Interesting to see & get encoded as andamp; in the title lol.
It’s a pity it wasn’t ampersandampsemicolon. ;)
OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
51–60 of 324 posts
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#52I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, but there's really no way to put out a release like this without a "history is written by the victors" vibe coming across.
(this was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39647488 but we've merged that thread hither)
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#53The conclusion just raises further questions on why the coup happened, other than a "consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust between the prior Board and Mr. Altman".
The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him, which scared the shit out of Microsoft. The prior and new Boards both cannot make the allegation that Altman tried to commit a corporate coup, albeit for different reasons[0], so we're never going to get official confirmation of anything. My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind u…
Nah, I think Microsoft will end up buying some form of assets off of OpenAI (it's a non-profit with odd corporate governance that Altman doesn't own stock in, so I don't think they'll buy the whole company) for an extremely exorbitant price. Altman will put in some ambitious but clueless Microsoft manager to run it and move on to his next thing. Then it'll turn out that Gen AI is dramatically overhyped and the real-world utility is far less than expected. Shit'll get fucked up, people will forget about it, and Microsoft will write down their investment by a large margin - kinda like Hotmail, and Skype, and Nokia, and Minecraft, and what's starting to happen to GitHub and LinkedIn. And so it goes, a classic Silicon Valley love story.
But I have enough faith in Altman's ability to fuck shit up without facing personal consequences that I'm pretty sure he'll navigate some sort of sale before everything goes south.
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him, which scared the shit out of Microsoft. The prior and new Boards both cannot make the allegation that Altman tried to commit a corporate coup, albeit for different reasons[0], so we're never going to get official confirmation of anything. My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind u…
> My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired Who has this happened to except for Travis kalanick at Uber?
for posterity:
- Steve Jobs - Sandy Lerner - Noah Glass - Mark Pinkus - Kyle Vogt
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#55He really seems to be a real-life Frank Underwood.
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him, which scared the shit out of Microsoft. The prior and new Boards both cannot make the allegation that Altman tried to commit a corporate coup, albeit for different reasons[0], so we're never going to get official confirmation of anything. My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind u…
> The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him Who elects the board in a non-profit? Who did sama go to to get them removed?
The story was that Altman lied to specific board members to have other removed.
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is that Altman tried to get the Board removed, the Board found out and snap fired him, which scared the shit out of Microsoft. The prior and new Boards both cannot make the allegation that Altman tried to commit a corporate coup, albeit for different reasons[0], so we're never going to get official confirmation of anything. My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind u…
> My prediction is that Altman will, unmoored from any sort of accountability, wind up fucking shit up like every god damned SV founder, get fired Who has this happened to except for Travis kalanick at Uber?
Parker Conrad at Zenefits, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, Andrew Mason at Groupon (but not before cashing his shares out at IPO!), Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack at Cisco, Steve Jobs at Apple.
I have a lot of confidence in Altman's ability to extricate himself before getting fired, but this is a very common Silicon Valley story.
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#58Isn't it generally kind of weird for the CEO to also sit on the board?
It is actually very common, despite the conflicts of interest. eg., Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mary Barra, Jamie Dimon, Mark Zuckerberg
I wouldn't mention Zuckerberg in this list, because he is in a completely different category!
Zuckerberg only owns about 13% of Meta's stock, but he holds over 50% of total voting power, meaning he essentially has a complete veto over other shareholders. I don't think any other big US corporation is run like this.
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#59I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, but there's really no way to put out a release like this without a "history is written by the victors" vibe coming across.
He pretty clearly won. There's not much to it. A huge chunk of the company went into open revolt and he got a competing offer that threatened to recruit all of them. There's nothing really underhanded or sneaky about it: the board drastically overplayed their hand, and all Altman and Brockman had to do was say "I call".
To use the parlance of this community of people: people's priors here all seem to be that something shady was going on with Altman, but the strat the board took here was so obviously doomed that they should probably be looking for hypos about the board being shady.
Re: OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
#60> reviewed more than 30,000 documents As somebody completely ignorant of the inner workings of the legal trade, can somebody explain what this means? Does this mean a group of informed humans reviewed 30k docs? Does this mean 30k docs were grep’d for keywords? Somewhere in between?
It means it cost OpenAI a lot in legal fees to keep Altman in power. With all of this boardroom drama, no wonder Microsoft is starting to diversify its AI investments.
it's likely it's diversifying hardware because of Nvidia.
these things must be worse than crypto