Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return. The deadline has passed and mass resignations expected if a deal isn’t reached ASAP
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Pretty incredible incompetence all around if true.
From the board for not anticipating a backlash and caving immediately... from Microsoft for investing into an endeavor that is purportedly chartered as non-profit and governed by nobodies who can sink it on a whim. And having 0 hard influence on the direction despite a large ownership stake
Why bother with a non-profit model that is surreptitiously for profit? The whole structure of OpenAI is largely a facade at this point.
Just form a new for profit company and be done with it. Altman's direction for profit is fine, but shouldn't have been pursued under the loose premise of a non profit.
While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama. Why keep the baggage?
It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO. OpenAI has first mover advantage, and perhaps better talent, but not by an order of magnitude. There is no special sauce here.
Altman may be charismatic and well connected, but the hero worship put forward on here is really sad and misplaced.
> While OpenAI leads currently, there are so many competitors that are within striking distance without the drama.
It's hard to put into words, that do not seem contradictory: GPT-4 is barely good enough to provide tremendous value. For what I need, no other model is passing that bar, which makes them not slightly worse but entirely unusable. But again, it's not that GPT-4 is great, and I would most certainly go to whatever is better at the current price metrics in a heartbeat.
look at the backgrounds of those board members... cant find any evidence that any of them have experience with corporate politics. theyre in way over their heads.
> It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO.
This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results.
Ilja can follow Google's Bard by holding it back until they have countermodels trained to remove conflicts ("safety"), but this will not win them any compute contracts, nor keep them the existing GPU hours. It's only mass, not smarts. Ilja lost this one.
my question is: why not both? why not pursue the profit and use that to fuel the research into AGI. seems like a best of both worlds.
Really weird phrasing in this tweet. The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.”
Edit: an update to the verge article sheds some more light, but I still consider it very sus since it’s coming from the Altman camp and seems engineered to exert maximal pressure on the board. And the supposed deadline has passed and we haven’t heard any resignations announced
> Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.
"Missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign."
Says who? And did they resign?
Maybe they used the old Soviet Russia trick / good old KGB methods to seek out those who supported Altman. Now the board has a list of his backers - and they will slowly fire them one by one later. "Give me the man and I will give you the case against him".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_g...
I am just baffled for so many reasons.
Why is the board reversing course? They said they lost confidence in Altman - that’s true whether lots of people quit or not. So it was bullshit
Why did the board not foresee people quitting en masse? I’m sure some of it is loyalty to Sam and Greg but it’s also revolting at how they were suddenly fired
Why did the interim CEO not warn Ilya about the above? Sure it’s a promotion but her position is now jeopardized too. Methinks she’s not ready for the big leagues
Who picked this board anyway? I was surprised at how…young they all were. Older people have more life experience and tend not to do rash shit like this. Although the Quora CEO should’ve known better as well.
From what we can see, it looks like the majority of the reporting sources are Altman aligned. Look at how the follow up tweet from this reporter read - the board resigning and the governance structure changing is being called a "truce" when it's a capitulation.
We might get a better understanding of what actually happened here at some point in the future, but I would not currently assume anything we are seeing come out right now is the full truth of the matter.
> I’m sure some of it is loyalty to Sam and Greg but it’s also revolting at how they were suddenly fired
Funny how people only use words like revolting for sudden firings of famous tech celebrities like Sam with star power and fan bases. When tech companies suddenly fire ordinary people, management gets praised for being decisive, firing fast, not wasting their time on the wrong fit, cutting costs (in the case of public companies with bad numbers or in a bad economy), etc.
If it’s revolting to suddenly fire Sam*, it should be far more revolting when companies suddenly fire members of the rank and file, who have far less internal leverage, usually far less net worth, and far more difficulty with next career steps.
The tech industry (and US society generally) is quite hypocritical on this point.
* Greg wasn’t fired, just removed from the board, after which he chose to resign.
Some of those board picks make zero sense to me.
The board was likely stacked with people who were easily influenced by the big personalities and to check some marks (safety person, academic, demographic etc).
The latest update is that investors have been reporting that Sam Altman was talking to them about funding a new venture separate from OpenAI, together with Greg Brockman. This seems to paint the picture that the board was reacting to this news when dismissing Altman.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/18/earthquak...
"Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, must be sacked."
Reminds me of the story of Chinggis Khan's burial:
"It's also said that after the Khan was laid to rest in his unmarked grave, a thousand horsemen trampled over the area to obscure the grave's exact location. Afterward, those horsemen were killed. And then the soldiers who had killed the horsemen were also killed, all to keep the grave's location secret."
Sounds like a line from HGTTG
Who sacks the person who sacks?
Curious to see if turning something off and back on will work out for the OpenAI board like it does in IT generally.
reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return
That's a funny use of the word truce.
I guess the alternative is more like a war where Altman and Brockman form a new for profit company that kills OpenAI?
Truce for me, but not for thee.
These updates all seem to be coming from one side. Have they said anything at all?
There is no scenario here where Sam returns and OpenAI survives as a nonprofit. The board will be sacked.
I agree. The pretense that OpenAI is still an open or a nonprofit has been a farce for a while now, it is an aggressively for-profit, trying to be the next Google company, and everybody knows it.
> The board will be sacked.
How does sacking a board work in practice?
Mass resignations from whom, I wonder. Other researchers?
Presumably a significant amount of OpenAI employees are motivated by money, at least in some form.
The board just vaporised the tender offer, and likely much of their valuation. It’s hard to have confidence in that.
If you're an engineer at open ai, you just saw probably millions of dollars of personal wealth get potentially evaporated on friday. You're going to quit and go wherever Altman goes next.
People who joined OpenAI because the organizations they left were stuck self-sabotaging the way OpenAI's board just did (for the same reasons the board did it)
But, but... what company will that guy from Quora go on to ruin next, if he's kicked off the OpenAI board now?
Don't worry about him: failure is the surest sign of an impending incidence of "white man about to get another chance to not learn from his failures".
This does not solve the company's California AG problem.
Hey I know something about this! I just mailed my organization's RRF-1 a couple of days ago. The author of this post seems to be confused. My organization is on the same fiscal year as OpenAI, and our RRF-1 had to be mailed by November 15th. That explains the supposed "six month" delay. Second, if it's mailed on November 15th, it might not have even been received yet, let alone processed. This post feels like grasping at straws on the basic facts, setting aside the fact that it just doesn't make any sense to imagine a board member filling out the RRF-1 and going "oh wait, was there financial fraud?" the morning of November 15th. (That's ... not how the world works? Under CA law, any nonprofit with 2M of more in revenue has to undergo an audit, which is typically completed before filling out the 990, and the 990 is a pre-req for submitting the RRF-1. That's where you'd expect to catch this stuff, and the board's audit committee would certainly be involved in reviewing the results well in advance.)
This could all be easily covered over with a few billion dollars. This is just some guy that thinks too small.
The board has to stick to the charter. unfortunately employees there wants to align with the profit part when they know they can damn lot of money.. obviously they will be with Altman size.
I’m sure everyone at OpenAI thought they hit the winning lottery ticket and will walk away with tens of millions at minimum and the early employees with significantly more. When you vaporize all that for some ideological utopian motives I’m sure many were incredibly pissed and ready to follow Sam into his next venture. If you gonna sacrifice everything and work 60-100hr weeks then you better get your moneys worth.
Been reading up on the insight offered up on this site.
Seems like a lot of these board members have deep ties around various organizations, governmental bodies, etc. and that seems entirely normal and probable. However, prior to chatgpt and dalle we, the public , had only been allowed brief glimpses into the current state of AI (eg Look this robot can sound like a human and book a reservation for you at the restaurant -Google ; look this robot can help you consume media better -many). As a member of the public it went from “oh cool Star Trek idea, maybe we’ll see it one day with flying cars” to “holy crap, I just felt a spark of human connection with a chat program.”
Ultimately, this is what “the board is focused on trust and safety” mean right? As in safety is SV techno HR PR dribble for go slow, wear a helmet and seatbelt and elbow protectors , never go above 55, give everyone else the right of way because we are in the for the good humanity and we know what’s best. (vs the Altman style of: go fast, double dog dare smart podcast dude to make unprecedented historical decision to open source, be “wild” and let people / fate figure some of it out along the way.”)
The question of openai’s true purpose being a form of controlled opposition is of course based on my speculation but an honest question for the crowd here.
I don't buy the whole the board is for safety and Sam is pushing too fast argument. This is just classic politics and backstabbing unless there is some serious wrongdoing in the middle that left the board with no option to fire the CEO.
the board is the ones that fired him, why would they resign if Sam isn't back?
Because they won't have a company to "run the board for" anymore if Sam doesn't come back (since so many people have threatened to resign).
Could be too far gone with both those who left and those who remain.
Has anyone else notice how many techies are on Twitter but still badmouth Twitter?
This is just everyone swallowing the crap Sam Altman drops as truth.
I’d guess this sort of narcissist behavior is what got him canned to begin with. Good riddance.