OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return

Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by 3cats-in-a-coat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @03:57PM (#38370000)

"It upset a bunch of employees. The tech is fine". Uhmm, it upset 98% (not figuratively, but mathematically) of all 700 employees who signed a petition to quit unless he's reinstated and for the board to resign. As for the tech... who... exactly do you think created, maintains and is developing future enhancement for the tech? Is it doing it by itself? Sorry, we're not there yet.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by spamizbad on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:01PM (#38370059)

I think one lesson we learned from Twitter is that you can cull a large amount of a tech workforce and the product will keep humming along, albeit at a reduced rate of change.

Also, unlike Twitter, OpenAI pays engineers very competitive salaries and can aggressively re-hire roles.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by phpisthebest on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:12PM (#38370226)

I dont think there is a large overlap here.

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

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by jacquesm on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:38PM (#38370622)

There is no comparison between the cadre at Twitter and and the talent pool at OpenAI, I don't think you can replace the bulk of them at all, and nobody worth that kind of compensation is going to touch OpenAI with a 100 foot pole as long as the current board is there.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by 3cats-in-a-coat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:09PM (#38370164)

You learned the wrong lesson. Twitter is dying and operating at a significantly degraded level, including moderation, content filtering, ad positioning, which caused a third or fourth mass advertiser exodus just few days ago.

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.

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[dead]

Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by 3cats-in-a-coat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:40PM (#38370654)

I've pretty good ways to know that.

- 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

The monetization (Premium etc.) are not even making up for 1% of that. Do you need the math on that too?

There's nothing controversial in what I'm saying. This is pretty much the actual situation.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by smegger001 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:04PM (#38371818)

Twitter is a very different animal. A twitter clone can be thrown together over a weekend with average web stack coders, making it scalable is a bit more work true but nothing fundamentally new or revolutionary. OpenAI on the other hand is working on new, challenging hard problems in a complex feild of math/computer science.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by righthand on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:00PM (#38370049)

> Uhmm, it upset 98% (not figuratively, but mathematically) of all 700 employees who signed a petition to quit unless he's reinstated and for the board to resign.

And they have yet to leave as far as I know. Seems like no one is in an actual hurry to quit.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by 3cats-in-a-coat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:02PM (#38370072)

Sam Altman is currently talking to the board. You want them to spin up drama by quitting in the middle of the talks? You're trying too hard to copy paste your desired narrative on this and it fits so, so, so poorly.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by righthand on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:11PM (#38370216)

If Sam comes back it’ll be under heavy changes. The board isn’t going to leave. You don’t get ousted and then get to call the shots, no matter how many employees you think you have on your side. Furthermore the fact that Sam is in talks is further proof that he won’t be coming back on his terms. As the board why would you fold to the employees just because they like a guy?

I’m not copy pasting anything, cute diss though.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by 3cats-in-a-coat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:14PM (#38370260)

Sorry to be blunt, but literally everything you said so far was nonsense, so I'll understand your opinion as a sign that Sam Altman will come back and the board will resign.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by righthand on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:28PM (#38370467)

Ah I see more disses, very cute. Get a Team Sam t-shirt made for yourself.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by 3cats-in-a-coat on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @12:02AM (#38374928)

Another bad guess from you.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by smegger001 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:06PM (#38371845)

To be fair if this board is good at one thing it is spinning up drama

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by zarzavat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:03PM (#38370092)

98% is meaningless. If Altman is reinstated then he will have the power to fire anyone who didn’t sign. You’d be an idiot not to sign it.

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by smegger001 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:08PM (#38371865)

If they didn't sign he wouldnt have the leverage to come back in the first place

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Re:OpenAI investors keep pushing for Sam Altman’s return by zarzavat on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @07:25AM (#38378289)

Sure if you’re one of the first names to sign. But let’s say most of the company has signed, you earn a 19-bit salary, there’s now a good chance that this guy will come back and be your boss again. Are you really going to refuse to sign and withhold your support for him? No way.

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