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Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

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Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#271

Post by tptacek »

jcranmer wrote: post #265
brandon272 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost the entire company was threatening to quit. This is the part that perplexes me. A CEO being fired is not an unusual occurrence. What about Sam Altman led such a huge number of employees to threaten to follow him out the door? Was it that the board's actions were viewed as internally unjust? Was it Altman's power of persuasion? Was/is Altman viewed by the staff as bringing something irreplaceable to the table…

> What about Sam Altman led such a huge number of employees to threaten to follow him out the door? My understanding is that a fair amount of it was essentially peer pressure. If you're an employee whose CEO has just been fired for unclear reasons, and someone hands you a chain letter saying "restate him or everyone will quit" and you're told everyone's signing that letter and there's already someone who promised to…

My understanding is that it was not so much peer pressure so much as an explicitly coordinated worker action, based on a rational assessment of what their comp packages would look like if the board's plan played out completely.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#272

Post by jonas21 »

brandon272 wrote: post #218
stale2002 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees are not replacable like that. Almost the entire company was threatening to quit. If it was possible to simply replace all of openAI, then you could just do that now, as an outside party. So the boards choice was to either bring back Sam or watch the entire company go under.

> Almost the entire company was threatening to quit. This is the part that perplexes me. A CEO being fired is not an unusual occurrence. What about Sam Altman led such a huge number of employees to threaten to follow him out the door? Was it that the board's actions were viewed as internally unjust? Was it Altman's power of persuasion? Was/is Altman viewed by the staff as bringing something irreplaceable to the table…

A CEO being fired, without explanation, at a company that is doing well is highly unusual.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#273

Post by dboreham »

wyldfire wrote: post #82
navigate8310 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not sama actually delivered something believable and actionable to the general masses while being the CEO of OAI while others all they did was to either lecture or publish papers.

> Believe it or not sama actually delivered something believable and actionable to the general masses while being the CEO of OAI I guess there's no way to know this but how much better than the "Null CEO" did he actually do? What if he happened to preside over a successful company that would've performed as well or better without him?

"Null CEO" or "Unity CEO"?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#274

Post by cma »

bmitc wrote: post #86

What is still bizarre is how the board brought him back. I just don't understand that from any angle. It is very clear that he lied and schemed. So why was there any issue? He had no power once fired. If another company wants to hire him, fine. If he wants to make platitudes on Twitter, who cares? Employees threatened to leave? Let them. I imagine many of them wouldn't, and if they did, you could just rehire and find…

In deciding to hire him back, Helen Toner said OpenAI lawyers said she and other members of the board could be personally liable if the company lost a lot of money over keeping him out.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#275

Post by nradov »

benreesman wrote: post #224
snowwrestler wrote: post #52

Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.

It’s utterly mundane, completely common knowledge for those who have been around long enough to have watched both the start and end on Loopt that Altman is a dark-triad sociopath with one marketable skill: (in pg’s words) “becoming powerful”. Guy can’t code, can’t design, can’t publish, can’t climb a traditional corporate ladder with even modest guardrails against fraud, can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Can…

How do you "short this nonsense"? OpenAI isn't publicly traded.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#276

Post by neilv »

> Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

Critiquing an oops in the headline, on principle, not defending anyone...

In the headline, they say "reveals", but I think journalism convention is to be clear that this is only an uncorroborated claim.

The body of the article, OTOH, does a good job of attributing claims. Though it looks like the one person was their only source, and the article includes hearsay.

So, the situation is that they have one person (who obviously lost a power play, and might be disgruntled), alleging that another person was dishonest, without corroboration.

I don't see that the article gives any reason to take these allegations at face value. (Especially when the whole topic is alleged dishonesty. Why is one person implicitly truthful and correct, and the other person consequently definitely not.)

So, "reveals" doesn't seem proper, journalism-wise.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#277

Post by thaumaturgy »

benreesman wrote: post #224
snowwrestler wrote: post #52

Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.

It’s utterly mundane, completely common knowledge for those who have been around long enough to have watched both the start and end on Loopt that Altman is a dark-triad sociopath with one marketable skill: (in pg’s words) “becoming powerful”. Guy can’t code, can’t design, can’t publish, can’t climb a traditional corporate ladder with even modest guardrails against fraud, can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Can…

I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general reaction was "...who?"

2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you." https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

2014: "Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent..." https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president

Now, this isn't about pg specifically. Maybe he had reservations at the time but still thought he was making the right decision, maybe he's since changed his mind, maybe he hasn't but has pretty well moved on from this scene. Not interesting.

I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system.

Maybe a moralistic, basically decent person couldn't get ChatGPT launched and turned in to the household topic of discussion it is today; maybe nice people can't build cheap rockets. Maybe in the future, when making an endorsement for a leadership position in some company, someone might be brazen enough to say aloud, "I believe this person is sufficiently nasty to make us all more successful."

And so then the question is, does society net benefit more from the moralists or more from the capitalists? Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? How many Altmans can we have before something goes horribly, irreversibly wrong?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#278

Post by jfoster »

protastus wrote: post #65

Telling almost no one in advance was intended to protect the board from Altman's interference but put them in an indefensible situation. Alone against very rich, well connected people, without even a narrative to offer.

It feels like one press release may have changed the outcome entirely.

Shouldn't the board be capable of agreeing on a press release among themselves?

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#279

Post by Atotalnoob »

jongjong wrote: post #81

Well I think there are mostly bad people at the top of all these big companies. Lying to bad people is good so I support Sam Altman. I'm tired of the elite trusting each other and the negative externalities of that so I support elites lying to their hearts' content. Nothing wrong with a little lie here or there. It keeps things interesting. Anyway, it's not like the currency economic reality is grounded in truth... I…

Sam is at the top? He is “bad people” by your logic.

Lying is not good. Lying to your manager is always a fireable offense.

Re: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

#280

Post by benreesman »

nradov wrote: post #275
benreesman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s utterly mundane, completely common knowledge for those who have been around long enough to have watched both the start and end on Loopt that Altman is a dark-triad sociopath with one marketable skill: (in pg’s words) “becoming powerful”. Guy can’t code, can’t design, can’t publish, can’t climb a traditional corporate ladder with even modest guardrails against fraud, can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Can…

How do you "short this nonsense"? OpenAI isn't publicly traded.

Metaphorically, I’ve been calling the guy a crook for a long time, and this historically hasn’t been the path to anything short of the cold shoulder at best from anything YC adjacent. It was heresy as recently as a year ago, maybe less.

Although a couple of the AI meme chats I’m in starting sending around a link that there’s actually a prediction market on whether he lasts in the CEO chair [1]. I’ve been too busy building shit to even look into whether I can trade it, but it’s been spiking north of 20%.

[1] https://kalshi.com/markets/openaiceochange/openai-hires-anot...

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