zlacker

>>nickru+(OP)
Edit: I called it

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857

nothing to do with dishonesty. That’s just the official reason.

———-

I haven’t heard anyone commenting about this, but the two main figures here-consider: This MUST come down to a disagreement between Altman and Sutskever.

Also interesting that Sutskever tweeted a month and a half ago

https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907

The press release about candid talk with the board… It’s probably just cover up for some deep seated philosophical disagreement. They found a reason to fire him that not necessarily reflects why they are firing him. He and Ilya no longer saw eye to eye and it reached its fever pitch with gpt 4 turbo.

Ultimately, it’s been surmised that Sutskever had all the leverage because of his technical ability. Sam being the consummate businessperson, they probably got in some final disagreement and Sutskever reached his tipping point and decided to use said leverage.

I’ve been in tech too long and have seen this play out. Don’t piss off an irreplaceable engineer or they’ll fire you. not taking any sides here.

PS most engineers, like myself, are replaceable. Ilya is probably not.

>>johnwh+c5
Ah, the old myth about the irreplaceable engineer and the dumb suit. Ask Wozniak about that. I don't think he believes Apple would be without Steve Jobs.

>>siva7+7J
Steve Jobs would be nothing without Wozniak to design something people wanted.

>>lepton+0R
vice versa ;)

>>siva7+hR
If Steve Jobs couldn't claim Wozniak's work as his own, he wouldn't have landed "his" Atari contract. Who knows where things would have gone after that, but I have a hard time tracing Apple's history of success without, say, the Apple II.

>>smolde+021
The milieu in which Apple came to fruitition was full of young small microcomputer shops. So it's not like Woz invented the microcomputer for the masses - his contribution was critical for early Apple for sure, but the market had tons of alternatives as well. Without Apple II it's hard to say were Jobs and Wozniak would have turned out. Jobs is such a unique, driven figure that I'm fairly sure he would have created a lasting impression on the market even without Woz. This is not to say Woz was insighnificant - but rather the 1970's Silicon Valley had tons of people with Woz's acumen (not to disparage their achievements) but only few tech luminaries who obviously were not one trick ponies but managed to build their industrial legacy over decades.

>>fsloth+0C1
I don’t believe the evidence backs this up. Woz is as much a one off as Jobs.

Woz did two magic things just in the Apple II which no one else was close to: the hack for the ntsc color, and the disk drive not needing a completely separate CPU. In the late 70s that ability is what enabled the Apple II to succeed.

The point is Woz is a hacker. Once you build a system more properly, with pieces used how their designers explicitly intended, you end up with the Mac (and things like Sun SPARCstafions) which does not have space for Woz to use his lateral thinking talents.

>>fidotr+QV1
I’ve always in my mind compared Apple 2 to the likes of Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum etc - 8 bit home computers. Apple 2 predates these several years ofc. You could most certainly create an 8 bit home computer without Woz. I haven’t really geeged out on the complete tech specs & history of these, it’s possible Apple 2 was more fundamental than that (and would love to understand why).

>>fsloth+q82
Apple already had competitors back then in the likes of Franklin Computers. From a pure "can you copy Woz" perspective, it's not really even a question; of course you could. It was always a matter of dedication and time.

It's foolish for any of us to peer inside the crystal ball of "what would Jobs be without Woz", but I think it is important to acknowledge that the Apple II and IIc pretty much bankrolled Apple through their pre-Macintosh era. Without those first few gigs (which Woz is almost single-handedly responsible for), Apple Computers wouldn't have existed as early (or successfully) as it did. Maybe we still would have gotten an iPhone later down the line, but that's frankly too speculative for any of us to call.