Unless sam Altman is actually GPT4 and is typing like mad at all times I don’t see how this impacts OpenAI in the least. There are plenty of suitors waiting for a chance to back OpenAI and forge such close partnerships. Sam is a talking head, backing his venture is backing vaporware until it’s not. OpenAI is here and now, and even if he churns senior leadership and line people, their advantage is so extreme at the present it’ll be a few years of disruption before anyone has caught up, it’s when that happens it’s more likely to be Claude than some new venture.
Given that Sam Altman was involved in OpenAI, I'm not sure why people are surprised that he has interests in making money, becoming powerful & getting attention. He's an one-trick pony, like many entrepreneurs in Sillicon Valley, their interests and decision-making patterns are really predictable.
The same is true for the people working in OpenAI. Everybody wants to make their million comp + potential huge cash out with their options. But is this worrisome? I don't think it is, competition is catching up, if they haven't already.
With the recent Claude 3 release(amazing!), Gemini and open models, which are most akin to GPT-4.
Unless OpenAI releases AGI on GPT-5, I don't really care about what happens to OpenAI. It is still really relevant, but we know by now that there is no moat in AI built.
OpenAI releases a new model, and 6 months later, others catch up with it; unless they would have a huge advantage, I don't care if they are all tied up with Microsoft and want to make money. Nobody wins, nobody loses anything.
This is quite unexpected. How instrumental is/has been Sam Altman in shaping OpenAI and how much is OpenAIs ability to execute and ship a result of his leadership? A lot of it, little of it? Will be interesting to watch.
OpenAI has enough momentum and built enough moat that Sam Altman cannot replicate it. If he can actually replicate it and over take openai, then the business itself has no legs as it will be easily commoditized and any moat nullified in no time
"Also, how come a 90 billion dollars company hailed as the future of computing and a major transformative force for society would now be valued 0 dollars only because its non-technical founder is now out?"
Please think about this. Sam Altman is the face of OpenAi and was doing a very good job leading it. If the relationships are what kept OpenAI from always being on top and they removed that from the company, corporations may be more hesitant to do business with them in the future.
> If Sam Altman starts a new company by next month, and him and Greg Brockman know all details of how GPT4/5 works, then what what will this mean for OpenAI's dominance and lead?
Well, if two top level officers dismissed from top posts at OpenAI go and take OpenAI's confidential internal product information and use it to try and start a new, directly competing, company, it means that OpenAI's lawyers are going to be busy, and the appropriate US Attorney's office might not be too far behind.
Altman won't be starting a competing company. First, he may have contractual restrictions and second, OpenAI owns their IP. And even if Altman is somehow free to do what he wants because he was fired (doubtful), anyone who quits to go with him surely do have airtight non-competes. Besides, it's not like Sam and his few loyalists are just going to spin up a few servers and duplicate what OpenAI has done. He'll do something AI-adjacent like the chip startup he was rumored to be pursuing.
As for Microsoft, they have a contract with OpenAI and are deeply reliant on them at the moment. OpenAI isn't disappearing just because Sam and Greg aren't there. Nadella may not be happy with the change, but he'll just have to live with it. Nothing will change for the foreseeable future there either.
When it comes to lawsuits? Who knows, but I highly doubt Altman will fight, or if he does, it will be discreetly settled as it's in no one's interest to wage some protracted battle. Microsoft may want to renegotiate their deal, but that again most likely isn't going to be anything nasty, as Microsoft needs OpenAI right now.
As for developers and consumers of OpenAI's service? They won't care or notice for many months until whatever changes the new CEO and board have in mind are enacted.
I don't think the support for Altman has much to do with that. There are a lot of people building companies and investing a lot of time of money into OpenAI products. They want to work with a company that they can do business with over the long term and isn't going to rug pull them.
My biggest question is: If Sam Altman starts a new company by next month, and him and Greg Brockman know all details of how GPT4/5 works, then what what will this mean for OpenAI's dominance and lead?
Because of a news article saying a prior VC firm is pushing to reinstate sam or fund his new venture and didn’t care which way it goes? That’s not a lot to hang your hat on. They legally have every right to do what they did and no one can force them to change their mind under any circumstance. They might choose to, but OpenAI has all the cards. Sam Altman is a talking head, and if they churn some senior folks, OpenAI has the technology and brand to replace them. If I were the OpenAI board, I would be sleeping like a baby, especially if sam were acting out of sync with the charter of the non profit. I imagine his antics caused a lot of stress the further they drifted from their mission and the more he acted autonomously.
There's a lot of speculation that Sam Altman will return to OpenAI. There are publicly disgruntled employees and high level employees resigning. The executives of the company are reportedly meeting with the board about reinstating Sam Altman. I definitely don't think that's ideal for the board.
Maybe. Or maybe they can profit differently going forward. Sam is not the reason OpenAI is gangbusters, its tech is. What I’m not hearing in any of this reporting is how Sam Altman is somehow the secret sauce.
And it’s because he isn’t. This is “rules for thee but not for me”. He as a bad fit, 2/3 the board outed him, and investors are mad because they didn’t feel included.
You know, like how they include employees in layoff decisions and not blind side them.
Sam Altman has spoken about “firing fast” when someone is a bad fit. he got fired fast, because he was a bad fit. That’s the seminal conclusion
So my understanding from reading the drama the past day is Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI due to being too inclined to 'move fast and break things' by commercializing OpenAI technology, with Greg Brockman (cofounder/board member/close friend/ally) choosing to resign in solidarity. The board coup was organized by cofounder/Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever who apparently wants OpenAI's original slow moving safety vision.
It's speculated Sam Altman and Greg Brockman may start a new AI company.
So now seems like a good time to mention a few very high-level points in case they read it:
1. I love Sam Altman's ship early and often inclinations, even if that apparently got him fired. OpenAI was such a breath of fresh air compared to sclerotic companies like Google that can invent the Transformer architecture yet be organizationally incapable of shipping ChatGPT-level tools for years due to overly conservative safety concerns
2. I hate OpenAI (or Sam Altman's?) apparently puritanical inclination to anything considered Not Safe For Work, especially for paid API usage. Why not allow people to build and sell virtual partner chat bots with explicit NSFW content?
3. I dislike his apparent inclination to build a regulatory moat to block others from developing advanced AI -- it's easy to interpret this as purely in the self-interest of OpenAI shareholders
Without Sam Altman's inclination to move fast I imagine OpenAI may become slow, sclerotic and less capable of shipping early, like what Google has become.
Sam Altman has inside information on OpenAI's current and future hardware needs. Sam Altman as CEO, was in a position to direct OpenAI's current and future hardware purchases.
How can he separate those concerns from having his own hardware initiative put together precisely to serve OpenAI and its competitors hardware needs?
Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
This situation smacks of the ethically questionable transition to a closed/profit organization, after receiving initial funding based on their being an open/non-profit organization. (Apparently the original funders didn't retain any veto power over such a transition, to the regret of at least one significant donor.)
WOW! Clearly some funny business going on at OpenAI, as people have speculated. I always assumed Sam Altman was too smart to be in a situation like this. I have heard grumblings about suspicious corporate structuring, behind the scenes profit taking, etc. All speculation though.
The All In podcast had some words about this a few months ago, though they spoke in generalities.
Given OpenAI is a 501c and Sam Altman has a history in the VC world, it seems more plausible to me that Altman was on the pro-"make it a normal business" side.
I agree. The core OpenAI crew is different from Elon's or Jobs people, it's made up of scientists who tend to be more sensitive/sensible to the impact of their work.
So I'm appalled OpenAI employees would follow Sam Altman into none other than... Microsoft!
My bet is that's not going to happen, at least not significantly. So far only the trust circle of Altman and Brockman actually quit. I don't see Sam Altman as a MSFT employee for long anyway, it's mostly negotiation leverage. This is obviously controversial, but time may even be on OpenAI's board's favor: by just not doing much the company will keep commercially thriving even if the new management "slows down" AI development, and at least as long as MSFT honors its compute compromises which it said it would and the whole coup fire wanes.
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