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Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him, which scared the shit out of Microsoft. The prior and new Boards both cannot make the allegation that Altman tried to commit a corporate coup, albeit for different reasons[0], so we're never going to get official confirmation of anything.

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

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>While the investigation cleared Altman to reclaim his board seat, he said he “did learn a lot from this experience,” expressing remorse for one incident in particular involving a board member he did not name.

>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...

It's always magnanimous to apologize for bad things after you've gotten away with them.

he doesn't think its a bad thing though. Its just a thing you are supposed to say.

Narcissists prayer. I'm sorry you were upset by thst

OpenAI is a nonprofit which changes most motivations for the board. They are ultimately tasked with preserving the mission rather than profit which cases Altman in a very poor light here.

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

Do people really still believe this?

The US government does, which is what matters.

I am surprised that using non profit status to build a business and transferring/converting to for profit down the line isn’t considered a form of tax evasion.

It's all about what happens to the money.

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.

So is IKEA.

Well, the entity behind IKEA the brand. Same for Bosch.

Difference is, both IKEA and Bosch don't raise questions about their corporate governance. Which OpenAI pretty much does.

It hasn't been a nonprofit in years.

https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

You can't go from nonprofit to for profit. They as I said created a subsidiary.

Nah, I think Microsoft will end up buying some form of assets off of OpenAI (it's a non-profit with odd corporate governance that Altman doesn't own stock in, so I don't think they'll buy the whole company) for an extremely exorbitant price. Altman will put in some ambitious but clueless Microsoft manager to run it and move on to his next thing. Then it'll turn out that Gen AI is dramatically overhyped and the real-world utility is far less than expected. Shit'll get fucked up, people will forget about it, and Microsoft will write down their investment by a large margin - kinda like Hotmail, and Skype, and Nokia, and Minecraft, and what's starting to happen to GitHub and LinkedIn. And so it goes, a classic Silicon Valley love story.

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.

Your appraisal seems to stem from a lot of people's disillusionment with the whole OpenAI thing: namely that GenAI is a hype train and will fade away as a gimmicky toy with limited real world-use cases. It's interesting seeing that perspective, because while I think it's based on a comparison of GenAI with prior "change everything" hype trains (VR, crypto), it's clearly not the same, and you and most people really don't understand just how much everything is about to change. GenAI isn't just any other technology.

> 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?

> most people really don't understand just how much everything is about to change

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.

because it will change everything

everything good in your life is because of applied intelligence

now imagine 1000x the intelligence at 1000x the intensity

> everything good in your life is because of applied intelligence

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 can imagine it. You're skipping over the actually hard part, which is the question of where the current AI paradigm will top out. Don't pretend this is not an open question.

>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?

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.

open source models cannot compete

> Altman will put in some ambitious but clueless Microsoft manager to run it and move on to his next thing

Gervais principle agrees with you.

But

- 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.

They probably thought Altman's character was unsalvageable and better move quick before he gets wind of it. They didn't expect the OpenAI employees and Microsoft to back Altman that strongly. They also seem to have misjudged Brockman and Muriati in particular.

Why was Brockman removed from board and demoted? For Sam, I could think of 100 reasons.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

Who has this happened to except for Travis kalanick at Uber?

for posterity:

- Steve Jobs - Sandy Lerner - Noah Glass - Mark Pinkus - Kyle Vogt

Parker Conrad at Zenefits, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, Andrew Mason at Groupon (but not before cashing his shares out at IPO!), Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack at Cisco, Steve Jobs at Apple.

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.

With Adam Neumann at WeWork currently in the process of doing it again with Flow and AH giving him $350M at a $1B value months before it even commenced operations (what the actual fuck?)

Some people deserve to lose their money.

> The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him

Who elects the board in a non-profit? Who did sama go to to get them removed?

The story was that Altman lied to specific board members to have other removed.

Where did you see this? Do you have any links?

Why didn't the board member(s) in question reveal the story in full when they had the chance?

I read it here on Hacker News. I dont have any links of it at hand, there were way too many threads about the drama for me to go looking for it now.

Cant answer your last question. As said, that was just the story that I heard here on HN.

There were six people on the board and it was 3 vs 3 for along time. Sam was trying to get one of the other 3 to flip to his side to get a majority but then the other side brought in Ilya and they had a majority and removed Sam.

He was trying to convince one of the independent directors to resign, leaving him with a 3-2 majority on the board which would be illegal under California non-profit law.

Usually in a non-profit the board itself elects new members if necessary. It depends on the charter.

> The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed,

Where did you see that?

Why didn't the board say so when they had the chance?

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