Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

This is kind of like the leadership of the executive branch switching parties. You're not going to say "why would the staff immediately quit?" Especially since this is corporate America, and sama can have another "country" next week.

If Ilya & co. want the staff to side with them, they have to give a reason first. It doesn't necessarily have to be convincing, but not giving a reason at all will never be convincing.

Better run for the lifeboat before the ship hits the iceberg.

It's "such a big deal" because he has been leading the company, and apparently some people really like how and they really don't like how it ended.

Why would it require any other explanation? Are you asking what leaders do and why an employee would care about what they do...?

"Dozens" sounds like about right amount for a large org.

In the field of AI, right now, "slowing down" is like deciding to stop the car and walk the track by foot in the middle of a Formula 1 race. It's like going backwards.

Unless things change from the current status quo, OpenAI will be irrelevant in less than 2 years. And of course many will quit such a company and go work somewhere where the CEO wants to innovate, not slow down.

I would think to myself, what if management ever had a small disagreement with me?

I quit a line cook job once in a very similar circumstance scaled down to a small restaurant. The inexperienced owners were making chaotic decisions and fired the chef and I quit the same day, not out of any kind of particular loyalty or anger, I just declined the chaos of the situation. Quitting before the chaos hurt me or my reputation by getting mixed up in it… to move on to other things.

The world is filled with Sam Altmans, but surely not enough Ilya Sutskevers.

>The reason I was a founding donor to OpenAI in 2015 was not because I was interested in AI, but because I believed in Sam. So I hope the board can get its act together and bring Sam and Greg back.

I guess other people joined for similar reasons.

As regards the 'strange and disturbing' support, personally I thought OpenAI was doing cool stuff and it was a shame to break it because of internal politics.

This guy is a villain.

As for Altman... I don't understand what's insignificant about raising money and resources from outside groups? Even if he wasn't working directly on the product itself, that role is still valuable in that it means he knows the amounts of resources that kind of project will require while also commanding some amount of familiarity with how to allocate them effectively. And on top of that he seems understand how to monetize the existent product a lot better than the Ilya who mostly came out of this looking like a giant hazard for anyone who isn't wearing rose tinted sci-fi goggles.

Bear in mind that the cause of an equity market crash and its trigger are two different things.

The 2000 crash in Tech was caused by market speculation in enthusiastic dot-com companies with poor management YES, but the trigger was simply the DOJ finally making Bill throw a chair (they had enough of being humiliated by him for decades as they struggled with old mainframe tech and limited staffing).

If the dot-com crash trigger had not arrived for another 12-18 months, I’m sure the whole mess could have been swept under the rug by traders during the Black Swan event and the recovery of the healthy companies would have been 5-6 months, not 5-6 years (or 20 years in MSFT’s case).

- The elite ML/AI researchers and engineers.

- The elite SV/tech venture capitalists.

These types come with their own followings - and I'm not saying that these two never intersect, but on one side you get a lot of brilliant researchers that truly are in it for the mission. They want to work there, because that's where ground zero is - both from the theoretical and applied point of view.

It's the ML/AI equivalent of working at CERN - you could pay the researchers nothing, or everything, and many wouldn't care - as long as they get to work on the things they are passionate about, AND they get to work with some of the most talented and innovative colleagues in the world. For these, it is likely more important to have top ML/AI heads in the organization, than a commercially-oriented CEO like Sam.

On the other side, you have the folks that are mostly chasing prestige and money. They see OpenAI as some sort of springboard into the elite world of top ML, where they'll spend a couple of years building cred, before launching startups, becoming VP/MD/etc. at big companies, etc. - all while making good money.

For the latter group, losing commercial momentum could indeed affect their will to work there. Do you sit tight in the boat, or do you go all-in on the next big player - if OpenAI crumbles the next year?

With that said, leadership conflicts and uncertainty is never good - whatever camp you're in.

It is Sam Altman. He will have one in a week.

> It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting out their turn for big bucks and fame.

I would imagine most employees at any organization are not really there because of corporate values, but their own interests.

> What does Altman bring to the table besides raising money from foreign governments and states, apparently?

And one of the world's largest tech corporations. If you are interested in the money side, that isn't something to take lightly.

So I would bet it is just following the money, or at least the expected money.

The new board also wants to slow development. That isn't very exciting either.

Whether or not he works at the company is symbolic and indicative of who is in charge: the people who want to slow AI progress, or the people who want to speed it up.

Of course, some employees may agree with the doom/safety board ideology, and will no doubt stay. But I highly doubt everyone will, especially the researchers who were working on new, powerful models — many of them view this as their life's work. Sam offers them the ability to continue.

If you think this is about "the big bucks" or "fame," I think you don't understand the people on the other side of this argument at all.

Pure f***g Greed. He is basically a front-man for a bunch of VCs/Angels/Influential Business Folks/Shady Investors/etc. who were betting on making big bucks through him.

Unfortunately, Ilya and his philosophical/ethical/moral stance has gotten in their way and hence they have let loose their dogs in the media to play up Sam Altman's "indispensability" to OpenAI.

I start to believe these workers are mostly financially motivated and that's why they follow him.

CEOs should be judged by their vision for the company, their ability to execute on that vision, bringing in funding, and building the best executive team for that job. That is what Altman brings to the table.

You make it seem that wanting to make money is a zero-sum game, which is a narrow view to take - you can be heavily emotionally and intellectually invested in what you do for a living and wanting to be financially independent at the same time. You also appear to find it “disturbing” that people support someone that is doing a good job - there has always been a difference between marketing and operations, and it is rather weird you find that disturbing - and appreciate stability, or love working for a team that gets shit done.

To address your initial strawman, why would workers quit when the boss leaves? Besides all the normal reasons listed above, they also might not like the remaining folks, or they may have lost faith in those folks, given the epic clusterfuck they turned this whole thing into. All other issues aside, if I would see my leadership team fuck up this badly, on so many levels, i’d be getting right out of dodge.

These are all common sense, adult considerations for anyone that has an IQ and age above room temperature and that has held down a job that has to pay the bills, and combining that with your general tone of voice, I’m going to take a wild leap here and posit that you may not be asking these questions in good faith.

I think that illustrates it will be a be a big uphill battle for any new entrant no matter how well funded or resourced.

Still, given the exodus and resources now available I’d imagine pretty fast

Bloomberg, the verge and the information all went to bat for Altman in a big way on this.

So that helped cut through all the cruft with this. There was a lot of effort behind putting across the perception that the board was going to resign and that Altman was going to come back.

Looked at through that lens, it makes more sense: the existing board had little incentive to quit and rehire Sam/Greg. The only incentive was if mass resignations threatened their priorities of working on safety and alignment, and I get the sense that most of these resignations are more on the product engineering side.

So I don't really think this is a twist that no one saw coming.

If OpenAI ceases to be Sam’s vision someone will replace it.

It is a good thing for the ecosystem I guess, we will have more diverse products to choose.

But making AI more safe? Not likely. The tech will spread and Ilya will probably not a safer AGI, because he will not control it

Should they decide to sink to the level of VC scheming briefly, it will be like child's play for them.

Pine forests are known to grow by fires. Fires scatter the seeds around, the area which is unsustainable is reset, new forests are seeded, life goes on.

This is what we're seeing, too. A very dense forest has burned, seeds are scattered, new, smaller forests will start growing.

Things will slow down a bit, bit accelerate again in a more healthy manner. We'll see competition, and different approaches to training and sharing models.

Life will go on...

> Isn’t breaking the strangle hold on AI what everyone wanted with open source models last week?

By other things getting better, not by stalling the leader of the pack.

Now turns out Linux is the workhorse everywhere for running workloads or consuming content. Almost every programming language (other than Microsoft's own SDKs) gets developed on Linux, has first class support for Linux and Windows is always an afterthought.

It has gone to that extent that to lure developers, Microsoft has to embed a Lunux in a virtual machine on Windows called WSL.

Local inference is going to get cheaper and affordable and that's for sure.

New models would also emerge.

So OpenAI doesn't seem to have an IP that can withstand all that IMHO.

If they are able to retain enough people to properly release a GPT-5 with significant performance increases in a few months, I would assume that the effect is less pronounced.

So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me

Do you really need all 3? Is each one going to claim that they're the only ones who can develop AGI safely?

Since Sam left, now OpenAI is unsafe? But I thought they were the safe ones, and he was being reckless.

Or is Sam just going to abandon the pretense, competing Google- and Microsoft-style? e.g. doing placement deals, attracting eyeballs, and crushing the competition.

Surely that's what you need for safety?

I don't buy for a second that enough employees will walk to sink the company (though it could be very be disruptive). But for OpenAI, losing a big chunk of their compute could mean they are unable to support their userbase and that could permanently damage their market position.

Is it though? "No outcome where [OpenAI] is one of the big five technology companies. My hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big." -Adam D'Angelo

That's kinda what happened. The latest gist I read was that the non-profit, idealistic(?) board clashed with the for-profit, hypergrowth CEO over the direction to take the company. When you read the board's bios, they're weren't ready for this job (few are; these rocket ship stories are rare), the rocket ship got ahead of their non-profit goals, and they found themselves in over their heads, then failed to game out how this would go over (poor communication with MS, not expecting Altman to get so much support).

From here, the remaining board either needs to either surface some very damning evidence (the memo ain't it) or step down and let MS and Sequoia find a new board (even if they're not officially entitled to do that). Someone needs to be saying mea culpa.

   - Nuke employee morale: massive attrition, not getting upside (tender offer),
   - Nuke the talent magnet: who's going to want to work there now?
   - Nuke Microsoft relationship: all those GPUs gone,
   - Nuke future fundraising: who's going to fund this shit show?

They need to show they’re taking steps to stabilize things now that their hype factory has come unraveled.

I don’t think they particularly need these people , because they likely already have in house talent that is competitive. But having these people on board now will allow them to paint a much more stable picture to their shareholders.

Btw, I think it's funny how much credit Hinton gets for AI. His contribution is pretty much just keeping some grad students on the problem.

Not rational iff (and unlike Sustkever, Hinton, Bengio) you are not a "doomer" / "decel". Ilya's very vocal and on record that he suspects there may be "something else" going on with these models. He and DeepMind claim AlphaGo is already AGI (correction: ASI) in a very narrow domain (https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2311.02462/). Ilya particularly predicts it is a given that Neural Networks would achieve broad AGI (superintelligence) before alignment is figured out, unless researchers start putting more resources in it.

(like LeCun, I am not a doomer; but I am also not Hinton to know any better)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/18/earthquak...

Everyone is just reiterating that board is inept and trying to undermine them. This does not sit right with me.

some important questions: - if Ilya had 4:2, why not just sit Sam down and work all this out in private? - why has the board been completely unable to explain themselves to OAI employees? to the public? - why not take a more neutral "parting ways" tone? - latest reporting suggests that the board is doing this without any outside council (legal or professional network). it seems absolutely bonkers to risk funding sources eg MSFT on a decision like this.

The board's decisions may or may not turn out to be correct in hindsight. But it's very difficult to say that this was a good example of leadership or decision making.

His own sister, even if it's not true, it reflects poorly to have this kind of relationship with your sister that she'd say this, and if it's true, it's very problematic.

And for some reason, very very little mention of this. I just find it suspicious from a media behavior point of view.

Why didn't the board explain itself clearly?

There are times when saying anything publicly would be considered defamation and openining themselves to lawsuits, but it seems that they owe it to their own staff in plain words. They didn't explain the situation properly as per leaked internal announcements.

The only thing it damages about Altman is the credibility of him using his purported concern for AI safety as a PR lever for regulatory capture.

And non competes can be as airtight as you like.. they are completely unenforceable in California which is where OpenAI's HQ is based and where Sam Altman lives.

First the loyal will jump ship. Followed quickly by the mercenaries who see the chance to join a new rocket ship from the ground up. Then as OpenAI's shares tank on the secondary market the rest will decide they've seen enough of their paper money burn and cash out.

OpenAI will survive but its going to be a much smaller company and a much smaller valuation.

As for Microsoft I'm guessing one of the strings Nadella was pulling was threatening to revoke credits, resources and even use by his teams and I'm sure he would be interested in investing in whatever Altman starts next and dedicating those now spare machines to the new enterprise.

noncompetes are illegal in california

One can ultimately still push the frontiers while also showing restraint - stop acting like it's either-or.

I think the more important question is: Is Sutskever interested in a model 5.0 anytime soon? If he really ousted Sam A. because he thought they moved "too fast" wouldn't he rather work on making 4.0 "more secure" (whatever that means) instead of producing a 5.0?

Also keep in mind that a year earlier in Spring 2017 Sam Altman led Quora's Series D, after YC previously joined in on Quora's Series C in 2014. So the two of them clearly had some pre-existing relationship.

I don't think OpenAI and Quora (the product) are a serious conflict of interest. You claim "I'm sure Quora views took a hit after ChatGPT" but I really doubt that's true in any meaningful way. Quora's struggles are a separate issue and predate the GPT craze of the last year.

Nor were Poe and OpenAI competitors until recently; Poe was simply building on top of OpenAI models, the same as hundreds of other ventures in the space right now.

However...I do agree that the GPTs announcement two weeks ago now creates a very clear conflict of interest--OpenAI is now competing directly against Poe. And because of that, I agree that Adam probably should leave the board.

The timing also raises the question of whether booting Sam is in any way related to the GPTs launch and to Poe. Perhaps Sam wasn't candid about the fact that they were about to be competing with Adam's company. The whole thing is messy and not a good look and exactly why you try to avoid these conflicts of interest to begin with.

If you look at Poe as a value add for existing Quora users, instead of a feature that is going to grow their userbase, it's still a net win for Quora even if GPT agents exist simultaneously.

Microsoft will fall in line and do what makes sense once the dust settles, and that probably means continuing to work with OpenAI for the foreseeable future. Most of the employees, even if they supported Sam, will probably also remain until a better option truly appears, and it remains to be seen whether Sam will really open up a competitor and try to hire everyone.

Money is exchanged for goods and services, like GPUs, hiring researchers and coders, and acquiring data.

No one is going to trust them. They will be able to use their whole 120M they got as donations to operate the company for a full week or two.

Good luck, twats.

(Maybe they have AGI/ASI in the basement. If so, kudos, they will be fine and it was classless to fire Sam)

Specifically:

> Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.

> it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.

So the board did not have confidence that Sam was acting in good faith. Watch any of Ilya's many interviews, he speaks openly and candidly about his position. It is clear to me that Ilya is completely committed to the principles of the charter and sees a very real risk of sufficiently advanced AI causing disproportionate harm.

People keep trying to understand OpenAI as a hypergrowth SV startup, which it is explicitly not.

https://openai.com/charter

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122

https://openai.com/our-structure

If you are CEO for a day do you get to wear a paper crown like at Burger King?

Seems like a way to put the incentives and motivations of the staff at odds with the charter of the organisation.

But at this point, we have Ilya who clearly has strong difference of opinions with Sam, Adam D'Angelo, whose company Poe has a conflict of interest with the existance of for profit OpenAI and their GPT store/customizable agents, and two other board members.

I would have been extremely uneasy if Altman had the power to get back as CEO after this kind of ousting but I didn't really support ousting him like that in the first place, especially if this didn't reach a fever pitch over some much more capable model.

Follow their dear saviour into a new venture or stay on a ship with their shares that will begin to sink at markets open.

Microsoft maybe holding a very huge bag. Probably will sue.

As best I can say regarding such a broad, poorly defined topic: Due to the brazen, distasteful, dangerous megalomania and seeing real consequences at Twitter and FTX, and others (Theranos, etc.), that brazen megalomania seems to have re-acquired the bad reputation that common sense has eternally given it, in every place and time.

Obviously, it's a ridiculous, self-destructive, dangerous idea. Whatever the cause, I'm glad people seem to be regaining their senses - but will they do it quickly and completely enough, will they be manipulated into blaming someone else (a massive risk in the post-truth world that accepts dis/misinformation), and will the megalomaniacs retain their attitudes and power, and then use it to suppress others.

https://twitter.com/karpathy/likes

By selecting Shear as the new interim CEO, the board signaled they weren't interested in Altman coming back.

Kyle's story was brewing from the moment GM appointed their attorney to manage Cruise - everyone knew there was gonna be restructuring of the executive team after the incident.

If anything, it was a convenient time for Kyle to step down as it wouldn't get a lot of prime time thanks to OpenAI drama.

And the fact that Emmett is only interim should give you a hint something is up.

I expect them to continue to be relevant, but just one of the chorus, no longer the leader.

Microsoft want OpenAI to do research, and give them the model to run on Azure.

They certainly don't need OpenAI competing in consumer products. ChatGPT could have been a Micrsoft product in an only slightly different timeline.

And they'd rather they didn't compete in API serving, they'd rather everyone currently using OpenAI had to shift to Azure.