Unsaid: “Also I lied about hiring him.”

> And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.

https://nitter.net/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122

I guess everyone was just playing a bit loose and fast with the truth and hype to pressure the board.

Why does this accusation keep coming up? Sam even confirmed he took the offer in one of the tweets above "when i decided to join msft on sun evening". Contracts are not handcuffs and he was free to change his mind.

Satya's statement at the time may well have been true at the time in that he, Sam and Greg had agreed on them joining MSFT. Later circumstances changed, and now that decision has been reversed or nullfied. Calling the original statement a lie is not warranted IMHO.

In either case the end effect is the essentially the same. Either Sam is at MSFT and can continue to work with openAI IP, or he's back at openAI and do the same. In both cases the net effect for MSFT is similar and not materially different, although the revealed preference of Sam's return to openAI indicates the second option was the preferred one.

[Edit for grammar]

There is a material difference between:

Sam and Greg will be joining Microsoft.

And:

Sam and Greg have in principle agreed to join Microsoft but not signed anything.

If Microsoft has (now) agreed to release either of them (or anyone else) from contractual obligations, then the first one was true.

If not, then the first was was a lie, and the second one was true.

This whole drama has been punctuated by a great deal of speculation, pivots, changes and, bluntly, lies.

Why do we need to sugar coat it?

Where the fuck is this new magical Microsoft research lab?

Microsoft preparing a new office for openAI employees? Really? Is that also true?

Is Sam actually going to be on the board now, or is this another twist in this farcical drama when they blow it off again?

I see no reason to, at least point, give anyone involved the benefit of the doubt.

Once the board actually changes, or Microsoft actually does something, I’m happy to change my tune, but I’m calling what I see.

Sam did not join Microsoft at any point.

Exactly this. It also moved Microsoft’s share price. Is that not questionable practice?

Only if people in the know took advantage of it.

Wait where are you getting that the hiring was a lie? At this point his tenure there was approximately as long as miras and emmets so that's par for the course in this saga, what makes that stint different?

Absolutely no lies here. It was a dynamic situation and it wasn't at all clear that discussions with OAI board would lead to an outcome where sama returns as CEO.

Satya offered sama a way forward as a backup option.

And I think it says a lot about sama that he took that option, at least while things were playing out. He and Greg could have gotten together capital for a startup where they each had huge equity and made $$$$$$. These actions from sama demonstrate his level of commitment to execution on this technology.

maybe he really had an affirmative statement on this from Sam Altman but nobody signs an employment contract this quickly so it was all still up in the air

Also even if he signed it he's allowed to quit? Like, the 14th amendment exists y'all. And especially if after that agreement 90+ percent of openai threatens to quit, that's a different situation than the situation 10 minutes before that announcement so why wouldn't they change their decision?

Did you miss the part where Sam himself said he "decided to join MSFT on Sunday"?

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883

He's has now changed his mind, sure, but that doesn't mean Satya lied.

it was Monday morning and he didn’t want MSFT stock to crash

will be joining =! has joined

>> a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.

That's quite a slap at the board... a polite way of calling them ignorant, ineffective dilettantes.

Yet one of them is still on the board…

The one (Adam D’Angelo) who’s a cofounder and CEO of a company (Quora) that has a product (Poe) that arguably competes with OpenAI’s “GPTs” feature, no less.

I don’t understand why that’s not a conflict of interest?

But honestly both products pale in comparison to OpenAI’s underlying models’ importance.

> I don’t understand why that’s not a conflict of interest?

It's not the conflict of interest it would be if it was the board of a for profit corporation that was basically identical to the existing for-profit LLC but without the lyaers above it ending with the nonprofit that the board actually runs, because OpenAI is not a normal company, and making profit is not its purpose, so the CEO of a company that happens to have a product in the same space as the LLC is not in a fundamental conflict of interest (there may be some specific decisions it would make sense for him to recuse from for conflict reasons, but there is a difference between "may have a conflict regarding certain decisions" and "has a fundamental conflict incompatible with sitting on the board".)

Its not a conflict for a nonprofit that raises money with craft faires to have someone who runs a for-profit periodic craft faire in the same market on its board. It is a conflict for a for profit corporation whose business is running such a craft faire to do so, though.

Still a conflict of interest. If D’Angelo has financial incentive to want OpenAI to fail, then this at odds with his duty to follow the OpenAI charter. It’s exactly why two of the previous board members left earlier this year.

D'Angelo?

Wonder if this is a signal that the theories about Poe are off the mark.

Doesn’t matter. It’s an absolutely clear conflict of interest. It may have taken an unrelated shakeup for people to notice (or maybe D’Angelo was critically involved; we don’t know), but there’s no way he should be staying on this board.

maybe it's just going to be easier to fire him in a second step once this current situation which seems to be primarily about ideology is cleared up. In D’Angelo's case it's going to be easier to just point to a clear traditional conflict of interest down the line

No one really knows who was responsible for what. But Sam agreed to this deal over the Microsoft alternative, so probably Adam isn't that bad.

I don't understand that either, but let's see what the board looks like in a few months/weeks/days/hours?

Old board needs to agree to new board, so I think some compromise is inevitable.

If all members of the old board resign simultaneously, what happens then? No more old board to agree to any new members. In a for-profit the shareholders can elect new board members, but in this case I don't know how it's supposed to work.

I've been privy to this happening at a nonprofit board. Depends on charter, but I've seen the old board tender their resignation and remain responsible only to vote for the appointment of their (usually interim to start) replacements. Normally in a nonprofit (not here), the membership of that nonprofit still has to ratify the new board in some kind of annual meeting; but in the meantime, the interim board can start making executive decisions about the org.

Maybe the other two left if Adam would remain.

Not sure why that would be contradictory.

Well then there’s still a “ignorant, ineffective dilettante“ making up 1/3 of the board.

Firstly, maybe don't put quotes around an unrelated party's representation of the board. Secondly, the board was made up of individuals and naturally, what might be true for the board as a whole does not apply to every individual on it.

I don’t understand this comment. I’m quoting from this thread, from the post that I was responding to. What do you think I was talking about?

Did Satya get played with the whole "Sam and Greg are joining Microsoft"? Was Satya in on a gambit to get the whole company to threaten to quit to force the board's hand?

It sure feels like a bad look for Satya to announce a huge hire Sunday night and then this? But what do I know.

Edit: don't know why the downvotes. You're welcome to think it's an obviously smart political move. That it's win/win either way. But it's a very fair question that every tech blogger on the planet will be trying to answer for the next month!

Consider that Satya already landed a huge win by the stock price hitting ATH rather than taking a hit based on the news. Further consider that MS owns 49% of a company which could be valued at 80 billion on the condition that the company makes structural changes to the board to prevent this from happening again (as opposed to taking a dive if the company essentially died.) Then there's the uncertainty of the tech behind Bing's chat (and other AI tie-ins) continuing to be competitive vs Google and other players. If MS had to recreate their own tech, then they would likely be far behind even a stalled OpenAI. Seems to me that it makes little difference where this tech is being developed (in-house vs in a company which you own 49% of) in terms of access. Probably better that the development happens within the company which started all of this and has already been the leader, rather than starting over.

Im not so sure. This whole ordeal revealed how strong of a position Microsoft had all along. And that’s all still true even without effectively taking over OpenAI. Because now everyone can see how easily it could happen.

Something does still seem not flattering towards Microsoft about reneging on the Microsoft offer though.

I think it was mostly a bluff to try the pressure the board. I don't think Sam and most of Open AI rank and file would want to be employees of MSFT

Can CEOs make market moving "bluffs"? Sounds like another word for securities fraud.

(what isn't)

Of course they can, but they can't do these and sell/buy stocks involved at the same time. It's not illegal to influence stocks value (one could argue just being a CEO does that), but buying/selling while in possession of insider knowledge.

Let's say Sam called his broker and said to him on Friday we'll before the market closes. Buy MSFT stock. Then he made his announcement on Sunday and on Monday he told his broker to sell that stock before he announced he's actually coming back to (not at all)OpenAI. That would be illegal insider trading.

If he never calls his broker/his friends/his mom to buy/sell stock there's nothing illegal.

Securities fraud is more than insider trading. Misleading investors about a company’s financial health is fraud 101 and it sure looks like he lied about hiring someone to stem a precipitate MSFT drop.

Or, it did seem like a deal, but all of OAI did align that that to be more disastrous than whatever apocalypse that Altman as the CEO must entail.

Also to lessen the MSFT share impact.

I guess that theory was right, that Satya's announcement was just a delaying tactic to calm the market before Monday morning.

He announced the hire and that precipitated 90+ percent of the employees threatening to quit. It would be an understatement to say that the situation changed. Why does everyone want satya to be bad at his job and and not react quickly to a rapidly evolving situation? His decision to hire Sama paved the way for samas return.

"Hiring" them was just a PR tactic to keep Microsoft stock from tanking while they got this figured out.

Yeah there's a word for that type of thing

Doesn't seem that way to me. Seems like it was Satya sorta calling the board's bluff.

Huh? Satyas move was politically brilliant. Either outcome of Sama returning to OpenAI or Sama going to Microsoft is good for Microsoft as continuity and progress are the most important things right now for Microsoft. An OpenAI in turmoil would have been worthless.

Satyas maneuvering gave Sama huge leverage.

and yet microsoft has no seat on the board.

The board is not finalized. There will most likely be more seats and Microsoft will probably have at least one.

microsoft is going to need 2-3 seats on that board

Larry Summers mostly counts as a Microsoft seat. Summers will support commercial and private interest and not have a single thought about safety, just like during the financial crisis 15 years ago https://www.chronicle.com/article/larry-summers-and-the-subv...

Larry Summers hurt the US economy by making the recovery from 2008 much too slow. If they'd done stimulus better, we could've had 2019's economic growth years earlier. That would've been great for Microsoft.