4 ms·

> We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D

• quotemstr 3y ago
  > Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news. It's only natural to confuse what is happening with what we wish to happen. After all, when we imagine something, aren't we undergoing a kind of experience? A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof. It's only human to do this. We all do.
  • nonethewiser 3y ago
    > A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof. Cognitive dissonance
    • veec_cas_tant 3y ago
      Or they read about the large cuts to Twitter’s valuation from banks and X itself?
  • ryzvonusef 3y ago
    It was funny reading Kara Swisher keeping saying twitter is dying and is toxic and what not, while STILL doing all her first announcements on twitter, and using twitter as a source. same with Ashlee Vance (the other journo reporting on this) and all the main players (Sam/Greg/Ilya/Mira/Satya/whoever) also make their first announcement on twitter. I don't know about the funding part of it, but there is no denying it, the news is still freshest on twitter. Twitter feels just as toxic for me as before, in fact I feel community notes has made it much better, imho. ____ In some related news, I finally got bluesky invite (I don't have invite codes yet or I would share here) and people there are complaining about... mastadon and how elitist it is... that was an eye opener. nice if you want some science-y updates but it's still lags behind twitter for news.
    • metabagel 3y ago
      I don’t use Twitter any more, other than occasionally following links there (which open in the browser, because I deleted the app). Discoverability on Mastodon is abysmal. It was too much work for me. I tend to get my news from Substack now.
      • ryzvonusef 3y ago
        interesting, substack doesn't sound like a platform for the freshest news, but for deep insights. Don't you feel out of date on substack? especially since things move so fast sometimes, like with this open-ai fiasco?
        • metabagel 3y ago
          Twitter is incredibly uncivil. I don’t have the stomach for it.
        • tayo42 3y ago
          Did being up to date really have an impact on your life? It's mostly just gossip.
          • ryzvonusef 3y ago
            I understand what you are saying, but sometimes, news like this is perhaps the only excitement in our otherwise dull lives.
    • hurryer 3y ago
      Skilled operators say what sounds most virtuous and do what benefits most. Especially when these two things are not the same.
    • hadlock 3y ago
      Twitter isn't dying, but it hasn't grown measurably since 2015. Still sitting at about 300m active users.
    • 3y ago
• seydor 3y ago
  Microsoft said they are OK with Sam returning to openAI. There are probbaly legal reasons why they prefer things to go back as it were (Thank you for calling Twitter Twitter)
  • AmericanOP 3y ago
    The website is twitter.com. Why call it something else?
    • alex_young 3y ago
      Also, x.com redirects to Twitter.com. Seems like they want us to say Twitter.
      • behnamoh 3y ago
        saying “to tweet” is definitely better than saying “to xeet”
        • asimovfan 3y ago
          Xeet is super funny, hopefully takes over.
          • behnamoh 3y ago
            share it on Xitter
          • grumpyprole 3y ago
            Or xcreet?
        • wise_young_man 3y ago
          Maybe it’s a cross post.
    • labster 3y ago
      Exactly right, fellow YCombinator News commenter!
• jatins 3y ago
  Microsoft's role remains same as it was on Thursday. Minor (49%?) shareholder and keeps access to models and IP IMO Kevin tweeting that MS will hire and match comp of all OpenAI employees was amazing negotiation tactic because that meant employees could sign the petition without worrying about their jobs/visas
  • ryzvonusef 3y ago
    but no board seat? how do they prevent a rehash of this in the future and how do they safeguard their investment? Really curious.
    • protocolture 3y ago
      OpenAI is an airgapped test lab for Microsoft. They dont want critical exposure to the downside risk of AI research, just the benefits in terms of IP. Sam and Greg probably offer enough stability for them to continue this way.
      • _jab 3y ago
        Sam and Greg don't appear to be getting their board seats back.
        • protocolture 3y ago
          They dont need them. If they get fired, they can go nuclear on the board again.
      • happosai 3y ago
        It makes sense to airgap Generative AI while courts ponder wether copyright fair use applies or not. Research is clearly allowed fair use, and let OpenAI experiment with commercialization until it is all clear waters.
        • astrange 3y ago
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  > So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults? Altman was trying to remove one of the board members before he was forced out. Looks like he got his way in the end, but I'm going to call Altman the primary instigator because of that. His side was also the "we'll nuke the company unless you resign" side.
  • theamk 3y ago
    His side was also "700 regular employees support this", which is pretty unusual as most people don't care about their CEO at all. I am not related to OpenAI at all, but given the choice of "favorite of all employees" vs "fire people with no warning then refuse to give explanation why even under pressure" I know which side I root for.
    • campbel 3y ago
      The 700 employees also have significant financial incentive to want Altman to stay. If he moved to a competitor all the shine would follow. They want the pay-day (I don't blame them), but take with a grain of salt what the employees want in this case.
    • xiwenc 3y ago
      No idea what these 700 employees were thinking. They probably had little knowledge of what truly went down other than “my CEO was fired unfairly” and rushed to the rescue. I think the board should have been more transparent on why they made the decision to fire Sam. Or perhaps these employees only cared about their AI work and money? The foundation would be perceived as the culprit against them. Really sad there’s no clarity from the old board disclosed. Hope one day we will know.
      • 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
        I wonder how much more transparent they can really be. I know that when firing a "regular" employee, you basically never tell everyone all the details for legal CYA reasons. When your firing someone worth half a billion dollars, I expect the legal fears are magnified.
• Barrin92 3y ago
  The explanation for point 1 is point 3. If the people involved were not terminally online and felt the need to share every single one of their immediate thoughts with the public they could have likely settled this behind closed doors, where this kind of stuff belongs. It's not actually news, it's entertainment and self-aggrandizement by everyone involved including the audience.
  • 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
    Interesting that the board were repeatedly criticized for "not being adults", and yet they were also the only party not live-tweeting everything... Seems like there's no way to win with Twitter. You may not be interested in Twitter, but Twitter is interested in you.
    • behnamoh 3y ago
      the board didn’t have to tweet. their ridiculous actions spoke for itself.
      • angryasian 3y ago
        we still don't know what Altman has actually been hiding, so to say it was ridiculous ... is ridiculous itself.
        • behnamoh 3y ago
          the board’s actions were ridiculous regardless of Sam’s. sell oai to anthropic? were they out of their minds?
          • 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
            From the perspective of upholding the charter https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter and preventing an AI race -- seems potentially sensible
    • 3y ago
• petesergeant 3y ago
  If there’s been one constant here, it’s been people who actually know Tonrer expressing deep support for her experience, intelligence, and ethics, so it’s interesting to me that she seems to be getting the boot.
  • causalmodels 3y ago
    Fiascos like this display neither experience nor intelligence. This whole saga was a colossal failure on the part of the previous board.
  • dmix 3y ago
    Add delusions of grandeur to that list thinking she can pursue her ideological will by winning over 3 board members while losing 90% of the company staff. She was fighting an idelogical battle that needs full industry buy in, legitimate or not that's not how you win people over. If she's truely a rationalist as she claims then a rationalist would be realistic understanding that if your engineers can just leave and do it somewhere else tomorrow you aren't making progress. Taking on the full might of US capitalism via winning over the fringe half of a non profit board is not the best strategy. At best it was desperate and naive.
    • astrange 3y ago
      This is pretty good evidence she's a rationalist; rationalism means a religious devotion to a specific kind of logical thinking that never works in real life because you can't calculate the probability a result if you didn't know it could happen in the first place. Traditional response to this happening is to say something about your "priors" being wrong instead of taking responsibility.
  • tsimionescu 3y ago
    If there is one clear thing, it's that no one on that board should be allowed anywhere near another board for any non-clown company. The level of incompetence in how they handled this whole thing was extraordinary. The fact that Adam D'Angelo is still on the new board apparently is much more baffling than the fact that Tonrer or Ilya are not.
• happosai 3y ago
  About 3) What is the benefit of learning about this kind of drama minute-by-minute, compared to reading it a few hours later on hacker news or next day on wall street journal? Personally I found twitter very bad for my productivity, a lot of focus destroyed just to know "what is happening" when there was neglible drawbacks of finding about news events a few hours later.
  • willdr 3y ago
    I have muted any mention of Open AI, Altman, Emmet and Satya from my Twitter feed for the past five days. It's a far better experience.
• kumarvvr 3y ago
  Satya comes out great, making the absolute best of a given shitty situation, with a high stake of 10 B USD. Microsoft is showing to investors that it is going to be an AI company, one way or the other. Microsoft still has access to everything OpenAI does. Microsoft has its friend, Sam, at the helm of OpenAI and with a more tighter grip on the company than ever. Its still a win for Microsoft.
  • dacryn 3y ago
    Satya comes out as evil imho, and I wonder how much orchestration there was going on behind the scenes. Microsoft is showing that it is still able to capture important scale ups and 'embrace' them, whilst also acting as if they have the moral high ground, but in reality are doing research with a high governance errors and potential legal problems away from their premises. and THAT is why stakeholders like him.
  • nabla9 3y ago
    Satya just played the hand he had. The hand he had was excellent, he had already won. MS already had perceptual license, people working on GPT and Sam Altman on his corner. The one thing in Microsoft has stayed constant from Gates to Ballmer to Satya: you should never, ever form a close alliance with MS. They know how to screw alliance partners. i4i, Windows RT partners, Windows Phone Partners, Nokia, HW partners in Surface. Even Steve Jobs was burned few times.
• blackoil 3y ago
  > So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults? Whole charade was by GPT5 to understand the position of person sitting next to red button and secondary to stress test Hacker News.
• _boffin_ 3y ago
  Larry Summers? like the Larry Summers?
  • Sai_ 3y ago
    yeah, the guy has a knack for being in/invited to places.
• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates This has been my single strongest takeaway from this saga: Twitter remains the centre of controversy. When shit hit the fan, Sam and Satya and Swisher took to Twitter. Not Threads. Not Bluesy. Twitter. (X.)
  • ssnistfajen 3y ago
    Bluesky still has gated signups at this point so I don't think it will ever be a viable alternative. Threads had a rushed rollout which resulted in major feature gaps that disincentivized users from doing anything beyond creating their profiles. Notable figures and organizations have little reason to fully migrate off Twitter unless Musk irreversibly breaks the site and even he is not stupid enough to do that (yet?). So with most of its content creators still in place, Twitter has no risk of following the path of Digg.
• Racing0461 3y ago
  > 2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this? This outcome WAS microsoft's role in all this. Satya offering sam a ceo like position to create a competing product was leverage for this outcome.
• deleted 3y ago
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