When you have irreconcilable differences with the board you could theoretically jump ship and start a rival company. Usually, in practice, that’s impossibly hard and yet Microsoft announced that they intended to do exactly that with funding and stock matching. For some reason that was turned down in favor of staging the equivalent of an in-country coup.
If you get caught breaking the law on vacation abroad and your response to being arrested is to take control of the country in retaliation then you are a very powerful, persuasive, or threatening person indeed.
You know a number of people are in that position though.
My first thought went to Samsung's chairman who will break the law and go to prison, but the country will have him back, bending over backwards to somewhat have it make sense.
Reminds me of the Wirecard scandal doc on Netflix. Wirecard was so powerful that the financial regulators (BaFin) started targeting journalists and actively defending a publicly traded company.
The board's major mistake was not communicating why he was let go.
My guess is that the likely reason why employees threatened to go was that they felt Altman had the best chances of making the for-profit arm's shares skyrocket. As a non-profit company's board, I'd be fine letting those people walk out the front door along with the CEO that was just fired.
It is my understanding that the key personnel who developed the actual technology were not part of the group threatening to leave. It was mainly the group in the for-profit arm that Altman had trojan-horsed into the company structure.
> This included the company's key leadership.
I'm not aware of the machine learning researchers responsible for the core technology threatening to leave. Who were they?
I would challenge you to name a researcher who didn't resign or threaten to resign. Remember, they all had a plausible landing spot: They could simply show up at Microsoft with all the same leadership, coworkers, salary, compute, and IP the next day. OpenAI as we know it was over unless and until the board gave in.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/95-percent-of-openai-employees-t... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/three-senior-openai-...
I still wager that things would have been different had the board clearly stated their reasons. Doesn't make any sense that they did it months later. The signing of the petition seems mostly group think and political. I would guess that the majority of employees would have followed through.
Lastly, I still can't say any of this makes any sense. Why did the employees even care about Altman? It still seems all very strange to leave your job for someone who doesn't seem to have ever said anything meaningful.
Ilya Sutskever, Alec Radford, Wojciech Zaremba, Nick Ryder, Mark Chen, ... how many names do you want? >90% of the company threatened to leave.
Him joining the pile-on when it was already clear how big it is was pretty much surrendering to the mob, and was perceived as such even at the time.
Guess you'd be fine being the board over a company that now only consists of a board. Thumbs up.
Instead, they did not even attempt to communicate any rationale behind their actions.
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
https://openai.com/index/openai-announces-leadership-transit...
I even said so at the time.
Instead, it's good form to wait 6 months and then do a Business Insider interview on the topic?
Also, "bad mouthing" suggests putting a spin on it. Based on the article, they should have been able to list out several objective facts that supported their decision. Instead, they opened it all up to intense speculation by providing a vague justification and by remaining tight lipped even once it became clear that a lot of clarification was needed.
But, what kind of Wild West is this? It's all so unhinged and strange.
There are no NDAs, non-competes or other impediments? MS just guts OpenAI at its whim?
>there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.
...If MS can do this, then there's already no OpenAI left to preside over.
It is a very pro employee policy, hence attractive to the best and brightest.
I mentioned non-competes as one of a universe of things that makes this unusual; including its original non-profit status becoming substantially for-profit, and the apparent ease with which MS can now gut the supposedly controlling non-profit and walk away with everything.
And, I'm guessing even the CA policy on non-competes wasn't conceived with the idea of one company simply "taking" another company at-will, even if that scenario is technically covered.
All businesses at all times are subject to losing their employees to another employer who is willing to pay enough for them.
But if they had the moral conviction, it seems like this would have been the right choice to make, because it would have diluted Altman's power (unless they trust Nadella even less than they trust Altman?)
What I did see was so much incompetence at the one thing I expect a board to be at least okay at. Hiring and firing.
For that alone, I think the board reshuffle was good. Regardless of who you support in all of this.
Sure, the rectification of names is an improvement in a sense; what is actually needed is a working Altman-control system.
PG called it over 15 years ago: "You could parachute him [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king".
Microsoft needs the sold-out version of OpenAI so they can make as much money as possible without anyone making pesky noises about ethics and safety.
Outsource all of the risk to a non-profit, but still be able to run it, and snag up all of the researchers if/when something gets ugly.
Almost the entire company was threatening to quit.
If it was possible to simply replace all of openAI, then you could just do that now, as an outside party.
So the boards choice was to either bring back Sam or watch the entire company go under.
This is the part that perplexes me. A CEO being fired is not an unusual occurrence. What about Sam Altman led such a huge number of employees to threaten to follow him out the door? Was it that the board's actions were viewed as internally unjust? Was it Altman's power of persuasion? Was/is Altman viewed by the staff as bringing something irreplaceable to the table in terms of talent, skill or ability?
My understanding is that a fair amount of it was essentially peer pressure. If you're an employee whose CEO has just been fired for unclear reasons, and someone hands you a chain letter saying "restate him or everyone will quit" and you're told everyone's signing that letter and there's already someone who promised to hire everyone who quits into their current role at equal pay, would you sign it?
Scenario A, Sam Altman continues as CEO and the for profit arm of OpenAI continues to call the shots, growth and market share continue to be priority number one.
Scenario B, Sam Altman is fired, OpenAI non-profit board (re?)-asserts more control. Safety, alignment and other things like that take priority over growth and market share.
x% of Employees are Sam believers, and when the remaining x% of ambiguous/non-Sam believers realize the first x% might leave, their PSUs would be worth significantly less, so they sign the letter as well. There is also the peer pressure / fear of retribution factor as well once it becomes likely there is even a chance of Sam being reinstated.
Many employees choose scenario A because it is likely their "profit sharing units" will be worth more than with scenario B. There's a non-zero chance that OpenAI (the for profit arm) eventually joins the ranks of the "FAANG" companies. Those PSUs might be worth millions today, but in the future could be worth "fuck you" levels of money.
That would shutdown the entire company.
And I would hope that wasn't their goal.
> So then why did the board re-hire Sam Altman?
Presumably so that the entire company wouldn't be shutdown.
Yeah... and? OpenAI is pretty much a for-profit company now. Why shouldn't a non-profit board pull the plug on a non-profit turned for-profit? Isn't that a part of their job?
And then it can't use that money on its mission because it shut down.
> Isn't that a part of their job?
No, it isn't. Their job would be to use the income that they received from that part of the business and spend it on their mission.
There are all sorts of non profits that operate in a similar way.
In fact acting sustainably is generally a positive for non-profits because it means that you can be more effective for longer without having to rely on donations.
Summarizing, essentially the employees were under the impression either Sama comes back OR OpenAI dissolves and they lose their job.
The ChatGPT release is what made the AI movement go mainstream. It is why OpenAI is worth ~80 billion dollars.
By Gods am I glad that the board wasn't able to stop ChatGPT from being released.
I seem to recall that the release in late November 2022 was only intended to be a way for volunteers on the Internet to experiment with it and provide feedback.
Worth to who?
It is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay for it.
I guess you also think Self-Driving Cars should come to full stop at STOP signs
But, if you think in first principles, humans need to stop because we have only two eyes that can look at only one direction and can never simultaneously compute what speed the other cars are traveling. Of course we have to stop and give enough buffer for 0% accident probability.
A FSD vehicle will have 8+ cameras looking around and already have computed where all the vehicles will be and has faster reaction time. So, it can be afforded higher buffer and lenient rules that was designed for humans.
But, people like yourself are hell bent on following rules for rules-following-sake instead of thinking in first principles. So, an FSD builder would have to lie to you to say "It'll follow traffic rules" because you have that framework.
If another first-principle-thinker asks the FSD builder, then they won't lie and will correctly say "Hey it will stop only when it is required and will break some traffic rules which doesn't make sense for a machine".
But you think it's just a Billionaire club. But it is really about having same principles.
Hope that clarifies.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/what-is-a-decel-dueling...
I'm sure that--in practice--there will be extremely strong correlation to social-order changes that leave the C-suite richer than before. :p
We don't necessarily have to like it to acknowledge it's very much reality.
So it actually implies allowing capitalists to wield extreme power, skirt laws and regulations.
I understand the term has gone through some kind of whitewashing to mean "this is the good system (unlike the bad system)", so one might be inclined to think it means something more equitable, but seriously, that was the original meaning.
It's like Elon 'Electric Jesus' Musk, without him, they're just selling shitty cars nobody quite like. So he can get paid more than all profit Tesla ever made, because without him, there would be 0 profit anyway.
Talk to Tesla owners: they are surprised by how shit the car is, but they feel like mini Elons. That's probably similar at OpenAI ?
So why would you rehire him and then resign? Why not leave him fired and resign?
Why did Microsoft care so much about Altman? They didn't have a board seat, so too bad so sad. They should have had no sway. If they want OpenAI, then they can buy it. Why would they even want Altman to come to their company? What possible value could Altman bring to Microsoft?
Just none of it makes any sense. In fact, the most clear thing is Altman's negative behavior and mode of operation. I remember his very loud, awshucks pronouncements of having no shares in OpenAI. Yea, right. A career VC setup a new company structure or structures where he wouldn't benefit at all financially.
In another timeline, OpenAI firing him, naming an interim CEO, ignoring all else, and then hiring a new CEO would have all gone just fine. I don't know why Microsoft and others made a huge kerfuffle over it. And I also don't know why the board released such a cryptic press release when they could have provided details.
I just can't wrap my head around any of it, even letting in conspiracy theory lines. Lol. It just makes no sense and gives me a feeling that no one involved has any clue about anything, including Satya Nadella.