zlacker

It seems clear that there weren’t specific reasons, just a kind of final straw in the product announcements that made the board realize how far from the original mission the company had drifted.

Turning it into an emergency and surprise coup with innuendo of wrongdoing looks to have been a huge mistake, and may result in total loss of control where a more measured course correction could have succeeded.

>>brooks+(OP)
Whatever the case all involved look terrible.

>>brooks+(OP)
Ilya is the stereotypical genius mind that is extremely passionate yet disconnected from the real world. He got way too worked up about abstract issues, failed to see the bigger picture and had a meltdown that other board members took seriously because he's a cofounder. He is instrumental in the research but he shouldn't be running the business.

>>itchy_+Q1
Is there any way he can even stay if Altman returns? Seems like one of them is out and making their own AI venture soon.

>>itchy_+Q1
If "bigger picture" means making more money with less safety concerns, then I think he is totally right to oppose that.

>>kranke+q2
If Steve can make him stay and remain productive, he's a real business genius

>>brooks+(OP)
Yeah, it looks like Sutskever was too late in realizing how far down the path of “embrace, extend, extinguish” OpenAI had gone and made a last ditch effort to stop it.

>>kranke+q2
He could possibly stay in a pure Chief Scientist role while abdicating his board seat. But if I were a CEO, I'd have a hard time trusting a C-level role to someone whose vision is diametrically opposed to my own.

>>brooks+(OP)
Purely outside perspective, but people’ve been complaining for quite a while that OpenAI seems to have bailed on their original mission. Sure looks like Altman was capitalism’ing the whole thing—maybe not on purpose, but because it’s just the only way he knows to operate—and had kinda half-sold it to Microsoft, which sure is corroborated by folks posting on here expecting MS to now be in a position to forcibly override the nonprofit board’s decisions, and by rumors that in fact that’s what’s going on.

Looks like they were right to boot him, but may have done it way too late, having already de facto lost control due to the direction he’d guided the organization. If he comes out on top, it’ll mean the original OpenAI and its mission is dead, looks like to me, and the board was already cut out months ago but didn’t realize it yet.

>>kranke+q2
Make him the same offer he made Brockman - you can stay on as an employee but you're off the board.

>>brooks+(OP)
Does the board not have final control? Why have they agreed (in principle) to step down? I wish more of the reporting around this was specific about who has the power to do what.

>>kranke+q2
He’d probably be better off going to Meta or HuggingFace and working on getting open source as close to OpenAI’s offerings as possible. I expect that real innovation (vs. commercialization) is now fully dead at OpenAI, with them instead focusing on ROÍ for Microsoft.

>>romanh+m3
He won't. In a company, you want all employees to share the same vision. Ylia and Altman clearly don't. There is no point pretending

>>jmckib+M6
If enough employees quit or Microsoft throws some weight around, the enterprise could implode, making board-control moot.

>>hotnfr+X3
OpenAI was ideologically dead when when they sold it to MS imo

>>jmckib+M6
My understanding is that, fundamentally, the only power the board _has_ is to fire the CEO. The CEO, not wanting to be fired, is therefore incentivized to manage the board's expectations, which looks a lot like being willing to take direction from the board if you squint a bit.

The problem comes when the situations starts to resemble the line about how, if you owe a bank a billion dollars, you own the bank: if the direction the CEO has taken the company differs enough from the vision of the board, and they've had enough time to develop the company in that direction, they can kinda hold the organization hostage. Yes, the company isn't what the board really wanted it to be, but it's still worth a bajillion dollars: completely unwinding it and starting over is unthinkable, but all the options that include firing the CEO (the only real lever the board has, the foundation of all the decision-making weight that they have, remember) end up looking like that.

>>buggle+79
Ilya is not a champion of open source: "We were wrong. Flat out, we were wrong. If you believe, as we do, that at some point, AI — AGI — is going to be extremely, unbelievably potent, then it just does not make sense to open-source. It is a bad idea... I fully expect that in a few years it’s going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is just not wise."

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/15/23640180/openai-gpt-4-lau...

>>jmckib+M6
My guess is it’s hard to say exactly who has the power and where the power comes from. I bet Sam and his side don’t have any direct power, but their power in the negotiation comes from other sources, like the ability of more Sam loyalists to resign, and Microsoft legal threats which don’t have to be legitimate to be effective since they have such powerful lawyers. So on paper the board has all the power, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the real world.

>>buggle+79
He's opposed to making powerful models open source, unfortunately.

>>cwillu+Md
If you really believe in the ideology and believe that the continuation of openai is dangerous--shutting down the company completely should be an option you consider

>>itchy_+Q1
> He is instrumental in the research but he shouldn't be running the business.

To push back on this a bit. If two yet unknown people, "an Altman" and "an Ilya", both applied to YC to start a company that builds and sells AI models, guess who would get funded. Not the guy who can't build AI models.

I find it bizarre that the guy who can build is suddenly the villain-nerd who can't be trusted, and the salesman is the hero, in this community.

>>bossyT+sd
Can we use more precise language please

>>Davidz+gk
Oh, absolutely, although you'd have to consider what happens to the tech and the people who developed it: it may be better to have the out-of-control genie at least nominally under your control than not.

>>hotnfr+X3
Yeah it's interesting to me how many here on HN seem to be taking Sam's side -- I feel like I've noticed HN users in OpenAI threads mentioning how dishonest Sam is.

Sam seems to have a "move fast and break things" approach which would be appropriate for a less critical industry

>>shrimp+pk
There has been a huge cultural shift in tech towards devaluing builders and (excessively) emphasising the roles of operations and sales.

In reality you need all of them, and they are all separate talents, but things are clearly unbalanced.

>>fidotr+jo
It's how whole industrial sectors become enshittified.

>>shrimp+pk
IMHE at YC, I'd put my money on whichever talked a more monetizable game.

>>shrimp+pk
They'll definitely both get funded.

>>itchy_+Q1
He seems to have gone the way of Eliezer Yudkowsky (but with actual technical chops).

>>next_x+Uv
For a very long time I thought Eliezer was one of the least likeable people on the internet, which should be a pretty high mountain to climb. But watching him on the Lex Friedman podcast was really interesting, and putting a face to the writing helped quite a bit in humanizing him. He's obviously neuro-divergent, and obviously very flawed in a number of personality traits, but he's quite intelligent and completely obsessed for more than a decade on a specific topic. I wouldn't just outright dismiss that.

>>letmev+4f
He said in an interview 2 weeks ago that below a certain capability threshold it is beneficial and good to open source models —- but once you cross that threshold it is a bad idea.

The example he gave is a model that could independently do science.

>>jmckib+M6
Power is a fuzzy thing. You can think about power as being distributed across lots of different entities (the board, CEO, senior execs, investors, rank and file employees, etc) with some having more concentrated power (eg the board) than others (eg individual employees). However, if you create a situation (eg lots of employees decide to walk out in support of the ousted CEO) that can aggregate enough power to overcome any other single entity. That seems to be what is happening here.

It does not matter that the board has the legal power to do whatever they want eg fire the CEO. If the investors and key employees that keep the company going walk away, they end up with nothing so they might as well resign and preserve the organization rather than burn the whole thing down.

>>shrimp+uo
The word enshittified has officially been enshittified.

>>DebtDe+w4
That will keep him employed for the three nanoseconds until he gets an offer from a competitor.

>>rrdhar+Rz
Enshittiception

>>fidotr+jo
Right, I’ve noticed this trend too. It sucks and I find myself frustrated by how easily people go along with smooth talking sales/business types and allow them to take over positions of power. The truth is that builders can exist and build amazing products without the sales guys, but the sales guys would have absolutely nothing without the builders. I’d even go a step further and say that the best products are built by solo or small teams of impassioned builders and as soon as sales/business types get involved things start tending towards enshittification.