How does this matter anymore? OpenAI is the most known company from the last year. You don’t need specific person anymore to market about your company. If it is up to single person whether company is worth investment, then everyone just hopes that eventually OpenAI will turn to full-profit mode.
It is pretty clear, that if board wants to run company for greater good, for-profit-only CEO must leave.
Regardless of who they fired, if the board is known to make arbitrary and capricious decisions about top executives without so much as a heads up to large investors, it's not clear that any investor will see them as being worth investment.
It is non-profit company, so investors should not be expecting too much increased returns for their investment other than the product and cooperation what this company provides.
If firing the CEO has no significant negative impact for actual product quality or cooperation, it should not be in the intrestes of investors.
Especially, if the argument for firing is revolved around profit/non-profit future of the company, if the expectations for the original investors was right (investing non-profit). In that case, it is not arbitrary or capricious decisions. But I would of course would like to see some transparency, since we don't really know what happened yet.
You think they just acted on a whim? Why?
Why is everybody assuming that the board just flipped out and did something insane?
To me, the rational assumption is that the board - being composed of multiple people who seem fairly well-grounded, i.e. not terminally online twitter types - are acting rationally. That's supported by them acting professionally; releasing one single press release and then shutting the hell up, presumably on the advice of their lawyers.
Because they fired him on Friday due to unspecified "lack of trust" issues and now, 2 days later, the new interim CEO is reportedly in talks to hire him back?
Do you not see why this looks like they fired him on a whim?
Literally nobody unbiased is reporting this. This reporting is _all_ coming from 'their side.' You are inside the smoke and mirrors if you can't see that.
new interim CEO Emmett Shear is involved in mediating these negotiations, creating the frankly unprecedented situation where (1) the interim CEO who replaced (2) the interim CEO who replaced Sam and who (3) got replaced for trying to get Sam back is now (4) deeply involved in a new effort to get Sam back
Explain to me how this was a well thought out transition and not done on a whim? Even the new CEO who was put into place after the interim CEO is trying to get Altman back.
Yeah sure eventually he could poach people and it’s always possible that this is the beginning of a transition but there’s some seriously magical thinking going on here.
OpenAI has 700 and they’re highly compensated. How would you even onboard and meet payroll in a week for a non existent entity if you suddenly had even half that number?
Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?
> Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?
Not saying it will happen but I'd honestly say this would be the least of the issues. VC's and established companies would be fighting tooth and nail to invest money in whatever venture Sam Altman/Greg Brockman + whatever % of staffers were launching. Money would not be the problem here. Think of how much money so many were willing to throw at the con-job that the vast majority of crypto was and then think of how much money they would throw at AI tools (which are clearly a big deal already).
As far as I can tell Altman’s real serious talent is getting billionaire types to like him. First Paul Graham then Elon and the initial OpenAI funders. In both cases he seems to have been dropped rather abruptly after running things for a few years.
He has never personally built meaningful tech and has definitely never actually demonstrated anything approaching popularity with any rank and file employees.
Might happen. But it sure hasn’t yet. I don’t doubt that the Davos / Bohemian Grove set will install him in another position though, he does seem to have a genuine knack for that.
And he did VC fund-raising before that for early projects too. Give his Wikipedia a read.
He is clearly a very savvy businessman and smooth operator on a personal level. And has been involved in enough high profile successes that I don't think it is a fluke.