> They plan for the backlash

You can't plan for something you have never experienced. Being hated by a large group of people is a very different feeling from getting hated by an individual, you don't know if you can handle it until it happens to you.

You can plan for something you've never experienced. You read, or learn from other people's experiences.

Normal people know not to burn a $80 billion company to the ground in a weekend. Ilya was doing something unprecedented in corporate history, and astounding he wasn't prepared to face the world's fury over it.

> You can plan for something you've never experienced. You read, or learn from other people's experiences.

Text doesn't convey emotions, and our empathy doesn't work well for emotions we have never experienced. You can see a guy that got kicked in the balls got hurt, but that doesn't mean you are prepared to endure the pain of getting kicked in your balls or that you even understand how painful it is.

Also watching politicians it looks like you can just brush it off, because that is what they do. But that requires a lot of experience, not anyone can do it, it is like watching a boxing match and think you can easily stand after a hard punch in your stomach.

> You can see a guy that got kicked in the balls got hurt, but that doesn't mean you are prepared to endure the pain of getting kicked in your balls or that you even understand how painful it is.

Sure, but you do your best not to be kicked in the balls.

Yep. Or, if you're running an immense, well-funded organization that is gauging the consequences of a plan that involves being kicked in the balls, you take a tiny sliver of those funds and get some advisors to appraise you of what to expect when being kicked in the balls, not just wing it/"fake it till you make it". (As it turns out, faking not being in severe pain is tricky.)

Ilya torched peoples' retirements by signaling that it would be very hard to cash out in OpenAI as it is now. You don't have to be emotional to understand the consequence of that action, just logical. You have to think beyond your own narrow perspective for a minute.

Where did he do that? Genuine question.

The board vote did it! They had a tender offer in the works that would have made employees millionaires. The board clearly signaled that they viewed the money-making aspects of the company as something to dial back, which in turn either severely lessens the value of that tender offer or prevents it from happening.

I mean, he didn't have a button on his desk that said, "torch the shares", but he ousted the CEO as a way to cut back on the things that might have meant profit. Did he think that everyone was going to continue to want to give them money after they signal a move away from profit motives? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to think that one through.

I think he was just preoccupied with AI safety, and didn't give a thought to the knock on effects for investors of any stripe. He's clearly smart enough to, he just didn't care enough to factor it into his plans.

I do believe OpenAI clearly signalled from the very beginning what the (complicated) company structure is about and what risks this means for any potential investor (or employee hoping to become rich).

If you project your personal hopes which are different from this into the hype, this is your personal problem.

Well, with the hollowing out of OpenAI, it seems that someone else will easily take the lead! They're not my personal hopes - this move destroyed OpenAI's best chance at retaining control over cutting edge AI as well. They destroyed their own hopes.

Torched retirements? Who is dumb enough to have his retirement portfolio that weighted to one company?

The OpenAI employees who are planning to resign en-masse for exactly this reason.

They'll squeak by.

> You read, or learn from other people's experiences...Ilya was doing something unprecedented in corporate history

So whose experiences was he supposed to read about?

Yevgeny Prigozhin's?

He hasn't ever posted to reddit?

Is it possible that someone in Ilya's position can be unaware of just how staggeringly enormous a phenomenon he is sitting on top of ( and thus have no idea how to evaluate the scale of the backlash that would result?)

I would say the answer is, demonstrably yes:

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/

This is fair, but understand, Google bought would probably not be Google we have.

To think it would grow just as fast, or in the ways it did? Acquires are seldom left alone to do magic.

Have you ever had a bad day? The consequences for people in power is about 1 million times bigger and more public.

Sutskever didn't get on the board by cunning politicking and schmoozing like most businesspeople with that sort of position. He's an outstanding engineer without upper management skills. Every meet one of those?

Outstandingly clueless seems more appropriate.

I haven't people any reasonably intelligent person so unaware of real world that they can berate a colleague so publicly and officially and think "Hey! I am sorry man" will do the trick.

Clueless is a word to use... I think Ilya got screwed over by corporate swindling and made a mistake that's all. As a smart idiot I can resonate with the guy - you don't make that mistake twice. I like to believe the push for prosperity is still a mutual goal and the board drama is an unfortunate setback to overcome.

There were plenty of hyped crypto coin companies supposedly worth billions too and we found out otherwise.

Normal people don't have multi-billion dollar companies to burn because they back off in the face of haters long before they get to that stage.

> Normal people don't burn a multi billion dollar company to the ground with a spontaneous decision either.

Has OpenAI been burnt to the ground?

Three CEOs in as many days, founders departing, and more than 600 employees out of 770 signing an open letter threatening to quit seems pretty burny.

And it's just Monday afternoon.

600 employees quitting would be burny. 600 employees signing a letter saying they’re going to quit isn’t quite there.

3 CEOs in 3 days, isn’t burny, either. There’s the guy they fired, the person they had take on the role so they have someone in the role, and then someone they hired to be CEO. I guess they could have gotten that down to 2 by jumping immediately to their intended replacement, but not having them ready to start immediately doesn’t seem odd.

And yeah, it’s just Monday afternoon. If in the next few days, a sizable chunk of those who threatened to quit do so, then that would be burny. But we ain’t there yet.