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Comment by mycologos | Hacker News Reader

> I think they could have won in the court of public opinion ... [but] they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely

Maybe we have different definitions of "the court of public opinion". Most people don't know who Sam Altman is, and most of the people who do know don't have strong opinions on his performance as OpenAI's CEO. Even on HN, the reaction to the board "skwer[ing] him" has been pretty mixed, and mostly one of confusion and waiting to see what else happens.

This quick a turnaround does make the board look bad, though.

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I mean, they're (allegedly) trying to get him to come back 24 hours later... so it's safe to say it did indeed backfire completely.

Sure, the average person doesn't care about Sam. But among the people who matter, Sam certainly came out on top.

If Sam does come back Ilya’s maneuver will have been a spectacular miscalculation. Sam would be back much stronger than before and the people who cared about OpenAI’s original mission will have a massively damaged their reputation and credibility. They threw all the influence they had out the window.

Indeed, this is the real damage.

> (allegedly)

If this (very sparse and lacking in detail) article is true, is this a genuine attempt to get Altman back or just a filip to concerned investors such as Microsoft?

Does OpenAI's board really want Altman back so soon after deposing him so decisively?

Would Altman even want to come back under any terms that would be acceptable to the board? If "significant governance changes" means removing those who had removed him, that seems unlikely.

The Verge's report just raises so many additional questions that I find it difficult to believe at face value.

> I mean, they're (allegedly) trying to get him to come back 24 hours later.

Could be a rumour spread by people close to Sam though.

You underestimate how many people are aware of OpenAI after ChatGPT's viral success.

The news yesterday broke the tech/AI bubble, and there would have been much more press on it if it wasn't done as a Friday news dump.

I guarantee not a single non-tech person knows who Sam Altman is. I know people in tech who have no idea who he is.

You severely overestimate his noteriety.

I would've said the same thing about ChatGPT itself. You could've knocked me over with a feather when they announced that they'd grown to 100 million weekly active users.

I know, personally, a dozen or so non-tech people who know of Sam, mostly because they listen to podcasts or consume other news sources that tell them.

I think it depends on what you mean by ‘non-tech’ and ‘knows’. Reasonable interpretations of those words would see your statement as obviously false.

I agree that he doesn’t have a huge amount of name recognition, but this ousting was a front-page/top-of-website news story so people will likely have heard about it somewhat. I think it’s in the news because of the AI and company drama aspects. It felt like a little more coverage than Bob Iger’s return to Disney got (I’m trying to think of an example of a CEO I’ve heard about who is far from tech).

I think it is accurate to say that most people don’t really know about the CEOs of important/public companies. They probably have heard of Elon/Zuckerberg/Bezos, I can think of a couple of bank CEOs who might come on business/economics news.

Well that's just wrong. Before OpenAI I would've agreed with you, but since OpenAI's rise to prominence there has been a noticeable increase in its coverage in mainstream media outlets featuring Sam. People still read the Times.

I received messages from a physician and a high school teacher in the last 24 hours, asking what I thought about "OpenAI firing Sam Altman".

You are deeply in denial about how much GenAI has permeated into the world TODAY.

Generative AI's ubiquity has nothing to do with Sam Altman's noteriety. People can know what the former is without needing to know the latter. It's not as though he relishes in celebrity like other famous CEO's (Musk).

It was the headline news story in most Indian news websites, even though we have two major states heading for election tomorrow.

You underestimate how obsessed people are with chatGPT and AI

I've been deeply "in tech" for 40 years, and never heard of Sam Altman until he was fired from OpenAI. "Tech" isn't one thing though, it's a very diverse thing with many different areas of interest. I'm not really that interested in AI, so no, I'm not going to care who the players are in that arena. My interests lie in other "tech".

"sib's Mom" (78 yo, retired Spanish professor) enters the chat. And no, she has no idea what GPT stands for.

My 60-year-old mom isn't tech savvy and always asks me for help with her computer. You wouldn't expect her to know about Sam Altman, but she's actively sending me articles about this fiasco.

Shouldn’t the board resign in that case?

That would also remediate the appearence of total incompetence of this clown show, in addition to admitting the board and Sam don’t fit with each other, and restore confidence for the next investor that their money is properly managed. At the moment, no-one would invest in a company that can be undermined by its non-profit, with a (probably) disparaging press release a few minutes before market closure on a Friday evening, for which Satya had to personally intervene.

What matters is what investors think, and by majority they seem very unhappy with all of this.

Speaking for myself, if they had framed this as a difference in vision, I would be willing to listen. But instead they implied that he had committed some kind of categorical wrongdoing. After it became clear that wasn’t the case, it just made them look incompetent.

There are no investors in the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, LLC.

Sure, but Microsoft can sever the relationship if they want to. Thrive can choose to revoke their tender offer, meaning employees won't get the money they were expecting. New firms can decline to ever invest in OpenAI ever again.

There's a lot more to this than who has explicit control.

This is the ideal scenario in my view, the only thing better would be if it also included more interest rate hikes.

And I'm sure Google would jump at the occasion to fund the nonprofit and keep MS out while they develop their own. The funding Goal for the openAI was just 1B. Small price to pay for Google to neuter one of it's competitors exclusive access to the GPT model.

Sure, but there's no research to be done without money for compute and salaries for researchers, which is the entire reason the for-profit company was spun out underneath the non-profit — they needed money. And who would give OpenAI money right now, given that the board ousted the popular CEO in a coup without consulting or even notifying investors?

Sam Altman was an integral part of Y combinator, who runs this site.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman

News about ousting of Altmann was on first page of BBC.

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