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OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

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Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is going to leave Microsoft because of some amateur hour non profit board fuckery that had Microsoft stepping in as the adult. You don’t tell your partner investing billions of dollars of value you’re about to fire a CEO over perspective differences in a very public way, coloring it as malfeasance or dishonesty, and you think someone is ever going to take you seriously again? Anyone with even a basic level of…

> No one is going to leave Microsoft because of some amateur hour non profit board fuckery that had Microsoft stepping in as the adult. But will they leave Microsoft (or, at least, be less inclined to rely on Microsoft in the future where competitors exsit) because of Microsoft terminating a relationship on which their access to a technology at the core of an enterprise service that enterprise customers rely on is ba…

Microsoft will make the case that those customers should onboard to Microsoft offerings when at parity due to the unreliability of OpenAIs governance. And they won’t be wrong. Enterprise customers don’t want to hear about a critical vendor staging a board coup on Bloomberg, with a bunch of key employees quitting in solidarity, and then reading only a day or two later “on second thought, we were wrong, CEO is coming back.” This will make your vendor/third party risk team very twitchy. This will make executive leadership give the command down the chain to constantly explore alternatives.

OpenAI’s actions do not give people who approve tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in spend the warm fuzzy feeling. Microsoft knows exactly the consistency and stability these customers desire. They are the conduit by which value flows from OpenAI to Microsoft customers until Microsoft can deliver the value themselves.

(also why people get fed Teams vs Slack; because of who is making the purchasing decision, and why it’s being made)

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#62
post #4

It's worth knowing the specific reasons why the board fired Sam before assessing the value of this news. Too much rumor and not enough evidence.

Also its likely that a large number of the news stories coming out right now are PR "plants" by one side or the other to make the firing seem justified or the return a fait accompli. In a coup one of the first tasks is to get public opinion on your side and build momentum for the outcome you want to see. I'm curious where the rank & file OpenAI employees stand on this, as it seems to me like they will be the ultimate…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#63
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also its likely that a large number of the news stories coming out right now are PR "plants" by one side or the other to make the firing seem justified or the return a fait accompli. In a coup one of the first tasks is to get public opinion on your side and build momentum for the outcome you want to see. I'm curious where the rank & file OpenAI employees stand on this, as it seems to me like they will be the ultimate…

It indeed did seem like something Ilya would post himself, or at least someone cosplaying as him. Based on what we’ve seen on Twitter from employees it looks like a significant chunk supports Sam.

They're dreaming of being the next version of early googlers, i guess that is inevitable once people start doing math equations that include eleven digit numbers in them

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#64

Is it so hard to find good people to put on the board? Sam was the CEO OF Y COMBINATOR. Shouldn't he know who is best to put on the board? Find them out? Apparently not? Please say they are not going to put a board just as bad as before. There are no checks and balances. Should Open AI employees be allowed to veto a board decision vote if they have 50% or 67% of the vote? Should Open AI employees be allowed to vote f…

The issue is that the old board has to agree to the new board.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#65
post #6

"Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce Inc., will be on the new board, several people said. Another possible addition is an executive from Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest shareholder — but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation, some people said." hah, Microsoft will be in control from here on out whether they have someone technically on the board or not. They did…

Hard to see how embrace, extend, extinguish fits here. There's no standards-based app ecosystem that depends on some community standard for interplay that they can break by getting market-wide adoption of their proprietary standard. ChatGPT's IO is natural language text prompts/answers. Can MS really create a proprietary extension to natural language, that the world recognizes?

It seems that some people embraced the concept of "embrace, extend, extinguish", and now they are extending it too far. Eventually the usage of the phrase will be so diluted that it will become extinguished.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. and MS takes a massive hit financially as they're hardpdroven as an unreliable cloud service.

No one is going to leave Microsoft because of some amateur hour non profit board fuckery that had Microsoft stepping in as the adult. You don’t tell your partner investing billions of dollars of value you’re about to fire a CEO over perspective differences in a very public way, coloring it as malfeasance or dishonesty, and you think someone is ever going to take you seriously again? Anyone with even a basic level of…

"Sorry, I don't have to worry about this sort of thing with AWS"

They get hacked by foreign governments due to their utter incompetence a lot less, too.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#67
post #8
post #4

It's worth knowing the specific reasons why the board fired Sam before assessing the value of this news. Too much rumor and not enough evidence.

It seems clear that there weren’t specific reasons, just a kind of final straw in the product announcements that made the board realize how far from the original mission the company had drifted. Turning it into an emergency and surprise coup with innuendo of wrongdoing looks to have been a huge mistake, and may result in total loss of control where a more measured course correction could have succeeded.

Does the board not have final control? Why have they agreed (in principle) to step down? I wish more of the reporting around this was specific about who has the power to do what.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#68

Altman is more powerful than I thought.

I think he’s lucky that apparently many OpenAI employees support him, as otherwise there would be less leverage over the board. Investors can threaten the board, but where would they go if the brainpower stays with OpenAI?

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#69
post #20
post #6

"Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce Inc., will be on the new board, several people said. Another possible addition is an executive from Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest shareholder — but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation, some people said." hah, Microsoft will be in control from here on out whether they have someone technically on the board or not. They did…

oh I recognize Taylor, he was on the former Twitter, Inc. board.

He was also in upper level in FB and had a work in Google. I expect him to be part in Amazon and Apple in this decade. He touchhes every big company, lol

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, MS leaving is the absolute end of OpenAI (and for all practical purposes the end of Ilya's career). It's Satya's call now, he's not happy and wants @sama back. Next week is going to be interesting!

Why would I not believe that Meta or Google or anyone really come in or replace Microsoft? You don’t think they’re kicking themselves that Microsoft got the deal?

>Why would I not believe that Meta or Google or anyone really come in or replace Microsoft?

Because they already do well on their own, Meta is doing exceptionally well actually.

It's better business for them if OpenAI just burns into the ground and leaves the cake up for grabs again. It doesn't take a lot of brain power to see that.

The only thing that has sent Google into "Code Red" in it's whole history has been OpenAI. They'd love to see it evaporate, and now they're not even spending a dime!

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