I highly doubt this is directly in support of Altman and more about not imploding the company they work for. But you never know.

I'm sure this is a big part of it. But everyone I know at OpenAI (and outside) is a huge Sam fan.

> everyone I know at OpenAI (and outside) is a huge Sam fan

Everyone you know is a huge Sam fan? What?

I was going to say, I wouldn’t be surprised if I am one of only a handful of the people whom I know who even know who sama is.

I reckon the people working at OpenAI know who sama is, though.

Could also be an indictment of the new CEO, who is no Sam Altman.

> Is this unprecedented or have been other cases in history where the vast majority of employees standup against the board in favor of their CEO?

It's unprecedented for it to be happening on Twitter. But this is largely how Board fights tend to play out. Someone strikes early, the stronger party rallies their support, threats fly and a deal is found.

In favour of the CEO who was about to make them fabulously wealthy. FTFY.

Yeah, especially with the PPU compensation scheme, all of those employees were heavily invested in turning OpenAI into the next tech giant, which won't happen if Altman leaves and takes everything to Microsoft

and there aint nothing wrong with wanting to be fabulously wealthy.

of course not, but at least have the decency to admit it - don't hide behind some righteous flag of loyalty and caring.

That is entirely dependent on how that wealth is obtained

Greed is good, eh Gordon Gekko?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VVxYOQS6ggk

Jobs was fired from Apple, and a number of employees followed him to Next.

Different, but that's the closest parallel.

Only a very small number of people left with Jobs. Of course, probably mainly because he couldn't necessarily afford to hire more without the backing of a trillion-dollar corporation...

Imagine if Jobs had gone to M$.

He would have been almost immediately fired for insubordination.

Jobs needed the wilderness years.

Jobs getting fired was the best thing that could have happened to him and Apple.

No, the failures at NeXT weren’t due to a lack of money or personnel. He took the people he wanted to take (and who were willing to come with him).

Apple back then was not a trillion dollar corporation.

Microsoft now is.

Gordon Ramsey quit Aubergine over business differences with the owners and had his whole staff follow him to a new restaurant.

I'm not going to say Sam Altman is a Gordon Ramsay. What I will say is that they both seem to have come from broken, damaged childhoods that made them what they are, and that it doesn't automatically make you a good person just because you can be such an intense person that you inspire loyalty to your cause.

If anything, all this suggests there are depths to Sam Altman we might not know much about. Normal people don't become these kinds of entrepreneurs. I'm sure there's a very interesting story behind all this.

Aaand there you have it: cargo culting in full swing.

I don't think you mean cargo culting. Cult of personality?

Cargo cult of personality?

Little care packages of seemingly magical AI-adjacent tech washes into our browsers and terminals and suddenly a large and irrational following springs up to worship some otherwise largely unfamiliar personage.

Market Basket.

I had to click too many links to discover the story, so here's a direct link to the New England Market Basket story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Basket_(New_England)#20...

Oh yes, I lived through this and it was fascinating to see. Very rarely does the big boss get the support of the employees to the extent they are willing to strike. The issue was that Artie T. and his cousin Artie S. (confusingly they had the same first name) were both roughly 50% owners and at odds. Artie S. wanted to sell the grocery chain to some big public corporation, IIRC. Just before, Artie T had an outstanding 4% off on all purchases for many months, as some sort of very generous promo. It sounded like he really treated his employees and his customers (community) well. You can get all inspirational about it, but he described supplying food to New England communities as an important thing to do. Which it is.

I misread this as Markov Blanket.

doubtful since boards don't elsewhere have an overriding mandate to "benefit humanity". usually their duty is to stakeholders more closely aligned with the CEO.