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Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by bmitc on Saturday November 18, 2023 @04:18PM (#38324568)
> They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two camps and have let Sam and Greg go angry and seeking retribution.

Given the language in the press release, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Sam Altman, and not the board, blindsided everyone? It was apparently his actions and no one else's that led to the consequence handed out by the board.

> Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.

From all current accounts, doesn't that seem like what Altman and his crew were already trying to do and was the reason for the dismissal in the first place?

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by calf on Saturday November 18, 2023 @05:44PM (#38325480)
I wonder if there's a specific term or saying for that, maybe "projection" or "self-victimization" but not quite: when one person biasedly frames that other people were responsible for a bad thing, when it is they yourself that were doing the very thing in the first place. Maybe "hypocrisy"?
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by bmitc on Saturday November 18, 2023 @05:46PM (#38325503)
Probably a little of all of that all bundled up together under the umbrella of cult of personality.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by Clubber on Saturday November 18, 2023 @06:01PM (#38325675)
Lack of accountability. Inability for self reflection.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by GCA10 on Saturday November 18, 2023 @05:50PM (#38325539)
The only appropriate target for Microsoft's anger would be its own deal negotiators.

OpenAI's dual identity as a nonprofit/for-profit business was very well known. And the concentration of power in the nonprofit side was also very well known. From the media coverage of Microsoft's investments, it sounds as if MSFT prioritized getting lots of business for its Azure cloud service -- and didn't prioritize getting a board seat or even an observer's chair.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Saturday November 18, 2023 @09:54PM (#38328134)
Sure, but Microsoft could also walk away today and leave OpenAI high and dry. They hold ALL the power here.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by fakedang on Saturday November 18, 2023 @11:45PM (#38329089)
If Open AI were to be in true crisis, I'm sure Amazon will step in to invest, for exclusive access to GPT4 (in spite of their Anthropic investment). That would put Azure in a bad place. So not exactly "All" the power.

Not to mention, after that, MSFT might be left bagholding onto a bunch of unused compute.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @01:29AM (#38329742)
Sam and Greg have already said they’re starting an OpenAI competitor, and at least 3 senior engineers have jumped ship already. More are expected tonight. Microsoft would just back them as well, then take their time playing kingmaker in choosing the winner.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by fakedang on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:21AM (#38330051)
That's true, but Sutskever and Co still have the head start. On the models, the training data, the GPT4 licenses, etc. Their Achilles heel is the compute which Microsoft will pull out. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia may sell their Open AI stakes at a discount, but I'm sure either Google or Amazon will snap it up.

All Sam and Greg really have is the promise of building a successful competitor, with a big backing from Microsoft and Softbank, while OpenAI is the orphan child with the huge estate. Microsoft isn't exactly the kingmaker here.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by peyton on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:26AM (#38330083)
It doesn’t sound like Sutskever is running anything. OpenAI reportedly put out a memo saying they’re trying to get Sam and Greg back: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-optimistic-it...
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by fakedang on Sunday November 19, 2023 @04:28AM (#38330847)
Sutskever built the models behind GPT4, if I reckon correctly (all credit to the team, but he's the focal point behind expanding on Google transformers). I don't see Sam and Greg working with him under the same roof after this fiasco, since he voted them out (he could have been the tiemaker vote).
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by HarHarVeryFunny on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:21PM (#38336667)
OpenAI leadership (board, CEO) didn't say that ... your link said their "Chief Strategy Officer" Jason Kwon said it.

Most likely outcome here does seem to be that Altman/Brockman come back, Sutskever leaves and joins Google, and OpenAI becomes for all intensive purposes a commercial endeavor, with Microsoft wielding a lot more clout over them (starting with one or more board seats).

Big winner in this scenario would be Google.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @07:42PM (#38340546)
Sam just posted a selfie wearing an OpenAI guest badge at the SF offices. He's back there for some sort of negotiations.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by dragonwriter on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:02AM (#38329226)
Microsoft terminating the agreement by which they supply compute to OpenAI and OpenAI licenses technology to them would be an existential risk to OpenAI (though other competing cloud providers might step in and fill the gap Microsoft created under similar terms), but -- whether or not OpenAI ended up somewhere else immediately (the tech eventually would, even if OpenAI failed completely and was dissolved) Microsoft would go from the best positioned enterprise AI cloud provider to very far behind overnight.

And while that might hurt OpenAI as an institution more than it hurts Microsoft as an institution, the effect on Microsoft's top decision-makers personally vs. OpenAI's top decisionmakers seems likely to be the other way around.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:12AM (#38329287)
Not if they invested in Sam’s new startup, under agreeable profit-focused terms this time, and all the OpenAI talent (minus Ilya) followed.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by dragonwriter on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:19AM (#38329334)
At best, that might enable them to eventually come back, once new products are built from scratch, but that takes non-zero time.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @01:24AM (#38329722)
Non-zero time, but not a lot either. Main hangup would be acquiring data for training, as their engineers would remember the parameters for GPT-4 and Microsoft would provide the GPUs. But Microsoft with access to Bing and all its other services ought to be able to help here too.

Amateurs on hugging face are able to match OpenAI in impressively short time. The actual former-OpenAI engineers with unlimited budget ought to be able to do as good or better.

Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by cteiosanu on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:19AM (#38330045)
Amateurs ?
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:30AM (#38330099)
Non-corporate groups.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by ensignavenger on Sunday November 19, 2023 @01:09PM (#38335656)
Could they? I don't know the details of MSFTs contracts with OpenAI... but even if they can legally just walk away, it would certainly have some negative impact on MSFTs reputation when dealing with future negotiations for them to do so.
Re:Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam... by adastra22 on Saturday November 18, 2023 @09:53PM (#38328124)
The leaked memo today (which was probably reviewed by legal, unlike yesterday’s press release) says there was no malfeasance.