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The Real Story Behind Sam Altman’s Firing From OpenAI
- dbuser99 2y agoSo sam was getting paid - possibly in egregious amounts while lying to congress?
- jeremyjh 2y agoVC huckster lies to the public, news at 11.
- Philpax 2y agohttps://archive.is/xP4N1 https://archive.is/xP4N1
- mellosouls 2y ago[dead]
- geremiiah 2y agoMeh, I personally don't care that much about OpenAI drama, anymore. By now it is clear that they do not hold any edge and that they won't be able to establish an AI monopoly, and that all I ever cared about.
- whiplash451 2y agoThat’s not what their revenue says, though, right?
- sdenton4 2y agoWe lose a dollar on every sale, but we'll make it up on volume!
- gdiamos 2y agoIt’s good for the community to move beyond drama and build
- moralestapia 2y ago[flagged]
- ajkjk 2y agoif you say something's provably false but you don't prove or even allude to a reason why someone should believe you, um, it's not very convincing
- moralestapia 2y agoYou're 100% right on that. But this should be enough for you, "This account is based on interviews with dozens of people who lived through one of the wildest business stories of all time"
- crazygringo 2y agoThat sounds like... they did extensive research and standard journalistic double-checking so it's probably correct? The WSJ isn't some random blog. Regardless of what you think of their opinion pages, their reporting is generally factually legit. So you seem to be suggesting that their story is, indeed, correct.
- moralestapia 2y agoGood, then I also did "extensive research and standard journalistic double-checking" or whatever.
- crazygringo 2y agoFantastic! You interviewed dozens of people directly involved? And corroborated everything independently at least once? Then please share your own version of events, we'd all love to read it! If you spent weeks doing all that research, I'm sure it was so others could learn?
- ajkjk 2y ago
- cowpig 2y agoFrom the outside it really seems like Peter Thiel was a brilliant kid who read Lord of the Rings and became obsessed with becoming the real world Sauron, manipulating weak-minded men in Silicon Valley into following the path of soulless corruption.
- croes 2y agoDid he read the end?
- rpmisms 2y agoYou can innovate that part away /s
- abenga 2y agoSkill issue. Easily overcome.
- generic92034 2y agoNot closely guarding the only means to destroy his source of power was such an obvious plot hole and oversight. ;)
- ipnon 2y agoOne of the strengths of the Chinese companies is they are more aligned on their goals as team members: make cutting edge LLMs and sell access. When you have all these competing interests you end up with internal strife. This faction wants to prevent the literal end of humanity, this faction wants to make the world a better place, this faction wants to curry favor with Washington apparatchiks. Nobody is really that interested in making money by inventing new algorithms. The result is frankly embarrassing drama for the whole world to indulge in. “One Company for All People” is a great weakness of American companies and is contributing to this economic downturn, and not just in tech. Corporate Universalism needs to go the way of history.
- justanotherjoe 2y agoChinese strength is that they have a manufacturing economy and oversupply on everything. They have a great incentive to quicken AI science, as it will lead to disillusionment, if not replacement, of the knowledge economy, in other words the US economy. I believe this to be the hidden motive and it's not about profit.
- transcriptase 2y agoThat, and state sponsored hacking groups and corporate moles sending everything they can back home.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoThis is old info. China is more than a manufacturing economy nowadays. It’s quickly surpassing the US.
- cowpig 2y agoWhat evidence are you basing this in? The way I see it, everything points to the opposite being true: US companies, by and large, are completely dominant in technology. Google seems to be winning the race and is exactly the "one company for all people" kind of place you're talking about. Academic studies have generally shown that diverse teams outperform monocultures.
- 2y ago
- Workaccount2 2y agoSo sam let the cat out of bag (chatgpt) behind the backs of "safety review" and the board. Probably why Google was caught flat footed and how ChatGPT became the household name. Dubious moral decision but an excellent business one. Perhaps the benefit of hindsight where ChatGPT didn't cause immediate societal collapse helps here.
- draw_down 2y agoI was with you until “immediate societal collapse”, what?
- jeremyjh 2y agoObviously safety is not a problem if the lack of it doesn't cause an immediate end to civilization. /s
- strogonoff 2y agoAside from becoming the opposite of the values their name suggests, there’s two main mistakes OpenAI made in my view: violate copyright when training, and rush to release the chatbot. Stealing original work is going to bite them legally (opening them to all sorts of lawsuits while killing their own ability to sue competitors piggy-backing off their model output, for example), and is a special case of them being generally shortsighted and passing on an opportunity to make a truly Apple- or Amazon-scale business by applying strategy and longer term thinking (even if someone else got to release an LLM chatbot before them, they could—as in, had the funds and the talent to—build something higher level, properly licensed, and much more difficult to commoditise). If this was the fault of Altman, it is understandable that certain people would want him out.
- john_texas 2y ago[dead]
- Terretta 2y ago> violate copyright when training If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright? When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation?
- awestroke 2y agoSam Altman is immune to consequences
- hnlmorg 2y agoThat tends to happen if you’re rich.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoThis is definitely the new US. Boy have my illusions been shattered. And then to see people here defending this new state of affairs. It's a different world we are living in now.
- hnlmorg 2y agoTo be honest I think this has been the case in every country for all time. What’s changed is that certain individuals don’t even try to hide privilege any more.
- Philpax 2y agoAlways has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy#United_States
- JCM9 2y agoPeople cared about the OpenAI drama when it looked like they might have some real edge and the future of AI depended on them. Now it’s clear the tech is cool but rapidly converging into a commodity with nobody having any edge that translates into a sustainable business model. In that reality they can drama all they want now, nobody really cares anymore.
- darioush 2y agoYes and the open source models + local inference are progressing rapidly. This whole API idea is kind of limited by the fact that you need to RT to a datacenter + trust someone with all your data. Imagine when OpenAI has their 23&me moment in 2050 and a judge rules all your queries since 2023 are for sale to the highest bidder.
- ptero 2y agoIt doesn't need to wait until 2050. The queries would be for sale as soon as they stop providing a competitive advantage.
- beeflet 2y agoEven worse for these LLM-as-a-service companies i that the utility of open source LLMs largely comes down to the customization: you can get a lot of utility by restricting token output, varying temperature, and lightly retraining them for specific applications. The use-cases for LLMs seem unexplored beyond basic chatbot stuff.
- techjamie 2y agoI'm surprised at how little their utility for turning unstructured data into structured data, even with some margin of error, is discussed. It doesn't even take an especially large model to accomplish it, either. I would think entire industries could reform around having an LLM as a first pass on data, with software and/or human error checking at significant cost reduction over previous strategies.
- patall 2y agoSo, why didn't the board tell the other executives (and employees) what Murati had told them. When it was them in the firing line, why didn't Ilya tell that story? They could have just fired Murati (based on the screenshots presented) and continued as before. Or what am I missing?
- siliconc0w 2y agoYeah I don't understand this either. Make a case or don't but keeping it incredibly vague, especially when so much money was on the line due to the secondary wasn't going to work.
- quantumwoke 2y agoSome of the early comments here almost read as astroturfing from friends of 'sama. This article provides interesting context to one of the most consequential SV events of the decade.
- tiahura 2y agoTLDR: In November 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired by the board—not because of AI safety fears or Effective Altruism, but due to concerns over his leadership, secrecy, and possibly misleading behavior. CTO Mira Murati and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever shared evidence of Altman’s actions, like skipping safety protocols and secretly controlling OpenAI’s startup fund. The board didn’t explain the firing well, and it backfired. Murati, who at first supported the board, turned on them when they wouldn’t give clear reasons. Nearly all OpenAI employees, including Murati and Sutskever, threatened to quit unless Altman came back. With the company on the brink of chaos, the board caved and he was reinstated days later.
- jackschultz 2y ago>They had banked on Murati calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board. I finally finished the 4th of Caro's books about LBJ, "The Passage of Power", largest part about how LBJ dealt with assassination. Over and over shows how LBJ made sure that nobody, meaning world leaders, citizens, others in government, and, relevant here, also those in the Kennedy administration would feel lost and want to resign. Caro made sure to note how this is a very difficult task and required LBJ to act differently than normal, but also how important it is to not have things go into disarray which easily happens. Side note: Astounding notes of how LBJ was able to get bills that weren't going to get through congress with Kennedy were pushed through and made possible by Johnson. Quote to end a chapter by Richard Russell, southern complete segregationist and racist, says "You know, we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but we can't Johnson." Other side, Caro makes certain however about how the coming issues of Vietnam show the darker side of LBJ and not get fully caught up in his stability of power and civil rights successes. Maybe these are all cases of those who want power are usually those who shouldn't have it.
- fulafel 2y agoTo save others the lookup- this is not talking about assassinations carried out by the administration abroad, but about the Kennedy assassination.
- epolanski 2y agoLiterally nothing gives me any trust in using and adopting tech from such a sociopath like Altman.
- mellosouls 2y agoFor anybody who followed the saga at the time, there's nothing revelatory here as implied by the title but the essay (an excerpt from a book) is a useful summary if you wanted one.
- rognjen 2y agohttps://archive.is/i3DHj https://archive.is/i3DHj
- togetheragainor 2y agoI’m even more confused now than before I read the article: - Sutskever and Murati compile evidence of Altman’s lies and manipulation to oust him. - Sutskever emails the evidence to the board and suggests they act on it. - The board fires Altman but refuses to explain why. - Murati demands the board explain why. - The board refuses, and Murati and Sutskever rebel against the board and petition with other employees to reinstate Altman. It all makes no sense. And why wouldn’t the board just explain their decision if Murati herself was imploring them to do so?
- Philpax 2y agoThe board did not plan or execute their ouster well, which forced Murati and Sutskever to coup their coup to maintain the stability of the company. The board and Sutskever were expecting the general support of the company, so they had no real backup plan or evidence ready that they could publicly release.
- togetheragainor 2y agoWhy couldn’t they release the evidence? At least some of it is here in the article, and it’s damaging to Sam but not particularly damaging to the company. If Murati demanded they release the evidence, why refuse?
- Philpax 2y agoMurati didn't demand they release the evidence, as far as I could tell. The board are describing as not wanting to throw Murati under the bus by stating the evidence came from her, which makes sense if their goal was to install her as the new CEO.
- togetheragainor 2y ago> [Murati] and the rest of the executive team gave the board a 30-minute deadline to explain why they fired Altman or resign—or else the executive team would quit en masse. > The board felt they couldn’t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altman’s management failings. Unclear whether she wanted it released internally or publicly, but this sounds like a demand to me.
- QuantumGood 2y agohttps://archive.is/20250329135312/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-real-story-behind-sam-altman-firing-from-openai-efd51a5d https://archive.is/20250329135312/https://www.wsj.com/tech/a...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoText-only, works where archive.is is blocked: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1BRU7s https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1BRU7s
- ec109685 2y agoWhy has safety taken such a back seat? Were the fears overblown back in 2022 or have model providers gotten better at fine tuning the worst away?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]