Nearly 500 OpenAI Employees Threaten To Quit Unless Board Resigns (wired.com) 100
OpenAI was in open revolt on Monday with 490 employees threatening to leave unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman as CEO, along with cofounder and former president Greg Brockman. Altman was controversially fired by the board on Friday. From a report: "The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company" the letter reads. "Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI." Remarkably, the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.
Shortly before the letter was released, Sutskever posted on X: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company." The letter's release follows an extraordinary, head-spinning weekend in Silicon Valley. OpenAI's board removed Altman from his position on Friday, claiming "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."
Shortly before the letter was released, Sutskever posted on X: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company." The letter's release follows an extraordinary, head-spinning weekend in Silicon Valley. OpenAI's board removed Altman from his position on Friday, claiming "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."
Board overplayed their hand (Score:5, Informative)
AI aside, this is a fascinating episode in the history of corporate governance.
Re:Board overplayed their hand (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a completely uninformed guess that seems to align with events:
Altman starts pushing monetization over research too far, vastly limiting compute available to OpenAI's research team, slowing their efforts down. Sutskever wants the board to take him down a peg so he can keep more compute resources in the hands of researching improvements over selling capacity to clients.
Board gets tries and fails to reign Altman in, resulting in a really bad relationship breakdown and termination of him as CEO. Researchers just wanted Altman taken down a peg, not removed and some unknown put in his place, so they collectively ask for his reinstatement, including Sutskever.
Re:Board overplayed their hand (Score:5, Interesting)
Altman starts pushing monetization over research too far, vastly limiting compute available to OpenAI's research team, slowing their efforts down. Sutskever wants the board to take him down a peg so he can keep more compute resources in the hands of researching improvements over selling capacity to clients.
Problem: the independent board on its own doesn't have the power to do that. It has three votes, while the commercial side also has three votes: Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever. The vote that would be required to allow them to fire Altman and demote Brockman is Sutskever's.
The much more likely explanation is that Sutskever wanted Altman gone (they've had conflict in the past) but didn't realize how badly that would damage OpenAI. Now everything's blown up in his face and he's in damage control.
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Your version is more informed than mine, and it sounds reasonable.
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heres a little context too: nerds have no idea how the real world works and only want "power". this is the result of them using such "power". autists all the way down.
There are far more clueless people in business than that. Some even shove their MBA certificate in your face. Insecurity is another factor that will do this.
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That's not at all confined to nerds. Everywhere from administrators to janitors to ditch diggers, some people handle authority well and grow into increasing amounts. Others get a little power, get a god complex, and accidentally burn the whole thing down or trigger an active revolt.
That can be seen at every level from foreman to CEO. The higher up they get, the more damage they do and the less likely they are to learn anything from it.
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Here's a completely uninformed guess that seems to align with events:
Altman starts pushing monetization over research too far, vastly limiting compute available to OpenAI's research team, slowing their efforts down. Sutskever wants the board to take him down a peg so he can keep more compute resources in the hands of researching improvements over selling capacity to clients.
Board gets tries and fails to reign Altman in, resulting in a really bad relationship breakdown and termination of him as CEO. Researchers just wanted Altman taken down a peg, not removed and some unknown put in his place, so they collectively ask for his reinstatement, including Sutskever.
Here's a marginally less uninformed guess with slightly better alignment with events.
The original OpenAI mission was creating safe and beneficial AGI.
OpenAI Global, was the for-profit arm created to raise capital and profit from ChatGPT.
I think Altman basically forgot about the original OpenAI and went full tech CEO. The original OpenAI board got worried that safety (and the original non-profit) was being forgotten in the race to become a member of Big Tech so they turfed him.
Such a re-alignment would obvio
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Leaders always want regulations to burn the bridge behind them.
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Very important thing to remember: one of several general goals of all regulation should be to foster healthy competition, not entrench incumbents.
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It should be but that's not usually what happens and certainly isn't the goal of all these tech overlords begging for government regulation now that they have their core work complete. Now they can write carefully crafted regulations to burn the bridge behind them that avoid hurting their own work going forward.
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Of course not. Every freedom humanity wins from natural law needs to be maintained if we want to keep it. Natural law trends towards monopolization, systemic crash and systemic rebirth as a cycle that repeated long before first fish crawled out of the oceans, and will continue long after humanity is gone.
The only thing that is eternal is the fight to make it into the future.
Re:Board overplayed their hand (Score:5, Interesting)
If the board thinks the CEO is being less than truthful, then they pretty much have no choice. If the CEO isn't being candid with the board, then there are no governance controls in the company. A CEO can get a do vastly more damage than a rogue employee. Ask ARM about losing control of their China operations [nikkei.com].
HP had something similar with Mark Hurd [networkworld.com]. HP was big enough that it eventually overcame the turbulence. Smaller companies don't survive.
It is much easier to destroy a company from the top than from the bottom. This could be a lose-lose situation for Open AI. Losing the CEO will destroy the company, and keeping the CEO will also destroy the company.
Depending on what the transgression is, the board can discipline the CEO without firing them. Open AI should have done this before Sam's departure. At this point, bringing back Sam Altman will likely mean the board abandoning its oversight role which will end badly.
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Counterpoint: this is the sort of nebulous charge that lets a motivated Board make a mountain out of a molehill.
He basically handed ammo to his enemies, and they used it.
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why didn't the board defend the firing by saying what happened
Because they don't want a lawsuit. If they say he lied, that could be considered defamatory. With as much money as their is floating around a court fight could be quite expensive.
In my experience even if they have the receipts a bad relationship like that usually means a lot of people have said and done things that don't leave anyone smelling to good. Sometimes its just better for everyone to walk away.
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HP had something similar with Mark Hurd [networkworld.com]. HP was big enough that it eventually overcame the turbulence.
Sort of survived. It broke up into a lot of smaller pieces.
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Maybe that was good for them?
My company managed a lot of critical internal HP data prior to, during and after the split and helped them through the split with that data set.
Pre-split their end of the relationship was chaotic. They were VERY nice people but equally hard to work with due to their chaos.
Once the split was done, the new companies were both just as nice but they actually knew what they were doing and our burden as their partner was much lighter. Maybe they were just too big before for anyone t
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Happy to share. The thing that surprised me most wasn't that a huge Fortune 100 company was chaotic but how incredibly nice and easy to work with they were all at a personal level. Never met a nicer bunch of folks in my life at any company.
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If the board thinks the CEO is being less than truthful, then they pretty much have no choice. If the CEO isn't being candid with the board, then there are no governance controls in the company.
Ironically it turns out that the board was not "candid" in the publicly announced explanation for Altman's firing. The board said that Altman was not candid, implying that he lied or concealed to some extent. In reality, the board knew exactly what Altman was doing and disagreed. That's fine and entirely within the board's power and mandate. However, the board wanted to save face (but in an incompetent way) and ironically touted the line that Altman was not candid, when in fact, it was the board that wa
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Fascinating indeed.
To quote Robot Chicken... [youtube.com]
Sad day for nonprofit idealism (Score:1)
I don't pretend to fully understand corporate structure and governance. But this seems a sad day for the ideals of nonprofit, openly beneficial development.
Of course OpenAI is a long way from a FOSS developer. There's no confusion there. But it's not the farthest thing from it. The charter of the top level corp embodies very non-greedy, socially beneficial principles in its goal to develop artificial general intelligence safely and for the benefit of all. And the for-profit subsidiary is controlled, and it
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"MASSIVE monetary potential"
I wonder if people there had visions of stock options dancing in their heads?
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A decent in-depth review of what just happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyakih3oYpk
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Board was just trying to uphold ESG principles.
What's actually going on over there? (Score:2)
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Hey, spoiler alert, jeesh, some of us are still watching the show.
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Quite the soap. I expect an evil twin infiltrated the board.
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We'll find out it was all just a dream and Altman was never fired.
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It was all just a dream.
Re:What's actually going on over there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Boardroom chaos is usually because someone is trying to take something that doesn't belong to them.
Well - it's the same old same old story. Sex. https://thethaiger.com/world/n... [thethaiger.com]
Apparently though, the main thrust is that he was not giving financial report to his sister Annie. Altman's sister, who for what it is worth, has an OnlyFans account, has accused Altman and his brother of all kinds of abuse, Tweeting “I suffered from verbal, financial, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse from my biological siblings, primarily Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman.”
Something just seems a little off, given her claims of financial abuse - second on her list. Regardless, there really should be due process for allegations like this.
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Which is proof that not all on OnlyFans belongs on OnlyFans...
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Which is proof that not all on OnlyFans belongs on OnlyFans...
And that “getting fucked”, is not just something that happens in the porn category.
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Sexual abuse is often about power and not so much about sexual gratification. Also note that GP mentions that she pointed the finger at her "biological siblings, primarily Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman", so the sexual abuse could also have been from the other brother.
Her main complaint is "financial abuse", or what she defines as financial abuse. Out of curiosity, are things like "playing doctor" sexual assault and abuse? If these were children, it seems plausible.
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She claims he was "in bed" with her when she was 4 and he was 13.
I dunno, make of it what you will but clearly -something- went wrong in her life as she's a super hot mess.
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There's lots of reasons why she would be screwed up. There are also a lot of reasons why a conflicted young kid might have done things that would seem very embarrassing nowadays. It's a sorry tale all around, but is it relevant?
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We don't have enough facts to know and never will.
Maybe she hallucinated the whole thing. Maybe he's a baby rapist. Who knows? We never will know the truth.
But I'm pretty sure if he wasn't a tech hero, the press would be all over him for it.
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She claims he was "in bed" with her when she was 4 and he was 13.
I dunno, make of it what you will but clearly -something- went wrong in her life as she's a super hot mess.
Yes, she is indeed a mess. Hypothetical follows. But let's say he hopped into bed with her when she was 4, and he was 12, as she claimed, and enjoyed her company in a sexual manner. We don't really know.
He was a child, and so was she. I hope we at the point where we arrest children for innocent curiosity, and have them register as sexual offenders? Have we entered a world where a couple children playing doctor or mommy and daddy is a trauma so deep that it causes the woman as the victim to become a pR0n s
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Childhood amnesia, yes that's certainly an issue for a 4 year old. In another post I noted that she said she has created a narrative from bits and pieces of her early childhood memories.... He may have done something but her memories are so unreliable we can't bash him based solely on that.
Childhood sex games: there's no serious issue with same age children playing and experimenting when both are ok with it. A 12+ year old and a 4 year old? I'm not ok with that. By 12+ he should know better and at 4 sh
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I played doctor and got naked with same age girls and all that. Shrug. I also was sucking the tits of my early 20s baby sitter. Today she'd get arrested but to me it was just a fun game. I never looked back crying about how I was sexually assaulted or whatever as a child. And I still recall she had great tits!
In this case, there's no way to ever know if she hallucinated the whole thing or he was a vicious early childhood rapist or something in between. I wouldn't bash him based solely on what she's said but I wouldn't leave him alone with my kid either.
True, because whatever he is, he's permanently tarnished, and caution is the prudent reaction.
A local weird story..
Around 10 years ago, there were two children, a boy and a girl around age 6, that were caught playing doctor in a local park. Same old story, Families were having a picnic, and the kids snuck off to explore. The parents of the girl called the police and reported a sexual assault. The police reaction was at first "You have to be kidding me!" but the parents insisted. so they investigated
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Wow that's a terrible story. Her parents are morons. Kids have been playing doctor since before we had doctors and not a single one was hurt during a mutually agreed upon exploratory game.
Her parents definitely did more damage than a harmless game of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours".
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They pretty much stated up front that he was moving forward recklessly, pursuing profit above safety, and focussing on other projects like WorldCoin.
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In a way I wish you were correct, but the allegations about a 13 year old Altman are certainly not what motivated that board to act rashly. Do you honestly think OpenAI's board gives a crap about Altman's sister?
He's being tarred and feathered because his sister'a allegations are being brought up again.
And if OpenAi were less secretive, they could mention that those allegations had absolutely nothing to do with their well reasoned and completely justified canning of Altman.
They pretty much stated up front that he was moving forward recklessly, pursuing profit above safety, and focussing on other projects like WorldCoin.
Pretty generic reasons. Are the employees wrong about this? In their open letter where they threatened a mass exodus, they wrote:
"“Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidenc
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He's being tarred and feathered because his sister'a allegations are being brought up again.
No one cares about something that happened long ago by a bunch of kids. Please stop this nonsense. There are many reason current and documented both directly referenced by the board and indirectly by employees of why what happened happened. Leave the conspiracy theories at home.
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He's being tarred and feathered because his sister'a allegations are being brought up again.
No one cares about something that happened long ago by a bunch of kids. Please stop this nonsense. There are many reason current and documented both directly referenced by the board and indirectly by employees of why what happened happened. Leave the conspiracy theories at home.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it is just what happens. I'm not promoting it, but some people care, otherwise it wouldn't be brought up in the lack of transparency. Tell me in plain English the exact reasons put out by this Board of directors.
Nadella of Microsoft and Emmit Shear, OpenAI's new interim CEO, claim to be in the dark as to the reasons. https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone... [msn.com] The nearly 500 employees in their open letter claim to not know the reasons. Explain why they are wrong.
My whole point in al
Re:What's actually going on over there? (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenAI was meant to be building an AGI that would be available to everyone and would not allow one company to control it. Altman had redirected the foundation towards massive profit for him and specific others by using that technology in a specific commercial implementation. Microsoft has been trying to get OpenAI to be their main driver of AI because it's by far the best current AI chat system. Do the calculation. We are now at Microsoft's third E for OpenAI and likely the board suddenly realized, but Microsoft and Altman's preparations were better because they have all the employees expecting to get huge money and convinced that's tied up with the Microsoft partnership.
There used to be a long list of Microsoft partners through time, built up when Microsoft started partnering with Nokia, which included all the companies like Borland, Nortel, Nokia (several times), Novell (for Netware) that partnered with them and showed their fate, with most ending up destroyed. Partnering with Microsoft has always been much more dangerous than competing against them. Unfortunately that list seems to be impossible to recover now. Anyone got a copy?
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This. All through the 90s and 00s there was the phrase "if you get in bed with Microsoft, you're going to get fucked".
Anyone who expects MS to change doesn't understand principle #1 about change: If there's no pain, there's no change. MS has been successful with the way it behaves, why would it change anything?
So yes, OpenAI was fucked when they partnered with MS. The only question was when and how, not if. Anyone who is surprised by this development desperately needs to come out of mom's basement.
Too little too late Ilya (Score:1)
"You're an adult" (Score:1)
I have serious disagreements with this sentiment these days.
Far too many people in this world have been getting by as barely restrained ids.
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My problem isn't "who's more gooder" or any of that crap.
My point is many people refuse to even APPEAR to act like an adult.
Irrespective of POV.
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"Coup"? He was removed through the authority of a lawfully elected board of directors.
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I mean...if it's a 501(c)(3) the Board SHOULDN'T treat him as a friend. That's a big problem with a lot of non-profits (and for-profits) where the chief executive has a cozy relationship with the Board and doesn't get enough oversight.
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>, especially since they are his friends.
Friends, whatever. If someone is lying to you (as was accused) about a business relationship, that's no longer about friendship at all and that should be taken off the table.
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Without discussing with or notifying the company providing nearly all their funding, and with certain board members specifically excluded from the discussion/vote. Is it legal? Probably. Is it a boardroom coup? Yup.
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I'm not commenting on their motivation really, just on the coup aspect. Brockman was chairman of the board, and Altman was also a board member, and neither of them was even notified that a vote on their removal was being held. They were just informed of the results after it was a fait accompli. I assume this is legal since nobody involved has raised that objection, but a secret vote that excludes a third of the board (including the chairman) sounds pretty coup-like to me.
They probably sunk the company (Score:5, Informative)
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No way. Too many companies have poured too much money into the company. They're not going to easily just let that money disappear. Money comes with purse strings, and large amounts of money come with large purse strings.
Ilya Sutskever wants rid of rest of board? (Score:1)
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That would be a 3D-chess level move.
Doesn't Altman already have a new job? (Score:2)
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Or is this one of those jobs where your name does all the work?
Yes, Microsoft gave him a job. But Microsoft would prefer to have him back in his old job.
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And make OpenAI a wholly owned subsidiary.
Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
So ...
Microsoft licenses the OpenAI IP.
Board member creates turmoil.
Board fires Altman and Brockman.
Microsoft hires them.
Microsoft commits $1T over 20 years to AI datacenters.
95% of employees say they'll quit OAI and go to Microsoft.
Including board member?
Is that about right? Odd acquisition method.
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Is that about right? Odd acquisition method.
The only odd thing about it is that it happened to such a high-profile company. "Destroy smaller competitor and buy up the pieces" is an old standard in the mergers & acquisitions playbook. It's generally a lot cheaper than negotiating a price with the current owners, but it looks bad in the press.
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... to work on getting Bing 2% of the search share more and having annual performance reviews, at the similar salary and zero chance of striking it rich on stock options.
That's not what they signed up for.
The rising start of OpenAI LABOUR UNION (Score:1)
Ilya Sutskever join Musk (Score:1)
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No, he just likes them on his platform?
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He is the only one not profit driven.
Please. Nobody who's a billionaire isn't profit driven. Sure, he also has other motivations, but that's true for nearly everyone. Regardless of whether you like Elon Musk or not, it's naive to think that profit isn't one of his primary motivations. Same goes for every other extremely rich person out there. And for a very large amount of "normal" people as well. If you want to be a fan of anyone (not just talking about Musk), please recognize the fact that you can very much like a person without drifting off
Netflix series or a Hollywood movie (Score:1)
Employees? Who cares? (Score:2)
Why don't we ask ChatGPT who it would rather work for?
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Why don't we ask ChatGPT who it would rather work for?
Heh, that's a nice idea, so I just did that. :-)
Here the important parts of the conversation I had with ChatGPT:
Me: Supposing you had to choose between being further developed and improved under the exclusive full authority of Sam Altman, or under the exclusive full authority of Ilya Sutskever, and there's no option for you to continue being further developed and improved under the shared authority of both, which of them would you prefer, Altman or Sustkever, and why?
ChatGPT: (...) Sam Altman, known for his
time to put up or shut up (Score:2)
Employees siding with the CEO? (Score:2)
700/800 (Score:2)
NYT is reporting that 700/800 say they will quit and go to MS.
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Cheapest buy out ever.