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Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

arstechnica.com

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Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#351

Post by sheepscreek »

threeseed wrote: post #216
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> 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 There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

In other words, it’s unheard of for a $90B company with weekly active users in excess of 100 million. A coup leaves a very bad taste for everyone - employees, users, investors and the general public.

When a company experiences this level of growth over a decade, the board evolves with the company. You end up with board members that have all been there, done that, and can truly guide the management on the challenges they face.

OpenAI's hypergrowth meant it didn’t have the time to do that. So the board that was great for a $100 million, even a billion $ startup falls completely flat for 90x the size.

I don’t have faith in their ability to know what is best for OpenAI. These are uncharted waters for anyone though. This is an exceptionally big non-profit with the power to change the world - quite literally.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#352

Post by speedylight »

The real issue is that OpenAI is both a for profit and a non profit organization. This structure creates a very significant conflict of interest where maintaining balance between both of them is very tricky business. The non-profit board shouldn’t have been in charge of the for-profit aspect of the company.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#353

Post by selimthegrim »

Michelangelo11 wrote: post #240

I've seen some discussion on HN in which people claimed that even really important engineers aren't -too- important and that Ilya is actually replaceable, using Apple's growth after Woz' departure as an example. But I don't think that's the best situation to compare this to. I think a much better one is John Carmack firing Romero from id Software after the release of Quake. Some background: During a period of about 1…

I think the team that became Looking Glass Studios did a lot of the same things in parallel so it’s a little unfair to say no one else had figured it out

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#354

Post by trhway »

wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> 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…

>it does not do right by Sam

you get that you sow. The way Altman publicly treated Cruise co-founder establishes like a new standard of "not do right by". After that I'd have expected nobody would let Altman near any management position, yet SV is a land of huge money sloshing care-free, and so I was just wondering who is going to be left holding the bag.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#355

Post by bmitc »

dagmx wrote: post #88
peter422 wrote: post #59

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…

It often comes down to auteur theory. Unless someone is truly well versed in the production of something, they latch on to the most public facing aspect of that production and the person at the highest level of authority (to them, even though directors and CEOs often have to answer to others as well) That’s not to say they don’t have an outsized individual effect, but it’s rare their greatness is solo

When you say director, do you mean film director or a director in a company? Film directors are insane with the amount of technical, artistic, and people knowledge that they need to have and be able to utilize. The amount of stuff that a film director needs to manage, all on the ground, is insane. I wouldn't say that for CEOs, not by a long shot. CEOs mainly sit in meetings with people reporting things to them and then the CEO providing very high-level guidance. That is very different from a director's role.

I have often thought that we don't have enough information on how film directors operate, as I feel it could yield a lot of insight. There's probably a reason why many film directors don't hit their stride until late 30s and 40s, presumably because it takes those one or two decades to build the appropriate experience and knowledge.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#356

Post by sseagull »

rafaelero wrote: post #338
eightysixfour wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - I think this is the schism. Sam is clearly a product person, these are AI people. Dev day didn’t meaningfully move the needle on AI, but for people building products it sure did.

The fact that this is a schism is already weird. Why do they care how the company transforms the technology coming from the lab into products? It's what pay their salaries in the end of the day and, as long as they can keep doing their research work, it doesn't affect them. Being resented about a thing like this to the point of calling it a "absolute embarrassment" when it clearly wasn't is childish to say the least.

> as long as they can keep doing their research work, it doesn't affect them

That’s a big question. Once stuff starts going “commercial” incentives can change fairly quickly.

If you want to do interesting research, but the money wants you to figure out how AI can help sell shoes, well guess which is going to win in the end - the one signing your paycheck.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#357

Post by HAL3000 »

threeseed wrote: post #216
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> 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 There is why you do something. And there is how you do something. OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance. They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two cam…

As someone who has orchestrated two coups in different organizations, where the leadership did not align with the organization's interests and missions, I can assure you that the final stage of such a coup is not something that can be executed after just an hour of preparation or thought. It requires months of planning. The trigger is only pulled when there is sufficient evidence or justification for such action. Building support for a coup takes time and must be justified by a pattern of behavior from your opponent, not just a single action. Extensive backchanneling and one-on-one discussions are necessary to gauge where others stand, share your perspective, demonstrate how the person in question is acting against the organization's interests, and seek their support. Initially, this support is not for the coup, but rather to ensure alignment of views. Then, when something significant happens, everything is already in place. You've been waiting for that one decisive action to pull the trigger, which is why everything then unfolds so quickly.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#358

Post by Barrin92 »

torstenvl wrote: post #272

It isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like describing voting out a politician as a coup. Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman. If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own i…

Yup. The only correct governance metaphor here is the opposite. It's a defense of openAI's constitution. The company, effectively like Mozilla, was deliberately structured as a non-profit in which the for-profit arm exists to raise capital to pursue the mission of the former. Worth paying attention to what they have to say on their structure:

https://openai.com/our-structure

especially this part:

https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#359

Post by svnt »

sheepscreek wrote: post #310

Here’s another theory. > the ousting was likely orchestrated by Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever over concerns about the safety and speed of OpenAI's tech deployment. Who was first to launch a marketplace for GPTs/agents? It wasn’t OpenAI, but Poe by Quora. Guess who sits on the OpenAI non-profit board? Quora CEO. So at least we know where his interest lies with respect to the vote against Altman and Greg.

This is a really good point. If a non profit whose board you sit on releases a product that competes with a product from the corporation you manage, how do you manage that conflict of interest? Seems he should have stepped down.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#360

Post by naveen99 »

speedylight wrote: post #352

The real issue is that OpenAI is both a for profit and a non profit organization. This structure creates a very significant conflict of interest where maintaining balance between both of them is very tricky business. The non-profit board shouldn’t have been in charge of the for-profit aspect of the company.

Balance is irrelevant. It’s an accounting mechanism for irs rules.
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