It's speculated that pressure is being put on OpenAI employees to sign the letter requesting his return: https://nitter.net/benlandautaylor/status/172700004961869463... If that's true, I imagine other kinds of pressure could be applied too.

Sam seems like the kind of guy you don't want to cross. Paul Graham says he's "extremely good at becoming powerful": https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

I linked that New Yorker article from another thread, and dang said my comment was downweighted, but he wouldn't say how, just that it wasn't done by a mod: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357062 (I know people don't like it when you complain about the moderation, but it seems topical in this case, since it gives insight into other machinations which could be happening)

Sam's criticality has nothing to do with the technical capabilities of OAI, but everything to do with the commercialization of OAI.

How so? Does he control the tech in some way? Patents?

Marketing to VCs and for lack of a better word, nerd influencers

> for lack of a better word, nerd influencers

Personality cult. Seeing hundreds of employees swearing fealty to their [ex]CEO has been very bizarre.

I don't think he's critical but that's not really the point. His unexpected and apparently unnecessary firing has demonstrated that OpenAI is a weirder organization than most people realized. It's corporate structure, the makeup of the board, the various dealings is now suddenly under the spotlight.

If anyone else was CEO of OpenAI and had been fired like this, the discussion would be almost the same.

My read is not that Sam is critical for the development of ai at openai, but he is the person pushing for them to get commercial success and also getting them deals to actually have the compute to do things. So he IS critical for making all of the employees have PPUs that are worth anything. I imagine a lot of people are looking at hundreds of thousands or even millions lost if OpenAI decides to just stop commercializing and walk away from being a $100B+ company.

> is Sam Altman really that critical

Maybe, maybe not.

This has more to do with board than with Altman.

To many people, it seems that the board made an insane decision without reason. Whether that one decision is the doom of OpenAPI or not, the idea of having incompetent leadership (if true) is the doom of OpenAPI.

I constantly do this OpenAI/OpenAPI typo

It looks like 90%+ of the company is ready to join him and other senior members at Microsoft under a new banner and with the backing of Microsoft which is the major cost center for OpenAI, and also own 49% of OpenAI. It's got to be a furiously grand couple of 10x'ers for the remaining 10% that stay behind to compete with Sam, so while some other CEO might sit in the same seat as him now and might have similar competences, I'd say that in light of this history he is critical, at least right now. We might ask if Steve Jobs was critical at Apple, it sure did seem so when he came back in 1997. History suggest so, but people will of cause have differing opinions on the matter.

Think of him as Elon but low-key

Twitter Elon or SpaceX Elon?

probably Tesla Elon right before the inflection point

He is clearly critical for the $80 Billion valuation to Thrive Capital

He is seemingly quite critical.

Not from any technical knowledge. Maybe his vision and business acumen, but mostly because at that level the tech-bro ceo founders stick together. Not in any formal conspiracy sense, just they have faith and trust and googly-eyes for each other.

From that perspective, the leaked sms messages from elon Musk prior to Twitter purchase were positively illuminating and will give you fascinating (if cringy) insight how billion dollar funding actually works.

What messages?

I assume they are referring to the text messages of Elon's that came out during the Twitter purchase lawsuit. They are an interesting read, to see how Elon and his hangers-on communicate day to day. I will say that my own impression was less than impressed, to put it very mildly.

Yes. It's very Knives Out : glass onion. Millionaires acting like sycophants to billionaires who are sycophants to multi-multi-billionaires. Massive deals over adoring text messages. Personality cults. All the things that you'd like to think our fearless leaders are above, and then you get a splash of reality that they are emotional boys and girls like the rest of us.

Don't get me wrong - the cocky visionary overconfident charming mega star founder schtick clearly works. I'm not certain it should, but it does.

Frankly, I would go so far as to say he is the wrong man for the job of running the for-profit arm of a nonprofit.

He seems to be a guy who wants to be the next Zuckerberg. He wants fame and power, and would step on anyone and anything that gets in his way.

His agreessive commercialization of OpenAI gets in the way of the organization’s original mission. He believes he should get to tell the board what to do, not the other way around.

OpenAI would be better off with a more “tame” CEO who would just do what he/she can to make some dough without running afoul of the organization’s charter, accepting that his/her role and desires are secondary to organization’s.