zlacker

So what was he lying about that got the board so pissed? A story that fits is that they assumed/knew that he had different goals and/or was going to create a spinoff.

If they waited for the GPT5 pretraining to finish and then they minimized the cost of the loss of Altman and the engineers.

The whole secrecy, compartmentalization and urgency of their actions could only be explained by being against a wall. Otherwise if it was about ethics, future plans or whatever political it would happen at a slower pace.

Hope they involved their investors beforehand but I don't know if they had time, OpenAI probably still exists and evolves on other people's money. But what else could they do?

>>antman+(OP)
current popular theory is that those fired/left were taking OpenAI for profit, and the board stuck with their original goal of non profit.

>>thinki+X2
you mean current completely made up speculation by anon online?

>>Lacerd+K3
That's one source. There are others about, but as I wrote it's a "theory".

edits: >>38314420

I imagine when the full story comes out all these theories and speculations will be ignored and we will literally forget ever being interested in them!

>>antman+(OP)
I don't think the firing would be this dramatic if it was merely lying to the board; I suspect it's something where:

- he makes misleading statement to board

- board puts this in regulatory filing (e.g. SEC)

- board finds out this is a legally critical statement

- they _have_ to fire him in order to avoid becoming accomplices.

The reverse of the other Sam situation.

>>thinki+P3
I didn't even need to check the source. I immediately thought that this was obvious when it was announced (implicitly) that Ilya must have voted out Sam on the board. Whatever legalese is going on in the side channels to justify everything, I can totally see the conflict in visions between these two guys. And I'm sorta glad Ilya came out on top, even though I'm not a big fan of him either. Brockman is the real loss from this mess.

>>antman+(OP)
Probably the Microsoft thing and the direction Sam Altman is taking OpenAI. I imagine that caused a significant shift in workload and nature of work for the people in OpenAI.

>>justan+jf
I don't see how it could be something like this. If Sam wanted to do this he wouldn't need to lie. I suspect Sam did something stupid and the board had no choice. I would be very surprised if they actually wanted to fire Sam.

>>antman+(OP)
Obvious wall would be financial - Sam arranged more Microsoft funding, diluting the non-profitness even more, and tried to force board's hand by high cash burn and persuasion.

Board had to act fast to fix it. And OpenAI changed enterprise pricing of API to be up front for cashflow related to that.

>>thinki+X2
how can people be so naïve... think about it. isn't it exactly the kind of spin that you would expect from "new" leadership? like, of course they're going to take the moral high-ground like any new regime would.

>>thinki+X2
Nobody was "taking" anything for profit. That ship had sailed.

The OpenAI 501(c)3 already spun up a for-profit company in 2019 to do all the commercial work and take VC money.

>>pjc50+vc
Yeah this feels like a possible white collar crime. And with the US government out for blood right now about tech abuses, even a minor tax audit wouldn't be good for them.

>>fancyf+dg
Well that turned out to be 100% wrong. I am, as predicted, very surprised.