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Comment by dschofie | Hacker News Reader

Makes you wonder how many other companies would have this level of consensus supporting their CEO

It's apples and oranges. Employees are expressing a preference for making a profit versus the nonprofit board. I'm sort of impressed 5% of the crowd might elevate conscience over cash. No other business has been so insane as to pursue a naked profit objective under the guise of a nonprofit operation. The fact that Altman did so is not a virtue, in my opinion.

I kinda doubt that. I imagine they're mostly mad about the injustice and unilateralness of it. For all we know the employees would make the same money either way.

Agree that it's not virtuous, though.

> The fact that Altman did so is not a virtue, in my opinion.

And did it so shrewdly he didn't get fired earlier, before he was "too big to fire."

You're accepting the board's good vs. evil framing without any evidence that Altman sacrificed safety for profit, or that the board (the Quora guy, really?) is any better. OpenAI needs money to achieve its mission. Training GPT-4 alone cost over $100 million. Commercializing the product is not bad in itself.

The quora guy is the last person I can think of that's not profit motivated.

If the original statement said that the board had removed him because it disagreed on for profit and Altman refused to change course then that makes a lot of sense and I think many people would at least be OK with their motives, even if it likely harmed OpenAI's progress.

Doesn't look like that is the reason given they are still holding onto Microsoft's $10 billion deal, the rejection/cancellation/notice of termination/notice it would be the last of that would have come along with the firing if this was the motive.

Whatever the real motives are I don't think we have heard them yet, which is a bad sign for them being with cause.

It’s probably more disapproval of the board than approval of the CEO.

It's probably a reflection of the fact that most engineers who joined OpenAI did so with the hope of becoming rich and working at what might end up being one of the most influential tech companies in the world. They probably figured the non-profit governance thing is just some weird accounting or PR thing.

I doubt they care about Sam Altman. But they didn't turn down offers from other tech giants to be stuck at a niche AI doomer research shop.

None. A CEO with >95% approval rating is unheard of, even considering sole-proprietorships

How many people would stand in front of their boss and the rest of the world and say that they don't support him? That's what this open letter is equivalent to.

Former boss.

You may want to double check that. Their letter was in support of the CEO from 3 days ago. Although you’re right they don’t support the new CEO appointed within the last 24 hrs, but they don’t explicitly mention that, but they do lambast the current board of directors — and I imagine the the board should feel embarrassed, but save one, there’s no evidence of that.

Ouch. The truth hurts.

It’s fairly unusual that a CEO getting fired would put a company’s ability to continue to operate at such high risk.

I’d take it less as a signal of approval in the ordinary sense (though some of it’s probably that!) and more one of perceived dependence. Altman = Microsoft = big piles of cash.

I'm not sure the problem is that he got fired, so much as how he got fired.

Sure, but (even more importantly after passing some threshold of signatures) the question's not 'do you approve of Altman as CEO' but 'do you approve of the board of your employer'.

And I'm not just saying it's the board vs CEO, it's job preservation etc. not just abstract personality approval. (Again, much more so for the last 20% than the first.)

This isn't indicative of a >95% approval rating for Altman, though—once the first 50% of employees sign the letter, the rest might sign due to peer pressure (even if not explicit), or because their favorite coworkers have already signed, or because the new CEO doesn't have a good reputation among workers, or lots of other reasons besides "when last asked if I approved of the CEO in the abstract I said yes".

By the dozens of employee accounts I’ve read in the last 72 hours they all spoke with affection, and I could not find any detractors. A repeated theme was that he always took the time to listen and he cared and went out of his way. I’ve never worked with a CEO I would describe that way. I don’t know how widespread that is among their employees, or whether they’re mostly pissed at the board for destroying their financial futures, but I’d say this situation and their level of devotion is mind boggling, almost cult like.

>I could not find any detractors

It's obvious and I don't mean to imply you aren't aware or even that you're wrong, but if I had the earning potential of an OpenAI employee, I probably wouldn't be looking to publicly shit on anyone that might affect that gravy train.

I did find a detractor: https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397...

This isn’t an approval rating, though. For one it’s public. I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure, spoken or unspoken, to sign.

I must admit, the first clause of my sentence was mostly a vehicle for the second clause, the punchline — sole-proprietors not approving of themselves. It loses a bit in the explaining. Although whatever that 95% is a proxy for, they clearly trust Altman dramatically, enough to endure a job at a Microsoft subsidiary.

For cult leaders, however, we are in familiar approval territories.

Very few.

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