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But what about the legal responsability of Microsoft and investors there? To explain, it's the board of the non-profit that ousted @sama . Microsoft is not a

But what about the legal responsability of Microsoft and investors there? To explain, it's the board of the non-profit that ousted @sama . Microsoft is not a member of the non-profit. Microsoft is "only" a shareholder of its for-profit subsidiary - even for 10B. Basically, what happened is a change of control in the non-profit majority shareholder of a company Microsoft invested in. But not a change of control in the for-profit company they invested in. To tell the truth, I am not even certain the board of the non-profit would have been legally allowed to discuss the issue with Microsoft at all - it's an internal issue only and that would be a conflict of interest. Microsoft is not happy with that change of control and they favourited the previous representative of their partner. Basically Microsoft want their shareholder non-profit partner to prioritize their interest over its own. And to do that, they are trying to impede on its governance, even threatening it with disorganization, lawsuits and such. This sounds like highly unethical and potentially illegal to me. How come no one is pointing that out? Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out? What does it say about the seriousness of it all? But of course, that's Silicon Valley baby.

Racing0461 3y ago
Very good point (even tho i think the right move is for sam to come back as ceo).
bob_theslob646 3y ago
"Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out?" Please think about this. Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. If the relationships are what kept OpenAI from always being on top and they removed that from the company, corporations may be more hesitant to do business with them in the future.
- financltravsty 3y ago
  The company still has assets and a balance sheet. They could fire everyone and simply rent out their process to big orgs and still make a pretty penny.
  - solarengineer 3y ago
    Loss of know-how is a risk. A vendor needs to be able to prove that it has sufficient headcount and skills to run and improve a system. While OpenAI would have the IP, they would also need to retain the right people who understand the system.
- anoopelias 3y ago
  > Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. Its not like every successful org needs a face. Back then Google was a wildly successful as an org, but unlike Steve Jobs then, people barely knew Eric Schmitt. Even with Microsoft as it stands today, Satya is mostly a backseat driver. Every org has its own style and character. If the board doesn't like what they are building, they can try change it. Risky move nevertheless, but its their call to make.
- soufron 3y ago
  Well, once again, then it's Satya's mistake to have allowed the representative of an independant third party entity become the public face of a company he invested in. OpenAI might have wasted the 10B of Microsoft. But whose fault is it in the first place? It's Microsoft's fault to have invested it in the first place.
  - Joeri 3y ago
    It depends on what assurances they were given and by whom. Perhaps it was Sam Altman himself that made verbal promises that weren’t his to give, and he may end up in trouble over them. We don’t know what was said, and what was signed. To put the blame with microsoft is premature.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
nojvek 3y ago
No one is saying they are now valued at 0. They are likely valued a lot less than 80 billion now. OpenAI had the largest multiple - >100X their revenue for a recent startup. That multiple is a lot smaller now without SamA. Honestly the market needs a correction.
- manyoso 3y ago
  SamA is nowhere even close to relevant to the value that OpenAI presents. He's def. less than half a billion and likely much less than that. What makes OpenAI so transformative is the technology it produces and SamA is not an engineer that built that technology. If the people that made it were to all leave it would reduce the value of the company by a large amount, but the technology would remain and it is not easy to duplicate given the scarcity of GPU cycles, the training data now being very hard to acquire and lots of other well invested companies chasing with the likes of Google, Meta, Anthropic. That doesn't even begin to mention the open source models that are also competing. SamA could try and start his own new copy of OpenAI and I have no doubt raise a lot of money, but that new company if it just tried to reproduce what OpenAI has already done would be not worth very much. By the time they reproduce OpenAI and its competitors will have already moved on to bigger and better things. Enough with the hero worship for SamA and all the other salesmen.
  - bradleyjg 3y ago
    SamA is nowhere even close to relevant to the value that OpenAI presents. The issue isn’t SamA per se. It’s that the old valuation was assuming that the company was trying to make money. The new valuation is taking into account that instead they might be captured by a group that has some sci-fi notion about saving the world from an existential threat.
    - manyoso 3y ago
      That's a good point, but any responsible investor would have looked at the charter and priced this in. What I find ironic is the number of people defending SamA and the like who are now tacitly admitting that his promulgation of AI risk fears was essentially bullshit and it was all about making the $$$$ and using AI risk to gain competitive advantage.
stevespang 3y ago
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emptysongglass 3y ago
Highly unethical would be throwing the CEO of the division keeping the lights on under a bus with zero regard for the consequences. The non-profit board acted entirely against the interest of OpenAI at large. Disclosing an intention to terminate the highest profile member of their company to the company paying for their compute, Microsoft, is not only the ethical choice, it's the responsible one. Members of the non-profit board acted recklessly and irresponsibly. They'll be paying for that choice for decades following, as they should. They're lucky if they don't get hit with a lawsuit for defamation on their way out. Given how poorly Mozilla's non-profit board has steered Mozilla over the last decade and now this childish tantrum by a man raised on the fanfiction of Yudkowsky together with board larpers, I wouldn't be surprised if this snafu sees the end of this type of governance structure in tech. These people of the board have absolutely no business being in business.
- soufron 3y ago
  Except it's not a "division" but an independent entity. And if that corporate structure does not suit Satya Nadella, I would say he's the one to blam for having invested 10B in the first place. Being angry at a decision he had no right to be consulted on does not allow him to meddle in the governance of its co-shareholder. Or then we can all accept together that corruption, greed and whateverthefuckism is the reality of ethics in the tech industry.
  - emptysongglass 3y ago
    > Except it's not a "division" but an independent entity. This is entirely false. If it were true, the actions of today would not have come to pass. My use of the word "division" is entirely in-line with use of that term at large. Here's the Wikipedia article, which as of this writing uses the same language I have. [1] If you can't get the fundamentals right, I don't know how you can make the claims you're making credibly. Much like the board, you're making assertions that aren't credibly backed. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Sam_Altman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Sam_Altman
    - 3y ago
jprete 3y ago
I think a lot of commenters here are treating the nonprofit as if it were a temporary disguise with no other relevance, which OpenAI now intends to shed so it can rake in the profits. Legally this is very much not true, and I’ve read that only a minority of the board can even be a stakeholder in the for-profit (probably why Altman is always described as having no stake). If that’s true, it’s very obviously why half the board are outside people with no stake in the finances at all.
- soufron 3y ago
  Exactly my point.
s3p 3y ago
I don't see any citations provided by you showing legal threats, though.

Racing0461 3y ago

Very good point (even tho i think the right move is for sam to come back as ceo).

bob_theslob646 3y ago

"Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out?" Please think about this. Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. If the relationships are what kept OpenAI from always being on top and they removed that from the company, corporations may be more hesitant to do business with them in the future.

financltravsty 3y ago
The company still has assets and a balance sheet. They could fire everyone and simply rent out their process to big orgs and still make a pretty penny.
- solarengineer 3y ago
  Loss of know-how is a risk. A vendor needs to be able to prove that it has sufficient headcount and skills to run and improve a system. While OpenAI would have the IP, they would also need to retain the right people who understand the system.
anoopelias 3y ago
> Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. Its not like every successful org needs a face. Back then Google was a wildly successful as an org, but unlike Steve Jobs then, people barely knew Eric Schmitt. Even with Microsoft as it stands today, Satya is mostly a backseat driver. Every org has its own style and character. If the board doesn't like what they are building, they can try change it. Risky move nevertheless, but its their call to make.
soufron 3y ago
Well, once again, then it's Satya's mistake to have allowed the representative of an independant third party entity become the public face of a company he invested in. OpenAI might have wasted the 10B of Microsoft. But whose fault is it in the first place? It's Microsoft's fault to have invested it in the first place.
- Joeri 3y ago
  It depends on what assurances they were given and by whom. Perhaps it was Sam Altman himself that made verbal promises that weren’t his to give, and he may end up in trouble over them. We don’t know what was said, and what was signed. To put the blame with microsoft is premature.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago

nojvek 3y ago

No one is saying they are now valued at 0. They are likely valued a lot less than 80 billion now. OpenAI had the largest multiple - >100X their revenue for a recent startup. That multiple is a lot smaller now without SamA. Honestly the market needs a correction.

manyoso 3y ago
SamA is nowhere even close to relevant to the value that OpenAI presents. He's def. less than half a billion and likely much less than that. What makes OpenAI so transformative is the technology it produces and SamA is not an engineer that built that technology. If the people that made it were to all leave it would reduce the value of the company by a large amount, but the technology would remain and it is not easy to duplicate given the scarcity of GPU cycles, the training data now being very hard to acquire and lots of other well invested companies chasing with the likes of Google, Meta, Anthropic. That doesn't even begin to mention the open source models that are also competing. SamA could try and start his own new copy of OpenAI and I have no doubt raise a lot of money, but that new company if it just tried to reproduce what OpenAI has already done would be not worth very much. By the time they reproduce OpenAI and its competitors will have already moved on to bigger and better things. Enough with the hero worship for SamA and all the other salesmen.
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  SamA is nowhere even close to relevant to the value that OpenAI presents. The issue isn’t SamA per se. It’s that the old valuation was assuming that the company was trying to make money. The new valuation is taking into account that instead they might be captured by a group that has some sci-fi notion about saving the world from an existential threat.
  - manyoso 3y ago
    That's a good point, but any responsible investor would have looked at the charter and priced this in. What I find ironic is the number of people defending SamA and the like who are now tacitly admitting that his promulgation of AI risk fears was essentially bullshit and it was all about making the $$$$ and using AI risk to gain competitive advantage.

stevespang 3y ago

[dead]

emptysongglass 3y ago

Highly unethical would be throwing the CEO of the division keeping the lights on under a bus with zero regard for the consequences. The non-profit board acted entirely against the interest of OpenAI at large. Disclosing an intention to terminate the highest profile member of their company to the company paying for their compute, Microsoft, is not only the ethical choice, it's the responsible one. Members of the non-profit board acted recklessly and irresponsibly. They'll be paying for that choice for decades following, as they should. They're lucky if they don't get hit with a lawsuit for defamation on their way out. Given how poorly Mozilla's non-profit board has steered Mozilla over the last decade and now this childish tantrum by a man raised on the fanfiction of Yudkowsky together with board larpers, I wouldn't be surprised if this snafu sees the end of this type of governance structure in tech. These people of the board have absolutely no business being in business.

soufron 3y ago
Except it's not a "division" but an independent entity. And if that corporate structure does not suit Satya Nadella, I would say he's the one to blam for having invested 10B in the first place. Being angry at a decision he had no right to be consulted on does not allow him to meddle in the governance of its co-shareholder. Or then we can all accept together that corruption, greed and whateverthefuckism is the reality of ethics in the tech industry.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  > Except it's not a "division" but an independent entity. This is entirely false. If it were true, the actions of today would not have come to pass. My use of the word "division" is entirely in-line with use of that term at large. Here's the Wikipedia article, which as of this writing uses the same language I have. [1] If you can't get the fundamentals right, I don't know how you can make the claims you're making credibly. Much like the board, you're making assertions that aren't credibly backed. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Sam_Altman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Sam_Altman
  - 3y ago

jprete 3y ago

I think a lot of commenters here are treating the nonprofit as if it were a temporary disguise with no other relevance, which OpenAI now intends to shed so it can rake in the profits. Legally this is very much not true, and I’ve read that only a minority of the board can even be a stakeholder in the for-profit (probably why Altman is always described as having no stake). If that’s true, it’s very obviously why half the board are outside people with no stake in the finances at all.

soufron 3y ago
Exactly my point.

s3p 3y ago

I don't see any citations provided by you showing legal threats, though.