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Comment by Alyaksandr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Comments like this don't see the forest for the trees. A good leader is a useful tool just like anyone else. 700 people threatening to quit isn't manufactured news.

Let’s see how many actually quit. Saying “I will quit” is not nearly the same as actually handing in your notice. How many people who threatened to move to Canada after the 2016 election did?

If they aren't quitting, they are moving to Microsoft with Sam I'd imagine.

That... is called quitting...

If they follow Sam to Microsoft the team might be basically the same and able to work on the same projects. But yes, they would be quitting one company and going to another.

The context here is somewhat different, given that Microsoft are essentially offering to roll out the red carpet for them.

Being funded by Microsoft is one thing, but working for them might lead to some dissonance -- I think tech ppl are already wary of them owning GitHub... and then owning the team building AGI.

It would and should give ppl pause. I suspect Sam is just inside Microsoft for the bluff. He couldn't operate in the way he wants -- "trust me, I have humanity's best interests at heart" -- while so close to them, I don't think

So altman is a big tree. What he brings to the table is the wood it's made of? I'll have a think on that.

You are close - it isn’t that a good leader is the wood, a good leader is the table itself. Don’t know if Sam is or isn’t, but I’ve worked with good leaders like this before, and bad ones who aren’t capable of being this.

This might be too drawn out but you should not consider leaders as the tip of the tree but the roots & trunk.

You can have the best leaves and branches but without good roots & trunk, it's pointless.

From everything I can tell, Altman is essentially an uber-leader. He is great at consolidating & acting on internal information, he's great at externalizing information & bringing in resources, he's great at rallying & exciting his collegues towards a mission. If a leader can have one of those, they are a good leader but to have all of them in one makes them world class.

That's also discounting his reputation and connections as well. Altman is a very valuable person to have on staff if only as a figurehead to parade around and use for introductions. It's like if you had Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, or any other tech superstar on staff. They are valuable as contributors but additionally valuable as people magnets.

> What does Altman bring to the table exactly. What is going to be lost if he leaves.

If Altman did literally nothing else for Microsoft, except instantly bring over 700 of the top AI researchers in the world, he would still be one of the most valuable people they could ever hire.

It's less about Altman himself and more about the board's actions.

Removing him shows (according to employees) that the board does not have good decision making skills, and does not share interests of the employees.

I think this is a bit harsh, as a good leader is obviously of some value, but the real prize is obviously the researchers themselves, including Suskever.

I guess then that Altman's value is that he will attract the rest of the team.

for one, he doesn't randomly throw a hand grenade that blows up one of the fastest growing companies in history and ruin team morale, which is what the board did. Good management does matter, otherwise Google wouldn't be so far behind OpenAI despite having more researchers and compute resources

and employees are pissed because they were all looking forward to being millionaires in a few weeks when their financing round at a 90B valuation finalized. Now the board being morons is putting that in jeopardy

He plays the orchestra.

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