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.
Come on. “By 5 pm everyone will quit if you don’t do x”. Response: tens of heart emojis.
As soon as one person becomes more important than the team, as in the team starts to be structured around said person instead of with the person, that person should be replaced. Because otherwise, the team will not be functioning properly without the "star player" nor is the team more the sum of its members anymore...
The example of Steve Jobs used in the above post is probably a prime example - Apple just wouldn’t be the company it is today without that period of his singular vision and drive.
Of course they struggled after losing him, but the current version of Apple that has lived with Jobs and lost him is probably better than the hypothetical version of Apple where he never returned.
Great teams are important, but great teams plus great leadership is better.