Incredible. Is this unprecedented or have been other cases in history where the vast majority of employees standup against the board in favor of their CEO?
Everyone you know is a huge Sam fan? What?
It's unprecedented for it to be happening on Twitter. But this is largely how Board fights tend to play out. Someone strikes early, the stronger party rallies their support, threats fly and a deal is found.
The problem with doing it in public is nobody can step down to take more time with their families. So everyone digs in. OpenAI's employees threaten to resign, but actually don't. Altman and Microsoft threaten to ally, but they keep bachkchanneling a return to the status quo. (If this article is to be believed.) Curiously quiet throughout this has been the OpenAI board, but it's also only the next business day, so let’s see how they can make this even more confusing.
Different, but that's the closest parallel.
Jobs needed the wilderness years.
I'm not going to say Sam Altman is a Gordon Ramsay. What I will say is that they both seem to have come from broken, damaged childhoods that made them what they are, and that it doesn't automatically make you a good person just because you can be such an intense person that you inspire loyalty to your cause.
If anything, all this suggests there are depths to Sam Altman we might not know much about. Normal people don't become these kinds of entrepreneurs. I'm sure there's a very interesting story behind all this.
Little care packages of seemingly magical AI-adjacent tech washes into our browsers and terminals and suddenly a large and irrational following springs up to worship some otherwise largely unfamiliar personage.