9 ms·

I can’t believe people are cheerleading this move * Tigris is DOA - If because it would piss off the MSFT board but mostly because the SEC would arrest Sam ass

by shmatt 3y ago

I can’t believe people are cheerleading this move * Tigris is DOA - If because it would piss off the MSFT board but mostly because the SEC would arrest Sam assuming he’s an officer at MSFT. He could maybe be a passive investor, but that’s it * People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the board forced headcount reductions? * Sam has even less power with the board, and the board in a 3 trillion dollar corporation would be even more risk averse than the OpenAI one * there was a ton of fan fiction yesterday online about Satya forcing a move on the board. This was never really a thing. He made one of the worst investments in the history of SV in terms of keeping power to make sure your money is used correctly. $10B for 0 votes or any power to change votes

asimovfan 3y ago
Microsoft can offer more if it wishes, no?
- blibble 3y ago
  but they can't offer the whole "we are doing this for the benefit of humanity" lark will researchers that were lured into OpenAI under this pretense jump ship to explictly work on extending microsoft's tendrils into more of people's lives? (essentially the opposite of "benefit humanity") no doubt some will
  - vikramkr 3y ago
    I don't think Microsoft cares about that crowd, since now without capital they can't really do anything anyway. The rest of the crowd that wants to make bank? Might be more appealing
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > without capital they can't really do anything Not a bad moment for a rich patron to swoop in and capitalise the non-profit. If only there were a billionaire with a grudge against Altman and historic link to the organisation…
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Why don’t they have capital?
      - vikramkr 3y ago
        I mean if someone else wants to give them billions of dollars to make an AGI that they think will extinct humanity while not commercializing or open sourcing the tech they do have because they're scared of extinction, then be my guest. Usually if say I'm happy to be proven wrong but in this case I'd just be confused.
manyoso 3y ago
Driving the narrative doesn't mean driving reality. It is clear that Sam and friends are great at manipulating the media. But this is a disaster for Microsoft and the CEO damn well knows it. It is also a personal disaster for Altman and probably not a great move for those who choose to join him. Time will tell if the OpenAI non-profit vision of creating safe AGI for the benefit of humanity can be revitalized, but it really does look like all involved are basically acknowledging that at best they were fooling themselves into believing they were doing something on behalf of humanity. Egos and profit seeking took over and right now the ethos which they championed looks to be dying.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  Why is this a disaster? They managed to acquihire the founders of a 90B company. Probably the most important company in the world until last Friday. Seems like a huge win to me. They can write off their entire investment in OAI without blinking. MS farts out 10B of profit in about a month.
  - manyoso 3y ago
    They acquired two of the founders least responsible for the actual tech. They made a huge bet on OpenAI to produce the tech and that relationship is going down the drain. Watch the market today, the next week, the next month, the next six months and that will tell you what I say: this is a disaster for MS and they damn well know it.
    - dkrich 3y ago
      You’ve nailed it. The excitement is going to be short lived imo
      - fernandotakai 3y ago
        given that 500 employees are saying "either give us sama and gdb back or we are going to msft", i say nadella won hard.
flappyeagle 3y ago
OAI employees have no equity. They have a profit sharing right. The board is clearly not interested in profit. MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to blow up Google. They will set the world on fire to do that.
- shmatt 3y ago
  I will admit I haven’t seen an OAI contract, but have seen articles and multiple Levels.fyi posts for about $600k equity/year (worth $0 right now obviously) So any idea how that translates into the profit sharing? They have no profit right now. Curious how employees get to that number
  - infecto 3y ago
    I have not seen any of the employee contracts so this is purely an educated guess which might be entirely wrong. There is a chart from Fortune[1] that spells out how the profit caps work. I have not looked at any of the documents myself so I am interpreting only what I have consumed. My guess is that the employee equity/contracts spell out the cap structure so perhaps the equity value is based off those caps. Assuming the profit cap for employees is correct I would assume you could not value any "equity" based off the last raise value. At best you could perhaps value the max cap available for those shares. [1] https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/structure-openai-investment-microsoft/ https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/structure-openai-investment-m...
- dkrich 3y ago
  MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to blow up Google. To me this is exactly why I’m skeptical of Microsoft’s strategy here. They seem to be convinced that their success at unseating Google is assured. Meanwhile, google’s share price has barely flinched. Also, the way this has played out just feels desperate to keep the whole thing going. Wouldn’t Microsoft want at least some clarity about what actually happened by the board up and fired the CEO on the spot before doubling down to bring him into a position of power within the company?
  - 3y ago
chatmasta 3y ago
> the SEC would arrest Sam SEC does not have the power to arrest anyone. Their investigations are civil.
- objektif 3y ago
  Criminal charges can be filed due to SEC investigations. For example: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2021/ia-5764.pdf https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2021/ia-5764.pdf
mnd999 3y ago
The cheerleaders are the LLM AI future true believers. I imagine they are the same people that were telling us about how NFTs will change the world last year.
- vikramkr 3y ago
  I really don't get the comparison of nfts to llms. I mean yeah some hype cycle idiots have redirected both of their brain cells to shilling useless startups that'll get obsoleted by minor feature additions to bard or whatever in a year, but who cares about them? NFTs didnt do anything but enable fraud. Llms do stuff that has value. I can use Rfdiffusion with motif scaffolding to create a fusion protein with units from enzymes that have no crystal or cryoem structures with as high as a 5-10% success rate!!!!!! That's absolutely insane! I only need to print 20 genes to have a chance of getting a variant that works. Literal orders of magnitude improvement. And if you don't have a good multisequence alignment for getting a good folks from alphafold? Pure llm based esmfold can fill in the gaps. Evodiff is out here generating functional proteins with disordered regions. Also, to bring it back to openai, if I ask chatgpt to write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. If I give it a bunch of PDFs and ask it to give me a summary, it gives me a summary. I don't buy the agi end of the world hype so a shift that means that we get more focus on d eveloping useful tools that make my life easier that I'm totally willing to pay 20 a month for? Yeah I'm down. Get this cool tech and product into a form that's easy to use and useful and keep improving it!
  - icy_deadposts 3y ago
    To me, this sounds very similar to the type of over-hyped, exaggerated response when someone criticized cryptocurrencies by saying they don't do anything. The response would be: -I'm literally drinking a coffee I bought with bit coin right now. -I was able to send large sums of money to my grandma in another country while paying a fraction of the fees going through banks -It's a stable store of value for people in volatile countries with unstable currency -It's an investment available to the small timers, normally only the wealthy have these opportunities -It lets me pay artists for their art directly and bypass the corrupt middlemen this is a forum coding so i have no idea what any of that biology mumbo jumbo means, but everything you mentiond about chatgtp is conveniently missing a lot of details. >write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. Is it trivial code? Is it code that shows up on the first page of any search engine with the same terms? >it gives me a summary. Is it an accurate summary? Is it any better than just reading the first and last section of the report directly?
toomuchtodo 3y ago
If OpenAI is beholden to Microsoft for investment, and OpenAI's license is exclusive to Microsoft, OpenAI has nothing to offer those who remain except mission and ramen. If OpenAI slows their own research, that impairs future profit allocation potential to remaining talent. Enterprise customers will run to Azure GPT, and Microsoft will carry the research forward with their resources. This morning at OpenAI offices will be talent asking current leadership, "What have you done for me lately?" Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348010 | https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775 (505 of 700 Employees OpenAI tell the board to resign)
anonylizard 3y ago
OpenAI employees are already quitting en masse in public on twitter. Their pay is majority equity, so its worthless now with a board that says it hates profits and money. OpenAI is probably worth 80% less than it did a weekend ago, so the equity pay is also worth 80% less. Microsoft is perfectly willing to pay those typical AI salaries, because Nvidia and Google are literally doing a recruitment drive on twitter right now. Apple and Amazon are also probably looking to scoop up the leftovers. So Microsoft has to pay properly, and Sam will demand them to, to get the OpenAI team moved over intact. There aren't that many core engineers at OpenAI, maybe 200-300, so it is trivial for Microsoft to afford it.
vikramkr 3y ago
From satyas tweet Sam's new division/subsidiary is going to run more like LinkedIn or GitHub, and openai has pretty explicitly just declared that they don't like making money, so I don't think the comp is gonna be an issue. And for now, if sam wants to make product and money and Microsoft wants the same thing, then having power over the board doesn't really matter. And Microsoft has all the IP they need. That's a better deal than equity given who is in control of openai now. They're actively not focused on profit. Whether or not you think this is a good outcome for AI or mankind - Microsoft absolutely won. Plus the more people they pull from openai the less they have to deal with openai, everything is in house. Edit: god damn - even the guy that pushed Sam out announced he wants to resign if Sam isn't brought back what the hell
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > Edit: god damn - even the guy that pushed Sam out announced he wants to resign if Sam isn't brought back what the hell It reads like an orchestrated coup against the other three members of the board. Convince the board to do something you imagine will get this kind of blowback. Board is forced to resign due to their fiduciary obligations to the non-profit. And now you control the entire board.
  - xdennis 3y ago
    > fiduciary obligations to the non-profit What fiduciary obligations does a non-profit have? Isn't the board pretty successful already at not making money?
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Fiduciary isn't about money, it's about the best interests of the non-profit they are governing. If staying on the board means a harm to the goals of the non-profit charter, then they have a duty to resign.
    - icelancer 3y ago
      Fiduciary obligations need not be profit-seeking. They often - perhaps especially - involve keeping the lights on for the chartered company.
infecto 3y ago
What equity at OAI? You mean the equity for profit sharing? Seems to me anyone who cared about their stake in the profit sharing would be fairly pissed off with the move the board made. Investors loved Satya's investment into OAI, not sure how we can qualify it as one of the worst investments in the history of SV? How can we even compare the risk concerns of MSFT with OpenAI? The impression we have of OpenAI is the risk concerns are specifically about the profit drive. From a business standpoint, LLMs have huge potential at reducing costs and increasing profit in multiples.
- shmatt 3y ago
  We went from OAI employees flaunting “$1,000,000 per year salaries” to the New York Times to “what equity?” Really fast This isn’t personally against you but they never had the $1M/year they flaunted when Sam the savior was their CEO
  - infecto 3y ago
    I realize you have a bias against Sam Altman but lets dig into your current statement. The NYT article you are quoting I believe is this one [1], in which it describes Ilya Sutskever making $1.8 million in salary. I am not sure exactly what you are trying to say but from the beginning the equity has not been part of the comp of OpenAI. Salary as far as I know is typically just that, the cash compensation excluding bonus and stock. I don't know exactly how employee contracts are drawn up there but OpenAI has been pretty vocal that all the for-profit sides have caps which eventually lead back to 100% going into the non-profit after hitting the cap or the initial investment amount. So I am not quite clear what you are saying? Salary is cash, equity is stock. There has always been profit caps on the stock. My only point was that you made an argument about employees giving up their equity for "mediocre" MSFT stock. It is just a misinformed statement that I was clearing up for you. 1) MSFT has been doing amazing as a stock 2) Employee equity has profit caps. 3) Employees who actually care about equity profit would most likely be more interested in joining MSFT. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329233149/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230329233149/https://www.nytim...
mirzap 3y ago
We witnessed the insane value destruction over the weekend. Every OpenAI employee is aware that everything they have and what is promised to them is whipped out. Their best chance is that Sam brings them to that new company within MS. They will get the same or better deals as they had. And they will probably deliver within 6m what OAI has now, and what spooked Ilya to launch this coup. This was a brilliant power move by Satya. I don't see any hope for OpenAI after this brain drainage.
- chucke1992 3y ago
  Yeah, just like reuters mentioned "The OpenAI for-profit subsidiary was about to conduct a secondary at a $80 billion+ valuation. These 'Profit Participation Units' were going to be worth $10 million+ for key employees. Suffice it to say this is not going to happen now," chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis said." Insane self own by OpenAI
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    That sounds like exactly the kind of thing the board of a non-profit should be preventing.
    - kuchenbecker 3y ago
      As an employee of a company, I trade my time and effort for some amount of rewards. I enter deals with the expectation of stability from the other party. My unfounded Internet opinion: OpenAI just removed or reduced a large source of reward and have shown fundamental instability. OpenAIs success is very much tied to Employees and Compute.
      - leetharris 3y ago
        Yeah I mean, who cares if ASI kills us all as long as a couple hundred of the most well-paid people on the planet get even more rich. It's insane to see all these takes when we don't even know what caused the loss of trust in the first place.
munchausen42 3y ago
>more risk averse than the OpenAI one At least it's not sci-fi-risk averse ;)
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Sam has even less power with the board, and the board in a 3 trillion dollar corporation would be even more risk averse than the OpenAI one This is where I see the win. Newcomer’s concerns about Altman are valid [1]. It is difficult to square the reputation he nurtured as OpenAI’s CEO with the reckless lawlessness of his crypto start-up. Microsoft knows how to play ball with the big boys. It also knows how to constrain big personalities. [1] https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the
DeWilde 3y ago
> no bonus some years, What do you mean? MS employees are getting bonuses on a yearly basis, this year included.
- shmatt 3y ago
  I’m referring to Satyas email from May saying there will be no raises and the bonus pool will be significantly reduced That’s fine for corporate employees, but OAI employees were promised mountains of money to leave Google/Meta, they might not be as happy
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    They don't have to leave OAI. OAI is a startup. All these OAI employees who were playing up their million dollar salaries should know that startups come with risk. How many times has it been said that equity is worth nothing until (and if) it is? In the grand scheme of the current IT economy, top of the queue for sympathy to me is not "people making seven digit salaries at startup who may have to put up with only making $500K+ at MSFT".
stetrain 3y ago
> People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the board forced headcount reductions? What long term prospects do those employees have of raises, profit-sharing, equity, etc. at OAI if the board is willing to destroy value to maintain their non-profit goals? I think the whole point of this piece is that OAI's entire organizational structure is built against generating a large startup valuation that would provide a large payout to employees and investors. OAI has cash from ChatGPT revenue that it could use to offer competitive pay, but also this entire situations is based around the board being uncomfortable with the decisions that led to this revenue or attempts to expand it.
yterdy 3y ago
HN is filled with temporarily-embarrassed billionaires (and actual billionaires) who would very much like to preserve the notion that big corporations can move with impunity and quash any threat to investment returns. Reality is not aligning with that, so they've entered their mental safe pods (with the rose-tinted windshields).
- djmips 3y ago
  OMG this ^
strangattractor 3y ago
Regardless of what anyone thinks about it - M$ was going to pay an entity they did not control 18 Billion to be a player. Now they don't have to - they get it almost for nothing. Hat's off to M$ - this is certainly one of the largest corporate missteps by a board in charge of such hot technology that I have ever witnessed. The Open AI board has taken the keys of Paradise and willingly handed them directly to the devil;)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Nobody cares what you think about it either.

by shmatt 3y ago

asimovfan 3y ago

Microsoft can offer more if it wishes, no?

blibble 3y ago
but they can't offer the whole "we are doing this for the benefit of humanity" lark will researchers that were lured into OpenAI under this pretense jump ship to explictly work on extending microsoft's tendrils into more of people's lives? (essentially the opposite of "benefit humanity") no doubt some will
- vikramkr 3y ago
  I don't think Microsoft cares about that crowd, since now without capital they can't really do anything anyway. The rest of the crowd that wants to make bank? Might be more appealing
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > without capital they can't really do anything Not a bad moment for a rich patron to swoop in and capitalise the non-profit. If only there were a billionaire with a grudge against Altman and historic link to the organisation…
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Why don’t they have capital?
    - vikramkr 3y ago
      I mean if someone else wants to give them billions of dollars to make an AGI that they think will extinct humanity while not commercializing or open sourcing the tech they do have because they're scared of extinction, then be my guest. Usually if say I'm happy to be proven wrong but in this case I'd just be confused.

manyoso 3y ago

Driving the narrative doesn't mean driving reality. It is clear that Sam and friends are great at manipulating the media. But this is a disaster for Microsoft and the CEO damn well knows it. It is also a personal disaster for Altman and probably not a great move for those who choose to join him. Time will tell if the OpenAI non-profit vision of creating safe AGI for the benefit of humanity can be revitalized, but it really does look like all involved are basically acknowledging that at best they were fooling themselves into believing they were doing something on behalf of humanity. Egos and profit seeking took over and right now the ethos which they championed looks to be dying.

flappyeagle 3y ago
Why is this a disaster? They managed to acquihire the founders of a 90B company. Probably the most important company in the world until last Friday. Seems like a huge win to me. They can write off their entire investment in OAI without blinking. MS farts out 10B of profit in about a month.
- manyoso 3y ago
  They acquired two of the founders least responsible for the actual tech. They made a huge bet on OpenAI to produce the tech and that relationship is going down the drain. Watch the market today, the next week, the next month, the next six months and that will tell you what I say: this is a disaster for MS and they damn well know it.
  - dkrich 3y ago
    You’ve nailed it. The excitement is going to be short lived imo
    - fernandotakai 3y ago
      given that 500 employees are saying "either give us sama and gdb back or we are going to msft", i say nadella won hard.

flappyeagle 3y ago

OAI employees have no equity. They have a profit sharing right. The board is clearly not interested in profit. MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to blow up Google. They will set the world on fire to do that.

shmatt 3y ago
I will admit I haven’t seen an OAI contract, but have seen articles and multiple Levels.fyi posts for about $600k equity/year (worth $0 right now obviously) So any idea how that translates into the profit sharing? They have no profit right now. Curious how employees get to that number
- infecto 3y ago
  I have not seen any of the employee contracts so this is purely an educated guess which might be entirely wrong. There is a chart from Fortune[1] that spells out how the profit caps work. I have not looked at any of the documents myself so I am interpreting only what I have consumed. My guess is that the employee equity/contracts spell out the cap structure so perhaps the equity value is based off those caps. Assuming the profit cap for employees is correct I would assume you could not value any "equity" based off the last raise value. At best you could perhaps value the max cap available for those shares. [1] https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/structure-openai-investment-microsoft/ https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/structure-openai-investment-m...
dkrich 3y ago
MS is risk adverse in every way except for one, which is to blow up Google. To me this is exactly why I’m skeptical of Microsoft’s strategy here. They seem to be convinced that their success at unseating Google is assured. Meanwhile, google’s share price has barely flinched. Also, the way this has played out just feels desperate to keep the whole thing going. Wouldn’t Microsoft want at least some clarity about what actually happened by the board up and fired the CEO on the spot before doubling down to bring him into a position of power within the company?
- 3y ago

chatmasta 3y ago

> the SEC would arrest Sam SEC does not have the power to arrest anyone. Their investigations are civil.

objektif 3y ago
Criminal charges can be filed due to SEC investigations. For example: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2021/ia-5764.pdf https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2021/ia-5764.pdf

mnd999 3y ago

The cheerleaders are the LLM AI future true believers. I imagine they are the same people that were telling us about how NFTs will change the world last year.

vikramkr 3y ago
I really don't get the comparison of nfts to llms. I mean yeah some hype cycle idiots have redirected both of their brain cells to shilling useless startups that'll get obsoleted by minor feature additions to bard or whatever in a year, but who cares about them? NFTs didnt do anything but enable fraud. Llms do stuff that has value. I can use Rfdiffusion with motif scaffolding to create a fusion protein with units from enzymes that have no crystal or cryoem structures with as high as a 5-10% success rate!!!!!! That's absolutely insane! I only need to print 20 genes to have a chance of getting a variant that works. Literal orders of magnitude improvement. And if you don't have a good multisequence alignment for getting a good folks from alphafold? Pure llm based esmfold can fill in the gaps. Evodiff is out here generating functional proteins with disordered regions. Also, to bring it back to openai, if I ask chatgpt to write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. If I give it a bunch of PDFs and ask it to give me a summary, it gives me a summary. I don't buy the agi end of the world hype so a shift that means that we get more focus on d eveloping useful tools that make my life easier that I'm totally willing to pay 20 a month for? Yeah I'm down. Get this cool tech and product into a form that's easy to use and useful and keep improving it!
- icy_deadposts 3y ago
  To me, this sounds very similar to the type of over-hyped, exaggerated response when someone criticized cryptocurrencies by saying they don't do anything. The response would be: -I'm literally drinking a coffee I bought with bit coin right now. -I was able to send large sums of money to my grandma in another country while paying a fraction of the fees going through banks -It's a stable store of value for people in volatile countries with unstable currency -It's an investment available to the small timers, normally only the wealthy have these opportunities -It lets me pay artists for their art directly and bypass the corrupt middlemen this is a forum coding so i have no idea what any of that biology mumbo jumbo means, but everything you mentiond about chatgtp is conveniently missing a lot of details. >write some code, it writes some pretty decent code. Is it trivial code? Is it code that shows up on the first page of any search engine with the same terms? >it gives me a summary. Is it an accurate summary? Is it any better than just reading the first and last section of the report directly?

toomuchtodo 3y ago

If OpenAI is beholden to Microsoft for investment, and OpenAI's license is exclusive to Microsoft, OpenAI has nothing to offer those who remain except mission and ramen. If OpenAI slows their own research, that impairs future profit allocation potential to remaining talent. Enterprise customers will run to Azure GPT, and Microsoft will carry the research forward with their resources. This morning at OpenAI offices will be talent asking current leadership, "What have you done for me lately?" Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348010 | https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726598360277356775 (505 of 700 Employees OpenAI tell the board to resign)

anonylizard 3y ago

OpenAI employees are already quitting en masse in public on twitter. Their pay is majority equity, so its worthless now with a board that says it hates profits and money. OpenAI is probably worth 80% less than it did a weekend ago, so the equity pay is also worth 80% less. Microsoft is perfectly willing to pay those typical AI salaries, because Nvidia and Google are literally doing a recruitment drive on twitter right now. Apple and Amazon are also probably looking to scoop up the leftovers. So Microsoft has to pay properly, and Sam will demand them to, to get the OpenAI team moved over intact. There aren't that many core engineers at OpenAI, maybe 200-300, so it is trivial for Microsoft to afford it.

vikramkr 3y ago

From satyas tweet Sam's new division/subsidiary is going to run more like LinkedIn or GitHub, and openai has pretty explicitly just declared that they don't like making money, so I don't think the comp is gonna be an issue. And for now, if sam wants to make product and money and Microsoft wants the same thing, then having power over the board doesn't really matter. And Microsoft has all the IP they need. That's a better deal than equity given who is in control of openai now. They're actively not focused on profit. Whether or not you think this is a good outcome for AI or mankind - Microsoft absolutely won. Plus the more people they pull from openai the less they have to deal with openai, everything is in house. Edit: god damn - even the guy that pushed Sam out announced he wants to resign if Sam isn't brought back what the hell

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> Edit: god damn - even the guy that pushed Sam out announced he wants to resign if Sam isn't brought back what the hell It reads like an orchestrated coup against the other three members of the board. Convince the board to do something you imagine will get this kind of blowback. Board is forced to resign due to their fiduciary obligations to the non-profit. And now you control the entire board.
- xdennis 3y ago
  > fiduciary obligations to the non-profit What fiduciary obligations does a non-profit have? Isn't the board pretty successful already at not making money?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Fiduciary isn't about money, it's about the best interests of the non-profit they are governing. If staying on the board means a harm to the goals of the non-profit charter, then they have a duty to resign.
  - icelancer 3y ago
    Fiduciary obligations need not be profit-seeking. They often - perhaps especially - involve keeping the lights on for the chartered company.

infecto 3y ago

What equity at OAI? You mean the equity for profit sharing? Seems to me anyone who cared about their stake in the profit sharing would be fairly pissed off with the move the board made. Investors loved Satya's investment into OAI, not sure how we can qualify it as one of the worst investments in the history of SV? How can we even compare the risk concerns of MSFT with OpenAI? The impression we have of OpenAI is the risk concerns are specifically about the profit drive. From a business standpoint, LLMs have huge potential at reducing costs and increasing profit in multiples.

shmatt 3y ago
We went from OAI employees flaunting “$1,000,000 per year salaries” to the New York Times to “what equity?” Really fast This isn’t personally against you but they never had the $1M/year they flaunted when Sam the savior was their CEO
- infecto 3y ago
  I realize you have a bias against Sam Altman but lets dig into your current statement. The NYT article you are quoting I believe is this one [1], in which it describes Ilya Sutskever making $1.8 million in salary. I am not sure exactly what you are trying to say but from the beginning the equity has not been part of the comp of OpenAI. Salary as far as I know is typically just that, the cash compensation excluding bonus and stock. I don't know exactly how employee contracts are drawn up there but OpenAI has been pretty vocal that all the for-profit sides have caps which eventually lead back to 100% going into the non-profit after hitting the cap or the initial investment amount. So I am not quite clear what you are saying? Salary is cash, equity is stock. There has always been profit caps on the stock. My only point was that you made an argument about employees giving up their equity for "mediocre" MSFT stock. It is just a misinformed statement that I was clearing up for you. 1) MSFT has been doing amazing as a stock 2) Employee equity has profit caps. 3) Employees who actually care about equity profit would most likely be more interested in joining MSFT. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329233149/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230329233149/https://www.nytim...

mirzap 3y ago

We witnessed the insane value destruction over the weekend. Every OpenAI employee is aware that everything they have and what is promised to them is whipped out. Their best chance is that Sam brings them to that new company within MS. They will get the same or better deals as they had. And they will probably deliver within 6m what OAI has now, and what spooked Ilya to launch this coup. This was a brilliant power move by Satya. I don't see any hope for OpenAI after this brain drainage.

chucke1992 3y ago
Yeah, just like reuters mentioned "The OpenAI for-profit subsidiary was about to conduct a secondary at a $80 billion+ valuation. These 'Profit Participation Units' were going to be worth $10 million+ for key employees. Suffice it to say this is not going to happen now," chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis said." Insane self own by OpenAI
- zarzavat 3y ago
  That sounds like exactly the kind of thing the board of a non-profit should be preventing.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    As an employee of a company, I trade my time and effort for some amount of rewards. I enter deals with the expectation of stability from the other party. My unfounded Internet opinion: OpenAI just removed or reduced a large source of reward and have shown fundamental instability. OpenAIs success is very much tied to Employees and Compute.
    - leetharris 3y ago
      Yeah I mean, who cares if ASI kills us all as long as a couple hundred of the most well-paid people on the planet get even more rich. It's insane to see all these takes when we don't even know what caused the loss of trust in the first place.

munchausen42 3y ago

>more risk averse than the OpenAI one At least it's not sci-fi-risk averse ;)

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> Sam has even less power with the board, and the board in a 3 trillion dollar corporation would be even more risk averse than the OpenAI one This is where I see the win. Newcomer’s concerns about Altman are valid [1]. It is difficult to square the reputation he nurtured as OpenAI’s CEO with the reckless lawlessness of his crypto start-up. Microsoft knows how to play ball with the big boys. It also knows how to constrain big personalities. [1] https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the https://www.newcomer.co/p/give-openais-board-some-time-the

DeWilde 3y ago

> no bonus some years, What do you mean? MS employees are getting bonuses on a yearly basis, this year included.

shmatt 3y ago
I’m referring to Satyas email from May saying there will be no raises and the bonus pool will be significantly reduced That’s fine for corporate employees, but OAI employees were promised mountains of money to leave Google/Meta, they might not be as happy
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  They don't have to leave OAI. OAI is a startup. All these OAI employees who were playing up their million dollar salaries should know that startups come with risk. How many times has it been said that equity is worth nothing until (and if) it is? In the grand scheme of the current IT economy, top of the queue for sympathy to me is not "people making seven digit salaries at startup who may have to put up with only making $500K+ at MSFT".

stetrain 3y ago

> People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the board forced headcount reductions? What long term prospects do those employees have of raises, profit-sharing, equity, etc. at OAI if the board is willing to destroy value to maintain their non-profit goals? I think the whole point of this piece is that OAI's entire organizational structure is built against generating a large startup valuation that would provide a large payout to employees and investors. OAI has cash from ChatGPT revenue that it could use to offer competitive pay, but also this entire situations is based around the board being uncomfortable with the decisions that led to this revenue or attempts to expand it.

yterdy 3y ago

HN is filled with temporarily-embarrassed billionaires (and actual billionaires) who would very much like to preserve the notion that big corporations can move with impunity and quash any threat to investment returns. Reality is not aligning with that, so they've entered their mental safe pods (with the rose-tinted windshields).

djmips 3y ago
OMG this ^

strangattractor 3y ago

Regardless of what anyone thinks about it - M$ was going to pay an entity they did not control 18 Billion to be a player. Now they don't have to - they get it almost for nothing. Hat's off to M$ - this is certainly one of the largest corporate missteps by a board in charge of such hot technology that I have ever witnessed. The Open AI board has taken the keys of Paradise and willingly handed them directly to the devil;)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DonHopkins 3y ago
Nobody cares what you think about it either.