The conclusion just raises further questions on why the coup happened, other than a "consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust between the prior Board and Mr. Altman".
My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired, and then OpenAI will wind up being eaten by Microsoft for a song.
[0] Old board: Potential defamation litigation, new board: they were literally put in there by Altman to not threaten him
this is why microsoft loves sama. of course the firing spooked them. it would have seriously soured the trajectory.
so much cleaner to let sama take the wheel.
everyone important goes home rich, or at least happy, they think. ms gets a gold-painted goose. sama will undoubtedly get some form of gold plated escape hatch, parachute, life raft, etc.
Who has this happened to except for Travis kalanick at Uber?
- Steve Jobs - Sandy Lerner - Noah Glass - Mark Pinkus - Kyle Vogt
I have a lot of confidence in Altman's ability to extricate himself before getting fired, but this is a very common Silicon Valley story.
There is a for profit subsidiary which Microsoft invested 13 billion in, but that can't return money to board members only Altman and it's investors.
OpenAI is a nonprofit
Many non profits generate revenue from operating a business rather than gift giving. Sesame workshop's deal with HBO and various merchandising deals with Elmo etc on a day to day basis looks a lot like a business, they just reinvest that money into content rather than handing money to investors.
Ultimately, most non profits would prefer a giant endowment which can provide them a low risk income stream. Which is why breaking off such ventures is surprisingly common, most of them don't revive 16 billion in outside funding and such media attention. But, again the important bit is what happens to the money / resources. Buy or sell a building, business, or other asset at fair market value and everything is fine.
Difference is, both IKEA and Bosch don't raise questions about their corporate governance. Which OpenAI pretty much does.
Who elects the board in a non-profit? Who did sama go to to get them removed?
Why didn't the board member(s) in question reveal the story in full when they had the chance?
Cant answer your last question. As said, that was just the story that I heard here on HN.
But I have enough faith in Altman's ability to fuck shit up without facing personal consequences that I'm pretty sure he'll navigate some sort of sale before everything goes south.
> real-world utility is far less than expected
The real-world utility is already enormous in the form it is now. You really think there's no real-world utility to GPT-4, Claude, and all the models that are coming out?
So instead of hedging and saying "it's going to change some things", you play into the "it's going to change everything?". Its stereotypical grandstanding when nobody really knows what is going to happen. The AI bros and AI deniers are both exhausting crowds.
everything good in your life is because of applied intelligence
now imagine 1000x the intelligence at 1000x the intensity
If this is true then everything bad in my life is also due to applied intelligence as intelligence itself doesn't have a moral connotation. "[N]ow imagine 1000x the intelligence at 1000x the intensity".
Both claims (everything good/bad because of intelligence) sound false to me. I guess the litmus test to the 1000x engineer (for example) is do we have 1000x the speed of product development.
I'm not who you're responding to, but I think it's at least true that there is enough competition, including open source competition, to make some of the current valuations a bit fanciful.
Gervais principle agrees with you.
And why didn't board tell this to anyone in the company after accusing Sam in the PR. Board members were so publicly humiliated and I find it weird that they just sat there in silence but at the same not giving up. Their career is surely affected by this unprofessional behavior.
- Why did the board snap decide to fire him and butcher it badly?
- Why didn't the board say he tried to manipulate them from the beginning? They only gave an explanation when they were literally forced to, and even then details are trickling out (like Mira's complaints).
Even after reading the NYTimes article, I still don't understand why the board decided to go straight to firing him.
>That appeared to be a reference to former OpenAI director Helen Toner, a researcher at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a Georgetown think tank. After she published a research analysis that criticized the speed of OpenAI’s product launch decisions, Altman reportedly tried to remove her from the board. “I think I could have handled that situation with more grace and care—I apologize for that,” he said.
https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-is-reinstated-to-open...
Where did you see that?
Why didn't the board say so when they had the chance?