OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

This isn't a new policy and has been the case for at least a year.

1) That LLMs cannot generalize outside of _patterns_ they pick up during training? (as shown by a recent paper from Google, and as many of us know from our work testing LLMs and working around their short comings)

2) That every time you train a new model, with potentially very high expense, you have no idea what you're going to get. Generally better but also potentially bigger reliability challenges. LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and not stable in any kind of use case besides chat apps, especially when they keep tweaking and updating the model and deprecating old ones. No one can build on shifting sands.

3) The GPT4-Turbo regressed on code generation performance and the 128K window is only usable up to 16K (but for me in use cases more compicated than Q&A over docs, I found that 1.2K is max usable window. That's 100X than he advertised.

4) That he priced GPT4-V at a massive loss to crush the competition

5) That he rushed the GPT Builder product, causing massive drain on resources dedicated to existing customers, and having to halt sign ups, even with a $29B investment riding on the grwoth of the user base. Any one of the above or none of the above.

No one knows... but the board.. .and Microsoft who has 49% control of the board.

Who knows, though -- I'm sure we'll find out more in the next few weeks, but it's fun to guess.

Ilya and Mira probably didn’t know and might have discovered it recently and raised it with the board, hence the promotion. Note: both have Eastern-European ties, so if the application is in Ukraine, they could have strong feelings about it. Greg co-signed or knew and didn’t tell.

Alternatively, Elon did, through Starlink and wanted to get revenge.

Alternatively, it could be a case where there was an option, Sam refused on ethical grounds without telling the board; they thought what is happening in Ukraine (or Gaza) justified the intervention. They confronted him and he lied.