zlacker

Could he be the one behind the recent coup at OpenAI, as well?

>>morale+(OP)
No. Elon Musk was not involved with the firing of Sam Altman as far as I'm aware.

The real story behind that is... complicated. First, Sam Altman allegedly does stuff that looks to be setting up a coup against the board, so the board fires Sam, but they don't provide proper context[0] and confuse everyone. So Sam gets Microsoft and a bunch of OpenAI employees to revolt and pressure the board to bring him back. He then fires the board and instates a new one, basically the original coup plan but now very much open and in the public eye.

[0] To be clear, most corporate communications try to say as little as possible about internal office politics. That can easily lead into defamation lawsuits.

>>morale+(OP)
My impression from all the stuff I’ve looked at was that one board member wrote a paper praising Anthropic’s approach with implied (or not so implied?) criticism of OpenAI’s approach. This got Altman furious. So he was going to each board member and subtly (or not so subtly?) presenting a case for her removal, using whatever reasoning, sometimes contradictory, he could tack on, maybe trying to intimidate some into compliance. This approach may have rubbed them the wrong way? Those board members communicated with each other and noted the contradictions, so they summarily fired him without consulting lawyers and without gathering a workable case file to present to stakeholders and the public. Without Altman’s relationships with the largest funders, employees got nervous and wanted information the board was rather embarrassed not to have, exacerbating the anxiety in the workforce. I’m sure that whatever the charter says about investments as donations, Microsoft had the lawyers to ensure they did not have to sink hundreds of millions into a sinking ship.

No Musk required, the individuals at OpenAI did it to themselves.

>>morale+(OP)
It suspicious, but the execution was utterly naive.