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Comment by tibbar | Hacker News Reader

You had the answer there before you dismissed it -- the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft (which has OpenAI's IP rights) offering to hire them all immediately. This included the company's key leadership. The organization was unraveling overnight. This was far past the tipping point of "a few disgruntled employees might leave" - there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.

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When the board fires you for wrongdoing it is like being deported from a foreign country for breaking that country’s laws. You can’t just go against that decision. It would be like telling the government that no, in fact they are the ones who are wrong and no, I didn’t break the law it is in fact their laws which are broken.

When you have irreconcilable differences with the board you could theoretically jump ship and start a rival company. Usually, in practice, that’s impossibly hard and yet Microsoft announced that they intended to do exactly that with funding and stock matching. For some reason that was turned down in favor of staging the equivalent of an in-country coup.

If you get caught breaking the law on vacation abroad and your response to being arrested is to take control of the country in retaliation then you are a very powerful, persuasive, or threatening person indeed.

Indeed, it was stunning. The Board outranked the CEO and had the right to replace him. What they didn't reckon on was that technically, if the entire company is willing to quit on behalf of the CEO, then they as a body outrank the board. And that was that, pretty much.

> It would be like telling the government that no, in fact they are the ones who are wrong and no, I didn’t break the law it is in fact their laws which are broken.

You know a number of people are in that position though.

My first thought went to Samsung's chairman who will break the law and go to prison, but the country will have him back, bending over backwards to somewhat have it make sense.

> It would be like telling the government that no, in fact they are the ones who are wrong and no, I didn’t break the law it is in fact their laws which are broken.

Reminds me of the Wirecard scandal doc on Netflix. Wirecard was so powerful that the financial regulators (BaFin) started targeting journalists and actively defending a publicly traded company.

I answered that scenario though. I'm fine, as a board, letting employees who want to hold the company hostage over a CEO that the board fired walk.

The board's major mistake was not communicating why he was let go.

My guess is that the likely reason why employees threatened to go was that they felt Altman had the best chances of making the for-profit arm's shares skyrocket. As a non-profit company's board, I'd be fine letting those people walk out the front door along with the CEO that was just fired.

It is my understanding that the key personnel who developed the actual technology were not part of the group threatening to leave. It was mainly the group in the for-profit arm that Altman had trojan-horsed into the company structure.

> This included the company's key leadership.

I'm not aware of the machine learning researchers responsible for the core technology threatening to leave. Who were they?

> I'm not aware of the machine learning researchers responsible for the core technology threatening to leave. Who were they?

Ilya Sutskever, Alec Radford, Wojciech Zaremba, Nick Ryder, Mark Chen, ... how many names do you want? >90% of the company threatened to leave.

Sutskever was one of the people who fired Altman to begin with.

Him joining the pile-on when it was already clear how big it is was pretty much surrendering to the mob, and was perceived as such even at the time.

It’s so much weirder than that. Reportedly, Greg Brockman’s wife begged him in tears to change his mind. Ilya presided over their wedding.

Source?

https://www.wsj.com/tech/openai-employees-threaten-to-quit-u...

Wait, are you simply unaware of the widely reported circumstances in the company at that time? 95% of employees signed a letter to the board stating that they would leave the company if Sam was not brought back [1]. Ilya Sutskever, who was on the board and voted to remove Sam, changed his mind and signed the letter. The board named Mira Murati interim CEO; then she signed the letter, the board fired her, and hired another outside CEO. Several key researchers resigned outright before letter even went out, including Jakub Pachoki, who replaced Ilya after he left [2] .

I would challenge you to name a researcher who didn't resign or threaten to resign. Remember, they all had a plausible landing spot: They could simply show up at Microsoft with all the same leadership, coworkers, salary, compute, and IP the next day. OpenAI as we know it was over unless and until the board gave in.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/95-percent-of-openai-employees-t... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/three-senior-openai-...

No, I am not simply unaware. I said my understanding, which appears to be wrong. Thanks for the details. However, I am still confused on which employees of which company. There is the non-profit OpenAI and for-profit OpenAI. Are these articles talking about everything or just the for-profit branch?

I still wager that things would have been different had the board clearly stated their reasons. Doesn't make any sense that they did it months later. The signing of the petition seems mostly group think and political. I would guess that the majority of employees would have followed through.

Lastly, I still can't say any of this makes any sense. Why did the employees even care about Altman? It still seems all very strange to leave your job for someone who doesn't seem to have ever said anything meaningful.

>I'd be fine letting those people walk out the front door along with the CEO that was just fired.

Guess you'd be fine being the board over a company that now only consists of a board. Thumbs up.

If the board had shared something equivalent to this article at the time, perhaps there wouldn't have been such an intense internal pressure campaign.

Instead, they did not even attempt to communicate any rationale behind their actions.

It’s not good form to bad mouth someone you’ve fired. They did, in fact, release a statement which aligns (in PR speak) with what Toner is claiming now.

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

https://openai.com/index/openai-announces-leadership-transit...

What they didn't realize is that they were going to have to convince the rank-and-file employees of that. Without a communication strategy to do that, they had basically no leverage.

I agree with this 100%

I even said so at the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372451#38373194

> It’s not good form to bad mouth someone you’ve fired.

Instead, it's good form to wait 6 months and then do a Business Insider interview on the topic?

Also, "bad mouthing" suggests putting a spin on it. Based on the article, they should have been able to list out several objective facts that supported their decision. Instead, they opened it all up to intense speculation by providing a vague justification and by remaining tight lipped even once it became clear that a lot of clarification was needed.

> This was far past the tipping point of "a few disgruntled employees might leave" - there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.

But if they had the moral conviction, it seems like this would have been the right choice to make, because it would have diluted Altman's power (unless they trust Nadella even less than they trust Altman?)

They should have called their bluff.

There's not many who have the balls to do that left in the country, let alone California or SF.

>the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft...

But, what kind of Wild West is this? It's all so unhinged and strange.

There are no NDAs, non-competes or other impediments? MS just guts OpenAI at its whim?

>there would have been no OpenAI left to preside over.

...If MS can do this, then there's already no OpenAI left to preside over.

The beauty of California is that there are no non competes, for anyone, ever.

It is a very pro employee policy, hence attractive to the best and brightest.

Good to see someone positive about California, given all of the politically-motivated negativity. It's a great state for many reasons.

I mentioned non-competes as one of a universe of things that makes this unusual; including its original non-profit status becoming substantially for-profit, and the apparent ease with which MS can now gut the supposedly controlling non-profit and walk away with everything.

And, I'm guessing even the CA policy on non-competes wasn't conceived with the idea of one company simply "taking" another company at-will, even if that scenario is technically covered.

I am not clear about the intent of your comment. People should be free to sell their labor to whoever they want. And people should be able to buy labor from whoever they want.

All businesses at all times are subject to losing their employees to another employer who is willing to pay enough for them.

My original point had very little to do with selling labor/non-competes, but I think you keyed on that part. Maybe re-reading and omitting that will make it clearer.

Yeah, sadly it looks like it was employees' greed that brought Altman back.

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