The capped-profit / non-profit structure muddles that a little bit, but the reality is that entity can't survive without the funding that goes into the for-profit piece
And if current investors + would-be investors threaten to walk away, what can the board really do? They have no leverage.
Sounds like they really didn't "play the tape forward" and think this through...
No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor available.
If anything they would be miffed about how it was handled, but to be frank, unless GPT4 is sam Altman furiously typing, I don’t know he’s that important. The instability caused by the suddenness, that’s different.
Others have commented on how Microsoft actually has access to the IP, so the odds that they could pack their toys and rebuild OpenAI 2.0 somewhere else with what they've learned, their near infinite capital and not have to deal with the non-profit shenanigans are meaningful.
I'm not saying Sam is needed to make OpenAI what it is, but he's definitely "the investors' guy" in the organization, based on what has surfaced over the last 24 hours. Those investors would rather have him there over someone else, hence the pressure to put him back. It doesn't matter whether you and I think he's the man for the job -- what matters is whether investors think they are.
TL;DR the board thinks they have leverage, but as it turns out, they don't
But right now they get a lot of shitstorm for this inexperience handling.
And it doesn't look good from the board that looks inexperienced.
Gordon-Levitt's wife?? Helen who? D'Angelo with a failing quora and a history of a coup.
Doesn't look good.
I'd bet it starts impacting their personal lives. This is equivalent to them coming out to support Donald Trump. It is that bad.
Definitely not OpenAI itself. They still need massive capital. With this drama, its future is put in serious doubt
The implication in Microsoft's statement is clear that they have what they need to use the tech. I read it to mean OpenAI board does not have leverage.
Doesn't look like it right now in this case.
There is theory and there is reality. If someone is paying your bills by an outsized amount and they say jump, you will say how high.
The influence is rarely that explicit though. The board knowing that X investor provides 60% of their funding, for instance, means the board is incentivized to do things that keep X investor happy without X having to ask for it.
9 times out of 10, money drives decisions in a captilist environment
This corporate structure is so convoluted that it's difficult to figure out what the actual powers/obligations of the individual agents involved are.
(Remember, fiduciary does not necessarily have anything to do with money)
Azure gets a hell of a lot more out of OpenAI than OpenAI gets out of azure. I’ll bet you GPT4 runs on nvidia hardware just as well regardless of who resells it.
I think the situation is tough because I can't imagine there aren't legal agreements in place around what OpenAI has to do to access the funding tranches and compute power, but who knows if they are in a position to force the issue, or if I'm write in my supposition to begin with. Even if I am, a protracted legal battle where they don't have access to compute resources, particularly if they can't get an injunction, might be extremely deleterious to OpenAI.
Perhaps Microsoft even knows that they will take a bath on things if they follow this, but don't want to gain a reputation of allowing this sort of thing to happen - they are big enough to take a total bath on the OpenAI side of things and it not be anything close to a fatal blow.
I was more skeptical of this being the case last night, but less so now.
But until he is re-hired Sam Altman is to all intents and purposes fired. And it may well come to that (and that would almost certainly require all those board members who voted for his ouster to vacate their positions because their little coup plan backfired and nobody is going to take the risk of that happening again, especially not in this way).
> I’ll bet you GPT4 runs on nvidia hardware
Yes but they'll need to convince someone else like Amazon to give to them for free and regardless what happens next Microsoft will still have a signficant stake in OpenAI due to their previous investments.
Hypothetically he might also have very little trust in the decision making abilities of the new management and how much their future goals will align with those of Microsoft.
Boards are agents to their principals. They call the shots only as long as their principals deem them to be calling them correctly. If they don't, they get replaced. Said differently, board members are "appointed" to do the bidding of someone else. They have no inherent power. Therefore, they do not, ultimately, call the final shots. Owners do. Like I said, this situation is a little muddier because it's a non-profit that owns a for-profit company, so there's an added layer of complexity between agents and principals.
OpenAI isn't worth $90B because of its non-profit. The for-profit piece is what matters to investors, and those investors are paying the bills. Sure, the non-profit board can fire Altman and carry on with their mission, but then everyone who is there "for profit" can also pack up their things and start OpenAI 2.0 where they no longer need the non-profit, and investors will follow them. I assume that's an undesirable outcome for the board as I suspect the amount of money raised at the for-profit level dwarfs the amount donated to the non-profit... which effectively means the for-profit shareholders own the company. Hence my original comment.
When I see it, it has always been “Amazon is a competitor and we don’t buy from competitors”.
Not your premises not your compute?
Honest question, do you have a source for that? Is it conceivable that Microsoft has some clause that grants them direct access to IP if OpenAI does not meet certain requirements. It is difficult to believe that Microsoft handed over $10B without any safeguards in place. Surely they did their due diligence on OpenAI's corporate structure.
Yes, they are accountable (and I'm actually surprised at how many people seem to believe that they are not), but they are not without power. Legal and practical are not always exactly overlapping and even if the board may not ultimately hold practical power (even if they believe they do) legally speaking they do and executives function at the pleasure of the board. If the board holds a vote and the bylaws of the company allow for it and the vote passes according to those bylaws then that's that. That's one good reason to pack the board of your billions of dollars worth company with seasoned people because otherwise stuff like this may happen.
Afterwards you can do a lot about it, you can contest the vote, you can fight it in court, you can pressure board members to step down and you can sue for damage to the company based on the decision. But the board has still made a decision that is in principle a done deal. They can reverse their decision, they can yield to outside pressure and they can be overruled by a court. But you can't pretend it didn't happen and you can't ignore it.
and then there's the real leverage of money and the court of public opinion.
Microsoft has a lot of experience interacting with small companies, including in situations like this one where the small company implodes. The people there know how to protect Microsoft's interests in such scenarios, and they definitely are aware that such things can happen.
I find the outputs of LLMs to be quite organic when they are given unique identities, and especially when you explore, prune or direct their responses.
ChatGPT comes across like a really boring person who memorized Wikipedia, which is just sad. Previously the Playground completions allowed using raw GPT which let me unlock some different facets, but they’ve closed that down now.
And again, I don’t really need to feed my unique thoughts, opinions, or absurd chat scenarios into a global company trying to create AGI, or have them censor and filter for me. As an AI researcher, I want the uncensored model to play with along with no data leaving my network.
The uses of LLMs for information retrieval are great (Bing has improved alot) but the much more interesting cases for me are how they are able to parse nuance, tone, and subtext - imagine a computer that can understand feelings and respond in kind. Empathetic commuting, and it’s already here on my PC unplugged from the Internet.
13B and 7B models run easily and much faster.
Which one side or the other would declare terminated for nonperformance by the other side, perhaps while suing for breach.
> and one way or another, everyone would get a stay on everyone else
If by a stay you mean an injunction preventing a change in the arrangements, it seems unlikely that "everyone would get a stay on everyone". Likelihood of success on the merits and harm that is not possible to remediate via damages that would occur if the injunction wasn't placed are key factors for injunctions, and that's far from certain to work in any direction, and even less likely to work in both directions.
> and nothing would happen for years except court cases
Business goes on during court cases, it is very rare that everything is frozen.
Ive found that benchmarks are great as a hygiene test, but pointless when you need to get work done.
The board can maintain control of the legal aspects (such as the org itself), but in the end, people are much more important.
Organizations are easy to duplicate. Persons, less so.
I'm not saying the board doesn't make decisions or that the board is powerless, or that their decisions are not enforceable or binding. That's already known to be true, there's no value in arguing that.
I'm saying the _ultimate_ decision is made by the people with the money, inevitably. The board is allowed to continue to make decisions until they go against the interests of owners. The whole point of a board is so owners don't have to waste their time making decisions, so instead they pay someone else (directors) to do make them on their behalf.
Start making decisions that go against the people who actually run the place, and you'll find yourself in trouble soon enough.
In fact we are very much arguing that thing in the same way. But you do have to get the minutiae right because those are very important in this case. This board is about to - if they haven't already - find out where the real power is vested and it isn't with them. Which is kind of amusing because if you look at the people that make up that board some of them should have questioned their own ability to sit on this board based on qualifications (or lack thereof) alone.
I think in this case I would need to see a source to believe you, and if substantiated, it would make me question Nadellas fitness to lead a cloud computing business.
Which I later restated as "Start making decisions that go against the people who actually run the place, and you'll find yourself in trouble soon enough." (emphasis added) -- which hopefully you agree is a clear restatement of my original comment.
Meanwhile you said
> This is wildly incorrect. (...) you are just simply factually incorrect. (...) But until he is re-hired Sam Altman is to all intents and purposes fired.
But I never claimed he wasn't for all intents and purposes fired
Yet you did claim I was "wildly" and "factually incorrect" and now you're saying "we are very much arguing that thing in the same way" but "you do have to get the minutiae right". To me, minutiae was sufficiently provided in the original comment for any minimally charitable interpretation of it. Said differently, the loss of minutiae was on the reader's part, not the writer's.
Regardless, lack of minutiae is not comparable to "wildly" or "factually" incorrect. Hence I was not either of these things. QED.
There's this [1], a NYT article saying that Microsoft is leading the pressure campaign to get Altman reinstated.
And there's this [2], a Forbes article which claims the playbook is a combination of mass internal revolt, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a lawsuit from investors.
[1] https://archive.is/fEVTK#selection-517.0-521.120
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...
Well, they're all about to be out of a job, so it's a good time to catch up on sleep.