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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…
What are the odds Sam can work the phones this weekend and have $10B lined up by Monday for a new AI company which will take all of the good talent from OpenAI?
I definitely believe he can raise a lot of money quickly, but I'm not sure where he'll get the talent, at least the core modeling talent. That's Ilya's lane, and I get the sense that group are the true believers in the original non-profit mission. But I suspect a lot of the hires from the last year or so, even in the eng side, are all about the money and would follow sama anywhere given what this signals for OpenAIs…
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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
Here's the thing. I've always been kind of cold on OpeanAI claiming to be "Open" when it was clearly a for profit thing and I was concerned about the increasing move to the commercialization of AI that Sam was taking. But I am much more concerned to be honest those who feel they need to control the development of AI to ensure it is "aligns with their principles", after all principles can change, and to quote Lewis "O…
If the board was really serious about doing good over making profit (if this is indeed what the whole thing is about) they'd open source gpt-4/5 with a gpl-style license
Theirs is a technocratic sense of open, where select credentialed experts collaborate on a rational good without a concentration of control by specific capitalists or nations.
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 in particular, whom I don't know; see the comment below about 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. And if anyone objects to the impact on the employees, they justify it with the magic words that somehow cancel all morality and humanity - 'it's business' - and call you an unserious bleeding heart. But when the investor's buddy CEO is fired ...
I think that's wrong and that they should also take into account the impact on employees. But CEOs are commanders on the business battlefield; they have great power over the company's outcomes, which are the reasons for the layoffs/firings. Lower-ranking employees are much closer to civilians, and also often can't afford to lose the job.
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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.
Here's what I don't understand. There clearly were tensions between the for and not-for growth factions, but the Dev Day is being cited as a 'last straw'. It was a product launch. Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months. They should have at the very least been privy to the plan, if not outright sanctioned it. Seems like before launch would have been the time…
Man this still seems crazy to me. The idea that this tension between commercial/non-commercial aspirations got so bad they felt the nuclear option of a surprise firing of Altman was the only move available doesn't seem plausible to me. I believe this decision was ego and vanity driven with this post-hoc rationalization that it was because of the mission of "benefiting humanity."