Or it was recognized that Adam was the instigator and the real power player, and the force that Sam needed to come to an accommodation with. From everything I've heard about Toner, she's a very principled person who lent academic credibility to the board, and was a great figurehead for the non-profit's conscience. Once the veneer was ripped from the non-profit's "controlling" role, she was deadweight and useful only as a scapegoat.
It looks to me like the real victim here is the "for humanity" corporate structure. At some point, the money decided it needed to be free.
From the outside none of this makes much sense. So the old board just disliked him enough to oust him but apparently didn’t have a good pulse on the company and overplayed their hand?
As far as I can tell, Sam did something? to get fired by the board, who are meant to be driven by non-profit ideals instead of corporate profits (probably from Sam pushing profit over safety, but there's no real way to know). From that, basically the whole company threatened to quit and move to Microsoft, showing the board that their power is purely ornamental. To retain any sort of power or say over decision making whatsoever, the board made concessions and got Sam back.
Really it just shows the whole non-profit arm of the company was even more of a lie then it appeared.
They did give reasons they were just vague. Reading between the lines, it seems the board was implying that Sam was trying to manipulate the board members individually. Was it true? Who knows. And as an outside observer, who cares? This is a fight between rich people about who gets to be richer. AI is so much larger than one cultish startup.
They wanted a new CEO and didn't expect Sam to take 95% of the company with him when he left.
Sam also played his hand extremely well; he's likely learned from watching hundreds of founder blowups over the years. He never really seemed angry publicly as he gained support from all the staff including Ilya & Mira. I had little doubt Emmett Shear would also welcome Sam's return since they were both in the first YC batch together.
If that were the case, would they not have presented the new CEO immediately for an “orderly transition”? As I understand it, Ms Murati tried to get Altman back, and when she pressured the board, they tried at least two other possible CEOs before settling on Mr Shear, who also threatened to leave if they could not give evidence of a legal reason for firing Altman. It smells like a personality conflict.
Satya's pay is about 100 million dollars. Ide say he has earned every penny for protecting MSFTs 10B investment in OpenAI. A 1% insurance policy is great value.
The new board only has 3 people to start with, but hopefully easier to add more members soon. Tonight's NYT story mentioned the board member attrition and the prolonged gridlock in adding new ones, which probably led to the current saga.
What a wild ride these past few days have been. Friday already feels like a very long time ago given all of the information and controversy that's come out.
The problem is none of the alternatives offered a smooth UX transition. Mastodon is fragmented by design and Bluesky is gated to this day. There was never a true Digg-like event that caused user migration to reach critical mass. So people simply trickled back once the most volatile periods of post-Elon Twitter passed.
That doesn't change the fact post-Elon Twitter has severely degraded in terms of user experience (rate limits, blue check spam, API pay-wall, etc.) and Elon isn't doing the platform any favours by continuing to participate in detrimental ways (seen in the recent advertiser exodus).
So, Ilya is out of the board, but Adam is still on it. I know this will raise some eyebrows but whatever.
Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.
OAI looks stronger than ever. The untrustworthy bits that caused all this instability over the last 5 days have been ditched into the sea. Care to expand on your claim?
I may have been overly eager in my comment because the big bad downside of the new board is none of the founders are on it. I hope the current membership sees reason and fixes this issue.
But I said this because: They've retained the entire company, reinstated its founder as CEO, and replaced an activist clown board with a professional, experienced, and possibly* unified one. Still remains to be seen how the board membership and overall org structure changes, but I have much more trust in the current 3 members steering OpenAI toward long-term success.
If by “long-term-success” you mean a capitalistic lap-dog of microsoft, I’ll agree.
It seems that the safety team within OpenAI lost. My biggest fear with this whole AI thing is hostile takeover, and openAI was best positioned to at least do an effort to prevent that. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
> The untrustworthy bits that caused all this instability over the last 5 days have been ditched into the sea
This whole thing started with Altman pushing a safety oriented non-profit into a tense contradiction (edit: I mean the 2019-2022 gpt3/chatgpt for-profit stuff that led to all the Anthropic people leaving). The most recent timeline was
- Altman tries to push out another board member
- That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
- Altman's side escalates by saying they'll nuke the company
Altman's side won, but how can we say that his side didn't cause any of this instability?
That event wasn't some unprovoked start of this history.
> That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
and the entire company retaliated. Then this board member tried to sell the company to a competitor who refused. In the meantime the board went through two interim CEOs who refused to play along with this scheme. In the meantime one of the people who voted to fire the CEO regretted it publicly within 24 hours. That's a clown car of a board. It reflects the quality of most non-profit boards but not of organizations that actually execute well.
Something that's been fairly consistent here on HN throughout the debacle has been an almost fanatical defense of the board's actions as justified.
The board was incompetent. It will go down in the history books as one of the biggest blunders of a board in history.
If you want to take drastic action, you consult with your biggest partner keeping the lights on before you do so. Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley had no business being on this board. Even if you had safety concerns in mind, you don't bypass everyone else with a stake in the future of your business because you're feeling petulant.
By recognizing that it didn't "start" with Altman trying to push out another board member, it started when that board member published a paper trashing the company she's on the board of, without speaking to the CEO of that company first, or trying in any way to affect change first.
I edited my comment to clarify what I meant. The start was him pushing to move fast and break things in the classic YC kind of way. And it's BS to say that she didn't speak to the CEO or try to affect change first. The safety camp inside openai has been unsuccessfully trying to push him to slow down for years.
Your "most recent" timeline is still wrong, and while yes the entire history of OpenAI did not begin with the paper I'm referencing, it is what started this specific fracas, the one where the board voted to oust Sam Altman.
It was a classic antisocial academic move; all she needed to do was talk to Altman, both before and after writing the paper. It's incredibly easy to do that, and her not doing it is what began the insanity.
She's gone now, and Altman remains, substantially because she didn't know how to pick up a phone and interact with another human being. Who knows, she might have even been successful at her stated goal, of protecting AI, had she done even the most basic amount of problem solving first. She should not have been on this board, and I hope she's learned literally anything from this about interacting with people, though frankly I doubt it.
Honestly, I just don't believe that she didn't talk to Altman about her concerns. I'd believe that she didn't say "I'm publishing a paper about it now" but I can't believe she didn't talk to him about her concerns during the last 4+ years that it's been a core tension at the company.
That's what I mean; she should have discussed the paper and its contents specifically with Altman, and easily could have. It's a hugely damaging thing to have your own board member come out critically against your company. It's doubly so when it blindsides the CEO.
She had many, many other options available to her that she did not take. That was a grave mistake and she paid for it.
"But what about academic integrity?" Yes! That's why this whole idea was problematic from the beginning. She can't be objective and fulfill her role as board member. Her role at Georgetown was in direct conflict with her role on the OpenAI board.
The OpenAI of the past, that dabbled in random AI stuff (remember their DotA 2 bot?), is gone.
OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it.
Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete.
Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just because something claims to be non-profit doesn't mean it will always remain that way. With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization. Non-profit status and whatever the organization's charter says is temporary.
I mean it is what they want isn't it. They did some random stuff like, playing dota2 or robot arms, even the Dalle stuff. Now they finally find that one golden goose, of course they are going to keep it.
I don't think the company has changed at all. It succeeded after all.
Nonprofit is a just a facade, it was convenient for them to appear as ethnical under that disguise, but they get rid of it when it is inconvenient in a week. 95% of them would rather join MSFT, than being in a non-profit.
Iirc, the NP structure was implemented to attract top AI talent from FAANG. Then they needed investors to fund the infrastructure and hence gave the employees shares or profit units (whatever the hell that is). The NP now shields MSFT from regulatory issues.
I do wonder how many of those employees would actually go to MSFT. It feels more like a gambit to get Altman back in since they were about to cash out with the tender offer.
There's no moat in giant LLMs. Anyone on a long enough timeline can scrape/digitize 99.9X% of all human knowledge and build an LLM or LXX from it. Monetizing that idea and staying the market leader over a period longer than 10 years will take a herculean amount of effort. Facebook releasing similar models for free definitely took the wind out of their sails, even a tiny bit; right now the moat is access to A100 boards. That will change as eventually even the Raspberry Pi 9 will have LLM capabilities
Branding counts for a lot, but LLM are already a commodity. As soon as someone releases an LLM equivalent to GPT4 or GPT5, most cloud providers will offer it locally for a fraction of what openAI is charging, and the heaviest users will simply self-host. Go look at the company Docker. I can build a container on almost any device with a prompt these days using open source tooling. The company (or brand, at this point?) offers "professional services" I suppose but who is paying for it? Or go look at Redis or Elasti-anything. Or memcached. Or postgres. Or whatever. Industrial-grade underpinnings of the internet, but it's all just commodity stuff you can lease from any cloud provider.
It doesn't matter if OpenAI or AWS or GCP encoded the entire works of Shakespeare in their LLM, they can all write/complete a valid limerick about "There once was a man from Nantucket".
I seriously doubt AWS is going to license OpenAI's technology when they can just copy the functionality, royalty free, and charge users for it. Maybe they will? But I doubt it. To the end user it's just another locally hosted API. Like DNS.
Moore's law seems to have failed on CPUs finally, but we've seen the pattern over and over. LLM specific hardware will undoubtedly bring down the cost. $10,000 A100 GPU will not be the last GPU NVidia ever makes, nor will their competitors stand by and let them hold the market hostage.
Quake and Counter-Strike in the 1990s ran like garbage in software-rendering mode. I remember having to run Counter-Strike on my Pentium 90 at the lowest resolution, and then disable upscaling to get 15fps, and even then smoke grenades and other effects would drop the framerate into the single digits. Almost two years after Quake's release did dedicated 3d video cards (voodoo 1 and 2 were accelerators, depended on a seperate 2d VGA graphics card to feed it) begin to hit the market.
Nowadays you can run those games (and their sequels) in the thousands (tens of thousands?) of frames per second on a top end modern card. I would imagine similar events with hardware will transpire with LLM. OpenAI is already prototyping their own hardware to train and run LLMs. I would imagine NVidia hasn't been sitting on their hands either.
> I seriously doubt AWS is going to license OpenAI's technology when they can just copy the functionality, royalty free, and charge users for it. Maybe they will? But I doubt it.
Yeah and looks like they're going to offer Llama as well. They offer Redhat linux EC2 instances at a premium, and other paid per hour AMIs. I can't imagine why they wouldn't offer various LLMs at a premium, but not also offer a home-grown LLM at a lower rate once it's ready.
Why do you think cloud providers can undercut OpenAI? From what I know, Llama 70b is more expensive to run than GPT-3.5, unless you can get 70+% utilization rate for your GPUs, which is hard to do.
So far we don't have any open source models that are close to GPT4, so we don't know what it takes to run them for similar speeds.
They still have gpt4 and rumored gpt4.5 to offer, so people have no choice but to use them. The internet has such short an attention span, this news will get forgotten in 2 months
i don't think that's really any brand loyalty for OpenAI. people will use whatever is cheapest and best. in the longer run people will use whatever has the best access and integration.
what's keeping people with OpenAI for now is that chatGPT is free and GPT3.5 and GPT4 are the best. over time I expect the gap in performance to get smaller and the cost to run these to get cheaper.
if google gives me something close to as good as OpenAI's offering for the same price and it pull data from my gmail or my calendar or my google drive then i'll switch to that.
This, if anything people really don't like the verbose moralizing and anti-terseness of it.
Ok, the first few times you use it maybe it's good to know it doesn't think it's a person, but short and sweet answers just save time, especially when the result is streamed.
People use "the chatbot from OpenAI" because that's what became famous and got all the world a taste of AI (my dad is on that bandwagon, for instance). There is absolutely no way my dad is going to sign up for an Anthropic account and start making API calls to their LLM.
But I agree that it's a weak moat, if OpenAI were to disappear, I could just tell my dad to use "this same thing but from Google" and he'd switch without thinking much about it.
good points. on second thought, i should give them due credit for building a brand reputation as being "best" that will continue even if they aren't the best at some point, which will keep a lot of people with them. that's in addition to their other advantages that people will stay because it's easier than learning a new platform and there might be lock-in in terms of it being hard to move a trained gpt, or your chat history to another platform.
You are forgetting about the end of the Moore's law. The costs for running a large scale AI won't drop dramatically. Any optimizations will require non-trivial expensive PhD Bell Labs level research. Running intelligent LLMs will be financially accessible only to a few mega corps in the US and China (and perhaps to the European government). The AI "safety" teams will control the public discourse. Traditional search engines that blacklist websites with dissenting opinions will be viewed as the benevolent free speech dinosaurs of the past.
This assumes the only way to use LLMs effectively is to have a monolith model that does everything from translation (from ANY language to ANY language) to creative writing to coding to what have you. And supposedly GPT4 is a mixture of experts (maybe 8-cross)
The efficiency of finetuned models is quite, quite a bit improved at the cost of giving up the rest of the world to do specific things, and disk space to have a few dozen local finetunes (or even hundreds+ for SaaS services) is peanuts compared to acquiring 80GB of VRAM on a single device for monomodels
Sutskever says there's a "phase transition" at the order of 9 bn neurons, after which LLMs begin to become really useful. I don't know much here, but wouldn't the monomodels become overfit, because they don't have enough data for 9+bn parameters?
They won't stand still while others are scraping and digitizing. It's like saying there is no moat in search. Scale is a thing. Learning effects are a thing. It's not the worlds widest moat for sure, but it's a moat.
Why would society at large suffer from a major flaw in GPT-4, if it's even there? If GPT-4 spits out some nonsense to your customers, just put a filter on it, as you should anyway. We can't seriously expect OpenAI to babysit every company out there, can we? Why would we even want to?
For example, and I'm not saying such flaws exist, GPT4 output is bias in some way, encourages radicalization (see Twitter's, YouTube's, and Facebook's news feed algorithm), create self-esteem issues in children (see Instagram), ... etc.
If you worked for old OpenAI, you would be free to talk about it - since old OpenAI didn't give a crap about profit.
Altman's OpenAI? He will want you to "go to him first".
We can't expect GPT-4 not to have bias in some way, or not to have all these things that you mentioned. I read in multiple places that GPT products have "progressive" bias. If that's Ok with you, then you just use it with that bias. If not, you fix it by pre-prompting, etc... If you can't fix it, use LLAMA or something else. That's the entrepreneur's problem, not OpenAI's. OpenAI needs to make it intelligent and capable. The entrepreneurs and business users will do the rest. That's how they get paid. If OpenAI to solve all these problems, what business users are going to do themselves? I just don't see the societal harm here.
Concerns about bias and racism in ChatGPT would feel more valid if ChatGPT were even one tenth as bias as anything else in life. Twitter, Facebook, the media, friends and family, etc. are all more bias and radicalized (though I mean "radicalized" in a mild sense) than ChatGPT. Talk to anyone on any side about the war in Gaza and you'll get a bunch of opinions that the opposite side will say are blatantly racist. ChatGPT will just say something inoffensive like it's a complex and sensitive issue and that it's not programmed to have political opinions.
GPT3/GPT4 currently moralize about anything slightly controversial. Sure you can construct a long elaborate prompt to "jailbreak" it, but it's so much effort it's easier to just write something by yourself.
>Encourages radicalization (see Twitter's, YouTube's, and Facebook's news feed algorithm)
What do you mean? It recommends things that it thinks people will like.
Also I highly suspect "Altman's OpenAI" is dead regardless. They are now Copilot(tm) Research.
They may have delusions of grandeur regarding being able to resist the MicroBorg or change it from the inside, but that simply does not happen.
The best they can hope for as an org is to live as long as they can as best as they can.
I think Sam's 100B silicon gambit in the middle east (quite curious because this is probably something the United State Federal Government Is Likely Not Super Fond Of) is him realizing that, while he is influential and powerful, he's nowhere near MSFT level.
> With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization.
In fact this observation is pertinent to the original stated goals of openAI. In some sense companies and organisations are superinteligences. That is they have goals, they are acting in the real world to achieve those goals and they are more capable in some measures than a single human. (They are not AGI, because they are not artificial, they are composed of meaty parts, the individuals forming the company.)
In fact what we are seeing is that when the superinteligence OpenAI was set up there was an attempt to align the goals of the initial founders with the then new organisation. They tried to “bind” their “golem” to make it pursue certain goals by giving it an unconventional governance structure and a charter.
Did they succeed? Too early to tell for sure, but there are at least question marks around it.
How would one argue against? OpenAI appears to have given up the lofty goals of AI safety and preventing the concentration of AI provess. In their pursuit of economic success the forces wishing to enrich themselves overpowered the forces wishing to concentrate on the goals. Safety will be still a figleaf for them, if nothing else to achieve regulatory capture to keep out upstart competition.
How would one argue for? OpenAI is still around. The charter is still around. To be able to achieve the lofty goals contained in it one needs a lot of resources. Money in particular is a resource which enables one greater powers in shaping the world. Achieving the original goals will require a lot of money. The “golem” is now in the “gain resources” phase of its operation. To achieve that it commercialises the relatively benign, safe and simple LLMs it has access to. This serves the original goal in three ways: gains further resources, estabilishes the organisation as a pre-eminent expert on AI and thus AI safety, provides it with a relatively safe sandbox where adversarial forces are trying its safety concepts. In other words all is well with the original goals, the “golem” that is OpenAI is still well aligned. It will achieve the original goals once it has gained enough resources to do so.
The fact that we can’t tell which is happening is in fact the worry and problem with superinteligence/AI safety.
They let the fox in. But they didn’t have to. They could have try to raise money without such a sweet deal to MS. They gave away power for cloud credits.
> They let the fox in. But they didn’t have to. They could have try to raise money without such a sweet deal to MS.
They did, and fell, IIRC, vastly short (IIRC, an order of magnitude, maybe more) short of their minimum short-term target. The commercial subsidiary thing was a risk taken to support the mission because it was clear it was going to fail from lack of funding otherwise.
Do we need to false dichotomy. DotA 2 bot was a successful technology preview. You need both research and development in a healthy organisation. Let's call this... hmm I don't know "R&D" for short. Might catch on.
On the contrary, this saga has shown that a huge number of people are extremely passionate about the existence of OpenAI and it's leadership by Altman, much more strongly and in larger numbers than most had suspected. If anything this has solidified the importance of the company and I think people will trust it more that the situation was resolved with the light speed it was.
That's a misreading of the situation. The employees saw their big bag vanishing and suddenly realised they were employed by a non-profit entity that had loftier goals than making a buck, so they rallied to overturn it and they've gotten their way. This is a net negative for anyone not financially invested in OAI.
What lofty goals? The board was questioned repeatedly and never articulated clear reasoning for firing Altman and in the process lost the confidence of the employees hence the "rally". The lack of clarity was their undoing whether there would have been a bag for the employees to lose or not.
My story: Maybe they had lofty goals, maybe not, but it sounded like the whole thing was instigated by Altman trying to fire Toner (one of the board members) over a silly pretext of her coauthoring a paper that nobody read that was very mildly negative about OpenAI, during her day job. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
And then presumably the other board members read the writing on the wall (especially seeing how 3 other board members mysteriously resigned, including Hoffman https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...), and realized that if Altman can kick out Toner under such flimsy pretexts, they'd be out too.
So they allied with Helen to countercoup Greg/Sam.
I think the anti-board perspective is that this is all shallow bickering over a 90B company. The pro-board perspective is that the whole point of the board was to serve as a check on the CEO, so if the CEO could easily appoint only loyalists, then the board is a useless rubber stamp that lends unfair legitimacy to OpenAI's regulatory capture efforts.
Let's see, Sam Altman is an incredibly charismatic founding CEO, who some people consider manipulative, but is also beloved by many employees. He got kicked out by his board, but brought back when they realized their mistake.
It's true that this doesn't really pattern-match with the founding story of huge successful companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. But somehow, I think it's still possible that a huge company could be created by a person like this.
(And of course, more important than creating a huge company, is creating insanely great products.)
I think people following Sam Altman is jumping to conclusions. I think it's just as likely that employees are simply following the money. They want to make $$$, and that's what a for-profit company does, which is what Altman wants. I think it's probably not really about Altman or his leadership.
Given that over 750 people have signed the letter, it's safe to assume that their motivations vary. Some might be motivated by the financial aspects, some might be motivated by Sam's leadership (like considering Sam as a friend who needs support). Some might fervently believe that their work is crucial for the advancement of humanity and that any changes would just hinder their progress. And some might have just caved in to peer pressure.
Most are probably motivated by money, some are motivated by stability and some are motivated by their loyalty to sam but i think most are motivated by money and stability.
I feel like history has shown repeatedly that having a good product matters way more than trust, as evidenced by Facebook and Uber. People seem to talk big smack about lost trust and such in the immediate aftermath of a scandal, and then quitely renew the contracts when the time comes.
All of the big ad companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook) have, like, a scandal per month, yet the ad revenue keeps coming.
Meltdown was a huge scandal, yet Intel keeps pumping out the chips.
> We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.
> We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.
1- So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults?
2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this?
3- Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.
> Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.
It's only natural to confuse what is happening with what we wish to happen. After all, when we imagine something, aren't we undergoing a kind of experience?
A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof. It's only human to do this. We all do.
> A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof.
It was funny reading Kara Swisher keeping saying twitter is dying and is toxic and what not, while STILL doing all her first announcements on twitter, and using twitter as a source.
same with Ashlee Vance (the other journo reporting on this) and all the main players (Sam/Greg/Ilya/Mira/Satya/whoever) also make their first announcement on twitter.
I don't know about the funding part of it, but there is no denying it, the news is still freshest on twitter. Twitter feels just as toxic for me as before, in fact I feel community notes has made it much better, imho.
____
In some related news, I finally got bluesky invite (I don't have invite codes yet or I would share here)
and people there are complaining about... mastadon and how elitist it is...
that was an eye opener.
nice if you want some science-y updates but it's still lags behind twitter for news.
Microsoft's role remains same as it was on Thursday. Minor (49%?) shareholder and keeps access to models and IP
IMO Kevin tweeting that MS will hire and match comp of all OpenAI employees was amazing negotiation tactic because that meant employees could sign the petition without worrying about their jobs/visas
OpenAI is an airgapped test lab for Microsoft. They dont want critical exposure to the downside risk of AI research, just the benefits in terms of IP. Sam and Greg probably offer enough stability for them to continue this way.
It makes sense to airgap Generative AI while courts ponder wether copyright fair use applies or not. Research is clearly allowed fair use, and let OpenAI experiment with commercialization until it is all clear waters.
I was thinking about this a lot as well, but what did that mean for employee stock in the commercial entity? I heard they were up for a liquid cash-out in the next funding round.
> So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults?
Altman was trying to remove one of the board members before he was forced out. Looks like he got his way in the end, but I'm going to call Altman the primary instigator because of that.
His side was also the "we'll nuke the company unless you resign" side.
His side was also "700 regular employees support this", which is pretty unusual as most people don't care about their CEO at all. I am not related to OpenAI at all, but given the choice of "favorite of all employees" vs "fire people with no warning then refuse to give explanation why even under pressure" I know which side I root for.
The 700 employees also have significant financial incentive to want Altman to stay. If he moved to a competitor all the shine would follow. They want the pay-day (I don't blame them), but take with a grain of salt what the employees want in this case.
No idea what these 700 employees were thinking. They probably had little knowledge of what truly went down other than “my CEO was fired unfairly” and rushed to the rescue.
I think the board should have been more transparent on why they made the decision to fire Sam.
Or perhaps these employees only cared about their AI work and money? The foundation would be perceived as the culprit against them.
Really sad there’s no clarity from the old board disclosed. Hope one day we will know.
I wonder how much more transparent they can really be. I know that when firing a "regular" employee, you basically never tell everyone all the details for legal CYA reasons. When your firing someone worth half a billion dollars, I expect the legal fears are magnified.
But that's the difference, the CEO is not a regular employee. If a board of directors wants to be trusted and taken seriously it can't just fire the CEO and say "I'm sorry we can't say why, that's private information".
Looking back, Altman's ace in hand was the tender offer from Thrive. Idk anyone at OpenAI, but all the early senior personnel backed him with vehemence. If the leaders hand't championed him strongly, I doubt you get 90% of the company to commit to leaving.
I'm sure some of those employees were easily going to make $10m+ in the sale. That's a pretty great motivation tool.
Overall, I do agree with you. The board could not justify their capricious decision making and refused to elaborate. They should've brought him back on Sunday instead of mucking around. OpenAI existing is a good thing.
That is one HUGE grain of salt considering 1/ it's Blind 2/ Even in the same thread there is another poster saying the exact opposite thing (i.e. no peer pressure)
Also, all the stuff they started doing with the hearts and cryptic messages on Twitter (now X) was a bit ... cult-y?. I wouldn't doubt there was a lot of manipulation behind all that, even from @sama itself.
So, there is goes, it seems that there's a big chance now that the first AGI will land on the hands of a group with the antics of teenagers. Interesting timeline.
The explanation for point 1 is point 3. If the people involved were not terminally online and felt the need to share every single one of their immediate thoughts with the public they could have likely settled this behind closed doors, where this kind of stuff belongs.
It's not actually news, it's entertainment and self-aggrandizement by everyone involved including the audience.
The board not saying what the hell they were on about was the source of the whole drama in the first place. If they had just said exactly what their problem was up front there wouldn't have been as much to tweet about.
Considering CEO2 rebelled next day and CEO3 allegedly said he'll quit unless board comes out with truth, doesn't provide much confidence in their adulthood.
If there’s been one constant here, it’s been people who actually know Tonrer expressing deep support for her experience, intelligence, and ethics, so it’s interesting to me that she seems to be getting the boot.
Add delusions of grandeur to that list thinking she can pursue her ideological will by winning over 3 board members while losing 90% of the company staff.
She was fighting an idelogical battle that needs full industry buy in, legitimate or not that's not how you win people over.
If she's truely a rationalist as she claims then a rationalist would be realistic understanding that if your engineers can just leave and do it somewhere else tomorrow you aren't making progress. Taking on the full might of US capitalism via winning over the fringe half of a non profit board is not the best strategy. At best it was desperate and naive.
This is pretty good evidence she's a rationalist; rationalism means a religious devotion to a specific kind of logical thinking that never works in real life because you can't calculate the probability a result if you didn't know it could happen in the first place.
Traditional response to this happening is to say something about your "priors" being wrong instead of taking responsibility.
If there is one clear thing, it's that no one on that board should be allowed anywhere near another board for any non-clown company. The level of incompetence in how they handled this whole thing was extraordinary.
The fact that Adam D'Angelo is still on the new board apparently is much more baffling than the fact that Tonrer or Ilya are not.
What is the benefit of learning about this kind of drama minute-by-minute, compared to reading it a few hours later on hacker news or next day on wall street journal?
Personally I found twitter very bad for my productivity, a lot of focus destroyed just to know "what is happening" when there was neglible drawbacks of finding about news events a few hours later.
Satya comes out as evil imho, and I wonder how much orchestration there was going on behind the scenes.
Microsoft is showing that it is still able to capture important scale ups and 'embrace' them, whilst also acting as if they have the moral high ground, but in reality are doing research with a high governance errors and potential legal problems away from their premises. and THAT is why stakeholders like him.
Satya just played the hand he had. The hand he had was excellent, he had already won. MS already had perceptual license, people working on GPT and Sam Altman on his corner.
The one thing in Microsoft has stayed constant from Gates to Ballmer to Satya: you should never, ever form a close alliance with MS. They know how to screw alliance partners. i4i, Windows RT partners, Windows Phone Partners, Nokia, HW partners in Surface. Even Steve Jobs was burned few times.
> Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates
This has been my single strongest takeaway from this saga: Twitter remains the centre of controversy. When shit hit the fan, Sam and Satya and Swisher took to Twitter. Not Threads. Not Bluesy. Twitter. (X.)
Bluesky still has gated signups at this point so I don't think it will ever be a viable alternative.
Threads had a rushed rollout which resulted in major feature gaps that disincentivized users from doing anything beyond creating their profiles.
Notable figures and organizations have little reason to fully migrate off Twitter unless Musk irreversibly breaks the site and even he is not stupid enough to do that (yet?). So with most of its content creators still in place, Twitter has no risk of following the path of Digg.
Doubt he took this job for financial comp so even if he got paid, it probably wasn't much.
Equity is a big part of CEO pay packages and OpenAI has weird equity structure, plus there was a very real chance OpenAI's value would go to $0 leaving whatever promised comp worthless. So Emmett likely took the job for other reasons.
On a side tangent, absolutely amazing how all this drama unfolded on Twitter/X. No Threads, no Mastodon, no Truth Social or Blue whatever.
Say what you want about Elon’s leadership but his instinct to buy Twitter was completely right. To me it seemed like any social network crap but he realized it was important.
By all accounts he paid about double what it was worth and the value has collapsed from there.
Probably not a great idea to say anything overtly political when you own a social media company, as due to politics being so polarised in the US, any opinion is going to divide your audience in half causing a usage collapse and driving support to competing platforms.
His worse problem is that he owns both a social media network and a bigger separate business that wants to operate in the US, Turkey, India, China, Saudi Arabia, etc. which means he can't fight any censorship requests in any of those countries. (Which the previous management was actually very aggressive about.)
His worst personal problem is that he keeps replying "fascinating" to neo-Nazis and random conspiracy theorists because he wants to be internet friends with them.
1. He tried to not buy Twitter very hard and OpenAI’s new board member forced his hand
2. It hasn’t been a good financial decision if the banks and X’s own valuation cuts are anything to go by.
3. If his purpose wasn’t to make money…all of these tweets would have absolutely been allowed before Elon bought the company. He didn’t affect any relevance changes here.
Why would one person owning something so important be better than being publicly owned? I don’t understand the logic.
> Why would one person owning something so important be better than being publicly owned?
Usually publicly owned things end up being controlled by someone: a CEO, a main investor, a crooked board, a government, a shady governmental organization. At least with Elon owning X, things are a little more transparent, he’s rather candid where he stands.
A huge amount of advertisers ran away, the revenue cratered and it is probably less than the annual debt servicing (revenue, not profit), the current valuation, accordingly to Musk math (https://fortune.com/2023/09/06/elon-musk-x-what-is-twitter-w...), is 1/10 of the acquisition price.
But yes, it was a masterstroke.
I don’t remember any other masterstroke in history that managed to lose 40B with a single acquisition.
I’d be rather reluctant to question the financial decisions of one of wealthiest men on earth. Losing 40B could feel quite different to him than to you or me. Besides, it’s unrealized loss until he sells.
The silicon valley/startups/VC tribe, and they favour Twitter because 1. that's what their friends use and 2. they like Elon Musk, they want to be like him.
Many OpenAI employees expressed their support for Sam at some point also on Twitter. Microsoft CEO (based in Redmond) tweeted quite a lot. Tech media reporters like Emily Chang and Kara Swisher also participated. The last one is quite critical of Twitter and I am not sure they all like Musk that much.
Are they all in the same “tribe”? Maybe you should enlarge the definition?
How about us all IT people who watched the drama unfolding on Twitter while our friend are using FB and Insta, we are far from SV and have mixed feelings about Elon Musk while never in a million years wanting to be like him? Also same “tribe”?
What does this have to do with Elon again? FYI Twitter existed before October 2022. Account join dates are public. Every single person involved in this, incl. OpenAI staff posting for solidarity, joined Twitter years before Elon's takeover.
Say what you want about Summers specifically but I think it's a good idea getting some economists on the board. They are academics but focused on practical, important issues like loss of jobs and what that means for the economy and society. Up until now it seems like the board members have either been AI doomers with no practical experience or Silicon Valley types that inevitably have conflicts of interest, because everybody is starting their own AI venture now.
This has nothing to do with Summers being an economist and everything to do with the fact that he used to run the parent agency of the IRS. Summers is the least sensible board pick imaginable unless one takes this fact and the coming regulatory catastrophe into account.
>This has nothing to do with Summers being an economist and everything to do with the fact that he used to run the parent agency of the IRS.
It has literally nothing to do with that. The reason he's on the board now is because D'Angelo wanted him on it. You could have a problem with that, but you can't use his inclusion as evidence that the board lost.
Now the blue tick has same effect on me on Twitter that the red N logo has on any film that came from the Netflix formula factory. I already know it’s going to be bad, regurgitated. Does everyone have a Twitter blue tick now? Or is that just a char people are using in their names?
>Does everyone have a Twitter blue tick now? Or is that just a char people are using in their names?
Blue tick just means user bought a subscription (X Premium) now - one of the features is "reply prioritization", so top replies to popular tweets are from blue ticks.
So, Adam D'Angelo is the only board member that remains, and he had also voted against Altman before. How interesting, considering all the theory crafting about him being the one who initiated this coup.
I wonder how this will impact the company-owned-by-a-non-profit model in the future. While it isn’t uncommon (e.g. I believe IKEA are owned by a nonprofit), I believe it has historically been for tax reasons.
Given the grandstanding and chaos on both sides, it’ll be interesting to see if OpenAI undergo a radical shift in their structure.
We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.
Firstly, maybe don't put quotes around an unrelated party's representation of the board. Secondly, the board was made up of individuals and naturally, what might be true for the board as a whole does not apply to every individual on it.
If all members of the old board resign simultaneously, what happens then? No more old board to agree to any new members. In a for-profit the shareholders can elect new board members, but in this case I don't know how it's supposed to work.
I've been privy to this happening at a nonprofit board. Depends on charter, but I've seen the old board tender their resignation and remain responsible only to vote for the appointment of their (usually interim to start) replacements. Normally in a nonprofit (not here), the membership of that nonprofit still has to ratify the new board in some kind of annual meeting; but in the meantime, the interim board can start making executive decisions about the org.
Doesn’t matter. It’s an absolutely clear conflict of interest. It may have taken an unrelated shakeup for people to notice (or maybe D’Angelo was critically involved; we don’t know), but there’s no way he should be staying on this board.
maybe it's just going to be easier to fire him in a second step once this current situation which seems to be primarily about ideology is cleared up. In D’Angelo's case it's going to be easier to just point to a clear traditional conflict of interest down the line
The one (Adam D’Angelo) who’s a cofounder and CEO of a company (Quora) that has a product (Poe) that arguably competes with OpenAI’s “GPTs” feature, no less.
I don’t understand why that’s not a conflict of interest?
But honestly both products pale in comparison to OpenAI’s underlying models’ importance.
> I don’t understand why that’s not a conflict of interest?
It's not the conflict of interest it would be if it was the board of a for profit corporation that was basically identical to the existing for-profit LLC but without the lyaers above it ending with the nonprofit that the board actually runs, because OpenAI is not a normal company, and making profit is not its purpose, so the CEO of a company that happens to have a product in the same space as the LLC is not in a fundamental conflict of interest (there may be some specific decisions it would make sense for him to recuse from for conflict reasons, but there is a difference between "may have a conflict regarding certain decisions" and "has a fundamental conflict incompatible with sitting on the board".)
Its not a conflict for a nonprofit that raises money with craft faires to have someone who runs a for-profit periodic craft faire in the same market on its board. It is a conflict for a for profit corporation whose business is running such a craft faire to do so, though.
Still a conflict of interest. If D’Angelo has financial incentive to want OpenAI to fail, then this at odds with his duty to follow the OpenAI charter. It’s exactly why two of the previous board members left earlier this year.
Larry Summers mostly counts as a Microsoft seat. Summers will support commercial and private interest and not have a single thought about safety, just like during the financial crisis 15 years ago https://www.chronicle.com/article/larry-summers-and-the-subv...
Larry Summers hurt the US economy by making the recovery from 2008 much too slow. If they'd done stimulus better, we could've had 2019's economic growth years earlier. That would've been great for Microsoft.
> And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.
maybe he really had an affirmative statement on this from Sam Altman but nobody signs an employment contract this quickly so it was all still up in the air
Also even if he signed it he's allowed to quit? Like, the 14th amendment exists y'all. And especially if after that agreement 90+ percent of openai threatens to quit, that's a different situation than the situation 10 minutes before that announcement so why wouldn't they change their decision?
Why does this accusation keep coming up? Sam even confirmed he took the offer in one of the tweets above "when i decided to join msft on sun evening". Contracts are not handcuffs and he was free to change his mind.
Satya's statement at the time may well have been true at the time in that he, Sam and Greg had agreed on them joining MSFT. Later circumstances changed, and now that decision has been reversed or nullfied. Calling the original statement a lie is not warranted IMHO.
In either case the end effect is the essentially the same. Either Sam is at MSFT and can continue to work with openAI IP, or he's back at openAI and do the same. In both cases the net effect for MSFT is similar and not materially different, although the revealed preference of Sam's return to openAI indicates the second option was the preferred one.
Absolutely no lies here. It was a dynamic situation and it wasn't at all clear that discussions with OAI board would lead to an outcome where sama returns as CEO.
Satya offered sama a way forward as a backup option.
And I think it says a lot about sama that he took that option, at least while things were playing out. He and Greg could have gotten together capital for a startup where they each had huge equity and made $$$$$$. These actions from sama demonstrate his level of commitment to execution on this technology.
Wait where are you getting that the hiring was a lie? At this point his tenure there was approximately as long as miras and emmets so that's par for the course in this saga, what makes that stint different?
Did Satya get played with the whole "Sam and Greg are joining Microsoft"? Was Satya in on a gambit to get the whole company to threaten to quit to force the board's hand?
It sure feels like a bad look for Satya to announce a huge hire Sunday night and then this? But what do I know.
Edit: don't know why the downvotes. You're welcome to think it's an obviously smart political move. That it's win/win either way. But it's a very fair question that every tech blogger on the planet will be trying to answer for the next month!
Huh? Satyas move was politically brilliant. Either outcome of Sama returning to OpenAI or Sama going to Microsoft is good for Microsoft as continuity and progress are the most important things right now for Microsoft. An OpenAI in turmoil would have been worthless.
Of course they can, but they can't do these and sell/buy stocks involved at the same time. It's not illegal to influence stocks value (one could argue just being a CEO does that), but buying/selling while in possession of insider knowledge.
Let's say Sam called his broker and said to him on Friday we'll before the market closes. Buy MSFT stock. Then he made his announcement on Sunday and on Monday he told his broker to sell that stock before he announced he's actually coming back to (not at all)OpenAI. That would be illegal insider trading.
If he never calls his broker/his friends/his mom to buy/sell stock there's nothing illegal.
Securities fraud is more than insider trading. Misleading investors about a company’s financial health is fraud 101 and it sure looks like he lied about hiring someone to stem a precipitate MSFT drop.
Im not so sure. This whole ordeal revealed how strong of a position Microsoft had all along. And that’s all still true even without effectively taking over OpenAI. Because now everyone can see how easily it could happen.
Something does still seem not flattering towards Microsoft about reneging on the Microsoft offer though.
Consider that Satya already landed a huge win by the stock price hitting ATH rather than taking a hit based on the news. Further consider that MS owns 49% of a company which could be valued at 80 billion on the condition that the company makes structural changes to the board to prevent this from happening again (as opposed to taking a dive if the company essentially died.) Then there's the uncertainty of the tech behind Bing's chat (and other AI tie-ins) continuing to be competitive vs Google and other players. If MS had to recreate their own tech, then they would likely be far behind even a stalled OpenAI. Seems to me that it makes little difference where this tech is being developed (in-house vs in a company which you own 49% of) in terms of access. Probably better that the development happens within the company which started all of this and has already been the leader, rather than starting over.
He announced the hire and that precipitated 90+ percent of the employees threatening to quit. It would be an understatement to say that the situation changed. Why does everyone want satya to be bad at his job and and not react quickly to a rapidly evolving situation? His decision to hire Sama paved the way for samas return.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 572 ms ] threadIt looks to me like the real victim here is the "for humanity" corporate structure. At some point, the money decided it needed to be free.
Still think D'Angelo wasn't the power player in the room?
Somebody make a Netflix documentary please.
Same with employees and their stock comp. Same with microsoft.
Thrive was about to buy employee shares at a $86 bn valuation. The Information said that those units had 12x since 2021.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/thrive-capital-to-le...
Really it just shows the whole non-profit arm of the company was even more of a lie then it appeared.
Sam also played his hand extremely well; he's likely learned from watching hundreds of founder blowups over the years. He never really seemed angry publicly as he gained support from all the staff including Ilya & Mira. I had little doubt Emmett Shear would also welcome Sam's return since they were both in the first YC batch together.
If that were the case, would they not have presented the new CEO immediately for an “orderly transition”? As I understand it, Ms Murati tried to get Altman back, and when she pressured the board, they tried at least two other possible CEOs before settling on Mr Shear, who also threatened to leave if they could not give evidence of a legal reason for firing Altman. It smells like a personality conflict.
Dispelling the complete nonsense that the platform is 'dying'.
That doesn't change the fact post-Elon Twitter has severely degraded in terms of user experience (rate limits, blue check spam, API pay-wall, etc.) and Elon isn't doing the platform any favours by continuing to participate in detrimental ways (seen in the recent advertiser exodus).
But the most common metrics for whether or not a social media platform is dying, are things like ad revenue and MAU.
I contribute to neither, since I'm not a user nor an ad viewer, and yet I'm still able to "get the news".
So my point is this: the fact that important news are still there, won't guarantee that the platform stays successfull
I don’t see any point to the non profit umbrella now.
Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.
Whose trust?
But I said this because: They've retained the entire company, reinstated its founder as CEO, and replaced an activist clown board with a professional, experienced, and possibly* unified one. Still remains to be seen how the board membership and overall org structure changes, but I have much more trust in the current 3 members steering OpenAI toward long-term success.
It seems that the safety team within OpenAI lost. My biggest fear with this whole AI thing is hostile takeover, and openAI was best positioned to at least do an effort to prevent that. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
They fixed the glitch.
This whole thing started with Altman pushing a safety oriented non-profit into a tense contradiction (edit: I mean the 2019-2022 gpt3/chatgpt for-profit stuff that led to all the Anthropic people leaving). The most recent timeline was
- Altman tries to push out another board member
- That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
- Altman's side escalates by saying they'll nuke the company
Altman's side won, but how can we say that his side didn't cause any of this instability?
That event wasn't some unprovoked start of this history.
> That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
and the entire company retaliated. Then this board member tried to sell the company to a competitor who refused. In the meantime the board went through two interim CEOs who refused to play along with this scheme. In the meantime one of the people who voted to fire the CEO regretted it publicly within 24 hours. That's a clown car of a board. It reflects the quality of most non-profit boards but not of organizations that actually execute well.
The board was incompetent. It will go down in the history books as one of the biggest blunders of a board in history.
If you want to take drastic action, you consult with your biggest partner keeping the lights on before you do so. Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley had no business being on this board. Even if you had safety concerns in mind, you don't bypass everyone else with a stake in the future of your business because you're feeling petulant.
See this article for all that context (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341399) because it sure didn't start with the paper you referred to either.
It was a classic antisocial academic move; all she needed to do was talk to Altman, both before and after writing the paper. It's incredibly easy to do that, and her not doing it is what began the insanity.
She's gone now, and Altman remains, substantially because she didn't know how to pick up a phone and interact with another human being. Who knows, she might have even been successful at her stated goal, of protecting AI, had she done even the most basic amount of problem solving first. She should not have been on this board, and I hope she's learned literally anything from this about interacting with people, though frankly I doubt it.
She had many, many other options available to her that she did not take. That was a grave mistake and she paid for it.
"But what about academic integrity?" Yes! That's why this whole idea was problematic from the beginning. She can't be objective and fulfill her role as board member. Her role at Georgetown was in direct conflict with her role on the OpenAI board.
So pointing out risks is trashing the company.
OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it.
Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete.
Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just because something claims to be non-profit doesn't mean it will always remain that way. With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization. Non-profit status and whatever the organization's charter says is temporary.
I mean it is what they want isn't it. They did some random stuff like, playing dota2 or robot arms, even the Dalle stuff. Now they finally find that one golden goose, of course they are going to keep it.
I don't think the company has changed at all. It succeeded after all.
Did they company change? I am not convinced.
Iirc, the NP structure was implemented to attract top AI talent from FAANG. Then they needed investors to fund the infrastructure and hence gave the employees shares or profit units (whatever the hell that is). The NP now shields MSFT from regulatory issues.
I do wonder how many of those employees would actually go to MSFT. It feels more like a gambit to get Altman back in since they were about to cash out with the tender offer.
Unfortunately, in the past few days, the only thing they've accomplished is significantly damaging their brand.
It doesn't matter if OpenAI or AWS or GCP encoded the entire works of Shakespeare in their LLM, they can all write/complete a valid limerick about "There once was a man from Nantucket".
I seriously doubt AWS is going to license OpenAI's technology when they can just copy the functionality, royalty free, and charge users for it. Maybe they will? But I doubt it. To the end user it's just another locally hosted API. Like DNS.
More likely, they're a loss-leader and generating publicity by making it as cheap as possible.
_Everything_ we've seen come out of silicon valley does this, so why would they suddenly be charging the right price?
I thought the was a somewhat clear agreement that openAI is currently running inference at a loss?
Quake and Counter-Strike in the 1990s ran like garbage in software-rendering mode. I remember having to run Counter-Strike on my Pentium 90 at the lowest resolution, and then disable upscaling to get 15fps, and even then smoke grenades and other effects would drop the framerate into the single digits. Almost two years after Quake's release did dedicated 3d video cards (voodoo 1 and 2 were accelerators, depended on a seperate 2d VGA graphics card to feed it) begin to hit the market.
Nowadays you can run those games (and their sequels) in the thousands (tens of thousands?) of frames per second on a top end modern card. I would imagine similar events with hardware will transpire with LLM. OpenAI is already prototyping their own hardware to train and run LLMs. I would imagine NVidia hasn't been sitting on their hands either.
You mean like they already do on Amazon Bedrock?
So far we don't have any open source models that are close to GPT4, so we don't know what it takes to run them for similar speeds.
They still have gpt4 and rumored gpt4.5 to offer, so people have no choice but to use them. The internet has such short an attention span, this news will get forgotten in 2 months
what's keeping people with OpenAI for now is that chatGPT is free and GPT3.5 and GPT4 are the best. over time I expect the gap in performance to get smaller and the cost to run these to get cheaper.
if google gives me something close to as good as OpenAI's offering for the same price and it pull data from my gmail or my calendar or my google drive then i'll switch to that.
Ok, the first few times you use it maybe it's good to know it doesn't think it's a person, but short and sweet answers just save time, especially when the result is streamed.
People use "the chatbot from OpenAI" because that's what became famous and got all the world a taste of AI (my dad is on that bandwagon, for instance). There is absolutely no way my dad is going to sign up for an Anthropic account and start making API calls to their LLM.
But I agree that it's a weak moat, if OpenAI were to disappear, I could just tell my dad to use "this same thing but from Google" and he'd switch without thinking much about it.
The efficiency of finetuned models is quite, quite a bit improved at the cost of giving up the rest of the world to do specific things, and disk space to have a few dozen local finetunes (or even hundreds+ for SaaS services) is peanuts compared to acquiring 80GB of VRAM on a single device for monomodels
If you worked for old OpenAI, you would be free to talk about it - since old OpenAI didn't give a crap about profit.
Altman's OpenAI? He will want you to "go to him first".
What do you mean? It recommends things that it thinks people will like.
Also I highly suspect "Altman's OpenAI" is dead regardless. They are now Copilot(tm) Research.
They may have delusions of grandeur regarding being able to resist the MicroBorg or change it from the inside, but that simply does not happen.
The best they can hope for as an org is to live as long as they can as best as they can.
I think Sam's 100B silicon gambit in the middle east (quite curious because this is probably something the United State Federal Government Is Likely Not Super Fond Of) is him realizing that, while he is influential and powerful, he's nowhere near MSFT level.
Languages other than English exist, and RLHF at least does work in any language you make the request in. regex/nlp, not so much.
In fact this observation is pertinent to the original stated goals of openAI. In some sense companies and organisations are superinteligences. That is they have goals, they are acting in the real world to achieve those goals and they are more capable in some measures than a single human. (They are not AGI, because they are not artificial, they are composed of meaty parts, the individuals forming the company.)
In fact what we are seeing is that when the superinteligence OpenAI was set up there was an attempt to align the goals of the initial founders with the then new organisation. They tried to “bind” their “golem” to make it pursue certain goals by giving it an unconventional governance structure and a charter.
Did they succeed? Too early to tell for sure, but there are at least question marks around it.
How would one argue against? OpenAI appears to have given up the lofty goals of AI safety and preventing the concentration of AI provess. In their pursuit of economic success the forces wishing to enrich themselves overpowered the forces wishing to concentrate on the goals. Safety will be still a figleaf for them, if nothing else to achieve regulatory capture to keep out upstart competition.
How would one argue for? OpenAI is still around. The charter is still around. To be able to achieve the lofty goals contained in it one needs a lot of resources. Money in particular is a resource which enables one greater powers in shaping the world. Achieving the original goals will require a lot of money. The “golem” is now in the “gain resources” phase of its operation. To achieve that it commercialises the relatively benign, safe and simple LLMs it has access to. This serves the original goal in three ways: gains further resources, estabilishes the organisation as a pre-eminent expert on AI and thus AI safety, provides it with a relatively safe sandbox where adversarial forces are trying its safety concepts. In other words all is well with the original goals, the “golem” that is OpenAI is still well aligned. It will achieve the original goals once it has gained enough resources to do so.
The fact that we can’t tell which is happening is in fact the worry and problem with superinteligence/AI safety.
They did, and fell, IIRC, vastly short (IIRC, an order of magnitude, maybe more) short of their minimum short-term target. The commercial subsidiary thing was a risk taken to support the mission because it was clear it was going to fail from lack of funding otherwise.
Next up would be an EVE corp run entirely by LLMs
If it's really valuable to society, it needs to be a government entity, full stop.
And then presumably the other board members read the writing on the wall (especially seeing how 3 other board members mysteriously resigned, including Hoffman https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...), and realized that if Altman can kick out Toner under such flimsy pretexts, they'd be out too.
So they allied with Helen to countercoup Greg/Sam.
I think the anti-board perspective is that this is all shallow bickering over a 90B company. The pro-board perspective is that the whole point of the board was to serve as a check on the CEO, so if the CEO could easily appoint only loyalists, then the board is a useless rubber stamp that lends unfair legitimacy to OpenAI's regulatory capture efforts.
It's true that this doesn't really pattern-match with the founding story of huge successful companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. But somehow, I think it's still possible that a huge company could be created by a person like this.
(And of course, more important than creating a huge company, is creating insanely great products.)
You forgot about Apple.
All of the big ad companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook) have, like, a scandal per month, yet the ad revenue keeps coming. Meltdown was a huge scandal, yet Intel keeps pumping out the chips.
2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this?
3- Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.
It's only natural to confuse what is happening with what we wish to happen. After all, when we imagine something, aren't we undergoing a kind of experience?
A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof. It's only human to do this. We all do.
Cognitive dissonance
same with Ashlee Vance (the other journo reporting on this) and all the main players (Sam/Greg/Ilya/Mira/Satya/whoever) also make their first announcement on twitter.
I don't know about the funding part of it, but there is no denying it, the news is still freshest on twitter. Twitter feels just as toxic for me as before, in fact I feel community notes has made it much better, imho.
____
In some related news, I finally got bluesky invite (I don't have invite codes yet or I would share here)
and people there are complaining about... mastadon and how elitist it is...
that was an eye opener.
nice if you want some science-y updates but it's still lags behind twitter for news.
Discoverability on Mastodon is abysmal. It was too much work for me.
I tend to get my news from Substack now.
Don't you feel out of date on substack? especially since things move so fast sometimes, like with this open-ai fiasco?
(Thank you for calling Twitter Twitter)
>It is just a joke that Facebook could be valued at $6 billion.
lol, seems HN is same since forever.
IMO Kevin tweeting that MS will hire and match comp of all OpenAI employees was amazing negotiation tactic because that meant employees could sign the petition without worrying about their jobs/visas
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sar...
(Sad day for popcorn sales.)
Altman was trying to remove one of the board members before he was forced out. Looks like he got his way in the end, but I'm going to call Altman the primary instigator because of that.
His side was also the "we'll nuke the company unless you resign" side.
I think the board should have been more transparent on why they made the decision to fire Sam.
Or perhaps these employees only cared about their AI work and money? The foundation would be perceived as the culprit against them.
Really sad there’s no clarity from the old board disclosed. Hope one day we will know.
I'm sure some of those employees were easily going to make $10m+ in the sale. That's a pretty great motivation tool.
Overall, I do agree with you. The board could not justify their capricious decision making and refused to elaborate. They should've brought him back on Sunday instead of mucking around. OpenAI existing is a good thing.
https://twitter.com/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410
Average people don't like to lie, if someone bullies them until they agree to sign they will sign because they are honest.
Also if they said they will sign but the ticker didn't go up, it is pretty obvious that they lied and I'm sure they don't want that risk.
Also, all the stuff they started doing with the hearts and cryptic messages on Twitter (now X) was a bit ... cult-y?. I wouldn't doubt there was a lot of manipulation behind all that, even from @sama itself.
So, there is goes, it seems that there's a big chance now that the first AGI will land on the hands of a group with the antics of teenagers. Interesting timeline.
I'm sure Sam is a charismatic guy, but generally speaking folks will support a whole lot when a multi million dollar payday is on the line.
It's not actually news, it's entertainment and self-aggrandizement by everyone involved including the audience.
Seems like there's no way to win with Twitter. You may not be interested in Twitter, but Twitter is interested in you.
She was fighting an idelogical battle that needs full industry buy in, legitimate or not that's not how you win people over.
If she's truely a rationalist as she claims then a rationalist would be realistic understanding that if your engineers can just leave and do it somewhere else tomorrow you aren't making progress. Taking on the full might of US capitalism via winning over the fringe half of a non profit board is not the best strategy. At best it was desperate and naive.
Traditional response to this happening is to say something about your "priors" being wrong instead of taking responsibility.
The fact that Adam D'Angelo is still on the new board apparently is much more baffling than the fact that Tonrer or Ilya are not.
What is the benefit of learning about this kind of drama minute-by-minute, compared to reading it a few hours later on hacker news or next day on wall street journal?
Personally I found twitter very bad for my productivity, a lot of focus destroyed just to know "what is happening" when there was neglible drawbacks of finding about news events a few hours later.
Microsoft is showing to investors that it is going to be an AI company, one way or the other.
Microsoft still has access to everything OpenAI does.
Microsoft has its friend, Sam, at the helm of OpenAI and with a more tighter grip on the company than ever.
Its still a win for Microsoft.
Microsoft is showing that it is still able to capture important scale ups and 'embrace' them, whilst also acting as if they have the moral high ground, but in reality are doing research with a high governance errors and potential legal problems away from their premises. and THAT is why stakeholders like him.
The one thing in Microsoft has stayed constant from Gates to Ballmer to Satya: you should never, ever form a close alliance with MS. They know how to screw alliance partners. i4i, Windows RT partners, Windows Phone Partners, Nokia, HW partners in Surface. Even Steve Jobs was burned few times.
Whole charade was by GPT5 to understand the position of person sitting next to red button and secondary to stress test Hacker News.
This has been my single strongest takeaway from this saga: Twitter remains the centre of controversy. When shit hit the fan, Sam and Satya and Swisher took to Twitter. Not Threads. Not Bluesy. Twitter. (X.)
Threads had a rushed rollout which resulted in major feature gaps that disincentivized users from doing anything beyond creating their profiles.
Notable figures and organizations have little reason to fully migrate off Twitter unless Musk irreversibly breaks the site and even he is not stupid enough to do that (yet?). So with most of its content creators still in place, Twitter has no risk of following the path of Digg.
This outcome WAS microsoft's role in all this. Satya offering sam a ceo like position to create a competing product was leverage for this outcome.
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727206691262099616 (+ follow-up https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883)
https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727206609477411261
https://twitter.com/miramurati/status/1727206862150672843
UPD https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727208843137179915
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598
https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1727207661547233721
https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1727207661547233721
Equity is a big part of CEO pay packages and OpenAI has weird equity structure, plus there was a very real chance OpenAI's value would go to $0 leaving whatever promised comp worthless. So Emmett likely took the job for other reasons.
Say what you want about Elon’s leadership but his instinct to buy Twitter was completely right. To me it seemed like any social network crap but he realized it was important.
By all accounts he paid about double what it was worth and the value has collapsed from there.
Probably not a great idea to say anything overtly political when you own a social media company, as due to politics being so polarised in the US, any opinion is going to divide your audience in half causing a usage collapse and driving support to competing platforms.
https://fortune.com/2023/09/06/elon-musk-x-what-is-twitter-w...
His worst personal problem is that he keeps replying "fascinating" to neo-Nazis and random conspiracy theorists because he wants to be internet friends with them.
1. He tried to not buy Twitter very hard and OpenAI’s new board member forced his hand
2. It hasn’t been a good financial decision if the banks and X’s own valuation cuts are anything to go by.
3. If his purpose wasn’t to make money…all of these tweets would have absolutely been allowed before Elon bought the company. He didn’t affect any relevance changes here.
Why would one person owning something so important be better than being publicly owned? I don’t understand the logic.
Usually publicly owned things end up being controlled by someone: a CEO, a main investor, a crooked board, a government, a shady governmental organization. At least with Elon owning X, things are a little more transparent, he’s rather candid where he stands.
Now, the question is “who owns Musk?” of course.
Are they all in the same “tribe”? Maybe you should enlarge the definition?
How about us all IT people who watched the drama unfolding on Twitter while our friend are using FB and Insta, we are far from SV and have mixed feelings about Elon Musk while never in a million years wanting to be like him? Also same “tribe”?
His second wife apparently asked him to buy Twitter and fix its, in her opinion, liberal bias.
Summers, too.
Welp.
It has literally nothing to do with that. The reason he's on the board now is because D'Angelo wanted him on it. You could have a problem with that, but you can't use his inclusion as evidence that the board lost.
It helps having somebody with government ties on board now.
Blue tick just means user bought a subscription (X Premium) now - one of the features is "reply prioritization", so top replies to popular tweets are from blue ticks.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium
Given the grandstanding and chaos on both sides, it’ll be interesting to see if OpenAI undergo a radical shift in their structure.
We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.
https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1727207661547233721
That's quite a slap at the board... a polite way of calling them ignorant, ineffective dilettantes.
Wonder if this is a signal that the theories about Poe are off the mark.
I don’t understand why that’s not a conflict of interest?
But honestly both products pale in comparison to OpenAI’s underlying models’ importance.
It's not the conflict of interest it would be if it was the board of a for profit corporation that was basically identical to the existing for-profit LLC but without the lyaers above it ending with the nonprofit that the board actually runs, because OpenAI is not a normal company, and making profit is not its purpose, so the CEO of a company that happens to have a product in the same space as the LLC is not in a fundamental conflict of interest (there may be some specific decisions it would make sense for him to recuse from for conflict reasons, but there is a difference between "may have a conflict regarding certain decisions" and "has a fundamental conflict incompatible with sitting on the board".)
Its not a conflict for a nonprofit that raises money with craft faires to have someone who runs a for-profit periodic craft faire in the same market on its board. It is a conflict for a for profit corporation whose business is running such a craft faire to do so, though.
> And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.
https://nitter.net/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122
I guess everyone was just playing a bit loose and fast with the truth and hype to pressure the board.
In either case the end effect is the essentially the same. Either Sam is at MSFT and can continue to work with openAI IP, or he's back at openAI and do the same. In both cases the net effect for MSFT is similar and not materially different, although the revealed preference of Sam's return to openAI indicates the second option was the preferred one.
[Edit for grammar]
Sam and Greg will be joining Microsoft.
And:
Sam and Greg have in principle agreed to join Microsoft but not signed anything.
If Microsoft has (now) agreed to release either of them (or anyone else) from contractual obligations, then the first one was true.
If not, then the first was was a lie, and the second one was true.
This whole drama has been punctuated by a great deal of speculation, pivots, changes and, bluntly, lies.
Why do we need to sugar coat it?
Where the fuck is this new magical Microsoft research lab?
Microsoft preparing a new office for openAI employees? Really? Is that also true?
Is Sam actually going to be on the board now, or is this another twist in this farcical drama when they blow it off again?
I see no reason to, at least point, give anyone involved the benefit of the doubt.
Once the board actually changes, or Microsoft actually does something, I’m happy to change my tune, but I’m calling what I see.
Sam did not join Microsoft at any point.
Satya offered sama a way forward as a backup option.
And I think it says a lot about sama that he took that option, at least while things were playing out. He and Greg could have gotten together capital for a startup where they each had huge equity and made $$$$$$. These actions from sama demonstrate his level of commitment to execution on this technology.
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883
He's has now changed his mind, sure, but that doesn't mean Satya lied.
It sure feels like a bad look for Satya to announce a huge hire Sunday night and then this? But what do I know.
Edit: don't know why the downvotes. You're welcome to think it's an obviously smart political move. That it's win/win either way. But it's a very fair question that every tech blogger on the planet will be trying to answer for the next month!
Satyas maneuvering gave Sama huge leverage.
(what isn't)
Let's say Sam called his broker and said to him on Friday we'll before the market closes. Buy MSFT stock. Then he made his announcement on Sunday and on Monday he told his broker to sell that stock before he announced he's actually coming back to (not at all)OpenAI. That would be illegal insider trading.
If he never calls his broker/his friends/his mom to buy/sell stock there's nothing illegal.
Something does still seem not flattering towards Microsoft about reneging on the Microsoft offer though.