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Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

This kind of gives away the reason for his firing.

He was pursuing his vision of AI incluing a chipset specific to LLM processing that would break nvidias hold of the market.

Apparently the BoD didnt like it. They should have just been more forthcoming about it.

Some CEOs would get fired for moonlighting. Others (Elon Musk, etc) build massive companies and make their existing companies more resilient and lasting. The fact that employees closed ranks around him tell you which kind of CEO he is, and the BoD chose to ignore that at their loss

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>The fact that employees closed ranks around him tell you which kind of CEO he is

I can only conclude that the guys were afraid for their big bag of cash, I would expect them would allow anything that would ensure they get an obscene amount of money.

the board was about to vaporize employee equity overnight - the secondary was days away and would have been life changing for many employees and significant for all of them. SA is probably a great a leader but the financial incentives for the employees to support him and ensure the secondary went through were huuuuuuge

Yep, the boards failure occurred when they allowed the profit motive to take control of the organization. The crisis was merely a manifestation of the inevitable.

Thats putting the carriage before the horse. How did the valuation get there, particularly when it did it before M$off, GOOG, etc?

It was the team. Who put the team together?

We will never know if OpenAI would have succeeded w/o SA. That's unfalsifiable. But they got to a life changing equity because the CEO helped get it there.

My point: SA was likely putting the scaffolding of a 2nd home run in place, right as the board got scared of being on 3rd base going for the run.

And therein lies the problem. The BoD was not playing the long game.

It seems there's more to it than that [1]. Altman did a surprisingly good job of cultivating a "nice guy" image among the tech crowd, but I personally don't buy it.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/what-sam-altman-did-so-bad-h...

Too much of a nice person image makes me really skeptical, especially if it seems at all cultivated.

People are people. Virtually anyone can be prickly or have some opinions you might not like. Show me the reality. I can take it because I don’t expect humans to be cardboard comic book caricatures.

It's unfortunate that everyone else was so comically bad at literally any kind of communication. I'm starting to feel like the general advice lawyers give of say nothing is a terrible advice, when you have such a public facing company. It's like what you need in that situation is a communication coach first and a lawyer second.

But as an engineer that also never learned this kind of narrative control, I too am struggling at where I can learn this from. Any hints are appreciated actually.

Sam Altman on the other hand has decades more experience is that playing field.

This sounds like snark but it’s not intended to be: do you really need sources to learn narrative control? Perceiving how narratives work seems to be a skill that almost all humans are very good at naturally. I acknowledge that shaping narratives is a different skill set (especially the parts that require putting yourself in a position to shape narratives effectively), but in my opinion if you’re already asking the question you already have all the foundational knowledge and awareness you need to start exercising those muscles as well.

I get the point, but the reality is that this goes way beyond business communication. And yes, given enough time almost anyone can learn almost anything, but we're also human with limited time and it simply makes no sense trying to learn everything from scratch. You gotta know when to ask people that are experts in their respective fields.

Not exactly what you asked but I think the same approach would work: I set the intention to gain insight into how stories work. This intention alone was sufficient to massively increase my abilities in this area, because during "idle time" my brain would mull over / analyze stories I'd heard recently.

So I think for PR or whatever the same thing would work, simply deciding to become skilled in this area and you will naturally begin to pick up the patterns already present in your reality.

When did I say it didn’t go way beyond business communication? That’s largely my point: this is a basic human skill in the modern world that I would think existing for 20-30 years would give you plenty of experience in navigating stories told by others as well as using your own narratives to steer outcomes.

Have you ever heard someone described as tone deaf?

The narrative that works in your head is not necessarily a narrative that works publicly.

Sure but that’s a matter of testing assumptions and updating them per new info.

Some people can roll their tongue like a tube and some can't. Some people can wiggle their ears and some people can't.

And some people can't really understand or perceive other people's intentions and motivations... and some people can do it but not in real time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test

Some people are good at following other people's eye gaze, some are not.

And then there is Machiavellian intelligence, which roughly scales with (real) intelligence -- but some people aren't good at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellian_intelligence

Yeah. You don’t get cult vibes happening by accident.

In OpenAI's case there are millions of dollars on the line for the employees involved so I consider that the most likely reason to stand behind him. Discounting that, are there any other companies that he's involved with where you see "cult vibes"?

> Some CEOs would get fired for moonlighting. Others (Elon Musk, etc) build massive companies and make their existing companies more resilient and lasting.

I don't get why more CEO/founders don't found second and third companies. You build a great leadership team, then explore adjacent spaces that can reinforce your vision of the future. In a way, it can clear the space of potential competitors. Or build potential customers.

I think Altman and Musk are doing an amazing job of it. Dorsey wasn't doing a bad job, either.

Also, self-risk broadening!

If you want to play in the big pool and own/run things, why not spread your personal risk over multiple ventures?

* Note: this for types constitutionally incapable of being happy retiring early with millions

I actually agree. While I more or less detest Musk and Dorsey, I do also appreciate as you put it, that they were able to build a leadership teams that can run the business while they go and about acting as the face of the business. Unfortunately I don't think they have succeeded fully at this, because to me their public image has now started to hurt their businesses...

IDK supposedly executives are paid to be on top of things, be responsible if they go south (but boards and golden parachutes protect them), and work however many hours it takes to make the important decisions.

So if their time is divided then my guess is they won't be doing it very well. If they are all face and PR then perhaps AI will replace them.

IMHO, this is the difference between the Berkshire Hathaway model and the Apple model.

Good leaders should probably invest a lot of time in developing a deep and talented pipeline of other good leaders, so that the current leader can be replaced.

Bad (but still effective) leaders leave the company flying off the edge of a cliff without a successor when they exit. Usually because they played politics and blocked anyone's rise who could challenge them. (See: PLO)

Do you know them personally?

no, do you? Lets roll over there and fight one of them.

Detest them for what?

Oh you know, they dont like to toss salads.

Its almost always because of OpenAI like-situations.

The CEO reports to a board, and the board is too narrowminded or risk averse to allow for the CEOs ideas.

Its actually not very dissimilar from the public company vs private enterprise conflict paradigm: public rewards short term thinking while private rewards long term investment.

  Unless the board is composed of visionaries, entrepreneurs , or the CEO has a track record of cultivating enterprises, you are going to have a really hard time

Why just CEOs? Should I, as an individual contributor, be encouraged to hold down several jobs so that I can split my time and attention between them?

Thanks to covid and the remote work revolution, this has actually become a very real scenario for many people working in tech. Of course this also further exposes Altman's hypocrisy, as he is one of the stronger proponents of the "return to office" movement. So he obviously doesn't want his employees doing the exact same thing he does himself.

Im convinced RTO makes sense in some specific highly collaborative scenarios but overall seems to be an effort in pushing for more control

You should. Be in demand enough and you can dictate your terms.

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