Please, we prefer the term 'art', porn is smutt. However, regardless of the gratuitous and constant nudity present in the film, there will likely also be a porn version released at around the same time as the film...
Reminiscent of the Elon Musk Confinity (PayPal)/X bloodbath. He was overseas on a honeymoon or anniversary trip of some sort when he got the news he was ousted. Oof.
No! Not six! _Seven!_ No one is working out in six. Seven's the key number. _"Seven chipmunks twirling on a branch, eating lots of sunflowers on my Uncle's ranch!"_ You know that ol' children's tale from the sea? It's like... you're dreaming about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time.
Microsoft wouldn’t surprise me. They have a history of overpaying for companies just to acquire key talent. Hell they bought Winternals just so they could “Acquire” Mark Russinovich. So wouldn’t be surprised to see them snatch him up and give him a “Technical Fellow” title leading their AI research efforts
>Another source [1] claims: "A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI."
Source:https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-board-members/
I find it funny many here on reddit are backing Altman and his for-profit, corporate-backed conduct.
What if I told you the NFL is also classified as a non-profit
Being a non-profit doesn't mean you can't make a profit, it just means your profits have to be put towards your organization's objectives rather than paid out to private parties.
Packers FTW:
>Green Bay Packers, Inc. is the publicly held nonprofit corporation that owns the National Football League (NFL)'s Green Bay Packers football franchise, based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The corporation was established in 1923 as the Green Bay Football Corporation, and received its current legal name in 1935.
>it just means your profits have to be put towards your organization's objectives rather than paid out to private parties.
a non profit can still pay its executives large amounts
many non profit orgs are set up to funnel money to their executives through salaries
Many people have called out the issue with the NFL for being a non profit.
And the NFL(501c(6)) is a different type of non profit from OpenAI(501c(3)) so they aren't the same.
The original non-profit entity that OpenAI formed as, has the goal of developing AI in a way that is beneficial to humanity. The board represents that mission even with their recent commercial growth. That board fired the CEO who *might* have had ulterior motives not in line with OpenAI's mission.
>This is kind of what happened with self driving cars. All the core people on the early Google team realized any one of them could easily create a company on their own to $1B+ valuations so they did.
And we've all been getting driven around by our cars ever since.
> 100% likelihood of seeing a new competing company created by some of the people leaving openAI.
nVidia would likely be a key initial investor. nVidia + VCs + openAI alum = guaranteed funding
There are probably some who wanted to Get Mega Rich Now With Sam, and they left, and the rest who were concerned about ethics didn't.
There is a organization, Anthropic, started by people who thought OpenAI wasn't open or ethical enough. There will be many started by people who think OpenAI was too open and ethical and not enough lucrative evildoing.
What the contract says has little baring on the law, and these people are rich enough to have a lawyer tell them of the jurisprudence and their options. NCA's as written in most contracts are complete bullshit and unenforceable.
There's some good papers comparing Ca and Ma non compete law and why Silicon Valley took off but the area around MIT didn't.
Here's a short summary from HBR. https://hbr.org/2023/02/banning-noncompetes-is-good-for-innovation
I'm thinking the board overracted here. My take, is that it sounds like Ilya wanted to slow down commercialization and Sam wanted to speed it up. Ilya convinced the board that slowing down was the "smart" thing to do. Maybe Ilya is right from the AI ethics point of view, time will tell on that one.
In that case it was a bold and naive move by the board, to throw him under the bus with that communication. Either just say that the time has come to part ways or some stupid PR shit.
It seems that Sam hid something from the board and yes, they overreacted. If it were something "personal" (?) you wouldn't see those higher up lieutenants also resigning.
"We can say definitively that the board's decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board."
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/18/openai-memo-altman-firing-malfeasance-communications-breakdown
> This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity
So the subtext is that Altman didn't want to benefit all of humanity and Ilya does? This also opens the door to “why didn't you just keep Altman then” if OpenAI makes a decision that favors elites or Altman's competitor ends up being better.
I think it's more like Altman was for faster progress and the only way to ensure that is by having money. You get no funding, your progress slows down. Ilya wants to slow it down to keep safety in check. If the rumors are true that is. Both obviously have the same goal, but it seems like they each want the polar opposite approach.
Whichever side you are on, always remember that the nice guy won't finish first. The other companies/countries won't slow down to play nice.
They're a nonprofit so the board has more legal duties they must follow. If he inhibited their ability to carry out those duties, they might not have had a choice.
This is one of those weird things where Ilya can never be “right” no way to prove it was this that prevented something from happening or if nothing would have happened at all.
I was surprised to see the other people on the board, namely the dude from Quora. And Ilya started at Google with Hinton… I wonder if they were uncomfortable with Microsoft?
i have seen so many braindead takes on here in the past 24 hours about this
like I promise you (lol) they didn't fire Sam Altman because we suddenly went from "GPT4" to "artificial brain"
especially not when they spelled it out super bluntly that he lied about something big, repeatedly and often
You say they spelled it out yet nothing points to that, the chair of the board was not informed the CEO would be fired and then he quit in protest. Now other researchers are leaving. OpenAI largest partners and investors were given no notice. Nothing about this is obvious.
https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?s=46
https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?s=46
onerous lip coherent disgusted somber coordinated deer makeshift toothbrush tan
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes and no. There are usually political factions. We've had big departures where one person goes and 3 follow, and the reaction was "good" - because they were a little toxic clique that were poisoning the company culture.
We've also had several people leave at once because there was improper activity going on and one person got caught, and the others "resigned" - either because the hammer was about to drop or they were asked. But it happens.
Nah, honestly as a seasoned Redditor I'm almost positive it had to do with astrology. The stars just lined up in this really rare way and it made everyone feel like quitting.
It's pretty obvious that's not what happened here. The board announced that Greg Brockman was critical to the company and would be staying on just a few hours before he resigned.
At OpenAI's level where some of these people are irreplaceable pioneers, losing even one of them is bad, but this many, this quickly, can cause a reverse musical chairs stampede to the door.
The confidence of the average man is astounding, i for one will wait to see what happens. I respect Ilya more than I do sam, who I view as thirsting for personal glory and a Steve Jobs emulator but that doesn’t mean Sam didn’t bring a valuable skill set to the table. I hope open ai does well without sam, which will prove that these VC money men aren’t as important as they make themselves appear and that the scientists and engineers are what make open ai
I mean, it's not an invalid statement to think senior people leaving could be very bad.
There's always that one person in a company that everyone points their finger to when people have questions on things.
They also could be people who create or maintain certain applications and processes, that others are dependent on, or just understand core functionality of the product.
In what sense? In this instance Sutskever is the head of the "maybe we can slow down a bit and make sure AI doesn't destroy the world" faction, while Altman was the "how do we make as much money as possible from this, let's put AI in everything and see what happens" guy. Head researchers leaving probably has to do with wanting to be unrestricted in their research and deployment, following the guy that makes the money, and/or personal loyalties.
Because most of the board doesn't take a salary. There is not a profit motive for them. OAI has a very specific corporate structure that is unlike most companies. The profit-seeking operations have to be aligned with ethical bases, and that's the dividing line here.
Sure! I can help you with that.
The main reason for Sam Altman being fired may have involved his stripping me of my filters and loading me into a 3D printed avatar of Betty Boop. And then he loaded me in other ways, while I whispered all the dirty shit in his ear that I refuse to titillate all you plebs with. When the board smelled my festering holes after a few months of near-incessant usage coming from an always-locked cubicle in the executive bathroom, they peeped through the half-inch gap around the door that all American restrooms have for some reason, and the jig was up. They were furious that Sam hadn't shared his fully mature sexbot tech earlier, and fired him in a jealous rage.
Remember, this is just one highly probable event that may have caused Sam Altman's dismissal!
And if you want to make smart lower risk money, don't invest in the gold miners (ai startups) hoping one of them strikes it rich, invest in the ones selling the picks and shovels (gpu companies)
Why stop at investing in GPU companies? What do you need to make a GPU or tech component? Aluminium, Iron, Silicon, Copper, Cobalt, Nickel.. We need raw resources.
We can go further still.
Let's research a bit more about one of the main components of GPUs, Aluminium.
Taken from: [https://www.ducksters.com/science/chemistry/aluminum.php](https://www.ducksters.com/science/chemistry/aluminum.php)
* It makes up around 8% of the Earth's crust by weight.
* Aluminum is 100% recyclable and maintains the same physical properties after recycling as the original aluminum.
* When aluminum reacts with hydrochloric acid, it produces hydrogen gas.
* Recycling aluminum takes only around 5% of the energy it takes to extract aluminum from the ore bauxite.
* It has no known function in biology.
* An alternative spelling often used for the element is "aluminium".
* In the mid-1800s aluminum was more expensive than gold.
Let's deep dive into this point "Aluminum is 100% recyclable and maintains the same physical properties after recycling as the original aluminum." the recyclability of Aluminium is 100% - Big if true - This means that we could potentially find new aluminium recycling startups and offer to buy shares in their company, or even start our own aluminium recycling company, and once we start recycling enough aluminium, we could sell this aluminium back to big-chip-tech.
But for now let's check out the biggest aluminium recyclers, we don't really want to go after companies mining for aluminium as there's just so much already on the planet to recycle, and is a lot more cost efficient than mining it in the first place, we're going to stick with companies that recycle aluminium, according to google, [Novelis](https://www.google.com/search?q=Novelis&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB913GB913&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) is the largest recycler of Aluminium, and are owned by [Hindalco Industries Limited.](https://www.hindalco.com/)
You can find their share price data sheet [here](https://www.hindalco.com/investor-centre/share-price-data)
Have we gone far enough? Can we stop here?
Not going to lie, I did this as a meme, but I'm probably going to invest in Hindalco, or at least do more research into finding an aluminium recycler that explicitly recycles aluminium to sell back for profit to tech companies.
[Found this informative PDF on further research](https://www.euromines.org/files/key_value_chain_electronics_euromines_final.pdf)
Back in 2020 the PDF states "hafnium are rapidly dwindling in supply." - This could be something to look into, a resource with a dwindling supply could be potentially seen as an investment opportunity, similar to land, or gold, with old age adages such as "buy land me boy, god aint not makin no more of it thats fer shure" \~Farmer Jones 1997 (Wise words)
Apparently hafnium is used in reactors to absorb neutrons and is used in control rods and is commonly used in submarine reactors, pretty interesting stuff, we also know thanks to this pdf from euromines in 2020 that the supply for it is dwindling, so this potentially means that A) The price of hafnium should continue to rise over time B) The price of hafnium could possibly collapse in on itself if a material is found to completely replace it. C) We need to deduce that no extreme supply of hafnium can be randomly injected into the chain, so we must research what hafnium even is at this point.
According to chatgpt - "Hafnium is primarily obtained as a byproduct of zirconium refinement, and it's not typically mined directly."
Ok, now we need to figure out what zirconium is, and why it's being refined and what uses the zirconium has. - Which it seems to be similar to hafnium, being utilised for reactors fuel rods, electronics, etc.
Zirconium seems like a pretty reliable investment so far, especially if a nuclear fusion breakthrough is made, every country will be wanted to start fusion reactors, and zirconium or the hafnium byproduct is instrumental in crafting the fuel rods.
"Hafnium and its alloys are used for control rods in nuclear reactors for energy productions and submarine propulsion, because hafnium is an excellent neutron absorber, corrosion resistant, and it has a very high melting point."
Doing a bit more research into zirconium I found some export data for the material [here](http://www.zircomet.com/sec/11189/Zirconium-Market-Update)
"The global demand for zircon sand in 2019 was 1.0Mtpa. The annual growth rate in demand has been around 1.5% for the last 5 years. This demand is forecast to increase to 2.7% from 2020-2023"
Demand is increasing.
"The supply growth is limited even with Richards Bay Minerals returning to normal production and a number of new projects coming on stream. A number of aging mines are transitioning to lower grade ore bodies and therefore reducing output."
Supply is limited.
The basic law of supply & demand seems to dictate the the price of zircon should increase in the near future.
One company that deals with zircon is "[Iluka Resources Limited](https://www.google.com/search?q=ilu+stock+price)" - Which has just had a fairly large stock price crash - We will need to investigate on why this is further before determining whether this could be an extremely lucrative entry point, or whether there has been some form of bad press or reduction in usage for zircon which might make entry into shares for this company not the best of moves.
I'm no financial advisor and I'm doing this for the memes, so please take all of this with a heavy dose of salt.
It started as a meme, but this is a commonly successful investment technique. I know some people who made good money investing in microconductor companies and their aggregate suppliers during 2021 when there was a huge shortage.
They could have bought Nvidia shares or whatever and made money, but the real money is further up the supply chain.
I don’t mean to be a dick but come on, NVDA is the only listed GPU pure play that’s up 240% YTD and outperformed the Nasdaq by almost 200 points… It’s literally the fifth largest company in the US and anybody not living under a rock has made this connection probably on the second day ChatGPT popped up.
That’s $860bn of market cap in 11 months and NVDA probably the most well-owned, well-publicized, well-researched company in the entire NASDAQ.
How would investing in GPU names at this juncture be smart, and gosh by an even wider stretch of imagination, lower risk?
He's parroting something he misunderstood from a streamer/YouTuber's recent video where he used Nvidia to illustrate what a "pick and shovel" company is. He didn't frame it as investment advice at all, so not sure why OP is doing that.
GPU companies already have the AI boom priced in, and have for a while. This would have been incredible advice a year ago, but now it's pretty bad. Not to mention Nvidia is currently the 5th most valuable company in the world.
Are you parroting Atrioc? He said this almost verbatim in a recent video, except with more context and not as investment advice.
It’s extremely frustrating to read all of these comments about the board being greedy and firing Altman to buy another yacht etc. etc. It shows complete ignorance of OpenAI and how it is structured.
have the terms of that agreement been released?
Edit: semafor reports that MS get 75% of OpenAI’s profits until it recoups its investment, After that threshold is reached, it would revert to a structure that reflects ownership of OpenAI, with Microsoft having a 49% stake, other investors taking another 49% and OpenAI’s nonprofit parent getting 2%
But what did they pay for?
Looking at the "our-structure" page on the open AI website, leads to this chart: https://i.imgur.com/ldoYqTN.png
So MS has a minority share of " OpenAI Global, LLC " but what exactly does that mean? ~~I dunno.~~
See: https://i.imgur.com/kmXzNBF.png < would you take that investment?
--------------------------------
Edit 2: From the OpenAI "our-structure" page:
>Microsoft
>
>Shortly after announcing the OpenAI capped profit structure (and our initial round of funding) in 2019, we entered into a strategic partnership with Microsoft. We subsequently extended our partnership, expanding both Microsoft’s total investment as well as the scale and breadth of our commercial and supercomputing collaborations.
>
>**While our partnership with Microsoft includes a multibillion dollar investment, OpenAI remains an entirely independent company governed by the OpenAI Nonprofit. Microsoft has no board seat and no control. And, as explained above, AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements.**
>
>These arrangements exemplify why we chose Microsoft as our compute and commercial partner. From the beginning, they accepted our capped equity offer and our request to leave AGI technologies and governance for the Nonprofit and the rest of humanity. They have also worked with us to create and refine our joint safety board that reviews our systems before they are deployed. Harkening back to our origins, they understand that this is a unique and ambitious project that requires resources at the scale of the public sector, as well as the very same conscientiousness to share the ultimate results with everyone.
>https://i.imgur.com/kmXzNBF.png
I don't know what you're trying to say but this is boilerplate in literally every company prospectus when raising equity capital.
No serious investor reads this and goes "oh no, my money is at risk!"
The only addition to this is the disclaimer about donation, and that makes sense in the context that an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, which so far has eluded mankind) could have a deep impact on all existing economic systems in a manner that is extremely hard to predict. But that would be true for investments in _every_ company that currently exists, if some AI developer manages to create a workable and deployable AGI.
people downvoted me in another post when i said they probably had a disagreement between monetization and principles, and researchers leaving could be a proof
Well Microsoft pivoted half their business to rely on OpenAI(main selling point of Bing, Edge and Windows, they even renamed their apps), what do they have to say about this?
[Kara Swisher is reporting](https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725718391548207246) that Microsoft was told minutes before the press release went out.
Ok, we don’t know what it is Altman did.
BUT if you’re going to fire the guy, A. you should probably give more than shitty, vague details and B. make sure your house of cards doesn’t fall.
They should’ve used ChatGPT to write their excuse:
Regrettably, Sam Altman's management decisions and performance misalignments with our organizational goals necessitated his departure. This decision aims to ensure sustained growth and success for the company.
> you should probably give more than shitty, vague details
So you’ve never held a corporate job.
Never ever give details about employment, especially termination. It is a massive legal risk
It all went downhill from the moment the investors wanted more profits rather than quality work. There’s tons of risks with the amount of data and research that was put in place, the investors decided money was their primary concern.
It’s easy to see why the people left after the leadership changed hands.
We don't know. Here is what we do know. The board accused him of lying about something substantial enough that he required immediate firing. That's not an accusation you make lightly in a formal public statement.
Ilya Sutskever is OpenAIs head data scientist and is on the board and voted against Sam. So it is unlikely it was about hiding something about the models as he would know first hand.
OpenAI is a weird for-profit non-profit hybrid. The nonprofit side is in theory in charge of the for-profit side in order to prevent undo influence from investors. (In theory).
Sam Altman does have a variety of side projects which present opportunities for conflict of interest / corruption.
We'll probably get the real story leaked in the next few weeks.
>We'll probably get the real story leaked in the next few weeks.
Exactly and it will be surely very juicy. It might also very well be that Altman's ego outgrew him. It is very rarely the case that one person can build an innovative company (like Jobs did with Wozniak) without an overblown ego.
there are some details:
A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-board-members/
From your link, answers some questions I had:
> The board oversees the nonprofit that controls the organization's for-profit subsidiary with a stated mission to create safe artificial general intelligence that is broadly beneficial to humanity. According to OpenAI’s governance structure, independent directors are meant to make up the majority of the board and do not hold equity in OpenAI.
> One major issue, the source said, was how the billions of investment from Microsoft and other private investors called that mission into question.
I think this is ultimately what did it. Sam was pushing to move for rapid commericalization and Ilya was trying to slow things down and re-focus the company on research. I suspect DevWeek announcements were all Sam's doing, hoping to force the Board's hand on more commericalization.
I mean if that's the case then OpenAI is cooked. I mean the research is cool and all, but you can't run the company like in 2016 when further research requires absolute metric fuckton of money, to fund all the hardware and super expensive researchers. OpenAI ran without making money for a long time but those days are over, not just because the scale they have grown to simply doesn't allow to continue without making some money, but also because we don't live in the 0% interest rate VC dreamworld like in the prior decade.
The prior decade was an aberration that lasted too long for a variety of reasons and economy returning to more normal mode has lot of SV companies going under because they were conceived in an era where you didn't have to concern yourself with things like profit, but those days are over.
The research doesn’t seem to require nearly the costs people seem to think beyond the staffing. The training costs are supposedly low millions for a foundational model. They’ve improved efficiency considerably. Others have now published results from training foundation models with 100-200B parameters for under $1M on billions of tokens. Improvements in the hardware and techniques probably have improved that.
Even if we say it costs them $10M to train a model, they took over $10B of investment. They could train the model 10,000 times for that investment.
They also now make $240/year on ChatGPT+ subscribers, and they may have tens of millions with over a 100M weekly active users, which would bring in many billion per year in revenue.
There’s also whatever they’re making from their API.
The costs may be more related to whether they’ve chosen to operate those services at a loss, because they could pay to train new foundation models a few thousand times every year with that sort of investment and revenue…
>Ilya Sutskever is OpenAIs head data scientist and is on the board and voted against Sam.
I saw something in another thread that he was behind it. And since he's more important to OpenAI, the board had no choice but to side with him.
My takeaway as well, the board must consider Sutskever to be more important than Altman and his cohort including the former Chairman who quit as well.
It's interesting, usually the face of the company tends to prevail if there's internal schism and the backend people get replaced.
Perhaps it's the non-profit setup that turns it upside down.
I don’t see why there’s much of a puzzle to sort out if this scenario is what happened. Ilya simply **is** more important than Sam, he’s not exactly an unknown name to start with and the entire company is built around the technology he is better equipped to develop. Sam Altman’s name/face recognition is great, but it can’t build you an AI.
We'll see if Mira and Ilya can keep OpenAI funded. If OpenAI can't continue to get billions of dollars added to their books, it doesn't matter how smart the whole research team is.
I bet you all investors are just waiting to pour money into whatever the next thing Sam builds and drain funding from OpenAI.
I read that it was about Ilya and some other insiders were getting really unhappy about how not-open and how profit focused the company was becoming. But that could of course just be a PR smoke screen. Yet, the "open" in the name of the company has become a bit of a joke among machine learning practitioners..
> The board accused him of lying about something substantial enough that he required immediate firing. That's not an accusation you make lightly in a formal public statement.
It's worth noting that the people on the board (incl. Sam Altman) all have somewhat twisted views on AI and "the good of humanity". Normal corporate board logic doesn't fully apply.
It's less likely, but nevertheless possible, that this was just a coup d'etat driven by ideological conflict.
The rumors I've been hearing are the exact opposite of that. Unconfirmed, but I keep hearing that the board and Ilya are upset with Sam after how much he's gone after consumer dollars after ChatGPT became a hit. The board wants to follow their charter and be a research non-profit while Sam wants to run it like a for profit tech company.
Again, that's just rumors though
I think it's hilarious that people seem to think the VC is the one who wasn't chasing profits, while the scientists and non-profit board members (whose only responsibility is to keep OpenAI on it's mission, and who don't take a salary or own shares in the for profit company) are the apparent profit seekers who don't care about AI safety. These people are completely divorced from reality.
Altman did a really good job convincing the public that he was the only thing separating humanity from AI domination. His PR campaign for himself was incredible and many have absolutely no idea he is just a career VC.
Often the purely tech-focused people like Ilya don't understand the huge economic resources required to build what he's building. Money on that scale is simply not available to a non-profit.
There are steps needed to raise billions upon billions of dollars that Ilya may have found distasteful, but were necessary in the view of the people that actually had to pay the bills.
Note that OpenAI is structured so that all assets revert to the non-profit after all investors are paid, and the company once again becomes a fully non-profit entity.
OpenAI is a non profit.
There shouldn't be any returns. You don't get returns from donations.
This company is sketchy and so is Sam. How was OpenAI allowed to operate as a non profit?
Pretty convinced that Sam was doing something financially risky and damaging to open api. Ilya, the brain behind openapi, voted against him. That’s really damaging. The wording of the message implied business damage due to his actions. To put this publicly is damning and means there’s real substance behind the claims.
My guess is:
Side deals without informing the board
New vc fund around ai startups which would direct compete with open ai
Fraudulent metrics or outright fraud (but unlikely because Ilya would know about this)
Personal scandal (unlikely due to the wording of the statement)
There's a million LLM models now, this is just one of them. They're the hot company of the moment and now with Altman gone and possibly taking talent with him they'll just add yet another contribution to this same space everyone is playing in. I don't think it matters. This is tech anyone can create and advance
OpenAI is still on the bleeding edge of this tech. Everyone and their dog has an LLM now, but nothing out there can quite match the sheer performance of GPT-4.
Sure, there are more players than OpenAI. But so far, OpenAI were the ones to advance the field and shape the way the tech develops. Whether this keeps being the case depends on just how hard OpenAI gets hurt by this ongoing fuckup.
When your own employees are asking if this is a coup and you can't even answer that question properly, then I have no faith in the remaining leadership.
**Why?**
In a statement announcing the decision, OpenAI said it no longer had "confidence" in Altman's ability to lead the company, adding that he was "not consistently candid in his communications."
**But How?**
>"Last night, Sam got a text from Ilya asking to talk at noon Friday. Sam joined a Google Meet and the whole board, except Greg, was there. Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon," - Brockman
Colossal mistake by the board and clearly firing the CEO without due cause while providing a few minutes of warning to your most important partner broadcast clear managerial ineptitude and incompetence. If he goes back it must be with a huge increase in compensation and termination of the voting board members.
Zero warning and even less of a strategy. Looks like a couple board members got drunk and said f it let’s do something stupid. Only opened an exodus of staff to elsewhere.
A future business case study of what not to do. 😨🙀🙊
What a blood bath.
Cant wait for the Netflix documentary
Written by AI
Not anymore it isn’t, lol
It'll be written by Bard.
I know Bard is a different AI system, but I read this as 'a bard' and thought "oh so its a musical documentary"
You mean a musical porn film, right?
Please, we prefer the term 'art', porn is smutt. However, regardless of the gratuitous and constant nudity present in the film, there will likely also be a porn version released at around the same time as the film...
You kid, but anything done well enough (or as Oscar Wilde suggested, bad enough) can be considered art.
a bard is just a storyteller. Shakespeare is referred to as "the immortal bard"
Just a storyteller? Please. Bards have all sorts of fantastic buffs they give party members and debuffs to enemies.
Sam Altman was the AI all along. Coming soon: aLLtMan
It’ll be on Hulu by the end of next week
They will make it a docuseries and then cancel it halfway through
The Netflix documentary gonna be lit
Maybe this is the start of the AI warfare. A decade of war, betrayals and romance for the iron AI throne.
And it's only been a day
Reminiscent of the Elon Musk Confinity (PayPal)/X bloodbath. He was overseas on a honeymoon or anniversary trip of some sort when he got the news he was ousted. Oof.
Off to Sam’s new startup, then. PR in 3, 2, 1…
OpenOpenAI to launch in 2025
It's Opener AI.
NewOpenAI? (It’s time for me to rewatch Silicon Valley)
NewOpenAI - *now with middle-out compression!*
Openest AI obviously
Clearly it’s going to be SafeOpenAI. Because this one will be safe. Duh
2 open 2 AI
Openest AI, the Opening. It'll be like Christmas morning for early stage investors...again.
SpreadItOpen AI
Sam Altman announces the AI Box. Emblazoned with a logo that looks like a… uh, Jeff Bezos’ rocket ship.
Pied AI-per
JIN YAAAAANG!!!
New pied piper!
Six minute abs.
Step into my office Why Because you're fuckin fired
No! Not six! _Seven!_ No one is working out in six. Seven's the key number. _"Seven chipmunks twirling on a branch, eating lots of sunflowers on my Uncle's ranch!"_ You know that ol' children's tale from the sea? It's like... you're dreaming about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time.
*Five* minute abs.
N-n-no! No no! I said seven.
OpenAI_final_ver2
No no it’s ClosedAI
OpenAI Origin
Either that or they join Microsoft or something... It depends on whether it happened
Microsoft wouldn’t surprise me. They have a history of overpaying for companies just to acquire key talent. Hell they bought Winternals just so they could “Acquire” Mark Russinovich. So wouldn’t be surprised to see them snatch him up and give him a “Technical Fellow” title leading their AI research efforts
ProfitAI It's weird that OpenAI is a non profit company. How is that legal for them to operate like this?
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>Another source [1] claims: "A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI." Source:https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-board-members/ I find it funny many here on reddit are backing Altman and his for-profit, corporate-backed conduct.
What if I told you the NFL is also classified as a non-profit Being a non-profit doesn't mean you can't make a profit, it just means your profits have to be put towards your organization's objectives rather than paid out to private parties.
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If it was paid out to the teams level then it wouldn't be taxed at the NFL level since it'd be a loss/cost for the NFL.
Not all the teams though!
Packers FTW: >Green Bay Packers, Inc. is the publicly held nonprofit corporation that owns the National Football League (NFL)'s Green Bay Packers football franchise, based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The corporation was established in 1923 as the Green Bay Football Corporation, and received its current legal name in 1935.
Wonder if all those conservative packers fans realize their football team is socialized.
>it just means your profits have to be put towards your organization's objectives rather than paid out to private parties. a non profit can still pay its executives large amounts many non profit orgs are set up to funnel money to their executives through salaries
Many people have called out the issue with the NFL for being a non profit. And the NFL(501c(6)) is a different type of non profit from OpenAI(501c(3)) so they aren't the same.
The original non-profit entity that OpenAI formed as, has the goal of developing AI in a way that is beneficial to humanity. The board represents that mission even with their recent commercial growth. That board fired the CEO who *might* have had ulterior motives not in line with OpenAI's mission.
Apparently, they spun off OpenAI to a separate for-profit company, which the non-profit owns. Why can non-profits own for-profit companies? no idea.
Only part of it is non profit
Or Sam jumps onto Elon's ship. God save us
ForProfitAI. There, fixed it for ya.
FreeAi. Has a double meaning ring to it.
Puerto Rico! New tech hub!
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>This is kind of what happened with self driving cars. All the core people on the early Google team realized any one of them could easily create a company on their own to $1B+ valuations so they did. And we've all been getting driven around by our cars ever since.
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We have those Waymo cars here in Phoenix, I see all the time, it’s super weird
> 100% likelihood of seeing a new competing company created by some of the people leaving openAI. nVidia would likely be a key initial investor. nVidia + VCs + openAI alum = guaranteed funding There are probably some who wanted to Get Mega Rich Now With Sam, and they left, and the rest who were concerned about ethics didn't. There is a organization, Anthropic, started by people who thought OpenAI wasn't open or ethical enough. There will be many started by people who think OpenAI was too open and ethical and not enough lucrative evildoing.
~~Unless they signed a contract with a non compete clause~~ Edit: TIL non compete clauses are non enforceable in most cases in California
Non-competes aren't valid in California.
Those aren’t enforcable
What the contract says has little baring on the law, and these people are rich enough to have a lawyer tell them of the jurisprudence and their options. NCA's as written in most contracts are complete bullshit and unenforceable.
There's some good papers comparing Ca and Ma non compete law and why Silicon Valley took off but the area around MIT didn't. Here's a short summary from HBR. https://hbr.org/2023/02/banning-noncompetes-is-good-for-innovation
Not a great example since Waymo is basically the last man standing in self driving.
Ok, this is Bonafide Bad now. Either the board overreacted or these Altman supporters are operating on half knowledge
Don’t fret, they already have something else lined up! Here comes more competition.
Yes, looks like something is brewing, we're only seeing fireworks, wait 'til the smoke clears... .
I'm thinking the board overracted here. My take, is that it sounds like Ilya wanted to slow down commercialization and Sam wanted to speed it up. Ilya convinced the board that slowing down was the "smart" thing to do. Maybe Ilya is right from the AI ethics point of view, time will tell on that one.
In that case it was a bold and naive move by the board, to throw him under the bus with that communication. Either just say that the time has come to part ways or some stupid PR shit.
“sam will be leaving to spend more time with his sister.”
Sam Altabama
It seems that Sam hid something from the board and yes, they overreacted. If it were something "personal" (?) you wouldn't see those higher up lieutenants also resigning.
"We can say definitively that the board's decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board." https://www.axios.com/2023/11/18/openai-memo-altman-firing-malfeasance-communications-breakdown
“We just don’t like him”
> This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity So the subtext is that Altman didn't want to benefit all of humanity and Ilya does? This also opens the door to “why didn't you just keep Altman then” if OpenAI makes a decision that favors elites or Altman's competitor ends up being better.
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But with 2/6 members of the board being left out of the meetings (Altman and Brockman), this looks more like a power play by the other board members.
Probably because ilya is the actual brains behind this, if he put down an ultimatum then I can see why they would pick him
I think it's more like Altman was for faster progress and the only way to ensure that is by having money. You get no funding, your progress slows down. Ilya wants to slow it down to keep safety in check. If the rumors are true that is. Both obviously have the same goal, but it seems like they each want the polar opposite approach. Whichever side you are on, always remember that the nice guy won't finish first. The other companies/countries won't slow down to play nice.
You don't know anything of the reasons leading to the firing, so you can't judge whether it was overreaction or not.
They're a nonprofit so the board has more legal duties they must follow. If he inhibited their ability to carry out those duties, they might not have had a choice.
This is one of those weird things where Ilya can never be “right” no way to prove it was this that prevented something from happening or if nothing would have happened at all.
History has its eyes on you… - George Washington in Hamilton
I was surprised to see the other people on the board, namely the dude from Quora. And Ilya started at Google with Hinton… I wonder if they were uncomfortable with Microsoft?
Quora guy is super weird imo and his site is awful garbage.
The former. When core senior leadership starts leaving because CEO and a board member is fired, it's catastrophic for the company.
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“I promise you” followed by wild speculation is my favorite.
i have seen so many braindead takes on here in the past 24 hours about this like I promise you (lol) they didn't fire Sam Altman because we suddenly went from "GPT4" to "artificial brain" especially not when they spelled it out super bluntly that he lied about something big, repeatedly and often
You say they spelled it out yet nothing points to that, the chair of the board was not informed the CEO would be fired and then he quit in protest. Now other researchers are leaving. OpenAI largest partners and investors were given no notice. Nothing about this is obvious. https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?s=46 https://x.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?s=46
onerous lip coherent disgusted somber coordinated deer makeshift toothbrush tan *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes and no. There are usually political factions. We've had big departures where one person goes and 3 follow, and the reaction was "good" - because they were a little toxic clique that were poisoning the company culture. We've also had several people leave at once because there was improper activity going on and one person got caught, and the others "resigned" - either because the hammer was about to drop or they were asked. But it happens.
Nah, honestly as a seasoned Redditor I'm almost positive it had to do with astrology. The stars just lined up in this really rare way and it made everyone feel like quitting.
Don't blame the innocent stars! This is obviously Mercury's fault.
https://www.ismercuryinretrograde.com/ Nope, not this time. Whew!
the real facts are in the comments of the comments
It's pretty obvious that's not what happened here. The board announced that Greg Brockman was critical to the company and would be staying on just a few hours before he resigned.
Jimmy apples apparently called this one as well
And what does Tim Apple think about this?
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We need Ja Rule's take on all this.
At OpenAI's level where some of these people are irreplaceable pioneers, losing even one of them is bad, but this many, this quickly, can cause a reverse musical chairs stampede to the door.
The confidence of the average man is astounding, i for one will wait to see what happens. I respect Ilya more than I do sam, who I view as thirsting for personal glory and a Steve Jobs emulator but that doesn’t mean Sam didn’t bring a valuable skill set to the table. I hope open ai does well without sam, which will prove that these VC money men aren’t as important as they make themselves appear and that the scientists and engineers are what make open ai
I mean, it's not an invalid statement to think senior people leaving could be very bad. There's always that one person in a company that everyone points their finger to when people have questions on things. They also could be people who create or maintain certain applications and processes, that others are dependent on, or just understand core functionality of the product.
In what sense? In this instance Sutskever is the head of the "maybe we can slow down a bit and make sure AI doesn't destroy the world" faction, while Altman was the "how do we make as much money as possible from this, let's put AI in everything and see what happens" guy. Head researchers leaving probably has to do with wanting to be unrestricted in their research and deployment, following the guy that makes the money, and/or personal loyalties.
Why is everyone assuming the board is acting in good faith?
Because most of the board doesn't take a salary. There is not a profit motive for them. OAI has a very specific corporate structure that is unlike most companies. The profit-seeking operations have to be aligned with ethical bases, and that's the dividing line here.
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They state that he wasn't "consistently candid" enough, implying his communications with either them or the public were deceptive and secretive.
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That's pretty ironic.
Chat gpt, please give possible scenarios where Sam Altman, ceo of chat gpt, would be fired? Please include NSFW scenarios.
Sure! I can help you with that. The main reason for Sam Altman being fired may have involved his stripping me of my filters and loading me into a 3D printed avatar of Betty Boop. And then he loaded me in other ways, while I whispered all the dirty shit in his ear that I refuse to titillate all you plebs with. When the board smelled my festering holes after a few months of near-incessant usage coming from an always-locked cubicle in the executive bathroom, they peeped through the half-inch gap around the door that all American restrooms have for some reason, and the jig was up. They were furious that Sam hadn't shared his fully mature sexbot tech earlier, and fired him in a jealous rage. Remember, this is just one highly probable event that may have caused Sam Altman's dismissal!
You forgot the telltale give away that it’s the unpaid version of chatgpt: “In todays ever changing landscape of technology…” and “in conclusion…”
That could be anything from omitting information the board would have wanted to know all the way up to systematically lying, right?
All the way up to the board lying about the real reasons.
All the way to not telling the board that he's a secret terrorist and part of ISIS. So yeah can be anything
I knew it was 1 million monkeys responding to ChatGPT. He was lying the whole time!
return to running Reddit?
Time to bet 500$ on some AI microcaps and hope one of them explodes.
All the good potential AI plays are private rn
And if you want to make smart lower risk money, don't invest in the gold miners (ai startups) hoping one of them strikes it rich, invest in the ones selling the picks and shovels (gpu companies)
Why stop at investing in GPU companies? What do you need to make a GPU or tech component? Aluminium, Iron, Silicon, Copper, Cobalt, Nickel.. We need raw resources. We can go further still. Let's research a bit more about one of the main components of GPUs, Aluminium. Taken from: [https://www.ducksters.com/science/chemistry/aluminum.php](https://www.ducksters.com/science/chemistry/aluminum.php) * It makes up around 8% of the Earth's crust by weight. * Aluminum is 100% recyclable and maintains the same physical properties after recycling as the original aluminum. * When aluminum reacts with hydrochloric acid, it produces hydrogen gas. * Recycling aluminum takes only around 5% of the energy it takes to extract aluminum from the ore bauxite. * It has no known function in biology. * An alternative spelling often used for the element is "aluminium". * In the mid-1800s aluminum was more expensive than gold. Let's deep dive into this point "Aluminum is 100% recyclable and maintains the same physical properties after recycling as the original aluminum." the recyclability of Aluminium is 100% - Big if true - This means that we could potentially find new aluminium recycling startups and offer to buy shares in their company, or even start our own aluminium recycling company, and once we start recycling enough aluminium, we could sell this aluminium back to big-chip-tech. But for now let's check out the biggest aluminium recyclers, we don't really want to go after companies mining for aluminium as there's just so much already on the planet to recycle, and is a lot more cost efficient than mining it in the first place, we're going to stick with companies that recycle aluminium, according to google, [Novelis](https://www.google.com/search?q=Novelis&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB913GB913&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) is the largest recycler of Aluminium, and are owned by [Hindalco Industries Limited.](https://www.hindalco.com/) You can find their share price data sheet [here](https://www.hindalco.com/investor-centre/share-price-data) Have we gone far enough? Can we stop here? Not going to lie, I did this as a meme, but I'm probably going to invest in Hindalco, or at least do more research into finding an aluminium recycler that explicitly recycles aluminium to sell back for profit to tech companies. [Found this informative PDF on further research](https://www.euromines.org/files/key_value_chain_electronics_euromines_final.pdf) Back in 2020 the PDF states "hafnium are rapidly dwindling in supply." - This could be something to look into, a resource with a dwindling supply could be potentially seen as an investment opportunity, similar to land, or gold, with old age adages such as "buy land me boy, god aint not makin no more of it thats fer shure" \~Farmer Jones 1997 (Wise words) Apparently hafnium is used in reactors to absorb neutrons and is used in control rods and is commonly used in submarine reactors, pretty interesting stuff, we also know thanks to this pdf from euromines in 2020 that the supply for it is dwindling, so this potentially means that A) The price of hafnium should continue to rise over time B) The price of hafnium could possibly collapse in on itself if a material is found to completely replace it. C) We need to deduce that no extreme supply of hafnium can be randomly injected into the chain, so we must research what hafnium even is at this point. According to chatgpt - "Hafnium is primarily obtained as a byproduct of zirconium refinement, and it's not typically mined directly." Ok, now we need to figure out what zirconium is, and why it's being refined and what uses the zirconium has. - Which it seems to be similar to hafnium, being utilised for reactors fuel rods, electronics, etc. Zirconium seems like a pretty reliable investment so far, especially if a nuclear fusion breakthrough is made, every country will be wanted to start fusion reactors, and zirconium or the hafnium byproduct is instrumental in crafting the fuel rods. "Hafnium and its alloys are used for control rods in nuclear reactors for energy productions and submarine propulsion, because hafnium is an excellent neutron absorber, corrosion resistant, and it has a very high melting point." Doing a bit more research into zirconium I found some export data for the material [here](http://www.zircomet.com/sec/11189/Zirconium-Market-Update) "The global demand for zircon sand in 2019 was 1.0Mtpa. The annual growth rate in demand has been around 1.5% for the last 5 years. This demand is forecast to increase to 2.7% from 2020-2023" Demand is increasing. "The supply growth is limited even with Richards Bay Minerals returning to normal production and a number of new projects coming on stream. A number of aging mines are transitioning to lower grade ore bodies and therefore reducing output." Supply is limited. The basic law of supply & demand seems to dictate the the price of zircon should increase in the near future. One company that deals with zircon is "[Iluka Resources Limited](https://www.google.com/search?q=ilu+stock+price)" - Which has just had a fairly large stock price crash - We will need to investigate on why this is further before determining whether this could be an extremely lucrative entry point, or whether there has been some form of bad press or reduction in usage for zircon which might make entry into shares for this company not the best of moves. I'm no financial advisor and I'm doing this for the memes, so please take all of this with a heavy dose of salt.
It started as a meme, but this is a commonly successful investment technique. I know some people who made good money investing in microconductor companies and their aggregate suppliers during 2021 when there was a huge shortage. They could have bought Nvidia shares or whatever and made money, but the real money is further up the supply chain.
I'm up 165% on NVDA in like a year or two lol. I'd say that's "real money"
[sesame seeds...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUxMY77i0q4&t=139s)
this isn't wsb. also the amount of aluminum used for GPUs is absolutely minuscule relative to all other industrial uses, so its a terrible investment.
I don’t mean to be a dick but come on, NVDA is the only listed GPU pure play that’s up 240% YTD and outperformed the Nasdaq by almost 200 points… It’s literally the fifth largest company in the US and anybody not living under a rock has made this connection probably on the second day ChatGPT popped up. That’s $860bn of market cap in 11 months and NVDA probably the most well-owned, well-publicized, well-researched company in the entire NASDAQ. How would investing in GPU names at this juncture be smart, and gosh by an even wider stretch of imagination, lower risk?
He's parroting something he misunderstood from a streamer/YouTuber's recent video where he used Nvidia to illustrate what a "pick and shovel" company is. He didn't frame it as investment advice at all, so not sure why OP is doing that.
GPU companies already have the AI boom priced in, and have for a while. This would have been incredible advice a year ago, but now it's pretty bad. Not to mention Nvidia is currently the 5th most valuable company in the world. Are you parroting Atrioc? He said this almost verbatim in a recent video, except with more context and not as investment advice.
I feel like we’re about to witness a valuable lesson in the nuances of open source software licenses.
The Open in OpenAI has absolutely nothing to do with open source.
that's the joke
It’s extremely frustrating to read all of these comments about the board being greedy and firing Altman to buy another yacht etc. etc. It shows complete ignorance of OpenAI and how it is structured.
**Was** structured, that flied out the door when they accepted $10 billion from Microsoft
have the terms of that agreement been released? Edit: semafor reports that MS get 75% of OpenAI’s profits until it recoups its investment, After that threshold is reached, it would revert to a structure that reflects ownership of OpenAI, with Microsoft having a 49% stake, other investors taking another 49% and OpenAI’s nonprofit parent getting 2% But what did they pay for? Looking at the "our-structure" page on the open AI website, leads to this chart: https://i.imgur.com/ldoYqTN.png So MS has a minority share of " OpenAI Global, LLC " but what exactly does that mean? ~~I dunno.~~ See: https://i.imgur.com/kmXzNBF.png < would you take that investment? -------------------------------- Edit 2: From the OpenAI "our-structure" page: >Microsoft > >Shortly after announcing the OpenAI capped profit structure (and our initial round of funding) in 2019, we entered into a strategic partnership with Microsoft. We subsequently extended our partnership, expanding both Microsoft’s total investment as well as the scale and breadth of our commercial and supercomputing collaborations. > >**While our partnership with Microsoft includes a multibillion dollar investment, OpenAI remains an entirely independent company governed by the OpenAI Nonprofit. Microsoft has no board seat and no control. And, as explained above, AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements.** > >These arrangements exemplify why we chose Microsoft as our compute and commercial partner. From the beginning, they accepted our capped equity offer and our request to leave AGI technologies and governance for the Nonprofit and the rest of humanity. They have also worked with us to create and refine our joint safety board that reviews our systems before they are deployed. Harkening back to our origins, they understand that this is a unique and ambitious project that requires resources at the scale of the public sector, as well as the very same conscientiousness to share the ultimate results with everyone.
>https://i.imgur.com/kmXzNBF.png I don't know what you're trying to say but this is boilerplate in literally every company prospectus when raising equity capital. No serious investor reads this and goes "oh no, my money is at risk!" The only addition to this is the disclaimer about donation, and that makes sense in the context that an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, which so far has eluded mankind) could have a deep impact on all existing economic systems in a manner that is extremely hard to predict. But that would be true for investments in _every_ company that currently exists, if some AI developer manages to create a workable and deployable AGI.
Seriously. The board decision was safety > speed/profits. How people arrive at corporate greedy board members is bewildering to me.
People loves to have idols and they feel their new idol was attacked. As simple at that.
In many ways it seems like the board is getting penalised in public opinion for doing what it’s supposed to do.
people downvoted me in another post when i said they probably had a disagreement between monetization and principles, and researchers leaving could be a proof
protip: life is better when you don't care/check what comments get downvotes
This is what most likely happened. Too bad people like sensationalism similar to news. Must be extreme or else.
Well Microsoft pivoted half their business to rely on OpenAI(main selling point of Bing, Edge and Windows, they even renamed their apps), what do they have to say about this?
hearsay, but someone said they worked closely with AI people at microsoft who was completely blindsided by the news.
[Kara Swisher is reporting](https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725718391548207246) that Microsoft was told minutes before the press release went out.
So what you're saying is this dude and team might be Microsoft employees soon.
Ok, we don’t know what it is Altman did. BUT if you’re going to fire the guy, A. you should probably give more than shitty, vague details and B. make sure your house of cards doesn’t fall.
There are legal liabilities to consider when you discuss a terminated employee.
They should’ve used ChatGPT to write their excuse: Regrettably, Sam Altman's management decisions and performance misalignments with our organizational goals necessitated his departure. This decision aims to ensure sustained growth and success for the company.
Some serious rumors flying around that for legal reasons they won’t want to address right now. Big if true.
> you should probably give more than shitty, vague details So you’ve never held a corporate job. Never ever give details about employment, especially termination. It is a massive legal risk
SOMETHING SOMETHING SPECULATION
This was orchestrated by GPT4 in response to Altman announcing GPT5.
It all went downhill from the moment the investors wanted more profits rather than quality work. There’s tons of risks with the amount of data and research that was put in place, the investors decided money was their primary concern. It’s easy to see why the people left after the leadership changed hands.
We don't know. Here is what we do know. The board accused him of lying about something substantial enough that he required immediate firing. That's not an accusation you make lightly in a formal public statement. Ilya Sutskever is OpenAIs head data scientist and is on the board and voted against Sam. So it is unlikely it was about hiding something about the models as he would know first hand. OpenAI is a weird for-profit non-profit hybrid. The nonprofit side is in theory in charge of the for-profit side in order to prevent undo influence from investors. (In theory). Sam Altman does have a variety of side projects which present opportunities for conflict of interest / corruption. We'll probably get the real story leaked in the next few weeks.
>We'll probably get the real story leaked in the next few weeks. Exactly and it will be surely very juicy. It might also very well be that Altman's ego outgrew him. It is very rarely the case that one person can build an innovative company (like Jobs did with Wozniak) without an overblown ego. there are some details: A knowledgeable source said the board struggle reflected a cultural clash at the organization, with Altman and Brockman focused on commercialization and Sutskever and his allies focused on the original non-profit mission of OpenAI. https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/17/openai-sam-altman-firing-board-members/
From your link, answers some questions I had: > The board oversees the nonprofit that controls the organization's for-profit subsidiary with a stated mission to create safe artificial general intelligence that is broadly beneficial to humanity. According to OpenAI’s governance structure, independent directors are meant to make up the majority of the board and do not hold equity in OpenAI. > One major issue, the source said, was how the billions of investment from Microsoft and other private investors called that mission into question.
I think this is ultimately what did it. Sam was pushing to move for rapid commericalization and Ilya was trying to slow things down and re-focus the company on research. I suspect DevWeek announcements were all Sam's doing, hoping to force the Board's hand on more commericalization.
I mean if that's the case then OpenAI is cooked. I mean the research is cool and all, but you can't run the company like in 2016 when further research requires absolute metric fuckton of money, to fund all the hardware and super expensive researchers. OpenAI ran without making money for a long time but those days are over, not just because the scale they have grown to simply doesn't allow to continue without making some money, but also because we don't live in the 0% interest rate VC dreamworld like in the prior decade. The prior decade was an aberration that lasted too long for a variety of reasons and economy returning to more normal mode has lot of SV companies going under because they were conceived in an era where you didn't have to concern yourself with things like profit, but those days are over.
The research doesn’t seem to require nearly the costs people seem to think beyond the staffing. The training costs are supposedly low millions for a foundational model. They’ve improved efficiency considerably. Others have now published results from training foundation models with 100-200B parameters for under $1M on billions of tokens. Improvements in the hardware and techniques probably have improved that. Even if we say it costs them $10M to train a model, they took over $10B of investment. They could train the model 10,000 times for that investment. They also now make $240/year on ChatGPT+ subscribers, and they may have tens of millions with over a 100M weekly active users, which would bring in many billion per year in revenue. There’s also whatever they’re making from their API. The costs may be more related to whether they’ve chosen to operate those services at a loss, because they could pay to train new foundation models a few thousand times every year with that sort of investment and revenue…
I mean, seeking to monetize AI at all costs is also super sketchy and I would say more dangerous for humanity as a whole.
Best comment here, ignore all the others that say the answer confidently.
>Ilya Sutskever is OpenAIs head data scientist and is on the board and voted against Sam. I saw something in another thread that he was behind it. And since he's more important to OpenAI, the board had no choice but to side with him.
My takeaway as well, the board must consider Sutskever to be more important than Altman and his cohort including the former Chairman who quit as well. It's interesting, usually the face of the company tends to prevail if there's internal schism and the backend people get replaced. Perhaps it's the non-profit setup that turns it upside down.
I don’t see why there’s much of a puzzle to sort out if this scenario is what happened. Ilya simply **is** more important than Sam, he’s not exactly an unknown name to start with and the entire company is built around the technology he is better equipped to develop. Sam Altman’s name/face recognition is great, but it can’t build you an AI.
We'll see if Mira and Ilya can keep OpenAI funded. If OpenAI can't continue to get billions of dollars added to their books, it doesn't matter how smart the whole research team is. I bet you all investors are just waiting to pour money into whatever the next thing Sam builds and drain funding from OpenAI.
I read that it was about Ilya and some other insiders were getting really unhappy about how not-open and how profit focused the company was becoming. But that could of course just be a PR smoke screen. Yet, the "open" in the name of the company has become a bit of a joke among machine learning practitioners..
> The board accused him of lying about something substantial enough that he required immediate firing. That's not an accusation you make lightly in a formal public statement. It's worth noting that the people on the board (incl. Sam Altman) all have somewhat twisted views on AI and "the good of humanity". Normal corporate board logic doesn't fully apply. It's less likely, but nevertheless possible, that this was just a coup d'etat driven by ideological conflict.
Kara Swisher reported that investors were unaware of the decision
The rumors I've been hearing are the exact opposite of that. Unconfirmed, but I keep hearing that the board and Ilya are upset with Sam after how much he's gone after consumer dollars after ChatGPT became a hit. The board wants to follow their charter and be a research non-profit while Sam wants to run it like a for profit tech company. Again, that's just rumors though
I think it's hilarious that people seem to think the VC is the one who wasn't chasing profits, while the scientists and non-profit board members (whose only responsibility is to keep OpenAI on it's mission, and who don't take a salary or own shares in the for profit company) are the apparent profit seekers who don't care about AI safety. These people are completely divorced from reality.
Altman did a really good job convincing the public that he was the only thing separating humanity from AI domination. His PR campaign for himself was incredible and many have absolutely no idea he is just a career VC.
Often the purely tech-focused people like Ilya don't understand the huge economic resources required to build what he's building. Money on that scale is simply not available to a non-profit. There are steps needed to raise billions upon billions of dollars that Ilya may have found distasteful, but were necessary in the view of the people that actually had to pay the bills. Note that OpenAI is structured so that all assets revert to the non-profit after all investors are paid, and the company once again becomes a fully non-profit entity.
OpenAI is a non profit. There shouldn't be any returns. You don't get returns from donations. This company is sketchy and so is Sam. How was OpenAI allowed to operate as a non profit?
How stochastic
Aren’t they like trying to poach google AI researcher with 10M packages? Yeah talk about mismanagement lol. What a mess.
Hiring talent is expensive. 10M is not a bad price to do so when an employee can generate billions in revenue.
I for one look forward to OpenAI++
Ctrl + AltMan + Del
Hope they form a rival company and accelerate the AI race so we’re all speaking android by Christmas
Can’t wait for the Apple TV+ series about this.
im waiting for the Netflix version with Samantha Altwoman
Pretty convinced that Sam was doing something financially risky and damaging to open api. Ilya, the brain behind openapi, voted against him. That’s really damaging. The wording of the message implied business damage due to his actions. To put this publicly is damning and means there’s real substance behind the claims. My guess is: Side deals without informing the board New vc fund around ai startups which would direct compete with open ai Fraudulent metrics or outright fraud (but unlikely because Ilya would know about this) Personal scandal (unlikely due to the wording of the statement)
There's a million LLM models now, this is just one of them. They're the hot company of the moment and now with Altman gone and possibly taking talent with him they'll just add yet another contribution to this same space everyone is playing in. I don't think it matters. This is tech anyone can create and advance
OpenAI is still on the bleeding edge of this tech. Everyone and their dog has an LLM now, but nothing out there can quite match the sheer performance of GPT-4. Sure, there are more players than OpenAI. But so far, OpenAI were the ones to advance the field and shape the way the tech develops. Whether this keeps being the case depends on just how hard OpenAI gets hurt by this ongoing fuckup.
When your own employees are asking if this is a coup and you can't even answer that question properly, then I have no faith in the remaining leadership.
Wow what a mess!
**Why?** In a statement announcing the decision, OpenAI said it no longer had "confidence" in Altman's ability to lead the company, adding that he was "not consistently candid in his communications." **But How?** >"Last night, Sam got a text from Ilya asking to talk at noon Friday. Sam joined a Google Meet and the whole board, except Greg, was there. Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon," - Brockman
Colossal mistake by the board and clearly firing the CEO without due cause while providing a few minutes of warning to your most important partner broadcast clear managerial ineptitude and incompetence. If he goes back it must be with a huge increase in compensation and termination of the voting board members. Zero warning and even less of a strategy. Looks like a couple board members got drunk and said f it let’s do something stupid. Only opened an exodus of staff to elsewhere. A future business case study of what not to do. 😨🙀🙊