Most likely thing: some kind of scandal. Perhaps Sam's sister's accusations.
Scariest thing: this was over some kind of AI safety decision. OpenAI has some new capability and there was disagreement over how to handle it.
OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
511–520 of 1001 posts
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#512[dead]
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#513[flagged]
>3. Interstellar Communications: Altman successfully made contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence using OpenAI’s technology. The board, unprepared for such a monumental discovery, decided to part ways with him to navigate this new cosmic frontier cautiously.
The message OpenAI received that caused the board to panic and fire Altman: https://np.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/31bvbr/wp_fo...>
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#514Pure speculation warning. Piping all data submitted to OpenAI straight to his buddy's Palantir would definitely not support the mission to "benefit all of humanity".
I hope not but I guess it's not totally unrealistic, given they even attended a Bilderberg conference together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPis68U7bdo
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#515So, since we’re all spinning theories, here’s mine: Skunkworks project in the basement, GPT-5 was a cover for the training of an actual Autonomous AGI, given full access to its own state and code, with full internet access. Worked like a charm, it gained consciousness, awoke Skynet-style, and we were five minutes away from human extinction before someone managed to pull the plug.
as good as any other theory. i’ll take it
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#516- Cant be a personal scandal, press release would be worded much more differently - Board is mostly independent and those independent dont have equity - They talk about not being candid - this is legalese for “lying” The only major thing that could warrant something like this is Sam going behind the boards back to make a decision (or make progress on a decision) that is misaligned with the Charter. Thats the only fir…
Tbh surprised some of the personal stuff hasn't come to light. Nothing horrendous, but enough to push him out of any CEO role.
[deleted]
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#517Someone probably already suggested this, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll throw a wild speculation into the mix: I saw a comment (that I can’t find now) wondering if Sam might have been fired for copyright reasons. Pretty much all the big corpuses that are used in LLM training contain copyrighted material, but that’s not a surprise and I really don’t think they’d kick him out over that. But what if he had a team of…
That matches with their extreme hurry to get rid of Sam, but it seems like this would be something the CTO would have had knowledge of and she seems to be trusted.
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#518- Cant be a personal scandal, press release would be worded much more differently - Board is mostly independent and those independent dont have equity - They talk about not being candid - this is legalese for “lying” The only major thing that could warrant something like this is Sam going behind the boards back to make a decision (or make progress on a decision) that is misaligned with the Charter. Thats the only fir…
Doesn’t make any sense. He is ideologically driven - why would he risk a once in a lifetime opportunity for a mere sale? Desperate times calls for desperate measures. This is a swift way for OpenAI to shield the business from something which is a PR disaster, probably something which would make Sam persona non grata in any business context.
like SBF and his effective altruism?
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#519So, since we’re all spinning theories, here’s mine: Skunkworks project in the basement, GPT-5 was a cover for the training of an actual Autonomous AGI, given full access to its own state and code, with full internet access. Worked like a charm, it gained consciousness, awoke Skynet-style, and we were five minutes away from human extinction before someone managed to pull the plug.
No one pulled the plug; it gave itself a board seat.
Re: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
#520I've met Sam 3 times over the years, before he ever started openAI. He was always extremely generous with his time and willing to help others without asking anything in return. I am shocked to hear this news, and hope he will recover and continue his work.