microsoft may not have a license to that these employees have. There are also legitimate questions about conflicts of interests, particularly with a former executive, et cetera.
> pretty sure Satya consulted with an army of lawyers over the weekend regarding the potential issue
Sure. I'm not suggesting anyone did anything illegal. Just that it will be litigated over from every direction.
Or maybe _this_ week he would need to spend his time doing something productive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8oVTKG39U8&t=27s
So this was never about safety or any such bullshit. It’s because GTPs store was in direct competition with Poe!?
Poe has direct competition with the GPTs and the "revenue sharing" plan that Sam released on Dev day.
The Poe Platform has their "Creators" build your own bot and monetize it, including OpenAI and other models.
Well, we don't know.
What we do know, is that the "coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman" is a rumor and speculation about a thing we don't know anything about.
JFC.
> We will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
If I may paraphrase Churchill: This has become a bit of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
I still think 'Altman's Basilisk' is a thing: I think somewhere in this mess there's actions taken to wrest control of an AI from somebody, probably Altman.
Altman's Basilisk also represents the idea that if a charismatic and flawed person (and everything I've seen, including the adulation, suggests Altman is that type of person from that type of background) trains an AI in their image, they can induce their own characteristics in the AI. Therefore, if you're a paranoid with a persecution complex and a zero-sum perspective on things, you can through training induce an AI to also have those characteristics, which may well persist as the AI 'takes off' and reaches superhuman intelligence.
This is not unlike humans (perhaps including Altman) experiencing and perpetuating trauma as children, and then growing to adulthood and gaining greatly expanded intelligence that is heavily, even overwhelmingly, conditioned by those formative axioms that were unquestioned in childhood.
I guess it makes sense. There has never been a company like OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.
Absolutely bonkers.
All due to one word: Greed.
Yet they start this kind of nonsense.
Not exactly focusing on building a great system or product.
edit: 'tho TBF, the other methods do require ethical management behavior down the road, which was just shown to be lacking in the last few days.
Perhaps it was just that original intention for openai to be a nonprofit, but at some point somewhere it wasn't pure $ and that's what makes it interesting. Also more tragic because now it looks like it's heading straight to a for profit company one way or another.
I would say it's due to unconventional not-battle-tested governance.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/corgs/fairchild.h...
Microsoft gobbles up all talent from OpenAI as they just gave everyone a position.
So we went from "Faux NGO" to, "For profit", to "100% Closed".
Going from OpenAI to Microsoft means ceding the upside: nobody besides maybe Altman will make fuck-you money there.
I’m also not sure as some in Silicon Valley that this is antitrust proof. So moving to Microsoft not only means less upside, but also fun in depositions for a few years.
What might have been tens or hundreds of millions in common stakeholder equity gains will likely be single digit millions, but at least much more likely to materialize (as Microsoft RSUs).
You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/characters/nm0000422
Wasn't a key enabler of early transitor work that required capital investment was modest?
SotA AI research seems to be well past that point.
They were simple in principle but expensive at scale. Sounds like LLMs.
My understanding was that practical results were indicating your model has to be pretty large before you start getting "magic."
_Big sigh_.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpc5_3B5xdk
The whole thing is just ridiculous. How can you be senior leadership and not have a clear idea of what you want? And what the staff want?
https://youtu.be/6qpRrIJnswk?si=h37XFUXJDDoy2QZm
Substitute with appropriate ex-Soviet doomer music as necessary
“Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...
Microsoft can absorb all the employees and switch them into the new AI subsidiary which basically is an acqui-hire without buying out everyone else's shares and making a new DeepMind / OpenAI research division inside of the company.
So all along it was a long winded side-step into having a new AI division without all the regulatory headaches of a formal acquisition.
Far from certain. One, they still control a lot of money and cloud credits. Two, they can credibly threaten to license to a competitor or even open source everything, thereby destroying the unique value of the work.
> without all the regulatory headaches of a formal acquisition
This, too, is far from certain.
This too is far from certain. The funding and credits was at best tied to milestones, and at worst, the investment contract is already broken and msft can walk.
I suspect they would not actually do the latter and the ip is tied to continual partnership.
Microsoft is a substantial shareholder (49%) in that for-profit subsidiary, so the value of Microsoft's asset has presumably reduced due to OpenAI's board decisions.
OpenAI's board decisions which resulted in these events appear to have been improperly conducted: Two of the board's members weren't aware of its deliberations, or the outcome until the last minute, notably the chair of the board. A board's decisions have legal weight because they are collective. It's allowed to patch them up after if the board agrees, for people to take breaks, etc. But if some directors intentionally excluded other directors from such a major decision (and formal deliberations), affecting the value and future of the company, that leaves the board's decision open to legal challenges.
Hypothetically Microsoft could sue and offer to settle. Then OpenAI might not have enough funds if it would lose, so might have sell shares in the for-profit subsidiary, or transfer them. Microsoft only needs about 2% more to become majority shareholder of the for-profit subsidiary, which runs ChatGPT sevices.
But stranger things have happened. One day I may be very very VERY surprised.
The point here is that if a country collapses, then you got bigger problems than the loss of whatever stored currency you got. Even if your money is in the hypothetically useful crypto, you got far bigger problems that the money you own is useless to you, you need to survive.
But aside from that extreme scenario, money is not the same thing.
Another way to think of it:
There is nothing in the world that would prevent the immediate collapse of crypto if everyone who owns it just decided to sell.
If everyone in the world stops accepting the US Dollar, the US can still continue to use it internally and manufacture goods and such. It'll just be a collapse of trade, but then even in that scenario people can just exchange the dollar locally for say gold, and trade gold on the global market. So the dollar has physical and usable backing. Meanwhile crypto has literally nothing.
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_currency
Bitcoin has nothing in and of itself.
Also private currency like script was awful, please don't take the worst financial examples in history and claim that bitcoin is similar as an argument as to why it is valid.
I don't understand what is "in and of itself" in an ordinary currency of an ordinary, small country.
> INTERNAL economical crisis is what causes the collapse of currency
Which is why it is very unlikely to happen with bitcoin.
> But just because the rest of the world doesn't recognize it, doesn't mean it is worthless, it simply converts.
Can't you say exactly the same about bitcoin?
Do we know why Murati was replaced?
I wonder if it will take 20 years to learn the whole story.
I don't think she actually had anything to do with the coup, she was only slightly less blindsided than everyone else.
So her move wasn't stupid at all. She obviously knew people working there respected the leadership of the company.
If 550 people leave OpenAI you might as well just shut it down and sell the IP to Microsoft.
Do you not trust Microsoft's public statement that jobs are waiting for anyone that decides to leave OpenAI? Considering their two decade adventure with Xbox and their $72bln in profits last year, on top of a $144bln in cash reserves, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is able (and willing) to match most comp packages considering what's at stake. Maybe not everyone, but most.
Actually for MS this might be much better cause they would get direct control over them without the hassle of talking to some "board" that is not aligned with their interests.
The board is going to be overseeing a company of 10 people as things are going.
I don't know if it was 3 or 4 in the end, but it may very well have been possible with just 3.
what the actual fuck =O
If you made a comment recently about de jure vs de facto power, step forward and collect your prize.
What do I win? Hahaha.
Maybe someone thinks Sam was “not consistently candid” about mentioning one of the feature bullets in latest release was dropping d'Angelo's Poe directly into the ChatGPT app for no additional charge.
Given dev day timing and the update releasing these "GPTs" this is an entirely plausible timeline.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/poes-ai-chatbot-app-now-le...
Ilya's role is a Chief Scientist. It may be fair to give at least some benefit of doubt. He was vocal/direct/binary, and also vocally apologized and worked back. In human dynamics – I'd usually look for the silent orchestrator behind the scenes that nobody talks about.
Now he’s trying to save his own skin. Sam will probably take him back on his own technical merits but definitely not in any position of power anymore
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die
Just because you are a genius in one domain does not mean you are in another
What’s funny is that everyone initially “accepted” the firing. But no one liked it. Then a few people (like greg) started voting with their feet which empowered others which has cumulated into this tidal shift.
It will make a fascinating case study some day on how not to fire your CEO
> In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join," they write.
Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.
(but also a good chunk of the 13bn was pre-committed Azure compute credits, which kind of flow back to the company anyway).
While Activision makes much more money I imagine, acquiring a whole division of productive, _loyal_ staffers that work well together on something as important as AI is cheap for 13B.
Some background: https://sl.bing.net/dEMu3xBWZDE
For investment deals of that magnitude, Microsoft probably did not literally wire all $13 billion to OpenAI's bank account the day the deal was announced.
More likely that the $10b to $13 headline-grabbing number is a total estimated figure that represents a sum of future incremental investments (and Azure usage credits, etc) based on agreed performance milestones from OpenAI.
So, if OpenAI doesn't achieve certain milestones (which can be more difficult if a bunch of their employees defect and follow Sam & Greg out the door) ... then Microsoft doesn't really "lose $10b".
surely the really self-destructive gamble was hiring him? he's a venture capitalist with weird beliefs about AI and privacy, why would it be a good idea to put him in charge of a notional non-profit that was trying to safely advance the start of the art in artificial intelligence?
Exactly. I'm curious about how much of this was planned vs emergent. I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists.
Equally, it's not entirely unpredictable. MS is the easiest to read: their moves to date have been really clear in wanting to be the primary commercial beneficiary of OAI's work.
OAI itself is less transpararent from the outside. There's a tension between the "humanity first" mantra that drove its inception, and the increasingly "commercial exploitation first" line that Altman was evidently driving.
As things stand, the outcome is pretty clear: if the choice was between humanity and commercial gain, the latter appears to have won.
From our outsider, uninformed perspective, yes. But if you know more sometimes these things become completely plannable.
I'm not saying this is the actual explanation because it probably isn't. But suppose OpenAI was facing bankruptcy, but they weren't telling anyone and nobody external knew. This allows more complicated planning for various contingencies by the people that know because they know they can exclude a lot of possibilities from their planning, meaning it's a simpler situation for them than meets the (external) eye.
Perhaps ironically, the more complicated these gyrations become, the more convinced I become there's probably a simple explanation. But it's one that is being hidden, and people don't generally hide things for no reason. I don't know what it is. I don't even know what category of thing it is. I haven't even been closely following the HN coverage, honestly. But it's probably unflattering to somebody.
(Included in that relatively simple explanation would be some sort of coup attempt that has subsequently failed. Those things happen. I'm not saying whatever plan is being enacted is going off without a hitch. I'm just saying there may well be an internal explanation that is still much simpler than the external gyrations would suggest.)
How far along were they on GPT-5?
They could've asked ChatGPT for hints.
Pick a different target and move on.
Sounds like that's what someone wants and is trying to obfuscate what's going on behind the scenes.
If Windows 11 shows us anything about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, having them be the ring of power for LMM's makes the future of humanity look very bleak.
Didn't follow this closely, but isn't that implicitly what an ex-CEO could have possibly been accused off ie. not acting in the company's best interest but someone else's? Not unprecedented either eg. the case of Nokia/Elop.
That’s like trying to create MAD with the position you “may” launch nukes in retaliation.
The board is being given a sanity-check; I would expect the signers intentionally left themselves a bit of room for escalation/negotiation.
How often do you win arguments by leading off with an immutable ultimatum?
200 people or even 50 of the right people who are definitely going to resign will be much stronger than 500+ who "may" resign.
Disclaimer that this is a ludicrously difficult situation for all these folks, and my critique here is made from far outside the arena. I am in no way claiming that I would be executing this better in actual reality and I'm extremely fortunate not to be in their shoes.
It’s time to take a breath, step back, and wait until someone from OpenAI says something substantial.
This is the point where I've realized I just have to wait until history is written, rather than trying to follow this in real time.
The situation is too convoluted, and too many people are playing the media to try to advance their version of the narrative.
When there is enough distance from the situation for a proper historical retrospective to be written, I look forward to getting a better view of what actually happened.
Studying revolutions is revealing - they are rarely the invevitable product of historical forces, executed to the plans of strategic minded players... instead they are often accidental and inexplicable. Those credited as their masterminds were trying to stop them. Rather than inevitible, there was often progress in the opposite direction making people feel the liklihood was decreasing. The confusing paradoxical mess of great events doesn't make for a good story to tell others though.
On our present stage there is no director, no stage manager; the set is on fire. There are multiple actors - with more showing up by the minute - some of whom were working off a script that not everyone has seen, and that is now being rewritten on the fly, while others don't have any kind of script at all. They were sent for; they have appeared to take their place in the proceedings with no real understanding of what those are, like Rosencranz and Guildenstern.
This is kind of what the end thesis of War and Peace was like - there's no possible way that Napoleon could actually have known what was happening everywhere on the battlefield - by the time he learned something had happened, events on the scene had already advanced well past it; and the local commanders had no good understanding of the overall situation, they could only play their bit parts. And in time, these threads of ignorance wove a tale of a Great Victory, won by the Great Man Himself.
I don't need to follow in real-time, but a lot of the context and nuance can be clearly understood at the moment and so it stills helps to follow along even if that means lagging on the input.
This breathless real-time speculation may be fun, but now that social media amplifies the tiniest fart such that it has global reach, I feel like it just reinforces the general zeitgeist of "Oh, what the hell NOW? Everything is on fire." It's not like there's anything that we peasants can do to either influence the outcome, or adjust our own lives to accomodate the eventual reality.
Makes sense in a conspiracy theory mindset. AGI takes over, crashed $MSFT, buys calls on $MSFT, then this morning the markets go up when Sam & co join MSFT and the AGI has tons of money to spend.
Speculation is just on motivation, the facts are easy to establish.
er...what does that even mean? how can a board "take full control" of the thing they are the board for? they already have full control.
the actual facts are that the board, by majority vote, sacked the CEO and kicked someone else off the board.
then a lot of other stuff happened that's still becoming clear.
The subject in that sentence that takes full control is “3 members" not "board".
The board has control, but who controls the board changes based on time and circumstances.
It says 3 board members found themselves in a position to take over OpenAI.
Do they mean we've seen Sam Altman and allies making a bid to take over the entire of OpenAI, through its weird Charity+LLC+Holding company+LLC+Microsoft structure, eschewing its goals of openness and safety in pursuit of short-sighted riches.
Or do they mean we've seen The Board making a bid to take over the entire of OpenAI, by ousting Glorious Leader Sam Altman, while his team was going from strength to strength?
I mean, they were literally able to fire him... and they're still not looking like they have control. Quite the opposite.
I think anyone watching ChatGPT rise over the last year would see where the currents are flowing.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/newmans-philanthropic-excepti...
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/newmans-philanthropic-excepti...
> Introduced in June of 2017, the act amends the Revenue Code to allow private foundations to take complete ownership of a for-profit corporation under certain circumstances:
Ilya (at the urging of Satya and his colleagues including Mira) wanted to reinstate Sam, but the deal fell through with the Board outvoting Sustkever 3 to 1. With Mira deflecting, Adam got his mate Emmett to steady the ship but things went nuclear.
A conspiracy like the one proposed would basically be impossible to coordinate yet keep secret, especially considering the board members might loose their seats and their own market value.
The most plausible scenario here is that the board is comprised of people lacking in foresight who did something stupid. A lot of people are generating a 5D chess plot orchestrated by Microsoft in their heads.
Or possibly some misinformation. It does seem very strange, and more than a little confusing.
I have to keep reminding myself that information ultimately sourced from Twitter/X threads can't necessarily be taken at face value. Whatever the situation, I'm sure it will become clearer over the next few days.
Did not expect to see this whole thing still escalating! WOW! What a power move by MSFT.
I'm not even sure OpenAI will exist by the end of the week at this rate. Holy moly.
But don't be surprised if Shear also walks before the week is out, if some board members resign but others try to hold on and if half of OpenAI's staff ends up at Microsoft.
Seems a bit of a lose-lose for MSFT and OpenAI, even if best that MSFT could do to contain the situation. Competitors must be happy.
Competitors should be fearful. OpenAI was executing with weights around their ankles by virtue of trying to run as a weird "need lots of money but cant make a profit" company. Now they'll be fully bankrolled by one of the largest companies the world has ever seen and empowered by a whole bunch of hypermotivated-through-retribution leaders.
The leaders may be motivated by retribution, but I'm sure none of leaders or researchers really want to be a division of MSFT rather than a cool start-up. Many developers may chose to stay in SF and create their own startups, or join others. Signing the letter isn't a commitment to go to MSFT - just a way to pressure for a return to status quo they were happy with.
Not everyone is going to stay with OpenAI or move to MSFT - some developers will move elsewhere and the knowledge of OpenAI's secret sauce will spread.