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Comment by Rapzid | Hacker News Reader

First question was if Sam was going to end up at Microsoft and Satya gave a complete non-answer to that. Gives credit that there was nothing substantive behind the Twitter announcement that Sam was going to CEO a Microsoft business; it was just to bolster investor confidence..

Incredible. Anyone with FTC knowledge know if making those sorts of announcements can run afoul of regulations?

Edit: Sorry, SEC.

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I think you mean SEC, the people who bought stock on the basis of Nadella's "announcement" will probably be thinking they can sue.

But beyond that did Nadella think there was insufficient chaos around OpenAI and felt he needed to add his own?

Everyone is issuing claims, counterclaims and threats. Has no one thought it might be a good idea to just step back and think for a day or two, let things cool down before issuing more of the same?

I think the situation is changing every five minutes. Sam going to Microsoft is surely an offer that exists, but it may or may not actually happen.

Honestly I think there was an offer and Sam verbally accepted.. maybe even signed. That doesn't mean it will happen and if all this is the case.. then it should be fine by SEC because there wasn't technically a lie.

Unless you state publicly that there was no reason to believe their statement was true and they said it only for the purpose of juicing the stock price.

Is Sam going to MS actually useful for MS in the long run? MS has a CEO. What they want is mostly-exclusive access to the best LLM.

They had that last week. If Sam returns to OpenAI, they will continue to have it. If Sam brings most of the OpenAI team to MS, there will be an awkward recreation of IP and MS will likely get it again [0]. But other than being the one to bring the team along, I’m not sure what Sam, personally, would bring.

(Sam at OpenAI is a different story obviously.)

[0] OpenAI has some maybe-dubious IP in the form of a massive dataset. MS may prefer not to possess such a thing. And I don’t know whether MS is permitted under its contract to create derivative works of whatever it licensed from OpenAI.

> MS has a CEO.

Sam Altman replacing Satya Nadella as CEO of Microsoft would certainly be a twist!

Microsoft has 340x the number of employees as OpenAI.

Sam Altman was never a consideration as CEO of the whole company.

But instead CEO or VP of a seperate entity similar to how Github operates for which Sam would be more than suitable. And once again Sam just built a $100b business. That requires a bit more skill than people give him credit for.

Sure, but would Sam want to do that?

Building a $100bn business is one thing. Running a division of a big company is rather different.

Microsoft already has several employees whose position is titled as "CEO" -- the heads of GitHub and LinkedIn at least -- other than head of the whole firm.

> there was nothing substantive behind the Twitter announcement that Sam was going to CEO a Microsoft business; it was just to bolster investor confidence

That would be a public admission of securities fraud, with an admission that they did so intenteding to commit securities fraud.

Yeah, that would explain why he is now dodging the question, if any answer would force him to choose between:

Confessing securities fraud, or

Doing more securities fraud.

Don't know why it would be a problem for investors if Sam went back to openai? Either way Microsoft gets what they want and given the scale of the walkout msft might get what they originally were pushing for anyway instead of the backup option with hiring them to msft.

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