Ilya Sutskever announces regret; 505 OpenAI employees sign letter asking board to resign.
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OpenAI employees revolt after board names new CEO and Altman heads to Microsoft
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From the letter:
What on earth? What's the deal with these board members, are they terrified of the Terminator or something else?
What on earth? What's the deal with these board members, are they terrified of the Terminator or something else?
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All over but the bleeding.
Scene: Your company's leadership has just been decapitated in one of the loudest, ugliest, and strangest spasms of recent corporate governance. Three quarters of your colleagues, including you, threatened to leave. And the board says "okay, we quit, Sam is back, yay!" How many reams of paper are still spent on resumes in the next, I don't know, forty five minutes? How fast would you run? I'd run really fast!
Scene: Your company's leadership has just been decapitated in one of the loudest, ugliest, and strangest spasms of recent corporate governance. Three quarters of your colleagues, including you, threatened to leave. And the board says "okay, we quit, Sam is back, yay!" How many reams of paper are still spent on resumes in the next, I don't know, forty five minutes? How fast would you run? I'd run really fast!
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Microsoft won a battle they didn't even plan to fight, that much is clear.
If I was the OpenAI board right now, I would strongly be considering an outright sale to Microsoft.
If I was the OpenAI board right now, I would strongly be considering an outright sale to Microsoft.
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The board not only nuked the company, they nuked their non-profit as well. It is nonsensical and every one of them needs to disappear for a very long time.
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I want to know what the board thought was going to happen. Did they really believe that this was going to work out, that they weren't just throwing out everything? Was there a plan, a step two after firing Altman?
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Microsoft just announced that they have developed their own custom machine learning chips. Their main contribution to OpenAI has been the donation of enormous amounts of cloud compute time for model training. It sounds like they're going their own way without OpenAI. It could be that Altman knew about this and planned to join them anyway. That's against the non-profit angle of OpenAI, which might have irked the board. They had a spat about that, and Altman left anyway. Now he may take the bulk of the company with him! Oddly, he had no stock in OpenAI. He might be getting a lot of stock from Microsoft, as will the rest of them.
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So Microsoft essentially gets to acquire OpenAI for pennies on the dollar.
Also, Sutskever's name being on the list is eyebrow-raising. As Kara Swisher said this morning, "it's him, hi, he's the problem, it's him."
Also, Sutskever's name being on the list is eyebrow-raising. As Kara Swisher said this morning, "it's him, hi, he's the problem, it's him."
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Microsoft can only buy the company if it comes with all the IP, which I doubt OpenAIs board will sell. If they do sell it, then the conspiracy hat comes on that Microsoft engineered this entire drama.
Crossposting my reply from another thread.
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The more this plays out, the less any previously offered explanation makes any sense.
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What a clusterf___! Are we sure this isn’t one big AI hallucination ? It borders on the surreal. Who saw this coming 4 days ago.
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The OpenAI board may very well be responsible for more value destruction than the Yahoo board was when they turned down Microsoft's $40 billion buyout offer back in the day. Impressive.
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In sports parlance, you don't trade for the star player who's just about to hit free agency.
What is the company qua company worth at this point? I suppose they have some fairly juicy IP, but I don't have a great feel for how much of the "value" created by OpenAI hasn't been in learning from mistakes in order to train increasingly sophisticated LLMs, and IANAL but it seems like a steep hill to climb to try to make an engineering team forget their previous mistakes.
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The guy who orchestrated Altman's firing is now demanding the board resign because of their incompetence in deciding to fire Altman?!
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board from lalaland wondering what's going on with their dreams not quite materializing
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Microsoft already has at least some IP rights from their previous deal with OpenAI.
Like I said, if I was the OpenAI board...I'm not saying Microsoft would want to/should do it when they can just hire away all the talent, but it might still be easier to buy OpenAI (or their for-profit arm, at least, depending on legal stuff I know nothing about) outright at this point...at a valuation nowhere near what it was worth on Friday morning.
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This is the best conclusion I've read based on the information that's been made public. Brilliant!
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We know if one of the Connors were in the building holding a gun to the boards head? Sarah? John?
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I think it's clear that the board is full of rank AMATEURS. They really thought they could fire Sam Altman without the entire company imploding. Absolute idiots who don't know the first thing about running a company and leading engineers who want to do their job and get paid. Quality management matters, rapid commercialization matters, and engineers are figuring that out in real time.
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OpenAI employees: "We want to make money!"
OpenAI board: "You joined a non for profit!"
OpenAI board: "You joined a non for profit!"
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Wait…what?
The guy who was the architect of ousting Altman and Brockman is now threatening to quit, and follow them to Microsoft? I’ve got that right, don’t I?
I’m sorry, but which “you” is Sutskever referring to in the letter? Isn’t it that guy in the mirror?
The guy who was the architect of ousting Altman and Brockman is now threatening to quit, and follow them to Microsoft? I’ve got that right, don’t I?
I’m sorry, but which “you” is Sutskever referring to in the letter? Isn’t it that guy in the mirror?
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It depends how much secret sauce is in ChatGPT and whether OpenAI has patents or could at least claim there are trade secrets involved? I wouldn't have thought Altman et al could move to a new company and just clone ChatGPT on Day 1.
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Yes, it appears so. It looks like Step 1 was "fire Altman," and there was no Step 2.
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I've got a brilliant idea!!!
Replace the board with AI, an AI company run by its own AI, it's brilliant, right?
Replace the board with AI, an AI company run by its own AI, it's brilliant, right?
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There won't even have to be a sale if MS wants to grunt through establishing new IP.
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With friends like this you don't need enemies, I guess....
A curse on both your houses, comes to mind...
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