If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen.
Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this then it will be changed back real fast, Ilya fired and the entire board resign. That's my prediction.
Alternative is Sam goes in house to MS who already have all the weights of GPT-4 and build again, but constrained by any existing charter.
Ilya is a co-founder of OpenAI, the Chief Scientist, and one of the best known AI researchers in the field. He has also been touring with Sam Altman at public events, and getting highlights such as this one recently:
The wrongest thing I've read on HN for a long while.
The world has alot more smart people in it than you realise, and Sam's rockstar profile gives him direct access to them.
There is a massive amount of tooling and infrastructure involved. You can't just get some Andrew Ng Coursera guy off the street and buy 50,000 H100s at your local Fry's electronics. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't even enough GPUs in the world for Altman to start a competitor in a reasonable amount of time.
I stand by my number, there are like 4 people in the world capable of building OpenAI. That is, a quality deep learning organization that pushes the state of the art in AI and LLMs.
Maybe you can find ~1,000 people in the world who can build a cheap knock-off that gets you to GPT3 (pre instruct) performance after about two years. But even that is no trivial effort.
I mean, anecdotally, most non-tech friends and family I know probably have heard of ChatGPT, but they don't know any of the founders or leadership team at OpenAI.
On the other hand, since I work in the field, all of my AI research friends/colleagues would know Ilya's work, and probably think of Sam more as a business guy.
In that sense, as far as attracting and maintaining AI researcher talent, I think it's arguable that people would prefer Ilya to Sam.
Wall Street Journal front page, top item right this minute: "Sam Altman Is Out at OpenAI After Board Skirmish"
Times Of London front page, right this minute: "Sam Altman sacked by OpenAI after directors lose confidence in him"
The Australian front page, right now: "OpenAI pushes out co-founder Sam Altman as CEO"
MSNBC front page, right now: "OpenAI says Sam Altman exiting as CEO, was 'not consistently candid' with board"
That's his name right there, front page news around the world - they assume people know his name, that's why they put it there.
The board that made this decision to fire Altman and they are the captain of the ship.
> if Satya doesn't like this then it will be changed back real fast, Ilya fired and the entire board resign. That's my prediction.
MS does not own openAI if the board does not want Satya to have a say Satay does not have a say. MS/Satay could throw lawyers at the issue, try to find a crack where the board has violated the law and or their own rules. The key is they can try, but MS/Satay have no immediate levers of power to enforce their will.
It is a rare counter case, where a tech-focused research demo, without any clear "product-market fit, suppliers, or customers" became a success almost overnight, to the surprise of it's own creators.
The early days were people playing around with ChatGPT just to see what it could do. All the market fit, fine tuning, and negotiation of deals came later.
Of course, OpenAI capitalized on that initial success very skillfully, but Ilya was the critical world renowned AI researcher who had a lot to do with enabling OpenAI's initial success.
That’s the key point there. Without leadership talent to capitalize on success, technical advances are for naught.
But also, GPT had been around for some years before ChatGPT. The model used in ChatGPT was an improvement in many ways and I don’t mean to diminish Ilya’s contribution to that, but it is the packaging of the LLM into a product that made ChatGPT a success. I see more of Sam’s fingerprints on that than Ilya’s.
OpenAI is where it is because its models are much, much better than the alternatives and pretty much always have been since their inception, not because of anything on the business side. The second alternative or open source models reach parity, they will start shedding customers. Their advantage is entirely due to their R&D, not anything on the business side.
If I asked my mom who Sam Altman was, she'd have no idea. Most of my friends wouldn't either, even some who work in tech. Having one's name in headlines isn't the same as being a household name.
However, my original comment on this thread was simply to point out that Ilya is not "unknown-to-anyone", but a world renowned AI researcher and a core part of OpenAI's team and their success. Your reply implied that Ilya "has very little to do with OpenAI’s success", which I thought undersells his importance.
In any case, I feel like we largely agree, so I'm confused as to why your reply focused solely on this small detail, in a rather condescending manner, while missing my larger point about retaining and attracting AI talent.