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.