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Why can't someone ask what happened in Ilya's mind. Firing Sam and then signing the solidarity letter of Sam to leave OpenAI if was fired. Other than that, all other information seems kind of just going over the surface.
>what happened in Ilya's mind

I thought Ronan Farrow's investigate essay answered that pretty satisfactorily? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

Part of the counter was Microsoft was going to try and hire everyone individually, compensating for the lost stock appreciation, without the org itself, if they went through with maintaining the firing. I think that could have been much harder to pull off, but maybe they made them believe it was an inevitable outcome.
Yes, that, please! I also never understood why the board resigned after ousting Sam...
Obviously OpenAI betrayed their stated mandate by going to the largely closed-source API-access business model, which is the one that Anthropic, Google, and xAI also adopted, i.e. the high-margin hosted model businesses, while DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Baidu/ERNIE, and Tencent/Hunyuan are breaking that model by releasing various open weight models.

I think the Chinese labs have a fundamentally different viewpoint: they’re building infrastructure, and looking at it more like how a US corporation might like having some of its employees making core contributions to compiler ecosystems like LLVM/clang and so on. The payoff is down the road, partially reputational, but also having a great compiler is good for everyone in the computational business world. The rentier-finance capitalist instead wants to privatize the compiler and extract rents for access.

The thing about infrastructure is this: you don’t get a direct financial return on investment in infrastructure (think roads, which make other economic activity possible) unless you have some ridiculously corrupt system controlled by rent-collectors (which is how the US electricity grid and fiber optic backbone works). That’s all the major US LLM providers are doing: trying to collect rents on systems that were built using the global human knowledge base as inputs.

At the very least OpenAI should be releasing their older models on a steady timetable. Sure it might reduce some revenue streams but it would be good for their reputation.

>So many people were trying to sign the petition at once that it actually crashed Google Docs

I still wonder how much peer pressure was behind that. Like, what if you think Sam is a scumbag and you're glad he's gone, but people are waving this petition in your face. What would you do? It would be really bad for you if the emperor returned and you were one of the few who didn't sign it.

Also, going by this video, the first order of business for an AGI should be finding a cure for hair loss.

Nioxin shampoo generally works.
what's wild is they accidentally solved it — pretraining IS unsupervised learning at scale, RLHF IS reinforcement learning. they just didnt know the recipe yet
pretraining isn't unsupervised, it is self-supervised - meaning it is moderately more scale limited.
I remember when computer magazines were aimed at programmers and had code listings in them.

Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was insider baseball of computer companies.

I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or Deborah...?

I remember when wired changed editors. After Chris Anderson left it became "gq but we talk about iPhones"
I dunno man, there are two "tech" industry worlds and the one you and I -- hacker types -- think of as "tech" is not what the rest of the world means. They mean the other one, which has almost nothing to do with the actual technology and instead everything to do with the absolutely apeshit amount of money, power, influence and intrigue that the technology enabled.

This was a very large apeshit $$ amount back in IBM vs Microsoft but the scale of it now in the era of e.g. OpenAI etc is beyond imagination.

There's a whole generation of people whose association with the engineering/technology side of things only happened because of their interest in the other side of things.

I too miss old Byte magazine days.

Pardon the almost 50 year old nostalgia, but I got so much out of manually typing in code from old BYTE Magazine and other articles.
I don't think it would have killed openai. It would have fixed it.
The winners get to write history.
As far as Brockman account of the past goes, there's also his personal diary which was made public as a part of that lawsuit by Musk. Includes for example the line: "Financially what will take me to $1B?". BTW, if you don't know, Musk lost it because he filed too late, lol.
If his entire personal diary got exposed and that's the worst that's in it, good for him.
Tres Comas!
I just don’t understand why a non-profit was allowed to do this. Does this not set a precedent that non-profit doesn’t actually mean anything? You can just use a favorable structure until it’s time to enrich yourself.
I think it would be helpful for you to clarify which part of the chain you found objectionable:

- in 2015, OpenAI was founded as a Delaware nonprofit

- in 2017, OpenAI discovered the scaling laws and realized they needed far more compute (and thus money) than they had initially anticipated

- that discovery precipitated a series of negotiations between the founders on how to restructure OpenAI to raise more money for compute, ultimately resulting in Musk’s departure when the other founders would not give him control

- in 2018, OpenAI attempted to dramatically increase its fundraising despite Elon ending his contributions, but raised only $50M of its $100M goal

- in 2019, OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary in order to attract funding from commercial entities

- the nonprofit hired an independent assessor to value its IP, and then transferred that IP to the for-profit for fair value (around $60 million in 2019)

- the OpenAI nonprofit received a right to 100x capped return on its IP investment, or $6B, once the for-profit began making a profit. The nonprofit also received the right to the residual profit after all future investors reached their caps

- in 2019, OpenAI’s capped-profit received $1B in investment from Microsoft. OpenAI later received $2B from Microsoft in 2021 and $10B in 2023 as compute scaling continued

- Microsoft received a cap of 20x on its $1B investment, and 6x on its $2B and $10B investments, for a total of $92B target redemption

- in 2025, OpenAI’s for-profit entity recapitalized from a capped-profit entity with residuals flowing to the nonprofit to a traditional public benefit corporation with traditional equity

- in exchange for the residual (and 100x profit cap on the original $60M transfer) the nonprofit received a 26% equity stake in the for-profit. That stake is currently valued at around $200B

All of the above is from the record in Musk v. Altman, thanks to which we now have all the details. The upshot for the nonprofit is that it transferred IP worth around $60M in 2019 for rights to $6B in future profit, and then ended up with $200B in equity after the recapitalization. I see a lot of people in this thread assuming that the nonprofit no longer exists, which is not true.

There's a lot of things these days that you can't do that are being done.
Non profits have always been able to have for profit subsidiaries, owned by the non profit.
Most startups don't actually make profits and nonprofits can't give equity so it's not really a favorable structure.
Most nonprofits don’t have a mission that would benefit from a transition or a trillion dollar product to sell. There would be no real way to profit they wanted to.
This case was the first of its kind and it was never tested if OpenAI breached their charitable mission and the case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations.

Other than researchers, nobody from big tech would ever see themselves wanting to work at a charity / non-profit. The moment the VCs came into the picture then all the grifters poured in and AGI meant IPO.

> You can just use a favorable structure until it’s time to enrich yourself.

Maybe that diary was made out of teflon.

Nonprofit doesn't mean anything, since people can just route the profits into salaries. It's just another legacy regulation that may have once once had a societally-constructive purpose that wealthy people just use as one of the array of financial tools to help implement their latest scams. IMO, here are no legitimate nonprofits.

Western countries have been utterly strangled by nonprofits. Governments fund them with tax money in order to lobby themselves for legislation that financially benefits individuals in government and their donors. Obama even expanded the rules in the US to allow the government to unconstitutionally fund religious groups to accomplish functions that belong in government.

They should all be either reformed so that their internal bylaws and compensation are strictly regulated or probably preferably, they should simply be destroyed. If you only pay taxes on your profits (and we get rid of legal vehicles to hide profits) and your employees are obligated to pay taxes on their incomes, there's no need for a nonprofit status. If nonprofits want to engage in business (religions included), let them pay taxes. If they engage in charity, they won't have anything to tax.

It should not surprise you to learn that Greg Brockman is a Trumper and major donor.

It should also not surprise you that the Epstein files have not been released.

Everything is possible and not possible in a corrupted system.

building products on top of their api makes these drama weekends terrifying. really makes you realize how fragile your whole stack is when a board decides to act up.
Or when sociopaths are in charge, and the board tries to fix that, but other sociopaths work together to overrule the board. (And wtf is that anyway, overriding the board? Why do we even have boards of directors if rich, powerful assholes can just do whatever they want?)
So firing a grifter means it would kill the company? Doesn't that mean the company is grifting? If no one else can possibly lead the supposedly the most important company, with billions/trillions (?) of so called value, do you have a good company and product?

Or do I forget that this guy sleeps with an Ayn Rand doll tucked under his arms?

Point of order: Anthropic is the most important AI company now.
not sure why but this episode feels v boring perhaps because he didn't share anything unexpected / unknown
It’s a matter of fact that OpenAI betrayed its origin.
Unfortunately they survived, not going to spend time with this.

From my point of view they are yet another big tech bros company.

Not feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned in the description?

> Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure

What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

isn't this the friend of scam altman? who cares of what he has to say?
If only we should have been so lucky.
Thankful for the mention of "AGI" in the first lines as I can bail out from reading the rest.

Whatever AGI is, it "AGI" is not glueing a load of text prediction machines together.

too bad, eh
Sky net from future protected itself.
Does everyone at OpenAI vocal fry like that?
Its really telling the example of personal AI/AGI given was booking tickets to a show.
If anyone else doesn't want to listen to the whole thing: https://apecast.app/podcast/the-knowledge-project/episode/op...