zlacker

I don't follow OpenAI or SV news all that much. Is this guy really that critical to the company? I thought Ilya Sutskever was the genius? Is this a non-compete thing, where they're scared Altman will take company secrets to a competitor, or is this dude actually a major factor in the company's success (and not just a lucky bystander)?

>>bogwog+(OP)
Ilya is certainly the brains behind ChatGPT, but I believe a lot of engineering talent recently joined OpenAI because they aligned with Sam and Greg’s vision of making consumer software and commercializing it.

So while you’re right that Sama isn’t crucial to OpenAI, I think a lot more employees are aligned with Sama’s vision.

>>bogwog+(OP)
They’re afraid he’s an actual leader and all of their talent will follow him. It doesn’t matter how good Ilya is individually, nobody is building gpt-5+ as an individual contributor.

>>bogwog+(OP)
He is one of the most well connected people in tech and probably responsible for all of their partnerships and fundraising success. His departure in this fashion would make it really hard for them to raise as much money as they will need and potentially put them on a blacklist of a lot of YC companies. To top it off he'd probably raise a few billion and poach half of the team.

>>bogwog+(OP)
Altman has been the CEO of OpenAI since early 2019, so he has been there for the whole journey from GPT-2 to GPT-4/ChatGPT and the company's shift to mostly focusing on LLMs over RL/robotics/other stuff. I can't say I know much about the degree of his involvement, but my gut feeling is that he has been heavily involved in steering the company's direction and efforts.

>>bogwog+(OP)
There’s no real evidence that the board is considering bringing him back. Team Altman is firmly in place as part of the global elite (that’s not an insinuation he literally attends Bohemian Grove) and has lots of connections and influence.

That’s pretty clearly where the stories are being sourced from. The narrative that the board was begging to get him back emerged all at once in an organized fashion.

Doesn’t prove it’s not true, maybe they are. Stranger things have happened. But definitely not something to take on faith without a clearer statement from those on the other side of the conflict.

>>bogwog+(OP)
Altman is the commercial streak of OpenAI. Investors are nervous because that's the part that actually makes money. If it was left up to Ilya, it's unlikely that OpenAI is going to reach it's full earning potential in favor of things that are more research oriented.

>>bogwog+(OP)
He made paul grahams list of 5 noteworthy start up founders in 2009: http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

After that he was Pres of ycombinator for a while.

Lucky? Sure. But I'd guess he's responsible for a significant amount of OpenAI's success.

>>m_ke+w1
To the first point, they’re hugely well known at this point and could probably continue to raise money fine without him. But to your 2nd point, they wouldn’t be doing that in a vacuum. They’d be competing against him, and he could probably still out-raise them to do the poaching.

>>preomm+q2
This really does feel like Ilya is Woz, an idealist, doing the hard work and soon to be cast aside for Altman as their Jobs. Because idealism doesn’t make people billionaires.

>>m_ke+w1
> His departure in this fashion would make it really hard for them to raise as much money as they will need and potentially put them on a blacklist of a lot of YC companies.

How does this matter anymore? OpenAI is the most known company from the last year. You don’t need specific person anymore to market about your company. If it is up to single person whether company is worth investment, then everyone just hopes that eventually OpenAI will turn to full-profit mode.

It is pretty clear, that if board wants to run company for greater good, for-profit-only CEO must leave.

>>nicce+d4
I'm not sure how this would work with their funding / ownership structure but a delaware c corp with such a high valuation and so much money raised would have to take a huge down round if it lost half the team and pissed off their largest partners (microsoft). It would usually be a bloodbath that would wipe out common shareholders and early investors, which would then lead to most early employees leaving.

>>bogwog+(OP)
Yes, that critical. Sam and Greg hired Ilya among many other world class researchers to build AI. Their business execution was so successful that replacing them with another leadership team triggered panic to investors.

>>bogwog+(OP)
The dude is the CEO. Likely he is a significant factor of success.

Have you worked for an average / incompetent boss? It is bad.

>>bogwog+(OP)
I mean he probably was an important factor in getting the commercial state of OpenAI Inc to what it is today. However a lot of people feel that he betrayed the original funding goal of OpenAI which was to work for the benefit of humanity. I'm not convinced OpenAI Inc is doing anything more for "humanities benefit" than Meta, Google, Microsoft or other players in the space.

I would like to know what is the actual reason for why they fired him though. Is there more to this story than meets the eye?

>>bogwog+(OP)
Even if he isn’t critical to OpenAI’s future there is the issue of how the board handled this. They surprised everyone from their most significant investors to their employees, which would be justified if they have a very good reason. Without an excellent reason, all of this looks capricious and incompetent.

>>nicce+d4
If it is up to single person whether company is worth investment,

Regardless of who they fired, if the board is known to make arbitrary and capricious decisions about top executives without so much as a heads up to large investors, it's not clear that any investor will see them as being worth investment.

>>nicce+d4
He can poach away half the staff IMMEDIATELY. You cannot run a company with majority of your key personnels gone in a week. Then the remaining staff will be moving over within 3mths to a year. What OpenAI will be left in a year time will be back to square one, startup mode. Whatever tech they have now it will stay stagnant. Whatever tech Altman started in his new venture will be just slightly behind what OpenAI has. Within a year Altman will supercede it. He is that important. Think Steve Jobs to Apple but AI.

>>VirusN+01
Having those people quit could be a feature, rather than a bug.

If that "vision" is the thing that you're worried about, because you think rapid commercialization is actively dangerous, then you may very well have a reason to want to completely blow up the commercial side of OpenAI. Even if it gets reconstituted elsewhere, you've at least created a speed bump by forcing it to get reconstituted.

It's inconvenient that in the medium to long term that means you wind up with fewer GPUs for the True Cause(TM), but at least the people you have working on it believe in that cause, and at least you haven't actively accelerated some destructive outcome.

>>John71+CA
Those people have kids and mortgages and car payments. And are very well compensated. They aren’t gone by this time next week. Is there any precedent for that? Nobody does that.

Yeah sure eventually he could poach people and it’s always possible that this is the beginning of a transition but there’s some seriously magical thinking going on here.

>>CPLX+kE
I have no reason to believe Sam Altman's a similar case, but have you heard of Nick Calandra? He was editor and chief of the escapist. Last week he got fired, the entire video department (~20 people) resigned and they immediately started a company together called Second Wind.

>>MrLeap+JG
Sure I’ll buy 20 employees walking. That’s plausible.

OpenAI has 700 and they’re highly compensated. How would you even onboard and meet payroll in a week for a non existent entity if you suddenly had even half that number?

Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?

>>CPLX+lI
> How would you even onboard and meet payroll in a week for a non existent entity if you suddenly had even half that number?

> Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?

Not saying it will happen but I'd honestly say this would be the least of the issues. VC's and established companies would be fighting tooth and nail to invest money in whatever venture Sam Altman/Greg Brockman + whatever % of staffers were launching. Money would not be the problem here. Think of how much money so many were willing to throw at the con-job that the vast majority of crypto was and then think of how much money they would throw at AI tools (which are clearly a big deal already).

>>TapWat+GK
I mean we’ll see.

As far as I can tell Altman’s real serious talent is getting billionaire types to like him. First Paul Graham then Elon and the initial OpenAI funders. In both cases he seems to have been dropped rather abruptly after running things for a few years.

He has never personally built meaningful tech and has definitely never actually demonstrated anything approaching popularity with any rank and file employees.

Might happen. But it sure hasn’t yet. I don’t doubt that the Davos / Bohemian Grove set will install him in another position though, he does seem to have a genuine knack for that.

>>infose+Ix
Thank you - this is one of the few reasonable takes I've seen on this whole mess. There is literally nothing Altman could have done that would justify the board having handled the situation in this way, and it makes them look grossly incompetent. Even if Altman had been engaged in some kind of criminal act, this is not the way in which you proceed. And regardless of whatever corporate structures you have in place, it is the height of naivete to think you can ignore the concerns of people who have written you a $10B check.

I do think this is a shame, because the structure had the potential to allow altruistic people to maintain some kind of governor on the commercial growth engine, but now that will be gone.

>>bogwog+(OP)
I don't think the backlash is about one person as much as it is the direction of the company. Doing something for the good of humanity is all well and good, which seems to be the boards position, but I think they really need to test themselves in the market if they want to make something good. And then there are the employees and the investors who would much rather see more money come out of this.

>>CPLX+rL
Not just the billionaire type though, right? We are discussing staff leaving with him for that very reason.

And he did VC fund-raising before that for early projects too. Give his Wikipedia a read.

He is clearly a very savvy businessman and smooth operator on a personal level. And has been involved in enough high profile successes that I don't think it is a fluke.

>>CPLX+kE
It's not like he's going to have any trouble at all raising enough money to match their compensation, and if he's going to build the ruthlessly for profit version who wouldnt switch over? These folks make too much money to care about kids and mortgages and car payments.

>>projec+FL
> Even if Altman had been engaged in some kind of criminal act, this is not the way in which you proceed.

No information came to light to back this sudden and unexpected decisions but were there criminal acts involved, it certainly would not be unexpected. CEOs get instant fired for being under investigation for criminal acts all the time. But again, 48hs later it seems clear it was not the case

>>bogwog+(OP)
He’s critical to those he’s making favours.

>>Johnny+5z
> Regardless of who they fired, if the board is known to make arbitrary and capricious decisions about top executives without so much as a heads up to large investors, it's not clear that any investor will see them as being worth investment.

It is non-profit company, so investors should not be expecting too much increased returns for their investment other than the product and cooperation what this company provides.

If firing the CEO has no significant negative impact for actual product quality or cooperation, it should not be in the intrestes of investors.

Especially, if the argument for firing is revolved around profit/non-profit future of the company, if the expectations for the original investors was right (investing non-profit). In that case, it is not arbitrary or capricious decisions. But I would of course would like to see some transparency, since we don't really know what happened yet.

>>CPLX+rL
Did Paul Graham drop him?

>>projec+FL
I think he might have been caught fundraising for a new venture in AI, but separate from OpenAI. It would be a gray-area in many other companies but as CEO, reporting to a board where he has no seat, it would be cause.

>>projec+FL
> Even if Altman had been engaged in some kind of criminal act, this is not the way in which you proceed.

Sometimes this is the _only_ way in which you proceed. If you gain knowledge of something truly egregious and don't eject the culprit you become immediately liable for any future malfeasance. Sometimes 'wow, gtfo right now' is the only safe course of action.

>>Johnny+5z
> make arbitrary and capricious decisions

You think they just acted on a whim? Why?

Why is everybody assuming that the board just flipped out and did something insane?

To me, the rational assumption is that the board - being composed of multiple people who seem fairly well-grounded, i.e. not terminally online twitter types - are acting rationally. That's supported by them acting professionally; releasing one single press release and then shutting the hell up, presumably on the advice of their lawyers.

>>154573+Wf1
>You think they just acted on a whim? Why?

Because they fired him on Friday due to unspecified "lack of trust" issues and now, 2 days later, the new interim CEO is reportedly in talks to hire him back?

Do you not see why this looks like they fired him on a whim?

>>Johnny+Qh1
> the new interim CEO is reportedly in talks to hire him back?

Literally nobody unbiased is reporting this. This reporting is _all_ coming from 'their side.' You are inside the smoke and mirrors if you can't see that.

>>154573+wf1
Unless Sam was using the AI to commit satanic sacrifices, it's hard to see what warrants expulsion at all, let alone immediate termination.

If they did have such a compelling reason to stuff their own reputation, they did a horrible job communicating it.

>>wddkcs+4q1
> they did a horrible job communicating it

I think their communication is perfectly professional. You're just expecting some weird tell-all because that's how this sector weirdly chooses to operate, just blurting shit out on twitter then thinking about the consequences later.

The wording of their press release is wonderfully professional. Discreet, generic, succinct. That's how things should be done.

It's the other side that are acting oddly. Charging into the office and taking selfies, counting public oaths of fealty on twitter? V. weird.

>>bogwog+(OP)
They likely knew if this was not a surprise, they would have been blocked from doing it by political maneuvering.

>>154573+2r1
It's true they were professional in their press releases, but they still didn't explicitly say the reason he was fired, and so people keep speculating.

>>154573+2r1
Ilya's latest tweet speaks for itself. Nothing about this was professional -

"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."

https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028?t=DjA...

>>154573+Gi1
Several days later and it's been continued to have been widely reported (backed up by Sam himself), and now this quote from Bloomberg today:

new interim CEO Emmett Shear is involved in mediating these negotiations, creating the frankly unprecedented situation where (1) the interim CEO who replaced (2) the interim CEO who replaced Sam and who (3) got replaced for trying to get Sam back is now (4) deeply involved in a new effort to get Sam back

Explain to me how this was a well thought out transition and not done on a whim? Even the new CEO who was put into place after the interim CEO is trying to get Altman back.