Former GitHub CEO Friedman and Scale AI CEO Wang Declined OpenAI CEO Role
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Actually, I think every plot twist we’ve seen has been a surprise for them as they have consistently acted without 5 minutes of foresight.
And not just with the drama. For example, according to Stratechery, the clause in the contract saying Microsoft couldn’t use GPT-4 as a foundation for their own models was recently removed in a contract revision. If you don’t like your CEO, and Microsoft likes your CEO, and Microsoft has the rights to your models and code, it doesn’t take much to add up 2 + 2 + 2 = 6.
The current story is that the board scrambled to find unconvincing grounds when explaining themselves to employees instead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356534
Which is ironic considering how much they claim to be focused on long term risks :)
People here have even pointed out how unqualified they think the board members are, or how they have conflicts of interest.
Picture yourself in this world where you essentially get free money for pretending to advise a company. Most of the time, you don't need to do shit. Other people have got you covered, the company does some well known widget-making business and everyone has known since business school how the business works. You just nod your head when there's a board meeting and otherwise try to keep a good handicap at the country club. When there's a decision to be made, you feel out which side will win and hedge your bets. You've get several of these board jobs, and each of them thinks the other memberships are why they are hiring you.
One day, your friend invites you to be on the board of a company that does something truly new and interesting. In fact some people say this is the modern day Manhattan project, taking humanity into a new yet potentially dangerous age. It's prestigious, and you think how different can it really be to any other business?
As time passes, you realize your strategy of just doing whatever the other board members are doing is not going to work. There is this really big question of what you should do about keeping things "safe", a vague idea that you've heard of from some prominent employees. It dawns upon you that you might actually have to think about what to do.
Eventually, you crap yourself, and you decide to use some of the formal powers of the board. You saw on Silicon Valley that the board can depose the CEO, maybe that should be done? You know a bunch of people who have talked about AI in the past, perhaps one of them has a clue about what to do?
My impression of the external side is somewhat similar to the view I'm presenting above. It's not that they are completely unqualified to comment on the company, they actually had tangentially relevant experience. But what did they really add, other than making our webpage look better? And if things went wrong, what would they really lose? They are just curious folks who are excited to be around business, and can introduce us to interested parties.
The other thing the board is supposed to do is pull the emergency break if stuff goes wrong. It's hard to know how closely they monitored that sort of thing, given it doesn't happen that much. Also if things get bad, do they jump ship or act like what a bystander might in a car accident, ie try to call emergency services but not stick their head in the fire? Because the rest of us have our heads in the fire.
If the board talked to Altman and said, "hey this is the wrong direction" or "it's moving too fast." Then if they'd given him a chance to adjust. And only if they were unable to agree after a reasonable time, then they crafted a plan to responsibly change leadership after a transition period, that'd probably be fine.
But instead they just bounced him randomly and called him a liar publicly without any thought on who would step in. Who would want to work for them?
Edit: moar elaboration please
Edit: she seriously said that re:Pornhub?! What is her association with porn and why would she bring that up?
Edit: unless the words came from her mouth, I wouldn't blow it up any further
Also, why doesn't she just hire a lawyer to help her sign up ?
The "powerful" people outside, matter a lot less. No matter what you do, if you're influential, about half the powerful will hate you and half will love you.
I have no idea what the actual implications are of the relation. But it's there and it's suggested his network of friends from YC could bolster his position with OpenAI. No idea if that's true, but it's not like it is so strange a notion that it merits "playing dumb" like you're doing.
OAI employees have $5-20m+ equity packages and want that number to grow, and they trust the guy who’s made himself the face of the company through its growth
The large financial stakes of OAI employees is more powerful than ideas about morality or idealism that are offered as the reasons here
They have an opportunity to sell equity next month as well in a second offering and obviously don’t want to wipe out that value suddenly. The workers stand to make hugely generational wealth overnight. Of course that’s on their mind as otherwise wage earners.
You would then be working under this huge change with a CEO with a mission to "slow down" and likely feeling much more constrained by the board. Altman would likely push back a lot more.
Fun how that goes.
Occam's Razor. This is impulsive firing, with impulsive hiring on the way.
But I hear she's currently unavailable...
example: “Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes...
I followed the story as it unfolded somewhat closer than I typically do. I said relatively little about it because I'm a woman on an overwhelmingly male forum and my point of view seemed wholly alien and unparseable here.
I think her gender contributed to the debacle. I'm not saying that makes her innocent, but I think there were extenuating circumstances.
The difference is that, for that mid level role, there are dozens of candidates who could fill it, who all look like good candidates on paper. It takes that long to sort through them all to find the person they like the most.
But imagine for a moment that they write a job description, and they can only expect a few people to meet the requirements ever, and you're one of them. Also the job should've been filled yesterday.
It's not going to take months to fill it. It'll take a week or less.
This was that situation. But normally, those executive searches take months.
You know who's a key player in this story, probably the most successful businessperson involved, who only got the CEO job after 5-6 months? Satya Nadella.
And he would probably agree with you that this was a terrible way to hire a CEO that reflects poorly on the company.
My take: the board already demonstrated they fire badly, and here we’ll see them hire bad as well.
If Sam did something bad enough to warrant being removed as soon as they learned it, chucking someone you know personally and trust in the position while you then be thorough would seem the least bad course of action.
If Sam did not do something bad enough to warrant being removed as soon as they learned it, then firing him without any succession plan in place was a bad move and is "firing badly", but the hiring situation seems to me as exactly the same as in the "Sam did something really bad" line. Claiming both bad hiring and bad firing for the one decision seems like double counting to me, and will lead to circular reasoning. They hired badly ergo we can assume they fired badly, therefore they hired badly.
Most, if not all, of the group of people we are talking about were born from rich parents who could afford them to study in the most prestigious universities of America and they were in their prime years when computers expanded everywhere during the 90´s/00’s and also when the economy was booming like never before in the human history.
Those people are now in positions of extreme power that never existed before that. In fact, they are all in power to decide if your future billion dollars company will live or die, and if they allow it to live, it will be under their control.
And if you somehow manage to fill through the cracks, you’ll ultimately be offered some big money to sell them your company well before you have the opportunity to become one of them.
That's not what I said.
And not even trying what ? I'm not saying you can't create a succesful company and earn a lot of money. I'm talking about power. The type of power those people have is virtually inaccessible to anyone. Because they have enough money to stop you in your way up. They have a wide range of options between destructing your business, taking control of it, or giving you enough money so that you stop your ascension.
even proven NFL coaches are just offered a job
So there might be bad bad blood and he's doing it to spite YC, or it could be that he's in the loop with the insider chat and is stepping up to rescue what money they can and the VCs will pat him on the back?
Regarding saving VCs money, if he pushes too hard for commercialization over safety he risks his job.
I thought he was close to PG.
They are trying to clean up this mess and now is not the time to be opportunistic.
I mean, OpenAI would be a step up in some regards under ideal circumstances. But under these circumstances he is wise to stay at his 10+ billion dollar company.
So, can you imagine having built and being at the helm of Scale.ai at 26?
NYT just released a new interview with Sam Altman:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38359070
(I have not watched it yet, but will soon.)
So it’s way less interesting.