Hey Everyone,
This is sort of like a breaking new emergency issue. A lot has occured on the weekend regarding this story. This article has been written over the past three days where hourly changes have occured, so will reflect this disjointed reality.
📶 From our sponsor: 📶
The future of intelligent composable content. With generative AI and composable content, the possibilities are as limitless as your team’s creativity.
As the leading intelligent composable content platform, Contentful enables developers and marketers alike to easily deliver compliant on-brand experiences and speed and scale—all within one unified content system.
OpenAI has some bad karma. Splits with Elon Musk in 2018, and then the founders of Anthropic and now Sam Altman disgraced by the board and the CTO co-founder Greg Brockman also leaving OpenAI.
Our community Chat on this has 66 replies.
OpenAI is calling it a “leadership transition”, yet real harm to Sam Altman’s reputation likely occurred here possibly a schism with other team member(s), Ilya Sutskever, who by the way they had originally poached from Google, just as they are doing now.
“We Trust in you Mira” – Microsoft
OpenAI’s turbulent history as high stakes today because many view them as the leaders in GPT technologies, at least perhaps until Google’s Gemini comes out. GPT-5 is in development and OpenAI. Usually politics and internal dramas in startups wouldn’t be a big deal, they are after all rather common, but this is one of the most important AI R&D labs around large language models on the planet.
Sam Altman has been Pushing Growth and Product Over Safety
Greg Brockman’s Tweet of the history of events sheds more light on the issue. Their side does refer to it as a ‘coup’, and there was a significant Venture Capital backed counter-rebellion to it.
OpenAI has had so many breakups and separations, can it survive another one? This is after all, just business. The Board has to do what they see as right. Things do move on, like we saw with the Anthropic split. Talent and executives can indeed be replaced. More competition isn’t itself a bad thing.
But if I was an Enterprise customer, I’d think twice about what this all means for how trustworthy the entity known as OpenAI is. Especially if Microsoft forces their hand.
Microsoft does not have a board member, even though they own roughly 49% of the company. According to OpenAI’s corporate governance, directors’ key fiduciary duty is not to maintain shareholder value, but to the company’s mission of creating a safe AGI, or artificial general intelligence, “that is broadly beneficial.”
If Altman and Brockman wanted to move too fast, that may have not been deemed safe by the others. OpenAI first began posting the names of its board of directors on its website in July, following the departures of Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis and Will Hurd earlier this year. Apparently Sam Altman wasn’t involved in the vote to fire himself, no surprise there.
Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of answers site Quora, joined OpenAI’s board in April 2018.
Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Ilya Sutskever is now the sole remaining cofounder of OpenAI on its overseeing board of directors.
Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021.
The board is small and would have likely given Sutskever a lot of say.
For a board to state that they have “lost confidence due to a lack of clarity” by their CEO means pretty major philosophical differences and likely on Sam’s side, secrets were being kept. “The board no longer has confidence in [Altman’s] ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the blog post reads. We may not know for some time what Altman lied about, though the public deserves to know.
AI influencers on X are saying even that this move means OpenAI’s board has itself lost credibility. But trust and safety really is too important to not deal with effectively. So-called AGI really is too important to cut corners with. In business and startups, let’s note that this happens all the time.
But what is it in OpenAI’s culture that has made for so much drama? Microsoft bet on Sam Altman as much as they did OpenAI serving their own product and stock market performance. Microsoft I’m sure was very much in favor of OpenIA’s shifting of strategies and values under Sam Altman. OpenAI has become a commercial entity under Microsoft and let’s face it, a far cry from its early philosophical values while startups like Anthropic and Aleph Alpha have doubled down on being trustworthy, OpenAI has lost its way in terms of a moral compass.
AI bros coming to the defense of Sam Altman on X or LinkedIn, is sort of beside the point. Sam Altman’s ‘world tour’ was good for publicity but also made the firm less trustworthy and the idea that AGI is their goal just always felt incredible deceptive and arrogant. To this day there is no evidence GPT-5 will be anywhere near an “AGI”.
While both Altman and Brockman leaving is a shock, are we really so shocked considering the rocky history of this startup and the constant pivots in fundamental ideologies and business practices? And will this impact Microsoft and others giving them more funds? If anything, it will open the door for them doing so. While the Information peddles in scoops and rumors, they didn’t call this one.
More will leave with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, which likely means yet another splinter-startup. How to dominate marketshare? Have several splinter startups forming at just the right time. Before GPT-5 launches is a fairly good time to do it. It wouldn’t surprise me if schisms with Anthropic and here were actually staged. Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic and the A.I. company which results likely from this spinoff all being the main leaders from the SAME group of individuals? It’s not just unlikely, it’s a bit perplexing and suspicious.
If hallucinating LLMs and synthetic media, it’s hard to know what’s really going in given the level of human factions apparently involved here. Countless rumors and speculations have been floated on X and LinkedIn over the last 24 hours.
The structure of OpenAI is outlined below:
This board is supposed to prioritize trust & safety and not shareholder profits. Read more about a brief history of OpenAI, while others compare OpenAI to Apple. But Sam Altman is not Steve Jobs.
Previous OpenAI Board Members
How Microsoft is commingled with OpenAI and Inflection is bad enough.
Reid Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s first investors, but the former LinkedIn cofounder and billionaire invested out of his charitable foundation, not from his venture capital firm Greylock.
Will Hurd, a former Texas congressman, joined the board of OpenAI in May 2021 to provide public policy expertise.
Holden Karnofsky, director of AI strategy at Open Philanthropy, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in 2017 following the nonprofit’s recommendation of a $30 million grant to the AI company over three years. At the time, Karnofsky was Open Philanthropy’s executive director (he briefly took a leave of absence in early 2023 and has since returned to lead its AI risk initiatives), according to Forbes.
Elon Musk, who helms X, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and the Boring Company, cofounded OpenAI in 2015 and resigned from its board in 2018 after having pledged $1 billion in funding.
Shivon Zilis is director of operations and special projects at Elon Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralink. Zilis joined OpenAI as an advisor in 2016 and as a board member in 2020, but reportedly left her position in the wake of comments from Musk that criticized the company.
Who will likely be Joining the New Startup?
Jakub Pachocki, the company’s director of research; Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating potential risks from AI, and Szymon Sidor, a seven-year researcher at the startup, told associates they had resigned, these people said.
Why would so many leave if they were not going to make yet another spin-off to OpenAI?
Is Sam Altman Honest?
Based on the board’s language and the way these giant tech companies work, this is the prevailing theory floating around right now. “Not consistently candid” is a very diplomatic way of saying Altman lied, notes TechCrunch. On most days, Sam Altman sounds more like a sales person than a CEO.
However, to publically out a CEO and also say that he wasn’t candid is very strange behavior and might hurt Sam Altman’s future.
But in the A.I. bro game of thrones, expect a lot of secrets, side-plots and cloak and dagger sort of moves. Sam Altman seems to be a player in that domain. To get $10 Billion from Microsoft must have taken a lot of persuasion, or some inside deals.
Sam Altman always seems to have future plans. Whether that’s with the money of Billionaires in Japan or Saudi Arabia, does it even matter? He will move the industry forward, even if his actions don’t always seem quite on board. Elon Musk has become increasingly a polarizing figure, Sam Altman is somehow tied personalities like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, part maverick and part Silicon Valley cheerleader. Addicted to making big bets on the future.
High Stakes Kind of Moves
It’s possible that Altman — and potentially OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who stepped down as chairman simultaneously, then resigned — wanted to make a bold move that he knew the board would not like.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, will become interim CEO in his place, according to the statement. Murati has been a part of the San Francisco-based company’s leadership for five years. This until a real new CEO is found. (Updated later on in the article).
Microsoft has too much riding on OpenAI not to keep funding it and get early-access to GPT-5 as well. Microsoft could also force Sam Altman and others back, not wanting to lose face, talent and the lucrative funding opportunities. (This has apparently failed so far).
Expect Sam Altman, if he is not welcomed back due to investor pressure, to form yet another A.I. startup and have some of OpenAI’s current team join them. I really personally think of Sam Altman as the San Bankman Fried of Generative A.I.
According to the company, OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to ensure that the company could raise capital in pursuit of this mission, while preserving the nonprofit’s mission, governance, and oversight. The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI.
But in recent months and years, OpenAI has been talking up AGI and pretending how close we are to it as justification to moving fast and breaking things. Synthetic media will definately change the internet and ChatGPT did impact some jobs already. The benefits haven’t been without real world costs, with very little A.I. regulation stopping them from releasing potentially dangerous models. The White House and Congress have no idea what they started.
The way the OpenAI Board conducted itself here seems to have been sudden and almost like a rash decision. One that must have been brewing however internally for quite some time. The announcement blindsided employees (though I’m sure not executives or co-founders), many of whom learned of the sudden ouster from an internal announcement and the company’s public facing blog.
Generative A.I. of Big Personalities
#SamAltmanExit is now trending on X.
Sam Altman’s conduct has been a bit less than stellar for quite some time. But his professional relationship with Ilya sutskever seems to have totally broken down. You can read the comments on Hacker News about Sam Altman getting fired from OpenAI. You can read some comments on LinkedIn here.
A lot can change in a few years and success can also do this.
This is a developing story, I’m sure there is so much more to it that will be revealed soon.
These co-founders never did have the same alignment. Safety and commercialization were central to disagreements, even with the OpenAI Board. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft CEO was ‘blindsided,’ furious at Altman’s firing.
Altman clashed with members of his board, especially Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and the company’s chief scientist, over how quickly to develop what’s known as generative AI, how to commercialize products and the steps needed to lessen their potential harms to the public, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Sam Altman’s Plans
As OpenAI’s popularity grew this year alongside ChatGPT, so too did Altman’s profile and he might have taken some big decisions into his own hands. He’s been CEO since 2019. Sam had a good run.
Altman’s ambitions may have also played a role in the divorce. Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp., according to a person with knowledge of the investment proposal.
Altman was also courting SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new company to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive.
Sam Altman may have been hiding many of his actions from the OpenAI Board for his own strategic reasons and to serve Microsoft better, their main investor.
According to Bloomberg’s source: Sutskever and his allies on the OpenAI board may have been put off by Altman raising funds off of OpenAI’s name and these new companies not sharing the same governance model as OpenAI, according to this person.
The OpenAI board disputes over safety echo long-standing rifts within OpenAI over the responsible development of powerful AI tools — issues that have plagued the company since its inception. OpenAI has had many internal disagreements over its commercialization and the safety implications of the approach advocated by Sam Altman. Many good people have left this company before, and many will do so in the here and now in late 2023.
If the damage is serious, Microsoft stands the most to lose. Whatever the outcome, there is likely to be less unity within OpenAI than previously and in recent memory.
If you think about it, Similar disagreements over safety and commercialization are why Elon Musk broke ties with OpenAI in 2018, and why a group of employees departed in 2020 and started rival Anthropic. The OpenAI drama is all about a fundamental compromise on their core values that has been degrading for quite some time and relatively related to Sam Altman’s actions.
In the Name Ilya
In July, 2023 or just three months ago, Sutskever formed a new team at the company to bring “super intelligent” future AI systems under control. Before joining OpenAI, the Israeli-Canadian computer scientist worked at Google Brain and was a researcher at Stanford University.
Ilya Sutskever is the most likely reason for Sam Altman’s exit given all the available information we currently have or that I could find.
He is a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist working in machine learning, who co-founded and serves as Chief Scientist of OpenAI. OpenAI’s divisions have been at the highest levels. While the last generation of AI innovators and Great personalities seemed to have worked together and had vigorous debates, this generation is a bit more under pressure from the commercialization and business model aspect.
Poaching people from Google won’t always work out for you, you want the talent but what else do they bring? They might actually bring more common sense and a higher level of best practices as AI engineers and AI scientists. OpenAI was supposed to be more than just a commercialized product or servant of Microsoft.
One likely description of events on Hacker News is as follows:
“Sam Altman, like Icarus, flew too close to Microsoft’s giant pot of money. He pivoted the company away from it’s founding mission, unleashing the very djinn they originally set out to harness. Turns out there were people at OpenAI who really believed in the original vision.”
Maybe he’s not the Oppenheimer of our age, but the Icarus.
Microsoft’s Wrath & Satya as Kingmaker
As the story got into the weekend, it appears that Investors led by Microsoft are pressuring for the return of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
Satya Nadella was very tight with Sam Altman. OpenAI investors are trying to get Sam Altman to return as CEO after the board fired him on Friday, according to people familiar with the matter reported The Information and others. The Verge has chronicled in real-time how close a return deal has come.
Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI after all. Why wouldn’t Satya Nadella play “kingmaker” if it impacts Microsoft’s shareholders and plans, who are advocating for rushing more funding and product and growth at the obvious costs to AGI trust and safety.
OpenAI’s board needs to be true to their mandate otherwise they in turn will lose all credibility. The microscope was already on OpenAI since the advent of ChatGPT and the Microsoft deal, so to have this internal power struggle take place on their watch and with the entire world watching, has been a bit dramatic over the past few days.
This Will Lead to more OpenAI Resignations
A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled (as of Saturday evening, November 19th, 2023) — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. This at the time of writing, was about three hours ago. Everything appears to be in flux.
Hopefully monday and this coming week in mid November, 2023 will bring more clarity to what many believe is the most important Generative A.I. company in the world as GPT-5 is coming in 2024.
Microsoft’s role and future funding amounts could be in jeopardy given the internal disagreements becoming so public. Firing a maverick CEO isn’t supposed to be this problematic, but this is OpenAI we are talking about.
OpenAI may not be the shepherd of AGI they have been claiming to be. And Sam Altman may not be the chosen one.
Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon wrote in a memo sent to staff late Saturday night that the company remained “optimistic” that it could bring back Altman and several senior employees who left in light of the CEO’s abrupt exit. It’s possible also that the backlash was simply too much pain for panicking OpenAI executives and Board members.
Mira Murati’s time as interim CEO may not last very long. But was Microsoft’s pressure the right move? OpenAI’s board listening to Ilya and his “faction” for a reason.
Altman’s return to OpenAI could potentially mean an impending shake-up of the company’s current board members and governance analysts have noted and common sense dictates. It’s hard to imagine given the early Sunday morning mood, that Microsoft and other powerful investors won’t have their day sooner than later regarding the fate of Sam Altman.
The entire history of Generative AI could be somewhat impacted.
While events surrounding Sam Altman’s exist may have been greatly exaggerated in recent days and hours, OpenAI’s internal conflicts remain like open wounds for all to see. Whether Sam Altman returns does not change the significant compromise this company has made to further its commercial interests and funding opportunities.
Of course who knows, maybe ChatGPT itself has the answers.
Future Developments & More Info
I definately don’t think the future of AI hinges on what happens to OpenAI. In spite of the support he has in the Venture Capital community and Silicon Valley. There is a level of hero worship because Sam Altman is making a lot of these people richer, and consequently there is respect in Silicon Valley for Sam Altman.
And the comparing to Steve Jobs just seems a bit off.
And the false praise is striking.
However a lot more info has come to light as well. Like his plans to found an A.I. chip company that would compete vs. Nvidia funded by the Middle East and Softbank’s Billionaire founder.
While BigTech dismantles their Responsible AI Teams, as Meta follows in the footsteps of Microsoft, what they have done to OpenAI makes it look unrecognizable from its original intent. It takes a Sam Altman to convert a non-profit into a commercial entity where so many “AI scientists” just want to strike it rich.
The board of directors of OpenAI, the high-flying artificial intelligence start-up, said in a note to employees on Sunday night that its former chief, Sam Altman, would not be returning to his job, while naming his second interim replacement in two days.
Emmett Shear Becomes Interim OpenAI CEO
As usual Semafor is on point. Twitch head Emmett Shear definately was not on most radars. A group of investors, including Microsoft and Thrive Capital, had been trying to bring Altman back, but at least for now they appear to have failed, even with Satya Nadella “mediating”.
The dangers of AI might become Real
Many powerful technologies, like nuclear power and genetic engineering, are “dual-use”: They have the potential to bring great benefit, but they could also cause great harm — whether by malevolent intent, accident of by accidental consequence. A.I. is now among humanity’s most powerful of these, but investors are not treating it as such.
Sam Altman was certainly moving fast with OpenAI, perhaps even too fast. People close to Altman say he plans to launch a new venture that may compete directly with OpenAI. Several investors will support his new venture including the key figure of Khosla Ventures.
With Meta and Microsoft basically disowning Responsible AI teams, and even firing some of those staff, Anthopric and OpenAI were supposed to be the startups that cared. This is turning out to be a bit of a spectacle with both startups taking money from powerful Cloud providers. Now we have to pin our hopes on Aleph Alpha, who embody some of the spirit of the EU in their values.
Silicon Valley Marketing vs. Reality
Silicon Valley’s attempt to care about A.I. ethics and alignment mostly appears to have been deceitful and part of their marketing ploys. It’s highly likely that their pursuit of AGI is as well more of a marketing direction than anything very likely to happen anytime soon.
OpenAI’s reckless history has Sam Altman’s own ambitions partly to blame. Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”, though Venture Capitalists rarely care about that, he’s a talented salesman CEO. After 4 great years at OpenAI, he has the opportunity to do something else that’s meaningful to AI and corporate America.
Sam Altman, for whatever his actual knowledge of A.I., has friends in Silicon Valley. That is the main takeaway from this weekend fiasco in late 2023. He’s more valuable to civilization and history likely out of OpenAI now.
I would not necessarily want to be Microsoft when they wake up monday morning November 20th, 2023 though. For Satya Nadella it’s a huge loss of face.
Think of the incredible centralization in Silicon Valley, OpenAI, Anthropic and whatever next startup they create will have the same people at the head of them. They might posture how different they are, but are they really? A small group of humans will develop the technology that could enslave or empower a great many Billions.
You might think these folk have good intentions but what will their commercial decisions lead to? We don’t really know. There aren’t real safeguards or rule of law in place. Least of all in the United States. So characters like Sam Altman are free to unleash things into the wild, for a few more months and years.
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman Joining Microsoft
Meanwhile, Altman and former president Greg Brockman are joining Microsoft “with colleagues” to “lead a new advanced AI research team” after Satya Nadella’s failed intervention.
Altman joining Microsoft seems like the easy way out.
Emmett Shear is at least known to recognize existential threats of AI technology. Sam and his friends will get all the funding they need at Microsoft for the time being.
Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will likely be able to bring some OpenAI talent with them as well to the new unit.
Read the Tweet.
Joining Microsoft is clearly one of the least ambitious things about all of this. It’s an anti-climax in what could have been for alternative AI startups. Joining Microsoft mitigates some of the reputational damage to Microsoft in the deal however. Still, it might be significant.
It also strengths Microsoft’s influence on OpenAI employees, many of whom respect Sam Altman greatly. A few who even quit as well in the heat of the moment. I suppose they or many of them will join this new lab inside of Microsoft.
Illustration by Joanne Imperio
OpenAI is likely to lose value over this drama as is Microsoft but at least some of OpenAI’s original protections are still in place regarding the potential harms of the tech they are pioneering.
OpenAI was deliberately structured to resist the values that drive much of the tech industry—a relentless pursuit of scale, a build-first-ask-questions-later approach to launching consumer products. It seems that structure has protested them from the antics of Sam Altman and the legion of greedy Venture Capitalists and AI engineers who follow him around, at least for today.
Read More in AI Supremacy
