Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his possible return

Re:Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his poss... by throw20away on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:12PM (#38371918)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his poss... by ethanbond on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:18PM (#38371982)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his poss... by adventured on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:28PM (#38372115)

> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his poss... by ethanbond on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:18PM (#38372664)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]