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Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

arstechnica.com

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Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#541

Post by cthalupa »

jacquesm wrote: post #537
eganist wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then I haven't seen it Unless I'm missing something, this stands to reason if you don't work there. Kinda like how none of us are privy to anything else going on inside the company. We're all speculating in the end, and it's healthy to have an open mind about what's going on without preconceived notions.

Have a look at the latest developments and tell me that again...

Impossible to know what is going on, really. The Forbes article makes it sound like there is significant investment pressure in trying to get Altman back on board, and they likely have access to the board. It could very well be that the board themselves have no desire to bring Altman back, but these conversations ended up being the origin for the story that they did.

It's also possible that the structure of the non-profit/for-profit/operating agreement/etc. just isn't strong enough to achieve the intent and the investors have the strangehold in reality.

If I was invested in the mission statement of OpenAI I don't think I would view the reinstatement of Altman as a good thing, though. Thankfully my interest in all of this is purely entertainment.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#542

Post by strikelaserclaw »

goldinfra wrote: post #369
peter422 wrote: post #59

I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…

It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders. Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI. Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He d…

Whoever had to do with ChatGPT most is the reason OpenAI is where it is today.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#543

Post by vikramkr »

Michelangelo11 wrote: post #374
danenania wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A difference in this case is how capital intensive AI research is at the level OpenAI is operating. Someone who can keep the capital rolling in (whether through revenue, investors, or partners) and get access to GPUs and proprietary datasets is essential. Carmack could make graphics advances on his own with just a computer and his brain. Ilya needs a lot more for OpenAI to keep advancing. His giant brain isn’t enough…

That's a really, really good point. Maybe OpenAI, at this level of success, can keep the money coming in though.

I'm pretty sure the people that kicked out altman don't consider this success and don't want the money

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#544

Post by jacquesm »

cthalupa wrote: post #541
jacquesm wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at the latest developments and tell me that again...

Impossible to know what is going on, really. The Forbes article makes it sound like there is significant investment pressure in trying to get Altman back on board, and they likely have access to the board. It could very well be that the board themselves have no desire to bring Altman back, but these conversations ended up being the origin for the story that they did. It's also possible that the structure of the non-p…

Provided a good enough reason there were many ways in which the board could have fired Altman without making waves. They utterly f'd that up, and even if their original reasons were good the way they went about it made those reasons moot. They may have to re-instate Altman for optical reasons alone at this point and it would still be a net win. What an incredible shit show.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#545

Post by anonymouskimmer »

no_wizard wrote: post #463
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." 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…

Corporate legal entities should have a mandatory vote of no confidence clause that gives employees the ability to unseat executives if they have a supermajority of votes. That would make things more equitable perhaps. It’d at least be interesting

This is called employee ownership. And yes, it would be great.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#546

Post by bertil »

wolverine876 wrote: post #46

> Angel investor Ron Conway wrote, "What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." 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…

I read this as, and both Conway and Y Combinator are famous for their defense of founders.

He might be emotional and defend his friends that’s not in challenge, he likes the guys— and he might be more cynical when it comes to firing 10,000 engineers —that’s less what I’ve heard about him personally, but maybe— however, in this case, he’s explicitly defending not an employee victim of the almighty board, but the people who created the entity, who later entrusted the board with some responsibility to keep the entity faithful to its mission.

Some might think Sam deserves that title less than Greg… not sure I can vouch for either. But Conway is trying to say that all entities (and their governance) owe their founders a debt of consideration, of care. That’s filial piety more than anything contractual. That isn’t the same as the social obligation that an employer might have.

The cult for founders, “0 to 1” and all that might be overblown in San Francisco, but there’s still a legitimate sense that the people who started all this should only be kicked out if they did something outrageous. Take Woz: he’s not working, or useful, or even that respectful of Apple’s decisions nowadays. But he still gets “an employee discount” (which is admittedly more a gimmick). That deference is closer to what Conway seems to flag than the (indeed) fairly violent treatment of a lot of employees during the staff reduction of the last year.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#547

Post by kmeisthax »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #178
fourside wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors are not gonna like when the business guy who was pushing for productizing, profitability and growth get ousted. We don’t know all the details about what exactly caused the board to fire Sam. The part about lying to the board is notable. It’s possible Sam betrayed their trust and actually committed a fireable offense. But even if the rest of the board was right, the way they’ve handled it so far doesn’t insp…

Again, they didn't state that he lied. They stated that he wasn't candid. A lot of people here have been reading specifics into a generalized term. It is even possible to not be candid without even using lies of omission. For a CEO this could be as simple as just moving fast and not taking the time to report on major initiatives to the board.

How much you wanna bet that the board wasn't told about OpenAI's Dev Days presentation until after it happened?

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#548

Post by bertil »

kelipso wrote: post #289
swatcoder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory. But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's…

I'm guessing Altman had a bunch of experienced ML researchers writing CRUD apps and LLM toys instead of actual AI research and they weren't too happy. Personally I would be pissed as a researcher if the company took a turn and started in on improved marketing blurbs LLMs or whatever.

I would be shocked if that was the case.

There are plenty of people I know from FAANG, now at OpenAI, where they do product design, operation, and DevOps at scale —all complicated, valuable, and worthwhile endeavors in their own right— that don’t need to get in the way of research. They are just the kind of talent that can operate a business with 90% margins to pay for that research.

Could there be requests or internal projects that are less exciting for some people? Sure, but it’s not very hard to set up Chinese Walls, priorities, etc. Every one of those people had to deal with similar concerns at previous companies and would know how to apply the right principles.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#549

Post by anonymouskimmer »

T-A wrote: post #287
vanrysss wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the first AGI is going to be used to kill other AGIs in the cradle ?

The scenario usually bandied about is AGI self-improving at an accelerating rate: once you cross the threshold to self-improvement, you quickly get superintelligence with God-like powers beyond human comprehension (a.k.a. the Singularity) as AGI v1 creates a faster AGI v2 which creates a faster AGI v3 etc. Any AI researchers still plodding along at mere human speed are then doomed: they won't be able to catch up even…

It seems to me that non-General AI would typically outcompete AGI, all else held equal. In such a scenario even a first-past-the-post AGI would have trouble becoming an overload if non-Generalized AIs were marshaled against it.

Re: Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

#550

Post by polishdude20 »

crazygringo wrote: post #418
torstenvl wrote: post #272

It isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like describing voting out a politician as a coup. Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman. If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own i…

No, you're confusing business with politics. You're right that a literal coup d'état is the forced takeover of a state with the backing of its own military. But in the business and wider world, a coup (without the d'état part) is, by analogy, any takeover of power that is secretly planned and executed as a surprise. (We can similarly talk about a company "declaring war" which means to compete by mobilizing all resour…

I think of it as more of a mutiny.
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