Rather than putting up a conspiracy theory the much more plausible explanation is that this board evidently pissed off a lot of customers, powerful people in tech and almost all employees of openai.

If we are to believe media reports. But why do customers and employees care that much about having Sam Altman as CEO? Sam was just at the right place at the right time. He is no doubt competent but not some kind of irreplaceable AI or management prodigy. OpenAI's true strength lies in its AI research team and their groundbreaking models. The C-suite is just a sideshow.

This is what I’m confused about. There are plenty of product people who would have been chomping at the bit to release ChatGPT if they knew their organization had the tech. I’m not sure what makes him unique here.

He is a known quantity who has been successful leading the company. But of course he could be replaced and there are others that could be equally, maybe more successful.

The problem is not that Sam has some totally unique DNA. Customers are reacting to 1) the board’s apparent rejection of the existing products and business model, and 2) the capricious and incompetent way the board handled this.

Companies are making huge bets, and a seemingly stable and industry-leading supplier just turned out to be unreliable. Of course people are angry and hesitant to keep doing business with OpenAI.

I'm sure this question can be answered better by the employees themselves and they voted very clearly that they don't want a leadership unter the current board that ousted Sam and Greg. As for why customers care about who the CEO is, i'm not even sure if you're seriously asking these questions.

I see your point, but I am somewhat skeptical about leaks. I'm open to being convinced about how Sam's leadership played a pivotal role in OpenAI's success, or why finding a suitable replacement might be difficult. Are there specific instances where his decisions clearly influenced the course of events?

Observing from the outside, it feels like the bulk of the credit goes to their AI team and that Sam was just there to make sure the machine was well oiled. Maybe he was really good at that, I don't know. Their productization of models wasn't that great, starting with the name, "ChatGPT". IMO, the real driving force has been the unparalleled capabilities of their models rather than branding or marketing.

> Sam was just there to make sure the machine was well oiled

That's a big part of the success of any company. Sam and Greg were responsible for recruiting the team that made it possible and removing the many obstacles those people faced over the years, even though their competition had much more money and prestige at the starting point.

As a customer/potential developer I don't care who the CEO is. However, I do wish the company was stable and the current situation seems anything but. The employees' letter makes me anxious about the company's future.

makes sense.

It seems this was a coup of Microsoft together with Altman to go full force ahead with the commercial upscaling.

In the past there was already a small uprising, and all who didn't like the Altman cult ran off to anthropic. So all that's left in openai are huge fans of Altman. So it only makes sense that you piss off almost all remaining employees, its survivor bias at work.

Some people on Twitter, notably @HackingButLegal, have been collecting examples of possible paid astroturfing accounts which she believes belong to a reputation management firm hired by Sam to suppress his sister Annie's accusations that Sam sexually abused her as a child.

https://twitter.com/HackingButLegal/status/17268410084771104...

https://twitter.com/HackingButLegal/status/17268395129057322...

There are so many pro-Sam posts from well established and even noteworthy accounts. What would be the point of astroturfing a majority opinion?

As long as we’re throwing around evidence-free accusations of bad faith, the astroturfing claims sure look like the age-old tactic of claiming anyone who disagrees must be a shill.

Have you actually read the sister's accusations? They read like the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic. One or two things, I could believe, but the sheer volume of ridiculously extreme accusations is impossible to believe.

Her core accusation is that Sam would always read her bedtime stories (he was almost a decade older) while laying in bed with her, and that sometimes while they were in bed he would cuddle her inappropriately. And that at some point she started asking him not to get in the bed and he ignored her “no” and kept up the nightly ritual.

This seems well within the realm of possibility. She probably does have mental health issues (maybe paranoid schizophrenia), but that could be an effect of the childhood sexual trauma. I had a 40-something-year-old aunt who committed suicide due to being raped as a child. :( Early trauma like that can fuck you up in ways that make you permanently unstable.

Getting abused will mess you up in all sorts of ways.

And in any case, someone as rich as Sam Altman letting a close relative live in poverty like that is by itself a pretty damning inditement of his character.

Would you feel better had he locked her up in premier upclass mental institution?

You don’t see any other possibilities? Not, say, paying her rent (or, realistically, buying a house with his spare change and letting her live there) or chipping in for therapy? His net worth is estimated to be in the half billion range so he’d never even notice the cost.

I'm not prepared to assess people's personal business, and I believe it's inappropriate for us to discuss their relationship as none of us are privy to their personal history, who paid for what, who approached who or approached not, and so on.

This thread only exists because you did feel it was appropriate to comment. My point was simply that you assumed one of the worst options rather than something more charitable.

Google says the guy's worth $500M. A mere 1% of that in a trust could ensure that none of his siblings would have to live in poverty ever again. In absolute numbers that's a lot, but in relative terms I've given away much larger percentages of my net worth to relatives, including ones more distant than siblings, I'd do it again, and I'd think less of anybody who wouldn't do the same.

I feel called out - I have created a HN account recently in order to comment on this matter.

I consider the recent events as crucial to the future of whole industry. I follow them extensively and I am greatly interested in participating in a conversation with informed people. What better venues are there? Twitter? Reddit? Those two platforms are sadly full of uninformed trolls.