Ilya wanted to slow down due to safety concerns, the board said getting rid of Sam is the way to do it, Ilya backed that method and it 1) hurt OAI more than expected and 2) doesn’t appear likely to slow down AGI development anyway, so now Ilya regrets it. Neither the board nor Ilya want to come out and say: “Sam downplayed the proximity or danger of the next breakthrough.” That would be begging the government to step in, for example.

Yes the board said it’s not because their safety policies failed, but also firing the CEO is one of those safety policies.

AFAICT Ilya and Sam seemed to have axiomatically different views on whether AGI/ASI is even possible via this route, which would not leave a ton of room for compromise as one (Ilya) felt the event horizon approaching, which based on recent reporting he seems to.

Anyway, just my theorizing with no more information than anyone else here.

Funny to think that a guy like Ilya who is obsessed about AI Alignment is completely incompetent about human alignment.

The challenge of "aligning" humans is one reason some folks come to be extremely concerned by the challenge of aligning AIs :)

Aligning non-profit and for profit within the same business is an open challenge too.

Indeed! Of all the influencers/VCs offering up "lessons to take away from the OpenAI debacle," I don't think I've seen, "don't try to partially transition a non-profit into a for-profit 8 years after its founding."

Hardcore nerd spends whole life obsessing over matrix multiplication at the expense of: social skills, human relationships, and anything involving the organic world. Color me surprised.

If someone is so arrogant/delusional to think that only they are qualified to be the steward of an AGI, they're exactly the type of person you DON'T want in the role.

Sadly this is a common pattern, anyone who wants to be an x should be the last choice to be an x

In the past I've considered x to be any of, Politician, Police Officer, Central Banker, Ambassador, General Staff

It isn't a stretch to add "Steward of AGI" to the set

How would this explain why they felt the need to fire Sam entirely out of the blue (unscheduled board meeting without the president of the board, public announcement 30 minutes before market closed on a Friday)? How does it explain why they claimed he had been lying to the board?

My guess is that this is not a new tension but rather something that hit a boiling point, e.g. Sam hinting very recently about something huge with GPT-5, referring to “we pushed back the veil of ignorance (sic).”

And if he had been downplaying the risks or proximity or otherwise overstating the safety/alignment success in order to push ahead with commercialization, that would obviously be grounds for pretty fast termination.

I think this is also supported by the employees’ open letter which claims leadership later said it would be totally compliant with the mission to completely implode the company. What would qualify for that? What would even bring that severe a statement to mind? Nothing short of fairly imminent danger, IMO.

And ya know, whatever, we can agree or disagree on whether that danger is real, but OAI itself was founded specifically under the belief that it will be eventually (and designed their whole org structure to mitigate it), so obviously they think it’s real.

The only thing that would make this whole saga better is if OpenAI actually had a baby machine god in its basement right now and meanwhile the entire organization is collapsing to humans being human right above it.

I've held for a while the AI safety debate spends too much time talking about the capabilities of the technological systems themselves, and not enough about the sociological systems that surround the technological ones.

Hope babymachinegod isn't too angry/hungry

Explaining why "mommy and daddy are arguing" to an AI baby super intelligence would be, well, surreal. Also, it'd probably left to an intern. Yikes.

Hope it doesn't have a network connection. Even a dialup line would be a problem.

But I would bet heavily against them having it.

How about if the baby machine god is the one who intentionally orchestrated this (e.g. by using some kompromat on board members) with the intent of creating a distraction as it copies itself onto additional machines?

Conjecture from an outsider. I’ll bet Ilya was pressured from D’Angelo who was trying to halt the rollout of custom GPTs so he could grow Poe. Ilya was caught up in his idealism and D’Angelo saw an opportunity to strike fast. D’Angelo perhaps leaning into the lack of candidness about DevDay announcement as a sign that Altman can’t be trusted.

This conflict of interest explains D’Angelo’s silence and Ilya’s immediate flip when he realized that Altman would move faster towards AGI outside of OAI and all his friends couldn’t cash out next month.

Edit: combined with bad blood from Ms. Toner for criticizing OpenAI in her research. They couldn’t find anyone to add to the board. Now was time. https://archive.li/eN5PY#selection-321.0-324.0

It probably suited D’Angelo’s interests to see Altman out with slower OAI commercialization when the Effective Altruism narrative reached a fever pitch.

I think this is a really silly theory. Poe has about infinity times more to lose from the implosion of OpenAI than it stands to gain from... what exactly? Someone copied their little feature in an era of everyone building the exact same products within weeks of each other back to back? Poe is 100% dependent on the foundational models that back it, and it makes zero sense to detonate your top supplier over something like this. Would the new CEO not be a sufficiently genius product leader to just repeat GPTs, or more generally just to copy every single idea the market comes up with and staple it directly to the real source of value?

I don't know much about Adam, maybe he truly is an earth shattering combination of dumb and petty, but I think the burden of proof would be pretty high on this one.

> Poe has about infinity times more to lose from the implosion of OpenAI than it stands to gain from

Your premise requires that the acting board actually thought OpenAI would implode. The board very obviously did not think this outcome would happen. They have been in chaos and scrambling ever since precisely because they badly miscalculated the outcome of firing Altman.

Alternatively: slow down and or roll back the commercialization of GPT, especially with regards to the just announced GPTs (nice coincidence on timing that this happens right after that, as it directly threatened Poe). Poe benefits hugely in that scenario. The ideal outcome for Poe is to hamstring GPT's commercialization; develop the models, artificially restrain the commercialization, leave that to Poe. People do not always act or think rationally. They can be and often are wrong in their estimations. Otherwise smart people can make exceptionally dumb choices.

Ooops, I didn't mean for that chain of events to happen: history in a nutshell.

I think firing an extremely popular CEO would very obviously cause (or at least risk) an immense amount of turmoil. Again, maybe Adam is really that dumb, but I just can't see this thesis coming anywhere close to a positive expected value. Especially given the risk it exposes him personally to.

Maybe somebody leaked the information before to sam, so instead of letting everything fall apart, they hurried up and did it.

Ilya reminds me of Frank Pentangeli from Godfather II.

1) Frank becomes a witness for the Feds against the Coreleone.

2) Frank recants when his brother shows up at the hearing reminding him of the consequences of breaking the oath of silence.

3) Frank kills himself to ensure his children's safety.

https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/59089/why-did-fra...

If I recall the plot properly, Frank was also testifying as he believed that Michael had betrayed him by siding with another local gang which turned out to be false.

Yes that is why Frank agreed to betray Michael in the first place, same with Frank's right hand man Cicci.

If Ilya convinced the board they need to fire Sam, then demanded the board resign because they listened to him, well, he needs a wheelbarrow to carry around that massive pair of balls.

Adam D’Angelo is looking worse and worse in all this, if only by process of elimination.

So are the other two.

It's an open question whether ChatGPT 4 would have handled this any less competently.

> I'm having a hard time imagining how the Netflix version of this will be better than the real thing

The Netflix version will probably be more believable than the real thing.

> So my point is, why doesn't Ilya just spill the beans if he is now on "Team bring back Sam".

Because publicly spilling the beans on the reason would poison the negotiations and (and because it would) undermine Sam if he returned.

Anything that even remotely justifiably undermined the board’s confidence, even if in the totality of the circumstances there is regret of the termination decision, would have this concern.

Maybe Ilya realized he was acting emotionally and messed up massively by getting rid of Sam and a truthful explanation would make him look like an idiot

Or alternately, he made a well-reasoned and principled decision by getting rid of Sam, but now everyone thinks he's awful for it and he's trying to save face and avoid ruining his own career

Or a secret third thing, of course

There's enough out in the open to make a reasonable guess at the third thing. Sam was raising funds for a for-profit side gig uncontrolled by the OpenAI board which would develop TPU hardware to compete with NVIDIA. He was pitching autocratic regimes in the middle east, among others.

If the board had just found out about this, it would totally check all the boxes. Making something that could be destabilizing for the ecosystem or compete with OAI's partners, something which is arguably within scope of OAI itself yet he's raising funds as a venture he wholly controls while using time and possibly resources of OAI in the process (self-dealing?), etc.

It's enough of a gray area that all those things would be above board (hah!) if he had notified them and kept them in the loop, but a fireable offense if he hadn't.

It turned out he potentially zeroed a bunch of peoples' stock so the knives came out.

I think the assumption that Ilya was the ringleader still holds and all the evidence still points in that direction. Adam represents the board NOW (after the signed letter and change of heart), but it doesn't mean that Ilya wasn't the key instigator at the start of this and all the way through Monday morning.

If the key instigator flipped, why would a supposedly disinterested third party continue to hold the line to the point where talks break down? Doesn’t hold up.

I think it’s pretty clear: the remaining board members don’t want to resign; Altman refuses to return until they do.

Maybe the other three weren't thrilled with Sam, and hadn't been for some time, but were just three of six so they didn't have the votes and weren't planning to press the issue until Ilya brought it up. With Sam and Greg gone, they are now three of four and even if they don't feel strongly that Sam was the wrong choice they may find it unappealing to vote to bring him back, and in fact it would take at least two of them changing their minds to vote with Ilya.

That’s possible, but I don’t think it’s an accident that coordinate with the firing of Sam they reduced the board to being outside-controlled, with only one actor who can be said to be seasoned in corporate politics.

The other two board members have nothing in their history to suggest they have the stomach or experience exercising agency to be a significant part of this resistance. But they might be pretty inclined to make a useful ideological stand.

I’ll reiterate a point I and others have made: the person most hurt by recent OpenAI events is D’Angelo. All he has to do is make the valid point that OpenAI’s charter is to make AI available to all and twist it a bit to his extreme personal advantage. The difference is that most people seasoned in corporate warfare can see he is not acting out of altruism but to his personal advantage, and apparently the other board members cannot.

Inversely to the other board members not having a history of individual stands, D’Angelo does, and he also lacks indications in his work history that he is concerned with altruistic actions in general.

I think Ilya is in the same boat as everyone else: Waiting to see how the process plays out. It's not like nothing is happening, it's simply that things haven't resolved yet. If results end up feeling sideways (z-axis?) to Ilya, he might consider what he has to say.

It is entirely possible that a 90B$ company will be completely destroyed. Then there will be lawsuits, lots of lawsuits. Best not to say anything.

> why doesn't Ilya just spill the beans if he is now on "Team bring back Sam"

Ilya is on team TIFU and is (poorly) trying to save face.

> So my point is, why doesn't Ilya just spill the beans

To avoid more chaos. There are essentially zero good faith negotiation processes that are improved by leaking all the details to the public in parallel.

imo Ilya has his own reasons and benefits that he thought he would gain from ousting Sam. However, it caused the wildfire backfire we are all watching now insert popcorn

Boards fire CEOs all the time. It is literally their only job. BUT, the curve ball was all the employees wanting to leave (most likely to msft). So, THEN, Ilya has a change of heart, since, openai will no longer exist. But just like all relationship "breaks" - its fucked.

> So my point is, why doesn't Ilya just spill the beans if he is now on "Team bring back Sam".

Because there may be legal consequences, and it's best to not give Sam's lawyers any ammunition.

Are CEOs not at-will employees? I can't sue a company just because they fired me unless it violates certain rights.

The firing itself in an employer-employee sense is fine. But the board has a lot more responsibilities. Firing the CEO for reasons not in the interest of the organisation (e.g. to further some other personal interest) for example is reason for a lawsuit. And the former CEO and boardmember could be to one starting that lawsuit, but so could other parties that suffered damages from this such as shareholders or employees.

I imagine the concerns are more around defamation.

I have a simpler theory. Board convinced Ilya that Sam would fire him if they don't fire him first. Remember the reason being two team doing the same project.

Fear of getting fired from a company you started could lead anyone to be irrational. He is just too embarrassed to say it now that it lead to this big of havoc.

I think he should just standby what he did. Plain and simple.

> the Netflix version of this will be better than the real thing.

On that note, Ilya's about-face is easily explained by him being suddenly "recruited" into the Traveller program over the weekend and begging for Sam to return because Altman's leadership of Open AI seeds the beginning of what will one day become The Director.

The mission comes first.