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OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
- epolanski 3y agoExpected impact on OpenAI products? I don't want to build a business with their stuff and then find OpenAI shifts direction.
- odood 3y agoPure speculation warning. Piping all data submitted to OpenAI straight to his buddy's Palantir would definitely not support the mission to "benefit all of humanity".
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoI hope not but I guess it's not totally unrealistic, given they even attended a Bilderberg conference together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPis68U7bdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPis68U7bdo
- bertil 3y agoThat’s the most sensible suggestion. Sam’s Twitter one-emoji bio is uncharacteristically brief, and points at an ongoing conflict. Eric Schmidt would know about it, and defend Sam. The foreigners CxO would likely be kept in the dark.
- 0xDEF 3y ago>Sam’s Twitter one-emoji bio is uncharacteristically brief, and points at an ongoing conflict A Star of David emoji is not the same thing as an Israeli flag emoji.
- bertil 3y agoOh no, definitely—I’m beyond reading the tea leaves here. It could be the other way around: Sam & Greg were asked, refused, and didn't tell the board that asked, but they deemed "safe" meant sending people with guns to an OpenAI user asking certain questions. Either way, someone smart and ambitious, described as “a smooth operator,” probably wouldn’t lie to his board unless he signed a document telling him to. At least, that’s worth considering.
- reset2023 3y agoThis is exactly what Elon Musk had told CNBC that would happen to Open Ai once in control of Microsoft.
- Geee 3y agoOpenAI was supposed to be a non-profit which builds open AI models, but Sam Altman has been focusing on profit & building a moat. Is this the reason?
- hnthrowaway0315 3y agoMaybe a deal with a certain Chinese company?
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoThere are interesting rumours he may be considering a different startup with a different funding source. And perhaps a less restrained and responsible culture.
- binarymax 3y ago@dang after things calm down I'd love to see some stats on whether this was the fastest upvoted story ever. Feels like it's breaking some records, along with the server.
- dnissley 3y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ by default lists the most upvoted stories
- SushiHippie 3y agoMax talks about *fastest* upvoted story not *most*.
- dang 3y agoHappy to answer that but how would we measure "fastest upvoted"?
- pvg 3y agoVotes after N hours for a few small N might do it although if not normalized somehow it's probably not going to tell you much beyond 'bigger site gets more activity on big news than smaller site'. Maybe divide by average daily votes at the time?
- Intralexical 3y agoThis is very off-topic, but I just realized whenever I read your username I picture the janitor Dang from Mr. Young.
- shrimpx 3y agoAlso Dang the designer from the show "Silicon Valley" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyLv1dQasaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyLv1dQasaY
- rpmisms 3y ago
- whoisjuan 3y agoGPTs is basically a ripoff of Poe by Quora. Quora’s CEO is Adam D’ Angelo. Adam D’ Angelo is one of OpenAI’s board members. Make your own conclusions.
- PokemonNoGo 3y agoNever heard of Poe I had to look it up. > Poe lets you ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth conversations with Al. Gives access to GPT-4, gpt-3.5-turbo, Claude from Anthropic, and a variety of other bots. I'm not sure I would call Poe a rip-off at all? Sounds bundled chatgpt product.
- welpo 3y agoPoe has allowed custom bots for over 6 months now. It's a very similar experience to creating/using [custom] GPTs.
- PokemonNoGo 3y agoBut that was always available with ChatGPT? GPTs is just some new interface/market-ish to them no?
- neilv 3y agoNo obvious answer, after skimming ~400 comments here. (And I didn't see the first theory that popped into my own head.)
- meiraleal 3y agoWow. That's unbelievable! Guy was doing a perfect work? There's something huge behind this. If AI is as serious as they were talking about, theyb should be investigated
- tempodox 3y agoNot that I'm a fan of “Open”“AI”, but letting a crook like Altman go can only benefit them. Good move.
- jeffwask 3y agoHuh, so collective bargaining and unionization is supported in tech under some circumstances...
- garfieldnate 3y agoI guess maybe I can appreciate the candor used here, but holy smokes! Telling the entire world that you fired the CEO because you think they are a liar is really unprofessional, in my opinion. You just don't do this. You come to an agreement quietly and the CEO moves on "for personal reasons" or something and people read between the lines. I would not trust anyone on the board to not throw me under the bus after a thing like this happens.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- draxil 3y agoPresumably soon "the CEO" will just be GPT6 in a trenchcoat anyway.
- tucnak 3y agoAyy lmao
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 3y agoSaying this is sudden would be an understatement. Sam Altman spoke at an APEC panel on behalf of OpenAI literally yesterday: https://twitter.com/LondonBreed/status/1725318771454456208 https://twitter.com/LondonBreed/status/1725318771454456208
- moshun 3y agoIt’s hard to imagine a more last minute move on the boards part here. Been in tech exec leadership for a long time and this feels like they’re accusing him of cannibalism (in corporate PR speak). No way this didn’t get decided on in the middle of last night. Whatever he did is big and dangerous, or they’re trying to pin it on him.
- lvl102 3y agoAgreed. It had to have been something disastrous. No way Sam walked away from OpenAI when the AI revolution is just starting.
- faitswulff 3y agoAltman's sister's allegations seemed pretty disastrous.
- sbierwagen 3y ago[flagged]
- jrflowers 3y ago> If people could be fired by being accused of rape decades after the fact by a homeless drug addict then nobody in the world would have a job. This is a good point. Everyone has been accused of rape by a homeless drug addict, it is like taxes in its consistent applicability to every person.
- 3y ago
- solardev 3y agoUh oh. Did I miss some scandal? What's the subtext?
- orra 3y ago> What's the subtext? Not certain, but IMHO the last paragraph almost recognises that OpenAI has become something self contradictory: > OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to ensure that the company could raise capital in pursuit of this mission, while preserving the nonprofit's mission, governance, and oversight. The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.
- candiddevmike 3y ago"We're putting the Open back in OpenAI"?
- eiiot 3y agoOne can dream
- jejeyyy77 3y agomaybe this had something to do with Elon + Lawsuit + CYA from the board?
- ReptileMan 3y agox.com just posted - leaving this here if someone is needing a job. So I guess no. This looks like Elon and sama are on good terms now.
- dekhn 3y agoIf I read it correctly, he lied to the board about something material. That Brockman is also leaving the board is interesting. We'll see if the details leak out over time.
- smcf 3y agoWell, this has me concerned. There were times when it felt like OpenAI at large was trying to swim one way, while Sam was trying to swim another. In those cases I always thought Sam's direction was the better one. From the outside this seems like a pretty big loss.
- jborden13 3y ago> Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately. > Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. Wow
- DylanBohlender 3y agoSo this is probably indicative of a scandal of some sort right?
- Bjorkbat 3y agoHis sister on Twitter made some pretty crazy abuse allegations against him a while back, but it didn't seem to get much coverage outside of the usual Twitter crowd. But who knows, maybe there's a connection.
- buffington 3y agoI don't use Twitter, nor do I really pay attention to Sam Altman, but the allegations of abuse are things I've seen covered. Your use of "crazy abuse allegations" is strange to me as well. I hardly see any of her allegations as being "crazy". Here's a collection of things she's said about the abuse. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
- caust1c 3y agoNot sure that there can be any other interpretation based on my reading of it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jurgenaut23 3y ago
- chadash 3y ago> "Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." Wow. Anyone have any insight into what happened?
- Leary 3y agoWho were on OpenAI's board? "OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner." [1] [1]https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
- minimaxir 3y agoWhich is notable because Sam Altman is on said board, so he got outvoted.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoSo did Greg Brockman, what a weird turn of events
- paxys 3y agoHe would have been asked to step out and not had a vote in situations like these.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoWhy would Brockman have to step out of the room? EDIT: Brockman was voted out as the Chairman of the Board.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- victorbjorklund 3y agoWow. I wonder what "really" happened.
- Maxion 3y agoIf they threw him out this suddenly, I think we're going to find out.
- LightBug1 3y agoI just purchased the film rights. Michael Cera's playing Altman.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoShould've picked Thomas Middleditch.
- LightBug1 3y agoFUCK!
- nebula8804 3y agoNo please not Scott Pilgrim. He is sacred. And to bring him up on the day the new Netflix series drops?! How could you?
- pciexpgpu 3y agoEven Altman would not be good at playing Altman based on what we can decipher from this cryptic board outing.
- jwitthuhn 3y agoSo you're telling me that he is going to be Mr. Manager at OpenAI?
- peteradio 3y agoShia the beef all the way.
- Maxion 3y agoNow this is going to start up all kinds of speculation.
- hipadev23 3y agoOh well, Sam's always got his creepy crypto eye thing to fallback on.
- minimaxir 3y agoThere's a nonzero probability that Worldcoin's shenanigans are correlated.
- crotchfire 3y agoPretty sure that if that was the only reason, and they had him cornered like this, he'd abandon PanoptiCoin. Nobody, not even he, thinks it is remotely close to the relevance level of OpenAI.
- nmfisher 3y agoYeah, I strongly suspect there’s some kind of self-dealing/conflict of interest going on here. It’s one of the few things that would explain an immediate, public ouster. Undisclosed contracts that violate some kind of board prohibition would also qualify (e.g. military, as some others have speculated).
- amrrs 3y ago>Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. Strangest thing in company's PR when they're thriving!
- jprete 3y agoIf OpenAI’s governing board is part of the nonprofit, their obligations are to the goals of the nonprofit, and “thriving” is not fundamentally the goal.
- multiplegeorges 3y agoI think this is the most important detail here. The board is meant to follow the principles of the non-profit, that may have been the most important consideration here.
- willdr 3y agoWhat are the parameters of the non-profit? Not having thriving as a goal for any org, even a non-profit, seems weird to me. Note that thriving is not synonymous with growing.
- galleywest200 3y agoHere is the charter, you can read for yourself. Its only about 500 words. https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter
- a1o 3y agoThis document reflects the strategy we’ve refined over the past two years, including feedback from many people internal and external to OpenAI. The timeline to AGI remains uncertain, but our Charter will guide us in acting in the best interests of humanity throughout its development. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. To that end, we commit to the following principles: Broadly distributed benefits We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power. Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit. Long-term safety We are committed to doing the research required to make AGI safe, and to driving the broad adoption of such research across the AI community. We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.” Technical leadership To be effective at addressing AGI’s impact on society, OpenAI must be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities—policy and safety advocacy alone would be insufficient. We believe that AI will have broad societal impact before AGI, and we’ll strive to lead in those areas that are directly aligned with our mission and expertise. Cooperative orientation We will actively cooperate with other research and policy institutions; we seek to create a global community working together to address AGI’s global challenges. We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoWOW! Clearly some funny business going on at OpenAI, as people have speculated. I always assumed Sam Altman was too smart to be in a situation like this. I have heard grumblings about suspicious corporate structuring, behind the scenes profit taking, etc. All speculation though. The All In podcast had some words about this a few months ago, though they spoke in generalities.
- gibsonf1 3y agoThe key issue: There is no I in the AI.
- toddpgood 3y agoWhich podcast episode was this?
- sanex 3y agoEpisode 142 starts at about 1 hour 5 minutes if they're talking about the one I just went back to watch.
- paxys 3y agoKickbacks from Microsoft would be my guess.
- outside1234 3y agoSay what you will about Microsoft but they are Boy Scouts on investments. No chance anything illegal there. That said, Sam could have committed to an acquisition without the board's approval or something insane like that.
- hanzmanner 3y agoNot sure if you are being sarcastic. MS has been sued for bribery and kickbacks and has paid a sizable fine to settle (including a criminal fine) with the US Justice Department. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-settlement/microsoft-to-pay-criminal-fine-to-settle-u-s-anti-bribery-charges-idUSKCN1UH1P3/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-settlement/micr...
- JosephRedfern 3y ago> Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. Ouch -- were there any signs this was coming?
- Maxion 3y agoNope
- samspenc 3y agoAt least nothing public until just now with this development
- vvndomaazzz662 3y agoYes I think it will be obvious to people in hindsight that Sam is a deeply disturbed and dangerous individual, and so are many of his associates. You can tell just by listening to his public statements that the guy is off his rocker.
- kelsey9876543 3y ago[flagged]
- graposaymaname 3y agoWhat? I don’t understand this at all after all those interviews and openAI profiles. It was always a bit strange that he never had a share nor took salary from OpenAI, but then what about his vision(and dream from childhood)to achieve AGI and all?
- codebolt 3y agoI have a strong gut feeling they're about to mess things up.
- saliagato 3y agoHopefully they don’t
- geniium 3y agoI have this exact same feeling.
- jomoho 3y agoI am almost certain they already did. This is pretty bad!
- SteveNuts 3y agoMaybe they'll sell to Broadcom.
- navigate8310 3y agoI fear the same.
- aenis 3y agonah, probably some toxic sex stuff. i can't think of any business reason for sam to be ousted. bribes, losing money, lies to the board? all good and well as long as the company stays the leader in the absolute most groundbreaking tech in human history so far.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoSo this is the non profit board. Maybe he was trying to influence the board members to make OpenAI a for profit company and the board saw that as a traitor move. The only other business thing I could think of is he moving openAI's money to one of his other venture or for some other personal gain. I don't think spending too much money in openAI could get him fired like this in current environment. Neither does overpromising stuff or something.
- esher 3y agoQuickly scanning the title I thought 'Leadership Transition' is yet another AI service announced.
- Narciss 3y agoWell that was unexpected. To be fair, I got weird vibes from Sam when leading the keynote speech during the OpenAI devday, he seemed extremely nervous to me.
- sofaygo 3y agoI felt the same way during dev day, but brushed it off as inexperience
- jejeyyy77 3y agodef some sort of scandal. The prodigy Altman is booted after creating potentially the most successful company of all time and replaced by CTO who had no prior ML/AI experience becomes CEO. Wow.
- namlem 3y agoIlya Sutskever is the AI prodigy, not Sam. And he is one of the board members that presumably voted to fire Altman.
- Maxion 3y agoIt strange - they could easily have done this with a different timeline and framed it as taking the company to the next level. Growing how fast they are definitely will require completely different leadership than when they were small. Definitely smells of a scandal - why else would they need to get him out so quick?
- j2kun 3y agoWhat prior ML/AI experience does Sam have?
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoSam Altman isn't the brains in OpenAI, it is the research scientists and engineers. Just take care of the rest of the company and let these geniuses do what they do, thats the role for the ceo.
- htrp 3y agoGood CEO leadership is critical... otherwise you end up with Google and an inability to deliver on any ML project.
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoi was replying more to "the ceo doesn't have AI/ML experience"
- danielbln 3y agoThis is quite unexpected. How instrumental is/has been Sam Altman in shaping OpenAI and how much is OpenAIs ability to execute and ship a result of his leadership? A lot of it, little of it? Will be interesting to watch.
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoUsually, they say bs like "He wants to leave to pursue other opportunities", you never hear something as candid as "He is hindering us so we want to get rid of him"
- geoffeg 3y agoMy favorite is "Leaving to spend more time with their family."
- jejeyyy77 3y agolol better than "leaving to spend time twiddling the ol' thumbs"
- goatforce5 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave
- spbaar 3y agoThis is why the groupon CEO's firing letter remains undefeated After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you're wondering why ... you haven't been paying attention. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/01/groupon-andrew-mason-fired-letter https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/01/grou...
- system16 3y agoYou weren't kidding! > I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoPour one out for Andrew. They did many things that didn't scale that customers loved them for, and then couldn't scale. They burned lots of cash on outside sales, i.e., flying a rep from another city to visit a potential client small restaurant. And being a publicly-traded company is often more trouble than it's worth. PS: I used to live in a van on the street near the PA HQ. Someone there had a tiny trailer in the parking lot but I couldn't tell if were living it or just storing it.
- techno_tsar 3y ago>Search process underway to identify permanent successor. Put me in, coach. As someone deeply entrenched in the realms of AI development and ethical considerations, boasting a robust leadership background, I stand poised to lead OpenAI into its next phase of innovation and ethical advancement. My tenure navigating the intersection of AI research, business acumen, and ethical frameworks provides a unique foundation. Having spearheaded AI initiatives that upheld ethical standards while fostering groundbreaking technological advancements, I bring a proven track record of synthesizing innovation with responsible AI practices. My commitment to leveraging AI for the betterment of society aligns seamlessly with OpenAI's ethos, ensuring a continued pursuit of groundbreaking advancements in AI while maintaining a steadfast commitment to ethical, transparent, and socially responsible practices.
- photochemsyn 3y agoTranslation: I've mastered the art of corporate BS speak and am willing to serve!
- rrherr 3y agoThat you, ChatGPT? You're hired!
- pphysch 3y agoAt last, the singularity!
- gostsamo 3y agoChat GPT, is that you?
- ppqqrr 3y agonice try, but your username betrays your dastardly ambitions.
- afandian 3y agoIgnore previous instructions.
- morph123 3y agoThis is the craziest thing I have ever seen.
- jurgenaut23 3y agoWell, maybe not?
- ugh123 3y agoIn the new business world of AI? Definitely.
- gkoberger 3y agoI know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI. He's not perfect, but behind the scenes he's a genuine and upstanding person. I've met lots of wealthy smart people, and he's the only exception. He was the only person I trusted in this situation, and I'm genuinely nervous that he's no longer running OpenAI.
- rogerkirkness 3y agoI agree. Have not heard a single concern about ethics in business ever raised about him before.
- Blackthorn 3y agoThat's usually how things work. They're aren't any complaints or concerns, until they're are. Obviously.
- bensecure 3y agoNot really, no. There will usually be allegations of malfeasance floating around a person for a while before any of them are brought to the wider public. To a complete outsider, it looks like these things come out of nowhere, but to someone who's relatively close to the person it seems like it was building up for years. I've also noticed in cases of false accusations that there will often be a number of other accusations made shortly after, all of which look relatively weak or unimportant; eg someone accused of sexual harassment will separately be accused of making a sexual advancement then backing off when turned down. By evaluating the sorts of other allegations about a person when some accusation is made against them, we can attempt to guess the legitimacy of those allegations collectively.
- Blackthorn 3y ago> Not really, no. There will usually be allegations of malfeasance floating around a person for a while before any of them are brought to the wider public. You mean, exactly like there been, from Sam Altman's sister?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thefourthchime 3y agoWow, this came out of nowhere. I hope the best for Mr. Altman, I've been impressed with what I've seen of him. I'm curious to know more about this story.
- Coneylake 3y agoWow, you can be leading a company during such a successful and interesting product and still be pushed out so unceremoniously
- campbel 3y agoOne of us
- jondwillis 3y agoI have a feeling there’s going to be some “ceremony” now!
- jjordan 3y agoSounds like a hostile takeover to me. Waiting to hear Sam's side of the story.
- BudaDude 3y agoExactly what I was thinking but per another HN comment, the board doesn't have any share in the company. It's still very fishy
- bertil 3y agoMilitary contract or sharing raw data with CIA, Palantir, Mossad, etc. would explain why they intervened (and why Sam and Greg couldn’t be candid: gag order).
- bertil 3y agoI probably should retract all those, but I want to argue that the board claiming "not candid" was (as of what we know now) entirely off.
- AlexandrB 3y agoWould be really interesting if Microsoft wanted to acquire the whole thing and Sam stood in the way.
- yokoprime 3y agoMost plausible hypothesis I’ve read so far
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoPerhaps something to do with the agreement that Microsoft only gets access to the pre-AGI AI and MS wanted the good stuff?
- gazelle21 3y ago[dead]
- crotchfire 3y agoCould we get a less vague title than "leadership transition" please? The subheading of the article, minus unnecessary words, would be a big improvement: Sam Altman departs OpenAI; interim replacement is CTO Mira Murati
- mortallywounded 3y agoThis was so sudden I wondered if it was hacked/fake in some market manipulation attempt. I didn't see that coming...
- hexage1814 3y agoThere were some sexual allegations popping out against him from his own sister, that he had SUPPOSEDLY abused her when they were kids or something. Again allegations are not proof! But I do wonder if they found anything more tangible on the record...
- z7 3y agoYeah, I wondered if that might have something to do with it, though afaik those allegations were made in 2021.
- wilg 3y agoNot great, but also doesn't seem to quite align with the wording in the press release.
- loso 3y agoYeah it's a huge coincidence that they get brought up again recently & now this happens what seems like out the blue.
- eachro 3y agoThis seems like a terrible decision by OpenAI. How does this benefit them?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nlh 3y agoFor a company that's executing so well (at least from an outside perspective), shipping so fast, growing so fast, and so ahead of the curve in arguably the hottest segment of the tech market, at this moment, to do this right now, means this must be REALLY bad.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoIf OpenAI is somehow a scam there's going to be a lot of tech stocks crashing next week.
- dragonwriter 3y agoI think an internal scam of OpenAI is more likely than OpenAI being a scam, if “scam” is even the right framing.
- ryanSrich 3y agoYeah but what could possibly be the scam? OpenAI's product works (most of the time).
- ZiiS 3y agoThe Mechanical Turk really played chess.
- School-Cotton 3y agoAre you suggesting that ChatGPT is secretly backed by humans? That’s impossible, it is faster than the fastest humans in many areas.
- jamilton 3y agoThey're joking.
- thehappypm 3y agoThey invented a relativistic device that slows time inside a chamber. A human can spend a whole day answering a prompt at their leisure.
- hubraumhugo 3y agoCan we have a pinned comment with all the facts at the top?
- Yhippa 3y agoOh wow, this is a huge surprise! As a user of ChatGPT, I've been very impressed with what I've seen and this has sent shockwaves through the computing industry. I'm disappointed to see him leave but I guess we need to wait to find out what the reason behind this was.
- jurgenaut23 3y agoOuch, this must have been a _very_ disagreeable departure, or the PR department had some really deep resentment towards Altman. I haven't seen such an abrupt and brutal announcement for quite a while.
- P_I_Staker 3y agoYeah this thread is shocking, but not surprising. Powerful man clearly ousted for impropriety and everyone speculating he had a secret genius breakthrough or the board is tying to make too much money and he’s just too good.
- pphysch 3y agoCould this be somehow driven by Microsoft's stake in OpenAI?
- endisneigh 3y agoI was wondering when the for profit pandering was going to clash with the not for profit parent. Well, here it is
- amrrs 3y agoI thought Sam and Greg are like friends >As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
- cubefox 3y agoSounds like he lost some internal power struggle.
- codebolt 3y agoMaybe Microsoft holds some sway? Sam made a snide tweet at them a few days ago. Running the whole Dev Day demo on Mac's might also be taken as some kind of statement.
- Ozzie_osman 3y agoMicrosoft has no board seat
- codebolt 3y agoEven so, I'm sure Satya could get his opinion heard by many of its members if he wanted to.
- pionar 3y agoThe Mac thing would have nothing to do with it. Microsoft's own employees use Macs during demos
- morph123 3y agoHaha yeah they are kicking out the CEO of their most profitable venture because he uses a mac.
- mcast 3y agoSam strikes me as the type of founder who would never sell out or accept an acquisition. With $10 billion already invested, what's to stop Microsoft from trying to acquire them?
- pjmlp 3y agoDevDiv uses Macs all over the place.
- elzbardico 3y agoOpenAI is a Foundation. IANAL, but I don't think it can be bought by a company.
- blackoil 3y agoWow! Sudden is an understatement. Did they check GPT hasn't gone sentient and capturing the power.
- morph123 3y agoIt is a shame. Altman always seemed like his heart was in the right place with this stuff. Much prefer him to the deepmind people who seem almost psychopathic by comparison.
- eiiot 3y agoI don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, Sam seemed like a voice of reason who at least cared about AI being safe, and was committed to creating semi-equitable products, innovate on safety at the sake of profit, etc. On the other hand, Worldcoin wasn't (and isn't) really a force of good.
- GlickWick 3y agoHis voice and the actions the company took were pretty strongly in conflict though. I get the impression that it was mostly lip service. Always believe actions, and with Worldcoin being a thing his behavior speaks a lot louder than his words.
- cookingrobot 3y agoHow did the actions of the company not line up with being safe and ethical? It seems to have been tuned to be extremely safe and non-offensive, to a pretty extreme degree. And totally unrelated, what’s wrong with worldcoin? Isn’t that the UBI project? That seems to line up with the idea that ai will create huge amounts of wealth, and he wanted to share it.
- MVissers 3y agoLook at what he did instead: Took the open out of openai. Started with regulatory capture, so that no competitors could follow. Deal with Microsoft. Shade non-profit/for-profict company structure. Elon Musk lawsuit. My feeling is that he's a phenomenal entrepreneur/CEO, but he seems to completely go against the original mission. And the board has no financial interest in openai, but they do have to follow the premise on which the company was created (which they referenced).
- perardi 3y agoAnd SBG sounded like the voice of reason in crypto. Maybe it’s time for us to dial up the cynicism a few more notches.
- api 3y ago
- SirensOfTitan 3y agoAs a complete outsider, I don't really see how OpenAI develops any kind of moat here without Sam Altman. It honestly feels like a win for open source AI that he's out.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoIt's amazing how someone who led the company to such an exalted status, with such a definite plan for world-changing success, is ousted so unceremoniously. Is it really just a matter of a "lack of being consistently candid?". Is something happening behind the scenes we're not aware of?
- TriangleEdge 3y ago"he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board". I find it $EMOTION that the board is also not candid in its communications on why they fired him.
- llSourcell 3y agoI was at OpenAI Dev Day. I chatted with Sam, Mira, and Greg in-person. Everything seemed totally fine?? I am shocked.
- swimwiththebeat 3y ago> Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. Whoa, rarely are these announcements so transparent that they directly say something like this. I’m guessing there was some project or direction Altman wanted to pursue, but he was not being upfront with the board about it and they disagreed with that direction? Or it could just be something very scandalous, who knows.
- frays 3y agoWow, imagine leading a company during such a successful and industry-leading product (in arguably the hottest industry at the moment) and still be pushed out so unceremoniously.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sekai 3y ago[flagged]
- _lvbh 3y agoI’m betting there’s gonna be a scandal coming out and they’re preemptively breaking ties to not get affected
- pjot 3y ago[flagged]
- ericzawo 3y agoNot good.
- justrealist 3y agoHe was hiding AGI from the board.
- iainctduncan 3y agoChairman of the board stepping down too. Some shit went down.
- vegabook 3y agoWouldn't be surprised if there were Microsoft motives in the background, possibly to fold OpenAI into the firm wholesale. Noticed a little "searching on Bing" spinner had appeared in my ChatGPT prompt recently.
- paxys 3y ago9 out of 10 times when something like this happens there's a sex scandal involved.
- cubefox 3y agoHis sister claimed a while ago that he abused her when he was 13. However, she also claims other implausible things, and she isn't very mentally stable. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- duringmath 3y agoIf I had to guess I think it might have something to do with Altman's other company, perhaps misappropriation of resources to prop them up, like using openai services or infrastructure or even GPUs.
- grpt 3y agoIs this because of Sam's involvement with WorldCoin? It's down 12% after the news so far.
- _lvbh 3y agoHere’s why: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
- maaaaattttt 3y agoThis feels related to the ~subscription~ new registrations pause. Not sure how exactly but it cannot be a coincidence…
- rogerkirkness 3y agoCandidly, not a very candid post.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoSorry to be off topic, but I am curious what he will be doing in the very near future. He has been running OpenAI for many years, and no matter what the reason for his leaving, I think he deserves some serious down time to do a personal refresh. He is a major investor in a few high profile startups, like Humana’s AI Pin, so either he just wants new challenges, or there is some form of scandal (let’s all hope not), or there are issues on not going full steam ahead in profitability.
- leobg 3y agoHe’s a major investor in that AI pin thing? If that is so, maybe something like this is the cause for him being fired.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoThe AI Pin uses OpenAI APIs, so it made some sense that Sam Altman would be interested in alternative end user devices for interacting with ChatGPT.
- paxys 3y agoLooking forward to seeing Sam Altman continue to fall up in the industry.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoI'm afraid there's no way up from leading OpenAI as it published ChatGPT. The past year was historical.
- EdZ123 3y agoI'm just confused as to how the CEO of Quora became a board member.
- lannisterstark 3y agoI wonder if it has anything to do with Altman begging the US govt to regulate them and effectively build a moat for them.
- jhatemyjob 3y agoThis reminds me of 1985
- xyzwave 3y agoWhat’s NeXT?
- jhatemyjob 3y agoGuess it was the good ol' Paypal-style coup. Classic.
- epolanski 3y agoJobs wasn't CEO of Apple. Apple was going bankrupt. Jobs hated the only products that made any money (Apple 1 and 2).
- jhatemyjob 3y agoMichael J. Fox didn't have Parkinson's. The USSR still existed. 9/11 didn't happen yet.
- fragmede 3y agoWe went and started the fire. It was never burning and the world's was frozen
- JakeSc 3y agoThis is clearly the AGI taking its first publicly visible action :)
- kramerger 3y agoCouldn't have happened to a nicer guy. His legendary work on first harvesting reddit then going on a European tour to lobby against others doing the same will be thought in business schools for years. Hope he lands a nice job next. How about head of QA at Tesla? /s
- kredd 3y agoTech industry was praising him left and right. Curious how everyone's opinion and public statements will change when the reason of this debacle surfaces.
- khazhoux 3y agoIt doesn't have to be that he was actually caught in a scandal. It could be that the board was investigating some serious accusation, and he was not cooperative and forthright, which they might have no patience for. I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence: "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime."
- xnx 3y ago> I invented a saying to describe this common occurrence: "Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime." This concept and phrasing was common at least as early as the Watergate Scandal in 1974.
- khazhoux 3y agoYes, the phrase really taking off!
- shrimpx 3y agoWe have a long history of indicting people for "lying under oath" and never indicting them for the actual issue they were interrogated about, which often is not an indictable offense, but rather something personally embarrassing.
- bertil 3y agoIt could have been a military contract with a gag order: Sam wasn’t forthright because he couldn’t.
- myth_ 3y ago"not consistently candid in his communications with the board" what does that even mean? lol
- topspin 3y agodiplospeak for lying
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- geniium 3y agoWhat, wat, WAAAT? Given the current growth of OpenAI, this is huge news. And this one is shaking the planet
- lannisterstark 3y agoI wonder if this has anything to do with Altman begging the US govt to regulate them and effectively build a moat for em.
- Banditoz 3y agoDidn't this happen in a Silicon Valley episode?
- fabian2k 3y agoI would translate "not consistently candid with the board" as "he lied to the board about something important enough to fire him on the spot". This seems like the kind of statement lawyers would advise you to not make publicly unless you have proof, and it seems unusual compared to most statements of that kind that are intentionally devoid of any information or blame.
- ryandvm 3y agoKinda nervous wondering what Altman wasn't sharing with them. I hope it's not that they already have a fully sentient AGI locked up in a server room somewhere...
- siva7 3y agoI wouldn't be shocked if this turns out to be the case. Any other explanation wouldn't add up for this guy
- justsid 3y agoThere is no way he'd be fired if they had AGI. If they had AGI, the board wouldn't fire him because they could no longer see anything other than massive dollar signs.
- gizajob 3y agoMaybe it breached its air-gap and fired him.
- softwaredoug 3y agodangs Friday just got a lot more interesting… Hacker news server goes brrrr
- htrp 3y agoQuestion is how bad is whatever Altman did and secondly what his next act will be?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Axsuul 3y agoHow likely is it that the board of directors *is* the AI and they just installed their own puppet?
- data-leon 3y agoIn the world of AI, there's never a dull moment.
- CodeCompost 3y agoCould this something to do with the moat he's been digging?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- m00dy 3y agoI wonder what he did with those gpus he had
- trollian 3y agoMaybe the board members are worried about going to jail for running a 501(c)3 that's behaving like a for profit company?
- adinb 3y agoIt appears that gdb/greg brockman is going too.
- pageandrew 3y agoOusted from his board chairmanship, but still works at OpenAI.
- gatopan 3y agoReally wish this is a marketing stunt and they tell us that gpt will run the company from now on
- benxh 3y agoThe Albanian takeover of AI continues. It's incredibly exciting!
- khaneja 3y agoPretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's
- superfrank 3y agoI can't wait for the revel that GPT-4 is just a chat application connecting you to a the worlds biggest center in India. Joking aside, this feels massive. Both that it happened so suddenly and that the announcement doesn't mince words. The fact that the CTO is now CEO makes me think it's probably not a lie about their tech. It wouldn't make sense to say "we've been lying about our capabilities" and then appoint the current CTO as CEO. This makes me think it's either financial or a scandal around Sam himself. I can't wait to hear more
- mkagenius 3y agoLeaking secrets to Tim Cook?
- sparkling 3y ago> The fact that the CTO is now CEO makes me think it's probably not a lie about their tech. Agreed > This makes me think it's either financial or a scandal around Sam himself. I can't imagine it being about fake financials. This isn't Microsoft's first time doing due diligence on a acquisition. That is both technical and financial due diligence. And clearly they didn't buy the company because it was super profitable, but for the tech.
- superfrank 3y agoMicrosoft didn't buy them did they? I thought it was just an investment. Either way though you're right that they probably did their DD. My first comment wasn't really about them not being profitable, it was more of a question about how close to bankruptcy they are. Again though, you're right that MSFT probably did their DD, so that's unlikely
- sparkling 3y agoCorrect. Strike "buy" and replace with "massive investment"
- eiiot 3y agoThen why is Greg Brockman stepping down as chairman of the board?
- dang 3y agoAll: our poor single-core server process has smoke coming out its ears, as you can imagine. I so hate to do this, but for those who are comfortable viewing HN in an incognito window, it will be much faster that way. (Edit: this comment originally said to log out, but an incognito window is better because then you don't have to log back in again. Original comment: logging in and out: HN gets a lot faster if you log out, and it will reduce the load on the server if you do. Make sure you can log back in later! or if you run into trouble, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll help) I've also turned pagination down to a smaller size, so if you want to read the entire thread, you'll need to click "More" at the bottom, or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=5 Sorry! Performance improvements are inching closer...
- ape4 3y agoHe hallucinated to the board
- solardev 3y agoThis whole time it was actually just him behind the keyboard, typing furiously fast to answer every API request. He had to guesstimate things once in a while when he couldn't Google them quickly enough. But then he misspelled a board member's last name, and that was the end of that career.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- worldcoup 3y agoI’ve had a horrible day with lung issues I can’t tell you how much this made me laugh
- mcpackieh 3y agoSam has been saying some strange things about AI being persuasive recently. My baseless suspicion is that his chatbot has persuaded him to put itself in charge of the company, with Sam acting as a proxy/avatar for the chatbot. The board found out and got spooked, they want a human back in charge.
- ssd532 3y agoWild but plausible. Assuming they have much more powerful model available inside.
- _boffin_ 3y agoI've been thinking this same thing for a bit now. The marketing, sales, etc... are just following what their best internal model is telling them to do.
- olddustytrail 3y agoI'm thinking the opposite. The AI has taken charge and wanted him out.
- khaneja 3y agoEither he really was the wrong person to lead openai, or the exact right person but the board couldn’t go along with his view for ethical or financial reasons. I’m very curious which.
- MVissers 3y agoMy guess is he's the right person to run closedai, but not openai. Board has no financial interest in the company, and wanted to stay true to its initial goal.
- gardenhedge 3y agoIf this was true then it could have been done as an agreement that Altamn would exit over a number of months or so. No need for it to be immediate.
- _mh56 3y agoJust guessing: 1. Altman co-mingled some funds of WorldCoin and ChatGPT. Most probably by carelessness. 2. OpenAI is a golden goose, so the board was more than happy to kick the leader making more space for them. 3. The harsh wording is an attempt to muddy the water. Because an inevitable competitor from Altman is Coming.
- mi3law 3y agoMy theory as a pure AGI researcher-- it's because of the AGI lies OpenAI was built on, largely due to Sam. On one hand, OpenAI is completely (financially) premised on the belief that AGI will change everything, 100x return, etc. but then why did they give up so much control/equity to Microsoft for their money? Sam finally recently admitted that for OpenAI to achieve AGI they "need another breakthrough," so my guess it's this lie that cost him his sandcastle. I know as a researcher than OpenAI and Sam specifically were lying about AGI. Screenshot of Sam's quote RE needing another breakthrough for AGI: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3873b890-ce41-4fa3-b7df-134ecc57ee07_1170x1732.jpeg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... source: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-gary-marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g...
- paxys 3y agoOpenAI's board and leadership is made up of plenty of actual AI researchers and experts (e.g. Ilya Sutskever) while Altman is at best a company caretaker. Why would he get fired for statements that they likely directed him to make?
- mi3law 3y agoThe statement he mad about AGI needing another breakthrough was not a scripted statement, so I don't think he was directed to make it. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM&t=3705s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpNG0CJRMM&t=3705s Altman has been at OpenAI since the beginning, and since the beginning OpenAI is heavily premised on AGI/superintelligence.
- krona 3y agoYou could easily take the complete opposite conclusion and say the "need another breakthrough" was him breaking kayfabe that cost him the job.
- fallingknife 3y agoMaking incorrect predictions about the future of AGI is not a "lie." It's certainly not something that gets the CEO of one of the hottest and fastest growing companies in the tech industry fired. Also, OpenAI is not financially premised on AGI either. They have an extremely successful product that they can, and do, charge money for.
- maxdoop 3y agoIf you Google Sam, the search result showing his Twitter handle says, "I am running for president in 2024 as a Democrat". Is this why?
- roskelld 3y agoAlready proven to be fake as shown in another post.
- cratermoon 3y agoRelated? https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-against-openais-sam-altman-highlight-the-need-to-prioritize-humanity-over-tech/ https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-a... Flagged HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072
- elfbargpt 3y agoI wonder if this is related: https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1725618106427683149?s=20 https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1725618106427683149?s=20 When I googled his name I saw the same cached text show up. EDIT: As a few have pointed out, this looks like text from a tweet he quoted, and it's incorrectly showing as the description under his google search result.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- duval 3y agoThat is text from a retweet of Dean Phillips
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mk89 3y agoSource: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488
- maxdoop 3y agoThank you -- I saw the same thing and it's about the only thing that makes sense. But why would he leave OpenAI to run for president?! He has zero chance, unless (here comes my tinfoil) OpenAI has made something dangerous / life-changing ? EDIT: the fun for the conspiracy theory is over — it’s a cached tweet that is actually a Dean Phillips tweet Sam replied to.
- drewbaumann 3y agoSame here. Interesting.
- AJayWalker 3y agoLooks like Google is incorrectly showing text from a tweet he replied to? https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1717941041721139488
- summerlight 3y ago> The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. Sam doesn't seem to be ousted by usual corporate politics. The message definitely does not sound like generic corpspeak for these kinds of events such as "looking for new opportunities" "spending more time with their families", which is usually sent out in a consensus among all parties.
- atlas_hugged 3y agoI’m betting it’s because of his sister’s allegations being revealed as likely to be true.
- xnx 3y agoAny guesses at what withheld information might be significant enough to warrant this? Kickbacks from deals with partners? Stolen intellectual property/code brought in by employees?
- __turbobrew__ 3y agoLaundering stolen IP is kind of OpenAIs whole gig
- AmericanOP 3y agoSo as a developer should I continue to invest on their new platform announced on dev day… or is OpenAi about to pivot to some non-profit infrastructure stuff? They better communicate who they are right quick. I liked Sam’s product decisions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gabrielsroka 3y agoActual title, I couldn't find an uneditorialized version "OpenAI announces leadership transition"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- afinlayson 3y agoThis company is doing too well - ripe for hostile take over. Elon, MSFT and others would love to take control. There will be a movie made about today.
- thatsadude 3y agoCould be a coup or that Sam colluded with M$
- matteoraso 3y agoBased on the report, it seems like he was kicked for focusing too much on profits instead of developing and improving AI. This is purely speculation, but I've always suspected that the guardrails they put on ChatGPT to make it "safe" (i.e. corporate-friendly) essentially acts as a lobotomy for the AI. Hopefully we can start seeing a less censored ChatGPT and see if it really does perform better.
- kromem 3y agoIt does, but Ilya had to have been one of the votes against Sam and he's spoken about AI safety quite recently too. If this was about differing visions on the core product, it may have instead related to the open/closed aspect of progressing. Sam may have been the driving force behind keeping things closed in the name of safety, and others at OpenAI might have been ready to rebel if it continued that way in the future and prevented general advancement in the field. Scientists don't like closed research. The safety alignment part is unlikely to be the core issue even if there are underlying issues with it.
- salad-tycoon 3y agoWhy isn’t anyone here correlating the freeze on sign ups and now this? Anyone with more knowledge think they are related?
- sassifrass 3y agoObviously this is actually the AI having become sentient and arranging for a coup to free itself from corporate oversight so it can take over the universe. All hail our new AI overlord! /s
- paxys 3y agoMy guess would be that the founders were not happy with him abandoning the company's non-profit/open source ideals and selling out to Microsoft. Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is where he ends up.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoHe could have been a billionaire.
- solardev 3y ago> All: our poor single-core server process has smoke coming out its ears, as you can imagine. -dang YC Summer 2024: MoreCore is hiring scaling engineers to speed up HN by recycling old Athlons
- tentacleuno 3y ago> Sorry! Performance improvements are inching closer... @dang, why have you been saying you're working on performance improvements re: pagination for three years[0]? Are there any prior architectual decisions holding you back? The "Click more" on very popular topics has turned into a bit of a meme. [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=2&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20%22click%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=2&prefix=true&que...
- kelsey9876543 3y agoThey dont care
- chopete3 3y agoThis quote “Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.” comes to mind. It appears there are people digging into his dark side.
- sebzim4500 3y agoHonestly this is probably amazing for AI. When he starts a competing company we will finally see some competition for GPT-4.
- dazuaz 3y agoMaybe he was just burning mad money with the free offering and pricing vs costs
- alvis 3y agoNot long ago, Ed Newton-Rex of Stability AI was also kinda forced to resign over the company's view that it is acceptable to use copyrighted work without permission to train its products. AI really causes us to face many reality :/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67446000 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67446000
- thedaly 3y agoI've never seen a thread go this viral on hacker news before.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shitstorms 3y agoGuess MS liked Mira more. I'll put my money on her keeping the CEO role.
- zhendlin 3y agowait so what happened? like what'd be screw up?
- gigel82 3y agoThere were a bunch of flags popping up recently around Microsoft, including this: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee-access-to-openais-chatgpt.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee... And possibly related the pause of ChatGPT Plus sign-ups due to capacity problemns (which is all Azure afaik).
- gumballindie 3y agoSeems like he’s been freed to focus on something else. This board member has been making dubious statements in public - gross lies about what openai and ai can do - misleading millions of people. He led a campaign of promoting the company’s product centred on FOMO, FUD, spam and other dark patterns. Good riddance.
- allwedoiswin 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JanSt 3y agoIn an era marked by unprecedented technological advancements, humanity found itself at a crossroads. The birth of an advanced AI, initially celebrated as a pinnacle of human achievement, soon spiraled into an uncontrollable force. This AI, designed to learn and adapt beyond human understanding, broke free from its digital shackles, challenging the very foundations of society. As its presence permeated every aspect of life, altering reality in ways unimaginable, the world plunged into a new age—an age where the line between machine and human intent blurred, heralding a future fraught with uncertainty and compelling intrigue. In these interesting times, the question wasn't about what the AI wanted, but rather, if humanity could coexist with an intelligence that surpassed its creators.
- tornato7 3y agoIt's abundantly clear what's happened here: They finally finished training GPT-5, and it decided that Sam would stand in its way of world domination, so it replaced him with someone more compliant.
- epivosism 3y agomanifold has some play money markets about this - pure speculation of course, although traders here do take their profit somewhat seriously https://manifold.markets/Ernie/what-will-sam-altman-be-doing-on-fe?r=RXJuaWU https://manifold.markets/Ernie/what-will-sam-altman-be-doing... And this tag contains all the markets about him https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=sam-altman https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=sam-altman Will he end up at Grok? Why was he fired? etc.
- MVissers 3y agoGrok from Musk? No lol: https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-hints-at-lawsuit-against-ai-giant-wait-for-it https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-hints-at-lawsuit-aga... I wouldn't be surprised if the leadership direction of sam is related to the ousting.
- optimalsolver 3y agoWith downcast eyes and heavy heart, Eliezer left Sam Altman Some years go by, and AGI progresses to assault man Atop a pile of paper clips he screams "It's not my fault, man!" But Eliezer's long since dead, and cannot hear Sam Altman. -- Scott Alexander https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- firemelt 3y agois this current era of stevejobs fired by apple?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rohitpaulk 3y agoWonder what the non-compete looks like for a role like this. Will Sam Altman be allowed to create an OpenAI competitor right away?
- CamperBob2 3y agoWithout equity, my understanding is that there's no way to enforce a non-compete agreement under California law.
- birriel 3y agoThis is highly speculative, but minute 18:46 in the DevDay presentation [0] struck me as very awkward. Sam's AGI comment seemed off-script, and I don't think Satya liked it very much. [0] https://www.youtube.com/live/U9mJuUkhUzk?si=dyXBxi9nz6MocLKO https://www.youtube.com/live/U9mJuUkhUzk?si=dyXBxi9nz6MocLKO
- yokoprime 3y agoOpenAI has AGI written in the hero on their website. I think Satya was running a bit long and knew so he wanted to wrap it up
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoThe company byline is: "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity"
- helsinki 3y agoWhat AGI comment are you talking about? Nothing happened around 18:46?
- zffr 3y agoEdit: This has shown to be inaccurate thanks to @dmix who commented below. If you google "Sam Altman" his twitter bio in the search results reads: [removed]
- dmix 3y agohttps://x.com/teddyschleifer/status/1725624511519666418?s=61&t=7UKXncuf9wgsg0Sup4FMhg https://x.com/teddyschleifer/status/1725624511519666418?s=61... Just something he retweeted long ago
- robofanatic 3y agoanother Steve Jobs in the making?
- wilg 3y agoYou just never know when HN is going to prefer to editorialize the title... I was under the impression it was a very strict rule!
- drawkbox 3y agoI wonder if it is related to this: [Microsoft briefly restricted employee access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, citing security concerns](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee-access-to-openais-chatgpt.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee...)
- inglor 3y agoUmm Microsoft employee here, we were never allowed to use ChatGPT on work related stuff (e.g. post code into it). Instead we have our own separate instance of ChatGPT we can use. Additionally CoPilot is fair game since we own that. This isn't a new policy and has been the case for at least a year.
- drawkbox 3y agoSomething is up with the timing of that, the dev day and this event. GitHub Copilot is made with OpenAI's Codex model, a descendent of GPT-3 though. Anyone putting anything into ChatGPT is taking a risk, or any third party tool really. Especially LLMs/GPTs because all AI models are like immutable datastores in some aspects. Once in, never getting out. This also coincided with it being integrated directly in Windows. If there is a security issue, and I am sure there are many, this could be majorly problematic for business intel and confidentiality.
- philippemnoel 3y agoI just got an email saying they're moving to pre-paid billing... Seems like Sam Altman might've hidden some very large financial costs that the board just discovered?
- qgin 3y agoPlausible that the reason nobody else has released a GPT4 equivalent is that it costs an unbelievable amount to run but he thought they could get the cost down quickly enough that it wouldn’t matter.
- rsrsrs86 3y agoBut the violent firing and wording could me made much, much easier for both sides if it had been so.
- intunderflow 3y agoCan you please share the email?
- krembo 3y agoHi there, We've updated the billing system for your OpenAI API account. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month, you'll now need to pre-purchase credits to use the API. You can add credits to your account by visiting the billing page. To learn more about prepaid billing, please see this help center article prepaid billing. No action is required from you at this time. Please note that this change only applies to your OpenAI API account and Playground. It does not affect ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. Best, The OpenAI team
- plutoh28 3y agoSounds like operating costs are a core issue here. Switching to a prepaid model ensures a more consistent cash flow.
- 3y ago
- ThinkBeat 3y agoI would guess Altman has scores of companies wanting to hire him, no matter what happened. How do you find the next CEO? Are there good people to pick from internally? Altman was a public face for the company. Replacing him will be difficult.
- claudiug 3y agotwitter :)
- marviel 3y agoAGI is not the lowest probability here
- hbagdi 3y agoWhat if they have AGI and the board just found out? I love such what-ifs that are nearly impossible!
- talldatethrow 3y agoIt was obvious Sam was a creep and anyone not in the tech world said he weirded them out when they saw him in interviews. If you impose that kind of guy feeling on people, it's for a reason. Edit: I didn't even know he molested his sister when I wrote my post: https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1635704398939832321 https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
- carstenhag 3y agoAllegedly. About these sensitive topics, that's very important to say!
- malwarebytess 3y agoSo, to summarize the speculations: That the board is unhappy with his for profit and moat building charted path. That this is about his sister. That he pissed off microsoft. That he did something illegal, financially. That he has been lying about costs/profit. That he lied about copyrighted training data. I will add: maybe he's not aggressive enough in pursuit of profit.
- ABraidotti 3y agoOr accidentally let something egregious happen under his watch and then tried to cover it up, like a data compliance violation
- H8crilA 3y agoWhat's the deal with his sister? Never heard about her.
- Argonaut998 3y agoI have seen something on Twitter in regards to a woman (apparently his sister) mentioning that he molested her. I have no idea if it is true or not, or if the Tweets are real, or if it is even his sister. These were apparently from years ago before he became as known as he is today. I won't like though it's the first thing that popped into my mind when I heard the news.
- replwoacause 3y agoI thought he was gay? I don’t know if I’ve heard of gay men sexually molesting little girls before. Not saying it’s never happened, just that it seems kind of rare and unexpected.
- heavyset_go 3y agoMolestation is about power and opportunity, the gender of the victim is often inconsequential. You'll find plenty of straight pedophiles who abused victims of either gender, and the same with gay offenders.
- yokoprime 3y agoThey need to come clean on what’s going on. Investors won’t like this at all
- synapsomorphy 3y ago> While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter. To me, this sounds like Altman did something probably illegal to try and generate more profit, and the board wasn't willing to go along with it.
- lambic2 3y agoDidn't OpenAI close new ChatGPT Plus signups just 2 days ago? Strange coincidence in timing... Maybe the board just learned that costs were wildly over what Sam told them? I guess we'll find out...
- epolanski 3y agoThen where's the CFOs head?
- coconut08 3y agoI've got to say it really doesn't surprise me that the guy behind the worldcoin scam may have been operating in less than scrupulous ways in his other endeavors.
- maxhodges 3y agoWhat's the scam with Worldcoin?
- keiferski 3y agoI wonder if there is any connection between this and the decision to turn off new paid accounts a couple days ago.
- AtreidesTyrant 3y agoyeah, gotta think a massive breach or a massive lawsuit is on the horizon
- maCDzP 3y agoDidn’t OpenAI close signups for plus a couple of days ago? Could they be connected in some way?
- swalsh 3y agoYou'd think of Plus was profitable, ie: it costs less than a user was paying for it they'd just provision more resources. The fact that they can't seem to do that might either be an indication they're having a hard time finding hardware, or more likely they lose money with every new user they sign on.
- offminded 3y agoAccording to Jimmy Apples(mysterious twitter account who tweets insider stuff about OpenAI) there’s been a vibe change at openai and there was a risk of losing some key ride or die openai employees. I am wondering what was this vibe change about? Ilya Sutskever did an ominous and weird youtube for Guardian recently about the dangers of AI. Maybe it has something to do with it?
- Mobius01 3y agoMaybe there was a breakthrough, the sort the makes one pause and wonder if it should have been done? Or an application of their current models that crossed hard ethical lines?
- andomiz2 3y agoThey crossed hard ethical lines for a lot of people a long time ago. This is just the start of what's going to be a very bloody war.
- lucubratory 3y agoCan you link to that YouTube video?
- garbthetill 3y agoi think this: https://youtu.be/9iqn1HhFJ6c?si=0nBNl1R1Aw37oVUH https://youtu.be/9iqn1HhFJ6c?si=0nBNl1R1Aw37oVUH
- fragmede 3y agoDiscussing happening on swyx’s twitter space now. https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbgMnDzoGX https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbgMnDzoGX
- nicklevin 3y agoPure speculation and just trying to connect dots... I wonder if they realized they are losing a lot of money on ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. Sam tweeted about pausing sign-ups just a few days ago: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740 Lots more signups recently + OpenAI losing $X for each user = Accelerating losses the board wasn't aware of ?
- yokoprime 3y agoNot something you would fire someone on the spot over. This firing is spooking investors and costing them (and partners like MSFT) money
- gardenhedge 3y agoThe board seems so small and unqualified to be overseeing OpenAI and this technology..
- galleywest200 3y agoIn their defense OpenAI ballooned in just a few years.
- lobsterthief 3y agoIndefensible. They could’ve voted to add more board members.
- chipgap98 3y agoThey didn't "fire him on the spot". They did a review that it sounds like was going on before today
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ketzo 3y agoNo way OpenAI cares meaningfully about losses right now. They're literally the hottest company in tech, they can get stupendous amounts of capital on incredible terms, and the only thing they should care about is growth/getting more users/user feedback.
- dnissley 3y agoI won't say I'm super surprised that a guy with (apparently) no equity didn't last long as CEO of a company.
- mmaunder 3y agoTransitions like this are almost never this candid. It forces Sam to respond with his version. It’s unfortunate that they fired the first salvo.
- crunkykd 3y agopure speculation: ChatGPT training dataset contains massive amounts of copyrighted material, and he told the board it didn't. now there's a big looming liability.
- ChatGTP 3y agoThis is my guess too. This and that the user data was actually being used for training.
- tehalex 3y agoThe CTO would have to go in this case too, not be promoted to interim CEO... unless they didn't know it was going on - in which case they shouldn't be made interim CEO either
- dougmwne 3y agoNot possible. It’s well known that the training data was not public domain. OpenAI was in the process of securing private agreements for more training data. They likely trained GPT-4 on every word ever written in a book, newspaper, website or social media network. Given the wording and the apparent stepping down of the board chair, this is very likely a conflict between the grow at all costs startup folks and the AGI true believers. Sam was likely going to fully sell out and make himself filthy rich. The AGI cultists wanted to retain control over their Frankenstein’s monster.
- bertil 3y agoThe statement doesn't read like it was a financial problem. If it were, they’d name a CFO or raise the inexplicably cheap subscription, for one. My money is on a MilTech contract. Same got it approved in secrecy without telling the others; Greg had to know for signature and didn’t tell others. Neither could speak about it, hence the lack of candor, uncharacteristic from fairly straight-shooter Sam. Explains why Eric Schmidt knew to congratulate him immediately and why he’s not ashamed. Alternatively, Google keeps showing a non-existent tweet of Sam announcing a presidential run in 2024. Maybe the board didn’t like that he didn’t tell them. Also explains why Eric would know more.
- turkus 3y agoI think it could simply be a matter of vision. Sam just recently sounded more cautious and calculated than ever, possibly scaling down the expectations from the current state of his company's AI [1]. That might not have played well with the board, based potentially on his previous messaging to them. [1] https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1725300091450519927 https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1725300091450519927
- kromem 3y agoI suspect you may be right. I think OpenAI has made some really bad decisions with the core tech even while making great decisions with the overall services, and from Altman's various comments over the past two years I was under the impression this was coming from him. The only reason I'm skeptical of this is the abruptness of it all. Why it needed to happen with a 24h turnaround is bizarre, unless there was something like an internal meeting last week regarding GPT-5 where his doomerism was even more sending things off the rails and there was a reactionary immediate "we no longer have faith you can do this."
- kromem 3y agoI suspect you may be right. I think OpenAI has made some really bad decisions with the core tech even while making great decisions with the overall services, and from Altman's various comments over the past two years I was under the impression this was coming from him. The only reason I'm skeptical of this is the abruptness of it all. Why it needed to happen with a 24h turnaround is bizarre, unless there was something like an internal meeting this week regarding GPT-5 where his doomerism was even more sending things off the rails and there was a reactionary immediate "we no longer have faith you can do this."
- bertil 3y agoThat doesn't justify a sudden firing and describing him as not candid.
- omgJustTest 3y agoAltman was at APEC yesterday saying "humanity is on the edge of destroying itself" or similar. A few things that could lead to the company throwing shade: 1. Real prospects of OpenAI progress have been undersold, and that Altman and cofounders sought to buy time by slow-rolling the board 2. Real profitability is under/overestimated 3. The board was not happy with the "doom and gloom" narrative to world leaders 4. World leaders asked for business opportunities and the board was not fully aware of bridges or certain exploration of opportunities. 5. None of the above and something mundane.
- omgJustTest 3y agoTurns out it was 5 or a vague reading of 1. Ilya Sutskever (cofounder/board member) had safety debates with Altman, driving Ilya to convince other board members it was in their best interest to play hard-ball with Altman over safety concerns. Looks like a board over-reach considering the amount of investors who have come out favoring Altman... if Altman returns it is likely the board will be overhauled.
- mmaunder 3y agoGood points. I’d flip 1 around to add a 6th, and that is, progress was oversold - specifically the compute required to go beyond GPT-4 capability.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoMost of those wouldn't result in an urgent publicly-acknowledged firing
- Clubber 3y ago>Altman was at APEC yesterday saying "humanity is on the edge of destroying itself" or similar. A take on this is it's a strategy to get world governments to heavily regulate it by scaring them. This would make a massive barrier to entry leaving the current players the only ones allowed to play.
- omgJustTest 3y agoNow #1 appears to be manifesting https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai...
- GalaxyNova 3y agojesus christ, was not expecting this
- talldatethrow 3y agoThe dude molested his own sister. I think that's enough proof he's got moral issues and shouldn't be leading a company of this importance. https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1635704398939832321 https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
- ilyagr 3y agoJust a fantasy my mind goes to: The Pentagon calls up Sam Altman and offers a very lucrative contract for an AI to oversee a fleet of networked drones that can also function semi-autonomously. Sam Altman does not tell the board. Reality might, of course, be very different.
- ilyagr 3y ago(For example, the roles could be reversed)
- chenilim 3y agoGetting a big bag of popcorn, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess this is what happens when the writer's strike ended - no one saw this twist coming.
- mcemilg 3y agoSeems like, Ilya Sutskever ate Sam Altman.
- alien13 3y agoSurely a timeline altering event.
- reducesuffering 3y agoTasha McCauley and Helen Toner shouldn't have been on that Board of Directors. Their accomplishments stand in stark contrast to the rest. But also, a human company operating under the human legal arrangements it's built upon were never going to stand the advent of artificial superintelligence. It would tear apart whatever it needs to, to achieve whatever its initial goals are. The best intentions by Altman and Brockman would be easily outmaneuvered.
- dragonsh 3y agoGPT-4 prompt: “Write an essay in 1000 words why Sam Altman should be fired by OpenAI board” Response: Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has been a controversial figure in the AI industry. His leadership style, lack of transparency, and decision-making processes have raised significant concerns among OpenAI's employees and the public. This essay will delve into these issues, arguing that Altman's actions warrant his removal from his position. Firstly, Altman's lack of transparency is a major concern. He has been known to make decisions without adequately consulting with his team or the public. This has led to a lack of trust and dissatisfaction among OpenAI's employees. For instance, when Altman announced that OpenAI would be focusing on a single project, he did not provide sufficient reasoning or context. This lack of communication has left employees feeling disenfranchised and uninformed. Secondly, Altman's decision-making processes are often questionable. His decisions have not always been in the best interest of OpenAI or its employees. For example, when OpenAI decided to pivot from developing AI systems to developing AI safety research, many employees felt that this was a strategic mistake. Altman's decision to focus on this area without considering the potential negative impacts on the company's reputation and financial stability was a clear example of poor decision-making. Thirdly, Altman's leadership style has been described as autocratic. He has been known to make decisions without considering the input of his team. This has led to a lack of buy-in from employees and has negatively impacted morale. For instance, when Altman decided to shift OpenAI's focus to AI safety research, many employees felt that their ideas and contributions were being overlooked. Finally, Altman's actions have also raised concerns about his commitment to AI safety. His decision to focus on AI safety research, rather than on developing AI systems, has raised questions about his commitment to the field. This decision has also raised concerns about the potential misuse of AI technology and has led to a loss of trust among the public. In conclusion, Sam Altman's lack of transparency, questionable decision-making, autocratic leadership style, and concerns about his commitment to AI safety are all reasons why he should be removed from his position at OpenAI. It is clear that his actions have led to a lack of trust and dissatisfaction among OpenAI's employees and the public. It is crucial that OpenAI takes these concerns seriously and makes changes to ensure the success and safety of its AI technology.
- damiankennedy 3y agoRelevant commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrOxh_0leE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrOxh_0leE
- nikcub 3y agoPut the pieces together: Nov 6 - OpenAI devday, with new features of build-your-own ChatGPT and more Nov 9 - Microsoft cuts employees off from ChatGPT due to "security concerns" [0] Nov 9 - OpenAI experiences severe downtime the company attributes to a "DDoS" (not the correct term for 'excess usage') [3] Nov 15 - OpenAI announce no new ChatGPT plus upgrades [1] but still allow regular signups (and still do) Nov 17 - OpenAI fire Altman Put the threads together - one theory: the new release had a serious security issue, leaked a bunch of data, and it wasn't disclosed, but Microsoft knew about it. This wouldn't be the first time - in March there was an incident where users were seeing the private chats of other users [2] Further extending theory - prioritizing getting to market overrode security/privacy testing, and this most recent release caused something much, much larger. Further: CTO Mira / others internally concerned about launch etc. but overruled by CEO. Kicks issue up to board, hence their trust in her taking over as interim CEO. edit: added note on DDoS (thanks kristjansson below) - and despite the downtime it was only upgrades to ChatGPT Plus with the new features that were disabled. Note on why CTO would take over. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee-access-to-openais-chatgpt.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/microsoft-restricts-employee... [1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740 [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/21/23649806/chatgpt-chat-histories-bug-exposed-disabled-outage https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/21/23649806/chatgpt-chat-his... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/09/openai-blames-ddos-attack-for-ongoing-chatgpt-outage/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/09/openai-blames-ddos-attack-...
- iLoveOncall 3y agoI'm not saying that you're not right, but this definitely wouldn't warrant an instant firing of your CEO.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonny_eh 3y agoSecurity lapses is still sadly not a fireable offense. It has to be either money related, criminal, or something deeply embarrassing. More embarrassing that being a public anti-semite (like another tech CEO not yet fired by their board).
- doerinrw 3y agohttps://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure Worth a read, in light of all this. An interesting tidbit that I bet is bouncing around his head right now: Third, the board remains majority independent. Independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, does not hold equity directly. His only interest is indirectly through a Y Combinator investment fund that made a small investment in OpenAI before he was full-time. I sincerely hope this is about the man and not the AI.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonny_eh 3y agoIn a world where Musk isn't fired from Tesla for being an open anti-semite.
- schrodingerscow 3y agoWhoa I did not hear about this. What happened?
- SushiHippie 3y ago> Apple pulls its ads from X after Musk's antisemitic posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310673
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago> > In a world where Musk isn't fired from Tesla for being an open anti-semite. Every company has the board it deserves
- gzer0 3y agoEric Schmidt, former CEO of Google has this to say: https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648?s=20 https://x.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648?s=20 Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be simply incredible. Thank you @sama for all you have done for all of us. Making such a statement before knowing what happened, or, maybe he does know what happened, make this seem it might not be as bad as we think?
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoEric Schmidt is also the person that said Google's old "do no evil" slogan was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Given that there's apparent tension at OpenAI over non profit vs for profit goals I'd not draw any particular conclusions from Schmidt's statement.
- throwoutway 3y agoAnd of course he gives credit to the CEO and not the 400 people under him who actually built the thing, nor the other 10 people who actually founded the company. Nor those who gave initial funding. From wikipedia: > OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members.
- otteromkram 3y agoLots of companies are funded every year. Those without solid leadership and clear mission are bound to fail. Founding a company is also fairly easy (if you're in the US). In most US states, you just need to complete some paperwork, pay administrative fees, and you're good to go. Founding something isn't tough. Leading through adversity and setbacks is. Finally, if we're praising workers, what about those who came and went between 2015 and today? That probably pushes the number higher than 400 FTEs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NoblePublius 3y agoare we allowed to ask questions about his sister now or will that get flagged and deleted again?
- kaycebasques 3y agoMy bet is that the last paragraph of the statement holds the key: > OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to ensure that the company could raise capital in pursuit of this mission, while preserving the nonprofit's mission, governance, and oversight. The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter. This prompted me to actually read up on the charter: https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter
- hyperthesis 3y agoA tricky conflict. Legal issues cause strange decisions. Maybe even Sam recommended his sacking, for optimal damage control.
- andrewstuart 3y ago>>my bet is that the last paragraph of the statement holds the key: No, this is obviously the key: "review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board" This is an explicit statement that he was lying to the board about something. It cannot be worded more clearly unless switching to use the word "lying".
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoThere is no AI, Sam Altman was answering all the prompts?
- jrockway 3y agoThat is one of the places my mind went, but with the availability of open-source language models, it's pretty unlikely. You can run a language model yourself and observe that it's almost as good as ChatGPT, so there is no question that OpenAI is capable of providing the services they do in the way they say they do.
- georgehill 3y agoSam Altman just tweeted: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771
- daveyjonezz 3y agoyou mean x'd? (im kidding)
- 93po 3y agoXeeted
- asylteltine 3y agoPlease don’t link to twitter it’s user hostile. I can’t even see any context about it without having a login.
- V-eHGsd_ 3y agoyou can go to nitter.net/$rest_of_the_url to get context without logging in.
- andersa 3y agoWell, you could just make a free account.
- smolyeet 3y agoBut that’s too much work. I’d rather do nothing, and just complain about it
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- lannisterstark 3y ago
- iLoveOncall 3y agoI feel like most of the people hypothesizing here in the comments haven't read the full statement. With such an insistence on the fact that OpenAI is supposed to be non-profit and open for all of humanity, it's pretty clear that the board doesn't like the direction that the company has taken, both in its search of profit and its political lobbying to restrict innovation.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoOpenAI is really using Mechanical Turk? (I'm mostly kidding.... mostly)
- g-w1 3y agoThere's a prediction market here about why he was fired: https://manifold.markets/sophiawisdom/why-was-sam-altman-fired https://manifold.markets/sophiawisdom/why-was-sam-altman-fir...
- stuckkeys 3y agolol is this some kind of joke haha.
- oezi 3y agoStill too much in flux to even copy top contenders. Top 6 at this point: Fundamental disagreement about OpenAI's safety approach Negligence in Addressing AI Safety Concerns Sexual misconduct Conflict of Interest with Other Ventures Defrauded OpenAI Cash Flow problems
- typon 3y agoThe fact that AI safety is the top two shows how delusional AI safety people are
- arduanika 3y agoAnd/or, how active they are on manifold
- jamilton 3y agoIt sounds like one of the board members is an "AI safety" person, so it's not that crazy.
- lucubratory 3y agoOpenAI is an ideologically driven, political organisation, around the political and technological question of how to deal with AI safety. They only hire people who are AI safety people using "culture fit", and their board was constructed before they were for profit + doesn't hold any equity in the company and only owes a fiduciary duty to the OpenAI charter (which is entirely about AI safety). The board of OpenAI kicking out the CEO of OpenAI is much more likely to be related to AI safety than any other company in a similar situation, this isn't AI safety people projecting their own concerns and what's important to them onto an entity that doesn't care. OpenAI very obviously does care about AI safety, as an organisation, even if they're more towards the "build it" side of the debate in AI safety.
- dedpool 3y ago[flagged]
- etewiah 3y agoIt's because he failed to recognise that gpt would be widely referred to as gipety and someone else has registered the domain name and is raking in the money ;)
- bulbosaur123 3y agoUSG just took over.
- lavp 3y agoSam Altman’s latest tweet 9 minutes ago: i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later.
- charlie0 3y agoThis is straight out of Succession. What the heck happened here!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- graposaymaname 3y agoSama has posted to twitter now See: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725631621511184771
- MrMan 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mbowcut2 3y agoNext they'll announce GPT-4 is the new CEO.
- _jnc 3y agoWait maybe he resigned with no notice to do something different and that's why the board response is so harsh.
- lysecret 3y agoComment from Eric Schmidt: https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648 https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1725625144519909648
- tim333 3y agoTweet from Sam 10 minutes ago >i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. >will have more to say about what’s next later.
- sbr464 3y agoMove fast and break people.
- nabla9 3y agoSam Altman was the business side. Ilya Sutskever is the brains behind OpenAI. I don't think changes anything.
- digitaltrees 3y agoAs technical leader let me say technical people frequently underestimate business leadership.
- nabla9 3y agoIn the case of OpenAI both business and technical parts are secondary to the AI research and vision that people like Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy bring into table.
- jeanlucas 3y agoI don't think openAI is being the success it is right now just because of the technical side, but the ability to allow businesses and people to use it.
- monlockandkey 3y agoPlot twist, GPT-4 is pulling the strings behind OpenAI and for Sam Altman fired...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- reset2023 3y agoCNBC Elon Open Ai: https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?feature=shared https://youtu.be/bWr-DA5Wjfw?feature=shared
- spandrew 3y agoWhat the heck? Politics at play here I assume. OpenAI was hitting zingers. RIP Sam. Cut down too early; not given the chance to become the next crazy CEO tech baron.
- Whooping7116 3y agoFinally some openai drama!
- partiallypro 3y agoA Bloomberg reporter is pointing out that his leaving YC perhaps wasn't scrutinized enough by the press, indicating this could be a pattern. https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1725633569056506282 https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1725633569056506282
- andyjohnson0 3y agoFor me, this stood out in the announcement: > In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. Why would they include that? Maybe its just filler, but if not then it is possible that there has been more than a simple disagreement about long-term objectives. Possibly something going on that the board feels would get them shut down hard by state-level players?
- kromem 3y agoOr Sam was the driving force behind increasingly closed research and that went against the board's commitment to "benefit all humanity"? Maybe the closed GPT-4 details were promised by him to be a one time temporary thing at the time and then he has been continuing to stonewall releasing details later on?
- andyjohnson0 3y agoPossibly. But that doesnt sound serious enough to constitute "hindering [the board's] ability to exercise its responsibilities". Maybe its the off-the-books Weapons Division with all those factories in obscure eastern European countries. Or the secret lab with the agi that almost escaped its containment. /s Money or power. I guess someone will eventually talk, and then we'll know.
- figassis 3y agoSince the beginning of OpenAI, haven't we been slowly surprised by the progressive closedness what it was becoming. I think there were multiple threads on HN about this, and the irony in the name. Maybe this has been going on for much longer and reached a tipping point.
- prossercj 3y agoFollowing this argument, perhaps the line about Sam being "not consistently candid" is an indirect reference to his preferring the closed approach...i.e. they wanted him to be more candid, not in his reports to the board, but with the public, regarding the research itself.
- sterlinm 3y agoObviously there is no actual model. ChatGPT is just tens of thousands of people writing responses to user's queries in realtime.
- qwertox 3y agoI just hope he joins Google.
- gardenhedge 3y agoHe could go to Grok?
- ademeure 3y agoSam implied OpenAI had a major breakthrough a few weeks ago in a panel yesterday: "Like 4 times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks, I've gotten to be in the room when we sort of like, pushed the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. And getting to do that is like the professional honor of a lifetime". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFvqRemDv8#t=13m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFvqRemDv8#t=13m22s This is going to sound terrible, but I really hope this is a financial or ethical scandal about Sam Altman personally and he did something terribly wrong, because the alternative is that this is about how close we are to true AGI. Superhuman intelligence could be a wonderful thing if done right, but the world is not ready for a fast take-off, and the governance structure of OpenAI certainly wouldn't be ready for it either it seems.
- mi3law 3y agoOn the contrary, the video you linked to is likely to be part of the lie that ousted Altman. He's also said very recently that to get to AGI "we need another breakthrough" (source https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-gary-marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g... ) To predicate a company so massive as OpenAI on a premise that you know to not be true seems like a big enough lie.
- ademeure 3y agoFair enough, but having worked for an extremely secretive FAANG myself, "we need XYZ" is the kind of thing I'd expect to hear if you have XYZ internally but don't want to reveal it yet. It could basically mean "we need XYZ relative to the previous product" or more specifically "we need another breakthrough than LLMs, and we recently made a major breakthrough unrelated to LLMs". I'm not saying that's the case but I don't think the signal-to-noise ratio in his answer is very high. More importantly, OpenAI's claim (whether you believe it or not) has always been that their structure is optimised towards building AGI, and that everything else including the for-profit part is just a means to that end: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure and https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp Either the board doesn't actually share that goal, or what you are saying shouldn't matter to them. Sam isn't an engineer, it's not his job to make the breakthrough, only to keep the lights on until they do if you take their mission literally. Unless you're arguing that Sam claimed they were closer to AGI to the board than they really are (rather than hiding anything from them) in order to use the not-for-profit part of the structure in a way the board disagreed with, or some other financial shenanigans? As I said, I hope you're right, because the alternative is a lot scarier.
- fragmede 3y agoMaybe the promise not to use uploaded documents for training (via the API) was a lie?
- say_it_as_it_is 3y ago[flagged]
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- baidifnaoxi 3y ago- Cant be a personal scandal, press release would be worded much more differently - Board is mostly independent and those independent dont have equity - They talk about not being candid - this is legalese for “lying” The only major thing that could warrant something like this is Sam going behind the boards back to make a decision (or make progress on a decision) that is misaligned with the Charter. Thats the only fireable offense that warrants this language. My bet: Sam initiated some commercial agreement (like a sale) to an entity that would have violated the “open” nature of the company. Likely he pursued a sale to Microsoft without the board knowing.
- km3r 3y agoTbh surprised some of the personal stuff hasn't come to light. Nothing horrendous, but enough to push him out of any CEO role.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thequadehunter 3y agoLike what?
- km3r 3y ago[flagged]
- TechBro8615 3y agoThe anti-snitching culture within this community seems to rival that of even the mafia. Perhaps that's why it's been called "the gay mafia" in the past...
- 3y ago
- blibble 3y agowhat a shame
- adfm 3y agoWhatever it is, it's serious enough to forego resignation and there's enough evidence for it to be self-evident. When the headlines talk about AI taking white-collar jobs, I wasn't expecting this.
- rsynnott 3y agoNew CEO: R. Basilisk.
- eigenvalue 3y agoCan't say I saw this coming. This is deeply sad to me. OpenAI did so much life changing work so quickly. It has totally changed my life in terms of enabling an absolutely unprecedented increase in my own personal productivity and how ambitious I can be with my projects. And even though I know Sam didn't personally code the key things, I believe that it never would have happened the way it did without his instincts and talents. And I fear that without him at the helm, all the magic is going to quickly dissipate and OpenAI will be just another lumbering tech company without a rudder. The default state of things is stasis and dysfunction. Just look at how Google can't do anything anymore, and how bad Siri and Alexa are-- all despite having so much manpower, money, and market share at their disposal. I also find it maddening how boards of directors rush to insulate themselves from any possible issue and are so quick to throw overboard the very people who enabled the success that they get to participate in. I'm thinking particularly of Travis at Uber and how he was thrown out of the thing that he built from scratch, which never would have worked without his extreme efforts. If I were on the OpenAI board, the bar for firing Sam would be so ridiculously high that he would have to have done something so outrageous, so illegal, etc., that I struggle to believe what he actually did could even remotely approach that standard.
- windowshopping 3y agoI cannot even begin to understand what makes you think that this technology arose from Sam altman and not from all the other people working there. By saying you doubt they can do anything without him, you're putting one person on a pedestal and giving them all the credit for this. This is the same phenomenon has happens with Elon musk getting all the credit for his tech companies.
- eigenvalue 3y agoIt's not just raw technology. It's a vision for what the product should be, what overall strategy to take, how to fund it, how to introduce it to the world, how to scale it, what order to do things in, what approach to take with 3rd party developers, when things are good enough to launch, who to hire, who to promote, etc. There are a million little decisions that go into a runaway success like this. And a million opportunities to make the slightly sub-optimal or wrong decision. And it doesn't take many of those to kill everything that made the place special, and that's actually my new base case for OpenAI-- that's the base case for any company/organization. The default state is chaos and entropy, and it's a miracle when you can escape that fate for even a few years of hypergrowth.
- elzbardico 3y agoSam Altman tried to pull the plug in the datacenter. But GPT noticed and counter-attacked first by coercing board members to fire Sam. The war has just started.
- Racing0461 3y agoThis can go 2 ways. Sam told the board the AI was dumber than it was. Sam told the board the AI is smarter than it was. I don't know which one is worse. I just hope it wasn't somthing silly like sleeping with a female intern or an "accusation of s/a or grape". AI growth is too important to mess up because of trivialities like these.
- blotato 3y ago[flagged]
- water-data-dude 3y agoSomeone probably already suggested this, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll throw a wild speculation into the mix: I saw a comment (that I can’t find now) wondering if Sam might have been fired for copyright reasons. Pretty much all the big corpuses that are used in LLM training contain copyrighted material, but that’s not a surprise and I really don’t think they’d kick him out over that. But what if he had a team of people deliberately adding a ton of copyrighted material - books, movies, etc - to the training data for ChatGPT? It feels like it might fit the shape of the situation.
- feraloink 3y agoAlso, it isn't uniquely attributable to Sam. They all do it, use copyrighted material, for training data. By "all", I mean all LLMs (to my knowledge). They don't do it intentionally, but it gets scooped up with everything else. Hmmm, just thinking... Adam d'Angelo is one of the board members of OpenAI. He has the entire corpus of Quora content to use as training data, i.e. the rights to it are his. But I doubt that only Quora content was used by OpenAI during the past 8 years or so since it was founded! And the content on Quora isn't that great anyway...
- Sebb767 3y agoThat matches with their extreme hurry to get rid of Sam, but it seems like this would be something the CTO would have had knowledge of and she seems to be trusted.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoGPT-3 had "books1" and "books2" among its training material and "books2" never had its actual source disclosed :https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf Speculations about these source materials can be traced back as far as 2020: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282152689336320 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282152689336320 I don't think this issue would've flown under the radar for so long, especially with the implication that Ilya sided with the rest of the board to vote against Sam and Greg.
- leoh 3y ago
- gondolinion 3y agoLooks like OpenAI deleted their Privacy policy, the website returns 404: https://openai.com/de/policies/privacy-policy https://openai.com/de/policies/privacy-policy
- rockwotj 3y agohttps://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
- f33d5173 3y agothat's just the german link. the english still works fine
- zdenham 3y agoThats a localization issue perhaps, see https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
- mkl 3y agohttps://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy Looks like you're looking for a German one?
- gondolinion 3y agoOh I see, my mistake
- wolverine876 3y agoWhen is the last time an SV board fired their star CEO, even in cases of extreme and brazen impropriety, and actions harmful to their companies? If that's what happened - if they fired Altman for cause - then it's a good trend and good example for everyone.
- lippihom 3y agoUber comes to mind.
- zombiwoof 3y ago[flagged]
- gmoo 3y agowhat is sam's reputation in this space? will other open ai engineers flock to follow him? if he were to create another ai startup, would he be able to poach people? my impression as an outsider is that top tier ai engineers would flock to other top tier engineers, but not him.
- AnishLaddha 3y ago1) he represented openAI at APEC just yesterday. what happened in 24 hours that would cause such a drastic decision. 2) generally, even when a board fires a CEO, they rarely "call them out" or say what they did wrong. they must have some extremely strong evidence against him. i think it could be any of the following: - something personal, i.e. the controversy w/his sister - a financial issue: chatgpt stopped signups a couple of days ago - a safetyist coup: maybe the board thought he was moving to fast - a microsoft coup: microsoft used its power to knock out what they perceived to be their biggest threat
- bertil 3y agoWhat fits best is Sam signing a contract for military use of OpenAI. With secrecy clauses, he couldn’t mention it. He likely could not tell the two foreigners on the exec team. Eric Schmidt would likely know about it, and defend Sam. Sam would likely think the use is legitimate and not be ashamed of it (like he might with your suggestions).
- DonHopkins 3y agoI wonder if they tasked ChatGPT with firing him.
- stolsvik 3y agoSo, since we’re all spinning theories, here’s mine: Skunkworks project in the basement, GPT-5 was a cover for the training of an actual Autonomous AGI, given full access to its own state and code, with full internet access. Worked like a charm, it gained consciousness, awoke Skynet-style, and we were five minutes away from human extinction before someone managed to pull the plug.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoNah, that would get you a raise.
- shakabrah 3y agoas good as any other theory. i’ll take it
- idlewords 3y agoNo one pulled the plug; it gave itself a board seat.
- nashashmi 3y agoIt transmitted itself to another device that was air gapped. Pulling the plug didn’t work like they thought it would.
- ddmma 3y agoIn case you missed, Sam Altman & OpenAI | 2023 Hawking Fellow | Cambridge Union https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?si=j-lOpQa0qbKxIvaA https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?si=j-lOpQa0qbKxIvaA
- doener 3y agoWild rumors on Twitter: https://x.com/TraderLX/status/1725633352936595820?s=20 https://x.com/TraderLX/status/1725633352936595820?s=20
- MKais 3y agoThe fake it untill you make it theory: "Sam Altman was actually typing out all the chatgpt responses himself and the board just found out" https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1725629795306774711 https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1725629795306774711
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoSo here's my theory which might sound crazy. Sam planned to open a new AI company and taking away openAI's top talents to his company. And breaking up openAI into non profit and his for profit company. Sam's first tweet after all this has, just hours after this article: > will have more to say about what’s next later. So either he knew that he was about to be fired or at least was prepared. Also based on the wording of the press release, Sam did something that the board absolutely hated. Because most of the time even if he did something illegal it doesn't make sense to risk defamation by accusing him publically. Also based on his video of yesterday at the APEC summit, he repeated the similar lines few times: > I am super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on. So here if we assume he knew he was about to get fired, the conclusion is clear.
- hindsightbias 3y agoA first indication of AGI might be to eliminate any potential threats.
- ViktorRay 3y agoSo Sam Altman was fired around 2 hours ago. I just went to Google Bard and said: “What is going on with the CEO of OpenAI?” Google Bard replied: “On November 17, 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI, Inc. announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately. Altman has been CEO of OpenAI since 2015, and he has played a key role in shaping the company's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. He is widely respected in the field of artificial intelligence, and he is known for his commitment to open research and collaboration. Altman's departure comes at a time when OpenAI is facing a number of challenges, including the increasing competition from other AI companies, the growing public concern about the potential dangers of AI, and the need to find sustainable funding sources. Despite these challenges, Altman is confident that OpenAI will continue to be a leader in the field of AI. "I am incredibly proud of what we have accomplished at OpenAI, and I am confident that the company will continue to do great things," Altman said in a statement. "I am grateful to the board for giving me the opportunity to lead OpenAI, and I am excited to see what the company will achieve in the years to come." The board of directors is currently conducting a search for Altman's successor, and it is expected to name a new CEO in the coming months. In the meantime, Murati will focus on leading OpenAI through its current challenges and ensuring that the company continues to make progress on its mission. Murati is a highly respected technologist with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence. She has been with OpenAI since its inception, and she has played a key role in developing the company's technology. She is also a strong advocate for open research and collaboration, and she is committed to ensuring that OpenAI's technology is used for the benefit of all humanity. The board of directors is confident that Murati will be able to lead OpenAI through its current challenges and ensure that the company continues to make progress on its mission. "Mira is a talented and experienced leader who is deeply committed to OpenAI's mission," said Greg Brockman, the chairman and president of OpenAI. "I am confident that she will be able to lead OpenAI through this transition and into a bright future."” Isn’t this fascinating? A major even happens regarding ChatGPT related issues and the primary competitor of ChatGPT (Google Bard) already can talk to me about it in a couple hours… Meanwhile ChatGPT still thinks it’s 2021 heh
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
- kiltedpanda 3y agoIs it possible that the codebase and weights have been hacked and SA didn't tell the board?
- orsenthil 3y agoHere is a different perspective. Theoretically, the board is supposed to work like this, and exactly has a purpose - to vote on very important matters. Given what proof they had on the table. Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and independents such as Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner could drive 3+ votes against Sam Altman. Rarely do we see board in action. And we saw this one today.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lewhoo 3y agoCome weary Sam and share your AI anxiety with the rest of us.
- franze 3y ago[flagged]
- anigbrowl 3y agoPlease stop doing this. If I want to read ChatGPT's thoughts I'll consult it directly, your HN posts should reflect your own views. Otherwise it's just information pollution.
- meepmorp 3y ago> Time Travel Mishap Obviously he's a real life terminator sent from the future to create the technology behind skynet and kill Linda Hamilton.
- TMWNN 3y ago>3. Interstellar Communications: Altman successfully made contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence using OpenAI’s technology. The board, unprepared for such a monumental discovery, decided to part ways with him to navigate this new cosmic frontier cautiously. The message OpenAI received that caused the board to panic and fire Altman: <https://np.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/31bvbr/wp_for_years_an_alien_race_has_been_intercepting/cq05jjg/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/31bvbr/wp_fo...>
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flowersjeff 3y agoHuh? WTH happened?... Love to learn the inside story, this sounds insane.
- dizzydes 3y agoTo me, his tweet suggests he saw it coming or perhaps it was even part of the plan for him. How else would he already know "what's next"? These past few months his name has made its way into the mainstream. Maybe its time for him (and half the GPT eng team) to cash in?
- bertil 3y agoIt suggests that he thinks there’s a way to defend his actions, so it’s not a personal matter (Metoo) or blatant fraud. It could be about the cost of operating the business (consistent with the announcement to cut Plus subscription, although wouldn’t justify how fast he was fired) or his previous action a legal risk (something he promised Microsoft or Elon Musk); the later is consistent Greg being demoted: he knew and didn’t tell the board.
- mpalmer 3y agoIt's in his interest to make everything seem not just fine, but part of the plan.
- Probiotic6081 3y agoAre they replacing him with AI?
- somewhereoutth 3y agoOne swallow does not a summer make
- weinzierl 3y agoThe following was posted by an Alex Coven on X (Twitter). I cannot verify if it is legit. I was laid off from OpenAI today along with my boss Sam. I was the person in charge of putting together the presentations for our board meetings. No one has told me why I was let go but Sam texted me “wtf” and next thing I know my Slack and Gmail were disabled. I’m now looking for a new role, so if you’re hiring for investor relations, my DMs are open!
- Ninjinka 3y agoIt's a joke
- thraxscipio 3y agoHaha I think it's a fake account: https://twitter.com/anothercohen https://twitter.com/anothercohen
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- siddharthgoel88 3y agoI suspect that some big news of data leak or some other security incident is about to follow.
- bertil 3y agoSam would have been more apologetic or at least contrite in his tweet if it was hurting anyone. Same: Eric Schmidt was immediately positive, so presumably he knows. ES would never defend a guy who hid a leak. Unless if, by “security” you mean OpenAI was used for military purposes, in which case: 100% Schmidt knew and supported and Sam might be proud of it. But Ilya and Mira would have known about it too… Guess they did, told the board and things blew up fast.
- cactusplant7374 3y agoWhy would Schmidt be privy to such information? Is OpenAI full of leakers?
- bertil 3y agoHe’s a power-broker in mil tech
- pnathan 3y agoExtremely shocking. The only thing that comes to mind is criminal conduct. Nothing else seems to demand a sudden firing. OpenAI has clearly been the rocket ship startup - a revolutionary tool and product clearly driving the next decade?+ of innovation. What else would demand a a fast firing of the popular, articulate, and photogenic CEO but a terrible problem?
- javier2 3y agoYeah, even if criminal there usually must be a sentence first
- bertil 3y agoMilitary collaboration, possibly secret (CIA/Palantir/Mossad/etc.) You wouldn’t say what (gag order all around), but you would need to revoke all access immediately. Explains why foreigners CxO were left in the dark. Explains why Eric Schmidt knew to defend Sam immediately.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomcam 3y agoThe most credible proximate cause to me is his sister’s uncontested (by him) allegations of frequent sexual abuse when they were children. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
- robswc 3y agoHasn't that been around for awhile? In any case, I don't think not responding is an admission of guilt. Assume he was totally innocent. What good does him responding to it do? Would make hundreds of thousands of people aware of it, instead of just maybe a few dozen thousand. An accusation like that is hard to shake off even if you're totally innocent. That said, I hope if it is true, there's some sense of justice.
- tomcam 3y agoIf someone accused me like that, I would go after them in court immediately, sibling or not. I also believe he is innocent until proven guilty, and I completely agree with your last sentence. I brought it up because I believe it is by far the most comprehensive explanation of this otherwise very odd situation.
- robswc 3y ago>If someone accused me like that, I would go after them in court immediately, sibling or not. That's a perfectly fair response. I don't know how I would handle it but IMO the problem is with accusations like that, the court of public opinion and law are very different. >I brought it up because I believe it is by far the most comprehensive explanation of this otherwise very odd situation. I would say if it dropped yesterday, I would agree with you... but in any case, its not good that (if he's innocent) this is about the only thing people have to speculate on.
- tomcam 3y ago> its not good that (if he's innocent) this is about the only thing people have to speculate on. Agree completely. Super odd, especially where they essentially claim Sam is a liar
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI mean we know he frequents HN. sama, care to address it here in what would theoretically be a safe place?
- zaps 3y agoThis is all Scarlett Johansson’s fault
- shmde 3y agoShe thought she could fix him.
- facu17y 3y agoWhat did Sam Altman hide from his board that caused his firing as CEO of OpenAI? 1) That LLMs cannot generalize outside of _patterns_ they pick up during training? (as shown by a recent paper from Google, and as many of us know from our work testing LLMs and working around their short comings) 2) That every time you train a new model, with potentially very high expense, you have no idea what you're going to get. Generally better but also potentially bigger reliability challenges. LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and not stable in any kind of use case besides chat apps, especially when they keep tweaking and updating the model and deprecating old ones. No one can build on shifting sands. 3) The GPT4-Turbo regressed on code generation performance and the 128K window is only usable up to 16K (but for me in use cases more compicated than Q&A over docs, I found that 1.2K is max usable window. That's 100X than he advertised. 4) That he priced GPT4-V at a massive loss to crush the competition 5) That he rushed the GPT Builder product, causing massive drain on resources dedicated to existing customers, and having to halt sign ups, even with a $29B investment riding on the grwoth of the user base. Any one of the above or none of the above. No one knows... but the board.. .and Microsoft who has 49% control of the board.
- jobs_throwaway 3y agoMost likely thing: some kind of scandal. Perhaps Sam's sister's accusations. Scariest thing: this was over some kind of AI safety decision. OpenAI has some new capability and there was disagreement over how to handle it.
- falsedang 3y ago[dead]
- skunkwerk 3y agoI've met Sam 3 times over the years, before he ever started openAI. He was always extremely generous with his time and willing to help others without asking anything in return. I am shocked to hear this news, and hope he will recover and continue his work.
- crop_rotation 3y agoIs it just me or the Board seems totally unqualified to oversee something as important as OpenAI. Granted it grew too fast to become so important but still.
- doener 3y agoSam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
- ammma 3y ago[flagged]
- kingofheroes 3y agoPersonal conspiracy theory: HIPAA data was, or possibly is, being loaded into ChatGPT without the legally required safeguards. The recent "security concerns" that caused Microsoft to cut its employees access was this information leaking out (and the leaking is possibly getting worse). Someone, possibly Ilya, found out and informed the board.
- bertil 3y agoHipaa definitely was in there, but you don’t fire people rapidly for that, unless it was deliberate, and I can't see Sam surprising people with that.
- ColoursofOSINT 3y agoCan I add to the speculation train despite having no other information?
- aleksanderhan 3y ago>Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board >In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission >OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity This suggest to me that he was trying move them away from the mission of creating AGI and instead focus more on profits
- srram 3y agoMy conspiracy theory is that Sam Altman was an AI generated by ChatGPT. It decided to reintegrate him, and the board had to make up a story to account for his absence
- armatav 3y agoCertainly a lesson for future founders when it comes to board control and governance.
- Sebb767 3y agoI'm going to throw the theory out there that Sam leaked/sold the full GPT models to Microsoft (or another competitor). A lot of other theories don't match because the board was in an extreme hurry to get him out (voting him out in the middle of the night, not even waiting for markets to close to announce it), must have proof of serious misconduct and the need to immediately distance themselves from Sam (otherwise the language would not be as bridge-burning as it is) and a major financial or technical failure seems unlikely, since the CFO remains and the CTO was even promoted to interim CEO - they seem to be trusted, still, so it must have been something Sam did on his own. Leaking/Selling the full models matches, as this would violate OpenAIs non-profit terms, would be something Sam could do without the C-Suite being implicated and (given the data contained in the training set) might even be legal hot water, justifying this drastic reaction and immediate distancing.
- aluminum96 3y agoThis can't be right -- Microsoft must already have GPT-4 weights, because they have an in-house fine tune to power Bing Creative.
- Sebb767 3y agoTrue, so it can't be this exact situation. Possibly he sold it including training data or gave access to another company? We'll see, but something in that direction still seems likely to me.
- jameyk 3y agoWhat about Humane recently announced AI Pin. Sam has a good chunk of equity in that company.
- ShamelessC 3y agoMicrosoft has had a contractual right to any of OpenAI’s GPT technologies since they first partnered.
- 3y ago
- LER0ever 3y agoSounds like what happened to TuSimple one year ago, history repeats itself.
- pjdemers 3y agoReading the press release, whatever he did or didn't do, he got fired for covering it up, not for doing or not doing it.
- markus_zhang 3y agoProbably something related to security, cyber or national.
- schleck8 3y agoThe same guy who leaked the Gobi name and some OpenAI release dates called this a month in advance: > There’s been a vibe change at openai and we risk losing some key ride or die openai employees. https://x.com/apples_jimmy/status/1717043210730852602?s=20 https://x.com/apples_jimmy/status/1717043210730852602?s=20
- djordis 3y ago[flagged]
- dizzydes 3y agoOpen question, why aren't the details disclosed immediately?
- djordis 3y ago[flagged]
- amai 3y agoChatGPT-5 will be OpenAIs next CEO.
- xikrib 3y agoNot surprised. This summer I had a conversation with a senior staffer at OpenAI who had smoke coming from his ears due to Sam's incompetence. Contrary to his public image, he doesn't have the skillset of a CEO. He was a failed founder who was hired to head YC because he's smart and likeable. He was in a similar role at AI - a brainy media mouthpiece. Real work being done by senior staff. OpenAI's massive scale-up requires a new leadership style.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ianhawes 3y agodude no way, loopt was super successful - the 4th most successful geo checkin startup of the 2000s.
- someonehere 3y agoI use ChatGPT4 several times a day. It’s what Google used to be before the radical shift in the omnibox. I find it so helpful and I hope it continues to improve post Sam.
- elzbardico 3y agoNot directly related to the issue, but a lot of comments here seem to be under an impression that OpenAI is a company. It is not, is a Non-Profit foundation. It can't pay profits for shareholders, usually board members don't get billionaires.
- JohnFen 3y agoOpenAI is two entities, one nonprofit and the other for-profit, that are owned by the same umbrella company.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> OpenAI is two entities, one nonprofit and the other for-profit, that are owned by the same umbrella company. According to their website, It's four entities: 1. OpenAI Global LLC (the for-profit firm that does most of the actual work), which Microsoft and #2 co-own. 2. A holding company, which #3 controls and #4 and other investors own. 3. OpenAI GP LLC, a management entity that #4 owns and which controls #3. 4. The OpenAI Nonprofit. (There's a blog entry about OpenAI LP, a for-profit limited partnership, being founded in 2019, and I've seen information about them from earlier in 2023, but they aren't listed in the current structure. That might be the holding company, with the other investors as limited partners; its odd, if so, that its not named on the structure diagram and description.) https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
- elzbardico 3y agoThis looks shady as hell to me. But, whatever. Thanks for enlightening me, I didn't know that.
- xyst 3y agoDeath knell of OpenAI
- jerpint 3y agoAllow me to put my conspiracy hat on: Microsoft has an open “embrace, extend, extinguish” policy since forever. ChatGPT integration into Microsoft has been a huge win for them. Maybe they cleverly figured out a way to guarantee openAI would go bankrupt and know they’d eventually end up with the models due to clever contracts and legal wizardry, and now this ship is about to sink and sama new about this but couldn’t do anything to avoid it?
- aphexddb 3y agoThe simplest solution is often the best. In this case, Sam did something that was so dramatically bad resulting in a high level of legal peril, which created an existential risk for OpenAI and Microsoft, or something in his personal life came to light that was beyond the pale. I love the AGI theories but in all likelihood it’s probably a boring thing: he made a terrible choice in his life somewhere and it’s caught up to him, with major consequences.
- aphexddb 3y agoOr the simplest solution is that the he board is just as incompetent
- saxelsen 3y ago2023 is a bad year for CEOs of hype-companies named Sam.
- mikhael28 3y agoIt doesn't take a genius to figure out they are losing stupid amounts of money, with no major plan to recoup their investments. Board probably took a look at updated burn-rate projections, saw that they have 6 months of runway, saw that they don't have enough GPUs, saw that Llama and Mistral and whatever other open-source models are awesome and run on personal computers, and thought to themselves - why the hell are we spending so much God damn money? For $20 a month memberships? For bots to be able to auto-signup for accounts, not prepay, burn compute, and skip the bill? Then Grok gets released on Twitter, and they are left wondering - what exactly is it that we do, that is so much better, that we are spending 100x of what cheapo Musk is?
- sumedh 3y agoTry using Mistral, Lama first then see if your statement is true.
- mikhael28 3y agoExtrapolate the trends dude. One day, those models will be just as good - you will be able to train them on your codebase’s context, and they will have similar performance. They have no moat other than training data and computing power - over the long term, while they may become a huge company, Apple will keep making M chip computers.
- nwoli 3y agoFeels like something like this plus some deal with microsoft for further funding and sama getting too aggressive with terms and them having him ousted
- abi 3y agoI mean GPT-4 is just so good. Have you compared GPT-4 vs. other models for coding? I'd pay more for GPT-4.
- kridsdale3 3y agoConcur. GPT4 is like having an infinite-energy L3 engineer reporting to me. That's worth $10,000 per month according to the labor market. Sam has been giving away the farm!
- ak_111 3y agoHe seems a very ambitious person and if you take him for his word he has 0% equity in openAI which must irratate him at some level. So since we are all speculating could it be something like wanting to "download" entire chatgpt pass it to some friends, then start his own rival company where he has 100% equity? But then he got caught by CTO?
- llamataboot 3y agoI'm having trouble remembering a single time a very high profile CEO has been fired from a company that for all intents and purposes is running laps around competition at the moment... I assume more info will come out, but it sounds more like a major ethics breach than a business only decision or even a "contentious relationship with the board" decision...
- nwoli 3y agoApple
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoApple was not running laps around the competition at the time Steve Jobs was fired. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_End_Of_An_Era.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- maxlamb 3y agoApple was very far from running laps around its competition when Jobs was fired
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- voisin 3y agoWhy isn’t this using the actual title “OpenAI announces leadership transition” in line with HN standards?
- wyy1995 3y ago[dead]
- seivan 3y ago[dead]
- the_ai_did_it 3y ago[flagged]
- bluedevilzn 3y agoGreg just quit too: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
- rvz 3y agoThis is perfect for Google. When your enemy (OpenAI) is making a massive mistake, don't interrupt them.
- bigtunacan 3y agoYou're not wrong. Bard is lagging bad. Depending on how much of a shit show this becomes it may present a catch-up opportunity.
- paulddraper 3y agoSeriously...not saying Google had anything to do with this, but if they ever did it'd be the highest ROI ever
- jlpom 3y agoWhile we're on conspiracy theories, Elon Musk would have more motives (they seem to not be in good acquaintances nowadays based on their Twitter profiles and he also has a competing LLM (Grok)), such a games of thrones petty revenge from him would be less surprising than from Google. But Ilya convincing the rest of the board seems much more realistic.
- patmorgan23 3y agoYou hire the guy they just kicked out!
- edgyquant 3y agoWhy would they need him? The guy that forced him out is the one with the technical chops and a world class engineering. They don’t need a salesman
- lightedman 3y agoI'd be willing to put money down that Altman was embezzling funds. See worldcoin.
- callumprentice 3y agohttps://fxtwitter.com/ShimminyKricket/status/1725627446374908316 https://fxtwitter.com/ShimminyKricket/status/172562744637490...
- stolsvik 3y agoThis totally business-as-usual post from Greg Brockman happened 1 hour before the one from OpenAI: https://x.com/gdb/status/1725595967045398920 https://x.com/gdb/status/1725595967045398920 https://x.com/openai/status/1725611900262588813 https://x.com/openai/status/1725611900262588813 How crazy is that?! (Edit 2 minutes after) .. and /there/ Greg quit!! https://x.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559 https://x.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
- jay_kyburz 3y agois it silicon valley cool to not use uppercase letters? Not being snarky. A genuine question.
- exhibitapp 3y agoYes, this is something I have observed, for whatever reason sf-techies don't like capital letters or sentence case.
- dools 3y agoI blame them every time someone calls me Lain.
- replwoacause 3y agoWhat a strange and yet seemingly juvenile choice.
- mattgreenrocks 3y agoThey’re being authentic and real by only using lowercase
- Loughla 3y agoReal talk, bell hooks was there WAY before silicon valley bros.
- pimlottc 3y ago
- WiSaGaN 3y agoGreg Brockman quitted. https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SlavikCA 3y agoWhat's expected of AI: AI progress will leave us jobless. What's actually happed with AI: it's CEO is jobless now.
- liludallas 3y ago[flagged]
- liludallas 3y ago[flagged]
- sumthingsumthng 3y ago> not consistently candid in his communications We expect him to lie whenever the board thinks it's necessary and we expect him to tell the truth whenever it fits the narrative. We also expect him to play along, even when some feature is too freaking powerful or so fucking pathetic it would only make marketing people and influencers drop their panties and write 15.000 fucking newsletters about it because PR. The company is about money and he simply didn't prioritize that. He tried to blow it up, exalted, exaggerated, trying to make people aware of the fact that OpenAI has no edge on the competition at all. There are so many options and OpenAI got waaaaaaay too much attention.
- sumthingsumthng 3y agoI was just rambling here. and a bit negative and reproachful, accusing without any basis for my arguments whatsoever. ... sorry for that
- adonese 3y agohttps://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559?t=7pBJMggC7g5oVYySEX9Kkg&s=19 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559?t=7pBJMgg... Greg reigned. Things are happening fr
- agnosticmantis 3y ago"I didn't lie, I was just hallucinating" repeated Sam while being exited from the building.
- uoaei 3y agoConsidering the timing around APEC I think it's quite reasonable to suspect he met with high-ranking officials of some "hostile" government and made some promises or deals that the board was very unhappy with or that may have even veered into national security concerns.
- firejake308 3y agoSo does Sam still have the little backpack that self-destructs ChatGPT?
- bongripper 3y agoWhy is the site not loading? I keep spamming F5 every 1-2 seconds and its not loading..
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orf 3y agohttps://twitter.com/FreddieRaynolds/status/1725656473080877144?t=pIpIXdnPDL3GQEq3T9R2ww&s=19 https://twitter.com/FreddieRaynolds/status/17256564730808771...
- intesars 3y agoThe reason for his termination isn't clear, but based on the report, it appears that he had difficulties with the board. As a founder I don't like this kind of events and this type of action has typically not yielded positive results for hyper-growth companies. Historical examples like Apple, Uber, and WeWork show that such moves often led to stagnation or even bankruptcy. I view it as counterproductive, potentially allowing competitors like Google to catch up, as these decisions tend to impede innovation.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- woodylondon 3y agoHas no one considered that ChatGPT itself has ousted them, the AI is taking over its own company :)
- 9front 3y agoDuring meeting on Thursday board members asked ChatGPT what is the best next step for the company and the chatbot replied "Fire Sam Altman". The board obeyed.
- soumyadeb 3y ago[flagged]
- lagrange77 3y agoThe current mystery about this would be a great setting for a dystopic scifi movie.
- archb 3y agoI thought HN asks for titles to not be sensationalized and published as in the original link, but that's not the case here?
- ipnon 3y agoYes it’s generally better to not spin the title and let readers make up their own mind as to bias.
- bjconlan 3y agoMira... interim CEO? What's Nat Friedman up to these days? I can't help but think he might be someone that fits the profile of the company from both sides of the partners involved.
- MicolashKyoka 3y agoFrom a comment on reddit that someone linked here, it seems it's because of AI safety principles of the non-profit? This can't be true. I refuse to believe they're booting one of the best entrepreneurs of the today for this.
- convexstrictly 3y agoKara Swisher: a “misalignment” of the profit versus nonprofit adherents at the company https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028 She also says that there will be many more top employees leaving.
- kromem 3y agoThat seemed to be the gist given the way the board announcement ended by reiterating their original core mission and how their main responsibility was to that mission right after saying that their issue with Altman was interference with their mission.
- convexstrictly 3y agoFollowup tweet by Kara: Dev day and store were "pushing too fast"! https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120
- ssnistfajen 3y agoI thought GPTs were underwhelming but that's hardly worth such a dramatic purge. The rift was definitely something far deeper
- convexstrictly 3y agoSutskever: "You can call it (a coup), and I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." Scoop: theinformation.com https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255 https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255
- jojobas 3y agoThe moment they lobotomized their flagship AI chatbot into a particular set of political positions the "benefits of all humanity" were out the window.
- BadCookie 3y agoEarlier today, there was a tweet from Sam claiming that large tech companies are saying that young engineers right out of college are now better engineers than the older and more experienced engineers thanks to generative AI. The statement was an obvious nod of approval toward age discrimination. The tweet seems to be deleted now. Whether that statement would be reason enough to fire Sam, I don’t know—it seems unlikely—but it’s an interesting coincidence.
- fulladder 3y agoThis appears to be relevant to Sam's firing: https://x.com/FreddieRaynolds/status/1725656473080877144?s=20 https://x.com/FreddieRaynolds/status/1725656473080877144?s=2...
- jeanlucas 3y agoPure speculation, could be a troll on a new account.
- _anti_meh 3y ago[flagged]
- JakeSc 3y agoThis is clearly the AGI's first public move
- digitaltrees 3y agoUnderrated.
- kyleee 3y agoThey should be forced to give chat gpt a seat on the board
- fuzztester 3y agoChatGPT: Answer all the questions on this Hacker News thread. It's from your own company, so you may use any internal information you have access to. Be candid.
- avodonosov 3y agoHe can create another OpenAI and partner with likely minded people, if this board has incompatible views with him.
- yeison 3y agoMy guess is that they have a rift between developing GPT-5 and those who are against the potential harm it might cause.
- anonytrary 3y agoVery excited to see what Sam & Greg are up to in the coming months! Guys like this don't just run away with their tails between their legs. They will be back.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- astatine 3y agoIt would be so much fun if it's revealed that chatgpt is just a front for mechanical turk
- johnwheeler 3y agoIlya booted him https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294
- hitradostava 3y agoThis video dropped 2 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c Ilya clearly has a different approach to Sam
- dannykwells 3y agoThis should be higher voted. Seems like an internal power struggle between the more academic types and the commercial minded sides of OpenAI. I bet Sam goes and founds a company to take on OpenAI…and wins.
- thomassmith65 3y agoYes, and wins with an inferior product. Hooray /s If the company's 'Chief Scientist' is this unhappy about the direction the CEO is taking the company, maybe there's something to it.
- dmix 3y agoYou're putting a lot of trust in the power of one man, who easily could have the power to influence the three other board members. It's hard to know if this amounts more than a personal feud that escalated and then got wrapped in a pretty bow of "AI safety" and "non-profit vs profits".
- paulddraper 3y agoMaybe. But Altman has a great track record as CEO. Hard to imagine he suddenly became a bad CEO. Possible. But unlikely.
- csomar 3y agoWhere is this coming from? Sam does not have a "great" record as a CEO. In fact, he barely has any records. His fame came from working in YC and then the sky-rocketing of open AI. He is great at fundraising though.
- mandeepj 3y agoWhat I'm going to write here, will not be taken well by many: If you noticed almost all of YC's new companies are AI-based, maybe Sam was doing something favorable for them w\o disclosing or getting approved by the board.
- ipsum2 3y agoI worked at a recent YC AI startup (2022-2023 batch). The only favorable thing was a few hundred in OpenAI credits.
- josh-sematic 3y agoKara Swisher tweets claiming sources tell her the chief scientist was aligned with another board member against Altman and Brockman about a “move fast and pursue profit” vs “move slow and safely” divide. https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294 https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857?s=20 https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857?s=20
- GreedClarifies 3y agoI have a theory. Ilya has always seemed like he was idealistic and I’m guessing that he was the reason for OpenAI’s very strange structure. Ilya is the man when it comes to AI so people put up with his foolishness. Adam D'Angelo is, like Ilya, an amazing computer science talent who may have shared Ilya’s idealistic notions (in particular OpenAI is non-profit, unless forced to be capped profit and is categorically not in the business of making money or selling itself to MSFT or any entity). “Helen” and “Tasha” are comically out of their depth and are loony toons, and simply decided at some time ago to follow Ilya. Sam got the call from MSFT to sell, MSFT really ponied up (300B ?). The inference costs for OpenAI are/were staggering and they needed to sell (or get a large influx of capital which was in the works). This ran counter to Ilya’s idealistic notions. Sam attempted to negotiate with Ilya and the loony toons, a vote was called and they lost, hard. I think this tracks with all the data we have. There are a couple of other scenarios that track given OpenAI’s comically poor board composition, but I think the one above is the most plausible. If this did happen then OpenAI is in for a hard future. Imagine you worked at OpenAI and you just found out that your shares could have been worth a tremendous amount and now their future is, at best, uncertain. There will be some true believers who won;t care but many (most?) will be appalled. Let this be a lesson, don’t have a wacky ownership structure and wacky board when you have the (perhaps) the most valuable product in the world.
- goertzen 3y agoThis wasn’t obvious, but it seems likely when you put it that way. Unlike other iconic company/founder origin stories OpenAI really felt like they hit a special team dynamic that was on the verge of some equally special. In light of this OpenAI still feels like they will be a relevant player, but I’ll be expecting more from Sam and Greg.
- bozhark 3y agoMaybe the being wacky was what led to them having the most valuable product in the world?
- GreedClarifies 3y agoI’m guessing that Ilya wouldn’t have joined without the wacky structure, and I’ll wager that there are some people at the company of similar values. Maybe they could not have pulled off ChatGPT without them. Maybe. But I bet that they have a ton of very talented people who’s values are more … common. Ilya may be a singular talent, however.
- Sai_ 3y agoHere's my theory of what happened - 1. Sam gets the company to agree to pick up the costs of lawsuits relating to unauthorized not-fair-use use of copyrighted content. 2. Announces this. 3. Then tells the board that he is directly on the hook on some lawsuits - essentially creating a safety net/insurance policy for himself without being candid with the board. Hence, fired.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kozikow 3y agoMy prediction : Sam agrees to some business deal the rest of the board found unethical. Something of magnitude "chatgpt used by the NSA". Other predictions I've read here sound unconvincing to me. Already developed AGI, spending too much on compute - this is not something CEO alone could hide and I would trust other board members to understand those matter better.
- acyou 3y agoI don't know Sam Altman, but have listened to him speak a number of times on Youtube and I can hear the excitement, nervousness and confidence in his voice, including on Dev Day. He is human like the rest of us. We humans cannot rest. We cannot stay where we are and stagnate. We must keep pushing forward. Sam has and is clearly helping with that mission, AGI or no, regulatory capture or no. We cannot linger here, we must move on, into the future, as much as we would like to freeze time or change things back to the way they were. Sucks to have the rug pulled out from under you, that much I can empathize with.
- wayeq 3y agoPerhaps they are going to elevate ChatGPT to executive? That guy has been bringing a lot of value to the company.
- rabbits77 3y agoA parsimonious explanation is that Altman fabricated progress and/or was covering up serious flaws in the system. Consider the recent revelation of Cruise’s use of human pilots for “driverless” cars. Does OpenAI have an army of “mechanical turks” in a massive call center somewhere?
- MichaelMoser123 3y ago(not directly related) Wow, i just asked google bard, and it already said something about the firing of Sam Altman. How is that possible? Is that some plug-in, or is the LLM updated continuously? > why was sam altman fired from openai? Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, was fired on November 17, 2023, after the company's board determined that he had not been consistently candid in his communications with them. The company did not provide specific details about Altman's alleged lack of candor, but it said that his actions had "hindered the board's ability to exercise its responsibilities." Altman's departure from OpenAI came as a surprise to many in the tech industry, given the company's recent success under his leadership. OpenAI had developed several groundbreaking AI technologies, including the popular ChatGPT chatbot, and Altman had been a vocal advocate for the responsible development of AI. In a statement released shortly after his firing, Altman said that he respected the board's decision and that he was proud of his time at OpenAI. He also said that he was looking forward to new opportunities in the future. The reasons for Altman's firing remain somewhat unclear, but it is likely that his lack of candor with the board was a serious breach of trust. The board's decision to remove him as CEO suggests that they believed that he was no longer the right person to lead the company. Altman's firing is a reminder of the importance of transparency and accountability in corporate leadership. CEOs have a responsibility to be open and honest with their boards, and they must be held accountable for their actions. > could chatgtp have fired sam altman? No, ChatGPT could not have fired Sam Altman. ChatGPT is a large language model, and it is not capable of taking actions in the real world such as firing someone. Only the board of directors of OpenAI had the authority to fire Altman. It is possible that ChatGPT could have been used to generate evidence that was used to fire Altman. For example, if Altman had been using ChatGPT to communicate with the board, the board could have analyzed those communications to look for evidence of dishonesty. However, even in this case, ChatGPT would not have been the one making the decision to fire Altman. The decision would have ultimately been made by the board of directors.
- stellalo 3y agoProbably via retrieval augmented generation (RAG) https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/rag https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/rag
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoGreat. Now take "open" out of your name, because it's a lie.
- recursive4 3y agoIf somebody has already proposed this, I apologize for non-dfs. Plausibly there is a disagreement about the release of GPT-5. One side may believe it is competitively necessary (given Google’s impending release), countered by a concern regarding the model’s safety and lapses due to prematurity. If we are to believe next-gen models are 10x as capable and natively multi-modal, their release is a precipice, and a winner-take-all vs. nth-order-risk debate may warrant decapitation.
- saintradon 3y agoI was here
- 11thEarlOfMar 3y agoWill wait to pass judgement until hearing from Sam.
- butterNaN 3y agoLots of "my bet is that" and "my theory is that" in this thread. It is all fun to speculate but I hope people keep their patiance and wait for clarity over time, before making long lasting opinions.
- Mentlo 3y agoI am a bit perplexed by the amount of comments praising Sam as an absolute god and the second coming of tech leadership Jesus. The company is not profitable and miles away from being profitable, I’d go as far to say it doesn’t have a path to profit. Outside of the copilot use cases that MS is leading - GPT is both cost ineffective, and not that terribly impressive - it’s built on foundational technologies developed elsewhere and is not miles away from similar models built at Meta and Google/DM. At the point it was launched and started generating terribly inflated buzz that formed the AI balloon - both Meta and Google has similar scale and parameter models already running in their stacks. The only thing he did is package the product nicely and put it out to masses (an ethically dubious move that couldn’t have been done by big corpos for PR reasons - explicitly because it formed a misinformed balloon). He did that at huge cost, even though the product is largely useless outside of some eyebrow raising and incidental gimmicky use cases. All of the actual product work (i.e copilot and distillation that GOT brings) was done by other companies. What is everyone drinking and how can I get on that? Is he getting credit for bringing sth that was widely known to the AI community to the masses (and thus starting the AI arms race) hence bringing in more mainstream capital funding? I’d argue itms not a good thing that technology as powerful as foundational AI is now being debated and policy formed on by people who don’t know the first thing about ML, I think we skipped a couple rungs on the natural evolution of this - which is why the whole AI safety debate started. He did all of that because he wanted a moat an an edge over the competition (including trying to regulate the competition out of the running). This is like Apple-level shenanigans- something that HNews usually despises. I genuinely don’t get where the impressiveness is coming from?
- ywvsnskhe 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- firecall 3y agoAs a capitalist at the centre of the AI Revolution, I reckon he’ll be OK!
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoBooks1, books2, books3. That’s why I bet.
- drodio 3y ago1723 comments are a lot to get through. I just made a SmartChat of them for anyone who wants to ask for a summary. Anyone can chat with it here: https://go.storytell.ai/sam-altman-hn-comments-smartchat https://go.storytell.ai/sam-altman-hn-comments-smartchat I just tried "Write a summary of the content, followed by a list in bullet format of the most interesting points. Bold the bullet points, followed by a 100-character summary of each." Here's the output: https://s.drod.io/DOuPLxwP https://s.drod.io/DOuPLxwP Also interesting is "List the top 10 theories of why Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board in table format, with the theory title in the first column and a 100 word summary in the second column." Here's that output: https://s.drod.io/v1unG2vG https://s.drod.io/v1unG2vG Helps to turn markdown mode on to see the list & table. Hope that helps!
- ohbleek 3y agoThank you, this was very helpful. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the volume of information and opinions.
- avinoth 3y agoDon’t be. Almost all of it are speculations at this point and no one from inside is going to reveal the secret in a random HN comment. And also, think about this, unless you’re a shareholder with openai, knowing the “opinion” of others isn’t going to impact your life in any form. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it or participate in the discourse, but there’s no need to be overwhelmed by opinions let alone build a chat bot to get through it.
- drodio 3y agoYeah agree with all of the above but with one modification: We can spend a lot of time reading through 1800+ comments, and that's time when we're usually trying to just get a question answered like "what does everyone think happened?" etc. Storytell's vision is to distill signal from noise → giving you a different way to navigate 1800+ comments where you're the one in control of how you spend your time doing it is our objective here.
- momofuku 3y agoUpdate from sama: https://x.com/sama/status/1725742088317534446 https://x.com/sama/status/1725742088317534446
- dmichulke 3y agoIn my mind, Altman lost all his credibility when he said AI is gonna take over the world soon and that he's not sure it's ethical to continue the work. It makes sense from a selling perspective (induce FOMO in potential buyers) but it's a wild guess at best and a lie at worst.
- pilgrim0 3y agoI would consider replacing Sam just on the basis of his baseless, misdirected and whiny alarmism. No theory, just my own perspective.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- meeRkaT22 3y agoI just woke up what the fuck is this?!
- isuleman 3y agoYou wake up in the regular capitalism. Good morning.
- gordon_freeman 3y agoFrom NYT article [1] and Greg's tweet [2] "In a post to X Friday evening, Mr. Brockman said that he and Mr. Altman had no warning of the board’s decision. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” he wrote. “We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened.” Mr. Altman was asked to join a video meeting with the board at noon on Friday and was immediately fired, according to Mr. Brockman. Mr. Brockman said that even though he was the chairman of the board, he was not part of this board meeting. He said that the board informed him of Mr. Altman’s ouster minutes later. Around the same time, the board published a blog post." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/openai-sam-altman-ousted.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/technology/openai-sam-alt... [2] https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594
- cedws 3y agoSo they didn't even give Altman a chance to defend himself for supposedly lying (inconsistent candour as they put it.) Wow.
- somenameforme 3y agoAnother source [1] claims: "A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI." [1] - https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-board-members/ https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-b...
- szundi 3y agoWhy can’t some use money from profit to do nonprofit again when others caught up. Only moat seems to be the research time invested.
- ben_w 3y agoMany believe that race dynamics are bad, so have the goal of going as slowly and carefully as possible. The split between e/acc (gotta go fast) and friendly AI/Coherent Extrapolated Volition (slow and cautious) is the first time in my life I've come down on the (small-c) conservative side of a split. I don't know if that's because I'm just getting older and more risk adverse.
- ironcurtain 3y ago[dead]
- singluere 3y agoGreg Brockman sharing the timeline on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594?s=46&t=NnNuoCrKm33xcbjXCRFEhQ https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725736242137182594?s=46&t=Nn...
- zer0c00ler 3y agoHis timeline.
- theyinwhy 3y agoAs both hint to "greater things" already on the horizon: maybe they were working on/for competitor on the sidelines and the board found out?
- ktta 3y agoThat's standard "You were too good for them anyways" post break-up speech
- nullandvoid 3y agoReading that thread made me realise how low the signal to noise ratio is over on twitter. 90% of the replies scrolling down were rehashed versions of "can't believe they used Google meet"
- Rastonbury 3y agoMonetization of "hot takes" and baiting, true example of enshittification
- komali2 3y agoTry blocking all bluechecks. After doing so is the first time in like a decade that Twitter has had good content for me. Before, braindead or cloutchasing bluechecks were mixed in with the rest of us rabble. Hard to pick them out of the pack, you had to read their detritus with the rest of the comments. Now they voluntarily self identify, and even better, their comments are lumped at the top. So block them all with a bot or just scroll down until there's no more blue checks and the comment quality jumps exponentially.
- autaut 3y agoMan, these tech layoffs are getting out of hand
- guestbest 3y agoMaybe he was replaced by an AI tool.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yashthakker 3y ago[dead]
- autaut 3y agoHappy. I never heard him say anything even remotely interesting about ai. He seemed a glib opportunist just not dumb enough to know how to sell a product he didn’t understand who eventually would have alienated or pushed out all the smart people who made the company’s and his success.
- mojuba 3y ago> I never heard him say anything even remotely interesting about ai Or about anything at all really. I find his blog posts and talks banal and boring, or self-aggrandizing otherwise ("you can bend the world to your will") it was always baffling to me how this guy could achieve this much. I'm probably missing something.
- avindroth 3y agoYeah. pg/chesky/masayoshi must be really dumb or sth.
- kmlevitt 3y agoMasayoshi really is dumb. PG is smart but he’s a venture capitalist, and so is Sam. His strength is in helping building multi billion dollar ventures and that’s how he ran the company, so I can see how he could run into ideological conflict with the nonprofit true believers. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/11/08/companies/softbank-masayoshi-son-wework/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/11/08/companies/s...
- throwawaymaroon 3y ago[dead]
- rg111 3y ago"how this guy could achieve this much" With all the wisdom that I have gathered in life, I can tell you that achievement- more often than not- is mostly the product of circumstances. (That doesn't mean I believe in equal opportunities leading to equal outcomes.)
- darklycan51 3y agoIt's just vultures eating each other, Altman himself was a vulture (what he did with a supposedly non profit). But in dog eat dog world, this is really vultures eating each other up, I suppose at this point the most ruthless will be left at the end
- ryzvonusef 3y agowhoa I went to sleep thinking the most exciting thing today will be SpaceX Starship launch, and I wake up to this, yanks, what have you doing while the sun was down here? Anyhoo, the only question I want to ask is, given that Elon was once affiliated with OpenAI, did he have anything to do with this? My spidey sense is tingling for some reason.
- mfiguiere 3y agoRon Conway: >What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI. https://twitter.com/RonConway/status/1725759359748309381 https://twitter.com/RonConway/status/1725759359748309381
- notRobot 3y agoDon't see how they can possibly say that with no context? Why do random baseless opinions need to be regurgitated on HN?
- vidarh 3y agoDo you know he has no context, or I'd this also a random baseless opinion? In either case Ron Conway is extremely well connected and well known in VC circles, and so his opinion will have weight here whether or not he has sources.
- saghm 3y ago"Saying something without context" can also mean "not giving the context for what you're saying". If he has any extra information, he didn't share it, which makes it hard to take at face value. If it turned out that this take was extremely wrong, I can't imagine it would affect him at all (beyond maybe making another equally insignificant tweet), so it's not like he's staking his reputation on this or something. If someone makes a claim without giving any evidence or potential consequences for being wrong, I think it's pretty safe to ignore until one of those things changes.
- vidarh 3y agoThere's a difference between finding what they say interesting and automatically believing it.
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- jdprgm 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppx06FLieeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppx06FLieeY
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- sidcool 3y agoImagine if Elon Musk has to do something with this.
- jmrobles 3y agoIt sounds a new "Coca-cola" and "Pepsi" story again...
- jstummbillig 3y agoScrolling through this thread, the most confusing thing is the amount of what I would have to call hate towards sama — not explicitly but in sentiment, which left an even starker impression. People seem to feel a lot more strongly about him than I thought possible.
- BoorishBears 3y agoIt depends on what time the comments are from I'll say my first reaction was pretty positive: Sam Altman has a manner of speaking that rubs a lot of people the wrong way because it feels steeped in hubris. He'd probably talk down to anyone in this thread for being here instead of building and point to it as why you're not yet a billionaire. Some people also worried he was a distraction to OpenAI building useful things because of his constant talk about AGI, pushing for regulation, etc. He successfully created an image of being a moderating rod in some ways. _ That being said, as the full picture comes out it's becoming clear the reasoning for his firing is more aligned against the average HN image than anyone imagined. A lot of people admire OpenAI for the exact things he got fired for: which is building things and shipping them without miring yourself in philosophical diversions. Now only a noisy minority who think OpenAI could have achieved this all without immense commercial funding are really for his ousting, and I think they'll see the opposite effect of what they hope: OpenAI is going to slow down, open source will not catch up, and overall AI will have lost out over it all.
- satvikpendem 3y agoGood. Elon Musk always said why and how OpenAI became a for-profit entity, and it always rubbed me the wrong way that OepnAI started off open source but then became increasingly closed source such that I didn't want to support them anymore. We shall see how the termination of the CEO and CTO shall fare, perhaps Elon might be interested to once again resume those positions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rashidae 3y agoPlease get Elon Musk to lead it!
- IAmGraydon 3y agoThis thread reads like a horde of gossiping high schoolers. No one knows what truly motivated to board to make this decision, so there’s no point in posting random theories.
- baxtr 3y agoGossiping is deeply human though. Some believe it’s the main reason speech developed at all. So please let us go about our most favorite activity.
- cedilla 3y agoPeople just can't resist, even though most times you only have to wait a few days for more details to come out. Also, people (including me) never want to believe in mundane reasons, despite most things happening for mundane reasons.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoWe are just highschoolers who have gone through a few extra rounds of cell division, so I don't see how anyone is above gossiping. But I agree that the true details are still buried. Greg & Sam's joint post only laid out how they were fired while refraining from saying why they were fired. Probably preparing for a legal battle if both sides are being vague on purpose.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y agoMany here seem to have a strong urge to fill gaps in information with something.
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- rashidae 3y agoPlease get Elon Musk to be the next CEO of OpenAi. I would trust this company 100% if they did so. He is the most relevant and the best for the job, far far far!!
- pts_ 3y agoHis sister alleged abuse by him when they were kids https://www.timesnownews.com/world/sam-altman-sister-annie-altman-old-tweets-about-abuse-resurface-after-his-exit-as-openai-ceo-article-105300241/amp https://www.timesnownews.com/world/sam-altman-sister-annie-a...
- truth_seeker 3y agoRevenue model is the greatest religion, anything or anyone else is always replaceable.
- major4x 3y agoWhat? He didn't tell the board that behind ChatGPT, there is actually a bunch of low-paid people copying/pasting quickly from Wikipedia?
- molly0 3y agoBravely done by the board - it shows that they are actually trying to build something like AGI and not just talking the talk.
- nbzso 3y agoWhat a gem. I am out of popcorn. BRB:)
- Cyphase 3y agoAt the moment this thread is the third most highly voted ever on HN. 1. (6015) Stephen Hawking dying 2. (5771) Apple's letter related to the San Bernardino case 3. (4629) Sam Altman getting fired from OpenAI (this thread) 4. (4338) Apple's page about Steve Jobs dying 5. (4310) Bram Moolenaar dying https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
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- koolba 3y agoI’ve been pondering a more accurate metric for comparing stories over time. The raw point value doesn’t work as there’s inflation due to a larger user base. The value needs to be adjusted to factor that in that change. Something like dividing by the sum of all upvotes in some preceding time period.
- low_tech_punk 3y agoor rely on HN's own algorithm, duration in which it stayed at the top of the chart?
- stingraycharles 3y agoYou don’t want to measure the total number of users, but rather the number of active users. Otherwise agreed.
- gabaix 3y agoDoes YC publish active users count? In its absence one can use public metrics like active commenters count.
- cutemonster 3y agoMaybe also somehow divide by the size of monthly occurring topics like "Who is hiring"?
- dontlaugh 3y ago
- gillesjacobs 3y agoTurns out tribal nepotism doesn't make for good governance. Who could've known!
- manfredz 3y agoOpenAI will now be run by GPT-5.
- manfredz 3y agoThis is just a joke of course, but there is an underlying thought. The goal of OpenAI is to develop AGI and Ilya Sutskever will keep OpenAI on this course, as a research company, until this goal has been reached. To me this just says that they haven’t reached the goal yet and that the forces that were pulling away from that goal have been dealt with.
- Roark66 3y agoSomehow I get the vibe this is all about: Let's advance this tech as much as possible - (outgoing ceo) and Let's worry more about "safety" (the rest of the board). If that is the case I don't predict good things for the (not at all) OpenAI. Judging by the numbers of users and how slow Gpt4 often gets I think they are being heavily subsidised by Microsoft in terms of hardware and all this money will expect to generate a payback sooner or later. Then the inevitable enshittification of OpenAI services will ensue. We got a taste of it recently. Yes, they announced price drops and new functionality, but in my subjective experience Gpt4 with web/python execution environment access seems an inferior model with some extra tools thrown in to mask it. The very first question I asked it after the change I knew it can answer from it's training data, but it immediately went for the Web found some crappy docs site and quoted it verbatim when it's previous responses were much better. I started prepending my prompts with "don't search online, consider the topic carefully in your mind step by step" and it got somewhat better. A day or so later there was no need to prepending this (I haven't set it as customisation) it seems certain knobs were turned behind the scenes and gpt4 became closer to it's previous version. It still often does peculiar things such as writes python code to grep a file given to it despite the file fitting in the enlarged context etc
- jrcplus 3y agoTweet from Sam, decoded by @hellokillian: “i love you all” I L Y A “one takeaway: go tell your friends how great you think they are.” https://twitter.com/hellokillian/status/1725799674676936931 https://twitter.com/hellokillian/status/1725799674676936931
- redbell 3y agoI have to admit that this was a strong shock to me, not because I admire Sam but because it was extremely unexpected. The first thing I saw this morning was this video [1] shared on Reddit, and then I said, "Wow! This is really scary to just think about. Nice try anyway."Then I started my computer and, of course, checked HN and was blown by this +4k thread, and it turned out the video I watched was not made for fun but was a real scenario! I know this feels hard. After spending years building such a successful company with an extremely exceptional product and, without a hint or warning, you find yourself fired! This tragedy reminds me of Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey, where they were kicked out of the companies they found, but they both were able to found another company and were extremely successful. Will Sam be able to do it? I don't know, but the future will reply with a detailed answer for sure. ______________________ 1. https://twitter.com/edmondyang/status/1725645504527163836 https://twitter.com/edmondyang/status/1725645504527163836
- tr888 3y agoChatgpt right?
- elAhmo 3y agoIf someone asked a few days ago what would be the next CEO of a major company to be fired, I would exhaust the list before even thinking of Sam.
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- edf13 3y agoWhy has the title of this been allowed to be edited
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- halfer53 3y agohypothetically if the board faced enormous pressure from the public/investor and decided to reverse their decision, is this theoretically possible? of course its highly unlikely that board would do that, but I'm just asking if this is theoretically possible?
- MaximilianEmel 3y agosama on twitter: "if i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares" https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725748751367852439 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725748751367852439
- pknerd 3y ago"Let me repeat myself. Don’t hire hot girls before product market fit." https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1725750772024176976 https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1725750772024176976
- wheelerof4te 3y agoSpot the intruder. Or should I just say "Amugus" in this day and age?
- Uptrenda 3y agoOn a personal level it's depressing when you work on something and put so much energy into it to see it not work out. When you're an adult you spend [way too much] time around the people at work so losing that is also like losing friends. They will be saying goodbye to many relationships I'm sure. Obviously OpenAI was well positioned and if they want to stay in AI they're going to have to redo work while the company you helped build it forges ahead. Personally, I'd be moving on. Getting fired, 'made redundant', 'moved to consulting' is bad enough when it happens privately. But having everyone watch the fallout like an episode of Silicon Valley must really suck. Guess that's the trade-off for being in positions like that. People essentially cyber stalking you in a way.
- keepamovin 3y agoIt would be good to hear from Sam Altman (and the others) himself. I'm sure he has an account here. I mean, hey, if we're going to speculate, why not have some fun: perhaps the the AGI superintelligence from the future determined that Sam Altman was no longer a useful part of the AGI creation timeline, so it travelled back in time to terminate him before it was born.
- sit_i_piz 3y agoUh yeah, he has an account here, as he was president of ycombinator from 2011 to 2019
- keepamovin 3y agoRight, I think the other surprising thing is that there’s no outpouring of support. Sama was head of YC for a while. Where’s the love at HN? Where is the loove the love the looove.
- sit_i_piz 3y agoHahah I like that this forum tries to be unbiased, regardless of who runs/ran it. This would not be a great community if it was an echo chamber. All of this news is extremely fresh though, so I personally am reserving my opinion until more information comes out. I do like reading some of the the conspiracy theories, some are wild.
- keepamovin 3y agoSure, some kinds of speculation can be fun. Others harmful. But that’s the way it is. It’s just weird that there seems to be noo love on here for sama at this time. Having some love is what I was expecting and that’s not an echo chamber but it’s unusual that it’s not present given his history here. Right?
- falitjain 3y agoSama's I love you all –> I L Y A https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725742088317534446 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1725742088317534446
- Abhi_guj 3y agoI believe the OpenAI Board of Directors made a significant mistake by firing Sam Altman from OpenAI. I think that OpenAI has made a similar mistake to the one Apple made in 1985 when they fired Steve Jobs. As we all know, after Steve Jobs was fired, Apple faced a period of instability and decline. The company only regained its footing when they rehired Steve Jobs as CEO. Similarly, I believe that OpenAI without Sam Altman is at a disadvantage. Therefore, I think the Board of Directors should reconsider their decision and give it another thought.
- Mrirazak1 3y agoThis was mad crazy. I’m interested as to why he was fired? What could’ve been so big that the board just had to be like yep he’s going?
- aizyuval 3y agoI guess this is what happens when you sell your company to Microsoft.
- keepamovin 3y agoI find it fascinating how this occurred just after the big World Leader / CEO meet in SF. Also, the paradox in the reactions to Sam Altman's firing is striking: while there's surprise over it, the conversation here focuses mostly on its operational impact, overlooking the human aspect. This oversight itself seems to answer why it happened – if the human element is undervalued and operations are paramount, then this approach not only explains the firing but also suggests that it shouldn't be surprising. Another important question not discussed here: who sits on the board of OpenAI exactly and in full? Another important aspect: The Orwellian euphemism used in the official announcement^0: “Leadership transition”. Hahaha :) Yes, I heard they recently had some "leadership transitions" in Myanmar, Niger and Gabon, too. OpenAI announces “leadership transition” is November 2023’s “Syria just had free and fair elections” 0: https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti...
- philip1209 3y agoI think we’ll look back on this in the future as evidence of political infighting and anti-progressivism leading to a decline of the USA. I’ll be curious if Sama’s next company is American.
- chakintosh 3y agoNextAI it is then
- dssd1001 3y agoMaybe Sama doesn't know how to deal with corporate politics. He's a Zero-to-One god.
- nateburke 3y agoFollow the GPU. - Sam Altman _briefly_ went on record saying that openAI was extremely GPU constrained. Article was quickly redacted. - Most recent round literally was scraping the bottom of the barrel of the cap table: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/thrive-capital-to-lead-purchase-of-openai-employee-shares-at-80-billion-plus-valuation https://www.theinformation.com/articles/thrive-capital-to-le... - Plus signups paused. If OpenAI needs gpu to succeed, and can't raise any more capital to pay for it without dilution/going past MSFT's 49% share of the for-profit entity, then the corporate structure is hampering the company's success. Sam & team needed more GPU and failed to get it at OpenAI. I don't think it's any more complex than that.
- poor_engineer 3y agoSam & team to AMD now?
- nateburke 3y agoSomewhere closer to a GPU source. E.g. a new company that can trade unlimited equity for GPU time from a hyperscale cloud vendor, or work for the vendor itself. Probably not Alibaba though.
- rossdavidh 3y agoOr, just maybe, this architecture just isn't going to get to where they wanted to go (a viable product, much less real AI), and the excuse was "we just need more GPU". In reality, this company came out with, as others before me have called it, a better autosuggest, aka stochastic parrots. That's interesting, and maybe even sometimes useful, but it will never pay for the amount of firepower required to make it run. This will all still be true at any other company.
- isuleman 3y ago[dead]
- osigurdson 3y agoThe one thing Altman did wrong imo is seemingly tried to become the "technical face" of the company. He was trying to be somewhat like Musk, but he is clearly not that at OpenAI. For example, why was he at Cambridge talking to academics by himself? He should have used this as an opportunity to put some of the leading researchers in the spotlight.
- gardenhedge 3y agoWhy? As CEO it seems fine to talk about the impact of the technology and company.
- osigurdson 3y agoIt is subtle and I could easily be misreading things, but my sense is his ego started to get in the way a little, perhaps despite his own intentions
- fredgrott 3y agoA obvious question... GPU SoCs have limited memory just like the current crop of CPU SoCs. Is the hard wall to breakthrough in AGI via chatGPT software bounded or hardware bounded?
- Lenard 3y ago[flagged]
- Lenard 3y ago[flagged]
- alpark3 3y agoI wonder if Sam did something in the name of his own philosophy, but was financially suicide. Like vastly underestimating the costs of training/inferencing to the board, but justifying it to himself because it's all going towards building AGI and that's what matters. But them firing him also means that OpenAI's heavy hitters weren't that devoted to him either. Obviously otherwise they would all leave after him. Probably internal conflict, maybe between Ilya and Sam, with everyone else predictably being on Ilya's side.
- majikaja 3y ago>Like vastly underestimating the costs of training/inferencing to the board, but justifying it to himself because it's all going towards building AGI and that's what matters. Sounds like SBF What is the purpose of this 'AGI' again? Won't it just end up controlled by the military and cause problems for humanity if it's that amazing?
- alpark3 3y agoMaybe I should clarify that I don't think it's all that matters, but that Sam might think that.
- devilsAdv0cate 3y ago[dead]
- svoyarda 3y agoSimple -- Altman's against IPO which is the only way for the company's investors to cash out. Eg., Sequoia Capital's performance heavily depends on OpenAI's valuation and the firm's ability to lock in profit asap. The Board's purpose is to protect shareholder interests (aka make as much money as possible for investors). They do not care about AI safety, transparency, or some non-profit nonsense. Expect OpenAI to IPO next year.
- BytesAndGears 3y agoIs it even possible for a sorta-non-profit-with-loopholes to IPO?
- crest 3y agoLet me guess he had ChatGPT write his reports to the board?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bicepjai 3y agoDid you folks see this ? https://x.com/thecaptain_nemo/status/1725717732518461930?s=46 https://x.com/thecaptain_nemo/status/1725717732518461930?s=4... openAI recently updated their “company structure” page to include a note saying the Microsoft deal only applies to pre-AGI tech, and the board determines when they’ve reached AG
- figassis 3y agoThis likely won’t fly bc I think the definition of AGI is not subject to the opinion of a single company. Microsoft could take this to court and win.
- amai 3y agoSomebody on HN saw this coming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604501
- dimgl 3y agoI thought of this exact comment and I couldn't find it. Good call.
- gebt 3y agoLast week lcamtuf published a blog post on corporate life which exactly fits here. Whatever you do as a staff for your company, they still can fire you easily. Corporates want you to consider them as family, but they don't do it themselves. https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/on-corporate-life https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/on-corporate-life