Ilya votes for and stands behind decision to remove Altman, Altman goes to MS, other employees want him back or want to join him at MS and Ilya is one of them, just madness.
All respect to the engineers and their technical abilities, but this organization has demonstrated such a level of dysfunction that there can't be any path back for it.
Say MS gets what it wants out of this move, what purpose is there in keeping OpenAI around? Wouldn't they be better off just hiring everybody? Is it just some kind of accounting benefit to maintain the weird structure / partnership, versus doing everything themselves? Because it sure looks like OpenAI has succeeded despite its leadership and not because of it, and the "brand" is absolutely and irrevocably tainted by this situation regardless of the outcome.
My biggest frustration with larger orgs in tech is the complete misalignment on delivering value: everyone wants their little fiefdom to be just as important and "blocker worthy" as the next.
OpenAI struck me as one of the few companies where that's not being allowed to take root: the goal is to ship and if there's an impediment to that, everyone is aligned in removing said impediment even if it means bending your own corner's priorities
Until this weekend there was no proof of that actually being the case, but this letter is it. The majority of the company aligned on something that risked their own skin publicly and organized a shared declaration on it.
The catalyst might be downright embarrassing, but the result makes me happy that this sort of thing can still exist in modern tech
They weren't attracted to OpenAI by money alone, a chance to actually ship their lives' work was a big part of it. So regardless of what the stated goals were, it'd never be surprising to see them prioritize the one thing that differentiated OpenAI from the alternatives