Hacker News Reader

Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

everything about it screams amateur hour, from the language and timing of the press release to the fact they didn't notify Microsoft. And how they apparently completely failed to see how employees and customers would react to the news, Ilya saying the circumstances for Altman's removal "weren't ideal" shows how naive they were. They had no PR strategy to control the narrative and let rumors run wild

I doubt he returns, now he can start a for profit AI company, poach OpenAI's talent, and still look like the good guy in the situation. He was apparently already talking to Saudis to raise billions for an Nvidia competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38323939

Have to wonder how much this was contrived as a win-win, either OpenAI board does what he wants or he gets a free out to start his own company without looking like he's purely chasing money

View on HN

This story that they want him back turns it from amateur hour to peak clownshow.

This is why you need someone with business experience running an organization. Ilya et al might be brilliant scientists, but these folks are not equipped to deal with the nuances of managing a ship as heavily scrutinised as OpenAI

actually wild to think about how something like this can even be allowed to happen considering OpenAI has(had) a roughly 90B valuation and it being important to the US from a geopolitical strategy perspective.

comical to imagine something like this happening at a mature company like FedEx, Ford, AT&T. All which have smaller market caps than OpenAI. You basically have impulsive children in charge of massively valuable company

Sure, it's important in some ways, but most corporations aren't direct subordinates of the US Government.

The companies you listed in contrast to OpenAI also have some key differences: they're all long-standing and mature companies that have been through several management and regime changes at this point, while OpenAI is still in startup territory and hasn't fully established what it will be going forward.

The other major difference is that OpenAI is split between a non-profit and a for-profit entity, with the non-profit entity owning a controlling share of the for-profit. That's an unusual corporate structure, and the only public-facing example I can think of that matches it is Mozilla (which has its own issues you wouldn't necessarily see in a pure for-profit corporation). So that means on top of the usual failure modes of a for-profit enterprise that could lead to the CEO getting fired, you also get other possible failure modes including ones grounded in pure ideology since the success or failure of a non-profit is judged on how well it accomplishes its stated mission rather than its profitability, which is uh well, it's a bit more tenuous.

All of them are when they become national security concerns. The executive branch could write the OpenAI board a letter directing them on what to do if it were a national security need. This has been done many times before, though usually limited to the defense industry in wartime, but as Snowden has showed it has been done in tech as well.

Except that is literally not true and the Government loses in court to private citizens and corporations all the time because surprise: people in America have rights and that extends to their businesses.

In wartime, pandemics, and in matters of national security, the government's power is at its apex, but pretty much all of that has to withstand legal challenge. Even National Security Letters have their limits: they're an information gathering tool, the US Government can't use them to restructure a company and the structure of a company is not a factor in its ability to comply with the demands of an NSL.

The PATRIOT act extended the wartime powers act to apply in peacetime, and there are other more obscure authorizations that could be used. I used to work in the defense industry. It was absolutely common knowledge that the government could step in to nationalize control (though not the profits of) private industry when required. This has been done in particular when there are rare resources needed for supersonic then stealth technology during the Cold War, and uranium in the 40’s and 50’s.

These things happen. ICANN controls DNS deeply and they were trying to sell off .org and you know what stopped them? California’s AG has some authority on non-profits in California.

That’s right. Worldwide DNS control and it was controlled by a non-profit in California. And that non-profit tried to do something shady and was kept in line simply because of California law enforcement.

Or little things like your $10b investment partner having a pissed off CEO and massive legal team ready to strike now. It’s such fucking amateur hour it’s incredible.

It’s unclear what Ilya thinks keeps the lights on when MSFT holds their money hostage now. Which is probably why there is desperation to get Altman back…

Sorry how could MSFT hold the money hostage exactly? Isn't that kind of investment a big cash transfer directly to OAI's bank account? Genuinely curious

just restricting their access to GPUs would finish them, even if they can't claw back the cash somehow

Not just that, the way they’ve handled this also means that no other large investor will fund them.

> Only a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI has been wired to the startup, while a significant portion of the funding, divided into tranches, is in the form of cloud compute purchases instead of cash, according to people familiar with their agreement.

Per https://www.semafor.com/article/11/18/2023/openai-has-receiv...

Microsoft’s “investment” is mostly cloud compute credits on a giga scale. OpenAI has pretty much free rein of every otherwise unallocated azure GPU host, and a lot of hardware spun up just for this purpose.

If Microsoft considers this action a breach of their agreement, they could shut off access tomorrow. Every OpenAI service would go offline.

There are very few services that would be able to backfill that need for GPU compute, and after this clusterfuck not a single one would want to invest their own operating dollars supporting OpenAI. Microsoft has OpenAI by the balls.

Microsoft has Microsoft by the balls. They just integrated GPT4 with their browser, search engine, and _desktop operating system_. It would be a mess to suddenly take all this functionality out. They have too much to lose by turning off compute for OpenAI.

The Nvidia competitor piece is a very good reason to fire him. Way out of his circle of competence and not necessary to the mission of the company.

This is what happens when a non-profit gets taken over by greed I guess..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com