I don't follow OpenAI or SV news all that much. Is this guy really that critical to the company? I thought Ilya Sutskever was the genius? Is this a non-compete thing, where they're scared Altman will take company secrets to a competitor, or is this dude actually a major factor in the company's success (and not just a lucky bystander)?
Even if he isn’t critical to OpenAI’s future there is the issue of how the board handled this. They surprised everyone from their most significant investors to their employees, which would be justified if they have a very good reason. Without an excellent reason, all of this looks capricious and incompetent.
Thank you - this is one of the few reasonable takes I've seen on this whole mess. There is literally nothing Altman could have done that would justify the board having handled the situation in this way, and it makes them look grossly incompetent. Even if Altman had been engaged in some kind of criminal act, this is not the way in which you proceed. And regardless of whatever corporate structures you have in place, it is the height of naivete to think you can ignore the concerns of people who have written you a $10B check.
I do think this is a shame, because the structure had the potential to allow altruistic people to maintain some kind of governor on the commercial growth engine, but now that will be gone.
> Even if Altman had been engaged in some kind of criminal act, this is not the way in which you proceed.
No information came to light to back this sudden and unexpected decisions but were there criminal acts involved, it certainly would not be unexpected. CEOs get instant fired for being under investigation for criminal acts all the time. But again, 48hs later it seems clear it was not the case
I think he might have been caught fundraising for a new venture in AI, but separate from OpenAI. It would be a gray-area in many other companies but as CEO, reporting to a board where he has no seat, it would be cause.
> Even if Altman had been engaged in some kind of criminal act, this is not the way in which you proceed.
Sometimes this is the _only_ way in which you proceed. If you gain knowledge of something truly egregious and don't eject the culprit you become immediately liable for any future malfeasance. Sometimes 'wow, gtfo right now' is the only safe course of action.
I think their communication is perfectly professional. You're just expecting some weird tell-all because that's how this sector weirdly chooses to operate, just blurting shit out on twitter then thinking about the consequences later.
The wording of their press release is wonderfully professional. Discreet, generic, succinct. That's how things should be done.
It's the other side that are acting oddly. Charging into the office and taking selfies, counting public oaths of fealty on twitter? V. weird.
Ilya's latest tweet speaks for itself. Nothing about this was professional -
"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."
It's true they were professional in their press releases, but they still didn't explicitly say the reason he was fired, and so people keep speculating.
He is one of the most well connected people in tech and probably responsible for all of their partnerships and fundraising success. His departure in this fashion would make it really hard for them to raise as much money as they will need and potentially put them on a blacklist of a lot of YC companies. To top it off he'd probably raise a few billion and poach half of the team.
> His departure in this fashion would make it really hard for them to raise as much money as they will need and potentially put them on a blacklist of a lot of YC companies.
How does this matter anymore? OpenAI is the most known company from the last year. You don’t need specific person anymore to market about your company. If it is up to single person whether company is worth investment, then everyone just hopes that eventually OpenAI will turn to full-profit mode.
It is pretty clear, that if board wants to run company for greater good, for-profit-only CEO must leave.
If it is up to single person whether company is worth investment,
Regardless of who they fired, if the board is known to make arbitrary and capricious decisions about top executives without so much as a heads up to large investors, it's not clear that any investor will see them as being worth investment.
> Regardless of who they fired, if the board is known to make arbitrary and capricious decisions about top executives without so much as a heads up to large investors, it's not clear that any investor will see them as being worth investment.
It is non-profit company, so investors should not be expecting too much increased returns for their investment other than the product and cooperation what this company provides.
If firing the CEO has no significant negative impact for actual product quality or cooperation, it should not be in the intrestes of investors.
Especially, if the argument for firing is revolved around profit/non-profit future of the company, if the expectations for the original investors was right (investing non-profit). In that case, it is not arbitrary or capricious decisions. But I would of course would like to see some transparency, since we don't really know what happened yet.
Why is everybody assuming that the board just flipped out and did something insane?
To me, the rational assumption is that the board - being composed of multiple people who seem fairly well-grounded, i.e. not terminally online twitter types - are acting rationally. That's supported by them acting professionally; releasing one single press release and then shutting the hell up, presumably on the advice of their lawyers.
Because they fired him on Friday due to unspecified "lack of trust" issues and now, 2 days later, the new interim CEO is reportedly in talks to hire him back?
Do you not see why this looks like they fired him on a whim?
> the new interim CEO is reportedly in talks to hire him back?
Literally nobody unbiased is reporting this. This reporting is _all_ coming from 'their side.' You are inside the smoke and mirrors if you can't see that.
Several days later and it's been continued to have been widely reported (backed up by Sam himself), and now this quote from Bloomberg today:
new interim CEO Emmett Shear is involved in mediating these negotiations, creating the frankly unprecedented situation where (1) the interim CEO who replaced (2) the interim CEO who replaced Sam and who (3) got replaced for trying to get Sam back is now (4) deeply involved in a new effort to get Sam back
Explain to me how this was a well thought out transition and not done on a whim? Even the new CEO who was put into place after the interim CEO is trying to get Altman back.
He can poach away half the staff IMMEDIATELY. You cannot run a company with majority of your key personnels gone in a week. Then the remaining staff will be moving over within 3mths to a year. What OpenAI will be left in a year time will be back to square one, startup mode. Whatever tech they have now it will stay stagnant. Whatever tech Altman started in his new venture will be just slightly behind what OpenAI has. Within a year Altman will supercede it. He is that important. Think Steve Jobs to Apple but AI.
Those people have kids and mortgages and car payments. And are very well compensated. They aren’t gone by this time next week. Is there any precedent for that? Nobody does that.
Yeah sure eventually he could poach people and it’s always possible that this is the beginning of a transition but there’s some seriously magical thinking going on here.
I have no reason to believe Sam Altman's a similar case, but have you heard of Nick Calandra? He was editor and chief of the escapist. Last week he got fired, the entire video department (~20 people) resigned and they immediately started a company together called Second Wind.
OpenAI has 700 and they’re highly compensated. How would you even onboard and meet payroll in a week for a non existent entity if you suddenly had even half that number?
Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?
> How would you even onboard and meet payroll in a week for a non existent entity if you suddenly had even half that number?
> Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?
Not saying it will happen but I'd honestly say this would be the least of the issues. VC's and established companies would be fighting tooth and nail to invest money in whatever venture Sam Altman/Greg Brockman + whatever % of staffers were launching. Money would not be the problem here. Think of how much money so many were willing to throw at the con-job that the vast majority of crypto was and then think of how much money they would throw at AI tools (which are clearly a big deal already).
As far as I can tell Altman’s real serious talent is getting billionaire types to like him. First Paul Graham then Elon and the initial OpenAI funders. In both cases he seems to have been dropped rather abruptly after running things for a few years.
He has never personally built meaningful tech and has definitely never actually demonstrated anything approaching popularity with any rank and file employees.
Might happen. But it sure hasn’t yet. I don’t doubt that the Davos / Bohemian Grove set will install him in another position though, he does seem to have a genuine knack for that.
Not just the billionaire type though, right? We are discussing staff leaving with him for that very reason.
And he did VC fund-raising before that for early projects too. Give his Wikipedia a read.
He is clearly a very savvy businessman and smooth operator on a personal level. And has been involved in enough high profile successes that I don't think it is a fluke.
It's not like he's going to have any trouble at all raising enough money to match their compensation, and if he's going to build the ruthlessly for profit version who wouldnt switch over? These folks make too much money to care about kids and mortgages and car payments.
I'm not sure how this would work with their funding / ownership structure but a delaware c corp with such a high valuation and so much money raised would have to take a huge down round if it lost half the team and pissed off their largest partners (microsoft). It would usually be a bloodbath that would wipe out common shareholders and early investors, which would then lead to most early employees leaving.
To the first point, they’re hugely well known at this point and could probably continue to raise money fine without him. But to your 2nd point, they wouldn’t be doing that in a vacuum. They’d be competing against him, and he could probably still out-raise them to do the poaching.
I mean he probably was an important factor in getting the commercial state of OpenAI Inc to what it is today. However a lot of people feel that he betrayed the original funding goal of OpenAI which was to work for the benefit of humanity. I'm not convinced OpenAI Inc is doing anything more for "humanities benefit" than Meta, Google, Microsoft or other players in the space.
I would like to know what is the actual reason for why they fired him though. Is there more to this story than meets the eye?
There’s no real evidence that the board is considering bringing him back. Team Altman is firmly in place as part of the global elite (that’s not an insinuation he literally attends Bohemian Grove) and has lots of connections and influence.
That’s pretty clearly where the stories are being sourced from. The narrative that the board was begging to get him back emerged all at once in an organized fashion.
Doesn’t prove it’s not true, maybe they are. Stranger things have happened. But definitely not something to take on faith without a clearer statement from those on the other side of the conflict.
They’re afraid he’s an actual leader and all of their talent will follow him. It doesn’t matter how good Ilya is individually, nobody is building gpt-5+ as an individual contributor.
Altman is the commercial streak of OpenAI. Investors are nervous because that's the part that actually makes money. If it was left up to Ilya, it's unlikely that OpenAI is going to reach it's full earning potential in favor of things that are more research oriented.
This really does feel like Ilya is Woz, an idealist, doing the hard work and soon to be cast aside for Altman as their Jobs. Because idealism doesn’t make people billionaires.
Altman has been the CEO of OpenAI since early 2019, so he has been there for the whole journey from GPT-2 to GPT-4/ChatGPT and the company's shift to mostly focusing on LLMs over RL/robotics/other stuff. I can't say I know much about the degree of his involvement, but my gut feeling is that he has been heavily involved in steering the company's direction and efforts.
Ilya is certainly the brains behind ChatGPT, but I believe a lot of engineering talent recently joined OpenAI because they aligned with Sam and Greg’s vision of making consumer software and commercializing it.
So while you’re right that Sama isn’t crucial to OpenAI, I think a lot more employees are aligned with Sama’s vision.
Having those people quit could be a feature, rather than a bug.
If that "vision" is the thing that you're worried about, because you think rapid commercialization is actively dangerous, then you may very well have a reason to want to completely blow up the commercial side of OpenAI. Even if it gets reconstituted elsewhere, you've at least created a speed bump by forcing it to get reconstituted.
It's inconvenient that in the medium to long term that means you wind up with fewer GPUs for the True Cause(TM), but at least the people you have working on it believe in that cause, and at least you haven't actively accelerated some destructive outcome.
I don't think the backlash is about one person as much as it is the direction of the company. Doing something for the good of humanity is all well and good, which seems to be the boards position, but I think they really need to test themselves in the market if they want to make something good. And then there are the employees and the investors who would much rather see more money come out of this.
Yes, that critical. Sam and Greg hired Ilya among many other world class researchers to build AI. Their business execution was so successful that replacing them with another leadership team triggered panic to investors.
I think Altman must have worked in the past with lots of ycombinator founders to resolve disputes. Then to end up in his own, completely blind-sided and cut off. Nobody is immune to bad founder relationships.
I don't think he's on his own. All those people he helped in the past have come out to support him via heart emojis. Almost his entire company (minus the board) has publicly supported him. His team is currently hosting him at the office with hopes to reinstate him. The CEO who temporarily replaced him has publicly and privately supported his return. OpenAI's investors are backing him. His cofounder quit in solidarity.
Turns out the secret to getting through something like this is to simply have spent the past 15+ years genuinely helping everyone you've ever come across.
Sure, he may have support from people like yourself. However, it’s possible that many people supporting him know the full story, or may be supporting him for the wrong reasons. For instance, Sam may have been courting outside investment for OpenAI or his own ventures competing with OpenAI without disclosing it to the board. Also, people may be supporting him because of their own interests (consider Microsoft). To say that he has support from people not involved is a bit meaningless right now; and saying he has support from j side OpenAI is devoid of evidence.
His CEO replacement supports him, the chairman of the board supports him, his investors (at least Satya + Kohsla) support him, his entire org supports him. You'd expect a handful of these people not to if there was really anything there, right?
I'm sure that this even happened at all isn't good for anyone. I can't for the life of me understand how the people who made this decision did it in the complete absence of talking to investors, stakeholders and even the OpenAI employees in leadership positions. And then to provide no explanation. Even the community and people who were using their APIs deserved one. They behaved so irresponsibly.
Of course they would. There's a lot of money and TC tied to OpenAI. Nonprofit status, ethical mission, and the problematic legalese of the datasets used be damned.
A group of OpenAI executives and investors racing to get Sam Altman reinstated to his role as chief executive officer have reached an impasse over the makeup and role of the board, [...] Altman, who was fired Friday, is open to returning but wants to see governance changes — including the removal of existing board members, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private. After facing intense pressure following their decision to fire Altman Friday, the board agreed in principle to step down, but have so far refused to officially do so. As of midday Sunday, the board had not resigned out of concern over who could replace them, and were vetting candidates, one of the people said.
From what's been said a plausible explanation could be the sama was being courted by saudi investors, incl vision fund, to make AI silicon, for 100 billion dollars, and wasn't upfront with the board.
Who knows, total speculation, but definitely grounds for dismissal. Of course he was probably a managed asset, and who knows what kind of complexity is behind the scenes. OpenAI has a very valuable product. Not supporting any ideology here, but the Russian president said that whomever controls AI controls the world. Well, anyway, AI will be a useful tool for technological advancement. It can definitely solve problems.
EDIT: meaning it's important that the AI isn't given problems whose solution harms beings, at all, let alone war- not even by carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
What are the odds that, if Sam Altman returns to OpenAI, it would remain a non-profit? From everything that the news has covered since his departure, it seems that the board is committed to the non-profit mission, but Sam runs OpenAI like a for-profit startup company. I imagine if he returns, the board will be replaced with people who share Sam's vision and OpenAI will drop the façade of public responsibility and non-profit mission and start optimizing for money.
They dropped it right after ChatGPT came out. For a full year, they were luring top talent with promises of exorbitant equity, sold integrations left and right, played a role in writing the EO that makes it difficult for newcomers to compete with OpenAI, etc. Didn't we have a story about $10M comp packages at OpenAI just a week ago?
I can't imagine this was just Altman. I suspect that a large proportion of current OpenAI staff is in it for the money and couldn't care less about the non-profit goals of the pre-ChatGPT era. In fact, many probably oppose the idea because it stands in the way of a big payout down the line.
This coup was probably some sort of the last stand for the old-timers who still believe in the non-profit mission, but I doubt they can prevail in the long haul. Not without gutting the company, at the very least.
I think they should gut the current company. For better or for worse. Sam and 80% of openai can start over and probably reach agi but like this it's too ironic
If I had to bet, I'd say it remains a non-profit but with significant structural changes (such as removing caps on returns and more experienced people joining the board).
Sam has always spoken favorably of the non-profit portion of the company, and he's very aware that the importance of what OpenAI is doing exceeds what a corporation can handle.
I think it would really be best overall if they can find a compromise. Both a full for-profit takeover and half of OpenAI’s employees leaving for a new startup would seem to be worse outcomes.
So if you wanted to remove non profit status from the equation, this is the best way to play it where at the end everybody is going to cheer "yey!", right?
> Mind you, the risk of "AI" acting on its own is massively exaggerated. It's AI-wielding humans who are the real unalignable threat.
IMO depends where you draw the line between "AI acting on its own" and "person takes AI that shouldn't be left unsupervised, sets it going in an infinite loop, leaves it unsupervised, then it explodes" (so far mostly in small ways and in the face of the person who did it, which is basically fine, but still, where do you draw the line?)
Some initial coverage talked about Sutskever's concerns over the lack of openness (possibly in publishing results if not full open source).
Other coverage made Sutskever sound like a doomer (the "AI will take over" type), although popular media often does conflate real concerns about the biases of some AI models with doomerism.
We'll never know exactly what the issue was.
It's in nobody's best interest to share that information. It's not in OpenAI's, Microsoft's, and certainly not sama's. Probably not even Ilya's.
Ultimately, whatever it was, it will be smoothed over.
Don't forget to checkout the LocalLLaMA subreddit to see the current state of hobbyist->small professional quality.
Obviously not on the level of GPT4/Claude (there are some good comparisions), but close enough to dispel any notion that this One True Saviour is needed for this field to advance. By all accounts he wasn't even spending that much time on it.
Sam wins either way and holds all the power with Microsoft’s backing. The only question is whether OpenAI survives (it will not if Sam and Microsoft go elsewhere) and who gets purged post coup attempt.
Because you can't train and operate models at scale with ideology. Costs money and compute. Without funding and compute, OpenAI is a bunch of smart folks with laptops talking AI safety in an office until the cashflow dries up.
People who want to get paid or are loyal to Sam will follow Sam. Microsoft is clearly behind Sam. "Whoever holds the gold makes the rules."
"I don't think he's on his own. All those people he helped in the past have come out to support him. Almost his entire company (minus the board) has publicly supported him. His team is currently hosting him at the office with hopes to reinstate him. The CEO who temporarily replaced him has publicly and privately supported his return. OpenAI's investors are backing him. His cofounder quit in solidarity.
Turns out the secret to getting through something like this is to simply have spent the past 15+ years genuinely helping everyone you've ever come across."
> Because you can't train and operate models at scale with ideology. Costs money and compute. Without funding and compute, OpenAI is a bunch of smart folks with laptops talking AI safety in an office until the cashflow dries up.
Without its exclusive relationship to Microsoft, there are other people with access to money and compute that would like a leg up in the enterprise AI space that Microsoft would be taking a major, even if (optimistically) temporary, step back from its leading position in by terminating its relationship with OpenAI.
OpenAI has the most valuable new technology product in a generation and it’s already monetized. It’s also a charity and could give a fuck about growth beyond the extent needed to meet their goals.
The idea that Microsoft is somehow the one irreplaceable part of this formula is completely fucking bizzare.
OpenAI is not a "thing", the workers are a thing. OpenAI is nothing if the engineers/scientists leave the company to work somewhere else if Altman leaves.
According to reports, the head of research and other senior staff have said that they will resign if Altman is not restored as CEO.
Yes that’s somewhat correct. If he really has the loyalty of a huge percentage of the staff and they leave to follow him you’re right.
But you might want to question why you’re so sure that’s the case. People talk about that a lot but it’s pretty rare to actually see that happen.
The usual way things like this go is most people go huh how about that and go back to work at their job the next day and think about their family and weekend plans.
In his case it’s especially odd given his oddly thin track record of actual success. He seems incredibly good at ingratiating himself with extremely powerful people, but there’s no evidence at all of him being a popular leader or particularly good at building and executing on anything.
Ask yourself how he got his last two jobs. He wasn’t exactly voted in due to widespread popular support.
In both cases however he departed abruptly amidst what looks like interpersonal conflict.
> But you might want to question why you’re so sure that’s the case. People talk about that a lot but it’s pretty rare to actually see that happen.
Difference here is OpenAI is not Google or FB with tens of thousands of employees bulk of which are engineers most likely not be able to get current level of compensation in case of mass layoff/resignations. OpenAI is couple of hundred people and are highly rated due to perceived level of success. So it is opposite of risk to follow the leader who has gotten them high level of compensation so far.
> He seems incredibly good at ingratiating himself with extremely powerful people
You seem to think it is negative. For most people including OpenAI employees it is great advantage to be working for/with him.
They have the GPUs and there's a GPU shortage already. What do you think is going to happen when they lose that access in $10bn compute? Given the shortage and other vendors being mostly locked up already, there's not much OpenAI can do. And that's not considering that the board is facing immense pressure internally starting from the very temporary CEO that they put in place two days ago to various members of senior leadership threatening to resign (with many employees being paid in options dependent on valuations that the board just destroyed). The board may have de jure power but that is nothing without the de facto power associated with it.
Microsoft is going to walk away from the most strategic deal they’ve made in a decade to save the Loopt guy’s ego?
I feel like everyone should be forced to watch a few Game of Thrones episodes before commenting. Organizations act in their own self interest. Leaders are convinced they’re irreplaceable all the way to the gallows steps.
If Sam can sabotage OpenAI or if the remaining people can’t capably run the organization then sure people will walk away. But if they keep things from falling apart nobody is going to give a fuck.
Well, now we know that once any putative superintelligence learns how to wave money around, we're doomed. All the preparatory "alignment" isn't going to save us from our own greed.
An apocalypse needs power. That power can be offering money to humans, but doesn't have to be: other (thankfully not yet existent) possibilities include hacking a single clanking replicator, as would offering rewards to unrelated non-human uplift project subjects.
What’s up with comparing altman to steve jobs? He’s well behind him on the scale of leadership, inspiration, vision, and not to mention he had little to no contribution to ai, other than a crypto style aggressive marketing campaign, sprinkled with fud fomo and gaslighting.
Undoubtedly, there are a lot of HN posters with a vested interest in OpenAI's continued success… Talk is cheap when it doesn't affect your bottom line.
That’s an interesting point. Many folks may have started companies around openai’s product, thus defending their turf. Probably fearing they might be freed if the new ceo decides to lock api access.
Not saying you're wrong, but the analogy is easy to draw. Both are CEOs, both were ousted, both are charismatic, Apple is the most valuable company in history, and OpenAI is among the fastest growing in history.
I love donating money to nonprofits and then exercising my rights as a shareholder to get my legal mandated influence over board seats. These board members must be sweating bullet given their fiduciary duty to these investors.
It is a special thing, a for-profit 501c3. At tax time it is tax exempt but when a guy I like gets fired the investors can leverage their donationvestments to fire the board and push the chari-business into further profitability. It is a good setup and it makes sense why so many people are cheering things on today :)
Sutskever has been clashing with Altman and it looks like he orchestrated his firing. Getting him back would almost certainly mean losing the other or even the whole board. Investors have decided which they would prefer to hang on to.
Ilya is a "him". And yes, there's probably no path to Ilya and Sam both remaining at the company... but both are brilliant adults with (relatively) low egos, so there's hope they can settle this and work together. Their disagreements on the future of AI are a feature, not a bug.
https://archive.ph/NBs7w