Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 985 posts

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#491

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Arson9416 wrote: post #61

The fact that these people aren't currently willing to "rewind the clock" about a week shows the dangers of human ego. Nothing permanent has been done that can't be undone fairly simply, if all parties agree to undo it. What we're watching now is the effect of ego momentum on decision making. Try it. It's not a crazy idea. Put everything back the way it was a week ago and then agree to move forward. It will be like h…

> Put everything back the way it was a week ago and then agree to move forward

Form follows function. This episode showed OpenAI's corporate structure is broken. And it's not clear how that can be undone.

Altman et al have, credit where it's due, been incredibly innovative in trying to reverse a non-profit into a for-profit company. But it's a dual mandate without any mechanism for resolving tension. At a certain point, you're almost forced into committing tax or securities fraud.

So no, even if all the pieces were put back together and peoples' animosities and egos put to rest, it would still be rewinding a broken clockwork mouse.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#492

Post by supriyo-biswas »

tedmiston wrote: post #463

Boosting this deeply nested interesting comment from @alephnerd to the top level: > As I posted elsewhere, I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Ilya may have been brought into this without his knowledge (which might explain why he retracted his position). Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-pro…

You can ask dang to pin comments, though I am not sure if it only works for top level comments.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#493

Post by hotnfresh »

jacquesm wrote: post #469
hotnfresh wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the board did the right thing, just waaaay too late for it to be effective. They’d been cut out long ago and just hadn’t realized it yet. … but I’d probably sign for exactly those good-career-move reasons, at this point. Going down with the ship isn’t even going to be noticed, let alone change anything.

Do you know their motivations? Because that is the main question everybody has: why did they do it?

I guess I should rephrase that as if they did it because they perceived that Altman was maneuvering to be untouchable within the company and moving against the interests of the nonprofit, they did the right thing. Just, again, way too late because it seems he was already untouchable.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#494

Post by chunky1994 »

alephnerd wrote: post #84

As I posted elsewhere, I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Ilya may have been brought into this without his knowledge (which might explain why he retracted his position). Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Alt…

Correlation =/= causation. This is most likely coincidental. I highly doubt Dustin's differing views caused a (near) unanimous ousting of a completely different company's CEO that had nothing to do with Dustin's primary business.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#495

Post by munificent »

Schiendelman wrote: post #337
jacquesm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Potentially: Liability based on their decisions. If it turns out those were not ultimately motivated by actual concern for the good of the company then they have a lot of problems.

It’s not a company - which is why they’re able to do this. We’ve just learned, again, that nonprofits can’t make these kinds of decisions because the checks and balances that investors and a profit motive create don’t exist.

> the checks and balances that investors and a profit motive create

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

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#496

Post by wilsonnb3 »

jader201 wrote: post #63
paulddraper wrote: post #18

As of 10am PT, 700 of 770 employees have signed the call for board resignation. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242

Are we aware of a timeline for this? E.g. when will people start quitting if the board doesn’t resign?

the original deadline was last Saturday at 5pm, so I would take any deadline that comes out with a grain of salt

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#497

Post by Rapzid »

This is bonkers. Usually there is a sense of "all sales are final" when companies make such impactful statements.

Yet we have:

* OpenAI fires Sam Altman hinting at impropriety.

* OpenAI is trying to get Sam back over the weekend.

Then we have:

* Microsoft CEO Satya personally announces Sam will CEO up a new.. business?, under Microsoft.

* We hear Sam is still trying to get back in at OpenAI?!

Never seen anything like this playing out in the open. I suspect the FTC is watching this entire ordeal like a hawk.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#498

Post by tedmiston »

alsodumb wrote: post #479
alephnerd wrote: post #84

As I posted elsewhere, I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Ilya may have been brought into this without his knowledge (which might explain why he retracted his position). Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Alt…

It's clear that Adam himself has a strong conflict of interest too. The GPT store announcement on DevDay pretty much killed his company Poe. And all this started brewing after DevDay announcement. Maybe Sam kept it under the wraps from Adam and the board.

I've heard others take this stance, but a common response so far has been "Poe is so small as to be irrelevant", "I forgot it exists", etc in the grand scheme of things here.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#499

Post by jacquesm »

romanhn wrote: post #349
Eji1700 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So i can't check this at work, but have we seen the document they've all been signing? I'm just curious as to how we're getting this information

Yes, this is the letter: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762

As an aside: that letter contains one very interesting tidbit: the board has consistently refused to go on the record as to why they fired Altman, and that alone is a very large red flag about their conduct post firing Altman. Because if they have a valid reason they should simply state it and move on. But if there is no valid reason it's clear why they can't state it and if there is a valid reason that they are not comfortable sharing then they are idiots because all of the events so far trump any such concern.

The other stand-out is the bit about destroying the company being in line with the mission: that's the biggest nonsense I've ever heard and I have a hard time thinking of a scenario where this would be a justified response that could start with firing the CEO.

Post reply on HN