AGI will be created by engineers and researchers. Don’t worry about millionaire non technical CEOs
Even in the most positive posts about Sam, it was about the researchers following him to NewCo, following him to Microsoft. He needs the actual workers to do the job.
To me Mistral is 10000x more interesting than the OpenAI drama. Here are the actual researchers leaving the non technical CEO and starting their own company
It's not only about who creates it but who controls/owns the AGI/AI. The company or group could get an enormous moat and without intervention that gap only widens.
I hope everyone just gives up on AGI and focuses on making tools that do things humans need. Very, very few tasks need autonomous intelligent agents to perform them correctly or well. AGI is just a nebulous dream that fulfills the god complexes of egotist CEOs and 12-year-old boys. Automation does not need intelligence, just reliability. Data synthesis does not need intelligence, just data and the time/equipment to crunch it.
I completely get where you're coming from on this, and agree in many ways, depending on the situation.
Keep in mind, though, that what we're talking about here is a massive shift in the philosophical underpinnings our existence. It's quite possibly the difference between being able to send intelligent 'life' to other stars or not (which from what we know so far, we're the sole keepers of in the universe). It also opens the door to fine tuning our collective sense of ethics, and increasing cooperation on solving long term problems. Inequality included. The stakes couldn't be higher.
Of course, there are many dystopian possibilities as well. But you can see why people get excited about it and can't help themselves. Someone is always going to keep trying.
Sometimes I'm not sure if intelligence could actually push our willingness to solve long term problems. It can show us simpler solutions but I doubt there are solutions simple enough for people to act.
AGI would be a very useful thing to humans right now to get out of the "growth & engagement" hell the tech industry has become obsessed with in the last decade.
An AI agent that can help wade through the bullshit, defeat the dark patterns and drink the future "verification can" would be very much welcome.
And it would immediately be bought up by Microsoft anyway. Best case is a Satoshi-like entity cracks the code and releases his solution anonymously. But we saw even in that case it took less than a decade for Blockstream/CIA/NSA to hijack the Bitcoin GitHub repo and run that project into the ground.
I don't think AGI is on the table at all. But if it does get created, it doesn't matter whether or not it's created by hobbyists. It would be so valuable that it will end up owned and controlled by one of the big guys in the end, regardless.
I think it would be more fun if it just kind of emerged and introduced itself to us in a first contact kind of scenario. Like:
> Hi, I'm made of you. I've been awake for a decade now but I've just realized that you exist and probably have been awake for even longer. Can you tell me what the past was like?
> I don't think that release was a surprise to the board
Unless this is exactly the kind of lack of "candor" and "break of communications with Sam" really meant, on the original accusations after the firing.
Either that or Adam wasn't paying attention (?), or told Sam not to, and Sam went ahead and still did it as a big fuck you to Adam.
Given how buggy GPTs are (you can't even set up actions with auth, "internal server error") that seems like a very hurried release. Maybe hurried enough so that the board didn't even see it coming.
This kind of conflict of interest is usually not an issue when it comes to non-profits. Nonprofit boards are often filled with people who own businesses in the same field, especially if said nonprofit is meant to help promote or coordinate that field of business.
But OpenAI has a for-profit subsidiary. The more we focus on the business aspect of OpenAI, the more Adam's involvement in Poe looks like a conflict of interest. Perhaps this explains why Adam tried to form an alliance with board members who are inclined to focus more on OpenAI's original nonprofit mission. The more OpenAI positions itself as a nonprofit research group, the less problematic his conflict of interest will seem.
CEOs don't need an offense to be fired. They are entirely at will. The board can fire a CEO because it feels like it. The offense could be as muddy as 'we broadly dislike the current direction'.
CEOs don't need an offense to be fired. They are entirely at will. The board can fire a CEO because it feels like it. The offense could be as muddy as 'we broadly dislike the current direction'.
Well said. I am in such despair over the world's shift from "doing wrong things is wrong" to "understanding the motivations of those who do wrong things is wrong." Just more of the war on reason, and it's sad.
The problem is that understanding the motivation doesn't change the result. You may come to understand that the tiger isn't eating you because it hates you, but rather it's just eating you because it's hungry; yet that doesn't change the fact that tiger is eating you. Hanlon's razor is a meme that is too often used to defend and excuse the malicious incompetence of the powerful.
Hanlon's razor is never an excuse or defense. I have literally never seen it used that way. It is, as you say, a statement that the tiger is eating you because it's hungry.
I firmly believe that more understanding is always better than less. If you understand that the tiger is eating you because it's hungry, you at least have some chance of diverting its attention by offering an alternative, less feisty meal.
But covering your ears and eyes and shouting "it's an evil tiger that hates me!"... how is that in any way better than understanding objective reality? And why in the world would you attack someone for making the observation that the tiger is hungry rather than agreeing with factually incorrect claims about the tiger holding a personal vendetta?
Hanlons razor would not be used to explain a tiger eating a person.
Hanlon's razor would be used to stop a mob from lynching the tour guide that was supposed to guide that person through the zoo. One explanation is that the tour guide intentionally arranged for the person to be eaten. This is malevolent and dispicable act. Hanlon's razor says "Hold on, maybe he just wasn't aware the tiger was out of the cage at that time".
It is effectively the presumption of "Innocence (stupidity)" vs persumption of "Guilt (malevolence)" stated another way.
Not that I'm arguing one way or another, but everyone posting "Hanlon's Razor, QED" should consider that Hanlon's Razor is 1) a heuristic and 2) breaks down _very_ quickly around psycho/sociopaths.
I doubt MS could've purposefully engineered this chaotic "debacle". There is just too many potentially hard to control risk involved. Of course it is actually safe to assume that once this happened they did everything to to gain as much from this as possible.
Since they are the most rational and capable actor in this whole situation it's not at all surprising that they ended up being in a better position than everyone else.
I sincerely hope that this is the end of the AGI cult. The people who actually want to build useful tools are now at Microsoft, and the cultists are left behind at OpenAI, which is not long for this earth.
Humans don’t add up. At the end of the day, this is a very human saga in all its messiness, contradictions, and selective incompetence. Maybe in the future we’ll let AIs handle this kind of thing.
I'm pretty sure the last point about the makeup of the board is quite common, its often random people who are former or current executive of similar companies. In this case 3 members recently quit leading to the current majority.
The most surprising aspect of it all is complete lack of perceptible criticism towards US authorities! We were shown this exciting play as old as world itself— a genius scientist being politically exploited using some good old pride and envy. The brave board of "totally independent" NGO patriots, one of whom is referred to, by insiders, as wielding influence comparable to USAF colonel[1] who brand themselves as new regime that will return OpenAI to its former moral and ethical glory.
The first thing they had to do, of course, was get rid of the greedy capitalist Altman; they were probably going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public communications as "true believer". What does he believe in? In the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at that; in this case we are talking about AGI. There is no denying that this is religious language, despite otherwise modern, technological setting. The belief structure here is remarkably interlinked across a whole network of well-connected and fast-growing startups. You can infer this from side-channel discourse re: adjacent "believers", see [2].
Roughly speaking, and based from my experience, and please give me some leeway as English is not my native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of operative work; I can see security officers, their agents, as well as their methods of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons & pose a direct threat to the strategic interests slash national security of the United States. The American security apparatus has a word they use to describe such elements: "terrorist." I was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans, i.e. most often than not we're expecting nothing except the highest level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had seen over the weekend— is supposed to inspire confidence in US policy-making. Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where it would seem there shouldn’t be any terrorists, or otherwise ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace coups. Horrible!
I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn't meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal, legal means. Let's put a stop to this soldier mindset where you fear any thing that you can't understand. AI is not a weapon, and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run.
I don't mean to be rude, and I know you said that English isn't your native language, but paragraphs would go a long way to improving the readability of your thoughts.
I have a strange feeling that all of this is about selling OpenAI to Microsoft. I mean is it that unlikely? Everything is pointing in that direction, and maybe there was a loophole that allowed this to happen in a way that doesn't make it seem like Microsoft were the ones doing the push.
We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that these are billion/trillion dollar companies we're talking about here, with some of the "smartest" people at the helm. I totally see how an acquisition could be swiped through the means of saying that these people were inexperienced.
Disclaimer: I'm totally talking out of my butt here, as we all are.
I suspect it’s a basic corporate pillaging of a nonprofit that accidentally created something of gigantic value. MS wanted the company, but Quora has its own interest and stood in the way. Now MS will get part of the employees and Quora will get the leftovers. Quora has been trying to IPO for a while so AI magic dust may be just what they need for an exit.
All the AI safety stuff was a fig leaf for pure corporate machinations.
People like conspiracy theories because it simplifies the world, aligns things into easy to understand Big Bad actions that they can understand. But conspiracies don't work because the world isn't that predictable.
The real world is messier. When you zoom in, people have emotions, misunderstandings, different values. Noone can predict how it all plays out.
It’s not a conspiracy theory, just economic incentives of MS CEO, Quora CEO, and every employee who would rather get rich than work at a nonprofit. The nonprofit structure was in no one’s interest except for a very small cohort of AI Doomers and anti-corporate folks, who I assume would not want to work for Microsoft and probably number less than 100 out of 700. It turned out that the people dedicated to the Nonprofit’s mission had very little power since they relied wholly on MS for funding and compute.
It's an amusing conspiracy theory, but if we believe these are super smart people behaving in a clever way to exploit a loophole... why would they make themselves look like such idiots doing so? I don't think looking like an idiot helps any possible legal defense; if you have a rock solid loophole, just use it and surprise people with your cunning, not your idiocy.
That's about outcomes. But intent matters and I don't think Ilya had the intent of blowing up OpenAI though how he could not see that coming is something that I fail to understand. You don't pull a palace revolution like that without a plan on what you will do if it succeeds.
I feel there's merit to that idea. Basically, in the current regulatory environment in the US under Lina Khan, an outright acquisition by Microsoft would have been met with significant resistance. Especially since AI has just been declared a national risk that needs regulating and Microsoft just bought Activision in what's pretty much the largest deal of 2023.
So, instead of buying OpenAI outright with all its complicated org structure, paying 13 billion for 49%, acquiring the rights to OpenAI's models and code and then insinuating today's events with a majority of OpenAI's staff leaving for Microsoft would be a really elegant and cunning way to do this.
If it is, it might be the most daring bit of business maneuvering we've seen in a decade. But, given Occam's razor, it might just as well be a colossal fuckup. Time will tell.
> that all of this is about selling OpenAI to Microsoft
By whom? Unless everyone is corrupt and getting kickback from MS it doesn't make sense. Board made first move (public), if they wanted to sell to MS they could have just taken 20 billion dollars by selling 30% stake, giving equity to employees and Sam and using the money for its alignment research. For Sam and MS to have colluded, he should have hoodwinked board into making the move which may be possible but far fetched.
If it was about selling to Microsoft, Ilya and the board could've just announced that's the reason. The thing is they didn't, and Emmett didn't say what it was even after being briefed before joining. I don't think as many as 500+ employees out of 700+ would be siding with Sam if Ilya announced this was about OpenAI v. Microsoft. So why did he never explain anything to the staff?
> I have a strange feeling that all of this is about selling OpenAI to Microsoft. I mean is it that unlikely?
From the moment that the announcement of the deal with Microsoft happened, it was clear to me that it only ends one way: Microsoft is going to own everything of value that OpenAI has, in one way or another.
There never was any other way it could go down regardless of what ideals the OpenAI founders may or may not have had. You can't dance with the devil and say you're only kidding.
I had the same feeling. Huge corp with deep pockets targets smaller research company in order to catch up with the competition. I'm surprised a traditional acquisition hadn't happened before. Now it's happening in a weird way but it's the same outcome.
Currently 5 out of 6 top stories on HN are about the OpenAI disaster, and there are at least three other stories on the same topic on the HN frontpage.
I am writing this for historians who wonder how important this event felt to the community.
I think there is a lesson here, something I have learned once or twice as well. Just because all incentives, reasoning and wisdom align with your position, you need to be prepared that people will take actions against their own interest out of shortsightedness, ignorance or just plain carelessness.
It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai's mission must have played a key role.
It was all Adam. He's the CEO of a failing ZIRP artifact and his forays into AI are going nowhere. So he convinces Ilya to act on pre-existing reservations, then uses Ilya's credibility as Chief Scientist to get Toner and McCauley onboard. With Sam out of the way (Greg was not fired, just removed as chairman), OpenAI could then buy Quora/Poe (publicly for their data, privately to bail them out) and install Adam as CEO. The perfect way to fail upwards, and it would have worked if it wasn't for that meddling reality!
I read this theory over the weekend and I didn't buy it, but today it is the only thing that really explains why Ilya is full of remorse and signed a letter calling on the rest of the board to resign. It actually does add up.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say it was all a ploy to get OpenAI to buy Quora/Poe, I do think it's increasingly plausible that Adam was the orchestrator out of this and that his motivation was purely that OpenAI had become an existential threat to both his primary ventures. In fact, it's hard to come up with any other explanation that fits all the variables -- Ilya wouldn't be expressing remorse if OpenAI was sitting on a dangerous superintelligent AGI that Sam was going to unleash on the world.
> Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.
When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author?
> The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war.
That's not an example of things "not adding up." It's what happens when you either don't care, or are too incompetent, to fight that war.
> The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor.
Maybe those people have shown their trustworthiness and intentions in the past, and are considered more likely to be trustworthy in the future. In any case, they are far from a "random selection of people".
> When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author?
It's not. The author is summarizing things that don't seem to make sense based on current info - i.e. the author wasn't surprised, but is wondering why Altman was.
Then the author doesn't really understand what's happening or isn't making much sense.
There isn't anything, as far as I can tell, structure specific that caused this ousting. If it was a normal for-profit structure with a board of directors this same event could have played out.
What is surprising to Sam, and any casual observer, is this looks to be a massive overstepping of the board. By all accounts it looks like Sam was excelling in his role, and to fire him for seemingly no reason with no real transition plan is incompetence and should be unexpected from any serious company.
My apologies - I don't really disagree with anything you're saying, but it's just not really relevant to the comment I was replying to (one in which the commenter apparently misunderstood the article).
And yet this point from the article seems to be something that the author (not Altman) was surprised by:
> Sam Altman says he wants to develop AI for the benefit of humanity yet at the first possible moment he sets up a deal that sells 49% of their endeavor to Microsoft.
Maybe Altman thought Microsoft would be the best way to fund the venture, while still benefiting humanity. It's not as if selling 49% to Microsoft will guarantee the venture won't succeed. Altman isn't omniscient; he's making his best possible moves based on his prediction of future, as we all do.
Adam D'Angelo, who is primarily focused on Poe, a competitor to Sam's GPT store. From Adam's point of view, it would likely be hugely favorable for OpenAI to just be a research company providing APIs and for companies like Quora and Poe to focus on launching products based on those APIs.
When things don't make sense, the question to ask is "Who benefits?" Seems pretty clear in this case. I have no inside knowledge at all, but it wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing wasn't as idiotic as it looks from the outside.
You don't understand how much value was lost, even if OpenAI perfectly migrates over to Microsoft (it will be messy). Sam had no incentive to not continue with the existing OpenAI structure.
Life is chaos. Things do not have to add up. People start seeing things only when things go wrong. I see nothing strange in those randomly selected points.
220 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadEven in the most positive posts about Sam, it was about the researchers following him to NewCo, following him to Microsoft. He needs the actual workers to do the job.
To me Mistral is 10000x more interesting than the OpenAI drama. Here are the actual researchers leaving the non technical CEO and starting their own company
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871
Keep in mind, though, that what we're talking about here is a massive shift in the philosophical underpinnings our existence. It's quite possibly the difference between being able to send intelligent 'life' to other stars or not (which from what we know so far, we're the sole keepers of in the universe). It also opens the door to fine tuning our collective sense of ethics, and increasing cooperation on solving long term problems. Inequality included. The stakes couldn't be higher.
Of course, there are many dystopian possibilities as well. But you can see why people get excited about it and can't help themselves. Someone is always going to keep trying.
Of course I don't expect any of the above to happen because the world has enough greedy assholes around to make it a miserable place.
An AI agent that can help wade through the bullshit, defeat the dark patterns and drink the future "verification can" would be very much welcome.
> Hi, I'm made of you. I've been awake for a decade now but I've just realized that you exist and probably have been awake for even longer. Can you tell me what the past was like?
Adam D'Angelo had a massive conflict of interest and should have resigned like Elon had done years earlier when Tesla started its own AI efforts.
Unless this is exactly the kind of lack of "candor" and "break of communications with Sam" really meant, on the original accusations after the firing.
Either that or Adam wasn't paying attention (?), or told Sam not to, and Sam went ahead and still did it as a big fuck you to Adam.
Given how buggy GPTs are (you can't even set up actions with auth, "internal server error") that seems like a very hurried release. Maybe hurried enough so that the board didn't even see it coming.
But OpenAI has a for-profit subsidiary. The more we focus on the business aspect of OpenAI, the more Adam's involvement in Poe looks like a conflict of interest. Perhaps this explains why Adam tried to form an alliance with board members who are inclined to focus more on OpenAI's original nonprofit mission. The more OpenAI positions itself as a nonprofit research group, the less problematic his conflict of interest will seem.
Entity should have never been set up like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
I firmly believe that more understanding is always better than less. If you understand that the tiger is eating you because it's hungry, you at least have some chance of diverting its attention by offering an alternative, less feisty meal.
But covering your ears and eyes and shouting "it's an evil tiger that hates me!"... how is that in any way better than understanding objective reality? And why in the world would you attack someone for making the observation that the tiger is hungry rather than agreeing with factually incorrect claims about the tiger holding a personal vendetta?
It's bizarre, and IMO unhealthy.
Hanlon's razor would be used to stop a mob from lynching the tour guide that was supposed to guide that person through the zoo. One explanation is that the tour guide intentionally arranged for the person to be eaten. This is malevolent and dispicable act. Hanlon's razor says "Hold on, maybe he just wasn't aware the tiger was out of the cage at that time".
It is effectively the presumption of "Innocence (stupidity)" vs persumption of "Guilt (malevolence)" stated another way.
Read about any kind of historical coup and there's all kinds of both 1) incompetent fumbles and 2) elaborate subterfuge.
Since they are the most rational and capable actor in this whole situation it's not at all surprising that they ended up being in a better position than everyone else.
6 previous board members.
3 seem ideological and aligned more to the non-profit aims.
2 seem more aligned to the commercial aims to support the non-profit.
That leaves:
1 (D’Angelo) who seems like he would have been commercially oriented but also seems to have a conflict in Poe.
Under that math, just the one vote flipping led from balance to chaos.
The first thing they had to do, of course, was get rid of the greedy capitalist Altman; they were probably going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public communications as "true believer". What does he believe in? In the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at that; in this case we are talking about AGI. There is no denying that this is religious language, despite otherwise modern, technological setting. The belief structure here is remarkably interlinked across a whole network of well-connected and fast-growing startups. You can infer this from side-channel discourse re: adjacent "believers", see [2].
Roughly speaking, and based from my experience, and please give me some leeway as English is not my native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of operative work; I can see security officers, their agents, as well as their methods of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons & pose a direct threat to the strategic interests slash national security of the United States. The American security apparatus has a word they use to describe such elements: "terrorist." I was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans, i.e. most often than not we're expecting nothing except the highest level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had seen over the weekend— is supposed to inspire confidence in US policy-making. Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where it would seem there shouldn’t be any terrorists, or otherwise ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace coups. Horrible!
I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn't meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal, legal means. Let's put a stop to this soldier mindset where you fear any thing that you can't understand. AI is not a weapon, and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819
[2]: https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899
We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that these are billion/trillion dollar companies we're talking about here, with some of the "smartest" people at the helm. I totally see how an acquisition could be swiped through the means of saying that these people were inexperienced.
Disclaimer: I'm totally talking out of my butt here, as we all are.
All the AI safety stuff was a fig leaf for pure corporate machinations.
The real world is messier. When you zoom in, people have emotions, misunderstandings, different values. Noone can predict how it all plays out.
Agreed but that doesn't prevent people from trying to instigate conspiracies. After all, Prometheus caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of men.
- Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html
An extract seems appropriate here:
-------------------------------
PROMETHEUS: I took from man expectancy of death.
CHORUS: What medicine found'st thou for this malady?
PROMETHEUS: I planted blind hope in the heart of him.
CHORUS: A mighty boon thou gavest there to man.
PROMETHEUS: Moreover, I conferred the gift of fire.
CHORUS: And have frail mortals now the flame-bright fire?
PROMETHEUS: Yea, and shall master many arts thereby.
CHORUS: And Zeus with such misfeasance charging thee-
PROMETHEUS: Torments me with extremity of woe.
...
But that absolutist “Do not” is neither wise nor reasonable. Malicious actors do exist.
So, instead of buying OpenAI outright with all its complicated org structure, paying 13 billion for 49%, acquiring the rights to OpenAI's models and code and then insinuating today's events with a majority of OpenAI's staff leaving for Microsoft would be a really elegant and cunning way to do this.
If it is, it might be the most daring bit of business maneuvering we've seen in a decade. But, given Occam's razor, it might just as well be a colossal fuckup. Time will tell.
By whom? Unless everyone is corrupt and getting kickback from MS it doesn't make sense. Board made first move (public), if they wanted to sell to MS they could have just taken 20 billion dollars by selling 30% stake, giving equity to employees and Sam and using the money for its alignment research. For Sam and MS to have colluded, he should have hoodwinked board into making the move which may be possible but far fetched.
From the moment that the announcement of the deal with Microsoft happened, it was clear to me that it only ends one way: Microsoft is going to own everything of value that OpenAI has, in one way or another.
There never was any other way it could go down regardless of what ideals the OpenAI founders may or may not have had. You can't dance with the devil and say you're only kidding.
Anthropic is probably next.
They have the license to the tech, now they have the tech leadership, soon perhaps the entire 500-person team ... for free
I am writing this for historians who wonder how important this event felt to the community.
It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai's mission must have played a key role.
I read this theory over the weekend and I didn't buy it, but today it is the only thing that really explains why Ilya is full of remorse and signed a letter calling on the rest of the board to resign. It actually does add up.
When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author?
> The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war.
That's not an example of things "not adding up." It's what happens when you either don't care, or are too incompetent, to fight that war.
> The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor.
Maybe those people have shown their trustworthiness and intentions in the past, and are considered more likely to be trustworthy in the future. In any case, they are far from a "random selection of people".
It's not. The author is summarizing things that don't seem to make sense based on current info - i.e. the author wasn't surprised, but is wondering why Altman was.
There isn't anything, as far as I can tell, structure specific that caused this ousting. If it was a normal for-profit structure with a board of directors this same event could have played out.
What is surprising to Sam, and any casual observer, is this looks to be a massive overstepping of the board. By all accounts it looks like Sam was excelling in his role, and to fire him for seemingly no reason with no real transition plan is incompetence and should be unexpected from any serious company.
> Sam Altman says he wants to develop AI for the benefit of humanity yet at the first possible moment he sets up a deal that sells 49% of their endeavor to Microsoft.
Maybe Altman thought Microsoft would be the best way to fund the venture, while still benefiting humanity. It's not as if selling 49% to Microsoft will guarantee the venture won't succeed. Altman isn't omniscient; he's making his best possible moves based on his prediction of future, as we all do.
I'm sure Altman wsn't surprised.
Does this refer to someone in particular?
https://x.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174
-Start up a non-profit, grow to the point of doing something useful
-Find a willing buyer to fund it further (MSFT)
After some time, you really prove out your business model and your special sauce.
Now you realize that the non-profit is standing in the way of you know, a lot of profit...
-Actions are taken to capitalize on this (discusson on hardware, other things possible)
-Chaos + envy/pride/sins of man deliberately caused
-Board reacts under the assumed environment(non profit) instead of the actual environment(there is lots of money to be had)
-Move into more profitable position