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> As staff threatened to quit and speculation swirled that Microsoft may poach Altman's team from OpenAI and hire him directly, the company's board brought back Altman as CEO less than a week later. To me, this is an important part of the story too, which Toner doesn't go into. I wonder why?
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.
I tried to Google for a concrete, high quality source, but I cannot find anything. The best I could find:
> Altman was allegedly fired from his role as the President of YCombinator for putting his own interests first.
Is there a YC press release or an insider's account of his termination? Else, this is just a rumor.
To be clear: I don't write this post as a shill for Altman, nor YC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds more to me like they were naive when it came to the inevitable PR war that would follow. They should have come out guns blazing with all the dirt they had. Instead they said very little and it just appeared nonsensical.
Except that I don't think it was for PR reasons that almost the entire company sided with Altman. I'd say it has much more to do with the profitability and the goal of continuing to work on interesting problems with the best resources.
Helen toner talks about this, and essentially the employees thought it was bring sama back or the company dissolves and they lose their jobs.
This was right near a tender offer, so employees had real money on the line in the short term.
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…
You had the answer there before you dismissed it -- the board agreed to bring Sam Altman back before resigning because of massive pressure campaign that involved 90%+ of employees threatening to resign, and Microsoft (which has OpenAI's IP rights) offering to hire them all immediately. This included the company's key leadership. The organization was unraveling overnight. This was far past the tipping point of "a few…
When you have irreconcilable differences with the board you could theoretically jump ship and start a rival company. Usually, in practice, that’s impossibly hard and yet Microsoft announced that they intended to do exactly that with funding and stock matching. For some reason that was turned down in favor of staging the equivalent of an in-country coup.
If you get caught breaking the law on vacation abroad and your response to being arrested is to take control of the country in retaliation then you are a very powerful, persuasive, or threatening person indeed.
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The board should have been transparent about the dishonesty, especially around financial stakes, and I suspect the OpenAI employees and MSFT would have reacted differently.
The dishonesty regarding the ChatGPT release sounds like the best decision that Sam or anyone could have made in the history of the company. The ChatGPT release is what made the AI movement go mainstream. It is why OpenAI is worth ~80 billion dollars. By Gods am I glad that the board wasn't able to stop ChatGPT from being released.
I seem to recall that the release in late November 2022 was only intended to be a way for volunteers on the Internet to experiment with it and provide feedback.
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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.
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.
You wrote "fired". I tried to Google for a concrete, high quality source, but I cannot find anything. The best I could find: > Altman was allegedly fired from his role as the President of YCombinator for putting his own interests first. Note the term "allegedly". Is there a YC press release or an insider's account of his termination? Else, this is just a rumor. To be clear: I don't write this post as a shill for Altm…
There are other sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you tell them so, in a meeting with all board members present, and argue your position in good faith. You don't lie to them. You certainly don't scheme behind the back of a board member you don't agree with to try to get them fired.
And if you realize there's no way to convince them that they are wrong? But it's a matter of survival of the entire universe?
The ad-extremo argument is a fallacy that doesn't ad anything to the discussion. It's simply a way of pushing a certain view, because you can always find some hypothetical that might justify an action.
Fortunately we are dealing with a concrete situation so we don't need to talk in hypotheticals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also a similar reason that Sam was fired from Y Combinator. None of this should be new, it's just when there's money on the line people's memories get as fuzzy as their morals.
And let's not forget the OpenAI investors include YC itself as well as Paul Graham's wife, Jessica Livingston. Sam may have been fired from YC but it does look like they believed in him.
Being character like that, unfortunately, leads often success in life. You are not limited by ethics or morals like most people do. You need to be convincing that you care, while in reality you are only objective about financial success.
And if you are into money, you will invest these kinds of people.
Paul Graham has said that one of the things he likes best about Sam Altman is that he figures out ways to "hack" things, and specified that he didn't mean programming, but rather systems, institutions, people, etc. As for me, I'd prefer to see Paul Graham running Open AI.
That is called as social engineering. Is that a good thing, to be able to manipulate people like that?