The only thing they are pressured on is to fill in the story for the media point of view which is irrelevant to the actual functioning of OpenAI.
Emmet is already threatening the board with resignation unless they provide evidence of wrongdoing [1]. Which they don't have, because they would have revealed it already.
They are empty shirts.
[1] https://x.com/emilychangtv/status/1727020834005700914?s=20
OpenAI’s valuation isn’t because Sam Altman is worth $90B it’s the tech. The tech is fine. Investors have no reason to worry about their investment in the tech.
The people under pressure are Sam Altman trying to reclaim his job he was fired from and Satya Nadella who is running a campaign to eat OpenAI. None of that is related to the functioning tech of OpenAI, all of it is related to the drama of what happened. Drama is not equal to money.
I was sad when my favorite pet died too, but then eventually you get a new pet that’s just as good as a Worldcoin guy, maybe better.
They have the power to remove him momentarily, do they have the power to keep him out? we're still finding out.
> OpenAI’s valuation isn’t because Sam Altman is worth $90B it’s the tech.
OpenAI's valuation is nominally because of the tech. It's fundamentally because of the people. 90% of the staff is threatening to follow Sam to $MS so that's the whole ball game. They went to OpenAI to make themselves rich. The board fired the guy that was trying to do that for them.
> I was sad when my favorite pet died too, but then eventually you get a new pet that’s just as good as a Worldcoin guy, maybe better.
Doesn't matter if you or I am sad. It only matters if the talent at OpenAI is sad. The board made them sad. Sam and Sataya make them happy.
If Satya and Sam make them happy then go work for Microsoft. The board is calling their bluff right now.
The market is flooded with junior engineers who have recently graduated from coding boot camps, and who might be good at building the specific types of software they have been shown. However, there is, as I understand it, still a dearth of senior engineers who can do the sort of work that OpenAI engineers are doing: building a novel product, with novel, cutting edge algorithms, at massive scale.
If lots of people could easily replicate OpenAI’s product, it seems strange that has nobody released a competitor to gpt4. Why is Microsoft - a company with one of the largest pools of software engineers in the world - clambering to hire all the engineers at OpenAI?
It’s because those people aren’t replaceable. There is probably a global pool of maybe ten thousand people who can do the work that OpenAI is doing. And OpenAI has assembled a high performance team of ~800 of them. Those people are currently worth their weight in gold.
Microsoft isn't clambering to hire them, they're clambering for the IP. The OpenAI employees will get significantly less if they go over to Microsoft.
So what you're saying is that companies are struggling to find qualified senior and staff level engineers to fill their open roles? Doesn't sound like a flooded market to me.
> The board is calling their bluff right now
The board is not doing much of anything. They picked a CEO then she went to team sam. Then they picked another CEO and now he's threatening them with resignation. Not to mention the 3 other people they tried to bring into the role who refused.
Maybe go and spend some time to bone up on who exactly works for OpenAI, what their track record is (education, publications and so on) and then tell me where you are going to find another 700 people that talented who will want to work for a company this damaged.
Sam and Greg returning. Board folded.
https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727228431396704557
Their hand picked CEO called them on their BS and they could not produce
The IP might be worth something (no idea what kind of patents they hold), but the valuation is fundamentally based on the current products they have and promise of future tech the company can create. And the future value stream far outweighs the current product.
And none of the future product is going to happen without people.
Of course, OpenAI without Sam will hire new people. But if they have already hired the best and they already had worthwhile experience, hiring new people has almost zero chance to recreate their ability to create new products at least in short/medium term.
Finding the right people and hiring them is far more difficult than it is assumed. Dropping money on the problem does not solve more than half of it.
The following story is only about an hour old, but the investors are reportedly considering legal action against the board:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-investors-consider...
The board just firing off half-cocked and then going silent is probably a larger source the issues for employees than altman the person/leader. There is effectively nobody in the driver seat and the board can't be trusted to do anything in the best interests of the company.
It's the current AND future tech. If most of the people who made that tech jump ship, that does not bode well for the future development of the technology. Maybe if the tech were something more ordinary, sure, but I think we both agree that it's not. For an investor, the future prospects of the company are generally a lot more important than its present state.
If you have a mass exodus of employees, sure you can hire people to maintain ChatGPT 4, but they won't complete a GPT 5 or 6. That valuation is definitely based on the assumption that they will continue advancing AI and that they will consistently stay ahead of competitors for some time. They just axed both of those assumptions.
ChatGPT 4 as the endgame is not worth 90 billion dollars.
Also, unlike Twitter, OpenAI pays engineers very competitive salaries and can aggressively re-hire roles.
Twitter seemed to be adult daycare with a HUGE amount of positions that openly did nothing all day, many many positing publicly about how they only actually worked a few hours a week. Along with a Huge business support staff that seemed to really be pointless
I do not see that analog at OpenAI which has mainly engineering positions.
Also the idea that you just just "aggressively re-hire role" engineering positions in a emergent field like AI seems to be bit naive to me. How many experience people outside OpenAI are their int he first place??
It seems to me to be very ironic that in other situations is seems to be common for people to hate on corporations that treat their employees like interchangeable widgets that can just be replaced on a dime with a new human, yet here we see people claim that exact thing. Very odd
Also. Leading the world in revolutionary AI is not exactly like maintaining a pre-existing message app.
Twitter:
- Had 7500 employees before Musk fired most of them.
- Now 1300, of which 550 are full-time devs.
- That's a company valuated at less than $16 billion currently, and losing about $2 billion a year.
OpenAI:
- Has 700 employees, including world-leading scientists and researchers that are practically irreplaceable.
- If they resign, it'll have 14 employees.
- For a company that before Sam Altman was fired was valuated at $90 billion.
- The puffed-up internal valuation of the company (for employee stock options) is $19 billion.
- There's a $15 valuation is by an independent financial services company (Fidelity).
- Elon saved ~$2 billion by firing a lot of his workforce (and closing one datacenter), but also...
- Lost over $3 billion out of $5 billion ad-revenue a year ago.
- And added $1 billion of interest payments (per annum) on a $13 billion loan.
- Twitter was roughly break-even prior.
5B - 5B + 2B - 3B - 1B = -2B / annum
There's nothing controversial in what I'm saying. This is pretty much the actual situation.
And they have yet to leave as far as I know. Seems like no one is in an actual hurry to quit.
I’m not copy pasting anything, cute diss though.
> Investors have no reason to worry about their investment in the tech.
If Stratechery is correct, this means that if Microsoft successfully poaches Sam Altman and friends, and vacuums OpenAI clean of talent, they will even be able to use the actual GPT-4 to build a Microsoft GPT-5. That should make investors sweat. If you lose the people and (possibly) the technology, what's left?
"Microsoft’s original agreement with OpenAI also barred Microsoft from pursuing AGI based on OpenAI tech on its own; my understanding is that this clause was removed in the most recent agreement."
(It's hidden under a citation bubble you need to click after the third paragraph.)
The WSJ article from June he cited indicates the license still comes with restrictions.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-awkw...
Have you ever maintained the software where the original team left? I have. And though it was much less complex and cutting edge than what OpenAI is doing, it was a massive pain with loss of knowledge and time.
The board tried to get a merger with Anthropic, probably the second best team in the world for this type of work.
They don't seem to think they can "just re-hire".
What? They have a MASSIVE reason to worry: 3/4 board members are clearly not aligned with the profit motive. And D'angelo has a massive conflict of interest with monetizing their models.
meanwhile, all the employees are paid via a profit sharing scheme. 98% of them are backing Altman because they don't want to see their compensation nuked.
I am ignorant, but you seem to be knowledgeable about this topic.
so says anonymous sources close to OpenAI who look suspiciously like MSFT wearing a fake mustache
It is all reminiscent of the Monty Python Judean people's front scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8
Though, arguably they showed more discipline.
-----> WHY DID THEY DO IT? <------
SERIOUSLY! They all just decided to wake up that day and say let's go fire Sam and blow up the company because "lack of candor" that they can't even give details on?? These are serious people doing serious stuff. These are not idiots. What the heck is going on? Can anyone explain?
A) DeAngelo getting revenge for custom GPTs killing his company Poe's core product.
B) The board discovering Sam working to use OpenAI resources/IP to further his own personal business/political goals.
Does it?
If it was exactly that but he misjudged the external response and resulting consequences, that would also be a reason for regret.
They shouldn't be. But short of temporary insanity I'm running out of ideas on what it could be.
Happens a lot. I know some on the very extreme outskirts of the left wing who look at the "splitters!" scene in Life of Brian and see themselves; I've seen it in arguments over programming language features; there's plenty of religious disputes that look like this from the outside; most of the Brexit arguments painted everyone who didn't agree with the speaker as being part of Team Other and merely an attempt to undermine Team Us; and so on.
People can get very seriously angry about things that seem totally pointless from the outside.
Ok, you have a higher threshold for the use of the word pressure than I do.
> If they don’t do anything else they just need the employees to fold on their threat to resign. Even if the employees resign, ChatGPT is still running and there are lots of people willing to take the defecting employees spots.
I wouldn't be so sure of that.
> The only thing they are pressured on is to fill in the story for the media point of view which is irrelevant to the actual functioning of OpenAI.
Their investors, employees and donors might disagree with that.
Want to bet that Emmet Shear won't last the week?
1, Sam comes back and thus obviously Emmet leaves.
2, Sam does not come back and OAI just dissolves into being a series of drawn out investor lawsuits, something Emmet probably don't want to get involved in.
>I wouldn't be so sure of that.
What about all those people who just pivoted from web3 to ai?
Given that a bunch of the staff are acting like they're Heavens Gate members you also expect them to sabotage it? Or literally have a flavor-aid session in the office?
> Their investors, employees and donors might disagree with that.
Nobody wants to invest in a personality cult that's sworn an oath of fealty to one guy, dude. That's basically flushing money down the toilet, as this fiasco demonstrates. These lunatics are ready to sacrifice their children on twitter. You cannot work with people like that!
Are you aware that Microsoft and Salesforce CEOs have both offered to hire any OpenAI employees who want to switch boat, while Nvidia CEO and Meta's FAIR team have both made similar but slightly lesser "call me" offers to all of them?
https://cointelegraph.com/news/microsoft-salesforce-nvidia-a...
> These lunatics are ready to sacrifice their children on twitter. You cannot work with people like that!
???
Sure, it's in their interest to break up a unified bloc of talent. Doesn't mean they genuinely want them.
> ???
The behaviour demonstrated by many of the staff on twitter is, for want of a better word, unhinged. Odd declarations of loyalty. 4am posts. Retweeting hearts. Acting very 'ride or die.' It's weird.
Doesn't fit. In the scenario where they're all thinking that, nobody has to follow up with the same offer after the first person says it.
> The behaviour demonstrated by many of the staff on twitter is, for want of a better word, unhinged. Odd declarations of loyalty. 4am posts. Retweeting hearts. Acting very 'ride or die.' It's weird.
How is any of that "sacrifice their children on twitter"?
I mean, jeez, this is major drama even for the rest of the tech community — this whole thing is even front-page on the BBC news site as I write — of course the people who work there are going to say things on Twitter.
Yes, different companies have to follow up with the same offer in order to break up the talent bloc. Otherwise the bloc will move en-masse to one firm.
> How is any of that "sacrifice their children on twitter"?
It's called hyperbole
Or just… not hire all of them. Much easier.
And in the scenario where Microsoft, Salesforce, NVIDIA, and Meta actually think the OpenAI staff are mad (rather than the more plausible scenario where they think the OpenAI board is mad and are looking for a big pile of skilled proven talent that already know each other and can work well together on big projects), the only sane response would have been "not only don't hire them, don't offer them jobs, what are you even thinking this is the real world we don't do things like the script of a Marvel film".
> It's called hyperbole
It makes you look like the mad one.
Then a competitor might hire all of them. If you're in the AI business you don't want that. You want to grab either all of them or balkanize them. Come on, this isn't a hard concept to grasp.
> And in the scenario where they actually think they're mad ... the script of a Marvel film
Then you hire them on a 5 year exclusive contract so they can't rejoin Hydra.
> It makes you look like the mad one
It's normal human writing style, hyperbole, sarcasm, exaggeration, wit, irony, you know. Adult writing, for adults to consume.
I'm throwing out suggestions as to why various differing parties here may be doing what they're doing. There's no need for internal consistency because it's not a unified top-down scenario, it's multipolar game theorizing.
'If A does B, then why would C do D, that isn't consistent' well the answer is that A and C are competing, not cooperating.
> Sure, it's in their interest to break up a unified bloc of talent
And
> If you're in the AI business you don't want that. You want to grab either all of them or balkanize them.
And
> Nobody wants to invest in a personality cult that's sworn an oath of fealty to one guy, dude. That's basically flushing money down the toilet, as this fiasco demonstrates. These lunatics are ready to sacrifice their children on twitter. You cannot work with people like that!
These are mutually incompatible positions.
Even 20% of employees leaving a company simultaneously is catastrophic. I think you're underestimating the effects here.
These folks are being flooded with offers. Why would they work for an organization that doesn't care what 95% of them want?
And, not every person from OpenAI is getting flooded with offers. Maybe a few key scientists/developers.
If anything, putting OpenAI on their resume might get workers preferential treatment for an initial interview. Maybe.
Given that:
1. Cycled three CEOs in less than a week.
2. The current interim CEO is in talks to resign (because the board still has not given a clear reason to why Sam was fired).
They should assign ChatGPT to be CEO
What do the board members have to loose by holding their ground?
Emmett Shear.
Altman won't be back.
Investors like success and returns but they don't like companies where all the employees have basically sworn out an oath of fealty to the CEO, as it means they (the investors) have basically no control over anything.
Another interpretation: those closest to the internal workings of the business believe that a certain person is best capable of managing the business. Turns out that person is also who the investors believe in. So rather than fealty to a person, they are simply voting (with their feet apparently) against the board.
Have you _seen_ the bizarre behaviour that's occurring on twitter? Retweeing heart emojis, making weird declarations of faith, acting in lockstep? They're 100% swearing fealty and it's incredibly weird.
“Sam isn’t important. Employees are weirdos. The board is just fine. Everyone calm down.”
That’s more wierd than anything happening on Twitter.
Those staff usually have their private champions within the company - usually technically focussed project managers who can run interference against the commercial side - but nod along with the CEO who they view as the ugly necessity of having to have a 'business guy.'
They are sending messages of unity, not fealty to Sam Altman.
Working together brought them to the top of the world both in term of research and product. This is a dream come true.
What would surprise me is that they wouldn't do everything they can to avoid breaking their team.
These are meant to be top-tier researchers, you'd think they'd put their thoughts in their own words. That too would avoid uncertainty and make their position easier to understand.
Just retweeting a heart emoji because their dear leader (lol) did it is... odd, to me. Unless it's specifically intended to send the message that they'll literally do whatever he tells them to do. Which is about a thousand times weirder.
The investment goes to zero anyway without talent.
I think you can assume that there's a large pool of talent that would love to work at OpenAI, they were just turned off by the ... vibes ... coming from the e/acc locksteppy types.
It may be very easy to re-hire talent that's actually a lot smarter, if a bit less 'mission focussed.'
So they just need to hire some Gen Z [1], not to actually make AI technology but to make "good vibes"
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/11/18/lifestyle/gen-z-workers-say-th...
>>I think you can assume that there's a large pool of talent
Why would we assume that? Every company in the US currently is complaining endlessly about the lack of talent, in IT especially I see posts from hiring managers being unable to find tech talent, and the fact that several companies are making very aggressive plays at getting OpenAI worker right now tells me there is not infact a "large pool of talent" that will just back fill all of these roles.
Hasn't the sector been aggressively laying off for the past 6 months? I mean, there have been many many many posts about it here.
Alot of Tech companies have been laying off alot of support staff in HR, Recruitment, Sales, and other business functions
and yes some Technical roles as well, but dont think because you see "Google Lays of X,000 employees" means they just laid off that many AI Researchers, programmers, etc...
Say, what agenda are you trying to push, spaceman? This is the second comment of yours in this thread trying to make it seem like everyone at OpenAI is irreplaceable, so maybe you missed the hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs this year in the US.
If you know where to find a hundred or so people of the caliber that OpenAI has managed to attract so far you should get into the recruiting business pronto because you could make a few million easily.
This field is small and nascent enough that there are really only a small number of people who can build something like GPT-4.
> Investors like success and returns but they don't like companies where all the employees have basically sworn out an oath of fealty to the CEO, as it means they (the investors) have basically no control over anything.
Investors love such companies. I, as an investor would love such a company, as long as I was sure that the CEO would stay. Investors tend to not have control over much of anything anyway unless they have a board seat. Other than that it's a shareholder meeting once per year where you get to sign off on the actions of the execs for the preceding year. But the better interpretation is that the people there have said "we are not loyal to the board" rather than that they are more loyal to Altman, that only goes for those that will follow him wherever he goes.
The best time for an investor to influence things is when you come on board. The best way for an investor to continue to be able to influence things is to have a controlling interest or very good relations with enough of the stockholders to effectively have a controlling interest.
As an investor you have no way of obtaining that surety. So, you would not love this company.
> But the better interpretation is that the people there have said "we are not loyal to the board" rather than that they are more loyal to Altman
Dude they're retweeting heart emojis and carrying water in _the most disturbing_ fashion on twitter. They're 100% declaring that they're his personal army, ride or die. I don't know how you aren't seeing this. It's completely abnormal behaviour for adults.
To me it's the 100% committed 'vibe' they're giving off. It's weird. It's not how staff, especially technical/researchers (who usually bicker like anything over the most trivial of differences) behave.
Anyone who's managed a big research team knows that competing rivalries and internecine warfare is the order of the day. Literal slapfights have broken out over whether big or little endian encoding will be more efficient for any given scenario, for example.
Oh yeah I think Sam is sleazier than most people seem to think. I also don’t think he’s in the right because the board has been quiet. The whole thing is insular and one sided. Everything they’re doing/saying is to try and control the board. That is off-putting because it’s detrimental to the board’s intent. I’m sure they’re all very nice people and hard workers.
I don't know enough about Sam or the board at all, so curious as to reasons why he might be sleazy/sneaky.
The board being quiet, in my opinion, is not doing them any favors!
The board being quiet is adult behaviour. Release a discreet and generic press release then direct all further enquiries to the lawyers. That's how things should be done.
The frenzy of reporting and contradictory articles and froth and spin that's coming from the other side makes them look deranged, IMHO. It's incredibly childish and just makes it look like they have tentacles everywhere that they can drag these weird articles out of so many different outlets. It's not a good look unless you're really trying to look like HYDRA.
https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1033862/op...
@OpenAI We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.
We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.
Objectively not true. Employees were quiet on Friday. It was after Ilya told employees that Altman was fired partly because he tasked two people with the same job, that they then organized.
Kidding aside, the board is under more and more pressure but - surprisingly - they haven't folded yet. I am interpreting that as that they are trying to get something out of it that nobody is willing to give them. The new CEO is also surprisingly not to be found at all, no public statements, nothing to reassure employees that the ship is in good hands. Not the best showing for a captain of a ship in crisis.