If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this?
Will be super interesting when all the details come out regarding the board’s decision making. I’m especially curious how the (former) CEO of Twitch gets nominated as interim CEO.
Finally, if Altman goes his own way, it’s clear the fervent support he’s getting will lead to massive funding. Combined with the reporting that he’s trying to create his own AI chips with Middle East funding, Altman has big ambitions for being fully self reliant to own the stack completely.
No idea what the future holds for any of the players here. Reality truly is stranger than fiction.
So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me
I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of them) who joined OpenAI recently with pure financial incentives. They'll jump to Sam's new company cause of course that's where they'd make real money.
This coupled with investors like Microsoft backing off definitely makes it fair to question the survival of OpenAI in the form we see today.
And this is exactly what makes me question Adam D'Angelo's motives as a board member. Maybe he wanted OpenAI to slow down or stop existing, to keep his Poe by Quora (and their custom assistants) relevant. GPT Agents pretty much did what Poe was doing overnight, and you can have as many as them with your existing 20$ ChatGPT Plus subscription. But who knows I'm just speculating here like everyone else.
There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya).
Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single largest investor and it didn't even warrant a courtesy phone call to let them know of all this fiasco (even thought some savants were saying they shouldn't have to, because they "only" owned 49% of the LLC. LMAO).
Next bit of news will be Microsoft pulling out of the deal but, unlike this board, Satya is not a manchild going through a crisis, so it will happen without it being a scandal. MS should probably just grow their own AI in-house at this point, they have all the resources in the world to do so. People who think that MS (a ~50 old company, with 200k employees, valued at almost 3 trillion) is now lost without OpenAI and the Ilya gang must have room temperature IQs.
It's what kind of got it achieved. Because every other company didn't really see the benefit of going straight to AGI, instead working on incremental addition and small iteration.
I don't know why the board decided to do what it did, but maybe it sees that OpenAI was moving away from R&D and too much into operations and selling a product.
So my point is that, OpenAI started as a charity and literally was setup in a way to protect that model, by having the for-profit arm be governed by the non-for-profit wing.
The funny thing is, Sam Altman himself was part of the people who wanted it that way, along with Elon Musk, Illya and others.
And I kind of agree, what kind of future is there here? OoenAI becomes another billion dollar startup that what? Eventually sells out with a big exit?
It's possible to see the whole venture as taking away from the goal set out by the non for profit.