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.
That in itself is not critical in mid to long term, but how fast they figure out WTF they want and recover from it.
The stakes are gigantic. They may even have AGI cooking inside.
My interpretation is relatively basic, and maybe simplistic but here it is:
- Ilya had some grievances with Sam Altman's rushing dev and release. And his COI with his other new ventures.
- Adam was alarmed by GPTs competing with his recently launched Poe.
- The other two board members were tempted by the ability to control the golden goose that is OpenAI, potentially the most important company in the world, recently values 90 billion.
- They decided to organize a coup, but Ilya didn't think it'll go that much out of hand, while the other three saw only power and $$$ by sticking to their guns.
That's it. It's not as clean and nice as a movie narrative, but life never is. Four board members aligned to kick Sam out, and Ilya wants none of it at this point.
Too many people quit too quickly unless OpenAI are also absolute masters of keeping secrets, which became rather doubtful over the weekend.
Also when I said "cooking AGI" I didn't mean an actual superintelligent being ready to take over the world, I mean just research that seems promising, if in early stages, but enough to seem potentially very valuable.