it takes talent to destroy 100 billion USD in less than a week. props to the worst combination of individuals ever to be thought as competent enough to be given real responsibility.
OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#42Can literally anyone provide even a 0.001% plausible sounding reason as to why this all was started in the first place? Nothing makes sense.
Two camps: one camp was into moving fast, cranking out products and profit. The other group watching from the side, claiming to be worried about the future of humanity. The group watching though had the power to fire the leaders of the other group, and they did.
It didn’t have to be any deeper philosophical disagreements or anything, just plain old rivalry and power grab. Of course it wouldn’t be written down as it’s just childish, but that’s how people behave, especially when newly found fame and power gets to their heads.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#43The fact it states that this was after firing Altman makes it seem like the phone call to Dario Amodei was just the board flailing "hey, do you want to come back to openai? no? or maybe you could just merge your company with ours? you still there?"
Apparently they not only asked Dario to become CEO, they also asked Nat Friedman (Former GitHub CEO) and Alex Wang (Scale AI CEO). Flailing indeed.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#44Can literally anyone provide even a 0.001% plausible sounding reason as to why this all was started in the first place? Nothing makes sense.
The most plausible sounding reason I’ve heard is that Open AI was originally a charity. People donated money to a cause. Most who donated got nothing in return. Those who donated a lot got board seats.
Now, the the employees of the for-profit arm of the organization are all trying to get rich while those who donated the original money get nothing. But… they still have their board seats, and they’re weaponizing them.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like sabotage. Adam, the quora guy runs a chatbot AI company as well and is on the board.
If they’d wanted to sabotage OpenAI, they could have declared that building GPT5 is unsafe, pulled the plug and erased all the backups, no?
They could have. But they wanted to have it too.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#46The OpenAI board seems to have fatally miscalculated the loyalty to Sam A. And in realizing their error is scrambling to undo their miscalculation. The sad thing is probably was for the right reasons (AI safety over profits), and will result in the precise opposite (unbridled capitalism in AI).
For their sake it had better be the AI safety thing because if it wasn't they are in a lot of trouble even if that hasn't registered yet. Board member is not a job without risks.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
First time having the curtain pulled back?
No, it's just plainly obvious that none of these people should never be allowed around a budget much less corporate governance.
It also looks as if they never even bothered to look up the rule book. They are probably used to just doing as they please and getting away with it. What surprises me is the number of HN'ers that seem to believe that a board can act with impunity and complete isolation from the fall out of their decisions. That's not the world that I live in and I've interacted with various boards over a long career and have never seen anything close to the level of incompetence on display here.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just blows me away. The unusual board activity is what drew me to this. What I'm also waiting for is an explanation for why/how they canned Brockman as their Chairman of the Board. With him so far I've not even heard of a hint of it being for cause, which it isn't exactly normal to remove a board member without cause...them offering to let him remain as regular employee actually made what they did all the more eye…
It’s hard to tell from the outside what happened there. And if the article used a reliable source.
https://twitter.com/willknight/status/1726793735143621058 This guy claims he has "reason" to believe it's a "complete fabrication."
No idea whether to trust this guy or his source more than the original article though.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#49One thing pretty clear to me now, if even only half of these rumored reactions from the current OAI board are correct, then they have nobody or have consulted with nobody with legal and business experience regarding their actions. Like come on, a merger talk at this point is so stupid. Nobody would want to touch something this hot and the attempt alone just made OAI situation worse. What are they thinking?
This just reinforces something I've been thinking for a while. When you look people at the top in medium to large companies, you'd think that they are extremely qualified and got there through merit alone. Although this is certainly true in many cases, it's probably not the case most of the time - a combination of luck and contacts often boost people to places they have no business being.
In general, people in high places can just surf the waves and go with the flow in collecting cash and not really make that much difference, relying on the other people closer to the work (engineers and frontline managers). But when making the right decisions can decide the fate of a company, you then see who's supposed to be there and who isn't.
Re: OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger
#50Makes some sense. It would be funny if they agreed to the merger and then mass resigned to join Microsoft also. And then repeat with quora merger and another mass exodus. Or they could just outsource keeping the lights on to a consulting company like ibm or Accenture or oracle. Unfortunately there won’t be a happy ending. Just like there was no happy ending with Java.
Also if they are exploring mergers, they might consider merging with a university like stanford or cern or a bigger non profit.