Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousDan | Hacker News Reader

Meh. The fundamental mistake the board made was to give MS an in perpetuity licence to OpenAI IP. What a terrible negotiation mistake.

View on HN

Isn't the CEO who arranged that now working for Microsoft? Interesting turn of events.

The timeline is a bit murky about what happened when but it looks to me as if Altman was working for OpenAI until he got fired after which he took a job with OpenAI's major partner that he helped bring on board.

That doesn't 100% rule out that there was more to this but the optics are mostly ok. It still doesn't resolve the problem that you probably don't want either Sam Altman or Microsoft to have an army of people working at creating AGI without oversight but that's where the board shot themselves in the foot, they effectively removed themselves from the equation.

If I was the OpenAI board and this goes ahead I would be investigating the possibility of taking legal action for this very reason.

I think the OpenAI board has enough trouble as it is but if they really want to ensure they are going to be sued for their actions over the last couple of days that would probably be the thing that would do it. I would absolutely welcome such a move because it would mean complete transparency about everything that has happened since Last Thursday and I think we would all benefit from such transparency.

If the recent news about AGI is true then their actions make more sense! I wasn't aware they had a clause about AGI.

For some reason the thought of Microsoft AGI brought my brain to the concept of a literal Blue Screen of Death.

They did that so that they could get $14 billion dollars without giving Microsoft any real ownership. People who actually understand the deal think it was very good for OpenAI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com