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I can’t imagine an organization where this wouldn’t have come up on some roadmap or prioritization meeting, etc. How could leadership not know what the org is working on?! They’re not that big.
Board is not exactly leadership. They meet infrequently and get updates directly from management, they don't go around asking employees what they're working on
> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…
>The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. When mangement lays off 10,000 employees, the investors congratulate management. Thats why Sam & Greg wasn't all they complained about. They lead with the fact that it was shocking and irresponsible. Ron seems to think that the board is not making the right move for OpenAI.
I can see where the misalignment (ha!) may be: someone deep in the VC world would reflexively think that "value destruction" of any kind is irresponsible. However, a non-profit board has a primary responsibility to its charter and mission - which doesn't compute for those with fiduciary-duty-instincts. Without getting into the specifics of this case: a non-profit's board is expected to make decisions that lose money (or not generate as much of it) if the decisions lead to results more consistent with the mission.
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They don’t have investors, it’s a non profit. The “won’t anyone think of the needs of the elite wealthy investor class” that has run through the 11 threads on this topic is pretty baffling I have to admit.
They do have investors in the for-profit subsidiary, including Microsoft and the employees. Check out the diagram in the linked article.
> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." With all sympathy and empathy for Sam and Greg, whose dreams took a blow, I want to say something about investors [edit: not Ron Conway…
>The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. When mangement lays off 10,000 employees, the investors congratulate management. Thats why Sam & Greg wasn't all they complained about. They lead with the fact that it was shocking and irresponsible. Ron seems to think that the board is not making the right move for OpenAI.
It’s possible Sam betrayed their trust and actually committed a fireable offense. But even if the rest of the board was right, the way they’ve handled it so far doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
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Isn’t that a bit like stealing from the for-profit investors? I’m not the first one to shed a tear for the super wealthy, but is that even legal? Can a company you invested in just say they don’t like profit any more?
Unless you have something in writing or you have enough ownership to say no, I don’t see how you’d be able to stop it.
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Isn’t that a bit like stealing from the for-profit investors? I’m not the first one to shed a tear for the super wealthy, but is that even legal? Can a company you invested in just say they don’t like profit any more?
They knew it when they donated to a non-profit. In fact trying to extract profit from a 501c could be the core of the problem.
OpenAI shares ownership of that for-profit company with Microsoft and Early investors like Sam, Greg, Musk, Theil, Bezos, the employees of that company.
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I worked at a startup where the first CEO, along with the VP of Sales and their entire department, was ousted by the board on a Tuesday. I think it's likely that we're going to find out Sam and others are just talented tech evangelists/hucksters and that justifiably worries a lot of people currently operating in the tech community.
How did the company end up fairing?
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Could be many things, like Sam not informing them of the GPTs store launch, or saying he won't launch and then launching. It sucks for openAi, but there's too many hungry hungry competitors salivating at replacing OpenAI so I don't think this will have big king term consequences in the field. I'm curious what sorts of oversight and recourse all the investors (or are they donors?) Have. I imagine there's a lot of peop…
They don’t have investors, it’s a non profit. The “won’t anyone think of the needs of the elite wealthy investor class” that has run through the 11 threads on this topic is pretty baffling I have to admit.
Only time will tell, but if this was indeed "just" a coup then it's somewhat likely we're witnessing a variant of the Steve Jobs story all over again. Sam is clearly one of the top product engineering leaders in the world -- few companies could ever match OpenAI's incredible product delivery over the last few years -- and he's also one of the most connected engineering leaders in the industry. He could likely have $5…
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> He could likely have $500M-$10B+ lined up by next week to start up a new company and poach much of the talent from OpenAI. Following the Jobs analogy, this could be another NeXT failure story. Teams are made by their players much more than by their leaders; competent leaders are a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition of success, and the likelihood that whatever he starts next reproduces the team conditio…
Well, I would debate that NeXT OS was a failure as a product, keeping in mind that it is a foundation of all current in macOS and even iOS versions that we have not. But I agree that it was a failure from a business perspective. Although I see it more like Windows phone — too late to market — failure, rather than an out of talented employers failure.