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OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

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Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#131

Post by htrp »

paulpan wrote: post #91
tedivm wrote: post #17

This was handled so very, very poorly. Frankly it's looking like Microsoft is going to come out of this better than anyone, especially if they end up getting almost 500 new AI staff out of it (staff that already function well as a team). > In their letter, the OpenAI staff threaten to join Altman at Microsoft. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we…

In hindsight firing Sam was a self-destructing gamble by the OpenAI board. Initially it seemed Sam may have committed some inexcusable financial crime but doesn't look so anymore. Irony is that if a significant portion of OpenAI staff opt to join Microsoft, then Microsoft essentially killed their own $13B investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Better than acquiring for $80B+ I suppose.

Msft/Amazon/Google would light 13 billion on fire to acquire OpenAI in a heartbeat.

(but also a good chunk of the 13bn was pre-committed Azure compute credits, which kind of flow back to the company anyway).

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#133

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rvz wrote: post #115
mjirv wrote: post #15

The key line: “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”

So essentially, OpenAI is a sinking ship as long as the board members go ahead with their new CEO and Sam, Greg are not returning. Microsoft can absorb all the employees and switch them into the new AI subsidiary which basically is an acqui-hire without buying out everyone else's shares and making a new DeepMind / OpenAI research division inside of the company. So all along it was a long winded side-step into having…

> OpenAI is a sinking ship as long as the board members go ahead with their new CEO and Sam, Greg are not returning

Far from certain. One, they still control a lot of money and cloud credits. Two, they can credibly threaten to license to a competitor or even open source everything, thereby destroying the unique value of the work.

> without all the regulatory headaches of a formal acquisition

This, too, is far from certain.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#134

Post by nytesky »

lordnacho wrote: post #25
yeck wrote: post #10

> the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever _Big sigh_.

For people who appreciate some vintage British comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpc5_3B5xdk The whole thing is just ridiculous. How can you be senior leadership and not have a clear idea of what you want? And what the staff want?

Knew it had to be Benny Hill before I clicked. Yackty-sax indeed.

Re: OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

#139

Post by hotsauceror »

fny wrote: post #20

At this point, I think it’s absolutely clear no one has any idea what happened. Every speculation, no matter how sophisticated, has been wrong. It’s time to take a breath, step back, and wait until someone from OpenAI says something substantial.

I agree. Although the story is fascinating in the way that a car crash is fascinating, it's clear that it's going to be very difficult to get any kind of objective understanding in real-time.

This breathless real-time speculation may be fun, but now that social media amplifies the tiniest fart such that it has global reach, I feel like it just reinforces the general zeitgeist of "Oh, what the hell NOW? Everything is on fire." It's not like there's anything that we peasants can do to either influence the outcome, or adjust our own lives to accomodate the eventual reality.

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