Altman was trying to remove one of the board members before he was forced out. Looks like he got his way in the end, but I'm going to call Altman the primary instigator because of that.
His side was also the "we'll nuke the company unless you resign" side.
I'm sure some of those employees were easily going to make $10m+ in the sale. That's a pretty great motivation tool.
Overall, I do agree with you. The board could not justify their capricious decision making and refused to elaborate. They should've brought him back on Sunday instead of mucking around. OpenAI existing is a good thing.
Average people don't like to lie, if someone bullies them until they agree to sign they will sign because they are honest.
Also if they said they will sign but the ticker didn't go up, it is pretty obvious that they lied and I'm sure they don't want that risk.
Also, all the stuff they started doing with the hearts and cryptic messages on Twitter (now X) was a bit ... cult-y?. I wouldn't doubt there was a lot of manipulation behind all that, even from @sama itself.
So, there is goes, it seems that there's a big chance now that the first AGI will land on the hands of a group with the antics of teenagers. Interesting timeline.
I think the board should have been more transparent on why they made the decision to fire Sam.
Or perhaps these employees only cared about their AI work and money? The foundation would be perceived as the culprit against them.
Really sad there’s no clarity from the old board disclosed. Hope one day we will know.
I'm sure Sam is a charismatic guy, but generally speaking folks will support a whole lot when a multi million dollar payday is on the line.
IMO Kevin tweeting that MS will hire and match comp of all OpenAI employees was amazing negotiation tactic because that meant employees could sign the petition without worrying about their jobs/visas
(Sad day for popcorn sales.)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sar...
What is the benefit of learning about this kind of drama minute-by-minute, compared to reading it a few hours later on hacker news or next day on wall street journal?
Personally I found twitter very bad for my productivity, a lot of focus destroyed just to know "what is happening" when there was neglible drawbacks of finding about news events a few hours later.
Microsoft is showing to investors that it is going to be an AI company, one way or the other.
Microsoft still has access to everything OpenAI does.
Microsoft has its friend, Sam, at the helm of OpenAI and with a more tighter grip on the company than ever.
Its still a win for Microsoft.
The one thing in Microsoft has stayed constant from Gates to Ballmer to Satya: you should never, ever form a close alliance with MS. They know how to screw alliance partners. i4i, Windows RT partners, Windows Phone Partners, Nokia, HW partners in Surface. Even Steve Jobs was burned few times.
Microsoft is showing that it is still able to capture important scale ups and 'embrace' them, whilst also acting as if they have the moral high ground, but in reality are doing research with a high governance errors and potential legal problems away from their premises. and THAT is why stakeholders like him.
(Thank you for calling Twitter Twitter)
>It is just a joke that Facebook could be valued at $6 billion.
lol, seems HN is same since forever.
This has been my single strongest takeaway from this saga: Twitter remains the centre of controversy. When shit hit the fan, Sam and Satya and Swisher took to Twitter. Not Threads. Not Bluesy. Twitter. (X.)
Threads had a rushed rollout which resulted in major feature gaps that disincentivized users from doing anything beyond creating their profiles.
Notable figures and organizations have little reason to fully migrate off Twitter unless Musk irreversibly breaks the site and even he is not stupid enough to do that (yet?). So with most of its content creators still in place, Twitter has no risk of following the path of Digg.
Whole charade was by GPT5 to understand the position of person sitting next to red button and secondary to stress test Hacker News.
It's not actually news, it's entertainment and self-aggrandizement by everyone involved including the audience.
Seems like there's no way to win with Twitter. You may not be interested in Twitter, but Twitter is interested in you.
This outcome WAS microsoft's role in all this. Satya offering sam a ceo like position to create a competing product was leverage for this outcome.
The fact that Adam D'Angelo is still on the new board apparently is much more baffling than the fact that Tonrer or Ilya are not.
She was fighting an idelogical battle that needs full industry buy in, legitimate or not that's not how you win people over.
If she's truely a rationalist as she claims then a rationalist would be realistic understanding that if your engineers can just leave and do it somewhere else tomorrow you aren't making progress. Taking on the full might of US capitalism via winning over the fringe half of a non profit board is not the best strategy. At best it was desperate and naive.
Traditional response to this happening is to say something about your "priors" being wrong instead of taking responsibility.
It's only natural to confuse what is happening with what we wish to happen. After all, when we imagine something, aren't we undergoing a kind of experience?
A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof. It's only human to do this. We all do.
same with Ashlee Vance (the other journo reporting on this) and all the main players (Sam/Greg/Ilya/Mira/Satya/whoever) also make their first announcement on twitter.
I don't know about the funding part of it, but there is no denying it, the news is still freshest on twitter. Twitter feels just as toxic for me as before, in fact I feel community notes has made it much better, imho.
____
In some related news, I finally got bluesky invite (I don't have invite codes yet or I would share here)
and people there are complaining about... mastadon and how elitist it is...
that was an eye opener.
nice if you want some science-y updates but it's still lags behind twitter for news.
Discoverability on Mastodon is abysmal. It was too much work for me.
I tend to get my news from Substack now.
Don't you feel out of date on substack? especially since things move so fast sometimes, like with this open-ai fiasco?
Cognitive dissonance
2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this?
3- Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.