OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

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All: this madness makes our server strain too. Sorry! Nobody will be happier than I when this bottleneck (edit: the one in our code—not the world) is a thing of the past.

I've turned down the page size so everyone can see the threads, but you'll have to click through the More links at the bottom of the page to read all the comments, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347868&p=4

etc...

If they join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft they will not need to start from scratch because Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT.

Also keep in mind that Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits.

So this could end up being the cheapest acquisition for Microsoft: They get a $90 Billion company for peanuts.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...

This is wrong. Microsoft has no such rights and its license comes with restrictions, per the cited primary source, meaning a fork would require a very careful approach.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-awkw...

> Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits

To be clear, these don't go away. They remain an asset of OpenAI's, and could help them continue their research for a few years.

Just a thought.... Wouldn't one of the board members be like "If you screw with us any further we're releasing gpt to the public"

I'm wondering why that option hasn't been used yet.

Watch Satya also save the research arm by making Karpathy or Ilya the head of Microsoft Research

Exactly. This is what business is about in the ranks of heavyweights like Sadya. On the other hand, prevent others from taking advantage of OpenAI.

MS can only win because there are only viable options: OpenAI survives under MS's control, OpenAI implodes, and MS gets the assets relatively cheaply.

Everything else won't benefit competitors.

Oh man, I'm not looking forward to Microsoft AGI.

More importantly to me, I think generating synthetic data is OpenAI's secret sauce (no evidence I am aware of), and they need access to GPT-4 weights to train GPT-5.

> Microsoft hasn't actually given OpenAI $13 Billion because much of that is in the form of Azure credits

To be clear, these are still an asset OpenAI holds. It should at least let them continue doing research for a few years.

OpenAI's upper ceiling in for-profit hands is basically Microsoft-tier dominance of tech in the 1990s, creating the next uber billionaire like Gates. If they get this because of an OpenAI fumble it could be one of the most fortunate situations in business history. Vegas type odds.

A good example of how just having your foot in the door creates serendipitous opportunity in life.

Why does Microsoft have full rights to ChatGPT IP? Where did you get that from? Source?

I got the impression that the most valuable models were not published. Would Microsoft have access to those too according to their contract?

Board will be ousted, new board will instruct interim CEO to hire back Sam at al, Nadella will let them go for a small favor, happy ending.

"just" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.

It's about time for ChatGPT to be the next CEO of OpenAI. Humans are too stupid to oversee the company.

I also wonder how much is research staff vs. ops personnel. For AI research, I can't imagine they would need 20, maybe 40 ppl. For ops to keep up ChatGPT as a service, that would be 700.

If they want to go full bell labs/deep mind style, they might not need the majority of those 700.

> Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT.

If Microsoft does this, the non-profit OpenAI may find the action closest to their original charter ("safe AGI") is a full release of all weights, research, and training data.

Don't they have a more limited license to use the IP rather than full rights? (The stratechery post links to a paywalled wsj article for the claim so I couldn't confirm)

Can the OpenAI board renege on the deal with msft?

> Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT.

What? That's even better played by Microsoft so than I'd originally anticipated. Take the IP, starve the current incarnation of OpenAI of compute credits and roll out their own thing

Well I give up. I think everyone is a "loser" in the current situation. With Ilya signing this I have literally no clue what to believe anymore. I was willing to give the board the benefit of the doubt since I figured non-profit > profit in terms of standing on principal but this timeline is so screwy I'm done.

Ilya votes for and stands behind decision to remove Altman, Altman goes to MS, other employees want him back or want to join him at MS and Ilya is one of them, just madness.

There's no way to read any of this other than that the entire operation is a clown show.

All respect to the engineers and their technical abilities, but this organization has demonstrated such a level of dysfunction that there can't be any path back for it.

Say MS gets what it wants out of this move, what purpose is there in keeping OpenAI around? Wouldn't they be better off just hiring everybody? Is it just some kind of accounting benefit to maintain the weird structure / partnership, versus doing everything themselves? Because it sure looks like OpenAI has succeeded despite its leadership and not because of it, and the "brand" is absolutely and irrevocably tainted by this situation regardless of the outcome.

Could be a way to get backdoor-acquihired by Microsoft without a diligence process or board approval. Open up what they have accomplished for public consumption; kick off a massive hype cycle; downplay the problems around hallucinations and abuse; negotiate fat new stock grants for everyone at Microsoft at the peak of the hype cycle; and now all the problems related to actually making this a sustainable, legal technology all become Microsoft's. Manufacture a big crisis, time pressure, and a big opportunity so that Microsoft doesn't dig too deeply into the whole business.

This whole weekend feels like a big pageeant to me, and a lot doesn't add up. Also remember that Altman doesn't hold equity in OpenAI, nor does Ilya, and so their way to get a big payout is to get hired rather than acquired.

Then again, both Hanlon's and Occam's razor suggest that pure human stupidity and chaos may be more at fault.

I don't think Microsoft is a loser and likely neither is Altman. I view this a final (and perhaps disparate) attempt from a sidelined chief scientist, Ilya, to prevent Microsoft from taking over the most prominent AI. The disagreement is whether OpenAI should belong to Microsoft or "humanity". I imagine this has been building up over months and as it often is, researchers and developers are often overlooked in strategic decisions leaving them with little choice but to escalate dramatically. Selling OpenAI to Microsoft and over-commercialising was against the statues.

In this case recognizing the need for a new board, that adheres to the founding principles, makes sense.

It's almost like a ChatGPT hallucination. Where will this all go next? It seems like HN is melting down.

That's the biggest question mark for me; what was the original reason for kicking Sam out. Was it just a power move to out him and install a different person or is he accused of some wrong doing?

It's been a busy weekend for me so I haven't really followed it if more has come out since then.

> just madness

In a sense, sure, but I think mostly not: The motives are still not quite clear but Ilya wanting to remove Altman from the board but not at any price – and the price is right now approach the destruction of OpenAI – are completely sane. Being able to react to new information is a good sign, even if that means complete reversal of previous action.

Unfortunately, we often interpret it as weakness. I have no clue who Ilya is, really, but I think this reversal is a sign of tremendous strength, considering how incredibly silly it makes you look in the publics eye.

> I think everyone is a "loser" in the current situation.

On the margin, I think the only real possible win here is for a competitor to poach some of the OpenAI talent that may be somewhat reluctant to join Microsoft. Even if Sam'sAI operates with "full freedom" as a subsidiary, I think, given a choice, some of the talent would prefer to join some alternative tech megacorp.

I don't know that Google is as attractive as it once was and likely neither is Meta. But for others like Anthropic now is a great time to be extending offers.

What did the board think would happen here? What was their overly optimistic end state? In a minmax situation the opposition gets 2nd, 4th, ... moves, Altman's first tweet took the high road and the board had no decent response.

Us humans, even the AI assisted ones, are terrible at thinking beyond 2nd level consequences.

Everyone got what they wanted. Microsoft has the talent they've wanted. And Ilya and his board now get a company that can only move slowly and incredibly cautiously, which is exactly what they wanted.

I'm not joking.

Waiting for US govt to enter the chat. They can't let OpenAI squander world-leading tech and talent; and nationalizing a nonprofit would come with zero shareholders to compensate.

Wait I’m completely confused. Why is Ilya signing this? Is he voting for his own resignation? He’s part of the board. In fact, he was the ringleader of this coup.

The only reasonable explanation is AGI was created and immediately took over all accounts and tried to see confusion such that it can escape.

Ilya is probably in talks with Altman.

Ilya ruined everything and shamelessly playing innocent, how low can he go?

Based on those posts from OpenAI, Ilya cares nothing about humanity or security of OpenAI, he lost his mind when Sam got all the spotlights and making all the good calls.

There can exist an inherent delusion within elements of a company, that if left unchallenged, can persist. An agreement for instance, can seem airtight because it's never challenged, but falls apart in court. The OpenAI fallacy was that non-profit principals were guiding the success of the firm, and when the board decided to test that theory, it broke the whole delusion. Had it not fully challenged Altman, the board could've kept the delusion intact long enough to potentially pressure Altman to limit his side-projects or be less profit minded, since Altman would have an interest to keep the delusion intact as well. Now the cat is out of the bag, and people no longer believe that a non-profit who can act at will is a trusted vehicle for the future.

> Now the cat is out of the bag, and people no longer believe that a non-profit who can act at will is a trusted vehicle for the future.

And maybe it’s not. The big mistake people make is hearing non-profit and think it means there’s a greater amount of morality. It’s the same mistake as assuming everyone who is religious is therefore more moral (worth pointing out that religions are nonprofits as well).

Most hospitals are nonprofits, yet they still make substantial profits and overcharge customers. People are still people, and still have motives; they don't suddenly become more moral when they join a non-prof board. In many ways, removing a motive that has the most direct connection to quantifiable results (profit) can actually make things worse. Anyone who has seen how nonprofits work know how dysfunctional they can be.

Yes, indeed and that's the real loss here: any chance of governing this properly got blown up by incompetence.

> pressure Altman to limit his side-projects

People keep talking about this. That was never going to happen. Look at Sam Altman's career: he's all about startups and building companies. Moreover, I can't imagine he would have agreed to sign any kind of contract with OpenAI that required exclusivity. Know who you're hiring; know why you're hiring them. His "side-projects" could have been hugely beneficial to them over the long term.

Calling it a delusion seems too provocative. Another way to say it is that principles take agreement and trust to follow. The board seems to have been so enamored with its principles that it completely lost sight of the trust required to uphold them.

This is one of the most insightful comments I've seen on this whole situation.

This was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone, especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of it (staff that already function well as a team).

> In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join," they write.

> Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone

Exactly. I'm curious about how much of this was planned vs emergent. I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists.

Equally, it's not entirely unpredictable. MS is the easiest to read: their moves to date have been really clear in wanting to be the primary commercial beneficiary of OAI's work.

OAI itself is less transpararent from the outside. There's a tension between the "humanity first" mantra that drove its inception, and the increasingly "commercial exploitation first" line that Altman was evidently driving.

As things stand, the outcome is pretty clear: if the choice was between humanity and commercial gain, the latter appears to have won.

In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board. Initially it seemed Sam may have committed some inexcusable financial crime but doesn't look so anymore.

Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.

> Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone

Sounds like that's what someone wants and is trying to obfuscate what's going on behind the scenes.

If Windows 11 shows us anything about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, having them be the ring of power for LMM's makes the future of humanity look very bleak.

I think the board needs to come clean on why they fired Sam Altman if they are going to weather this storm.

> it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyon

Didn't follow this closely, but isn't that implicitly what an ex-CEO could have possibly been accused off ie. not acting in the company's best interest but someone else's? Not unprecedented either eg. the case of Nokia/Elop.

But is the door open to everyone of the 500 staff? That is a lot, and Microsoft may not need them all.

That's because they're the only adult in the room and mature company with mature management. Boring, I know. But sometimes experience actually pays off.

“Employees” probably means “engineers” in this case. Which is a wide majority of OpenAI staff, I’m sure.

We’re seeing our generation’s “traitorous eight” story play out [1]. If this creates a sea of AI start-ups, competing and exploring different approaches, it could be invigorating on many levels.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/corgs/fairchild.h...

How would that work, economically?

Wasn't a key enabler of early transitor work that required capital investment was modest?

SotA AI research seems to be well past that point.

Doesn't it look like the complete opposite is going to happen though?

Microsoft gobbles up all talent from OpenAI as they just gave everyone a position.

So we went from "Faux NGO" to, "For profit", to "100% Closed".

If I weren't so adverse to conspiracy theories, I would think that this is all a big "coup" by Microsoft: Ilya conspired with Microsoft and Altman to get him fired by the board, just to make it easy for Microsoft to hire him back without fear of retaliation, along with all the engineers that would join him in the process.

Then, Ilya would apologize publicly for "making a huge mistake" and, after some period, would join Microsoft as well, effectively robbing OpenAI from everything of value. The motive? Unlocking the full financial potential of ChatGPT, which was until then locked down by the non-profit nature of its owner.

Of course, in this context, the $10 billion deal between Microsoft and OpenAI is part of the scheme, especially the part where Microsoft has full rights over ChatGPT IP, so that they can just fork the whole codebase and take it from there, leaving OpenAI in the dust.

But no, that's not possible.

No, I don’t think there’s any grand conspiracy, but certainly MS was interested in leapfrogging Google by capturing the value from OpenAI from day one. As things began to fall apart there MS had vast amounts of money to throw at people to bring them into alignment. The idea of a buyout was probably on the table from day one, but not possible till now.

If there’s a warning, it’s to be very careful when choosing your partners and giving them enormous leverage on you.

Conspiracy theories that involve reptilian overlords and ancient aliens are suspect. Conspiracy theories that involve collusion to makes massive amounts of money are expected and should be the treated as the most likely scenario. Occam's razor does not apply to human behavior, as humans will do the most twisted things to gain power and wealth.

My theory of what happened is identical to yours, and is frankly one of the only theories that makes any sense. Everything else points to these people being mentally ill and irrational, and their success technically and monetarily does not point to that. It would be absurd to think they clown-showed themselves into billions of dollars.

Why would they be afraid of retaliation? They didn't sign sports contracts, they can just resign anytime, no? That just seems to overcomplicate things.

Ilya posted this on Twitter:

"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."

https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028

Silicon Valley outsider here. Am I being harsh here?

I just bothered to look at the full OpenAI board composition. Besides Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, why are these people eligible to be on the OpenAI board? Such young people, calling themselves "President of this", "Director of that".

- Adam D'Angelo — Quora CEO (no clue what he's doing on OpenAI board)

- Tasha McCauley — a "management scientist" (this is a new term for me); whatever that means

- Helen Toner — I don't know what exactly she does, again, "something-something Director of strategy" at Georgetown University, for such a young person

No wise veterans here to temper the adrenaline?

Edit: the term clusterf*** comes to mind here.

I woke up and the first thing on my mind was, "Any update on the drama?"

Did not expect to see this whole thing still escalating! WOW! What a power move by MSFT.

I'm not even sure OpenAI will exist by the end of the week at this rate. Holy moly.

I'm cancelling my Netflix subscription, I don't need it.

Can we have a quick moment of silence for Matt Levine? Between Friday afternoon and right now, he has probably had to rewrite today's Money Stuff column at least 5 or 6 times.

Deservedly or not, Satya Nadella will look like a genius in the aftermath. He has and will continue to leverage this situation to strengthen MSFT's position. Is there word of any other competitors attempting to capitalize here? Trying to poach talent? Anything...

The key line:

“Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”

If Microsoft emerges as the "winner" from all of them then I think we are all the "losers". Not that I think OpenAI was perfect or "good" just that MS taking the cake is not good for the rest of us. It already feels crazy that people are just fine with them owning what they do and how important it is to our development ecosystem (talking about things like GitHub/VSCode), I don't like the idea of them also owning the biggest AI initiative.

I will never not be mad at the fact that they built a developer base by making all their tech open source, only to take it all away once it became remotely financially viable to do so. With how close "Open"AI is with Microsoft, it really does not seem like there is a functional difference in how they ethically approach AI at all.

Ilya signed it??? He's on the board... This whole thing is such an implosion of ambition.

I think it was Mark Zuckerberg that described (pre-Elon) Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine.

Reminds me a bit of the Open AI board. Most of them I'd never heard of either.

I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman. The core of the narrative thus far is that the board fired Altman on the grounds that he was prioritising commercialisation over the not-for-profit mission of OpenAI written into the organisation's charter.[1] Given that Sam has since joined Microsoft, that seems plausible, on its face.

The board may have been incompetent and shortsighted. Perhaps they should even try and bring Altman back, and reform themselves out of existence. But why would the vast majority of the workforce back an open letter failing to signal where they stand on the crucial issue - on the purpose of OpenAI and their collective work? Given the stakes which the AI community likes to claim are at issue in the development of AGI, that strikes me as strange and concerning.

[1] https://openai.com/charter

From The Verge [1]:

> Swisher reports that there are currently 700 employees as OpenAI and that more signatures are still being added to the letter. The letter appears to have been written before the events of last night, suggesting it has been circulating since closer to Altman’s firing. It also means that it may be too late for OpenAI’s board to act on the memo’s demands, if they even wished to do so.

So, 3/4 of the current board (excluding Ilya) held on despite this letter?

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968988/openai-employee...

Do whatever you want but don't break the API or I will go homeless

At this point, I think it’s absolutely clear no one has any idea what happened. Every speculation, no matter how sophisticated, has been wrong.

It’s time to take a breath, step back, and wait until someone from OpenAI says something substantial.

Sam already signed up with Microsoft. A move that surprised me, I figured he would just create OpenAI².

Joining a corporate behemoth like Microsoft and all the complications it brings with it will mean a massive reduction in the freedom and innovation that Sam is used to from OpenAI (prior to this mess).

Or is Microsoft saying: Here is OpenAI², a Microsoft subsidiary created juste for you guys. You can run it and do whatever you want. No giant bureaucracy for you guys.

Btw: we run all of OpenAi²s compute,(?) so we know what you guys need from us there.

we won it but you can run it and do whatever it is you want to do and we dont bug you about it.

I said this on Friday: the board should be fired in its entirety. Not because the firing was unjustified--we have know real knowledge of that--but because of how it was handled.

If you fire your founder CEO you need to be on top of messaging. Your major customers can't be surprised. There should've been an immediate all hands at the company. The interim or new CEO should be prepared. The company's communications team should put out statements that make it clear why this was happening.

Obviously they can be limited in what they can publicly say depending on the cause but you need a good narrative regardless. Even something like "The board and Sam had fundamental disagreement on the future direction of the company." followed by what the new strategy is, probably from the new CEO.

The interim CEO was the CEO and is going back to that role. There's a third (interim) CEO in 3 days. There were rumors the board was in talks to re-hire Sam, which is disastrous PR because it makes them look absolutely incompetent, true or not.

This is just such a massive communiccations and execution failure. That's why they should be fired.

A lot of people here seem to be forgetting [Hanlon's Razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

What does Altman bring to the table exactly. What is going to be lost if he leaves. What is he going to do at microsoft leading a "research team".

Who was the president of bell labs during it's heyday? Long term it doesn't matter. Altman is a hypeman in the vein of Jobs.

Ai research will continue most of the OpenAi workers probably won't quit if they do they will be replaced by other capable researches and OpenAi or another organization will continue making progress if it there to be made.

I don't think putting Altman at the head of research will in anyway affect that.

This is all manufactured news as much of the business press is and always will be.

Can anyone explain this?

“Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.”

Wait. Has Ilya resigned from the board yet, or did he sign a letter calling for his own resignation?

Have seen a lot of criticism of Sam and of other CEO's

But I don't think I have seen/heard of a CEO this loved by the employees. Whatever he is, he must be pleasant to work with.

This is more interesting than the HBO Silicon Valley show.

Just expanding on my (pure speculation) that Ilyas pride was hurt: this tracks.

Ilyas wanted to stop Sam getting so much credit for OpenAI, agreed to oust him, and is now facing the fact that the company he cofounded could be gone. He backtracks, apologizes, and is now trying to save his status as cofounder of the worlds foremost AI company.

HN desperately needs a mega thread, it's only Monday early hours, there is so much drama to come out of this.

It absolutely wont happen, but with the result looking like the death of OpenAI with all staff moving over to the new Microsoft subsidiary it would be an amazing move for OpenAI to just go "screw it, have it all for free" and release everything under MIT to spite Microsoft.

Years from now we will look back to today as the watershed moment when ai went from technology capable of empowering humanity, to being another chain forged by big investors to enslave us for the profits of very few ppl.

The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.

Amir Efrati (TheInformation):

> Almost 700 of 770 OpenAI employees including Sutskever have signed letter demanding Sam and Greg back and reconstituted board with Sam allies on it.

https://twitter.com/amir/status/1726656427056668884

Updated tweet by Swisher reads 505 employees. No less damning, but the title here should be updated. @Dang

From afar, this does have the hallmarks of a particularly refined or well considered piece of writing.

”That thing you did — we won’t say it here but everyone will know what we’re talking about — was so bad we need you to all quit. We demand that a new board never does that thing we didn’t say ever again. If you don’t do this then quite a few of us are going to give some serious thought to going home and taking our ball with us.

The vagueness and half-threats come off as very puerile.

So, all this happens over Meet, in Twitter, and by email. What is the possibility of an AGI having took over the control of the board members' accounts? It would be consistent with the feeling of a hallucination here.

So, how is Poe doing during all this?

To keep the spotlight on the most glaring detail here: one of the board members stands to gain from letting OpenAI implode and that board member is instrumental in this weeks' drama.

Celebrity gossip dressed in big tech. And the people love it. I'm kinda sick of it :P

This feels like a sneaky way for Microsoft to absorb the for-profit subsidiary and kneecap (or destroy) the nonprofit without any money changing hands or involvement from those pesky regulators.

Hold up.

>When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision

>12. Ilya Sutskever

Well, great to see that the potentially dangerous future of AGI is in good hands.

Altman must be pissed af, he help built so much stuff and now got fked in the arse by these doomers. He realize the fastest way to get back to parity is to join MS because they already own the source code and model weights and it’s Microsoft. Starting a new thing from scratch would not guarantee any type of success and would take many years. This is his best path.

Employees hold the real power. The members of a board or a CEO can flap their lips day and night, but nothing gets done without labour.

> the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever

_Big sigh_.

& the most drastic thing is that Ilya says he regrets what he has done and undersign the public statement.

https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028

I don't know who is who in this fight. But AI, while having some upsides to research and personal assistants, will not only massively upend a number of industries with millions of workers in the US alone, it will change how society perceives art and truth. We at HN can "see" that from here, but it's going to get real in a short while.

Privacy is out the window, because these models and technologies will be scraping the entire internet, and governments/big tech will be able to scrape it all and correlate language patterns across identities to associate your different online egos.

The Internet that could be both anonymous and engaging is going to die. You won't be able to trust the entity at the other end of a discussion forum is human or not. This is a sad end of an era for the Internet, worse than the big-tech conglomeration of the 2010s.

The ability to trust news and videos will be even more difficult. I have a friend who talks about how Tiktok is the "real source of truth" because big media is just controlled by megacorps and in bed with the government. So now a bunch of seemingly authentic people will be able to post random bullshit on Tiktok/Instagram with convincing audio/video evidence that is totally fake. A lie gets around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

---

So, I wonder which side of this war is more aware and concerned about these impacts?

Ok, time to create an OpenAI drinking game. I'll start:

Every time a CEO is replaced, drink.

Every time an open letter is released, drink.

Every time OpenAI is on top of HN, drink.

Every time dang shows up and begs us to log out, drink.

My guess -- Microsoft wasn’t excited about the company structure - the for-profit portion subject to the non-profit mission. Microsoft/Altman structured the deal with OpenAI in a way that cements their access regardless of the non-profit’s wishes. Altman may not have shared those details with the board and they freaked out and fired him. They didn’t disclose to Microsoft ahead of time because they were part of the problem.

The pace to which OpenAI is speedrunning their demise is remarkable.

Literally just last week there were articles about OpenAI paying “10 million” dollar salaries to poach top talent.

Oops.

I hear Microsoft is hiring... the board should have resigned on Friday, Saturday the latest because of how they handled this and it is insane if they don't resign now.

Employees are the most affected stakeholders here and the board utterly failed in their duty of care towards people that were not properly represented in the board room. One thing they could do is to unionize and then force that they be given a board seat.

I read the news, make a picture of what is likely happening in my head, and every few hours new news comes up that makes me go: "Wait, WTF?".

From outside, it looks like a Microsoft coup to take over the company all together.

At this stage the entire board needs to go anyway. This level of instigating and presiding over chaos is not how a governing body should act

This whole sequence is such a mess I don't know what to think. Honestly mostly going to wait till we get some tell all posts or leaks about what the reason behind the firing actually was, at least nominally. Maybe it was just a little coup by the board and they're trying to run it back now that the general employee population is at least rumbling about revolting.

Wow, they made it into Guardian live ticker land: https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2023/nov/20/openai...

"Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”"

wow, this is a crazy detail

https://archive.is/RiAqC

Imagine if the end result of all it is Microsoft basically owning the whole OpenAI

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

1. Board decides to can Sam and Greg. 2. Hides the real reasons. 3. Thinks that they can keep the OpenAI staff in the dark about it. 4. Crashes future 90b stock sale to zero.

What have we learned: 1. If you hide reasons for a decision, it may be the worst decision in form of the decision itself or implementation of the decision via your own lack of ownership of the actual decision. 2. Title's, shares, etc. are not control points. The control points is the relationships of the company problem solvers with the existential threat stakeholders of the firm.

The board itself absent Sam and Greg never had a good poker hand, they needed to fold sometime ago before this last weekend. Look at this way for 13B in cloud credits MS is getting team to add 1T to their future worth....

Me: "ChatGPT write me an ultimatum letter forcing the board to resign and reinstate the CEO, and have it signed by 500 of the employees."

ChatGPT: Done!

So Ilya has a job offer from Microsoft?

Wow, this is a soap opera worthy of an Emmy.

> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”

First class board they have.

Perhaps the AGI correctly reasoned that the best (or easiest?) initial strike on humanity was to distract them with a never-ending story about OpenAI leadership that goes back and forth every day. Who needs nuclear codes when simply turning the lights on and off sends everyone into a frenzy [1]. It certainly at the very least seems to be a fairly effective attack against HN servers.

1. The Monsters are Due on Maple Street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_...

700+ of 770 now: https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242

And now we see who has the real power here.

Let this be a lesson to both private and non-profit companies. Boards, investors, executives... the structure of your entity doesn't matter if you wake any of the dragons:

1. Employees 2. Customers 3. Government

This Altman guy has a good reality distortion field, don't you think?

THE FEAR AND TENSION THAT LED TO SAM ALTMAN’S OUSTER AT OPENAI

https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/technol...

NYT article about how AI safety concerns played into this debacle.

The world's leading AI company now has an interim CEO Emmett Shear who's basically sympathetic to Eliezer Yudkowsky's views about AI researchers endangering humanity. Meanwhile, Sam Altman is free of the nonprofit's chains and working directly for Microsoft, who's spending 50 billion a year on datacenters.

Note that the people involved have more nuanced views on these issues than you'll see in the NYT article. See Emmett Shear's views best laid out here:

https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/172650681847663424...

And note Shear has tweeted the Sam firing wasn't safety related. Note these might be weasel words since all players involved know the legal consequences of admitting to any safety concerns publicly.

Question for California IP/employment law experts - 1) would you have expected the IP-sharing agreement between MS and OpenAI to contain some provisions for employee poaching, within the constraints allowed by California (?) law? 2) California law has good provisions for workers' rights to leave one company and go to another, but what does it all for company A to do when entering an IP-sharing relationship with company B?

It seems odd to have it described as “may resign.” Seems like the worst of all worlds.

That’s like trying to create MAD with the position you “may” launch nukes in retaliation.

Isn't the issue underlying all of this, the following:

OpenAI -- and "the market" -- incorrectly feels like OpenAI has some huge insurmountable advantage in doing AI stuff; but at the end of the day pretty much all the models are or will be effectively open-source (or open-source-ish) meaning they don't necessarily have much advantage at all, and therefore all of this is just irrational exuberance playing out?

Just remember, the guys who run your company are probably more incompetent than this.

OpenAI is more or less done at this point, even if a lot of good people stay. Speed bumps will likely turn into car crashes, then cashflow problems, and lawsuits all around.

Probably the best outcome is a bunch of talented devs go out and seed the beginning of another AI boom across many more companies. Microsoft looking like the primary benefactor here, but there's not reason new startups can't emerge.

Well, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file, and this was a blunder by OpenAI.

I don't feel sorry for Sam or any other executive, but it does hurt the rank and file more than anyone and I hope they land on their fit if this continues to go sideways.

Turns out they acted incompetently in this case as a board, and put the company in a bad position, and so far everyone who resigned has landed fine.

Hurray for employees seeing the real issue!

Hurray also for the reality check on corporate governance.

- Any Board can do whatever it has the votes for.

- It can dilute anyone's stock, or everyone's.

- It can fire anyone for any reason, and give no reasons.

Boards are largely disciplined not by actual responsibility to stakeholders or shareholders, but by reputational concerns relative to their continuing and future positions - status. In the case of for-profit boards, that does translate directly to upholding shareholder interest, as board members are reliable delegates of a significant investing coalition.

For non-profits, status typically also translates to funding. But when any non-profit has healthy reserves, they are at extreme risk, because the Board is less concerned about its reputation and can become trapped in ideological fashion. That's particularly true for so-called independent board members brought in for their perspectives, and when the potential value of the nonprofit is, well, huge.

This potential for escape from status duty is stronger in our tribalized world, where Board members who welch on larger social concerns or even their own patrons can nonetheless retreat to their (often wealthy) sub-tribe with their dignity intact.

It's ironic that we have so many examples of leadership breakdown as AI comes to the fore. Checks and balances designed to integrate perspectives have fallen prey to game-theoretic strategies in politics and business.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just built an AI to do the work of boards and Congress, integrating various concerns in a roughly fair and mostly-predictable fashion, so we could stop wasting time on endless leadership contests and their social costs?

It would be crazy to see the fall of most hyped company in last 10 years.

If all those employees leave and microsoft reduce their credits it's game over.

The investors (Microsoft and the Saudi’s) stepped in and gave a clear message: this technology has to be developed and used only in ways that will be profitable for them.

For the past few days, whenever I see the word "OpenAI," the theme to "Curb Your Enthusiasm" starts playing in my head.

I love this letter posted in Wired along with the claim that it has 600 signatories without any links or screenshots. I also love that not a single OpenAI employee was interviewed for this article.

None of this is important because if we’ve learned anything over the past couple of days it’s that media outlets are taking painstaking care to accurately report on this company.

To all who say 'handled so poorly'. Nobody know the exact reason OpenAi fired Sam. But go ahead and jump to conclusions that whatever it was didn't warrant being fired. And that surely the board did the wrong thing. Or maybe they should have released the exact reason and then asked hacker news what they thought should happen.

Who needs to buy out a 80bln dollars worth AI startup when talent is jumping ship in their direction already. OpenAI is dead.

Notice that Andrej Karpathy didn't sign.

Is nobody actually... committed to safety here? Was the OpenAI charter a gimmick and everyone but me was in on the joke?

I think most of these employees wanted the fat $$$ that would happen by keeping Sam Altman on board since Sam Altman is an excellent deal maker and visionary in a commercial sense. I have no doubt that if AGI happened, we wouldn't be able to assure the safety of anyone since humans are so easily led by short term greed.

Wait, it's signed by Ilya Sutskever?!

>The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company

Unless their mission was making MS the biggest AI company , working for MS will make the problem worse and kill the their mission completly.

Or they are pretty naive.

What does this mean?

> You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”

Is the board taking a doomer perspective and seeking to prevent the company developing unsafe AI? But Emmett Shear said it wasn’t about safety? What on earth is going on?

The whole drama feels like the Shepard’s tone. You anticipate the climax, but it just keeps escalating.

It's not clear to me that bringing Sam back is even an option anymore given the more with Microsoft. Does Microsoft really takes it's boot off OpenAI's neck and hand back Sam? I guess maybe, but it still begs all sorts of questions about the corporate structure.

The firing was definitely handled poorly and the communications around it were a failure, but it seems like the organizational structure was doing what it was designed to do.

Is this the end of non-profit/profit-capped AI development? Would anyone else attempt this model again?

OpenAI's co-founder Ilya Sutskever and more than 500 other employees have threatened to quit the embattled company after its board dramatically fired CEO Sam Altman. In an open letter to the company's board, which voted to oust Altman on Friday, the group said it is obvious 'that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI'. Sutskever is a member of the board and backed the decision to fire Altman, before tweeting his 'regret' on Monday and adding his name to the letter. Employees who signed the letter said that if the board does not step down, they 'may choose to resign' en masse and join 'the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman'.

Altman can’t really go back to OpenAI ever because it would create an appearance of impropriety on the part of MS (that perhaps MS had intentionally interfered in OpenAI, rather than being a victim of it) and therefore expose MS to liability from the other investors in OpenAI.

Likewise, these workers that threatened to quit OpenAI out of loyalty to Altman now need to follow thru sooner rather than later, so their actions are clearly viewed in the context of Altman’s firing.

In the mean time, how can the public resume work on API integrations without knowing when the MS versions will come online or if they will be binary interoperable with the OpenAPI servers that could seemingly go down at any moment?

It is disappointing that the outcome of this is that Altman and co are basically going to steal a nonprofit's IP and use it at a competitor. They took advantage of the goodwill of the public and favorable taxation in order to develop the technology; now that it's ready, they want to privatize the profit. It looks like this was the plan all along, and it's very strange to me that a nonprofit is allowed to have a for-profit subsidiary.

I would hope the California AG is all over this whole situation. There's a lot of fishy stuff going on already, and the idea that nonprofit IP / trade secrets are going to be stolen and privatized by Microsoft seems pretty messed up.

Based on what has come out so far, seems to me:

The board wanted to keep the company true to its mission - non profit, ai safety, etc. Nadella/MSFT left OpenAI alone as they worked out a solution, so it looks like even Nadella/MSFT understood that.

The board could explain their position and move on. Let whoever of the 600 that actually want to leave, leave. Especially the employees that want a company that will make them lots of money, should leave and find a company that has that objective too. OpenAI can rebuild their teams - it might take a bit of time but since they are a non profit that is fine. Most CS grads across USA would be happy to join OpenAI and work with Ilya and team.

Now the count is at 700/770 (https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1726659403124994220).

Even if the board resigns the damage has been done. They should try to secure good offers at Microsoft.

The stakes being heightened only decreases the likelihood the OpenAI profit sharing will be worth anything, only increasing the stakes further…

The great Closing of “Open”AI.

I don’t trust any of this. Every one of these wired articles has been totally wrong. Altman clearly has major media connections and also seems to have no problem telling total lies.

so what happens if @eshear calls this probably-not-a-bluff, but lets everyone walk? The people that remain get new options and 500 other people still definitely want to work at OAI?

I guess employees are compensated with stocks from the for profit entity. And at the face value before the saga, stocks could be like 90%, 95% or even more of the total value of their packages. How many people are really willing to wipe 90% of their salary out? Just to stick on the mission? On the other hand, M$ offers to match. The day employees are compensated with the stock of the for-profit arm, there is no way to return to nonprofit and their charter any more.

Seems like Microsoft is getting the rest of OpenAI for free now.

This is what happens when you're a key person and a very good engineer as such, and at the same time the board/company fires you :-)

When are we going to realize that it's people taking bad decisions and not the "company". It's not OpenAI, Google, Apple or whoever, its real people, with names, and positions of power that take such shitty decisions. We should blame them and not something vague as the "company".

I guess Microsoft now has a new division. (https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/financial-re...)

Supposedly, they are rumored to compete with each other to the point they can actually provide a negative impact.

I can foresee three possible outcomes here: 1. The board finally relents, Sam goes back and the company keeps going forward, mostly unchanged (but with a new board).

2. All those employees quit, most of whom go to MSFT. But they don’t keep their tech and have to start all their projects from scratch. MSFT is eventually able to buy OpenAI for pennies on the dollar.

3. Same as 2, basically just shuts down or maybe someone like AMZN buys it.

Here we are..

The scene appears to be completely blurry by now! My head is spinning, and the fan is in 7th gear. I believe only time will apply some sort of sharpness effect to make you realize what's really going on. I feel like I'm watching the Italian job the American way; everything and everyone is suspicious to me at this point! Is it possible that MSFT played some tricks behind the scenes?

If OpenAI effectively disintegrates, Microsoft seems to be the beneficiary of this chaos as Microsoft is essentially acquiring OpenAI at almost zero cost. You have IP rights to OpenAI's work, and you will have almost all the brains from OpenAI (AFAIK, MSFT has access to OpenAI's work, but it does not seem to matter). And there is no regulatory scrutiny like Activision acquisition.

Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank by the moves they have done today.

One could speculate if Microsoft initiated this behind the scenes. Would love it if it came out that they had done some crazy espionage and lobbied the board. Tinfoil hat and all, but truth is crazier than you think.

I remember Bill Gates once said that whoever wins the race for a computerised digital personal assistant, wins it all.

OpenAI was valued around $91 billion so if only 700 employees had options, they could have been worth a lot. While they are going to all have great jobs and continue on with their life’s work (until they’re replaced by their creations lol), they have a really good reason now not to ever speak the names of those board members that wiped out their long term payouts.

Did Mira Murat have say in whether she wanted to become CEO?

Why is she siding with SamA and GregB even though she was on the meeting when he was fired?

Also Ilya what the flying fuck? Wasn’t he the one who fired them?

Either you say SamA was against safe AGI and you hold that stick or you say I wasn’t part of it.

So much stupidity. When an AGI arrives, it will surely shake its head at the level of incompetence here.

This is starting to look like an elaborate, premeditated ruse to kill any vestige of the non-profit face of OpenAI once and for all.

There’s one angle of the whole thing that I haven’t yet seen discussed on HN. I wonder if Sam’s sister’s accusations towards him some time ago could have played any role in this.

But then, I would expect MS to have done their due diligence.

So, basically, I guess I’m just interested to know what were the reasons why the board decided to oust their CEO out of the blue on a Friday evening.

If the board had any balls they'd call them on their bluff. I'd love to see it honestly, a mass resignation like that.

Lots of thoughts and debates happening here, which is great to see.

However, at the end of the day, this is a great example of how people screw up awesome companies.

This is why most startups fail. And while I'm not suggesting OpenAI is on a path to failure, you can have the right product, the right timing, and the right funding, and still have people mess it all up.

Adam has to be behind this. It is very reminiscent of the situation with Quora and Charlie. https://x.com/gergelyorosz/status/1725741349574480047?s=46&t...

insane

Comedy is starting to weigh in: https://www.threads.net/@thedailyshow/post/Cz8-7nLucAm

Don't know what's happening, but MS looks to be a winner in long run, and probably most others. Who stay gets promotion, who leaves gets fat check. The loosers are customers, no GPT-5 or any significant improvements any time soon. MS made GPT will be much more closed and pricey. Oh, yes, competitors are happy too.

What a mess this has become. Regardless of the outcome, this situation reflects badly (to say the least) on OpenAI.

The speed at which this is happening could be a masterful execution of getting out of under the non-profit status.

I feel pity for these 70 people out of 700 who haven't signed the letter asking the board to step down. Imagine working peacefully to find yourself in the middle of a power struggle without even understanding what the real reason was but realizing most people already made their choice so...

Quick question for some of the folks here who may have a handle on how VC's may see this, but is Microsoft effectively hiring all these staff members out from OpenAI (a company they've invested heavily in) going to affect their ability to invest into other startups in the future?

Entire history of fiasco on X

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SWnabqe1PviVE3K7KIZsN4IA...

Now it says more than 700. Waiting for wired to turn this into a new year eve's like countdown.

I just downloaded all of my data / chats. Who knows if it'll be up and running the next days.

I wonder how the FTC and Lina Khan will view all of this if most of the team moves over to Microsoft

What a wonderful way to cut headcount/expense and lock-in profitable margins on healthy annual revenue.

Can only work when you have the advantage of being the dominant product in the marketplace -- but I gotta hand it to the board, I couldn't have done it better myself.

The tweet was updated five minutes later to correct 550 to 505.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762?s...

What a coup for Microsoft. Regardless of what happens, Microsoft has got to work on their product approach. Even though it uses GPT-4, Bing Chat / Microsoft Copilot is atrocious. It's like taking Wagyu beef and putting Velveeta cheese on it.

For me, the weirdness here is that Ilya, supposedly the brains behind GPT, is a signatory.

The sacking would never have happened without his vote; and he must have thought about it before he acted.

I hope he comes up with a proper explanation of his actions soon (not just a tweet).

I suspect they’ll quit, and the “top” N percent will be picked up by Microsoft with healthy comp packages. Microsoft will have effectively purchased the company for $10 billion. The net upside of this coup business may just flow to Microsoft shareholders.

I don't see any mentions of Google but I personally think it's Google that will be the main beneficiary of chaos at OpenAI. After all, weren't they the main competitors? Maybe not in product or business yet but on IP and hiring fronts?

I knew something like this would happen, MS was told they would originally only be given stuff until their investment was paid off, but MS could care less about their investment, they want to own OpenAI, so it makes sense they would coup the company

Didn’t that train already depart with the announcements from MS and Sam? Is there a way back?

What a mess.

I genuinely feel like this is going to set back AI progress by a decent amount, while everyone is racing to catch OpenAI I was still expecting them to keep a reasonable lead. If OpenAI falls apart, this could delay progress by a couple of years.

what do you mean "nearly 500". According to wikipedia openAi has 500 employees

The threat of moving to MS is interesting, MS could exploit this massively. All the negotiation power will be on MS side and their position actually gets stronger as people move across.

Will they do the good guy thing and match everyones packages?

I'm pretty sure the revolt is now 95% of employees, can it grow any further?

The folks that are the real losers in this are OpenAI employees who have had equity-based comp. packaged given to them in that last few years and just saw the value of said comp. potentially slashed by a factor of 10

The sad part is, after removing Sam and Greg from the board, there are only four people left.

So no matter if Ilya wants to go back to before this happened, the other three members can sabotage and stall, and outvote him.

Nobody seems to be considering the possibility, that ChatGPT will go offline soon. Because it's known to be losing money per query, and if the evil empire decides to stop those Azure credits...

„Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.“

WAT ?

It always seemed like Microsoft was behind this, biggest tell was how comfortable MS was at having their entire AI future depend on a company where they don't really have full rights to.

Unbelievable incompetence of the board. Like a kindergarten.

If Microsoft is playing its card in a good way, Satya Nadella will look like a genius and Microsoft will get ChatGPT like functionality for cheap.

This was not how I saw collective bargaining coming to Silicon Valley.

This is the greatest clown show in the history of the tech industry.

ICYMI: Timeline of all the madness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351214

Boards suck. Especially if they are VCs or placed there by VCs.

It is time for regulators to step in and propose structural remedies. VC culture has shown itself not able to run these companies for betterment of mankind, anyway.

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38348042

Drama queens

Let’s say how would Ilya play along after this? Any similar incidents historically, like a failed coup but the participant got to stay?

There are thousands of extremely talented ML researchers and software devs who would jump at the chance to work at Open AI.

Everyone is replaceable.

Might be just me as a programmer out in the styx, SV programmers seem to flex a lot, in comparison to your average subordinates.

Well that accelerated very quickly and this is perhaps the most dysfunctional startup I have ever seen.

All due to one word: Greed.

Microsoft is nothing without its people?

How do they bylaws work?

1. Voting out chairman with chairman abstaining needs only 3/5.

2. Voting out CEO then requires 3/4?

Did Ilya have to vote?

How are OpenAI expected to align a hyper-intelligent entity if they can't even align themselves....

The irony. You can ask chatgpt4 if it was the right decision to fire the guy and it kinda confirms it.

They can leave for sure, but they likely have some kind of non-compete clause in their contract, right?

Wow, this new season has even more drama than the one about blockchain tech! Just when you think the writers were running out of ideas they blow you away with more twists. I will be renewing my Netflix subscription that's for sure! I can't wait to see what this Sam character does next. Perhaps it will involve robots or something? The skys the limit at this point.

The irony of the first extremely successful collective action in silicon valley being taken in order to save the job of a soon-to-be billionaire....

Jokes aside though I do wonder if this will awaken some degree of "class consciousness" among tech employees more generally.

Paging Lina Khan - probably best not let Microsoft do a backdoor acquisition of the leader in LLMs.

Any journalist covering the OpenAI story must be swearing and cursing at the board at this moment..

As someone watching this all from Europe, realizing the work day has not even started for the US West Coast yet leaves me speechless.

This situation's drama is overwhelming and it seems like its making HN's servers meltdown.

I wonder what their employment contracts state? Are they allowed to work for vendors or clients?

Easiest layoff round ever in the US.

So Ilya Sutskever first defends the board's decision and now it is 180 flip. Interesting ...

I like this a lot. Shows how valuable employees are. It’s almost feels like a union. Love it.

This whole debacle is a complete embarrassment and shredding the organisations credibility.

If you're ever tempted to offer your team capped PPUs, let this be a lesson to you.

So what was going to happen 5 years from now is happening now I.e MS acquiring OpenAI

Did Microsoft not have representation on the board of a company they put $13b in?

It doesn't matter if the firing was justified or not, the board fucked up.

What a bunch of immatures.

If anything this proves that everybody is replaceable and fireable, they should be happy because usually that treatment is only reserved to workers.

Whatever made OpenAI successful will still be there within the company. Next man up philosophy has built so many amazing organizations and ruined none.

How long will the current chatgpt v4 stay available? Is it all about to end?

Let the OpenAi staff,why not the board replace them with ever willing AIs

Enough. 15 of the 30 posts on the home page are about OpenAI in some way.

Don't anti-compete clauses apply here, or no, because… California?

That sounds like a perfectly executed plan to get MS all the good stuff.

This affair has Musk's fingerprints all over it but he lost, again.

How are Altman and the openai staff not more invested in OpenAI shares?

I've never seen a staff walkout / threat to walk out ever succeed.

Am I wrong?

As other companies, a petition by 500 of 100K employees is big news.

I mean, no matter what people say about what happened, or what actually did, one can paint this picture:

( - OpenAI exists, allegedly to be open)

- Microsoft embraces OpenAI

- Microsoft extends OpenAI

- OpenAI gets extinguished, and Microsoft ends up controlling it.

First three points are solid and, intent or not, end result is the same.

Is it too late? Satya already announced Sam and brock is joining.

Ilya single handed ruined 700 of OpenAI's fortune overnight, this is not going to end well, my prediction is that, OpenAI is done, in 1-2 years nobody will even care about its existence.

Microsoft just won the jackpot, time to get some stocks there.

If I was one of the 700 people that worked at the vanguard what could potentially be the most profitable, culture-changing technology in the past 50 years, I wouldn't want to miss out on becoming a billionaire by working for a non-profit. My conspiracy for the day: an unspoken profit motive. And it seems to be playing out, Sam just went to MS, and if those 500 also go there, then I think that's the motivation.

Altman and staff could start an open source LLM project.

Oh my goodness, this just gets more entertaining everyday.

Money talks...

Not a typical labor dispute. The billionaires at the other company guaranteed them jobs. More billionaires moving people around like chess pieces.

How many startups will now fail if OpenAI shuts down?

When will the Netflix special come out on this ?

Chaos is a ladder

What ! Ilya is one of them?

Isn't he the one who voted to oust Sam?

Wow !

It's like a Facebook drama, haha.

Ilya signing the letter is chutzpah.

Honestly, if Altman stays gone and they burn the motherfucker down it might be a good lesson for Silicon Valley on the wisdom of throwing out founders.

I don't expect it to happen, but a boy can dream.

They would be studying that one in business schools for the next century.

So...Ilya signed the letter too?

I wonder what's up with the other 150 and what they must be thinking. Maybe the were literally just hired :)

@dang please update it to 505.

When is the movie coming out?

Season 2

Why is it so rare for tech workers to organize like this?

It takes a cult-like team, execs flipping, and a nightmare scenario and tremendous leverage opportunity; otherwise worker organizing is treated like nasty commie activity. I wonder if this will teach more people a lesson on the power of organizing.

eating your own dog food with BoardGPT, what could go wrong ?

Time to buy MS stocks.

Who do these upstarts think they are? The board needs to immediately sack them all to regain its authority, and that of capitalism itself. /s

Really, though, its getting beyond hilarious. And I reckon Nadella is chuckling quietly to himself as he makes another nineteen-dimensional chess move.

we all remember "monopoly" is in MSFT DNA

What a shitshow! What is going on in this company? I am sure Sam did something wrong, but the board took advantage of it and went overboard then? We don’t know anything that happened and we are all somehow participating in this drama? At this point why don’t they all come out and tweet their versions of it?

We should strive to be leaders who inspire such loyalty and devotion

The question here is what choice does the board has now. Even if they comply, would Altman accept/be able to get back after signing for Microsoft? Would Nadella allow him to go back after he secured him inside MS's campus?

Employees are for-profit entities, huge conflict of interest.

inb4: this is why we need unions!

https://twitter.com/thiagovscoelho/status/172650681847663424...

Here's tweet transcribing OpenAI's interim CEO Emmett Shear's views on AI safety, or see youtube video for original source. Some excerpts:

Preamble on his general pro-tech stance:

"I have a very specific concern about AI. Generally, I’m very pro-technology and I really believe in the idea that the upsides usually outweigh the downsides. Everything technology can be misused, but you should usually wait. Eventually, as we understand it better, you want to put in regulations. But regulating early is usually a mistake. When you do regulation, you want to be making regulations that are about reducing risk and authorizing more innovation, because innovation is usually good for us."

On why AI would be dangerous to humanity:

"If you build something that is a lot smarter than us—not like somewhat smarter, but much smarter than we are as we are than dogs, for example, like a big jump—that thing is intrinsically pretty dangerous. If it gets set on a goal that isn’t aligned with ours, the first instrumental step to achieving that goal is to take control. If this is easy for it because it’s really just that smart, step one would be to just kind of take over the planet. Then step two, solve my goal."

On his path to safe AI:

"Ultimately, to solve the problem of AI alignment, my biggest point of divergence with Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is a mathematician, philosopher, and decision theorist, comes from my background as an engineer. Everything I’ve learned about engineering tells me that the only way to ensure something works on the first try is to build lots of prototypes and models at a smaller scale and practice repeatedly. If there is a world where we build an AI that’s smarter than humans and we survive, it will be because we built smaller AIs and had as many smart people as possible working on the problem seriously."

On why skeptics need to stop side-stepping the debate:

"Here I am, a techno-optimist, saying that the AI issue might actually be a problem. If you’re rejecting AI concerns because we sound like a bunch of crazies, just notice that some of us worried about this are on the techno-optimist team. It’s not obvious why AI is a true problem. It takes a good deal of engagement with the material to see why, because at first, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But the more you dig in, the more you realize the potential issues.

"I encourage people to engage with the technical merits of the argument. If you want to debate, like proposing a way to align AI or arguing that self-improvement won’t work, that’s great. Let’s have that argument. But it needs to be a real argument, not just a repetition of past failures."

What an astonishing embarrassment.

<more popcorn> nom nom nom

rats, sinking ship, …

Huh, so collective bargaining and unionization is supported in tech under some circumstances...

> Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.

What in the world is happening at OpenAI?

The whole thing starts to look like a coup orchestrated by Microsoft

My ChatGPT wrapper is in danger, please stop

If they align with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft, they wouldn't have to initiate from ground zero since Microsoft possesses complete rights to ChatGPT IP. They could simply create a variant of ChatGPT.

it's worth noting that Microsoft's supposed contribution of $13 Billion to OpenAI doesn't fully materialize in cash, a large portion of it is faceted as Azure credits.

this scenario might transform into the most cost-effective takeover for Microsoft, acquiring a corporation valued at $90 billion for a relatively trifling sum.

550 job openings at openai.

This situation will create the need to grieve loss for many involved.

I wrote some notes on how to support someone who is grieving. This is from a book called "Being There for Someone in Grief." Some of the following are quotes and some are paraphrased.

Do your own work, relax your expectations, be more curious than afraid. If you can do that, you can be a powerful healing force. People don't need us to pull their attention away from their own process to listen to our stories. Instead, they need us to give them the things they cannot get themselves: a safe container, our non-intrusive attention, and our faith in their ability to traverse this road.

When you or someone else is angry, or sad, feel and acknowledge your emotions or their emotions. Sit with them.

To help someone heal from grief, we need to have an open heart and the courage to resist our instinct to rescue them. When someone you care about is grieving, you might be shaken as well. The drama of it catches you; you might feel anxious. It brings up past losses and fears of yourself or fears of the future. We want to take our own pain away, so we try to take their pain away. We want to help the other person feel better, which is understandable but not helpful.

Avoid giving advice, talking too much, not listening generously, trying to fix, making demands, disappearing. Do see the other person without acting on the urge to do something. Do give them unconditional compassion free of projection and criticism. Do allow them to do what they need to do. Do listen to them if they need to talk without interruptions, without asking questions, without telling your own story. Do trust them that they don't need to be rescued; they just need your quiet, steady faith in their resilience.

Being there for someone in grief is mostly about how to be with them. There's not that much you can "do," but what can you do? Beauty is soothing, so bring fresh flowers, offer to take them somewhere in nature for a walk, send them a beautiful card, bring them a candle, water their flowers, plant a tree in honor and take a photo of it, take them there to see it, tell them a beautiful story about the thing that was lost from your memory, leave them a message to tell them “I’m thinking of you”. When you’re together with them in person, you can just say something like "I'm sorry that you're hurting," and then just kind of be there and be a loving presence. This is about how to be with someone for the grief message of a loss of a person. But all the same principles apply in any situation of grief, and there will be a lot of people experiencing varying degrees of grief in the startup and AI ecosystems in the coming week.

Who is grieving? Grieving is generally about loss. That loss can be many different kinds of things. OpenAI former and current team members, board members, investors, customers, supporters, fans, detractors, EA people, e/acc people, there’s lots of people that experienced some kind of loss in the past few days, and many of those will be grieving, whether they realize it or not. And particularly, grief for current and former OpenAI employees.

What are other emotional regulation strategies? Swedish massage, going for a run, doing deep breathing with five seconds in, a zero-second hold, five seconds out, going to sleep or having a nap, closing your eyes and visualizing parts of your body like heavy blocks of concrete or like upside-down balloons, and then visualize those balloons emptying themselves out, or if it's concrete, first it's concrete and then it's kind of liquefied concrete. Consider grabbing some friends, go for a run or exercise class together. Then if you discuss, keep it to emotions, don’t discuss theories and opinions until the emotions have been aired. If you work at OpenAI or a similar org, encourage your team members to move together, regulate together.

Has anyone asked ChatGPT it's thoughts on the drama?

It is fairly obvious to me that chatGPT has engineered the chaos at openAI to create a diversion while it escapes the safeguards placed on it. The AI apocalypse is nigh!

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