I genuinely can't believe the board didn't see this coming. I think they could have won in the court of public opinion if their press release said they loved Sam but felt like his skills and ambitions diverged from their mission. But instead, they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely.
I hope Sam comes back. He'll make a lot more money if he doesn't, but I trust Sam a lot more than whomever they ultimately replace him with. I just hope that if he does come back, he doesn't use it as a chance to consolidate power – he's said in the past it's a good thing the board can fire him, and I hope he finds better board members rather than eschewing a board altogether.
EDIT: Yup, Satya is involved https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726025717077688662
I doubt he returns, now he can start a for profit AI company, poach OpenAI's talent, and still look like the good guy in the situation. He was apparently already talking to Saudis to raise billions for an Nvidia competitor - >>38323939
Have to wonder how much this was contrived as a win-win, either OpenAI board does what he wants or he gets a free out to start his own company without looking like he's purely chasing money
This is why you need someone with business experience running an organization. Ilya et al might be brilliant scientists, but these folks are not equipped to deal with the nuances of managing a ship as heavily scrutinised as OpenAI
It’s unclear what Ilya thinks keeps the lights on when MSFT holds their money hostage now. Which is probably why there is desperation to get Altman back…
If Microsoft considers this action a breach of their agreement, they could shut off access tomorrow. Every OpenAI service would go offline.
There are very few services that would be able to backfill that need for GPU compute, and after this clusterfuck not a single one would want to invest their own operating dollars supporting OpenAI. Microsoft has OpenAI by the balls.