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I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every singl

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience, but I also am not going to assume that this is a complete outlier.

itronitron 3y ago
I worked at a startup where the first CEO, along with the VP of Sales and their entire department, was ousted by the board on a Tuesday. I think it's likely that we're going to find out Sam and others are just talented tech evangelists/hucksters and that justifiably worries a lot of people currently operating in the tech community.
- barfingclouds 3y ago
  Sam helped bring a lot of talented people to OpenAI which is a huge accomplishment, even if we assume the worst and that he doesn’t do much day to day work with them.
- za3faran 3y ago
  How did the company end up fairing?
  - itronitron 3y ago
    sold to another company four years later, about a year after I left
Draiken 3y ago
Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird. It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses. Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens. They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.
- bsenftner 3y ago
  > Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird. Now imagine the weekend for those fired and those who quit OpenAI: you know they are talking together as a group, and meeting with others offering them billions to make a pure commercial new AI company. An Oscar worthy film could be made about them in this weekend.
- hef19898 3y ago
  My last gig was with one of those wannabe Elon Musks (what wouldnI give to get wannabe Steve Jobs back). Horrible, ultimately he was ousted as CEO, only to be allowed to stay on as some head of innovation, because he and his founder buddies retained enough voting power to first get him a life time position as head of the board fir his "acievements" and then prevent his firing. They also vetoed, from ehat people told, a juicy acquisition offer, basically jeopardizing the future of the place. Right after, a new CEO was recruited as the result of a "lengthy and thoroughly planned process of transition". Now, the former CEO is back, and in charge, in fact and noz on paper, of the most crucial part of the product. Besides getting said company to 800 people burning a sweet billion, he didn't do anything else in his life, and that company has yet to launch a product. Sad thing so, if they find enough people to continue investing, they will ultimately launch a product, most likely the early employees and founders will sell of their shares, become instant millionaires in the three figures and be hailed as thebtrue geniuses in their field... What an utter shit show that was...
  - Draiken 3y ago
    The sad reality is that most top executives get there because of connections or simply being in the right place at the right time. Funnily enough I also worked for a CEO that hit the lottery with timing and became a millionaire. He then drank his own kool-aid and thought he was some sort of Steve Jobs. Of course he never managed to build anything afterwards. But he kept making a shit ton of money, without a doubt. After they get one position in that echelon, they can keep failing upwards ad nauseam. I don't get the cult part though. It's so easy to see they're not even close to the geniuses they pretend to be. Just look at the recent SBF debacle. It's pathetic how folks fall for this.
  - 3y ago
dagmx 3y ago
It often comes down to auteur theory. Unless someone is truly well versed in the production of something, they latch on to the most public facing aspect of that production and the person at the highest level of authority (to them, even though directors and CEOs often have to answer to others as well) That’s not to say they don’t have an outsized individual effect, but it’s rare their greatness is solo
- bmitc 3y ago
  When you say director, do you mean film director or a director in a company? Film directors are insane with the amount of technical, artistic, and people knowledge that they need to have and be able to utilize. The amount of stuff that a film director needs to manage, all on the ground, is insane. I wouldn't say that for CEOs, not by a long shot. CEOs mainly sit in meetings with people reporting things to them and then the CEO providing very high-level guidance. That is very different from a director's role. I have often thought that we don't have enough information on how film directors operate, as I feel it could yield a lot of insight. There's probably a reason why many film directors don't hit their stride until late 30s and 40s, presumably because it takes those one or two decades to build the appropriate experience and knowledge.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Would it be accurate to liken CEOs to film producers?
    - bmitc 3y ago
      No. I'm pretty sure that my comment describes why.
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        > CEOs mainly sit in meetings with people reporting things to them and then the CEO providing very high-level guidance. Isn’t that essentially the job of a film producer? You do see a lot of productions where there’s a ton of executive producer titles given out as almost a vanity position.
iamflimflam1 3y ago
I think the problem is, this is not just about dumping the CEO. It’s signalling a very clear shift away from where OpenAI was heading - which seemed to be very focussed on letting people build on top of the technology. The worry now is that the approach is going to be more of controlling access to just researchers who are trusted to be “safe”.
- antonioevans 3y ago
  i agree with this. What about the GPTs Store. Are they planning on killing that? Just concerning they'll kill the platform unit AGI comes out.
  - xpe 3y ago
    Did you mean ‘_until_ AGI comes out.’?
- jatins 3y ago
  Frankly in OpenAI's case, for a lowly IC or line manager, it is also very obviously about the money as well. A non-profit immediately makes the values of OpenAI's PPUs (their spin on RSUs) to zero. Employees will be losing out of life changing sums on money.
fsociety 3y ago
On the other hand, I have seen an executive step away from a large company and then everything coincidentally goes to shit. It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of an executive.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  It's hard to judge based on that, because a lot of times, CEOs are fired because they have done things that are putting the company on a bad trajectory or just because the company was on a bad trajectory for whatever reason. So firing the CEO is more of a signal than a cause.
swatcoder 3y ago
A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory. But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's exactly what was happening at OpenAI. I don't think everyone there wants them to be selling cool LLM toys, especially not on a "make fast and break things" approach and with an ecosystem of startup hackers operationalizing it. (Wisely or not) I think they want to be shepherding responsible AGI before someone else does so irresponsibly.
- jddj 3y ago
  This is where I've ended up as well for now. I'm as distant from it all as anyone else, but I can easily believe the narrative that Ilya (et al.) didn't sign up there just to run through a tired page from the tech playbook where they make a better Amazon Alexa with an app store and gift cards and probably Black Friday sales.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    And that is fine.. but why the immediate firing, why the controversy?
    - justaj 3y ago
      My guess is that if Sam would have found this out before being fired, he would have done his best not to be fired. As such, it would have been much more of a challenge to shift OpenAI's supposed over-focus on commerce towards a supposed non-profit focus.
    - eganist 3y ago
      The immediate firing is from our perspective. Who's to say everything else wasn't already tried in private?
      - 3y ago
huytersd 3y ago
You may be right in many cases but if you think that’s true in all cases, you’re a low level pleb that can’t see past his own nose.
te_chris 3y ago
There’s a whole business book about this, good to great, where a key facet of companies that have managed to go from average to excellent over a sustained period of time is servant-leader CEOs
victor9000 3y ago
This was done in the context of Dev Day. Meaning that the board was convinced by Ilya that users should not have access to this level of functionality. Or perhaps he was more concerned that he was not able to gatekeep its release. So presumably it was Altman who pushed for releasing this technology to the general public. If this is accurate then this shift in control is bound to slow down feature delivery and create a window for competitors.
fullshark 3y ago
It doesn't matter in the short term (usually). Then you look in 2-4 years and you see the collective impact of countless decisions and realize how important they are. In this case, tons of people already have resigned from OpenAI. Sam Altman seems very likely to start a rival company. This is a huge decision and will have massive consequences for the company and their product area.
goldinfra 3y ago
It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders. Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today. Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.
- cthalupa 3y ago
  > Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. I'm not sure this is actually the case, even ignoring the non-profit charter and the for-profit being beholden to it. We know that OpenAI has been the talk of the town, we know that there is quite a bit of revenue, and that Microsoft invested heavily. What we don't know is if the strategy being pursued ever had any chance of being profitable. Decades-long runways with hope that there is a point where profitability will come and at a level where all the investment was worth it is a pretty common operating strategy for the type of company Altman has worked with and invested in, but it is less clear to me that this is viable for this sort of setup, or perhaps at all - money isn't nearly as cheap as it was a decade ago. What makes a for-profit startup successful isn't necessarily what makes a for-profit LLC with an operating agreement that makes it beholden to the charter of a non-profit parent organization successful.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  Whoever had to do with ChatGPT most is the reason OpenAI is where it is today.
- glitchc 3y ago
  > Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.
jdthedisciple 3y ago
If the CEO was not important and basically doesn't impact anything, as you say, then why would the board feel the need to oust Altman for "pushing too fast" in the first place?
jatins 3y ago
You are missing the emotional aspect of it, a connection towards building something great _together_. In some ways it is selfish, it make you feel important. If Susan Fowler's book is accurate, Uber under TK was riddled with toxic management and incompetent HR. Yet you will hear people on Twitter reminisce of TK era Uber as the golden period and many would love him back
blazespin 3y ago
The difference with OpenAI / GPT is a dozen or so primary engineers plus a few billion dollars for GPUs and you have a competitive version. And if those primary engineers get sucked out of OpenAI, OpenAI won't be able to compete. OpenAI is a different animal. SamAltman has the cache to pull out those engineers. Particularly because Ilya's vision doesn't include lucrative stock options.

itronitron 3y ago

I worked at a startup where the first CEO, along with the VP of Sales and their entire department, was ousted by the board on a Tuesday. I think it's likely that we're going to find out Sam and others are just talented tech evangelists/hucksters and that justifiably worries a lot of people currently operating in the tech community.

barfingclouds 3y ago
Sam helped bring a lot of talented people to OpenAI which is a huge accomplishment, even if we assume the worst and that he doesn’t do much day to day work with them.
za3faran 3y ago
How did the company end up fairing?
- itronitron 3y ago
  sold to another company four years later, about a year after I left

Draiken 3y ago

Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird. It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses. Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens. They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.

bsenftner 3y ago
> Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird. Now imagine the weekend for those fired and those who quit OpenAI: you know they are talking together as a group, and meeting with others offering them billions to make a pure commercial new AI company. An Oscar worthy film could be made about them in this weekend.
hef19898 3y ago
My last gig was with one of those wannabe Elon Musks (what wouldnI give to get wannabe Steve Jobs back). Horrible, ultimately he was ousted as CEO, only to be allowed to stay on as some head of innovation, because he and his founder buddies retained enough voting power to first get him a life time position as head of the board fir his "acievements" and then prevent his firing. They also vetoed, from ehat people told, a juicy acquisition offer, basically jeopardizing the future of the place. Right after, a new CEO was recruited as the result of a "lengthy and thoroughly planned process of transition". Now, the former CEO is back, and in charge, in fact and noz on paper, of the most crucial part of the product. Besides getting said company to 800 people burning a sweet billion, he didn't do anything else in his life, and that company has yet to launch a product. Sad thing so, if they find enough people to continue investing, they will ultimately launch a product, most likely the early employees and founders will sell of their shares, become instant millionaires in the three figures and be hailed as thebtrue geniuses in their field... What an utter shit show that was...
- Draiken 3y ago
  The sad reality is that most top executives get there because of connections or simply being in the right place at the right time. Funnily enough I also worked for a CEO that hit the lottery with timing and became a millionaire. He then drank his own kool-aid and thought he was some sort of Steve Jobs. Of course he never managed to build anything afterwards. But he kept making a shit ton of money, without a doubt. After they get one position in that echelon, they can keep failing upwards ad nauseam. I don't get the cult part though. It's so easy to see they're not even close to the geniuses they pretend to be. Just look at the recent SBF debacle. It's pathetic how folks fall for this.
- 3y ago

dagmx 3y ago

It often comes down to auteur theory. Unless someone is truly well versed in the production of something, they latch on to the most public facing aspect of that production and the person at the highest level of authority (to them, even though directors and CEOs often have to answer to others as well) That’s not to say they don’t have an outsized individual effect, but it’s rare their greatness is solo

bmitc 3y ago
When you say director, do you mean film director or a director in a company? Film directors are insane with the amount of technical, artistic, and people knowledge that they need to have and be able to utilize. The amount of stuff that a film director needs to manage, all on the ground, is insane. I wouldn't say that for CEOs, not by a long shot. CEOs mainly sit in meetings with people reporting things to them and then the CEO providing very high-level guidance. That is very different from a director's role. I have often thought that we don't have enough information on how film directors operate, as I feel it could yield a lot of insight. There's probably a reason why many film directors don't hit their stride until late 30s and 40s, presumably because it takes those one or two decades to build the appropriate experience and knowledge.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Would it be accurate to liken CEOs to film producers?
  - bmitc 3y ago
    No. I'm pretty sure that my comment describes why.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      > CEOs mainly sit in meetings with people reporting things to them and then the CEO providing very high-level guidance. Isn’t that essentially the job of a film producer? You do see a lot of productions where there’s a ton of executive producer titles given out as almost a vanity position.

iamflimflam1 3y ago

I think the problem is, this is not just about dumping the CEO. It’s signalling a very clear shift away from where OpenAI was heading - which seemed to be very focussed on letting people build on top of the technology. The worry now is that the approach is going to be more of controlling access to just researchers who are trusted to be “safe”.

antonioevans 3y ago
i agree with this. What about the GPTs Store. Are they planning on killing that? Just concerning they'll kill the platform unit AGI comes out.
- xpe 3y ago
  Did you mean ‘_until_ AGI comes out.’?
jatins 3y ago
Frankly in OpenAI's case, for a lowly IC or line manager, it is also very obviously about the money as well. A non-profit immediately makes the values of OpenAI's PPUs (their spin on RSUs) to zero. Employees will be losing out of life changing sums on money.

fsociety 3y ago

On the other hand, I have seen an executive step away from a large company and then everything coincidentally goes to shit. It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of an executive.

jjeaff 3y ago
It's hard to judge based on that, because a lot of times, CEOs are fired because they have done things that are putting the company on a bad trajectory or just because the company was on a bad trajectory for whatever reason. So firing the CEO is more of a signal than a cause.

swatcoder 3y ago

A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory. But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's exactly what was happening at OpenAI. I don't think everyone there wants them to be selling cool LLM toys, especially not on a "make fast and break things" approach and with an ecosystem of startup hackers operationalizing it. (Wisely or not) I think they want to be shepherding responsible AGI before someone else does so irresponsibly.

jddj 3y ago
This is where I've ended up as well for now. I'm as distant from it all as anyone else, but I can easily believe the narrative that Ilya (et al.) didn't sign up there just to run through a tired page from the tech playbook where they make a better Amazon Alexa with an app store and gift cards and probably Black Friday sales.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  And that is fine.. but why the immediate firing, why the controversy?
  - justaj 3y ago
    My guess is that if Sam would have found this out before being fired, he would have done his best not to be fired. As such, it would have been much more of a challenge to shift OpenAI's supposed over-focus on commerce towards a supposed non-profit focus.
  - eganist 3y ago
    The immediate firing is from our perspective. Who's to say everything else wasn't already tried in private?
    - 3y ago

huytersd 3y ago

You may be right in many cases but if you think that’s true in all cases, you’re a low level pleb that can’t see past his own nose.

te_chris 3y ago

There’s a whole business book about this, good to great, where a key facet of companies that have managed to go from average to excellent over a sustained period of time is servant-leader CEOs

victor9000 3y ago

This was done in the context of Dev Day. Meaning that the board was convinced by Ilya that users should not have access to this level of functionality. Or perhaps he was more concerned that he was not able to gatekeep its release. So presumably it was Altman who pushed for releasing this technology to the general public. If this is accurate then this shift in control is bound to slow down feature delivery and create a window for competitors.

fullshark 3y ago

It doesn't matter in the short term (usually). Then you look in 2-4 years and you see the collective impact of countless decisions and realize how important they are. In this case, tons of people already have resigned from OpenAI. Sam Altman seems very likely to start a rival company. This is a huge decision and will have massive consequences for the company and their product area.

goldinfra 3y ago

It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders. Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today. Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.

cthalupa 3y ago
> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. I'm not sure this is actually the case, even ignoring the non-profit charter and the for-profit being beholden to it. We know that OpenAI has been the talk of the town, we know that there is quite a bit of revenue, and that Microsoft invested heavily. What we don't know is if the strategy being pursued ever had any chance of being profitable. Decades-long runways with hope that there is a point where profitability will come and at a level where all the investment was worth it is a pretty common operating strategy for the type of company Altman has worked with and invested in, but it is less clear to me that this is viable for this sort of setup, or perhaps at all - money isn't nearly as cheap as it was a decade ago. What makes a for-profit startup successful isn't necessarily what makes a for-profit LLC with an operating agreement that makes it beholden to the charter of a non-profit parent organization successful.
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
Whoever had to do with ChatGPT most is the reason OpenAI is where it is today.
glitchc 3y ago
> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.

jdthedisciple 3y ago

If the CEO was not important and basically doesn't impact anything, as you say, then why would the board feel the need to oust Altman for "pushing too fast" in the first place?

jatins 3y ago

You are missing the emotional aspect of it, a connection towards building something great _together_. In some ways it is selfish, it make you feel important. If Susan Fowler's book is accurate, Uber under TK was riddled with toxic management and incompetent HR. Yet you will hear people on Twitter reminisce of TK era Uber as the golden period and many would love him back

blazespin 3y ago

The difference with OpenAI / GPT is a dozen or so primary engineers plus a few billion dollars for GPUs and you have a competitive version. And if those primary engineers get sucked out of OpenAI, OpenAI won't be able to compete. OpenAI is a different animal. SamAltman has the cache to pull out those engineers. Particularly because Ilya's vision doesn't include lucrative stock options.