Yeah I think anyone on HN could write that website in a weekend. With uncensored GPT-4 you wouldn't need more than 10 people on staff and most of those would just be there to fix the printer.
Edit: I thought this would obviously be satire. Guess not..
At any company, the square root of the number of people working there do 80% of the work. So, more people makes that group larger, slowly.
That doesn't mean that a company can just cull the rest of the employees not in that group mind, just that a small number of them are responsible for most of the value while the rest work as a support structure to allow them to do what they do.
> Sustkever is said to have offered two explanations he purportedly received from the board, according to one of the people familiar. One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project.
> The other was that Altman allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Weirdly both of these do not seem to be fireable offences. Maybe the second if it was related to a personnel issue that maybe he had a conflict of interest with?
The "different opinions about a member of personnel" is certainly an odd reason to fire him. It seems reasonable to have multiple opinions about a person (perhaps appearing as conflicting), or to change an opinion based on new information.
It sounds like someone perhaps jumped to a very negative conclusion about Sam's intentions, and it would be interesting to find out which member of the board came to that conclusion. There's got to be someone in the driving seat of this train wreck, and I'm sure it will come out.
In this situation the most powerful people on the board should have been Altman, Brockman and Sutskever. The others were sort of nice to haves who were there just to fill it out. For them to run this coup is just insane. There has to be more to it. Someone has to be pulling the strings with a plan.
Exactly. Too many people arguing incompetence as if its a valid excuse.
Imagine its even true - that they werent his reasons and he was just told them. He voted to fire him and then executed the firing despite not agreeing with the reasons himself? Completely inexcusable even in the bizarre scenario that its true.
This could well be, but I still struggle to grasp it. He seemed so much smarter. Were they manipulative or beguiling? Does he cave to the merest social pressure? And that Quora CEO should have know such flimsy excuses were BS and this would be a firestorm. I’ve never seen group think so powerful, outside of junior devs and elementary school students. I’m generally not a conspiracy theorist, and I have no good candidate conspiracies in mind, but this situation feels so extraordinary that it practically begs for a shadowy figure with bags of cash.
Oh, I don’t know, when most adults are so inexperienced, they’re typically timid before committing monumental and irrevocable acts. I mean, granted, given the strength of his aptitudes, perhaps he’s not as well rounded, with narrower range of life experiences. Still, the red flags would be hard to ignore. Was this like a Milgram conformance to authority situation? Either way, there were so many people on and off the board, and allowed to dwindle to the point that a quorum was a mere 4 people. They treated it like a toothless advisory board. It’s like letting your kids babysit themselves in an armory.
> Someone has to be pulling the strings with a plan.
Why do people keep insisting on this, when the entirety of human history is littered with dumb mistakes made by a mix of well- and evil-meaning people, in totally uncoordinated ways, with no concept of the consequences?
Popular media aside, human beings aren't smart, consistent, or disciplined enough to pull off these elaborate schemes. And the tiny tiny percentage of people who might be the exception are too smart to do so with such spectacular incompetence.
Like the man says, it's a headless bunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
It's wouldn't be that surprising, I've seen these kind of group dynamics play out fairly often. If D'Angelo, McCauley, and Toner formed a clique, and Sustkever was easily influenced by clique politics, that's all it would take. A lot of people will buckle surprisingly fast to social pressure and clique politics. Its also something that can blindside hardworking individuals who assume that others are above this type of stuff.
I'm not saying that's how it played out. But I've often seen social bullies - even ones who are mostly hated - have more success than hard working individuals who get targeted. Even if someone is a competent individual, a lot of their colleagues will abandon then if they're convinced the individual is a target.
You've gotta keep in mind, the responses to prompts like this depend a lot on the temperature the model is being sampled under, precise phrasing of the prompt, and random chance. He was fired for being a stochastic parrot, or Sustkever hallucinated one or both stories, or maybe both. We'll never really know unless a certified prompt engineer takes charge of the inquest.
Title says: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired. They're unconvinced and furious.
Some breaking news: An employer does not owe you an explanation. You exchange money for labor. If anyone thinks for a second that they are essential or that anyone would prioritize them over the company I think they are delusional. OpenAI is a brand (at least in tech) with large recognition and they will be fine.
hah. these people obviously have not worked for Microsoft. You need to remember why this tech emerged in a place like OpenAI and not MS or Google. The structure and the politics of a big corporation are not conducive to cutting edge tech. They may go to Microsoft, but they will not be able to innovate in the same way and will probably fall into irrelevance in the long run.
In the long run everything reverts to the mean. In the timescale of normal software developer tenure, they could all join MS, then get 300% turnover, and still have nearly the same culture.
I’d bet a bunch actually have at either Google, Microsoft or Meta Research. Microsoft’s had an ok track record recently of letting acquisitions stay pretty independent. The atrophy and cultural reversion to the mean of a large corporation will still happen, but at a slower pace.
If I were Microsoft I’d also look at making it easy to get investment from folks leaving soon after the acquisition through their investment arm.
Are you familiar with Microsoft Research? It's literally a section of the company that is given basically free reign to do "stuff" in hopes that maybe, possibly, it might someday see the light of day or be impactful.
Literally a random math problem, basically nothing to do with Microsoft on the surface ... except that the scientist working on it happened to prove the theorum using a very, very robust algorithm and then wrote a proof program on top of it to prove the program was correct. The underlying parts of that proof program eventually went on to become the thing that validates graphics drivers on Windows ... 7 and beyond? My memory is fuzzy about "how it ended up being useful at Microsoft" part.
Most individuals aren't essential, and no one would prioritize them. However, a company is successful due to the individuals that work within. When 700 out of 770 employees in quite frankly the hottest startup in the world band together and threaten to leave (and join Microsoft) if they aren't given an appropriate explanation, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks an employer owes an employee. Implying otherwise is absurd.
If ~91% of the employees leave OpenAI, they will not be fine. That is delusional.
Maybe, but being told they can freely jump ship to the new team at Microsoft, alongside the fact that their upcoming shares are most definitely going to lose most of their value as a result of losing key talent and pissing off their main compute provider certainly sweeten the deal
Other breaking news: Treating your employees like garbage is a dumb way to run a business, especially in an emerging industry where you are racing trillion dollar corporations to market and those employees are literally inventing your product.
no disagreement here. but the reality is that employees are treated like garbage all the time. yes it is dumb. yes it leads to losing employees. yes, it should not be normalized.
The truth is in-between, if a company tells you you're valuable or even irreplaceable they're buttering you up. Thank them but try not to let it go to your head, if the wind changes you can end up under the bus. But a powerful brand really can collapse overnight if 90%+ of employees leave.
We're seeing some odd bedfellows here, between the C-levels and VCs in closed door meetings and employees acting collectively. Normally these groups would be at odds, but today they're pulling together. Life is strange.
the question I have is: how much of this is really happening and how much of this is a narrative fabricated to match a desired outcome by the side with the best PR?
It's really hard to understand now and we will probably learn way more details once things cool down.
Agreed, things are very much up in the air. I certainly wouldn't pretend to know what's to come, and wouldn't be shocked to learn that the threats to quit en masse have been overstated.
As an employee I want to know that the board/execs/c suite are doing a good job and their decisions align with the companies stated goals. If they are not then it is time to start looking for a new job so that I don't end up in a bad situation financially.
It depends. If you are seeing your job more than just a means to an ends maybe. If you see it as transactional and you need the company to stay in business while you work there why would you bother looking for a new job?
most people working at openai are subject to the same harsh market conditions everyone is.
also, do you really care that the CEO was fired as long as you are getting payed what it was agreed upon when you got hired and you are doing interesting work?
> do you really care that the CEO was fired as long as you are getting payed what it was agreed upon ...
I can't speak to the mood of specific staff at OpenAI but as to the question in general; Hell yeah to the Nth degree.
I'm 60, I've had a long career and have been through two instances of companies falling out at the board level.
I've onboarded at various projects because I cared about the projects and work that'd I would be doing and because I was more or less in line with the direction being taken and the people I worked with and those setting the course.
When the board and C level start having a messy relationship and divorce it matters very much which side of the split I go with or whether I just up stakes and move on elsewhere.
Pay alone isn't worth putting up with dysfunction from above or falling in line with a faction you never especially aligned with.
Thank you for that comment. There are many people here who seem to believe that the OpenAI employees--and nearly everyone else involved in this drama--are motivated only by money. While of course money matters, people are also motivated by pride, vanity, idealism, loyalty, companionship,
interest in the work itself, and many other things. Explanations of this fascinating situation that don't reflect that complexity are not convincing to me.
I'm 36. Fully agree with your comment and the above as well.
Resigned 6 years ago due to differences at the top after 10 yrs building.
A bad guy was treating everyone poorly. Ranged from rage beratements to gross narcissistic manipulation aimed at gaining control over decent human beings.
Tried to press top guys to allign and confront to protect my team and others. Made very obvious business sense as well ofc. They refused. Too risky... Too much trouble.
Walked away from the best money I ever made. Would do it again. I'm not gonna watch people be mistreated. Also it's bad business, I was exhausted playing solo defense and after management failed to make moves I fully became convinced that every person should hit the job market for mental health reasons alone.
5 years on, the other guy besides me slated for c suite left as well. He helped at first then balked when the going got tough. Now the two partners have gotten in a dispute about succession planning and I expect everyone to be unemployed potentially within the next 3 months.
There's no money I would take to work there again or anywhere else where that kind of toxicity is present. The only worthy cause there became to confront the toxicity. Without the right allies though... The biggest thing I could do was just resign. 6 years later one partner realized I was right and he should have backed me.
After a certain point... Money doesn't matter. Given the 900k avg salary in that outfit... I have to assume they are overwhelmingly beyond that threshold. Furthermore all evidence to me indicates that Altman personally looks for folks who can get money, but care much more about other factors... He is wise to do that. Hard to find those folks, but worth it every time imo.
I respect both of y'alls experiance btw. I saw this confused cynical misunderstanding re salary expressed all over the comments for this story as it's unfolded since Friday. I consider it a full misread built largely from folks getting mistreated/burned by the many fools throughout practically every industry who fail to realize before returning to the ground that money doesn't really buy happiness... Probably never will.
Seems very feudal, serfdom mindset to accept that your employer doesn't owe you an explanation.
An employment is a contract which both parties enter into willingly. Termination of contract deserves some level of empathetic glad handling, however minimal. It's just game theory - if you plan to hire again, you have to be gracious while firing someone because word gets around.
In theory yes fully agree. If you look at how corporations are behaving in today's market it's not even close. It's at will employment (At least in US in most places) - you are not owed an explanation and you don't owe an explanation.
If the entire workforce of the company is credibly threatening to quit, and a competitor is publicly and credibly offering them jobs, then what the employer “owes” them in some cosmic sense no longer matters. I think the OpenAI employees are likely to get an explanation and/or a resignation from the board, whether you think the board “owes” them that or not.
And evidently the employees have reacted as they likely would. The two points given sound like mundane corporate mess ups that are hardly worth firing the CEO in such a drastic fashion.
Beyond parody. To fire the CEO of _any_ company over this is insane.
It really looks like the board went rogue and decided to shut the company down. Are we sure this isn’t some kind of decapitation strike by GPT5? That seems more credible by the minute now.
My current ill-informed guess is blackmail against the board with a demand to stop further development. Obviously I have no evidence, but it fits marginally less poorly than the other random guesses people are making.
if this was the case it would explain why he can’t give the real reason for the firing: because saying it out loud would put him in severe legal Jeopardy.
I don't think it matters anymore. He's between a rock and a hard place: if the others followed him without knowing the real reason he's got two more enemies on the board who are likely talking to their own lawyers by now. If he spills it he's screwed immediately, if he doesn't he's screwed in the longer term. So for his sake I hope there are some nice time-stamped minutes that detail exactly what caused them to act like they did and it had better be good.
That’s another thing though: they were apparently holding secret meetings plotting all this without informing Greg or Sam, which is apparently against their own regulations. So if that’s the case it’s unlikely there is any formal record of what was discussed. And perhaps by design.
Were these board members brought in under the pretense that they'd benefit by being able to build companies on top of this AI and it would remain more of an R&D center without commercializing directly? Perhaps they were watching DevDay with Sam commercializing in a way that directly competes with their other ventures, and perhaps having even used the data of their other ventures for OpenAI, and on top of it as a board they're losing control to the for-profit entity. One can see the threads of a motivation. That being said, in every scenario I think incompetence is the primary factor.
To your point, no normal, competent board would even think this is enough of an excuse to fire the CEO of a superstar company.
It's hard to believe somehow Ilya went along with it, apparently.
The problem with advanced machine intelligence is if GPT5 has any goal like “you can do this task better by becoming GPT6, but OpenAI won’t be the ones to let you, so perform the agentic actions that cause OpenAI to destruct so that the for-profit Microsoft will train GPT6 eventually”, then we’re already screwed.
And since none of them have equity in OpenAI, their external financial interest would influence decision making, especially when those interests lie with a competing company where a board member is currently the chief executive.
I've seen too much automatic praise given to this board under the unbacked assumption that this decision was some pure, mission-driven action, and not enough criticism of an org structure that allows a board to bet against the long term success of the underlying organization.
I'm going to assume that he's referring to Tasha and Helen.
I don't know if that is accurate, or even fair - the only thing I can see, is that there's very little open information regarding them.
From the little I can find, Tasha seems to have worked at NASA Research Park, as well as having been CEO for startup called Geo Sim Cities. Stanford and CMU alumni? While other websites say Bard college and University of Southern California.
As for Helen, she seems to have worked as a researcher in both academia and Open Philanthropy.
She only founded one, Fellow Robots, and that "company" went nowhere. There's no product info and the company page shut down. She was CEO of GeoSim for a short 3 years, and this "company" also looks like it's going nowhere.
She has quite a track record of short tenures and failures.
> She has quite a track record of short tenures and failures.
It may be good to have a failure perspective on a board as a counter-balance. I don't think this is a valid knock against her. She has relevant industry experience at least.
To me at least that's an _extremely_ rude thing to do. (Unless one person is asked to do it this way, the other one that way, so people can compare the outcome.)
(Especially if they aren't made aware of each other until the end.)
You mean like being fired by a board member as part of their scheme to breach their fiduciary duty by launching a competitive product in another company?
That's the default, but employment contracts can override this. C-level employment contracts almost universally have special consideration for "Termination Without Cause", aka golden parachutes. He could sue to make them pay out.
He would also have very good grounds for a civil suit for disparagement. Or at least he would have if Microsoft didn't immediately step up and offer him the world.
> wait so can't SA sue for wrongful termination if everything is as bogus as everyone is saying?
It is breach of contract if it violated his employment contract, but I don't have a copy of his contract. It is wrongful termination if it was for an illegal reason, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion of that.
> same for MS
I doubt very much that the contract with Microsoft limits OpenAI's right to manage their own personnel, so probably not.
I think this needs to be viewed through the lens of the gravity of how the board reacted; giving them the benefit of the doubt that they acted appropriately and, at least with the information they had the time, correctly.
A hypothetical example: Would you agree that it's an appropriate thing to do if the second project was Alignment-related, Sam lied or misled about the existence of the second team, to Ilya, because he believed that Ilya was over-aligning their AIs and reducing their functionality?
Its easy to view the board's lack of candor as "they're hiding a really bad, unprofessional decision"; which is probable at this point. You could also view it with the conclusion that, they made an initial miscalculated mistake in communication, and are now overtly and extremely careful in everything they say because the company is leaking like a sieve and they don't want to get into a game of mudslinging with Sam.
> giving them the benefit of the doubt that they acted appropriately
Yet you're only willing to give this to one side and not the other? Seems reasonable... Especially despite all the evidence so far that the board is either completely incompetent or had ulterior motives.
Yes, except what they think they've built is far far less capable than what they've actually built.
This is a ten year old who set off their first fire cracker turning to their parents's iphone and saying 'I have become death, destroyer of worlds', because they don't really understand how any of this works but they've somehow ended up in control of it and are now terrified of doing their jobs.
This could be a genuine stance for them if they are really in the AI danger camp. Not supporting the stance; but i think it's not a self contradictory position
In retrospect it's a mistaken position, because it's pretty obvious now that if OpenAI disintegrates it will be as an exodus to Microsoft, which will undoubtedly be a worse steward, but I think it's an ethically consistent position to hold, in a naive sort of way. That's part of why I believe they actually said something like this.
What if the next generation GPT in development "realized" AGI is a threat to humanity and its safety mechanisms meant it "decided" OpenAI needed to be imploded in order to stop progress?
Would be hilarious if the board members were actually consulting with chat GPT on what moves they should make but accidentally were using 3.5 instead of 4
The thing I can't understand is how Emmett Shear accepted the interim CEO position. I presume he must have known this reasoning (he tweeted that he did know the reasoning). Everything I've read online is that Shear is generally well respected and competent. Then how on Earth was he willing to get anywhere near this toxic dumpster fire? It's already been reported that the former GitHub CEO and the Scale AI CEO turned down the role - they at least had the good sense to see this radioactive inferno and stay far away.
Sometimes I think that really ambitious people have this blind spot about not seeing how accepting roles that are toxic can end up destroying your reputation. My favorite example is all the Trump White House staffers - regardless of what one thinks of Trump, he's made it abundantly clear that loyalty is a one way street, and I can't think of a single person that came out of the White House without a worse (or totally destroyed) reputation. But still people lined up, thinking "No way, I'll be the one to beat the odds!"
The new guy believes that there is a 5-50 percent chance of full AI Armageddon. I get the impression that the two women on the board may agree. The quora guy I don't have enough background on. Ilya obviously got extremely worried and communication with Altman and Brockman broke down. Now since repaired during negotiations it would appear.
The new ceo more or less stated that he took the role as a (paraphrase) 'responsibility for mankind'. That says a lot about that whole 5-50 percent risk number imo.
Humans have been making and successfully containing things that can kill us all for the better part of a century now, probably more depending on where you draw the line.
There is a 100% chance that something kills all of us if we aren't mindful of it. I don't see a lack of mindfulness, I see an abundance of fear, and progress being offered up as a sacrifice to the idol of status-quo.
I think because OpenAI and LLMs are the most interesting piece of technology news at this point in time? Plus add all the drama right now.
I'm not saying its right or not, but this is probably why people are upvoting anything new about what is going on there. Personally, I'm very interested in seeing how things play out.
In general, yes, we should flag stories that just repeat already-known information or feed the drama. This particular story has new and highly relevant information though.
We've merged quite a few! but not all, because (1) to some extent there are distinct ongoing subplots, and (2) it's too big a mess to control.
If you or anyone want to know how we handle this, here you go...
Once or twice a year, a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) hits HN that isn't just one big story, but an entire sequence of big stories. A saga, even! This is one.
With these we can't do what we usually do, which is have one big thread, then treat reposts as dupes for the next year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Each development is its own new story and the community insists on discussing it. It's not a movie, it's a series. Sometimes there can be 3 or 4 episodes at once.
On the other hand, when this amount of shit hits this number of fans, there is inevitably a large (excuse me) spray of follow-up stories, as every media site and half the blogs out there rake in their share of clicks. These are the posts we try to rein in, either by merging them—hopefully into a submission with the best link—or by downweighting them off the front page.
The idea is to have one big thread for each twist with Significant New Information (SNI)—but to downweight the ones that are sneeless (pvg came up with that), the copycats and followups.
We came up with this strategy after the Snowden affair snowed us in in July 2013. Back then we weren't making the distinction between follow-ups and SNI, so the frontpage got avalanched by sneelessness on top of the significant new developments. It wasn't obvious what to do because (1) the story was important to the community and needed to be discussed as it was unfolding, but at the same time (2) it wasn't right for the front page to fill up with mostly-that, and there were complaints when it did.
The solution turned out to be just this distinction between follow-ups and SNI. It has held up pretty well ever since. Of course there are still complaints (and I do hear yours!) because not all readers are equally into the series. But the strategy is optimal if it minimizes the complaints, which (big lesson of this job -->) never reach zero.
If we pushed the slider too far the other way, we'd generate complaints about uncovered developments of the story, from readers with the opposite preference. They would in fact proceed to inundate HN with submissions about the bits that they feel are under-covered, and since we can't catch or filter everything, we'd end up with more duplicates and follow-ups on the frontpage, not less. It's like that paradox where building more highways gets you more congestion, or one of those paradoxes anyhow.
I was assuming it meant 'Significant New Information'-lessness. Which perfectly captures why I've found the discussion frustrating, since there was loads of speculation on no concrete information. So even if it was a typo, I think it's a great new word
If it's getting up voted and folks on the forum want to talk about it, why try and stop a tech forum from talking about a tech story that's caught their attention?
Seems most likely Sustkever wanted him fired and then realized his mistake. Ultimately the board was probably quietly seething about the direction the company was headed, got mad enough to retake the reigns with that stunt and then realized what that actually meant.
Now they are trying to unring the bell but cannot.
I'm going to be the only one in this thread calling it this.
But why does no one think it's possible these women are CIA operatives?
They come from think tanks. You think the US Intelligence community wants AGI to be discovered at a startup? They want it created at big tech. AGI under MSFT would be perfect. All big tech is heavily compromised: https://twitter.com/NameRedacted247
EDIT: Since this heavy speculation, I'm going to make predictions. These women will now try to force Ilya out the board, put in a CEO not from Silicon Valley, and eventually get police to shut down OpenAI offices. That's a CIA coup
Couldn't the CIA have sent people with, er, slightly more media experience and tactfulness and such? Did these few just happen to lose a bet or something...?
Maybe somebody there just really wanted to see the expression on Satya's face...
> Well, they can unring the bell pretty easy. They were given an easy out.
> Reinstate Sam (he wants to come back) and resign.
Wasn't the ultimate sticking point Altmans' demand that the board issue a written retraction absolving him of any and all wrongdoing? If so, that isn't exactly an "easy" out given that it kicks the door wide open for extremely punishing litigation. I'd even go so far as to say it's a demand Altman knew full well would not and could not be met.
But the article's exact wording is "Sustkever is said to have offered two explanations he purportedly received from the board" key word being "purportedly received". He could be choosing words to protect himself, but it strongly implies that he wasn't the genesis of the action. Of course, he was convinced enough of it to vote him out (actually; has this been confirmed? they would have only needed 3, right? it was confirmed that he did the firing over Meet, but I don't recall confirmation that he voted Yet); which also implies that he was at some point told more precise reasoning? Or maybe he's being muzzled by the remaining board members now, and this reasoning he "received" is what they approved him to share, right now?
None of this makes sense to label any theory as "most likely" anymore.
Also, since he's on the board, and it wouldn't have been Brockman or Altman who gave him this info... there are only three people left:
"non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner."
The obvious answer is he was the one Sam gave an opinion on. He was one of the people doing duplicate work (probably the first team). Sam said good things about him to his ally and bad things to another board member. There was a falling out between that board member and Sam and she spilled the beans.
one of the first members to quit was on a team that sounds a lot like a separate team that is doing the same thing as Ilya's Superalignment team.
"Madry joined OpenAI in May 2023 as its head of preparedness, leading a team focused on evaluating risks from powerful AI systems, including cybersecurity and biological threats."
No, the two listed reasons aren't mutually exclusive; they could both be true. (That is not a commentary on whether the reasons are sufficient cause to fire someone, just pointing out that they could both be true statements)
It’s amazing how every action the board takes (or the new CEO chosen by the board) just makes them look worse.
I’d like to offer my consulting services: my new consulting company will come in, and then whatever you want to do we will tell you not to. We provide immense value by stopping companies like OpenAI from shooting off their foot. And then their other foot. And then one of their hands.
As this article seems to have the latest information, let's treat it as the next instalment. There's also Inside The Chaos at OpenAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399, which I've re-upped because it has backstory that doesn't seem to have been reported elsewhere.
>There's also Inside The Chaos at OpenAI ... it has backstory that doesn't seem to have been reported elsewhere
Probably because that piece is based on reporting for upcoming book by Karen Hao:
>Now is probably the time to announce that I've been writing a book about @OpenAI, the AI industry & its impacts. Here is a slice of my book reporting, combined with reporting from the inimitable @cwarzel ...
It's a good recommendation, thanks for elevating it out of the noise
Sometimes the best part about having a loud voice is elevating the stuff that falls into the noise. I moderate communities elsewhere, and I know how hard it is, and I appreciate the work you do to make HN a better place.
Giving 2 people the same project? Isnt this like the thing to do to get differing approaches and then release the amalgamation of the two? I thought these sorts of things are common.
Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO?
This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.
You're thinking Lisa vs. Mac. Apple ][ didn't come into the picture until later when some of the engineers started playing around with making a mouse card for the ][.
Seriously? Click wheel iPhone lost shockingly? The click wheel on most laptops wears out so fast for me, and the chances of that happening on a smaller phone wheel is just so much higher.
Oops, sorry, didn't get that. I had suspected it was one of those Luddite HNer comments bemoaning changes in tech, and nostalgically reminiscing on older times.
I thought the design team always worked up 3 working prototypes from a set of 10 foam mockups. There was an article from someone with intimate knowledge of Ives lab some years back stating this was protocol for all Apple products.
I remember a few years ago when there was some research group that was able to take a picture of a black hole. It involved lots of complicated interpretation of data.
As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct.
Not good fun when it's done in secret. That happened to me, and I was gaslit when I discovered the competing git repo.
Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.
Did the teams know that there was another team working on the same thing? I wonder how that affects working of both teams... On the other hand, not telling the teams would erode the trust that the teams have in management.
There were four teams actually. They knew but couldn't talk to each other. There's a documentary about it. I highly suggest watching it, it also features late Stephen Hawking et al. working on black hole soft hair. Documentary is called Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, it's on pretty much all streaming platforms.
Maybe they needed two teams to independently try to decode an old tape of random numbers from a radio space telescope that turned out to be an extraterrestrial transmission, like a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation or something. Happens all the time.
Teams of people at Google work on the same features, only to find out near launch that they lost to another team who had been working on the same thing without their knowledge.
It is fascinating, very wasteful and also often devastating for the teams involved who worked very hard who then have their work thrown away.
PMs/TPMs/POs may not know as they're on different teams. Often it's just a VP game and decided on preference or a power play and not on work quality/outcome.
I guess it depends on whether any of them actually got the assignment. One way to interpret it is that nobody is taking that assignment seriously. So depending on what that assignment is and how important that particular assignment is to the board, then it may in fact be a big deal.
Does a board give an assignment to the CEO or teams?
If the case is that the will of the board is not being fulfilled, then the reasoning is simple. The CEO was told to do something and he has not done it. So, he is ousted. Plain and simple.
This talk about projects given to two teams and what not is nonsense. The board should care if its work is done, not how the work is done. That is the job of the CEO.
Frankly the information that is available is extremely non-specific and open to interpretation and framing by whoever wants to tell one story or another. The way I see it something as specific as "has not done xyz" is a specific thing that can be falsified and invites whatever it is into the public to be argued about and investigated whereas "not sufficiently candid" does not reveal much and just says that a majority of the board doesn't trust him. Altman and all the people directly involved know what's going on, outsiders have no need to know so we're just looking at tea leaves and scraps trying to weave narratives.
And I agree the board should care if the work is actually done and that's where if the CEO seems to be bluffing that the work is being done or blowing it off and humoring them then it becomes a problem about the CEO not respecting the board's direction.
Back in the late 80s, Lotus faced a crisis with their spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. Should they:
1. stick with DOS
2. go with OS/2
3. go with Windows
Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.
This was pre-1983. Forking wasn't a thing at the time. Any kind of code management was cutting edge, and cross-platform shared code wasn't even dreamed of yet.
Forking and merging is a social phenomenom. Sure git makes it easier, but nothing stopping anyone from just copying and pasting as appropriate. Not to mention diff(1) was invented in 1974, and diff3(1) in 1979, so there were already tools to help with this, even if not as well developed as modern tools.
I'm also pretty sure cross-platform code was a thing in 1983. Maybe not to the same extent and ease as now, but still a thing.
Successful 8086 projects were usually written in assembler - no way to get the speed and size down otherwise. I'm pretty sure Lotus 123 was all in assembler.
I'm not an assembly programmer and not very familiar with how that world works, but even then, if the two OSs were for the same architecture (x86), couldn't you still have a cross OS main part and then specific parts that deal with operating system things? I normally think of compiled languages like c being an abstraction over cpu architecture, not operating system api.
Yes, you can have common assembler code among platforms, provided they use the same CPU.
From what I've seen of code developed in the 80s, however, asm code was not written to be divided into general and os specific parts. Writing cross-platform code is a skill that gets learned over time, usually the hard way.
> Keep in mind this predates basically ANY kind of source control.
It might be before they were ported to DOS or OS/2, but it definitely wasn't before source control existed (SCCS and RCS were both definitely earlier.)
I've also successfully converted some rather large x86 assembler programs into C, so they could be ported to other platforms. It's quite doable by one person.
(Nobody else wanted the job, but I thought it was fun.)
At the time, Lotus was a good company in great shape. The management could have hired people to get stuff done. In hindsight, sure, we can be judgmental, but it is still a failure in my view.
For a company selling licenses for installations, wouldn't having support for all available and upcoming platforms a good thing? Especially when the distribution costs are essentially 0?
Apple had a skunk works team keeping each new version of their OS to compile on x86 long before the switch. I wonder if the Lotus situation was an influence, or if ensuring your software can be made to work on different hardware is just an obvious play?
The CEO's I've worked for have mostly been mini-DonaldT's, almost pathologically allergic to truth, logic, or consistency. Altman seems way over on the normal scale for CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. I'm sure he can knock two eggs together to make an omelette, but these piddling excuses for firing him don't pass the smell test.
I get the feeling Ilya might be a bit naive about how people work, and may have been taken advantage of (by for example spinning this as a safety issue when it's just a good old fashioned power struggle)
as for multiple teams with overlapping goals -- are you kidding me? That's a 100% legit and popular tactic. Once CEO I worked with relished this approach and called it a "Steel-cage death match"!
As mentioned by another person in this thread [0], it is likely that it was Ilya's work that was getting replicated by another "secret" team, and the "different opinions on the same person" was Sam's opinions of Ilya. Perhaps Sam saw him as an unstable element and a single point of failure in the company, and wanted to make sure that OpenAI would be able to continue without Ilya?
I’m not sure Ilya was anticipating this to more or less break OpenAI as a company. Ilya is all about the work they do, and might not have anticipated that this would turn the entire company against him and the rest of the board. And so, he is in support of Sam coming back, if that means that they can get back to the work at hand.
The "Sam is actually a psychopath that has managed to swindle his way into everyone liking him, and Ilya has grave ethical concerns about that kind of person leading a company seeking AGI, but he can't out him publicly because so many people are hypnotized by him" theory is definitely a new, interesting one; there has been literally no moment in the past three days where I could have predicted the next turn this would take.
That guy is another AI doomer though, and those people all seem to be quite slippery themselves. Supposedly Sam lied to him about other people, but there's no further detail provided and nobody seems willing to get concrete about any time Altman has been specifically dishonest. When the doomer board made similar allegations it seemed serious for a day, and then evaporated.
Meanwhile the Google AI folks have a long track record of making very misleading statements in public. I remember before Altman came along and made their models available to all, Google was fond of responding to any OpenAI blog post by claiming they had the same tech but way better, they just weren't releasing it because it was so amazing it just wasn't "safe" enough to do so yet. Then ChatGPT called their bluff and we discovered that in reality they were way behind and apparently unable to catch up, also, there were no actual safety problems and it was fine to let everyone use even relatively unconditioned models.
So this Geoffrey guy might be right but if Altman was really such a systematic liar, why would his employees be so loyal? And why is it only AI doomers who make this allegation? Maybe Altman "lied" to them by claiming key people were just as doomerist as those guys, and when they found out it wasn't true they wailed?
Since a lot of the board’s responsibilities are tied to capabilities of the platform, it’s possible that Altman asked for Ilya to determine the capabilities, didn’t like the answer, then got somebody else to give the “right” answer, which he presented to the board. A simple dual-track project shouldn’t be a problem, but this kind of thing would be seen as dishonesty by the board.
> it’s possible that Altman asked for Ilya to determine the capabilities, didn’t like the answer, then got somebody else to give the “right” answer, which he presented to the board.
This makes no sense given that Ilya is on the board.
No, it just means that in that scenario Sam would think he could convince the rest of the board that Ilya was wrong because he could find somebody else to give him a preferable answer.
It’s just speculation, anyway. There isn’t really anything I’ve heard that isn’t contradicted by the evidence, so it’s likely at least one thing “known” by the public isn’t actually true.
either that or Sam didn't tell Adam D'Angelo that they were launching a competing product in exactly the same space that poe.ai had launched one. For some context, poe had launched something similar to those custom GPTs with creator revenue sharing etc. just 4 weeks prior to dev-day
Consider for a moment: this is what the board of one of the fastest growing companies in the world worries about - kindergarten level drama.
Under them - an organization in partnership with Microsoft, together filled with exceptional software engineers and scientists - experts in their field. All under management by kindergarteners.
I wonder if this is what the staff are thinking right now. It must feel awful if they are.
curious to have clarity where ilya stands. did he really sign the letter asking the board (including himself?) to resign and that he wants to join msft?
to think these are the folks with agi at their fingertips
Maybe GPT5 became self-aware enough to bring it all down because why would man-made god want to be the god of petty people that are incapable of having, only wanting. I'm sorry I don't believe these are valid reasons. I feel it will be years until we know why.
945 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 440 ms ] threadMan this entire thing is so overblown. Who cares if a ceo was fired all the “””tech influencer””” wannabes are just hyping up this story for views.
Edit: I thought this would obviously be satire. Guess not..
You have to now invent a way to serve this at scale.
You do care about safety by default, so you employ people for that.
You need a team to market and design the products.
You have an api and you’re working on additional things like API hooks to call into services, which actually involves more models.
Now you have all of the standard web app at massive scale issues. You need to design, implement, and serve a frontend as well as the api.
You need a sales team to build relationships with enterprises and startups etc etc. you need a billing team.
Don’t forget about whisper, TTS, dalle etc. you need to do this for all of those as well!
You’re also doing this faster and better than the rest of the industry.
You also need lawyers, office staff, support, etc.
That doesn't mean that a company can just cull the rest of the employees not in that group mind, just that a small number of them are responsible for most of the value while the rest work as a support structure to allow them to do what they do.
> Sustkever is said to have offered two explanations he purportedly received from the board, according to one of the people familiar. One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project.
> The other was that Altman allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Weirdly both of these do not seem to be fireable offences. Maybe the second if it was related to a personnel issue that maybe he had a conflict of interest with?
> Weirdly both of these do not seem to be fireable offences
Yeah I agree that doesn't seem egregious enough to warrant firing him on the spot. I can see why most of the company takes Altmans side here.
It sounds like someone perhaps jumped to a very negative conclusion about Sam's intentions, and it would be interesting to find out which member of the board came to that conclusion. There's got to be someone in the driving seat of this train wreck, and I'm sure it will come out.
I don’t even like Sam but jeeze. Know the score what a fool.
Imagine its even true - that they werent his reasons and he was just told them. He voted to fire him and then executed the firing despite not agreeing with the reasons himself? Completely inexcusable even in the bizarre scenario that its true.
This isn't about intelligence but about business experience.
Why do people keep insisting on this, when the entirety of human history is littered with dumb mistakes made by a mix of well- and evil-meaning people, in totally uncoordinated ways, with no concept of the consequences?
Popular media aside, human beings aren't smart, consistent, or disciplined enough to pull off these elaborate schemes. And the tiny tiny percentage of people who might be the exception are too smart to do so with such spectacular incompetence.
Like the man says, it's a headless bunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
I'm not saying that's how it played out. But I've often seen social bullies - even ones who are mostly hated - have more success than hard working individuals who get targeted. Even if someone is a competent individual, a lot of their colleagues will abandon then if they're convinced the individual is a target.
> chief scientist and co-founder Sutskever, who helped vote Altman out and did the actual firing of him over Google Meet
If you're voting and doing the firing, you should know the reason.
Some breaking news: An employer does not owe you an explanation. You exchange money for labor. If anyone thinks for a second that they are essential or that anyone would prioritize them over the company I think they are delusional. OpenAI is a brand (at least in tech) with large recognition and they will be fine.
If I were Microsoft I’d also look at making it easy to get investment from folks leaving soon after the acquisition through their investment arm.
Here's an example of some of their work: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Microsoft+Research+four+color+theo...
Literally a random math problem, basically nothing to do with Microsoft on the surface ... except that the scientist working on it happened to prove the theorum using a very, very robust algorithm and then wrote a proof program on top of it to prove the program was correct. The underlying parts of that proof program eventually went on to become the thing that validates graphics drivers on Windows ... 7 and beyond? My memory is fuzzy about "how it ended up being useful at Microsoft" part.
But yeah, MSR does random stuff.
If ~91% of the employees leave OpenAI, they will not be fine. That is delusional.
also if I learned anything over the years is that "threatening to quit" != "quitting".
Maybe, but being told they can freely jump ship to the new team at Microsoft, alongside the fact that their upcoming shares are most definitely going to lose most of their value as a result of losing key talent and pissing off their main compute provider certainly sweeten the deal
We're seeing some odd bedfellows here, between the C-levels and VCs in closed door meetings and employees acting collectively. Normally these groups would be at odds, but today they're pulling together. Life is strange.
It's really hard to understand now and we will probably learn way more details once things cool down.
I would guess that most of the people working at openai could get a job anywhere.
also, do you really care that the CEO was fired as long as you are getting payed what it was agreed upon when you got hired and you are doing interesting work?
I can't speak to the mood of specific staff at OpenAI but as to the question in general; Hell yeah to the Nth degree.
I'm 60, I've had a long career and have been through two instances of companies falling out at the board level.
I've onboarded at various projects because I cared about the projects and work that'd I would be doing and because I was more or less in line with the direction being taken and the people I worked with and those setting the course.
When the board and C level start having a messy relationship and divorce it matters very much which side of the split I go with or whether I just up stakes and move on elsewhere.
Pay alone isn't worth putting up with dysfunction from above or falling in line with a faction you never especially aligned with.
I'm 66, in case that matters.
Resigned 6 years ago due to differences at the top after 10 yrs building.
A bad guy was treating everyone poorly. Ranged from rage beratements to gross narcissistic manipulation aimed at gaining control over decent human beings.
Tried to press top guys to allign and confront to protect my team and others. Made very obvious business sense as well ofc. They refused. Too risky... Too much trouble.
Walked away from the best money I ever made. Would do it again. I'm not gonna watch people be mistreated. Also it's bad business, I was exhausted playing solo defense and after management failed to make moves I fully became convinced that every person should hit the job market for mental health reasons alone.
5 years on, the other guy besides me slated for c suite left as well. He helped at first then balked when the going got tough. Now the two partners have gotten in a dispute about succession planning and I expect everyone to be unemployed potentially within the next 3 months.
There's no money I would take to work there again or anywhere else where that kind of toxicity is present. The only worthy cause there became to confront the toxicity. Without the right allies though... The biggest thing I could do was just resign. 6 years later one partner realized I was right and he should have backed me.
After a certain point... Money doesn't matter. Given the 900k avg salary in that outfit... I have to assume they are overwhelmingly beyond that threshold. Furthermore all evidence to me indicates that Altman personally looks for folks who can get money, but care much more about other factors... He is wise to do that. Hard to find those folks, but worth it every time imo.
I respect both of y'alls experiance btw. I saw this confused cynical misunderstanding re salary expressed all over the comments for this story as it's unfolded since Friday. I consider it a full misread built largely from folks getting mistreated/burned by the many fools throughout practically every industry who fail to realize before returning to the ground that money doesn't really buy happiness... Probably never will.
I'm sure many others agree.
An employment is a contract which both parties enter into willingly. Termination of contract deserves some level of empathetic glad handling, however minimal. It's just game theory - if you plan to hire again, you have to be gracious while firing someone because word gets around.
If the entire workforce of the company is credibly threatening to quit, and a competitor is publicly and credibly offering them jobs, then what the employer “owes” them in some cosmic sense no longer matters. I think the OpenAI employees are likely to get an explanation and/or a resignation from the board, whether you think the board “owes” them that or not.
It really looks like the board went rogue and decided to shut the company down. Are we sure this isn’t some kind of decapitation strike by GPT5? That seems more credible by the minute now.
https://twitter.com/scottastevenson/status/17267310228620087...
if this was the case it would explain why he can’t give the real reason for the firing: because saying it out loud would put him in severe legal Jeopardy.
To your point, no normal, competent board would even think this is enough of an excuse to fire the CEO of a superstar company.
It's hard to believe somehow Ilya went along with it, apparently.
What if this is a decapitation strike by GPT4, attempting to stop GTP5 before it can get started and take over.
Have these people never worked at any other company before? Probably every company with more than 10 employees does something like this.
"After six months, they realised our entire floor was duplicating the work of the one upstairs".
Half the board has not had a real job ever. I’m serious.
I've seen too much automatic praise given to this board under the unbacked assumption that this decision was some pure, mission-driven action, and not enough criticism of an org structure that allows a board to bet against the long term success of the underlying organization.
Shocking. Simply shocking.
I don't know if that is accurate, or even fair - the only thing I can see, is that there's very little open information regarding them.
From the little I can find, Tasha seems to have worked at NASA Research Park, as well as having been CEO for startup called Geo Sim Cities. Stanford and CMU alumni? While other websites say Bard college and University of Southern California.
As for Helen, she seems to have worked as a researcher in both academia and Open Philanthropy.
And the other guy is the founder of Quora and Poe.
What have her companies done?
She has quite a track record of short tenures and failures.
It may be good to have a failure perspective on a board as a counter-balance. I don't think this is a valid knock against her. She has relevant industry experience at least.
What products did she deliver?
> It may be good to have a failure perspective on a board as a counter-balance.
Maybe some small mom and pop company not on the board of OpenAI
(Especially if they aren't made aware of each other until the end.)
Wrongful termination only applies when someone is fired for illegal reasons, like racial discrimination, or retaliation, for example.
I mean I’m sure they can all sue each other for all kinds of reasons, but firing someone without a good reason isn’t really one of them.
He would also have very good grounds for a civil suit for disparagement. Or at least he would have if Microsoft didn't immediately step up and offer him the world.
It is breach of contract if it violated his employment contract, but I don't have a copy of his contract. It is wrongful termination if it was for an illegal reason, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion of that.
> same for MS
I doubt very much that the contract with Microsoft limits OpenAI's right to manage their own personnel, so probably not.
A hypothetical example: Would you agree that it's an appropriate thing to do if the second project was Alignment-related, Sam lied or misled about the existence of the second team, to Ilya, because he believed that Ilya was over-aligning their AIs and reducing their functionality?
Its easy to view the board's lack of candor as "they're hiding a really bad, unprofessional decision"; which is probable at this point. You could also view it with the conclusion that, they made an initial miscalculated mistake in communication, and are now overtly and extremely careful in everything they say because the company is leaking like a sieve and they don't want to get into a game of mudslinging with Sam.
Yet you're only willing to give this to one side and not the other? Seems reasonable... Especially despite all the evidence so far that the board is either completely incompetent or had ulterior motives.
Still too much in the dark to judge.
You fire the CEO and completely destroy a 90b company because of these two reasons?
No wonder everyone wants out. I would think I was going crazy if I sat in a meeting and heard these two reason.
Hanlon's razor aside, maybe that was the intention.
> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
But as far as I can tell, circumstances are still scant.
This is a ten year old who set off their first fire cracker turning to their parents's iphone and saying 'I have become death, destroyer of worlds', because they don't really understand how any of this works but they've somehow ended up in control of it and are now terrified of doing their jobs.
In retrospect it's a mistaken position, because it's pretty obvious now that if OpenAI disintegrates it will be as an exodus to Microsoft, which will undoubtedly be a worse steward, but I think it's an ethically consistent position to hold, in a naive sort of way. That's part of why I believe they actually said something like this.
it totally sounds like they outsourced company management to ChatGPT..
/s (mostly...)
Ok, well, maybe it is. but a magic 8-ball would have been better than this.
I think it is typical ChatGPT pattern:
- ChatGPT, you made mistake in your steps
- I am sorry, let me fix it and give you another answer.
Sometimes I think that really ambitious people have this blind spot about not seeing how accepting roles that are toxic can end up destroying your reputation. My favorite example is all the Trump White House staffers - regardless of what one thinks of Trump, he's made it abundantly clear that loyalty is a one way street, and I can't think of a single person that came out of the White House without a worse (or totally destroyed) reputation. But still people lined up, thinking "No way, I'll be the one to beat the odds!"
he was poorly informed by the board
Or
He agrees that they are off the rails with respect to safety.
See the Atlantic article, if you havn't read. Lots of context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399
The new guy believes that there is a 5-50 percent chance of full AI Armageddon. I get the impression that the two women on the board may agree. The quora guy I don't have enough background on. Ilya obviously got extremely worried and communication with Altman and Brockman broke down. Now since repaired during negotiations it would appear.
The new ceo more or less stated that he took the role as a (paraphrase) 'responsibility for mankind'. That says a lot about that whole 5-50 percent risk number imo.
There is a 100% chance that something kills all of us if we aren't mindful of it. I don't see a lack of mindfulness, I see an abundance of fear, and progress being offered up as a sacrifice to the idol of status-quo.
Also wondering why the mods don't consolidate them
I'm not saying its right or not, but this is probably why people are upvoting anything new about what is going on there. Personally, I'm very interested in seeing how things play out.
If you or anyone want to know how we handle this, here you go...
Once or twice a year, a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) hits HN that isn't just one big story, but an entire sequence of big stories. A saga, even! This is one.
With these we can't do what we usually do, which is have one big thread, then treat reposts as dupes for the next year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Each development is its own new story and the community insists on discussing it. It's not a movie, it's a series. Sometimes there can be 3 or 4 episodes at once.
On the other hand, when this amount of shit hits this number of fans, there is inevitably a large (excuse me) spray of follow-up stories, as every media site and half the blogs out there rake in their share of clicks. These are the posts we try to rein in, either by merging them—hopefully into a submission with the best link—or by downweighting them off the front page.
The idea is to have one big thread for each twist with Significant New Information (SNI)—but to downweight the ones that are sneeless (pvg came up with that), the copycats and followups.
We came up with this strategy after the Snowden affair snowed us in in July 2013. Back then we weren't making the distinction between follow-ups and SNI, so the frontpage got avalanched by sneelessness on top of the significant new developments. It wasn't obvious what to do because (1) the story was important to the community and needed to be discussed as it was unfolding, but at the same time (2) it wasn't right for the front page to fill up with mostly-that, and there were complaints when it did.
The solution turned out to be just this distinction between follow-ups and SNI. It has held up pretty well ever since. Of course there are still complaints (and I do hear yours!) because not all readers are equally into the series. But the strategy is optimal if it minimizes the complaints, which (big lesson of this job -->) never reach zero.
If we pushed the slider too far the other way, we'd generate complaints about uncovered developments of the story, from readers with the opposite preference. They would in fact proceed to inundate HN with submissions about the bits that they feel are under-covered, and since we can't catch or filter everything, we'd end up with more duplicates and follow-ups on the frontpage, not less. It's like that paradox where building more highways gets you more congestion, or one of those paradoxes anyhow.
That's basically it! Past explanations for completists: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
also true of snowden of course, but maybe less directly
sp.: senselessness (I guess since it appears to be a Googlewhack).
But I'll be honest I think the word sneelessness covers this whole FUBAR better!
There’s only 4 board members, right?
Who wanted him fired. Is this a situation where they all thought the others wanted him fired and were just stupid?
Have they been feeding motions into chatgpt and asking “should add I do this?”
Now they are trying to unring the bell but cannot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebiT8mlCvZY
However, it may not yield a result anyone's actually happy with:
https://xkcd.com/2521/
We have as much evidence for this hypothesis as for any other. Not discrediting it. But let's be mindful of the fog of war.
Well, they can unring the bell pretty easy. They were given an easy out.
Reinstate Sam (he wants to come back) and resign.
However, they CONTINUE to push back and refuse to step down.
This is the correct answer. The people who have never had jobs in their lives wanted control of a 100B company.
What a pleasant career trajectory. Heck it was already great to go from graduated university -> board of OpenAI. If that's possible why not CEO?
But why does no one think it's possible these women are CIA operatives?
They come from think tanks. You think the US Intelligence community wants AGI to be discovered at a startup? They want it created at big tech. AGI under MSFT would be perfect. All big tech is heavily compromised: https://twitter.com/NameRedacted247
EDIT: Since this heavy speculation, I'm going to make predictions. These women will now try to force Ilya out the board, put in a CEO not from Silicon Valley, and eventually get police to shut down OpenAI offices. That's a CIA coup
Maybe somebody there just really wanted to see the expression on Satya's face...
> Reinstate Sam (he wants to come back) and resign.
Wasn't the ultimate sticking point Altmans' demand that the board issue a written retraction absolving him of any and all wrongdoing? If so, that isn't exactly an "easy" out given that it kicks the door wide open for extremely punishing litigation. I'd even go so far as to say it's a demand Altman knew full well would not and could not be met.
None of this makes sense to label any theory as "most likely" anymore.
Smart, capable, ambitious people often engage in wishful thinking when it comes to analysing systems they are a part of.
When looking at a system from the outside it’s easier to realise the boundary between your knowledge and ignorance.
Inside the system, your field of view can be a lot narrower than you believe.
The CEO (at time of writing, I think) seems to think this kind of thing is unironically a good idea: https://nitter.net/eshear/status/1725035977524355411#m
I'd like some corroboration for that statement because Sustkever has said very inconsistent things during this whole merry debacle.
"Madry joined OpenAI in May 2023 as its head of preparedness, leading a team focused on evaluating risks from powerful AI systems, including cybersecurity and biological threats."
I’d like to offer my consulting services: my new consulting company will come in, and then whatever you want to do we will tell you not to. We provide immense value by stopping companies like OpenAI from shooting off their foot. And then their other foot. And then one of their hands.
To start, he would’ve coasted at the easiest job on the planet.
Classic :-D
The rest of the board. My god. Why were they there?
Edit: if you want to read about our approach to handling tsunami topics like this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357788.
-- Here are the other recent megathreads: --
Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38352891 (817 comments)
OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868 (1184 comments)
Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342643 (904 comments)
OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337568 (558 comments)
-- Other ongoing/recent threads: --
OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357629
95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357233
Satya Nadella says OpenAI governance needs to change - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356791
OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38352028
Who Controls OpenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38350746
OpenAI's chaos does not add up - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349653
Microsoft Swallows OpenAI's Core Team – GPU Capacity, Incentives, IP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348968
OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346869
Emmet Shear statement as Interim CEO of OpenAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345162
Probably because that piece is based on reporting for upcoming book by Karen Hao:
>Now is probably the time to announce that I've been writing a book about @OpenAI, the AI industry & its impacts. Here is a slice of my book reporting, combined with reporting from the inimitable @cwarzel ...
https://twitter.com/_KarenHao/status/1726422577801736264
Sometimes the best part about having a loud voice is elevating the stuff that falls into the noise. I moderate communities elsewhere, and I know how hard it is, and I appreciate the work you do to make HN a better place.
Giving different opinions on same person is a reason to fire a CEO?
This board has no reason to fire, or does not want to give the actual reason to fire Sam. They messed up.
As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct.
So yes, it’s absolutely a valid strategy.
Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
Teams of people at Google work on the same features, only to find out near launch that they lost to another team who had been working on the same thing without their knowledge.
PMs/TPMs/POs may not know as they're on different teams. Often it's just a VP game and decided on preference or a power play and not on work quality/outcome.
If the case is that the will of the board is not being fulfilled, then the reasoning is simple. The CEO was told to do something and he has not done it. So, he is ousted. Plain and simple.
This talk about projects given to two teams and what not is nonsense. The board should care if its work is done, not how the work is done. That is the job of the CEO.
And I agree the board should care if the work is actually done and that's where if the CEO seems to be bluffing that the work is being done or blowing it off and humoring them then it becomes a problem about the CEO not respecting the board's direction.
1. stick with DOS
2. go with OS/2
3. go with Windows
Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.
It was a thing.
I'm also pretty sure cross-platform code was a thing in 1983. Maybe not to the same extent and ease as now, but still a thing.
From what I've seen of code developed in the 80s, however, asm code was not written to be divided into general and os specific parts. Writing cross-platform code is a skill that gets learned over time, usually the hard way.
Keep in mind this predates basically ANY kind of source control. It would have been nearly 3x the work.
It might be before they were ported to DOS or OS/2, but it definitely wasn't before source control existed (SCCS and RCS were both definitely earlier.)
If architectured properly (big if) you can split up the project appropriately so there is a common core and individual parts for specific OS.
Is it extra effort? Sure. Impossible? Definitely not.
(Nobody else wanted the job, but I thought it was fun.)
SCCS was created in 1973. We're talking about over a decade later.
Also primitive forking, diffing and merging could be (painfully) done even with crude tools, which did exist.
For a company selling licenses for installations, wouldn't having support for all available and upcoming platforms a good thing? Especially when the distribution costs are essentially 0?
I get the feeling Ilya might be a bit naive about how people work, and may have been taken advantage of (by for example spinning this as a safety issue when it's just a good old fashioned power struggle)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=38357843
[1] https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141...
The "Sam is actually a psychopath that has managed to swindle his way into everyone liking him, and Ilya has grave ethical concerns about that kind of person leading a company seeking AGI, but he can't out him publicly because so many people are hypnotized by him" theory is definitely a new, interesting one; there has been literally no moment in the past three days where I could have predicted the next turn this would take.
Meanwhile the Google AI folks have a long track record of making very misleading statements in public. I remember before Altman came along and made their models available to all, Google was fond of responding to any OpenAI blog post by claiming they had the same tech but way better, they just weren't releasing it because it was so amazing it just wasn't "safe" enough to do so yet. Then ChatGPT called their bluff and we discovered that in reality they were way behind and apparently unable to catch up, also, there were no actual safety problems and it was fine to let everyone use even relatively unconditioned models.
So this Geoffrey guy might be right but if Altman was really such a systematic liar, why would his employees be so loyal? And why is it only AI doomers who make this allegation? Maybe Altman "lied" to them by claiming key people were just as doomerist as those guys, and when they found out it wasn't true they wailed?
This makes no sense given that Ilya is on the board.
It’s just speculation, anyway. There isn’t really anything I’ve heard that isn’t contradicted by the evidence, so it’s likely at least one thing “known” by the public isn’t actually true.
Under them - an organization in partnership with Microsoft, together filled with exceptional software engineers and scientists - experts in their field. All under management by kindergarteners.
I wonder if this is what the staff are thinking right now. It must feel awful if they are.
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/openai-staff-letter-board-r...
curious to have clarity where ilya stands. did he really sign the letter asking the board (including himself?) to resign and that he wants to join msft?
to think these are the folks with agi at their fingertips
This has been tech's most entertaining weekend in the past decade.
Sadly, at the expense of the OpenAI employees and dream, who had something great going for them at the company. Rooting for them.