The board removed the board's chairman and fired the CEO. That's why it was called a coup.
>The shareholders can fire the board, but that’s not what he’s asking for. And so far we haven’t heard anything about them getting fired
nonprofits don't have shareholders (or shares).
Edit: nvm I missed the point was about firing the board.
Second, because the board is still the board of a Nonprofit, each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to make and distribute profit, it is subject to this mission. The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors.
Third, the board remains majority independent. Independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, does not hold equity directly. His only interest is indirectly through a Y Combinator investment fund that made a small investment in OpenAI before he was full-time.
• Employees
• Donors or whoever is paying the bills
In this case, the threat appears to be that employees will leave and the primary partners paying the bills will leave. If this means the non-profit can no longer achieve its mission, the board has failed.
I'm aware that Altman has made the same claim (close to zero equity) as you are making, and I don't see any reason why either of you would not be truthful, but it also has always just seemed very odd.
If that's the case, then the failing would be in letting it get to this point in the first place.
No wonder this is causing drama.
Pedantic, but: LLCs have "members", not "shareholders". They are similar, but not identical relations (just as LLC members are similar to, but different from, the partners in an partnership.)
Not everything is about money. He likely just likes the idea of making AI.
Sam has superior table stakes.
That's functionally true, but more complicated. The for profit "OpenAI Global LLC" that you buy ChatGPT subscriptions and API access from and in which Microsoft has a large direct investment is majority-owned by a holding company. That holding company is itself majority owned by the nonprofit, but has some other equity owners. A different entity (OpenAI GP LLC) that is wholly owned by the nonprofit controls the holding company on behalf of the nonprofit and does the same thing for the for-profit LLC on behalf of the nonprofit (this LLC seems to me to be the oddest part of the arrangement, but I am assuming that there is some purpose in nonprofit or corporate liability law that having it in this role serves.)
https://openai.com/our-structure and particularly https://images.openai.com/blob/f3e12a69-e4a7-4fe2-a4a5-c63b6...
Financial backing to make a competitor
Internal knowledge of roadmap
Media focus
Alignment with the 2nd most valuable company on the planet.
I could go on. I strongly dislike the guy but you need to recognize table stakes even in your enemy. Or you’ll be like Ilya. A naive fool who is gonna get wrecked thinking doing the “right” thing in his own mind will automatically means you win.
A true believer is going to act along the axis of their beliefs even if it ultimately results in failure. That doesn't necessarily make them naive or fools - many times they will fully understand that their actions have little or no chance of success. They've just prioritized a different value of you.
Ultimately this is good for competition and the gen-AI ecosystem, even if it's catastrophic for OpenAI.
It's a tricky situation (and this is just with a basic/possibly-incorrect understanding of what is going on). I'm sure it's much more complicated in reality.
From my read, Ilya's goal is to not work with Sam anymore, and relatedly, to focus OpenAI on more pure AGI research without needing to answer to commercial pressures. There is every indication that he will succeed in that. It's also entirely possible that that may mean less investment from Microsoft etc, less commercial success, and a narrower reach and impact. But that's the point.
Sam's always been about having a big impact and huge commercial success, so he's probably going to form a new company that poaches some top OpenAI researchers, and aggressively go after things like commercial partnerships and AI stores. But that's also the point.
Both board members are smart enough that they will probably get what they want, they just want different things.
IMO, there are basically two justifiably rational moves here: (1) ignore the noise; accept that Sam and Greg have the soft power, but they don't have the votes so they can fuck off; (2) lean into the noise; accept that you made a mistake in firing Sam and Greg and bring them back in a show of magnanimity.
Anything in between these two options is hedging their bets and will lead to them getting eaten alive.
Any decision that doesn't make the 'line go up' is considered a dumb decision. So to most people on this site, kicking Sam out of the company was a bad idea because it meant the company's future earning potential had cratered.
pushing to call it a coup is an attempt to control the narrative.
That being said, this is a case of biting the hand that feeds you. An equivalent would be if a nonprofit humiliated its biggest donor. The donor can always walk away, claiming her future donations away, but whatever she's donated stays at the nonprofit.
Sure, I guess I didn't consider them, but you can lump them into the same "media campaign" (while accepting that they're applying some additional, non-media related leverage) and you'll come to the same conclusion: the board is incompetent. Really the only argument I see against this is that the legal structure of OpenAI is such that it's actually in the board's best interest to sabotage the development of the underlying technology (i.e. the "contain the AGI" hypothesis, which I don't personally subscribe to - IMO the structure makes such decisions more difficult for purely egotistical reasons; a profit motive would be morally clarifying).
Here is what I understand by table stakes: https://brandmarketingblog.com/articles/branding-definitions...
If your objective is to suppress the technology, the emergence of an equally empowered competitor is not a development that helps your cause. In fact there's this weird moral ambiguity where your best move is to pretend to advance the tech while actually sabotaging it. Whereas by attempting to simply excise it from your own organization's roadmap, you push its development outside your control (since Sam's Newco won't be beholden to any of your sanctimonious moral constraints). And the unresolvability of this problem, IMO, is evidence of why the non-profit motive can't work.
As a side-note: it's hilarious that six months ago OpenAI (and thus Sam) was the poster child for the nanny AI that knows what's best for the user, but this controversy has inverted that perception to the point that most people now see Sam as a warrior for user-aligned AGI... the only way he could fuck this up is by framing the creation of Newco as a pursuit of safety.
Please get real.
I'd guess, OpenAI without Sam Altman and YC/VC network is toothless. And Microsoft's/VC/media leverage over them is substantial.
Why would they care about that?
I'm not sure that's actually true anymore. Look at any story about "growth", and you'll see plenty of skeptical comments. I'd say the audience has skewed pretty far from all the VC stuff.
Or they'll do something hilarious like sell VCs on a world wide cryptocurrency that is uniquely joined to an individual by their biometrics and somehow involves AI. I'm sure they could wrangle a few hundred million out of the VC class with a braindead scheme like that.
"Table stakes" simply means having enough money to sit at the table and play, nothing more. "Having a big pile of GPUs is table stakes to contest in the AI market."
Another way to think about these is that companies are basically small countries.
