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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know who is currently CEO of OpenAI? Friday, Sam. Saturday, Mira. Sunday was a day off, Monday it was Emmet so who is it for today?

Kidding aside, the board is under more and more pressure but - surprisingly - they haven't folded yet. I am interpreting that as that they are trying to get something out of it that nobody is willing to give them. The new CEO is also surprisingly not to be found at all, no public statements, nothing to reassure employees that the ship is in good hands. Not the best showing for a captain of a ship in crisis.

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I don’t think the board is under any pressure. If they don’t do anything else they just need the employees to fold on their threat to resign. Even if the employees resign, ChatGPT is still running and there are lots of people willing to take the defecting employees spots.

The only thing they are pressured on is to fill in the story for the media point of view which is irrelevant to the actual functioning of OpenAI.

> I don’t think the board is under any pressure.

Ok, you have a higher threshold for the use of the word pressure than I do.

> If they don’t do anything else they just need the employees to fold on their threat to resign. Even if the employees resign, ChatGPT is still running and there are lots of people willing to take the defecting employees spots.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.

> The only thing they are pressured on is to fill in the story for the media point of view which is irrelevant to the actual functioning of OpenAI.

Their investors, employees and donors might disagree with that.

Want to bet that Emmet Shear won't last the week?

> I wouldn't be so sure of that.

Given that a bunch of the staff are acting like they're Heavens Gate members you also expect them to sabotage it? Or literally have a flavor-aid session in the office?

> Their investors, employees and donors might disagree with that.

Nobody wants to invest in a personality cult that's sworn an oath of fealty to one guy, dude. That's basically flushing money down the toilet, as this fiasco demonstrates. These lunatics are ready to sacrifice their children on twitter. You cannot work with people like that!

> Nobody wants to invest in a personality cult that's sworn an oath of fealty to one guy, dude. That's basically flushing money down the toilet, as this fiasco demonstrates.

Are you aware that Microsoft and Salesforce CEOs have both offered to hire any OpenAI employees who want to switch boat, while Nvidia CEO and Meta's FAIR team have both made similar but slightly lesser "call me" offers to all of them?

https://cointelegraph.com/news/microsoft-salesforce-nvidia-a...

> These lunatics are ready to sacrifice their children on twitter. You cannot work with people like that!

???

> made similar but slightly lesser "call me" offers to all of them

Sure, it's in their interest to break up a unified bloc of talent. Doesn't mean they genuinely want them.

> ???

The behaviour demonstrated by many of the staff on twitter is, for want of a better word, unhinged. Odd declarations of loyalty. 4am posts. Retweeting hearts. Acting very 'ride or die.' It's weird.

> Sure, it's in their interest to break up a unified bloc of talent. Doesn't mean they genuinely want them.

Doesn't fit. In the scenario where they're all thinking that, nobody has to follow up with the same offer after the first person says it.

> The behaviour demonstrated by many of the staff on twitter is, for want of a better word, unhinged. Odd declarations of loyalty. 4am posts. Retweeting hearts. Acting very 'ride or die.' It's weird.

How is any of that "sacrifice their children on twitter"?

I mean, jeez, this is major drama even for the rest of the tech community — this whole thing is even front-page on the BBC news site as I write — of course the people who work there are going to say things on Twitter.

> nobody has to follow up with the same offer

Yes, different companies have to follow up with the same offer in order to break up the talent bloc. Otherwise the bloc will move en-masse to one firm.

> How is any of that "sacrifice their children on twitter"?

It's called hyperbole

> Yes, different companies have to follow up with the same offer in order to break up the talent bloc. Otherwise the bloc will move en-masse to one firm.

Or just… not hire all of them. Much easier.

And in the scenario where Microsoft, Salesforce, NVIDIA, and Meta actually think the OpenAI staff are mad (rather than the more plausible scenario where they think the OpenAI board is mad and are looking for a big pile of skilled proven talent that already know each other and can work well together on big projects), the only sane response would have been "not only don't hire them, don't offer them jobs, what are you even thinking this is the real world we don't do things like the script of a Marvel film".

> It's called hyperbole

It makes you look like the mad one.

> Or just… not hire all of them. Much easier.

Then a competitor might hire all of them. If you're in the AI business you don't want that. You want to grab either all of them or balkanize them. Come on, this isn't a hard concept to grasp.

> And in the scenario where they actually think they're mad ... the script of a Marvel film

Then you hire them on a 5 year exclusive contract so they can't rejoin Hydra.

> It makes you look like the mad one

It's normal human writing style, hyperbole, sarcasm, exaggeration, wit, irony, you know. Adult writing, for adults to consume.

You're saying

> Sure, it's in their interest to break up a unified bloc of talent

And

> If you're in the AI business you don't want that. You want to grab either all of them or balkanize them.

And

> Nobody wants to invest in a personality cult that's sworn an oath of fealty to one guy, dude. That's basically flushing money down the toilet, as this fiasco demonstrates. These lunatics are ready to sacrifice their children on twitter. You cannot work with people like that!

These are mutually incompatible positions.

Oh, I see what you mean. When I said 'grab all of them' I meant the researchers. On the assumption that you can deprogram them, lol.

Your position is not internally consistent, you should really think over what each of those implies and then drop or adjust one or more of these.

> Your position is not internally consistent

I'm throwing out suggestions as to why various differing parties here may be doing what they're doing. There's no need for internal consistency because it's not a unified top-down scenario, it's multipolar game theorizing.

'If A does B, then why would C do D, that isn't consistent' well the answer is that A and C are competing, not cooperating.

Also cointelegraph (lol) is not a reliable source of ... anything. Apart from hype, maybe.

I might agree except they cited their sources and I checked them. I may be wrong, but those look like legit X accounts to me.

>> If they don’t do anything else they just need the employees to fold on their threat to resign. Even if the employees resign, ChatGPT is still running and there are lots of people willing to take the defecting employees spots.

>I wouldn't be so sure of that.

What about all those people who just pivoted from web3 to ai?

I am not going to bet against that. There are only two possible outcomes and neither has Emmet as a CEO.

1, Sam comes back and thus obviously Emmet leaves.

2, Sam does not come back and OAI just dissolves into being a series of drawn out investor lawsuits, something Emmet probably don't want to get involved in.

These words are gonna get ate one way or another. There is no outcome where the current board wins.

Emmet is already threatening the board with resignation unless they provide evidence of wrongdoing [1]. Which they don't have, because they would have revealed it already.

They are empty shirts.

[1] https://x.com/emilychangtv/status/1727020834005700914?s=20

Why? The board announced the removal of a CEO which they have the power to do. It upset a bunch of employees who liked the CEO. The board is in search of a new CEO.

OpenAI’s valuation isn’t because Sam Altman is worth $90B it’s the tech. The tech is fine. Investors have no reason to worry about their investment in the tech.

The people under pressure are Sam Altman trying to reclaim his job he was fired from and Satya Nadella who is running a campaign to eat OpenAI. None of that is related to the functioning tech of OpenAI, all of it is related to the drama of what happened. Drama is not equal to money.

I was sad when my favorite pet died too, but then eventually you get a new pet that’s just as good as a Worldcoin guy, maybe better.

According to Stratechery, Microsoft does not just have the rights to use the source code and model weights for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, but a clause saying that Microsoft could not use the models as foundations for their own projects was recently removed.

> Investors have no reason to worry about their investment in the tech.

If Stratechery is correct, this means that if Microsoft successfully poaches Sam Altman and friends, and vacuums OpenAI clean of talent, they will even be able to use the actual GPT-4 to build a Microsoft GPT-5. That should make investors sweat. If you lose the people and (possibly) the technology, what's left?

Source? Ben didn't read his cited source in his article yesterday.

Currently, the claim is unproven. However, if I were an investor, I'd be pounding on the doors demanding for clarification.

I meant, can you link the claim that the clause in question got removed?

https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...

"Microsoft’s original agreement with OpenAI also barred Microsoft from pursuing AGI based on OpenAI tech on its own; my understanding is that this clause was removed in the most recent agreement."

(It's hidden under a citation bubble you need to click after the third paragraph.)

I see. Pursuing AGI sounds distinct from commercializing future versions of ChatGPT based on OpenAI IP. I imagine the exact legal wording in the contract makes all the difference.

The WSJ article from June he cited indicates the license still comes with restrictions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-openai-forge-awkw...

I'd have my lawyers do the pounding.

Yeah okay Microsoft poaches them but they still have to restart building everything from scratch which wouldn’t benefit Microsoft. Microsoft doesn’t want to poach talent, they can always do that with or without this incident. Microsoft wants the whole bundle. Hence the media campaign Satya is doing.

No, the point is they would not have to start building everything from scratch.

That only happens if Microsoft acquires all of OpenAI, not if they just poach the employees. Poaching means starting again even if they have the road map in their head.

They already have access to GPT4 per their agreement with OpenAI.

Companies aren’t valued for their current state, but future prospects.

Is Sam Altman a future prospect of LLMs? It’s not like he holds the secret to GPT v5 or anything.

I'd be surprised if Sam was by himself, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the people who signed that letter do hold the secret to the next big thing (GPT-5 probably isn't the next big thing; if it exists already it's likely just a nice iterative improvement and not a fundamental change).

Seeing the amount of employees that are willing to follow him, yes I'd say he is.

If you have a mass exodus of employees, sure you can hire people to maintain ChatGPT 4, but they won't complete a GPT 5 or 6. That valuation is definitely based on the assumption that they will continue advancing AI and that they will consistently stay ahead of competitors for some time. They just axed both of those assumptions.

ChatGPT 4 as the endgame is not worth 90 billion dollars.

"It upset a bunch of employees. The tech is fine". Uhmm, it upset 98% (not figuratively, but mathematically) of all 700 employees who signed a petition to quit unless he's reinstated and for the board to resign. As for the tech... who... exactly do you think created, maintains and is developing future enhancement for the tech? Is it doing it by itself? Sorry, we're not there yet.

> Uhmm, it upset 98% (not figuratively, but mathematically) of all 700 employees who signed a petition to quit unless he's reinstated and for the board to resign.

And they have yet to leave as far as I know. Seems like no one is in an actual hurry to quit.

Sam Altman is currently talking to the board. You want them to spin up drama by quitting in the middle of the talks? You're trying too hard to copy paste your desired narrative on this and it fits so, so, so poorly.

If Sam comes back it’ll be under heavy changes. The board isn’t going to leave. You don’t get ousted and then get to call the shots, no matter how many employees you think you have on your side. Furthermore the fact that Sam is in talks is further proof that he won’t be coming back on his terms. As the board why would you fold to the employees just because they like a guy?

I’m not copy pasting anything, cute diss though.

Sorry to be blunt, but literally everything you said so far was nonsense, so I'll understand your opinion as a sign that Sam Altman will come back and the board will resign.

Ah I see more disses, very cute. Get a Team Sam t-shirt made for yourself.

Another bad guess from you.

Oh and:

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727206187077370115

"We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this."

Get yourself a "loser" shirt.

To be fair if this board is good at one thing it is spinning up drama

I think one lesson we learned from Twitter is that you can cull a large amount of a tech workforce and the product will keep humming along, albeit at a reduced rate of change.

Also, unlike Twitter, OpenAI pays engineers very competitive salaries and can aggressively re-hire roles.

You learned the wrong lesson. Twitter is dying and operating at a significantly degraded level, including moderation, content filtering, ad positioning, which caused a third or fourth mass advertiser exodus just few days ago.

Also. Leading the world in revolutionary AI is not exactly like maintaining a pre-existing message app.

Twitter:

- Had 7500 employees before Musk fired most of them.

- Now 1300, of which 550 are full-time devs.

- That's a company valuated at less than $16 billion currently, and losing about $2 billion a year.

OpenAI:

- Has 700 employees, including world-leading scientists and researchers that are practically irreplaceable.

- If they resign, it'll have 14 employees.

- For a company that before Sam Altman was fired was valuated at $90 billion.

I dont think there is a large overlap here.

Twitter seemed to be adult daycare with a HUGE amount of positions that openly did nothing all day, many many positing publicly about how they only actually worked a few hours a week. Along with a Huge business support staff that seemed to really be pointless

I do not see that analog at OpenAI which has mainly engineering positions.

Also the idea that you just just "aggressively re-hire role" engineering positions in a emergent field like AI seems to be bit naive to me. How many experience people outside OpenAI are their int he first place??

It seems to me to be very ironic that in other situations is seems to be common for people to hate on corporations that treat their employees like interchangeable widgets that can just be replaced on a dime with a new human, yet here we see people claim that exact thing. Very odd

There is no comparison between the cadre at Twitter and and the talent pool at OpenAI, I don't think you can replace the bulk of them at all, and nobody worth that kind of compensation is going to touch OpenAI with a 100 foot pole as long as the current board is there.

Twitter is a very different animal. A twitter clone can be thrown together over a weekend with average web stack coders, making it scalable is a bit more work true but nothing fundamentally new or revolutionary. OpenAI on the other hand is working on new, challenging hard problems in a complex feild of math/computer science.

98% is meaningless. If Altman is reinstated then he will have the power to fire anyone who didn’t sign. You’d be an idiot not to sign it.

If they didn't sign he wouldnt have the leverage to come back in the first place

Sure if you’re one of the first names to sign. But let’s say most of the company has signed, you earn a 19-bit salary, there’s now a good chance that this guy will come back and be your boss again. Are you really going to refuse to sign and withhold your support for him? No way.

Technology is not made out of thin air but it is made - and maintained - by people; and when 500 out of 700 people threaten to quit on the spot and leave for competitors, or for Microsoft, investors might not be happy at all.

It's not 500/700. It's like 728/770 last I checked. Almost everyone.

Yes but as mentioned most of these people can be replaced.

> The board announced the removal of a CEO which they have the power to do.

They have the power to remove him momentarily, do they have the power to keep him out? we're still finding out.

> OpenAI’s valuation isn’t because Sam Altman is worth $90B it’s the tech.

OpenAI's valuation is nominally because of the tech. It's fundamentally because of the people. 90% of the staff is threatening to follow Sam to $MS so that's the whole ball game. They went to OpenAI to make themselves rich. The board fired the guy that was trying to do that for them.

> I was sad when my favorite pet died too, but then eventually you get a new pet that’s just as good as a Worldcoin guy, maybe better.

Doesn't matter if you or I am sad. It only matters if the talent at OpenAI is sad. The board made them sad. Sam and Sataya make them happy.

If it’s fundamentally about the people, can you name some of these 90% that OpenAI couldn’t live without? Other than Ilya? From where I’m sitting the 90% are replaceable in a flooded market of available software engineers.

If Satya and Sam make them happy then go work for Microsoft. The board is calling their bluff right now.

Do you think they hired those people because they're useless?

> The board is calling their bluff right now

The board is not doing much of anything. They picked a CEO then she went to team sam. Then they picked another CEO and now he's threatening them with resignation. Not to mention the 3 other people they tried to bring into the role who refused.

No I think they hired them because they can do the job the agreed to pay them. I don’t think these people are irreplaceable, that would be silly. That’s what Sam Altman wants you to think.

> I don’t think these people are irreplaceable, that would be silly.

Maybe go and spend some time to bone up on who exactly works for OpenAI, what their track record is (education, publications and so on) and then tell me where you are going to find another 700 people that talented who will want to work for a company this damaged.

That’s only if 700 people are all doing the same job. The entire company is key engineering talent? That seems unlikely.

> From where I’m sitting the 90% are replaceable in a flooded market of available software engineers.

The market is flooded with junior engineers who have recently graduated from coding boot camps, and who might be good at building the specific types of software they have been shown. However, there is, as I understand it, still a dearth of senior engineers who can do the sort of work that OpenAI engineers are doing: building a novel product, with novel, cutting edge algorithms, at massive scale.

If lots of people could easily replicate OpenAI’s product, it seems strange that has nobody released a competitor to gpt4. Why is Microsoft - a company with one of the largest pools of software engineers in the world - clambering to hire all the engineers at OpenAI?

It’s because those people aren’t replaceable. There is probably a global pool of maybe ten thousand people who can do the work that OpenAI is doing. And OpenAI has assembled a high performance team of ~800 of them. Those people are currently worth their weight in gold.

It is not flooded with junior engineers, it's engineers of all skill levels. I happen to know as someone who is senior looking for work right now. Most of the open positions are for senior and staff level positions.

Microsoft isn't clambering to hire them, they're clambering for the IP. The OpenAI employees will get significantly less if they go over to Microsoft.

My guy. It’s flooded with juniors. Juniors at all levels of junior-ness. Including ones called “senior”

I hope you enjoy the difficulty of finding a job in a flooded market one day.

I hope no one does. Whether it's the Open AI situation or the job market, I am describing reality, not wishful thinking.

> Most of the open positions are for senior and staff level positions.

So what you're saying is that companies are struggling to find qualified senior and staff level engineers to fill their open roles? Doesn't sound like a flooded market to me.

I can't name them, no, but they're the people who built the thing that is being valued 90B. If they migrate (leadership included), so does the potential for future value. My feeling is that the 90B are moving. Sure, IP, existing contracts, licensing, you name it, will have residual value - but if I consider its board a clown car I will refrain from building on top of its API because they might not be around by lunchtime tomorrow. Enough people think like this, it starts spiraling down the drain.

Do you know the board is a clown car or is that what the media surrounding “the chaos” has told you. The board has been quiet is all. Does that automatically mean they’re in the back flushing documents down the toilet and juggling balls? Or is there a better reason they feel no reason to publicly respond to a bunch of media flurry?

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727206187077370115

Sam and Greg returning. Board folded.

https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1727228431396704557

Their hand picked CEO called them on their BS and they could not produce

About the 90%, this is very much a game of musical chairs and game theory in general. If your perception is that there is a high likelihood that Altman might return it's prudent to sign the letter. That's why I think the past few days were about shaping a narrative on Twitter and in the media in general.

> OpenAI’s valuation isn’t because Sam Altman is worth $90B it’s the tech. The tech is fine. Investors have no reason to worry about their investment in the tech.

The following story is only about an hour old, but the investors are reportedly considering legal action against the board:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-investors-consider...

They claimed to remove the CEO with cause. They have not provided cause. Even the twitch dude is asking for the cause.

The board just firing off half-cocked and then going silent is probably a larger source the issues for employees than altman the person/leader. There is effectively nobody in the driver seat and the board can't be trusted to do anything in the best interests of the company.

They did provide cause, you just don't accept what they said as valid or detailed enough.

No they made an extremely vague aligation with no concrete examples or evidence provided.

> The tech is fine.

Have you ever maintained the software where the original team left? I have. And though it was much less complex and cutting edge than what OpenAI is doing, it was a massive pain with loss of knowledge and time.

Yes I have. I’ve even added features to legacy software and have made that a part of my mentoring to engineers to not reinvent the wheel and be good at reading and understanding code. I don’t think it’s a loss because the company has chosen to invest in that software. I include that time as onboarding for a project.

OpenAI IP is not code that you can read. It's the know-how of their team.

The board tried to get a merger with Anthropic, probably the second best team in the world for this type of work.

They don't seem to think they can "just re-hire".

> Investors have no reason to worry about their investment in the tech

What? They have a MASSIVE reason to worry: 3/4 board members are clearly not aligned with the profit motive. And D'angelo has a massive conflict of interest with monetizing their models.

How are they not aligned? They didn’t oust Sam because of profit they ousted him for dishonesty.

are you serious? they're board members of the non-profit... they don't have any shares in the for-profit subsidiary and thus no financial incentive for commercializing the IP

meanwhile, all the employees are paid via a profit sharing scheme. 98% of them are backing Altman because they don't want to see their compensation nuked.

How does ousting Altman nuke compensation? If they keep working there and bring in a new CEO equivalent to Altman with less dishonesty then everyone still wins, except Altman.

It's not about what the board can or can not do. It's about whether they can make it stick. I'm thinking they can't but plenty of clever people here on HN think they can. Time will tell.

Vindicated. I've never had such pushback on something that seemed so obvious.

Is it the tech that is worth that much or the tech and the people that built the tech when future iterations of the product rely so heavily on the people? Losing 95 percent of the employees will definitely impact delivering future products and that will definitely impact future profits and that has to impact valuation.

> OpenAI’s valuation isn’t because Sam Altman is worth $90B it’s the tech.

It's the current AND future tech. If most of the people who made that tech jump ship, that does not bode well for the future development of the technology. Maybe if the tech were something more ordinary, sure, but I think we both agree that it's not. For an investor, the future prospects of the company are generally a lot more important than its present state.

> OpenAI’s valuation isn’t because Sam Altman is worth $90B it’s the tech.

The IP might be worth something (no idea what kind of patents they hold), but the valuation is fundamentally based on the current products they have and promise of future tech the company can create. And the future value stream far outweighs the current product.

And none of the future product is going to happen without people.

Of course, OpenAI without Sam will hire new people. But if they have already hired the best and they already had worthwhile experience, hiring new people has almost zero chance to recreate their ability to create new products at least in short/medium term.

Finding the right people and hiring them is far more difficult than it is assumed. Dropping money on the problem does not solve more than half of it.

In a normal corporation, they would be empty shirts, because ultimately they serve at bequest of the share holders. But this is a non-profit so they actually have a lot of power and don't need to answer to anyone.

But don’t they have to answer to the people who funded the nonprofit?

I am ignorant, but you seem to be knowledgeable about this topic.

They need to comply with any profit-sharing or loan repayments, but funders can't have any control. The only person who would have input into whether or not the board is properly fulfilling its non-profit mission would be the Delaware attorney general.

As we are all witnessing, they have to answer to their employees.

So no evidence of wrongdoing then:

-----> WHY DID THEY DO IT? <------

SERIOUSLY! They all just decided to wake up that day and say let's go fire Sam and blow up the company because "lack of candor" that they can't even give details on?? These are serious people doing serious stuff. These are not idiots. What the heck is going on? Can anyone explain?

Yeah there has been plenty of explanation. Sam Altman has competing interests and was looking to leverage OpenAI’s tech in those interests.

Source??

Considering Ilya regrets his decision, implying this wasn't an e/acc vs safety debate, the two most likely scenarios to me appear to be:

A) DeAngelo getting revenge for custom GPTs killing his company Poe's core product.

B) The board discovering Sam working to use OpenAI resources/IP to further his own personal business/political goals.

> Considering Ilya regrets his decision, implying this wasn't an e/acc vs safety debate

Does it?

If it was exactly that but he misjudged the external response and resulting consequences, that would also be a reason for regret.

That's very well possible but there is as of now no evidence to substantiate that. But that is what it ultimately could have boiled down to and if there is even a remote chance that it can be spun that way you can be sure that chance will be exploited - even if it wasn't originally the case!

My guess, and it is just a guess, is that there's some deep and fundamental position that the board members hold to, which Sam cannot describe well enough to pass the Ideological Turing Test[0], and this failure was perceived as being deliberately dishonest.

Happens a lot. I know some on the very extreme outskirts of the left wing who look at the "splitters!" scene in Life of Brian and see themselves; I've seen it in arguments over programming language features; there's plenty of religious disputes that look like this from the outside; most of the Brexit arguments painted everyone who didn't agree with the speaker as being part of Team Other and merely an attempt to undermine Team Us; and so on.

People can get very seriously angry about things that seem totally pointless from the outside.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ideological-turing-tests

> These are not idiots.

They shouldn't be. But short of temporary insanity I'm running out of ideas on what it could be.

Well, at least he's still there. Wonder if they have a successor lined up already and whether or not that successor has already offered to resign.

It is all reminiscent of the Monty Python Judean people's front scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8

Though, arguably they showed more discipline.

> Emmet is already threatening the board with resignation

so says anonymous sources close to OpenAI who look suspiciously like MSFT wearing a fake mustache

Good luck keeping those employees around even if they all decide to fold.

These folks are being flooded with offers. Why would they work for an organization that doesn't care what 95% of them want?

Why keep them around when there are hordes of qualified, recently laid-off workers ready to take their spot?

And, not every person from OpenAI is getting flooded with offers. Maybe a few key scientists/developers.

If anything, putting OpenAI on their resume might get workers preferential treatment for an initial interview. Maybe.

Why would I jump ship for some lesser tech when OpenAI has everything I love working on?

> there are lots of people willing to take the defecting employees spots.

Even 20% of employees leaving a company simultaneously is catastrophic. I think you're underestimating the effects here.

They might be willing to take the spots, but given that OpenAI has been vacuuming up all of the real talent they could find those surely aren't going to be in the same class as the team that they already have.

No I’m not, the effects are most likely short term snafu.

Even if only 1/4 of the people threating to resign, resigns, its still like 20% of the company leaving abruptly without any sort of handover. They might keep the light on for chatgpt and the API's, but its going to blunt growth and re-hiring isn't done in a heartbeat. You need to vet, test and onboard new employees. You're looking at a setback of at least 9-12 months of growth and research

It's one of the most innovative and impactful companies in a long time. I'm sure they'll be able to run gpt4, but good luck delivering gpt 5 (or 6 depending on how far along 5 is) when you lost entire teams that dreamt up and built previous iterations.

Even if all the employees don’t quit, losing even a quarter would be devastating. They will have a reputation as a shit show and lose all the best people to anthropic, Microsoft and google. They have the best product right now but everything improving so quickly means they will get left behind.

Current CEO is effectively the co-CEO of three board members at any given time.

Given that:

1. Cycled three CEOs in less than a week.

2. The current interim CEO is in talks to resign (because the board still has not given a clear reason to why Sam was fired).

Satoshi Nakamoto probably

> Does anybody know who is currently CEO of OpenAI?

Emmett Shear.

Altman won't be back.

Investors like success and returns but they don't like companies where all the employees have basically sworn out an oath of fealty to the CEO, as it means they (the investors) have basically no control over anything.

> where all the employees have basically sworn out an oath of fealty to the CEO, as it means they (the investors) have basically no control over anything.

Another interpretation: those closest to the internal workings of the business believe that a certain person is best capable of managing the business. Turns out that person is also who the investors believe in. So rather than fealty to a person, they are simply voting (with their feet apparently) against the board.

> So rather than fealty to a person

Have you _seen_ the bizarre behaviour that's occurring on twitter? Retweeing heart emojis, making weird declarations of faith, acting in lockstep? They're 100% swearing fealty and it's incredibly weird.

I think it’s wierd the dismissive way many folks in this thread speak about it all.

“Sam isn’t important. Employees are weirdos. The board is just fine. Everyone calm down.”

That’s more wierd than anything happening on Twitter.

It's objectively weird to see staff - almost all of them researchers and head-down types - unite so firmly behind a non-technical CEO.

Those staff usually have their private champions within the company - usually technically focussed project managers who can run interference against the commercial side - but nod along with the CEO who they view as the ugly necessity of having to have a 'business guy.'

This is not how I interpret the messages from the OpenAI team members.

They are sending messages of unity, not fealty to Sam Altman.

Working together brought them to the top of the world both in term of research and product. This is a dream come true.

What would surprise me is that they wouldn't do everything they can to avoid breaking their team.

Does it not seem odd to you that they all just retweet heart emojis and copy/pasted statements, instead of composing their own separately written statements of support?

These are meant to be top-tier researchers, you'd think they'd put their thoughts in their own words. That too would avoid uncertainty and make their position easier to understand.

Just retweeting a heart emoji because their dear leader (lol) did it is... odd, to me. Unless it's specifically intended to send the message that they'll literally do whatever he tells them to do. Which is about a thousand times weirder.

No, what better way to send a message of unity than to all send the same message?

Shear won't last.

> Investors like success and returns but they don't like companies where all the employees have basically sworn out an oath of fealty to the CEO, as it means they (the investors) have basically no control over anything.

Investors love such companies. I, as an investor would love such a company, as long as I was sure that the CEO would stay. Investors tend to not have control over much of anything anyway unless they have a board seat. Other than that it's a shareholder meeting once per year where you get to sign off on the actions of the execs for the preceding year. But the better interpretation is that the people there have said "we are not loyal to the board" rather than that they are more loyal to Altman, that only goes for those that will follow him wherever he goes.

The best time for an investor to influence things is when you come on board. The best way for an investor to continue to be able to influence things is to have a controlling interest or very good relations with enough of the stockholders to effectively have a controlling interest.

> I, as an investor would love such a company, as long as I was sure that the CEO would stay.

As an investor you have no way of obtaining that surety. So, you would not love this company.

> But the better interpretation is that the people there have said "we are not loyal to the board" rather than that they are more loyal to Altman

Dude they're retweeting heart emojis and carrying water in _the most disturbing_ fashion on twitter. They're 100% declaring that they're his personal army, ride or die. I don't know how you aren't seeing this. It's completely abnormal behaviour for adults.

That will last until Sam gives up and drops them all when he moves on to whatever he’s doing next. They may be dogmatic about it but it’s only because they think they have cards to play.

It's giving me real Jim Jones vibes, to be honest. It's incredibly weird behaviour.

Dude, you’re all over this thread and have such a strange bias against Sam and the current employees. Can I ask, out of genuine curiosity, why you find the board to be OK in this situation and why you find Sam / the employees behind him so off-putting?

Dude I’m all over this thread because people are responding to me. It’s called conversation. You want me to run and hide because 20 people jumped on me with opposing thoughts?

Oh yeah I think Sam is sleazier than most people seem to think. I also don’t think he’s in the right because the board has been quiet. The whole thing is insular and one sided. Everything they’re doing/saying is to try and control the board. That is off-putting because it’s detrimental to the board’s intent. I’m sure they’re all very nice people and hard workers.

No, I think you're mistaking my tone. I was genuinely curious, because it's rare to see someone with a sure view on this mad saga! And I wanted to learn a bit more from the somewhat-less-popular side (I do think there is an odd cultish energy around Sam at the moment from some folks).

I don't know enough about Sam or the board at all, so curious as to reasons why he might be sleazy/sneaky.

The board being quiet, in my opinion, is not doing them any favors!

IMO opinion the board is quiet because they owe the media and public nothing as they are not a publicly traded company. The entire frenzy around this is seated with the employees, Microsoft CEO, and outlets looking for clicks. In a week or so when this is over everyone will see how much of a nothing burger this will have turned out to be…IMO.

> The board being quiet, in my opinion, is not doing them any favors!

The board being quiet is adult behaviour. Release a discreet and generic press release then direct all further enquiries to the lawyers. That's how things should be done.

The frenzy of reporting and contradictory articles and froth and spin that's coming from the other side makes them look deranged, IMHO. It's incredibly childish and just makes it look like they have tentacles everywhere that they can drag these weird articles out of so many different outlets. It's not a good look unless you're really trying to look like HYDRA.

> why you find Sam / the employees behind him so off-putting?

To me it's the 100% committed 'vibe' they're giving off. It's weird. It's not how staff, especially technical/researchers (who usually bicker like anything over the most trivial of differences) behave.

Anyone who's managed a big research team knows that competing rivalries and internecine warfare is the order of the day. Literal slapfights have broken out over whether big or little endian encoding will be more efficient for any given scenario, for example.

The investors already have no control!

What are you talking about? The OpenAI board isn't made up of investors.

Employees hate working for companies where they have no voice too. Morale will drop and attrition will skyrocket. New talent won't consider OpenAI, existing talent will leave.

The investment goes to zero anyway without talent.

> New talent won't consider OpenAI

I think you can assume that there's a large pool of talent that would love to work at OpenAI, they were just turned off by the ... vibes ... coming from the e/acc locksteppy types.

It may be very easy to re-hire talent that's actually a lot smarter, if a bit less 'mission focussed.'

>>they were just turned off by the ... vibes ...

So they just need to hire some Gen Z [1], not to actually make AI technology but to make "good vibes"

[1] https://nypost.com/2023/11/18/lifestyle/gen-z-workers-say-th...

>>I think you can assume that there's a large pool of talent

Why would we assume that? Every company in the US currently is complaining endlessly about the lack of talent, in IT especially I see posts from hiring managers being unable to find tech talent, and the fact that several companies are making very aggressive plays at getting OpenAI worker right now tells me there is not infact a "large pool of talent" that will just back fill all of these roles.

> in IT especially I see posts from hiring managers being unable to find tech talent

Hasn't the sector been aggressively laying off for the past 6 months? I mean, there have been many many many posts about it here.

you have confused "tech company layoffs" with "tech worker layoffs"

Alot of Tech companies have been laying off alot of support staff in HR, Recruitment, Sales, and other business functions

and yes some Technical roles as well, but dont think because you see "Google Lays of X,000 employees" means they just laid off that many AI Researchers, programmers, etc...

Plenty of talent flooding the market right now.

Say, what agenda are you trying to push, spaceman? This is the second comment of yours in this thread trying to make it seem like everyone at OpenAI is irreplaceable, so maybe you missed the hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs this year in the US.

Not that level talent though.

If you know where to find a hundred or so people of the caliber that OpenAI has managed to attract so far you should get into the recruiting business pronto because you could make a few million easily.

Not all talent is the same.

This field is small and nascent enough that there are really only a small number of people who can build something like GPT-4.

New talent will consider any place that pays 300k base :)

> all the employees have basically sworn out an oath of fealty to the CEO

Objectively not true. Employees were quiet on Friday. It was after Ilya told employees that Altman was fired partly because he tasked two people with the same job, that they then organized.

Wow, they were played like a fiddle. How old do you have to be to believe that story, 9?

Emmett is already threatening to resign.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1033862/op...

This entire thread is full of reddit-tier 'sources'

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727206187077370115

@OpenAI We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

If the board resigns that may be good for the company, but it may not be good for those on the board. If, on the other hand, the board prevails OpenAI may still turn out to be fine regardless.

What do the board members have to loose by holding their ground?

There was an internal announcement that Sam had said he would not be deciding overnight Monday.

Does anybody know who is currently CEO of OpenAI?

They should assign ChatGPT to be CEO

That would put 'dogfooding' on a whole new level.

Jack's Empty Chair

Credit where credit is due for righting the ship!

https://donhopkins.com/home/CostaConcordiaFTFY.jpg

Hehe. That's funny.

Damn, I was hoping you'd be horrified as a Dutchman.

Hehe, as a Dutchman I wonder how many people pick up on that joke, but yes, chance missed. Too busy. On a less busy day I would have seen my chance and jumped for it. But don't worry, you're not off the hook yet.

You still owe me that dutch rudder.

It is safe to say OpenAI has become ungovernable since last Friday, unless that person is Sam/Greg

ChatGPT

Elizabeth Holmes.

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