To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness. A bigger sign of weakness in my opinion is people who commit to a shitty idea just because they said it first, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The weakness was the first decision; it’s already past the point of deciding if the board is a good steward of OpenAI or not. Sometimes backtracking can be a point of strength, yes, but in this case waffling just makes them look even dumber.
If they wanted to show they’re committed to backtracking they could resign themselves.
Now it sounds more like they want to have their cake and eat it.
Lmfao you're joking if you think they "realized their mistake" and are now atoning.
This is 99% from Microsoft & OpenAI's other investors.
Exactly. You can bet there have been some very pointed exchanges about this.
At this point, I don’t care how it resolves—the people who made that decision should be removed for sheer incompetence.
But everyone important does so who cares about the rest?
It’s really dismissive toward the rank and file to think that they don’t matter at all.
b) Altman personally hired many of the rank and file.
c) OpenAI doesn't exist with customers, investors or partners. And in this one move the board has alienated all three.
Investors care, but if new management can keep the gravy track, they ultimately won’t care either.
Companies pivot all the time. Who is to say the new vision isn’t favored by the majority of the company?
I also feel, that they can patch relationships, Satya may be upset now but will he continue to be upset on Monday?
It needs to play out more before we know, I think. They need to pitch their plan to outside stakeholders now
I've honestly never had more hope for this industry than when it was apparent that Altman was pushed out by engineering for forgoing the mission to create world changing products in favor of the usual mindless cash grab.
The idea that people with a passion for technical excellence and true innovation might be able to steer OpenAI to do something amazing was almost unbelievable.
That's why I'm not too surprised to see that it probably won't really play out, and likely will end up in OpenAI turning even faster into yet another tech company worried exclusively with next quarters revenue.
Which is why every developer/partner including Microsoft is going to be watching this situation unfold with trepidation.
And I don't know how you can "keep the gravy track" when you want the company to move away from commercialisation.
Microsoft could run the entire business as a loss just to attract developers to Azure.
"Disagree and commit."
- says every CEO these days
Everything just assumes that without Sam they’re worse off.
But what if, my gosh, they aren’t? What if innovation accelerates?
My point being is it’s useless to speculate that Altman starting a new business competing with OpenAI will be successful inherently. There’s more to it than that
I also suspect they could very well secure this kind of agreement from another company that would be happy to play ball for access to OpenAI tech. Perhaps Amazon for instance, who’s AI attempts since Alexa have been lackluster
It's often a sign of incompetence though. Or rather a confirmation of it.
Which doesen't mean a lot. Of course they'd wait for this to play out before committing to anything.
> but if new management can keep the gravy track
I got the vague impression that this whole thing was partially about stopping the gravy train? In any case Microsoft won't be too happy about being entirely blindsided (if that was the case) and probably won't really trust the new management.
But it's not just him is it?
I think a wait and see approach is better. I think we had some inner politics spill public because Altman needs to the public pressure to get his job back, if I was speculating
I had the exact opposite take. If I were rank and file I'd be totally pissed how this all went down, and the fact that there are really only 2 possible outcomes:
1. Altman and Brockman announce another company (which has kind of already happened), so basically every "rank and file" person is going to have to decide which "War of the Roses" team they want to be on.
2. Altman comes back to OpenAI, which in any case will result in tons of time turmoil and distraction (obviously already has), when most rank and file people just want to do their jobs.
It reads like they ousted him because they wanted to slow the pace down, so by design and intent it would seem unlikely innovation would accelerate. Which seems doubly bad if they effectively spawned a competitor that is made up by all the other people that wanted to move faster
The signs of "weakness in leadership" by the board already happened. There is no turning back from that. The only decision is how much continued fuck-uppery they want to continue with.
Like others have said, regardless of what is the "right" direction for OpenAI, the board executed this so spectacularly poorly that even if you believe everything that has been reported about their intentions (i.e. that Altman was more concerned about commercializing and productization of AI, while Sutskever was worried about the developing AI responsibly with more safeguards), all they've done is fucked over OpenAI.
I mean, given the reports about who has already resigned (not just Altman and Brockman but also other many other folks in top engineering leadership), it's pretty clear that plenty of other people would follow Altman to whatever AI venture he wants to build. If another competitor leap frogs OpenAI, their concerns about "moving too fast" will be irrelevant.
Regarding your last sentence, it's pretty obvious that if Altman comes back, the current board will effectively be neutered (it says as much in the article). So my guess is that they're more in "what do we do to save OpenAI as an organization" than saving their own roles.