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It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours t

• manyoso 3y ago
  Very nice skepticism.
  • qwertox 3y ago
    Yeah, it's good to have such voices around.
    • brookst 3y ago
      I’m skeptical they provide any value at all.
• anonylizard 3y ago
  Sam is not just the darling of tech media. He literally 1. Met with every major head of state except for Xi and Putin. He is the face of AI, not just for OpenAI, but for the entire world. The entire AI industry would hate for this to happen. 2. Lead a company from 2 billion valuation to nearly 80 billion in a year. There is no precedent in startup history to get rid of a CEO at this stage.
  • no_wizard 3y ago
    the old saying “first time for everything” holds here, I think. It was a mandate. 2/3 the board voted in favor of relieving Sam Altman of his obligation to the company. The question now is why and how that plays out. It is clearly what the board wanted
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    He is the face of AI, not just for OpenAI, but for the entire world Stop making up nonsense please.
  • Trombone12 3y ago
    I guess that's because most "startups" aren't controlled by non-profits.
  • svaha1728 3y ago
    He makes it rain H100s.
  • Scaevolus 3y ago
    He dined with Xi just a few days ago. https://youtu.be/lKNwoEm-R3E https://youtu.be/lKNwoEm-R3E
  • strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    This is a dumb take, most of the general population don't even know who Sam Altman is.
    • x86x87 3y ago
      You can argue your point without calling the take dumb.
    • LeafItAlone 3y ago
      You are 100% right. Even those who know of his meetings with heads of state outside of the tech community probably just know that it was ChatGPT company doing it, if even that. They wouldn’t know his name. Though I think it’s best to refrain from calling something a “dumb take”.
• Digory 3y ago
  Agreed the article is more about probing the board’s weakness. But the board seems to have a weak hand. It can decide to disappoint the for profit investors. But it doesn’t own Sam, or the vast majority of the workers, and maybe not much of the know how. And they can walk if the board disappoints them. The board’s altruism might be great, but it lacks the legal tools to do what it wants, against organized labor backed by unlimited capital.
  • Trombone12 3y ago
    The board do own Chat-GPT though
    • joshspankit 3y ago
      That’s not only trivial to replace with enough funding for training, but ChatGPT is barely a 0.1 release. Everything after is where the big money is.
      • p1esk 3y ago
        trivial to replace And yet no one has been able to do that since gpt4 was released.
        • threeseed 3y ago
          That's only because the key players have no reason to compete. They don't want to run a developer/enterprise ChatGPT platform. Google cares about Search, Apple about Siri, Meta about VR/Ads. But those three are interesting heavily in their own LLMs which at some point may better OpenAI.
      • himaraya 3y ago
        It's not trivial given current supply bottlenecks, not to mention research expertise.
        • deleted 3y ago
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• gumballindie 3y ago
  > incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign The same media that promoted the skizoid idea that agi is around the corner and blew ai out of proportion. The same media that would not hesitate to do character assassinations of people opposing altman. The media is corrupt and incompetent. To be replaced soon by the monster they created.
  • JakeAl 3y ago
    "To be replaced soon by the monster they created." Niiice.
• willseth 3y ago
  > This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. There’s no evidence of that, only your assumptions. Lots of comments from knowledgeable folks outside the media and who couldn’t care less about a “pressure campaign”, even if it did exist, think the board was clueless and got duped into making a huge mistake with the coup.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > > This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. > There’s no evidence of that The leaks themselves whether or not based in fact are evidence of that. The only reason for someone in a position to be taken credibly reporting the information contained in either this Verge article or the Bloomberg article with a similarly sourced but slightly different narrative, to take that information to the media, whether or not it is true, is to use public pressure to attempt to shape the direction of events. EDIT: To be clear, its evidence of the "pressure campaign" part; to the extent that the "incestuous tech media" part has any substantive meaning, I'm not sure its evidence of that.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• bradleyjg 3y ago
  the point of a non-profit is that they are allowed to make investors unhappy in pursuit of the greater mission A non-profit isn’t supposed to have investors. This structure should never have been allowed in the first place (nor IKEA.)
  • lucubratory 3y ago
    Which is why investors that signed on got a giant warning saying that the Board could choose to be unprofitable if they wanted and that the mission came first, so they should view their investment as a donation.
    • cthalupa 3y ago
      What we're seeing is that (predictably) the investors have decided that they don't care that they agreed with it and they don't want to lose out on their investment. What remains to be seen is just how closely the board holds the charter to their hearts and whether the governance structure that was built is strong enough to withstand this.
      • lumost 3y ago
        MSFT likely has the option to claw back some of their money - they could also cease providing Openai gpu’s. At the extreme, they could do so tomorrow based on their perception of the contract dispute. Although such action would risk reputational damage to MSFT. At a minimum, taking your largest supplier and customer for a ride is probably a bad idea.
        • cthalupa 3y ago
          It wouldn't be a good idea in a regular business, for sure. But non-profits aren't a regular business and their ultimate obligation is to their charter. Depending on just what the level of misalignment was here, it's possible that the company becoming nonviable due to terminating Altman is serving the charter more closely than keeping him on board. No one posting here has enough detail to really understand what is going on, but we do know the structure of OpenAI and the operating agreement for the for-profit LLC make it a mistake to view the company from the lens as we would a regular for-profit company.
• RivieraKid 3y ago
  I honestly don't know what you're talking about. This article and The Verge one just describe the likely reality of the situation. Sam Altman was fired. 4 other key people quit and it seems more will follow and join Sam's new venture. This outcome would be a disaster for Microsoft, for other OpenAI investors and for OpenAI. So the board is, per multiple sources, talking with Sam Altman to return. The board declined to comment and is free to clarify any inaccuracies. There's no need for a spin, the board has miscalculated and got itself in a bad spot.
• mrcwinn 3y ago
  Welcome to The Verge. This is the same website that pasted “reporting by Alex Heath” on the original article - which was literally just regurgitating the board’s press release and pasting in some tweets. Reporting, huh? Good job if you can get it.
  • lucubratory 3y ago
    I don't mind the Verge, I don't agree with everything they've written but I generally like their coverage. My criticism is specific to this situation and the cult of personality in tech media around Sam Altman.
• yowlingcat 3y ago
  There's nothing insane at all. The board has the freedom to make their choices, but they must own the consequences of those choices. This appears to be a choice they made which has had obvious consequences they miscalculated. Having to walk it back to some degree would prove their inability to effectively plan and govern.
  • lucubratory 3y ago
    It might, if that had actually happened. There is not good evidence that this has actually happened, and it's just a fact that Sam + investors are going on a massive pressure campaign to try to regain control that they are not legally entitled to, including a media blitz. Moreover, there is an impartiality issue here in the tech press. A lot of the tech press disagree with the OpenAI Charter and think that Sam's vision of OpenAI as basically Google but providing consumer AI products is superior to the Charter, which they view in incredibly derogatory terms ("people who think Terminator is real"). That's fine, people can disagree on these important issues! But I think as a journalist it's not engaging fairly with the topic to be on Sam's political side here and not even attempt to fairly describe the cause of the dispute, which is the non-profit Board accusing Sam Altman of violating the OpenAI charter which they are legally obligated to uphold. This is particularly important because if you actually read the OpenAI Charter, it's really clear to see why they've made that decision! The Charter clearly bans prioritising commercialisation and profit seeking, and demands the central focus be building an AGI, and I don't think a reasonable observer can look at OpenAI Dev Day and say it's not reasonable to view that as proof that OpenAI is no longer following its charter. Basically, if you disagree with the idea of the non-profit and its Charter, think the whole thing is science-fiction bunk and the people who believe in it are idiots, I think you should argue that instead of framing all of this as "It's a coup" without even disclosing that you don't support the non-profit Charter in the first place.
    • yowlingcat 3y ago
      > Basically, if you disagree with the idea of the non-profit and its Charter, think the whole thing is science-fiction bunk and the people who believe in it are idiots, I think you should argue that instead of framing all of this as "It's a coup" without even disclosing that you don't support the non-profit Charter in the first place. I think you might have better luck grasping the situation if you put a little bit more effort into understanding it rather than jumping to put words in the mouths of others. Nobody said whether they support the non-profit charter or not in the first place, and as far as the phenomena of what's happening right now, the non-profit charter has nothing to do with it. 550 of 700 OpenAI employees have just told the board to resign. Altman is going to MSFT and taking his org with him. Regardless of what the board says, who do you think really has the power here -- the person who has and already had the full support of the org he built around him, or a frankly amateurish board that is completely unequipped for executing on a highly public, high stakes governance task presented in front of it? Unfortunately, not only can you cannot charter public opinion, but those who try often see it backfiring by making clear their air of moral superiority rather than leaning on their earned mandate to govern the rank and file they are supposed to represent. The board, and it seems you, will simply be learning that lesson the hard way.
• deleted 3y ago
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• yreg 3y ago
  > violating the company's Charter What did he violate specifically?
  • brookst 3y ago
    Any why didn’t the board cite these violations?
    • dragonwriter 3y ago
      The board didn't claim there were violations, it claimed he wasn't fully candid with them and that they had lost confidence in his leadership. "Violations of the charter" was something invented by the upthread commenter.
      • lucubratory 3y ago
        There is a bunch of independent reporting citing sources inside OpenAI that the central dispute is over the principles of the Charter, and while no one is clear on the lack of candour thing my view is that it's just an excuse, there was probably a real incident(s) but it wouldn't have been fireable if not for the core dispute about the Charter. They did explicitly re-affirm the Charter in their announcement of Sam's dismissal: "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."
    • lucubratory 3y ago
      I wasn't clear enough that I was talking about the real reasons for the dismissal; I think the lack of candour was probably a real event, but was functionally just an excuse. There has been heaps of reporting from inside OpenAI that this was a dispute over AI safety, the values of the Charter, etc. Here's what you can find in the press release itself: "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. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period." "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."
• chatmasta 3y ago
  While this is an insightful perspective, it doesn't change the fact that the board is revealed as incompetent. Either they made a mistake in firing him and are now walking it back (while yielding so much leverage that Altman can condition his return on the resignation of everyone who voted to fire him), or they have such little credibility that some standard-practice media collusion has created sufficient pressure to change their optimal strategy, i.e. force their hand. If they do nothing, then public perception harms their ability to raise further capital, and employees leave for Altman's new company. If they cave to the pressure (despite that being objectively the financially right decision), they lose their board seats and Sam comes back, proving they overplayed their hand when they fired him. They're basically in a lose/lose situation, even if this article is sourced from entirely biased and fabricated information. And that's exactly what reveals them as incompetent. Their mistake was making a move while considering only the technicalities of their voting power, and ignoring the credibility they had to make it. Machiavelli is rolling in his grave...
  • lucubratory 3y ago
    ...or they don't respond to these pressure tactics, continue talking to their employees to ameliorate legitimate concerns, and accept that some of Sam's hires will go to join him. OpenAI's core (remembering that OpenAI's Charter doesn't demand it makes cool consumer/developer AI products, it demands OpenAI build AGI safely) is not the ChatGPT product team or admin, it is the research team that Ilya leads (or lead until a month ago when Sam tried to sideline him). The company isn't going to leave to follow Sam, or at least the scientists and engineers aren't. They've lost some technical leads that Sam hired and will probably lose more, but it's worth it to make sure that OpenAI is actually following its Charter.
    • chatmasta 3y ago
      > continue talking to their employees to ameliorate legitimate concerns, and accept that some of Sam's hires will go to join him This is wishful thinking. If an employee is inclined to follow the innovation, it's clear where they'll go. But otherwise, the point you raise is a good one: this is about the charter of the board. Many of us are presuming a financial incentive, but the structure of the company means they might actually be incentivized to stop the continued development of the technology if they think it poses a risk to humanity. Now, I personally find this to be hogwash, but it is a legitimate argument for why the board might actually be right in acting apparently irrationally.