zlacker

>>davidb+(OP)
I would translate "not consistently candid with the board" as "he lied to the board about something important enough to fire him on the spot". This seems like the kind of statement lawyers would advise you to not make publicly unless you have proof, and it seems unusual compared to most statements of that kind that are intentionally devoid of any information or blame.

>>fabian+Z8
I wonder if the cost of running GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models at scale turned out to have been astoundingly more expensive than anticipated.

Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?

Or, if I wanted to speculate to the extremely negative; what if the training and operating costs ballooned to such a degree, that the deal with Microsoft was an attempt to plug the cash hole without having to go to the board requesting an enormous loan? Because the fact that Copilot (edit: previously known as Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator) is free and ChatGPT (edit: and DALL-E 3) are not should be a red flag...

>>gjsman+sd
"not significantly candid"

and

"no longer has confidence"

points to something more serious than underestimating costs.

>>davegu+Bh
Underestimating costs could be the reasoning if Altman knew the costs would be higher then estimated, and didn't tell the board for an unreasonable amount of time. Burning through a ton of cash for months and not telling the board about it could be enough grounds for this sudden firing.

Of course we have no clue if that's what actually happened. Any conclusions made at this point are complete speculation, and we can't make any conclusions more specific then "this is probably bad news."

>>ARandu+jn
That only makes sense if Altman is the only one with access to the company's financials which obviously can't be the case. No one else noticed truckloads of cash getting flushed down the toilet?

>>jliptz+Vo
It's certainly possible. Company financials can get very complicated very quickly, and it's possible that Altman was the only person (or one of a small number of people) who had the complete picture.

To be clear, this is only one possible explanation for Altman's firing. And for my money, I don't even think it's the most likely explanation. But right now, those who rely on OpenAI products should prepare for the worst, and this is one of the most existentially threatening possibilities.