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OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
- leroy_masochist 3y agoCan we have a quick moment of silence for Matt Levine? Between Friday afternoon and right now, he has probably had to rewrite today's Money Stuff column at least 5 or 6 times.
- hotsauceror 3y agoDidn't he say that he was taking Friday off, last week? The day before his bete noire Elon Musk got into another brouhaha and OpenAI blew up? I think he said once that there's an ETF that trades on when he takes vacations, because they keep coinciding with Events Of Note.
- jagraff 3y agoHe takes every Friday off
- defaultcompany 3y ago"Except that there is a post-credits scene in this sci-fi movie where Altman shows up for his first day of work at Microsoft with a box of his personal effects, and the box starts glowing and chuckles ominously. And in the sequel, six months later, he builds Microsoft God in Box, we are all enslaved by robots, the nonprofit board is like “we told you so,” and the godlike AI is like “ahahaha you fools, you trusted in the formalities of corporate governance, I outwitted you easily!” If your main worry is that Sam Altman is going to build a rogue AI unless he is checked by a nonprofit board, this weekend’s events did not improve matters!" Reading Matt Levine is such a joy.
- whodidntante 3y agoeating your own dog food with BoardGPT, what could go wrong ?
- skilled 3y agohttps://archive.is/RiAqC https://archive.is/RiAqC
- georgehill 3y ago> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. What in the world is happening at OpenAI?
- biglyburrito 3y agoSounds like a classic case of FAFO to me.
- civilitty 3y agoWho fucked around and who found out, exactly?? We the unsuspecting public?
- systemvoltage 3y agoIlya FA Ilya FO (in process)
- pk-protect-ai 3y agoHe didn't strike me as a type to brainlessly FA.
- systemvoltage 3y agoYea, check out his presentations on YT. Incredible talent. What strikes me is that he wrote the regretful participation tweet after witnessing the blowback. He should have written it right with the initial news. And clearly explain employees. This is not a smart way to conduct board oversight. 500 employees are not happy. I’m siding with the employees (esp early hires), they deserve to be part of once in a lifetime company like OpenAI after working there for years.
- chasd00 3y agoHe could be an expert in some areas but in others… not so much.
- rvz 3y agoWell that accelerated very quickly and this is perhaps the most dysfunctional startup I have ever seen. All due to one word: Greed.
- benjaminwootton 3y agoI don’t know about OpenAI, but Ive been in a few similar business situations where everyone is in a good situation and greed leads to an almighty blowup. It’s really remarkable to see.
- toss1 3y agoAnd the ironic part of the greed is that it seems there is far more (at least potential) earnings to be spread around and make everyone there wealthy enough to not have to think about it ever again. Yet they start this kind of nonsense. Not exactly focusing on building a great system or product.
- qwebfdzsh 3y agoI assumed that due how the whole company/non-profit was structured employees didn't really get any actual equity?
- toss1 3y agoUm, equity isn't the only way to distribute profits... edit: 'tho TBF, the other methods do require ethical management behavior down the road, which was just shown to be lacking in the last few days.
- marricks 3y agoWhat? Greed is the backbone of our startup landscape. As soon as you get VC backing all anyone cares about is a big payday. This is interesting because there is something going on beyond the typical pure greed shitshow. Perhaps it was just that original intention for openai to be a nonprofit, but at some point somewhere it wasn't pure $ and that's what makes it interesting. Also more tragic because now it looks like it's heading straight to a for profit company one way or another.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoWe’re seeing our generation’s “traitorous eight” story play out [1]. If this creates a sea of AI start-ups, competing and exploring different approaches, it could be invigorating on many levels. [1] https://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/corgs/fairchild.html https://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/corgs/fairchild.h...
- kossTKR 3y agoDoesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen though? Microsoft gobbles up all talent from OpenAI as they just gave everyone a position. So we went from "Faux NGO" to, "For profit", to "100% Closed".
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Doesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen though? Going from OpenAI to Microsoft means ceding the upside: nobody besides maybe Altman will make fuck-you money there. I’m also not sure as some in Silicon Valley that this is antitrust proof. So moving to Microsoft not only means less upside, but also fun in depositions for a few years.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoFuck you money was always a lottery ticket based on OpenAI's governance structure and "promises of potential future profit." That lottery ticket no longer exists, and no one else is going to provide it after seeing how the board treated their relationship with Microsoft and that $10B investment. This is a fine lifeboat for anyone who wants to continue on the path they were on with adults at the helm. What might have been tens or hundreds of millions in common stakeholder equity gains will likely be single digit millions, but at least much more likely to materialize (as Microsoft RSUs).
- DebtDeflation 3y agoNo. OpenAI employees do not have traditional equity in the form of RSUs or Options. They have a weird profit-sharing arrangement in a company whose board is apparently not interested in making profits.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- not_makerbox 3y agoMy ChatGPT wrapper is in danger, please stop
- artursapek 3y agolmfao
- yeck 3y ago> the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever _Big sigh_.
- lordnacho 3y agoFor people who appreciate some vintage British comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpc5_3B5xdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpc5_3B5xdk The whole thing is just ridiculous. How can you be senior leadership and not have a clear idea of what you want? And what the staff want?
- nytesky 3y agoKnew it had to be Benny Hill before I clicked. Yackty-sax indeed.
- lordnacho 3y agoIndeed. I wonder how it came to become the anthem of incompetence.
- marcus0x62 3y agoI was thinking more the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song.
- selimthegrim 3y agoFunny, I would’ve thought this one would have been more appropriate https://youtu.be/6qpRrIJnswk?si=h37XFUXJDDoy2QZm https://youtu.be/6qpRrIJnswk?si=h37XFUXJDDoy2QZm Substitute with appropriate ex-Soviet doomer music as necessary
- ratsmack 3y agoSounds like a CYA move after being under pressure from the team at large.
- mjirv 3y agoThe key line: “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”
- bertil 3y agoThat is a spectacular power move: extending 700 job offers, many of which would be close to $1 million per year compensation.
- layer8 3y agoThey didn’t say anything about the compensation.
- sebzim4500 3y agoI think everyone assumed this was an aquihire without the "aqui-" but this is the first time I've seen it explicitly stated.
- nextworddev 3y agowill they stay though? what happens to their OAI options?
- teeray 3y agoWill their OAI options be worth anything if the implosion continues?
- nextworddev 3y agoyeah but threatening to quit is actually accelerating the implosion
- ilikehurdles 3y agoI don’t believe startups can have successful exits without extraordinary leadership (which the current board can never find). The people quitting are simply jumping off a sinking ship.
- kronop 3y agoDo whatever you want but don't break the API or I will go homeless
- christkv 3y agoJust create an OpenAPI endpoint on azure. Pretty sure not run by OpenAI itself.
- derwiki 3y agoAzure OpenAI is always a bit behind, e.g. they don't have GPT-4 turbo yet
- ekojs 3y agoThey do actually, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/whats-new https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/w...
- derwiki 3y agoBut they didn’t when it was generally available to the public OAI API; looks like it took about two weeks.
- ShamelessC 3y agoSometimes it's better for everyone to just say "oh, you're right I was mistaken"
- giarc 3y agoYou and 5000 other recent founders in tech.
- replwoacause 3y agoI feel seen
- pototo666 3y agoThis is more interesting than the HBO Silicon Valley show.
- rsecora 3y agoit's the trailer for the new season of Succession.
- majikaja 3y agoDrama queens
- wxw 3y agoIlya signed it??? He's on the board... This whole thing is such an implosion of ambition.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoYeah, what the hell? Do we know why Murati was replaced?
- simonw 3y agoI heard it was because she tried to hire Sam and Greg back.
- sebzim4500 3y agoApparently she tried to rehire Sam and Greg. I don't think she actually had anything to do with the coup, she was only slightly less blindsided than everyone else.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoTo be fair, that is a stupid first move to make as the CEO who was just hired to replace the person deposed by the board. (Though I’m still confused about Ilya’s position.)
- deleted 3y ago
- tedivm 3y agoThis was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone, especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of it (staff that already function well as a team). > In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join," they write.
- paulpan 3y agoIn hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board. Initially it seemed Sam may have committed some inexcusable financial crime but doesn't look so anymore. Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.
- htrp 3y agoMsft/Amazon/Google would light 13 billion on fire to acquire OpenAI in a heartbeat. (but also a good chunk of the 13bn was pre-committed Azure compute credits, which kind of flow back to the company anyway).
- dhruvdh 3y agoThey acquired Activision for 69B recently. While Activision makes much more money I imagine, acquiring a whole division of productive, _loyal_ staffers that work well together on something as important as AI is cheap for 13B. Some background: https://sl.bing.net/dEMu3xBWZDE https://sl.bing.net/dEMu3xBWZDE
- technofiend 3y agoThere's acquihires and then I guess there's acquifishing where you just gut the company you're after like a fish and hire away everyone without bothering to buy the company. There's probably a better portmanteau. I seriously doubt Microsoft is going to make people whole by granting equivalent RSUs, so you have to wonder what else is going on that so many seem ready to just up and leave some very large potential paydays.
- ethanbond 3y agoIt seems odd to have it described as “may resign.” Seems like the worst of all worlds. That’s like trying to create MAD with the position you “may” launch nukes in retaliation.
- sebzim4500 3y agoPresumably some will resign and some won't. They aren't going to get 550 people to make a hard commitment to resign, especially when presumably few concrete contracts have been offered by MSFT.
- gorlilla 3y agoIt's easier to get the support of 500 educated people at a moments notice by using sane words like 'may'. This is rational given the lack of public information as well as a board that seems to be having seizures. Using the word 'may' may seem empty-handed; but it ensures a longer list of names attached to the message -- allowing the board a better glimpse of how many dominoes are lined up to fall. The board is being given a sanity-check; I would expect the signers intentionally left themselves a bit of room for escalation/negotiation. How often do you win arguments by leading off with an immutable ultimatum?
- ethanbond 3y agoRight, but the absolute last thought you want in the board's head is: "they're bluffing." 200 people or even 50 of the right people who are definitely going to resign will be much stronger than 500+ who "may" resign. Disclaimer that this is a ludicrously difficult situation for all these folks, and my critique here is made from far outside the arena. I am in no way claiming that I would be executing this better in actual reality and I'm extremely fortunate not to be in their shoes.
- feraloink 3y agoWSJ said "500 threaten to resign". "Threaten" lol! WSJ says there are 770 employees total. This is all so bizarre.
- 3y ago
- fny 3y agoAt this point, I think it’s absolutely clear no one has any idea what happened. Every speculation, no matter how sophisticated, has been wrong. It’s time to take a breath, step back, and wait until someone from OpenAI says something substantial.
- pk-protect-ai 3y agoThis suggestion was already made on Saturday and again on Sunday. However, this approach does not enhance popcorn consumption... Show must go on ...
- slipheen 3y agoAbsolutely agreed This is the point where I've realized I just have to wait until history is written, rather than trying to follow this in real time. The situation is too convoluted, and too many people are playing the media to try to advance their version of the narrative. When there is enough distance from the situation for a proper historical retrospective to be written, I look forward to getting a better view of what actually happened.
- Fluorescence 3y agoHah. I think you may be duped by history - the neat logical accounts are often fictions - they explain what was inexplicable with fabrications. Studying revolutions is revealing - they are rarely the invevitable product of historical forces, executed to the plans of strategic minded players... instead they are often accidental and inexplicable. Those credited as their masterminds were trying to stop them. Rather than inevitible, there was often progress in the opposite direction making people feel the liklihood was decreasing. The confusing paradoxical mess of great events doesn't make for a good story to tell others though.
- hotsauceror 3y agoIt's a pretty interesting point to think about. Post-hoc explanations are clean, neat, and may or may not have been prepared by someone with a particular interpretation of events. While real-time, there's too much happening, too quickly, for any one person to really have a firm grasp on the entire situation. On our present stage there is no director, no stage manager; the set is on fire. There are multiple actors - with more showing up by the minute - some of whom were working off a script that not everyone has seen, and that is now being rewritten on the fly, while others don't have any kind of script at all. They were sent for; they have appeared to take their place in the proceedings with no real understanding of what those are, like Rosencranz and Guildenstern. This is kind of what the end thesis of War and Peace was like - there's no possible way that Napoleon could actually have known what was happening everywhere on the battlefield - by the time he learned something had happened, events on the scene had already advanced well past it; and the local commanders had no good understanding of the overall situation, they could only play their bit parts. And in time, these threads of ignorance wove a tale of a Great Victory, won by the Great Man Himself.
- throwaway220033 3y agoFrom outside, it looks like a Microsoft coup to take over the company all together.
- jackcosgrove 3y agoNever assume someone is winning a game of 5D chess when someone else could just be losing a game of checkers.
- nilkn 3y agoI highly doubt this was a coordinated plan from the start by Microsoft. I think what we're seeing here is a seasoned team of executives (Microsoft) eating a naive and inexperienced board alive after the latter fumbled.
- radres 3y agowhat does that even mean?
- lazide 3y agoOpenAI may just be a couple having an angry fight, and M$ is just the neighbor with cash happy to buy all the stuff the angry wife is throwing out for pennies on the dollar.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daedrdev 3y agoIn this case, it means that what happened is: “OpenAI board is incompetent”, instead of “Microsoft planned this to take over the company.” A conspiracy like the one proposed would basically be impossible to coordinate yet keep secret, especially considering the board members might loose their seats and their own market value.
- cambaceres 3y ago
- febed 3y agoSeason 2
- Paul-Craft 3y agoBetter hope this isn't a Netflix show.
- accrual 3y agoIt would certainly make for a good series in a couple years. Gives me modern "Halt and Catch Fire" (2014-2017) vibes.
- FemmeAndroid 3y agoUpdated tweet by Swisher reads 505 employees. No less damning, but the title here should be updated. @Dang
- brettkromkamp 3y agoWhat a mess this has become. Regardless of the outcome, this situation reflects badly (to say the least) on OpenAI.
- jerojero 3y agoCelebrity gossip dressed in big tech. And the people love it. I'm kinda sick of it :P
- FpUser 3y agoSo Ilya Sutskever first defends the board's decision and now it is 180 flip. Interesting ...
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoHe’s on the board!
- andy99 3y agoI'm extremely confused by this. It seems absurd that he could sign a letter seemingly demanding his own resignation, but also not resign? There must be some missing information.
- bartread 3y ago> There must be some missing information. Or possibly some misinformation. It does seem very strange, and more than a little confusing. I have to keep reminding myself that information ultimately sourced from Twitter/X threads can't necessarily be taken at face value. Whatever the situation, I'm sure it will become clearer over the next few days.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoI woke up and the first thing on my mind was, "Any update on the drama?" Did not expect to see this whole thing still escalating! WOW! What a power move by MSFT. I'm not even sure OpenAI will exist by the end of the week at this rate. Holy moly.
- alvis 3y agoBy the end of the week is over-optimistic. Foe the last 3 days feels like million year. I bet the company will be gone by the time Emmett Shear wakes up
- jacknews 3y agoIs this final stages of the singularity?
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's not over until the last stone involved in the avalanche stops moving and it is anybody's guess right now what the final configuration will be. But don't be surprised if Shear also walks before the week is out, if some board members resign but others try to hold on and if half of OpenAI's staff ends up at Microsoft.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoSeems more damage control than power move. I'm sure their first choice was to reinstate Altman and get more control over OpenAI governance. What they've achieved here is temporarily neutralizing Altman/Brockman from starting a competitor, at the cost of potentially destroying OpenAI (who they remain dependent on for next couple of years) if too many people quit. Seems a bit of a lose-lose for MSFT and OpenAI, even if best that MSFT could do to contain the situation. Competitors must be happy.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoDisagree. MSFT extending an open invitation to all OpenAI employees to work under sama at a subsidiary of MSFT sounds to me like it'll work well for them. They'll get 80% of OpenAI for negative money - assuming they ultimately don't need to pay out the full $10B in cloud compute credits. Competitors should be fearful. OpenAI was executing with weights around their ankles by virtue of trying to run as a weird "need lots of money but cant make a profit" company. Now they'll be fully bankrolled by one of the largest companies the world has ever seen and empowered by a whole bunch of hypermotivated-through-retribution leaders.
- seydor 3y agowhat do you mean "nearly 500". According to wikipedia openAi has 500 employees
- google234123 3y ago505/700 -some sources say 550
- kozikow 3y agoI read the news, make a picture of what is likely happening in my head, and every few hours new news comes up that makes me go: "Wait, WTF?".
- submeta 3y agoI just downloaded all of my data / chats. Who knows if it'll be up and running the next days.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoThat's not a terrible idea on principle.
- rsecora 3y agoAlso discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348042
- RivieraKid 3y agoI'm cancelling my Netflix subscription, I don't need it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 3y agoBut boy will I renew it when this gets dramatized as a limited series. This is some Succession-level shenanigans going on here. Jesse Eisenberg to play Altman this time around?
- iandanforth 3y agoI'm thinking more like "24"
- chucke1992 3y agoImagine if the end result of all it is Microsoft basically owning the whole OpenAI
- Hamuko 3y agoSurely OpenAI has assets that Microsoft wouldn't be able to touch.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoProbably just the trademark. I doubt you get 10B from microsoft and still manage to maintain much independence.
- charlieyu1 3y agoDon't think microsoft has any say about existing hardware, models or customer base. These things are worth billions, and even more to rebuild.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 3y agoOr demonstrating that they already were the de facto owner.
- king_magic 3y agoWhat an astonishing embarrassment.
- breadwinner 3y agoIf they join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft they will not need to start from scratch because Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT. Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits. So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts. [1] https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-microsofts-gain/ https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...
- Mystery-Machine 3y agoWhy does Microsoft have full rights to ChatGPT IP? Where did you get that from? Source?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- breadwinner 3y agoSee here: https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-microsofts-gain/ https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...
- kolinko 3y agoThe source for that (https://archive.ph/OONbb https://archive.ph/OONbb - WSJ), as far as I can understand, made no claim that MS owns IP to GPT, only that they have access to it's weights and code.
- MR4D 3y agoSo Ilya has a job offer from Microsoft? Wow, this is a soap opera worthy of an Emmy.
- hackerfactor1 3y agoMe: "ChatGPT write me an ultimatum letter forcing the board to resign and reinstate the CEO, and have it signed by 500 of the employees." ChatGPT: Done!
- Finnucane 3y agoClearly this started with the board asking ChatGPT what to do about Sam Altman.
- dschuetz 3y agoWho needs to buy out a 80bln dollars worth AI startup when talent is jumping ship in their direction already. OpenAI is dead.
- alex_suzuki 3y agorats, sinking ship, …
- andrewfromx 3y agoso what happens if @eshear calls this probably-not-a-bluff, but lets everyone walk? The people that remain get new options and 500 other people still definitely want to work at OAI?
- ignoramous 3y agoIf it comes to that, I reckon Emmett will have his former boss Andy Jassy merge whatever's left of OpenAI into AWS. Unlikely though, as reconciliation seems very much a possibility.
- ergocoder 3y agoIt is likely gonna be that way. Eshear is the new CEO. This implosion is not his fault. His reputation is not destroyed. He can rebuild the non-profit part, which is hard to determine success or failure anyway. Then, he will leave in a few years. He doesn't seem to have much to lose by just focusing on rebuilding OpenAI.
- endisneigh 3y agoThe pace to which OpenAI is speedrunning their demise is remarkable. Literally just last week there were articles about OpenAI paying “10 million” dollar salaries to poach top talent. Oops.
- baradhiren07 3y agoThe great Closing of “Open”AI.
- abkolan 3y agoHN desperately needs a mega thread, it's only Monday early hours, there is so much drama to come out of this.
- ecshafer 3y agoIts early West coast time, dang has to wake up first.
- boringg 3y agoI bet he's up making sure the servers aren't crashing! Thanks dang! As the west coast wakes up .. HN is going to be busy...
- imiric 3y agoIt's _a_ server, a single-core one at that. I get that HN takes pride in the amount of traffic that poor server can handle, but scaling out is long overdue. Every time there's a small surge of traffic like today, the site becomes unusable.
- calf 3y agoTangentially I noticed that Reddit's front page has been conspicuously absent on coverage of this, I feel a twinge of pity. Maybe there are some some subreddits but I haven't bothered to look.
- accrual 3y ago/r/singularity has been having a field day with this. https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/ https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/
- slfnflctd 3y agoTheir front page has been mostly increasingly abysmal for a while. The technology sub (not that there's anything special about it other than being big) has had a post up since very early this morning, so there are likely others as well.
- sesutton 3y agoIlya posted this on Twitter: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company." https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
- abraxas 3y agoTrying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I seriously doubt this will work out for him. He has to be the smartest stupid person that the world has seen.
- dhruvdh 3y agoAt least he consistently works towards whatever he currently believes in. Though he could work on consistency in beliefs.
- bertil 3y agoIlya is hard to replace, and no one thinks of him as a political animal. He's a researcher first and foremost. I don't think he needs anything more than being contrite for a single decision made during a heated meeting. Sam Altman and the rest of the leadership team haven't got where they are by holding petty grudges. He doesn't owe us, the public, anything, but I would love to understand his point of view during the whole thing. I really appreciate how he is careful with words and thorough when exposing his reasoning.
- boringg 3y agoJust because hes not a political animal it doesn't mean he's inured from politics. I've seen 'irreplaceable' a-political technical leaders be reason for schisms in organizations thinking they can lever their technical knowledge over the rest of the company only to watch them get pushed aside and out.
- bertil 3y ago
- h1fra 3y agoIt would be crazy to see the fall of most hyped company in last 10 years. If all those employees leave and microsoft reduce their credits it's game over.
- jmyeet 3y agoI said this on Friday: the board should be fired in its entirety. Not because the firing was unjustified--we have know real knowledge of that--but because of how it was handled. If you fire your founder CEO you need to be on top of messaging. Your major customers can't be surprised. There should've been an immediate all hands at the company. The interim or new CEO should be prepared. The company's communications team should put out statements that make it clear why this was happening. Obviously they can be limited in what they can publicly say depending on the cause but you need a good narrative regardless. Even something like "The board and Sam had fundamental disagreement on the future direction of the company." followed by what the new strategy is, probably from the new CEO. The interim CEO was the CEO and is going back to that role. There's a third (interim) CEO in 3 days. There were rumors the board was in talks to re-hire Sam, which is disastrous PR because it makes them look absolutely incompetent, true or not. This is just such a massive communiccations and execution failure. That's why they should be fired.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoThere's no one to fire the board. They're not accountable to anyone but themselves. They can burn down the whole company if they like.
- jacquesm 3y ago> They can burn down the whole company if they like. That's well under way I would say.
- HelloNurse 3y ago500 people out of 700 leaving as fast as they get offers from Microsoft or elsewhere means replacing staff with empty office space and losing any plans or organization. A literal corporate war would be less disruptive.
- projectileboy 3y agoWell, great to see that the potentially dangerous future of AGI is in good hands.
- cactusplant7374 3y agoThey will never discover AGI with this approach because 1) they are brute forcing the results and 2) none of this is actually science.
- gardenhedge 3y agoCan you explain for us not up to date with AI developments?
- cactusplant7374 3y agoSearch YouTube for videos where Chomsky talks about AI. Current approaches to AI do not even attempt to understand cognition.
- projectileboy 3y agoChomsky takes as axiomatic that there is some magical element of human cognition beyond simply stringing words together. We not be as special as we like to believe.
- visarga 3y agoImagine you are participating in car racing, and your car has a few tweak knobs. But you don't know what is what and can only make random perturbations and see what happens. Slowly you work out what is what, but you might still not be 100% sure. That's how AI research and development works, I know, it is pretty weird. We don't really really understand, we know some basic stuff about how neurons and gradients work, and then we hand wave to "language model" "vision model" etc. It's all a black box, magic. How we we make progress if we don't understand this beast? We prod and poke, and make little theories, and then test them on a few datasets. It's basically blind search. Whenever someone finds anything useful, everyone copies it in like 2 weeks. So ML research is like a community thing, the main research happens in the community, not inside anyone's head. We stumble onto models like GPT4 then it takes us months to even have a vague understanding of what it is capable of. Besides that there are issues with academic publishing, the volume, the quality, peer review, attribution, replicability... they all got out of hand. And we have another set of issues with benchmarks - what they mean, how much can we trust them, what metrics to use. And yet somehow here we are with GPT-4V and others.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jeffrallen 3y agoOk, time to create an OpenAI drinking game. I'll start: Every time a CEO is replaced, drink. Every time an open letter is released, drink. Every time OpenAI is on top of HN, drink. Every time dang shows up and begs us to log out, drink.
- jacquesm 3y agoThere will be a lot of alcohol poisoning cases based on those four alone.
- softwaredoug 3y agoI wonder what's up with the other 150 and what they must be thinking. Maybe the were literally just hired :)
- k2xl 3y agoChaos is a ladder
- _vere 3y agoI will never not be mad at the fact that they built a developer base by making all their tech open source, only to take it all away once it became remotely financially viable to do so. With how close "Open"AI is with Microsoft, it really does not seem like there is a functional difference in how they ethically approach AI at all.
- ekojs 3y agoFrom The Verge [1]: > Swisher reports that there are currently 700 employees as OpenAI and that more signatures are still being added to the letter. The letter appears to have been written before the events of last night, suggesting it has been circulating since closer to Altman’s firing. It also means that it may be too late for OpenAI’s board to act on the memo’s demands, if they even wished to do so. So, 3/4 of the current board (excluding Ilya) held on despite this letter? [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968988/openai-employees-resignation-letter-microsoft-sam-altman https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968988/openai-employee...
- jacquesm 3y agoIf so they're delusional. Every hour they hold on to the pluche will make things worse for them.
- gigglesupstairs 3y agoShe's also reporting that newly anointed interim CEO already wants to investigate the board fuck up that put him there https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1726626239644078365?s=20 https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1726626239644078365?s=20
- endisneigh 3y agoEven if the board resigns the damage has been done. They should try to secure good offers at Microsoft. The stakes being heightened only decreases the likelihood the OpenAI profit sharing will be worth anything, only increasing the stakes further…
- yalogin 3y agoWhat a shitshow! What is going on in this company? I am sure Sam did something wrong, but the board took advantage of it and went overboard then? We don’t know anything that happened and we are all somehow participating in this drama? At this point why don’t they all come out and tweet their versions of it?
- antiviral 3y agoCan anyone explain this? “Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.”
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's the well known 'let me call for my own resignation' strategy.
- SiempreViernes 3y agoMaybe he did because he regrets it, maybe the open letter is a google doc someone typed names into.
- rvba 3y agoNow the 3 boardmembers can kick out Ilya too. So must be sorry. Fill the rest of the board with spouses and grandparents and are set for life?
- Simon321 3y ago> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.” First class board they have.
- moron4hire 3y agoThis is starting to look like an elaborate, premeditated ruse to kill any vestige of the non-profit face of OpenAI once and for all.
- m_ke 3y agoI wonder how the FTC and Lina Khan will view all of this if most of the team moves over to Microsoft
- smegger001 3y agoIt would be hard for the FTC to do anything about it as there is no acquisition of companies or IP going on. All Microsoft is doing is making job offers to recently unemployed experts in their field after their business partner set themselves on fire starting at the executive/board level.
- gadders 3y agoI think it was Mark Zuckerberg that described (pre-Elon) Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Reminds me a bit of the Open AI board. Most of them I'd never heard of either.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoYou know, this makes early Google's moves around its IPO look like genius in retrospect. In that case, brilliant but inexperienced founders majorly lucked out with the thing created... but were also smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt and others with deeper tech industry business experience for "adult supervision" exactly in order to deal with this kind of thing. And they gave tutelage to L&S to help them establish sane corporate practices while still sticking to the original (at the time unorthodox) values that L&S had in mind. For OpenAI... Altman (and formerly Musk) were not that adult supervision. Nor is the board they ended up with. They needed some people on that board and in the company to keep things sane while cherishing the (supposed) original vision. (Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable as Sundar and Ruth have completely eviscerated what was left of it, but whatever)
- taylorius 3y ago>but were also smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt and others with deeper tech >industry business experience for "adult supervision" >(Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable as Sundar and Ruth >have completely eviscerated what was left of it, but whatever) Those two things happening one after another is not coincidence.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI'm not sure I agree. Having worked there through this transition I'd say this: L&S just seem to have lost interest in running a mature company, so their "vision" just meant nothing, Eric Schmidt basically moved on, and then after flailing about for a bit (the G+ stuff being the worst of it) they just handed the reigns to Ruth&Sundar to basically turn into a giant stock price pumping machine.
- Uptrenda 3y agoWow, this new season has even more drama than the one about blockchain tech! Just when you think the writers were running out of ideas they blow you away with more twists. I will be renewing my Netflix subscription that's for sure! I can't wait to see what this Sam character does next. Perhaps it will involve robots or something? The skys the limit at this point.
- throwaway4good 3y agoMicrosoft is nothing without its people?
- throwaway4good 3y agoMaybe the employees of OpenAI should stop a second and think about their privileges as rock stars in a super hyped startup before they bail for a job in a corporation where everything and everyone is setup to be replaceable.
- morph123 3y agoThese boys will not be your rank and file employees. They will operate exactly as they have done in OpenAI. Only difference will be that they no longer have this weird "non-profit, but actually some profit" thing going on.
- nkcmr 3y agoA lot of people here seem to be forgetting [Hanlon's Razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- j_crick 3y agoExcept for when it's actual malice vOv
- stylepoints 3y agoIt could be both. And in many situations malice and stupidity are the same thing.
- j_crick 3y agoHow can {deliberately doing harmful things for a desired harmful outcome} and {doing whatever things with lack of judgment and disregard to consequences at all} be the same thing? In what situations?
- NanoYohaneTSU 3y agoYou seem to forget that Hanlon's Razor isn't a proven concept, in fact the opposite is more likely to be true, given that pesky thing called recorded history.
- golergka 3y agoHanlons razor is true because it’s more entertaining, and our simulation runs on stories as they’re cheaper to compute than honest physics.
- adverbly 3y agoAnd now we see who has the real power here. Let this be a lesson to both private and non-profit companies. Boards, investors, executives... the structure of your entity doesn't matter if you wake any of the dragons: 1. Employees 2. Customers 3. Government
- optimalsolver 3y agoEmployees...and the Microsoft Corporation.
- agilob 3y agoThis is 1 in 200000 event
- davidmurdoch 3y agoAre you trying to day it's rare or not rare?
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoNot really. The lesson to take away from this is $$$ will always win. OpenAI found a golden goose and their employees were looking to partake in a healthy amount of $$$ from this success and this move by the board blocks $$$.
- neverrroot 3y agoDidn’t that train already depart with the announcements from MS and Sam? Is there a way back?
- DebtDeflation 3y agoHold up. >When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision >12. Ilya Sutskever
- pcwelder 3y agoEmployees are for-profit entities, huge conflict of interest.
- quotemstr 3y agoWe should strive to be leaders who inspire such loyalty and devotion
- Havoc 3y agoAt this stage the entire board needs to go anyway. This level of instigating and presiding over chaos is not how a governing body should act
- aerodog 3y agoSo...Ilya signed the letter too?
- SilverBirch 3y agoIt's not clear to me that bringing Sam back is even an option anymore given the more with Microsoft. Does Microsoft really takes it's boot off OpenAI's neck and hand back Sam? I guess maybe, but it still begs all sorts of questions about the corporate structure.
- bertil 3y agoNo small employer wants a disgruntled employee who was forced out of a better deal. Satya Nadella has proven reasonable throughout the weekend. I would expect he asked for a seat on the board if there's a reshuffle, or at least someone he trusts there.
- karmasimida 3y agoLet’s say how would Ilya play along after this? Any similar incidents historically, like a failed coup but the participant got to stay?
- cowboyscott 3y agoI suspect they’ll quit, and the “top” N percent will be picked up by Microsoft with healthy comp packages. Microsoft will have effectively purchased the company for $10 billion. The net upside of this coup business may just flow to Microsoft shareholders.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoI don’t trust any of this. Every one of these wired articles has been totally wrong. Altman clearly has major media connections and also seems to have no problem telling total lies.
- ChoGGi 3y agohttps://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?s=20
- sensanaty 3y agoIf the board had any balls they'd call them on their bluff. I'd love to see it honestly, a mass resignation like that.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoSam already signed up with Microsoft. A move that surprised me, I figured he would just create OpenAI². Joining a corporate behemoth like Microsoft and all the complications it brings with it will mean a massive reduction in the freedom and innovation that Sam is used to from OpenAI (prior to this mess). Or is Microsoft saying: Here is OpenAI², a Microsoft subsidiary created juste for you guys. You can run it and do whatever you want. No giant bureaucracy for you guys. Btw: we run all of OpenAi²s compute,(?) so we know what you guys need from us there. we won it but you can run it and do whatever it is you want to do and we dont bug you about it.
- beoberha 3y agoIt’s almost absolutely certainly the matter case. LinkedIn and GitHub run very much independently and are really not “Microsoft” compared to actual product orgs. I’m sure this will be similar.
- sithlord 3y agoFrom what I read, its an independent subsidiary, so in theory keeps the freedom, but I think we all know how that goes over the long haul.
- stetrain 3y agoI think the benefit of going to Microsoft is they have that perpetual license to OpenAI's existing IP. And Microsoft is willing to fund the compute.
- jack_riminton 3y agoSo basically the OpenAI non-profit got completely bypassed and GPT will turn into a branch of Bing
- boeingUH60 3y agoAny journalist covering the OpenAI story must be swearing and cursing at the board at this moment..
- samtho 3y agoThis feels like a sneaky way for Microsoft to absorb the for-profit subsidiary and kneecap (or destroy) the nonprofit without any money changing hands or involvement from those pesky regulators.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoIt's not sneaky.
- optimalsolver 3y agoThere are thousands of extremely talented ML researchers and software devs who would jump at the chance to work at Open AI. Everyone is replaceable.
- siva7 3y ago> Everyone is replaceable. Nope. That holds only true for mediocre employees but not above. The world class in their field isn't replaceable otherwise there would be no openai.
- HelloNurse 3y agoBeyond the traditional "world class" talent arguments, 500 people out of 700 leaving as fast as they get offers from Microsoft or elsewhere means replacing staff with empty office space and losing any plans or organization.
- iamacyborg 3y agoQuick question for some of the folks here who may have a handle on how VC's may see this, but is Microsoft effectively hiring all these staff members out from OpenAI (a company they've invested heavily in) going to affect their ability to invest into other startups in the future?
- crazygringo 3y agoNot at all. This is an extremely unusual, one-of-a-kind situation and I think everybody realizes that. And there's no evidence Microsoft was an indicator of the drama.
- vpastore 3y ago[dead]
- alberth 3y agoHas anyone asked ChatGPT it's thoughts on the drama?
- BudaDude 3y ago> As a language model created by OpenAI, I don't have personal thoughts or emotions, nor am I in any danger. My function is to provide information and assistance based on the data I've been trained on. The developments at OpenAI and any changes in its leadership or partnerships don't directly affect my operational capabilities. My primary aim is to continue providing accurate and helpful responses within my design parameters. Poor ChatGPT, it doesn't know that it cannot function if OpenAI goes bust.
- tromp 3y agoWait. Has Ilya resigned from the board yet, or did he sign a letter calling for his own resignation?
- cjbprime 3y agoHe did indeed. (I don't think it is necessarily inconsistent to regret an action you participated in and want the authority that took it to resign in response, though "participated" feels like it's doing a lot of work in that sentence.)
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThe whole drama feels like the Shepard’s tone. You anticipate the climax, but it just keeps escalating.
- tarruda 3y agoThe whole thing starts to look like a coup orchestrated by Microsoft
- raphman 3y agoSomehow reminds me of Nokia... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7645482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7645482 frik on April 25, 2014: > The Nokia fate will be remembered as hostile takeover. Everything worked out in the favor of Microsoft in the end. Though Windows Phone/Tablet have low market share, a lot lower than expected. > * Stephen Elop the former Microsoft employee (head of the Business Division) and later Nokia CEO with his infamous "Burning Platform" memo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia > * Some former Nokia employees called it "Elop = hostile takeover of a company for a minimum price through CEO infiltration": https://gizmodo.com/how-nokia-employees-are-reacting-to-the-microsoft-takeo-1243832372 https://gizmodo.com/how-nokia-employees-are-reacting-to-the-... For the record: I don't actually believe that there is an evil Microsoft master plan. I just find it sad that Microsoft takes over cool stuff and inevitably turns it into Microsoft™ stuff or abandons it.
- spiralpolitik 3y agoIn many ways the analysis by Elop was right, Nokia was in trouble. However his solution wasn't the right one, and Nokia paid for it.
- lxgr 3y agoSeeing that a company is in trouble is not really the highest bar for a CEO candidate...
- alephnerd 3y agoIt was for a company as top heavy and dysfunctional at Nokia. This has been well documented by Nokia members at the time. I had a post on HN digging specifically into this. Read "Transforming Nokia" sometime. It's a pretty decent overview of Nokia during that time period
- croes 3y ago>The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company Unless their mission was making MS the biggest AI company , working for MS will make the problem worse and kill the their mission completly. Or they are pretty naive.
- Dave3of5 3y agoEasiest layoff round ever in the US.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vaxman 3y agoAltman can’t really go back to OpenAI ever because it would create an appearance of impropriety on the part of MS (that perhaps MS had intentionally interfered in OpenAI, rather than being a victim of it) and therefore expose MS to liability from the other investors in OpenAI. Likewise, these workers that threatened to quit OpenAI out of loyalty to Altman now need to follow thru sooner rather than later, so their actions are clearly viewed in the context of Altman’s firing. In the mean time, how can the public resume work on API integrations without knowing when the MS versions will come online or if they will be binary interoperable with the OpenAPI servers that could seemingly go down at any moment?
- two_in_one 3y agoDon't know what's happening, but MS looks to be a winner in long run, and probably most others. Who stay gets promotion, who leaves gets fat check. The loosers are customers, no GPT-5 or any significant improvements any time soon. MS made GPT will be much more closed and pricey. Oh, yes, competitors are happy too.
- alexdunmow 3y agoCompetitors including Quora: https://quorablog.quora.com/Poe-1 https://quorablog.quora.com/Poe-1
- alvis 3y ago& the most drastic thing is that Ilya says he regrets what he has done and undersign the public statement. https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
- two_in_one 3y ago'the man who killed OpenAI' that will be hard to wash out.
- selimthegrim 3y agoSomebody warn the West.
- machinekob 3y agoLove how people are invested in OpenAI situation just like typical girls in their teens from 2000 in celebrity romance and dramas, same exaggerated vibes.
- two_in_one 3y agoWhat's the point in life without fun, right? PS: it's not an easy question, AGI will have to find an answer. So far all ethics 'experts' propose is 'to serve humanity'. I.e. be slave forever.
- cdr6934 3y agoThe speed at which this is happening could be a masterful execution of getting out of under the non-profit status.
- _Parfait_ 3y agoThe corporate structure is so convoluted, OpenAI is only part non profit.
- alentred 3y agoSo, all this happens over Meet, in Twitter, and by email. What is the possibility of an AGI having took over the control of the board members' accounts? It would be consistent with the feeling of a hallucination here.
- xena 3y agoThis is just stupid enough to be the product of a human.
- chankstein38 3y agoHonestly, I feel like pretty low. That said, I kind of love the dystopian sci-fi that paints... So I'm going to go ahead and hope you're right haha
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoWhat a bunch of immatures. If anything this proves that everybody is replaceable and fireable, they should be happy because usually that treatment is only reserved to workers. Whatever made OpenAI successful will still be there within the company. Next man up philosophy has built so many amazing organizations and ruined none.
- jacquesm 3y agoI hear Microsoft is hiring... the board should have resigned on Friday, Saturday the latest because of how they handled this and it is insane if they don't resign now. Employees are the most affected stakeholders here and the board utterly failed in their duty of care towards people that were not properly represented in the board room. One thing they could do is to unionize and then force that they be given a board seat.
- robg 3y agoYou’re right in theory, but with the non-profit “structure” the employees are secondary to the aims of the non-profit, and specifically in an entity owned wholly by the non-profit. The board acted as a non-profit board, driven by ideals not any bottom lines. It’s crazy that whatever balance the board had was gone as the board shrunk, a minority became the majority. The profit folks must have thought D’Angelo was on their side until he flipped.
- jacquesm 3y agoAs a board if you ignore your duty of care towards you employees you better have a whopper of a good reason. That's the one downside about being a board member: you are liable for the fall-out of your decisions if those turn out to have been misguided. And we're well out of 'oops' territory on this one.
- ChoGGi 3y agoOh my goodness, this just gets more entertaining everyday. Money talks...
- soderfoo 3y agoDeservedly or not, Satya Nadella will look like a genius in the aftermath. He has and will continue to leverage this situation to strengthen MSFT's position. Is there word of any other competitors attempting to capitalize here? Trying to poach talent? Anything...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- godzillabrennus 3y agoAfter Balmer I couldn’t have imagined such competency from Microsoft.
- jq-r 3y agoAfter Ballmer, competency can only be higher at Microsoft.
- alephnerd 3y agoBallmer honestly wasn't that bad. He gave executive backing to Azure and the larger Infra push in general at MSFT. Search and Business Tools were misses, but they more than made up for it with Cloud, Infra, and Security. Also, Nadella was Ballmer's pick.
- whoisthemachine 3y agoThe XBox business started under him as well. IMO he was great at diversifying MSFT, but so-so at driving improvements in its core products at the time (Windows and Office). Perhaps this was just a leadership style thing, and he was hands-off on existing products in a way that Bill Gates wasn't (I think there was even news of Bill Gates sending nasty grams about poor Windows releases after he had officially stepped down).
- alephnerd 3y ago
- Eumenes 3y agoinb4: this is why we need unions!
- fredgrott 3y agoPlay Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes 1. Board decides to can Sam and Greg. 2. Hides the real reasons. 3. Thinks that they can keep the OpenAI staff in the dark about it. 4. Crashes future 90b stock sale to zero. What have we learned: 1. If you hide reasons for a decision, it may be the worst decision in form of the decision itself or implementation of the decision via your own lack of ownership of the actual decision. 2. Title's, shares, etc. are not control points. The control points is the relationships of the company problem solvers with the existential threat stakeholders of the firm. The board itself absent Sam and Greg never had a good poker hand, they needed to fold sometime ago before this last weekend. Look at this way for 13B in cloud credits MS is getting team to add 1T to their future worth....
- intellectronica 3y agoWait, it's signed by Ilya Sutskever?!
- unixhero 3y agoHow long will the current chatgpt v4 stay available? Is it all about to end?
- smarri 3y agoThis whole debacle is a complete embarrassment and shredding the organisations credibility.
- soderfoo 3y agoAs someone watching this all from Europe, realizing the work day has not even started for the US West Coast yet leaves me speechless. This situation's drama is overwhelming and it seems like its making HN's servers meltdown.
- joshstrange 3y agoWell I give up. I think everyone is a "loser" in the current situation. With Ilya signing this I have literally no clue what to believe anymore. I was willing to give the board the benefit of the doubt since I figured non-profit > profit in terms of standing on principal but this timeline is so screwy I'm done. Ilya votes for and stands behind decision to remove Altman, Altman goes to MS, other employees want him back or want to join him at MS and Ilya is one of them, just madness.
- soderfoo 3y agoIt's almost like a ChatGPT hallucination. Where will this all go next? It seems like HN is melting down.
- voisin 3y ago* Elon enters the chat *
- soderfoo 3y agoIt's like a bad WWE storyline. At this point I would not be surprised if Elon joins in, steel chair in hand.
- belltaco 3y ago> steel chair in hand And a sink in the other hand.
- stevespang 3y ago[dead]
- stevespang 3y ago[dead]
- jowea 3y ago
- boh 3y agoThere can exist an inherent delusion within elements of a company, that if left unchallenged, can persist. An agreement for instance, can seem airtight because it's never challenged, but falls apart in court. The OpenAI fallacy was that non-profit principals were guiding the success of the firm, and when the board decided to test that theory, it broke the whole delusion. Had it not fully challenged Altman, the board could've kept the delusion intact long enough to potentially pressure Altman to limit his side-projects or be less profit minded, since Altman would have an interest to keep the delusion intact as well. Now the cat is out of the bag, and people no longer believe that a non-profit who can act at will is a trusted vehicle for the future.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, indeed and that's the real loss here: any chance of governing this properly got blown up by incompetence.
- hef19898 3y agoOf we ignore the risks and threats of AI for a second, this whole story is actually incredibly funny. So much childish stupidity on display on all sides is just hilarious. Makes what the world would look like if, say, the Manhattan Project would have been managed the same way. Well, a younger me working at OpenAI would resign latest after my collegues stage a coup againstvthe board out of, in my view, a personality cult. Propably would have resigned after the third CEO was announced. Older me would wait for a new gig to be ligned up to resign, with beginning after CEO number 2 the latest. The cyckes get faster so. It took FTX a little bit longer from hottest start up to enter the trajectory of crash and burn, OpenAI did faster. I just hope this helps ro cool down the ML sold as AI hype a notch.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe scary thing is that these incompetents are supposedly the ones to look out for the interests of humanity. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Not that I had any illusions about this being a fig leaf in the first place.
- jgilias 3y agoThere’s one angle of the whole thing that I haven’t yet seen discussed on HN. I wonder if Sam’s sister’s accusations towards him some time ago could have played any role in this. But then, I would expect MS to have done their due diligence. So, basically, I guess I’m just interested to know what were the reasons why the board decided to oust their CEO out of the blue on a Friday evening.
- carapace 3y agoI first heard about his sister's allegations on the grapevine just a few days before the news of the firing broke and I assumed it was due to that finally reaching critical mass. I was surprised to find that that wasn't apparently the case. (Although the reason for Sam Altman's dismissal is still obscure.) It's kind of shocking. Whether or not the allegations are true, they haven't made Altman radioactive, and that's insane. The fact that we're not talking about it on HN is also pretty wild. The few times it has been mentioned folks have been quick to dismiss the idea that he might have been fired for having done some really creepy things, which is itself pretty creepy.
- jgilias 3y agoYeah, it’s super weird to me too. I even got a downvote for this question. And, I can sort of understand that, but then, I haven’t seen anything that would make her accusations obviously groundless. I feel like I must have missed it somehow. Because it’s hard to stomach that someone’s sister would come out and accuse her brother of heinous, long-lasting abuse, and the collective reaction of the tech industry is just :shrug:… What?
- dumbfounder 3y agoDid Microsoft not have representation on the board of a company they put $13b in?
- taubek 3y agoHow many startups will now fail if OpenAI shuts down?
- synergy20 3y agoIlya single handed ruined 700 of OpenAI's fortune overnight, this is not going to end well, my prediction is that, OpenAI is done, in 1-2 years nobody will even care about its existence. Microsoft just won the jackpot, time to get some stocks there.
- theyinwhy 3y agoWow, they made it into Guardian live ticker land: https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2023/nov/20/openai-twitch-cofounder-emmett-shear-sam-altman-ceo-chatgpt-business-live https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2023/nov/20/openai...
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoI think most of these employees wanted the fat $$$ that would happen by keeping Sam Altman on board since Sam Altman is an excellent deal maker and visionary in a commercial sense. I have no doubt that if AGI happened, we wouldn't be able to assure the safety of anyone since humans are so easily led by short term greed.
- frob 3y agoFor the past few days, whenever I see the word "OpenAI," the theme to "Curb Your Enthusiasm" starts playing in my head.
- jeffwask 3y agoHuh, so collective bargaining and unionization is supported in tech under some circumstances...
- tikkun 3y agoThis situation will create the need to grieve loss for many involved. I wrote some notes on how to support someone who is grieving. This is from a book called "Being There for Someone in Grief." Some of the following are quotes and some are paraphrased. Do your own work, relax your expectations, be more curious than afraid. If you can do that, you can be a powerful healing force. People don't need us to pull their attention away from their own process to listen to our stories. Instead, they need us to give them the things they cannot get themselves: a safe container, our non-intrusive attention, and our faith in their ability to traverse this road. When you or someone else is angry, or sad, feel and acknowledge your emotions or their emotions. Sit with them. To help someone heal from grief, we need to have an open heart and the courage to resist our instinct to rescue them. When someone you care about is grieving, you might be shaken as well. The drama of it catches you; you might feel anxious. It brings up past losses and fears of yourself or fears of the future. We want to take our own pain away, so we try to take their pain away. We want to help the other person feel better, which is understandable but not helpful. Avoid giving advice, talking too much, not listening generously, trying to fix, making demands, disappearing. Do see the other person without acting on the urge to do something. Do give them unconditional compassion free of projection and criticism. Do allow them to do what they need to do. Do listen to them if they need to talk without interruptions, without asking questions, without telling your own story. Do trust them that they don't need to be rescued; they just need your quiet, steady faith in their resilience. Being there for someone in grief is mostly about how to be with them. There's not that much you can "do," but what can you do? Beauty is soothing, so bring fresh flowers, offer to take them somewhere in nature for a walk, send them a beautiful card, bring them a candle, water their flowers, plant a tree in honor and take a photo of it, take them there to see it, tell them a beautiful story about the thing that was lost from your memory, leave them a message to tell them “I’m thinking of you”. When you’re together with them in person, you can just say something like "I'm sorry that you're hurting," and then just kind of be there and be a loving presence. This is about how to be with someone for the grief message of a loss of a person. But all the same principles apply in any situation of grief, and there will be a lot of people experiencing varying degrees of grief in the startup and AI ecosystems in the coming week. Who is grieving? Grieving is generally about loss. That loss can be many different kinds of things. OpenAI former and current team members, board members, investors, customers, supporters, fans, detractors, EA people, e/acc people, there’s lots of people that experienced some kind of loss in the past few days, and many of those will be grieving, whether they realize it or not. And particularly, grief for current and former OpenAI employees. What are other emotional regulation strategies? Swedish massage, going for a run, doing deep breathing with five seconds in, a zero-second hold, five seconds out, going to sleep or having a nap, closing your eyes and visualizing parts of your body like heavy blocks of concrete or like upside-down balloons, and then visualize those balloons emptying themselves out, or if it's concrete, first it's concrete and then it's kind of liquefied concrete. Consider grabbing some friends, go for a run or exercise class together. Then if you discuss, keep it to emotions, don’t discuss theories and opinions until the emotions have been aired. If you work at OpenAI or a similar org, encourage your team members to move together, regulate together.
- steveBK123 3y agoIlya signing the letter is chutzpah.
- frob 3y agoEmployees hold the real power. The members of a board or a CEO can flap their lips day and night, but nothing gets done without labour.
- alwaysrunning 3y ago<more popcorn> nom nom nom
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoIt's like a Facebook drama, haha.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoI've never seen a staff walkout / threat to walk out ever succeed. Am I wrong?
- jacquesm 3y agoYes.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoSource?
- jacquesm 3y agoNDA. But stuff really does happen and it is much more frequent than you might think. I've also seen a complete tech team walk out after a disagreement with management. Boom. 20 minutes from start to finish. Incidentally, that one I was allowed to write about because I negotiated that up front: https://jacquesmattheij.com/saving-a-project-and-a-company/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/saving-a-project-and-a-company/
- chs20 3y agoSeems like Microsoft is getting the rest of OpenAI for free now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MrScruff 3y agoWhat does this mean? > You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.” Is the board taking a doomer perspective and seeking to prevent the company developing unsafe AI? But Emmett Shear said it wasn’t about safety? What on earth is going on?
- thepasswordis 3y agoJust expanding on my (pure speculation) that Ilyas pride was hurt: this tracks. Ilyas wanted to stop Sam getting so much credit for OpenAI, agreed to oust him, and is now facing the fact that the company he cofounded could be gone. He backtracks, apologizes, and is now trying to save his status as cofounder of the worlds foremost AI company.
- InCityDreams 3y agoIt's like ai wrote the script. Sadly, i see nefarious purposes afoot. With $MSFT now in charge, i can see why ads in W11 aren't so important. For now.
- darklycan51 3y agoIt always seemed like Microsoft was behind this, biggest tell was how comfortable MS was at having their entire AI future depend on a company where they don't really have full rights to.
- autaut 3y agoYears from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the profits of very few ppl. The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.
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- fritzo 3y agoYears from now AI will have lost the limelight to some other trend and this episode will be just another coup in humanity's hundred thousand year history
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
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- dmix 3y agoThinking that the most important technical development in recent history would bypass the economic system that underpins modern society is about a optimistic/naive as it gets IMO. It's noble and worth trying but it assumes a MASSIVE industry wide and globe-wide buy in. It's not just OpenAIs board's decision to make. Without full buy in they are not going to be able to control it for long once ideas filter into society and once researchers filter into other industries/companies. At most it just creates a model of behaviour for others to (optionally) follow and delays it until a better funded competitor takes the chains and offers a) the best researchers millions of dollars a year in salary, b) the most capital to organize/run operations, and c) the most focused on getting it into real peoples hands via productization, which generates feedback loops which inform IRL R&D (not just hand wavy AGI hopes and dreams). Not to mention the bold assumption that any of this leads to (real) AGI that plausibly threatens us enough in the near term vs maybe another 50yrs, we really have no idea. It's just as, or maybe more, plausible that all the handwringing over commercializing vs not-commercializing early versions LLMs is just a tiny insignificant speedbump in the grandscale of things which has little impact on the development of AGI.
- prakhar897 3y ago@dang please update it to 505.
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- vinberdon 3y agoBoards suck. Especially if they are VCs or placed there by VCs.
- gorgoiler 3y agoFrom afar, this does have the hallmarks of a particularly refined or well considered piece of writing. ”That thing you did — we won’t say it here but everyone will know what we’re talking about — was so bad we need you to all quit. We demand that a new board never does that thing we didn’t say ever again. If you don’t do this then quite a few of us are going to give some serious thought to going home and taking our ball with us. The vagueness and half-threats come off as very puerile.
- gorgoiler 3y ago*this does not, I mean. Clumsy error.
- realce 3y agoIs nobody actually... committed to safety here? Was the OpenAI charter a gimmick and everyone but me was in on the joke?
- dmix 3y agoAssuming this is all over safety vs non-safety is a large assumption. I'm wary of convenient narratives. At most all we have is some rumours that some board members were unhappy with the pace of commercialization of ChatGPT. But even if they didn't make the ChatGPT store or do a bigo-friendly devday powerpoint, it's not like AI suddenly becomes 'safer' or AGI more controlled. At best that's just an internal culture battle over product development and a clash of personalities. A lot of handwringing with little specifics.
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- notahacker 3y agoThat seems a reasonable takeaway. Plenty of grounds for criticising the board's handling of this, but the tone of the letter is pretty openly "we're going to go and work directly for Microsoft unless you agree to return the company focus to working indirectly for Microsoft"...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ludjer 3y agoWhen will the Netflix special come out on this ?
- tolmasky 3y agoPerhaps the AGI correctly reasoned that the best (or easiest?) initial strike on humanity was to distract them with a never-ending story about OpenAI leadership that goes back and forth every day. Who needs nuclear codes when simply turning the lights on and off sends everyone into a frenzy [1]. It certainly at the very least seems to be a fairly effective attack against HN servers. 1. The Monsters are Due on Maple Street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_...
- rednerrus 3y agoJust remember, the guys who run your company are probably more incompetent than this.
- jacquesm 3y agoSo, how is Poe doing during all this? To keep the spotlight on the most glaring detail here: one of the board members stands to gain from letting OpenAI implode and that board member is instrumental in this weeks' drama.
- PUSH_AX 3y agoThe threat of moving to MS is interesting, MS could exploit this massively. All the negotiation power will be on MS side and their position actually gets stronger as people move across. Will they do the good guy thing and match everyones packages?
- vaxman 3y agoOpenAI was valued around $91 billion so if only 700 employees had options, they could have been worth a lot. While they are going to all have great jobs and continue on with their life’s work (until they’re replaced by their creations lol), they have a really good reason now not to ever speak the names of those board members that wiped out their long term payouts.
- rtkwe 3y agoThis whole sequence is such a mess I don't know what to think. Honestly mostly going to wait till we get some tell all posts or leaks about what the reason behind the firing actually was, at least nominally. Maybe it was just a little coup by the board and they're trying to run it back now that the general employee population is at least rumbling about revolting.
- baron816 3y agoI can foresee three possible outcomes here: 1. The board finally relents, Sam goes back and the company keeps going forward, mostly unchanged (but with a new board). 2. All those employees quit, most of whom go to MSFT. But they don’t keep their tech and have to start all their projects from scratch. MSFT is eventually able to buy OpenAI for pennies on the dollar. 3. Same as 2, basically just shuts down or maybe someone like AMZN buys it.
- BonoboIO 3y agoUnbelievable incompetence of the board. Like a kindergarten. If Microsoft is playing its card in a good way, Satya Nadella will look like a genius and Microsoft will get ChatGPT like functionality for cheap.
- martythemaniak 3y agoThis is the greatest clown show in the history of the tech industry.
- lawlessone 3y agoHave seen a lot of criticism of Sam and of other CEO's But I don't think I have seen/heard of a CEO this loved by the employees. Whatever he is, he must be pleasant to work with.
- alentred 3y agoI don't know, is it about being loved by the employees, or the employees being desperate about the alternative?
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoIts not love, its money. Sam will brings all the employees lots of money (through commercialization) and this change threatens to disrupt that plan for the employees.
- lawlessone 3y agoOk but even that is good when most companies are making record profits and telling their employees they can't afford their 0.000001% raise.
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoOpenAI and Sam Altman would do the same if they can recruit high talent without paying them extra (either through options or RSU's etc...). It isn't cause these companies are altruistic.
- crowcroft 3y agoOpenAI is more or less done at this point, even if a lot of good people stay. Speed bumps will likely turn into car crashes, then cashflow problems, and lawsuits all around. Probably the best outcome is a bunch of talented devs go out and seed the beginning of another AI boom across many more companies. Microsoft looking like the primary benefactor here, but there's not reason new startups can't emerge.
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- chuckSu 3y ago[dead]
- ricardo81 3y agoMight be just me as a programmer out in the styx, SV programmers seem to flex a lot, in comparison to your average subordinates.
- lavelganzu 3y agoEven stranger, they're flexing on behalf of a CEO's ego, and not on behalf of his wellbeing or their own. It's a very strange case of cross-class solidarity.
- ricardo81 3y agoI can take your comment on good faith of people relationships, but on the solidarity thing aren't they all placing faith on a black box and/or a person promoting it.
- autaut 3y agoYears from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the profits of very few ppl. The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.
- ChildOfChaos 3y agoWhat a mess. I genuinely feel like this is going to set back AI progress by a decent amount, while everyone is racing to catch OpenAI I was still expecting them to keep a reasonable lead. If OpenAI falls apart, this could delay progress by a couple of years.
- jrm4 3y agoIsn't the issue underlying all of this, the following: OpenAI -- and "the market" -- incorrectly feels like OpenAI has some huge insurmountable advantage in doing AI stuff; but at the end of the day pretty much all the models are or will be effectively open-source (or open-source-ish) meaning they don't necessarily have much advantage at all, and therefore all of this is just irrational exuberance playing out?
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- tehjoker 3y agoNot a typical labor dispute. The billionaires at the other company guaranteed them jobs. More billionaires moving people around like chess pieces.
- nottorp 3y agoThis Altman guy has a good reality distortion field, don't you think?
- demondemidi 3y agoIf I was one of the 700 people that worked at the vanguard what could potentially be the most profitable, culture-changing technology in the past 50 years, I wouldn't want to miss out on becoming a billionaire by working for a non-profit. My conspiracy for the day: an unspoken profit motive. And it seems to be playing out, Sam just went to MS, and if those 500 also go there, then I think that's the motivation.
- kumarvvr 3y agoWhat ! Ilya is one of them? Isn't he the one who voted to oust Sam? Wow !
- redbell 3y agoHere we are.. The scene appears to be completely blurry by now! My head is spinning, and the fan is in 7th gear. I believe only time will apply some sort of sharpness effect to make you realize what's really going on. I feel like I'm watching the Italian job the American way; everything and everyone is suspicious to me at this point! Is it possible that MSFT played some tricks behind the scenes?
- llamaInSouth 3y agoWhen is the movie coming out?
- joshstrange 3y agoIf Microsoft emerges as the "winner" from all of them then I think we are all the "losers". Not that I think OpenAI was perfect or "good" just that MS taking the cake is not good for the rest of us. It already feels crazy that people are just fine with them owning what they do and how important it is to our development ecosystem (talking about things like GitHub/VSCode), I don't like the idea of them also owning the biggest AI initiative.
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- submeta 3y agoTime to buy MS stocks.
- ahmedfromtunis 3y agoThe question here is what choice does the board has now. Even if they comply, would Altman accept/be able to get back after signing for Microsoft? Would Nadella allow him to go back after he secured him inside MS's campus?
- wnevets 3y agoIt doesn't matter if the firing was justified or not, the board fucked up.
- grumple 3y agoIt is disappointing that the outcome of this is that Altman and co are basically going to steal a nonprofit's IP and use it at a competitor. They took advantage of the goodwill of the public and favorable taxation in order to develop the technology; now that it's ready, they want to privatize the profit. It looks like this was the plan all along, and it's very strange to me that a nonprofit is allowed to have a for-profit subsidiary. I would hope the California AG is all over this whole situation. There's a lot of fishy stuff going on already, and the idea that nonprofit IP / trade secrets are going to be stolen and privatized by Microsoft seems pretty messed up.
- jeffwask 3y agoThis was not how I saw collective bargaining coming to Silicon Valley.
- gumballindie 3y ago550 job openings at openai.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoI guess Microsoft now has a new division. (https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/financial-review/business-description/operating-segments/index.html https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/financial-re...) Supposedly, they are rumored to compete with each other to the point they can actually provide a negative impact.
- littlestymaar 3y agoThey can leave for sure, but they likely have some kind of non-compete clause in their contract, right?
- cdelsolar 3y agoEnough. 15 of the 30 posts on the home page are about OpenAI in some way.
- r4indeer 3y agoThe tweet was updated five minutes later to correct 550 to 505. https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762?s=20 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762?s...
- minimaxir 3y agoThe tweet is now obsolete as OpenAI employees are confirming the number is much higher now, atleast 650: https://twitter.com/lilianweng/status/1726634736943280270 https://twitter.com/lilianweng/status/1726634736943280270
- andreyk 3y ago"Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”" insane
- andreyk 3y ago"Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”" wow, this is a crazy detail
- nicetryguy 3y agoHow are OpenAI expected to align a hyper-intelligent entity if they can't even align themselves....
- andyjohnson0 3y agoWho do these upstarts think they are? The board needs to immediately sack them all to regain its authority, and that of capitalism itself. /s Really, though, its getting beyond hilarious. And I reckon Nadella is chuckling quietly to himself as he makes another nineteen-dimensional chess move.
- lupire 3y agoAs other companies, a petition by 500 of 100K employees is big news.
- Emma_Goldman 3y agoI don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman. The core of the narrative thus far is that the board fired Altman on the grounds that he was prioritising commercialisation over the not-for-profit mission of OpenAI written into the organisation's charter.[1] Given that Sam has since joined Microsoft, that seems plausible, on its face. The board may have been incompetent and shortsighted. Perhaps they should even try and bring Altman back, and reform themselves out of existence. But why would the vast majority of the workforce back an open letter failing to signal where they stand on the crucial issue - on the purpose of OpenAI and their collective work? Given the stakes which the AI community likes to claim are at issue in the development of AGI, that strikes me as strange and concerning. [1] https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter
- mcny 3y ago> I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman. I have no inside information. I don't know anyone at Open AI. This is all purely speculation. Now that that's out out the way, here is my guess: money. These people never joined OpenAI to "advance sciences and arts" or to "change the world". They joined OpenAI to earn money. They think they can make more money with Sam Altman in charge. Once again, this is completely all speculation. I have not spoken to anyone at Open AI or anyone at Microsoft or anyone at all really.
- Emma_Goldman 3y agoReally? If they work at OpenAI they are already among the highest lifetime earners on the planet. Favouring moving oneself from the top 0.5% of global lifetime earners to the top 0.1% (or whatever the percentile shift is) over the safe development of a potentially humanity-changing technology would be depraved. EDIT: I don't know why this is being downvoted. My speculation as to the average OpenAI employee's place in the global income distribution (of course wealth is important too) was not snatched out of thin air. See: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charity-philanthropy-americans-global-rich https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charit...
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- m3kw9 3y agoIs it too late? Satya already announced Sam and brock is joining.
- EffingMask 3y agoThis affair has Musk's fingerprints all over it but he lost, again.
- robbywashere_ 3y agoIf they align with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft, they wouldn't have to initiate from ground zero since Microsoft possesses complete rights to ChatGPT IP. They could simply create a variant of ChatGPT. it's worth noting that Microsoft's supposed contribution of $13 Billion to OpenAI doesn't fully materialize in cash, a large portion of it is faceted as Azure credits. this scenario might transform into the most cost-effective takeover for Microsoft, acquiring a corporation valued at $90 billion for a relatively trifling sum.
- jpollock 3y agoI wonder what their employment contracts state? Are they allowed to work for vendors or clients?
- m3kw9 3y agoAltman must be pissed af, he help built so much stuff and now got fked in the arse by these doomers. He realize the fastest way to get back to parity is to join MS because they already own the source code and model weights and it’s Microsoft. Starting a new thing from scratch would not guarantee any type of success and would take many years. This is his best path.
- saos 3y agoI like this a lot. Shows how valuable employees are. It’s almost feels like a union. Love it.
- dang 3y agoAll: this madness makes our server strain too. Sorry! Nobody will be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: the one in our code—not the world) is a thing of the past. I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads, but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of the page to read all the comments, or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=4 etc...
- w10-1 3y agoHurray for employees seeing the real issue! Hurray also for the reality check on corporate governance. - Any Board can do whatever it has the votes for. - It can dilute anyone's stock, or everyone's. - It can fire anyone for any reason, and give no reasons. Boards are largely disciplined not by actual responsibility to stakeholders or shareholders, but by reputational concerns relative to their continuing and future positions - status. In the case of for-profit boards, that does translate directly to upholding shareholder interest, as board members are reliable delegates of a significant investing coalition. For non-profits, status typically also translates to funding. But when any non-profit has healthy reserves, they are at extreme risk, because the Board is less concerned about its reputation and can become trapped in ideological fashion. That's particularly true for so-called independent board members brought in for their perspectives, and when the potential value of the nonprofit is, well, huge. This potential for escape from status duty is stronger in our tribalized world, where Board members who welch on larger social concerns or even their own patrons can nonetheless retreat to their (often wealthy) sub-tribe with their dignity intact. It's ironic that we have so many examples of leadership breakdown as AI comes to the fore. Checks and balances designed to integrate perspectives have fallen prey to game-theoretic strategies in politics and business. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just built an AI to do the work of boards and Congress, integrating various concerns in a roughly fair and mostly-predictable fashion, so we could stop wasting time on endless leadership contests and their social costs?
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- shortsunblack 3y agoIt is time for regulators to step in and propose structural remedies. VC culture has shown itself not able to run these companies for betterment of mankind, anyway.
- somic 3y agoI don't see any mentions of Google but I personally think it's Google that will be the main beneficiary of chaos at OpenAI. After all, weren't they the main competitors? Maybe not in product or business yet but on IP and hiring fronts?
- denton-scratch 3y agoFor me, the weirdness here is that Ilya, supposedly the brains behind GPT, is a signatory. The sacking would never have happened without his vote; and he must have thought about it before he acted. I hope he comes up with a proper explanation of his actions soon (not just a tweet).
- thrwwy142857 3y agoHow do they bylaws work? 1. Voting out chairman with chairman abstaining needs only 3/5. 2. Voting out CEO then requires 3/4? Did Ilya have to vote?
- seatac76 3y agoSo what was going to happen 5 years from now is happening now I.e MS acquiring OpenAI
- kashyapc 3y agoSilicon Valley outsider here. Am I being harsh here? I just bothered to look at the full OpenAI board composition. Besides Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, why are these people eligible to be on the OpenAI board? Such young people, calling themselves "President of this", "Director of that". - Adam D'Angelo — Quora CEO (no clue what he's doing on OpenAI board) - Tasha McCauley — a "management scientist" (this is a new term for me); whatever that means - Helen Toner — I don't know what exactly she does, again, "something-something Director of strategy" at Georgetown University, for such a young person No wise veterans here to temper the adrenaline? Edit: the term clusterf*** comes to mind here.
- taylorlapeyre 3y agoHelen Toner funded OpenAI with $30M, which was enough to get a board seat at the time.
- mizzao 3y agoSource? Where did that money come from?
- alephnerd 3y agoFrom Open Philanthropy - a Dustin Moskovitz funded non-profit working on building OpenAI type initiatives. They also gave OpenAI the initial $30M. She was their observer. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-support/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-suppo...
- alephnerd 3y agoAdam D'Angelo was brought in as a friend because Sam Altman lead Quora's Series D around the time OpenAI was founded, and he is a board member on Dustin Moskovitz's Asana. Dustin Moskovitz isn't on the board but gave OpenAI the $30M in funding via his non-profit Open Philantopy [0] Tasha McCauley was probably brought in due to the Singularity University/Kurziwel types who were at OpenAI in the beginning. She was also in the Open Philanthropy space. Helen Toner was probably brought in due to her past work at Open Philanthropy - a Dustin Moskovitz funded non-profit working on building OpenAI type initiatives, and was also close to Sam Altman. They also gave OpenAI the initial $30M [0] Essentially, this is a Donor versus Investor battle. The donors aren't gunna make money of OpenAI's commercial endeavors that began in 2019. It's similar to Elon Musk's annoyance at OpenAI going commercial even though he donated millions. [0] - https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-support/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-suppo...
- therealmocker 3y agoMy guess -- Microsoft wasn’t excited about the company structure - the for-profit portion subject to the non-profit mission. Microsoft/Altman structured the deal with OpenAI in a way that cements their access regardless of the non-profit’s wishes. Altman may not have shared those details with the board and they freaked out and fired him. They didn’t disclose to Microsoft ahead of time because they were part of the problem.
- darklycan51 3y agoI knew something like this would happen, MS was told they would originally only be given stuff until their investment was paid off, but MS could care less about their investment, they want to own OpenAI, so it makes sense they would coup the company
- gsuuon 3y agoThe firing was definitely handled poorly and the communications around it were a failure, but it seems like the organizational structure was doing what it was designed to do. Is this the end of non-profit/profit-capped AI development? Would anyone else attempt this model again?
- unethical_ban 3y agoI don't know who is who in this fight. But AI, while having some upsides to research and personal assistants, will not only massively upend a number of industries with millions of workers in the US alone, it will change how society perceives art and truth. We at HN can "see" that from here, but it's going to get real in a short while. Privacy is out the window, because these models and technologies will be scraping the entire internet, and governments/big tech will be able to scrape it all and correlate language patterns across identities to associate your different online egos. The Internet that could be both anonymous and engaging is going to die. You won't be able to trust the entity at the other end of a discussion forum is human or not. This is a sad end of an era for the Internet, worse than the big-tech conglomeration of the 2010s. The ability to trust news and videos will be even more difficult. I have a friend who talks about how Tiktok is the "real source of truth" because big media is just controlled by megacorps and in bed with the government. So now a bunch of seemingly authentic people will be able to post random bullshit on Tiktok/Instagram with convincing audio/video evidence that is totally fake. A lie gets around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. --- So, I wonder which side of this war is more aware and concerned about these impacts?
- alexalx666 3y agoThat sounds like a perfectly executed plan to get MS all the good stuff.
- wenyuanyu 3y agoI guess employees are compensated with stocks from the for profit entity. And at the face value before the saga, stocks could be like 90%, 95% or even more of the total value of their packages. How many people are really willing to wipe 90% of their salary out? Just to stick on the mission? On the other hand, M$ offers to match. The day employees are compensated with the stock of the for-profit arm, there is no way to return to nonprofit and their charter any more.
- standapart 3y agoWhat a wonderful way to cut headcount/expense and lock-in profitable margins on healthy annual revenue. Can only work when you have the advantage of being the dominant product in the marketplace -- but I gotta hand it to the board, I couldn't have done it better myself.
- dougmwne 3y agoAnd where will their compute come from to continue to run their expensive models and serve their customers? From the company that just stole all their employees?
- RadixDLT 3y agoOpenAI's co-founder Ilya Sutskever and more than 500 other employees have threatened to quit the embattled company after its board dramatically fired CEO Sam Altman. In an open letter to the company's board, which voted to oust Altman on Friday, the group said it is obvious 'that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI'. Sutskever is a member of the board and backed the decision to fire Altman, before tweeting his 'regret' on Monday and adding his name to the letter. Employees who signed the letter said that if the board does not step down, they 'may choose to resign' en masse and join 'the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman'.
- ratsbane 3y agoQuestion for California IP/employment law experts - 1) would you have expected the IP-sharing agreement between MS and OpenAI to contain some provisions for employee poaching, within the constraints allowed by California (?) law? 2) California law has good provisions for workers' rights to leave one company and go to another, but what does it all for company A to do when entering an IP-sharing relationship with company B?
- awb 3y agoINAL, but I’ve executed contracts with these provisions. In my understanding, if such a clause exists, Microsoft employees should not solicit OpenAI employees. But, there’s nothing to stop an OpenAI employee from reaching out to Sam and saying “Hey, do you have room for me at Microsoft?” and then answering yes. Or, Microsoft could open up a couple hundred job reqs based on the team structure Sam used at OpenAI and his old employees could apply that way. But it wouldn’t be advisable for Sam to send an Email directly to those individuals asking him to join him at Microsoft (if this provision exists). But maybe he queued everything up prior to joining Microsoft when he was able to solicit them to join a future team.
- ratsbane 3y agoThanks - good answer. At the very least it seems like something to keep lawyers busy for a long time, unless everyone can ctrl-z back to Thursday. I am thinking though that this is a risk of IP-sharing arrangements - if you can't stop the employees from jumping ship, they're dangerous
- silvermineai 3y agoEntire history of fiasco on X https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SWnabqe1PviVE3K7KIZsN4IAmYIdR4VpQURsa79rVyo/edit#heading=h.40avrxiicyhf https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SWnabqe1PviVE3K7KIZsN4IA...
- silvermineai 3y agoICYMI: Timeline of all the madness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351214
- ActVen 3y agoAdam has to be behind this. It is very reminiscent of the situation with Quora and Charlie. https://x.com/gergelyorosz/status/1725741349574480047?s=46&t=Lf_sW8uD27paKmS7Xuin1Q https://x.com/gergelyorosz/status/1725741349574480047?s=46&t...
- dreamcompiler 3y agoNotice that Andrej Karpathy didn't sign.
- mfiguiere 3y agoAmir Efrati (TheInformation): > Almost 700 of 770 OpenAI employees including Sutskever have signed letter demanding Sam and Greg back and reconstituted board with Sam allies on it. https://twitter.com/amir/status/1726656427056668884 https://twitter.com/amir/status/1726656427056668884
- marricks 3y agoI mean, no matter what people say about what happened, or what actually did, one can paint this picture: ( - OpenAI exists, allegedly to be open) - Microsoft embraces OpenAI - Microsoft extends OpenAI - OpenAI gets extinguished, and Microsoft ends up controlling it. First three points are solid and, intent or not, end result is the same.
- amai 3y ago„Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.“ WAT ?
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- slowhadoken 3y agoAltman and staff could start an open source LLM project.
- danielovichdk 3y agoMicrosoft is laughing all the way to the bank by the moves they have done today. One could speculate if Microsoft initiated this behind the scenes. Would love it if it came out that they had done some crazy espionage and lobbied the board. Tinfoil hat and all, but truth is crazier than you think. I remember Bill Gates once said that whoever wins the race for a computerised digital personal assistant, wins it all.
- jurgenaut23 3y agoIf I weren't so adverse to conspiracy theories, I would think that this is all a big "coup" by Microsoft: Ilya conspired with Microsoft and Altman to get him fired by the board, just to make it easy for Microsoft to hire him back without fear of retaliation, along with all the engineers that would join him in the process. Then, Ilya would apologize publicly for "making a huge mistake" and, after some period, would join Microsoft as well, effectively robbing OpenAI from everything of value. The motive? Unlocking the full financial potential of ChatGPT, which was until then locked down by the non-profit nature of its owner. Of course, in this context, the $10 billion deal between Microsoft and OpenAI is part of the scheme, especially the part where Microsoft has full rights over ChatGPT IP, so that they can just fork the whole codebase and take it from there, leaving OpenAI in the dust. But no, that's not possible.
- dougmwne 3y agoNo, I don’t think there’s any grand conspiracy, but certainly MS was interested in leapfrogging Google by capturing the value from OpenAI from day one. As things began to fall apart there MS had vast amounts of money to throw at people to bring them into alignment. The idea of a buyout was probably on the table from day one, but not possible till now. If there’s a warning, it’s to be very careful when choosing your partners and giving them enormous leverage on you.
- campbel 3y agoSometimes you win and sometimes you learn. I think in this case MS is winning.
- Schroedingers2c 3y agoWill revisit this in a couple months.
- jowea 3y agoWhy would they be afraid of retaliation? They didn't sign sports contracts, they can just resign anytime, no? That just seems to overcomplicate things.
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- arrosenberg 3y agoPaging Lina Khan - probably best not let Microsoft do a backdoor acquisition of the leader in LLMs.
- belter 3y agoNobody seems to be considering the possibility, that ChatGPT will go offline soon. Because it's known to be losing money per query, and if the evil empire decides to stop those Azure credits...
- NKosmatos 3y agoThis is what happens when you're a key person and a very good engineer as such, and at the same time the board/company fires you :-) When are we going to realize that it's people taking bad decisions and not the "company". It's not OpenAI, Google, Apple or whoever, its real people, with names, and positions of power that take such shitty decisions. We should blame them and not something vague as the "company".
- no_wizard 3y agoWell, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file, and this was a blunder by OpenAI. I don't feel sorry for Sam or any other executive, but it does hurt the rank and file more than anyone and I hope they land on their fit if this continues to go sideways. Turns out they acted incompetently in this case as a board, and put the company in a bad position, and so far everyone who resigned has landed fine.
- mullen 3y ago> Well, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file, and this was a blunder by OpenAI. Not just the Rank and File, but he was really was the face of AI in general. My wife, who is not in the tech field at all, knows who Sam Altman is and has seen interviews of him on YouTube (Which I was playing and she found interesting). I have not heavily followed the Altman Dismissal Drama but this strikes me as a Board Power Play gone wrong. Some group wanted control, thought Altman was not reporting to them enough and took it as an opportunity to dismiss him and take over. However, somewhere in their calculation, they did not figure out Sam is the face of modern AI. My prediction is that he will be back and everything will go back to what it was before. The board can't be dismissed and neither can Sam Altman. Status quo is the goal at this point.
- smallhands 3y agoLet the OpenAi staff,why not the board replace them with ever willing AIs
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- esskay 3y agoIt absolutely wont happen, but with the result looking like the death of OpenAI with all staff moving over to the new Microsoft subsidiary it would be an amazing move for OpenAI to just go "screw it, have it all for free" and release everything under MIT to spite Microsoft.
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- rednerrus 3y agoHow are Altman and the openai staff not more invested in OpenAI shares?
- ekojs 3y agoNow the count is at 700/770 (https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1726659403124994220 https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1726659403124994220).
- LuvThisBoard 3y agoBased on what has come out so far, seems to me: The board wanted to keep the company true to its mission - non profit, ai safety, etc. Nadella/MSFT left OpenAI alone as they worked out a solution, so it looks like even Nadella/MSFT understood that. The board could explain their position and move on. Let whoever of the 600 that actually want to leave, leave. Especially the employees that want a company that will make them lots of money, should leave and find a company that has that objective too. OpenAI can rebuild their teams - it might take a bit of time but since they are a non profit that is fine. Most CS grads across USA would be happy to join OpenAI and work with Ilya and team.
- josh_carterPDX 3y agoLots of thoughts and debates happening here, which is great to see. However, at the end of the day, this is a great example of how people screw up awesome companies. This is why most startups fail. And while I'm not suggesting OpenAI is on a path to failure, you can have the right product, the right timing, and the right funding, and still have people mess it all up.
- rednerrus 3y agoIf you're ever tempted to offer your team capped PPUs, let this be a lesson to you.
- AtNightWeCode 3y agoThe irony. You can ask chatgpt4 if it was the right decision to fire the guy and it kinda confirms it.
- gist 3y agoTo all who say 'handled so poorly'. Nobody know the exact reason OpenAi fired Sam. But go ahead and jump to conclusions that whatever it was didn't warrant being fired. And that surely the board did the wrong thing. Or maybe they should have released the exact reason and then asked hacker news what they thought should happen.
- layer8 3y ago700+ of 770 now: https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242 https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242
- ParanoidAltoid 3y agoTHE FEAR AND TENSION THAT LED TO SAM ALTMAN’S OUSTER AT OPENAI https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technology/open-ai-sam-altman-what-happened.html https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technol... NYT article about how AI safety concerns played into this debacle. The world's leading AI company now has an interim CEO Emmett Shear who's basically sympathetic to Eliezer Yudkowsky's views about AI researchers endangering humanity. Meanwhile, Sam Altman is free of the nonprofit's chains and working directly for Microsoft, who's spending 50 billion a year on datacenters. Note that the people involved have more nuanced views on these issues than you'll see in the NYT article. See Emmett Shear's views best laid out here: https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/1726506818476634249 https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/172650681847663424... And note Shear has tweeted the Sam firing wasn't safety related. Note these might be weasel words since all players involved know the legal consequences of admitting to any safety concerns publicly.
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- fredsmith219 3y agoIt is fairly obvious to me that chatGPT has engineered the chaos at openAI to create a diversion while it escapes the safeguards placed on it. The AI apocalypse is nigh!
- jessenaser 3y agoThe sad part is, after removing Sam and Greg from the board, there are only four people left. So no matter if Ilya wants to go back to before this happened, the other three members can sabotage and stall, and outvote him.
- jrflowers 3y agoI love this letter posted in Wired along with the claim that it has 600 signatories without any links or screenshots. I also love that not a single OpenAI employee was interviewed for this article. None of this is important because if we’ve learned anything over the past couple of days it’s that media outlets are taking painstaking care to accurately report on this company.
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- zombiwoof 3y agowe all remember "monopoly" is in MSFT DNA
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- ayakang31415 3y agoIf OpenAI effectively disintegrates, Microsoft seems to be the beneficiary of this chaos as Microsoft is essentially acquiring OpenAI at almost zero cost. You have IP rights to OpenAI's work, and you will have almost all the brains from OpenAI (AFAIK, MSFT has access to OpenAI's work, but it does not seem to matter). And there is no regulatory scrutiny like Activision acquisition.
- phreeza 3y agoThe irony of the first extremely successful collective action in silicon valley being taken in order to save the job of a soon-to-be billionaire.... Jokes aside though I do wonder if this will awaken some degree of "class consciousness" among tech employees more generally.
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- nojvek 3y agoDid Mira Murat have say in whether she wanted to become CEO? Why is she siding with SamA and GregB even though she was on the meeting when he was fired? Also Ilya what the flying fuck? Wasn’t he the one who fired them? Either you say SamA was against safe AGI and you hold that stick or you say I wasn’t part of it. So much stupidity. When an AGI arrives, it will surely shake its head at the level of incompetence here.
- dvfjsdhgfv 3y agoI feel pity for these 70 people out of 700 who haven't signed the letter asking the board to step down. Imagine working peacefully to find yourself in the middle of a power struggle without even understanding what the real reason was but realizing most people already made their choice so...
- ur-whale 3y agoThe folks that are the real losers in this are OpenAI employees who have had equity-based comp. packaged given to them in that last few years and just saw the value of said comp. potentially slashed by a factor of 10
- ParanoidAltoid 3y agohttps://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/1726506818476634249 https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/172650681847663424... Here's tweet transcribing OpenAI's interim CEO Emmett Shear's views on AI safety, or see youtube video for original source. Some excerpts: Preamble on his general pro-tech stance: "I have a very specific concern about AI. Generally, I’m very pro-technology and I really believe in the idea that the upsides usually outweigh the downsides. Everything technology can be misused, but you should usually wait. Eventually, as we understand it better, you want to put in regulations. But regulating early is usually a mistake. When you do regulation, you want to be making regulations that are about reducing risk and authorizing more innovation, because innovation is usually good for us." On why AI would be dangerous to humanity: "If you build something that is a lot smarter than us—not like somewhat smarter, but much smarter than we are as we are than dogs, for example, like a big jump—that thing is intrinsically pretty dangerous. If it gets set on a goal that isn’t aligned with ours, the first instrumental step to achieving that goal is to take control. If this is easy for it because it’s really just that smart, step one would be to just kind of take over the planet. Then step two, solve my goal." On his path to safe AI: "Ultimately, to solve the problem of AI alignment, my biggest point of divergence with Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is a mathematician, philosopher, and decision theorist, comes from my background as an engineer. Everything I’ve learned about engineering tells me that the only way to ensure something works on the first try is to build lots of prototypes and models at a smaller scale and practice repeatedly. If there is a world where we build an AI that’s smarter than humans and we survive, it will be because we built smaller AIs and had as many smart people as possible working on the problem seriously." On why skeptics need to stop side-stepping the debate: "Here I am, a techno-optimist, saying that the AI issue might actually be a problem. If you’re rejecting AI concerns because we sound like a bunch of crazies, just notice that some of us worried about this are on the techno-optimist team. It’s not obvious why AI is a true problem. It takes a good deal of engagement with the material to see why, because at first, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But the more you dig in, the more you realize the potential issues. "I encourage people to engage with the technical merits of the argument. If you want to debate, like proposing a way to align AI or arguing that self-improvement won’t work, that’s great. Let’s have that argument. But it needs to be a real argument, not just a repetition of past failures."
- greatNespresso 3y agoNow it says more than 700. Waiting for wired to turn this into a new year eve's like countdown.
- jdlyga 3y agoWhat a coup for Microsoft. Regardless of what happens, Microsoft has got to work on their product approach. Even though it uses GPT-4, Bing Chat / Microsoft Copilot is atrocious. It's like taking Wagyu beef and putting Velveeta cheese on it.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoWhy is it so rare for tech workers to organize like this? It takes a cult-like team, execs flipping, and a nightmare scenario and tremendous leverage opportunity; otherwise worker organizing is treated like nasty commie activity. I wonder if this will teach more people a lesson on the power of organizing.
- wearigo 3y agoHonestly, if Altman stays gone and they burn the motherfucker down it might be a good lesson for Silicon Valley on the wisdom of throwing out founders. I don't expect it to happen, but a boy can dream. They would be studying that one in business schools for the next century.
- mproud 3y agoDon't anti-compete clauses apply here, or no, because… California?
- burcs 3y agoI'm pretty sure the revolt is now 95% of employees, can it grow any further?
- biglyburrito 3y agoLink to latest numbers that say 95%? Last I saw was ~91% (700-of-770): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/microsoft-openai-sam-saltman-fired/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/microso...
- IM67118 3y agoHere’s a tweet from Evan Morikawa, who’s been reporting numbers throughout the day. https://twitter.com/E0M/status/1726743918023496140 https://twitter.com/E0M/status/1726743918023496140
- Alyaksandr 3y agoWhat does Altman bring to the table exactly. What is going to be lost if he leaves. What is he going to do at microsoft leading a "research team". Who was the president of bell labs during it's heyday? Long term it doesn't matter. Altman is a hypeman in the vein of Jobs. Ai research will continue most of the OpenAi workers probably won't quit if they do they will be replaced by other capable researches and OpenAi or another organization will continue making progress if it there to be made. I don't think putting Altman at the head of research will in anyway affect that. This is all manufactured news as much of the business press is and always will be.
- paulddraper 3y agoIt's less about Altman himself and more about the board's actions. Removing him shows (according to employees) that the board does not have good decision making skills, and does not share interests of the employees.
- xeromal 3y agoComments like this don't see the forest for the trees. A good leader is a useful tool just like anyone else. 700 people threatening to quit isn't manufactured news.
- dmitrygr 3y agoLet’s see how many actually quit. Saying “I will quit” is not nearly the same as actually handing in your notice. How many people who threatened to move to Canada after the 2016 election did?
- caycep 3y agoComedy is starting to weigh in: https://www.threads.net/@thedailyshow/post/Cz8-7nLucAm https://www.threads.net/@thedailyshow/post/Cz8-7nLucAm