Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

The board's job is not to do right

There is why you do something. And there is how you do something.

OpenAI is well within its rights to change strategy even as bold as from a profit-seeking behemoth to a smaller research focused team. But how they went about this is appalling, unprofessional and a blight on corporate governance.

They have blind-sided partners (e.g. Satya is furious), split the company into two camps and have let Sam and Greg go angry and seeking retribution. Which in turn now creates the threat that a for-profit version of OpenAI dominates the market with no higher purpose.

For me there is no justification for how this all happened.

The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI. When mangement lays off 10,000 employees, the investors congratulate management.

Thats why Sam & Greg wasn't all they complained about. They lead with the fact that it was shocking and irresponsible.

Ron seems to think that the board is not making the right move for OpenAI.

I mostly agree with you on this. That being said, I've never gotten the impression Ron is the type of VC you're referring to. He's definitely founder-friendly (that's basically his core tenant), but I've never found him to be the type of VC who is ruthless about cost-cutting or an advocate for layoffs. (And I say this as someone who tends to be particularly wary of investors)

The board's job is not to do right by 'Sam & Greg', but to do right by OpenAI.

The board's job is specifically to do right by the charitable mission of the nonprofit of which they are the board. Investors in the downstream for-profit entity (OpenAI Global LLC) are warned explicitly that such investments should be treated as if they were donations and that returning profits to them is not the objective of the firm, serving the charitable function of the nonprofit is, though profits may be returned.

Bingo.

I met Conway once. He described investing in Google because it was a way to relive his youth via founders who reminded him of him at their age. He said this with seemingly no awareness of how it would sound to an audience whose goal in life was to found meaningful, impactful companies rather than let Ron Conway identify with us & vicariously relive his youth.

Just because someone has a lot of money doesn’t mean their opinions are useful.

Corporate legal entities should have a mandatory vote of no confidence clause that gives employees the ability to unseat executives if they have a supermajority of votes.

That would make things more equitable perhaps. It’d at least be interesting

it's hilarious how much people for no reason, want to defend the honor of Sam Altman and co. i mean ffs, the guy is not your friend and will definitely backstab you if he gets the opportunity.

i'm surprised anyone can take this "oh woe is me i totally was excited about the future of humanity" crap seriously. these are SV investors here, morally equivalent to the people on Wall Street that a lot here would probably hold in contempt, but because they wore cargo shorts or something, everyone thinks that Sam is their friend and that just if the poor naysayers would understand that Sam is totally cool and uses lowercase in his messages just like mee!!!!

they don't give a shit that your product was "made with <3" or whatever

they don't give a shit about you.

they don't give a shit about your startup's customers.

they only give a shit about how many dollars they make from your product.

boo hooing over Sam getting fired is really pathetic, and I'd expect better from the Hacker News crowd (and more generally the rationalist crowd, which a lot of AI people tend to overlap with).

I think almost everyone at OpenAI would be ok if there were layoffs there though

it does not do right by Sam

you get that you sow. The way Altman publicly treated Cruise co-founder establishes like a new standard of "not do right by". After that I'd have expected nobody would let Altman near any management position, yet SV is a land of huge money sloshing care-free, and so I was just wondering who is going to be left holding the bag.

If they were looking out for investors "blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft, reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious" doesn't make it sound like they did a terribly good job.

I'm fairly certain that a board is not allowed to capriciously harm the non-profit they govern and unless they have a very good reason there will be more fall-out from this.

I read this as, and both Conway and Y Combinator are famous for their defense of founders.

He might be emotional and defend his friends that’s not in challenge, he likes the guys— and he might be more cynical when it comes to firing 10,000 engineers —that’s less what I’ve heard about him personally, but maybe— however, in this case, he’s explicitly defending not an employee victim of the almighty board, but the people who created the entity, who later entrusted the board with some responsibility to keep the entity faithful to its mission.

Some might think Sam deserves that title less than Greg… not sure I can vouch for either. But Conway is trying to say that all entities (and their governance) owe their founders a debt of consideration, of care. That’s filial piety more than anything contractual. That isn’t the same as the social obligation that an employer might have.

The cult for founders, “0 to 1” and all that might be overblown in San Francisco, but there’s still a legitimate sense that the people who started all this should only be kicked out if they did something outrageous. Take Woz: he’s not working, or useful, or even that respectful of Apple’s decisions nowadays. But he still gets “an employee discount” (which is admittedly more a gimmick). That deference is closer to what Conway seems to flag than the (indeed) fairly violent treatment of a lot of employees during the staff reduction of the last year.

A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory.

But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's exactly what was happening at OpenAI.

I don't think everyone there wants them to be selling cool LLM toys, especially not on a "make fast and break things" approach and with an ecosystem of startup hackers operationalizing it. (Wisely or not) I think they want to be shepherding responsible AGI before someone else does so irresponsibly.

Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird.

It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses.

Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens.

They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.

It often comes down to auteur theory.

Unless someone is truly well versed in the production of something, they latch on to the most public facing aspect of that production and the person at the highest level of authority (to them, even though directors and CEOs often have to answer to others as well)

That’s not to say they don’t have an outsized individual effect, but it’s rare their greatness is solo

It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders.

Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.

Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today.

Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.

I think the problem is, this is not just about dumping the CEO. It’s signalling a very clear shift away from where OpenAI was heading - which seemed to be very focussed on letting people build on top of the technology.

The worry now is that the approach is going to be more of controlling access to just researchers who are trusted to be “safe”.

I worked at a startup where the first CEO, along with the VP of Sales and their entire department, was ousted by the board on a Tuesday.

I think it's likely that we're going to find out Sam and others are just talented tech evangelists/hucksters and that justifiably worries a lot of people currently operating in the tech community.

On the other hand, I have seen an executive step away from a large company and then everything coincidentally goes to shit. It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of an executive.

This was done in the context of Dev Day. Meaning that the board was convinced by Ilya that users should not have access to this level of functionality. Or perhaps he was more concerned that he was not able to gatekeep its release. So presumably it was Altman who pushed for releasing this technology to the general public. If this is accurate then this shift in control is bound to slow down feature delivery and create a window for competitors.

There’s a whole business book about this, good to great, where a key facet of companies that have managed to go from average to excellent over a sustained period of time is servant-leader CEOs

If the CEO was not important and basically doesn't impact anything, as you say, then why would the board feel the need to oust Altman for "pushing too fast" in the first place?

You are missing the emotional aspect of it, a connection towards building something great _together_. In some ways it is selfish, it make you feel important.

If Susan Fowler's book is accurate, Uber under TK was riddled with toxic management and incompetent HR. Yet you will hear people on Twitter reminisce of TK era Uber as the golden period and many would love him back

You may be right in many cases but if you think that’s true in all cases, you’re a low level pleb that can’t see past his own nose.

It doesn't matter in the short term (usually). Then you look in 2-4 years and you see the collective impact of countless decisions and realize how important they are.

In this case, tons of people already have resigned from OpenAI. Sam Altman seems very likely to start a rival company. This is a huge decision and will have massive consequences for the company and their product area.

The difference with OpenAI / GPT is a dozen or so primary engineers plus a few billion dollars for GPUs and you have a competitive version.

And if those primary engineers get sucked out of OpenAI, OpenAI won't be able to compete.

OpenAI is a different animal.

SamAltman has the cache to pull out those engineers. Particularly because Ilya's vision doesn't include lucrative stock options.

The irony is that a money-fuelled war for AI talent is all the more likely to lead to unsafe AI. If OpenAI had remained the dominant leader, it could have very well set the standards for safety. But now if new competitors with equally good funding emerge, they won’t have the luxury of sitting on any breakthrough models.

OpenAI’s biggest issue is that it has no moat. The product is a simple interface to a powerful model, and it seems likely that any lead they have in the power of the model can be quickly overcome should they decrease R&D.

The model is extremely simple to integrate and access - unlike something like Uber, where tons of complexity and logistics is hidden behind a simple interface, an easy interface to OpenAI’s model can truly be built in an afternoon.

The safety posturing is a red herring to try and get the government to build a moat for them, but with or without Altman it isn’t going to work. The tech is too powerful, and too easy to open source.

My guess is that in the long run the best generative AI models are built by government or academia entities, and commercialization happens via open sourcing.

[Removed. Unhelpful speculation.]

He could likely have $500M-$10B+ lined up by next week to start up a new company and poach much of the talent from OpenAI.

Following the Jobs analogy, this could be another NeXT failure story. Teams are made by their players much more than by their leaders; competent leaders are a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition of success, and the likelihood that whatever he starts next reproduces the team conditions that made OpenAI in the first place are pretty slim IMO (while still being much larger than anyone else's).

Agree with this take. Sam made OpenAI hot, and they’re going to cool, for better or worse. Without revenue it’ll be worse. And surprising Microsoft given their investment size is going to lead to pressures they may not be able to negotiate against.

If this pivot is what they needed to do, the drama-version isn’t the smart way to do it.

Everyone’s going to be much more excited to see what Sam pulls next and less excited to wait the dev cycles that OpenAI wants to do next.

Could be many things, like Sam not informing them of the GPTs store launch, or saying he won't launch and then launching.

It sucks for openAi, but there's too many hungry hungry competitors salivating at replacing OpenAI so I don't think this will have big king term consequences in the field.

I'm curious what sorts of oversight and recourse all the investors (or are they donors?) Have. I imagine there's a lot of people with a lot of money that are quite angry today.

Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months

Not necessarily, and that may speak to the part of the Board's announcement that Sam was not candid

Let's look closer at the Ilya Sutskever vs Sam Altman tensions, and think of the product/profit as a cover.

Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI, in that respect aligned with Geoff Hinton, his academic advisor at University of Toronto. Hinton has said "So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete"[1].

Meanwhile, Altman has decided that LLMs aren't the way.[2]

So Altman was pushing to turn the LLM into a for-profit product, to get what value it has, while the Sutskever-aligned faction thinks it is AGI, and want to keep it not-for-profit.

There's also some difference about whether or not AGI poses an "existential risk" or if the risks of current efforts at AI are along the lines of algorithmic bias, socioeconomic inequality, mis/disinformation, and techno-solutionism.

1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinto...

2. https://www.thestreet.com/technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-s...

they could have been beefing non-publicly for a long time, and might have had many private conversations, probably not very useful to speculate here

What if Enterprises get access to a much better version of AI compared to the GPT+ subscription customer?

They “should have” but if the board was wildly surprised by what was presented, that sounds like a really good reason to call out the CEO for lack of candor.

These people are humans, and there’s a big difference between kinda knowing the keynote was coming up, and then actually watching it happen and receive absolutely rave coverage from everyone in tech.

I could very much see it as a “look in the mirror” moment, yeah.

They should have at the very least been privy to the plan, if not outright sanctioned it.

Never assume this. After all, their communication specifically cited that Sam deceived them in some way, and Greg was also impacted. Ilya is the only board member that might have known naturally, given his day-to-day work with OAI, but since ~July he has worked in the area of superalignment, which could reasonably be a different department (it shouldn't be). The Board may have also found out about these projects, maybe from a third party/Ilya, told Sam they're moving too fast, and Sam ignored them and launched anyway. We really don't know.

Three points:

1. I don't think Ilya is equivalent to Carmack in this case — he's been focused on safety and alignment research, not building GPT-[n]. By most accounts Greg Brockman, who quit in disgust over the move, was more impactful than Ilya in recent years, as well as the senior researchers who quit yesterday.

2. I think you are underselling what happened with id: while they didn't blow up as fantastically as Ion Storm (Romero's subsequent company), they slowly faded in prominence, and while graphically advanced, their games no longer represented the pinnacles of innovation that early Carmack+Romero id games represented. They eventually got bought out by Zenimax. Carmack alone was much better than Romero alone, but seemingly not as good as the two combined.

3. I don't think Sam Altman is equivalent to John Romero; Romero's biggest issue at Ion Storm was struggling to ship anything instead of endlessly spinning his wheels chasing perfection — for example, the endless Daikatana delays and rewrites. Ilya's primary issue with Altman was he was shipping too fast, not that he was unable to motivate and push his teams to ship impressive products quickly.

I hope Sam and Greg start a new foundational AI company, and if they do, I am extremely excited to see what they ship. TBH, much more excited than I am currently by OpenAI under a more alignment-and-regulation regime that Ilya and Helen seems to want.

I think the team that became Looking Glass Studios did a lot of the same things in parallel so it’s a little unfair to say no one else had figured it out

Ilya might be too concerned with AI safety to make significant progress on model quality improvement.

Meanwhile, id under Carmack kept cranking out hit after hit for years, essentially shrugging off Romero's firing like nothing happened.

I don't think that is accurate...

The output of id Software after Romero left (post Quake 1) was a clear step down. The technology was fantastic but the games were boring and uninspired, at best "good" but never "great". It took a full 20 years for them to make something interesting again (Doom in 2016).

After Romero left, id Software's biggest success was really as a technology licensing house, but not as a games developer. Powering games like Half Life, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, ...

Meanwhile Romero's new company (Ion Storm) eventually failed, but at least the creative freedom there led to some interesting games, like Deus Ex and Anachronox. And even Daikatana is a more interesting game than something like Quake 2 or Quake III.

A difference in this case is how capital intensive AI research is at the level OpenAI is operating. Someone who can keep the capital rolling in (whether through revenue, investors, or partners) and get access to GPUs and proprietary datasets is essential.

Carmack could make graphics advances on his own with just a computer and his brain. Ilya needs a lot more for OpenAI to keep advancing. His giant brain isn’t enough by itself.

Meanwhile, id under Carmack kept cranking out hit after hit for years, essentially shrugging off Romero's firing like nothing happened.

Romero was fired in 1996

Until this point, as you mentioned id had created multiple legendary franchises with unique lore, attributes, and each one groundbreaking tech breakthroughs: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake.

After Romero left, id released: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_id_Software_games

* Quake 2

* Quake 3

* Doom 3

* And absolutely nothing else of any value or cultural impact. The only "original" thing was Rage which again had no footprint.

There were a lot of technical achievements, yes, but it turns out that memorable games need more than interesting technology. They were well-reviewed for their graphics at a time when that was the biggest thing people expected from new id games - interesting new advances in graphics. For a while, they were THE ones pushing the industry forward until arguably Crysis.

But the point is for anyone experiencing or interacting with these games today, Quake is Quake. Nobody remembers 1, 2 or 3 - it's just Quake.

Now, was id a successful software company and business? Yes. Would it have become the industry titan and shaped the future all of all videogames based on their post Romero output? Absolutely not.

So, while it is definitely justifiable to claim that Carmack achieved more on his own than Romero did, the truth is at least in the video game domain they needed each other to achieve the real greatness that they will be remembered for.

It remains to be seen what history will say about ALtman and Sutskever.

Quake III's fast inverse square root algorithm

Carmack did not invent that trick; it had been around more than a decade before he used it. I remember reading a Jim Blinn column about that and other dirty tricks like it in an IEEE magazine years before Carmack "invented" it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

You know a lot more than me on this subject but can it also be that starting new company and for it to not die is quite hard. Especially in gaming.

Meanwhile, id under Carmack kept cranking out hit after hit for years, essentially shrugging off Romero's firing like nothing happened.

I believe this is absolutely wrong. Quale 2, 3 and Doom 3 were critical success, not commercial ones, which led ID to be bought.

John and John were like Paul and John from the beatles, they never made really great games anymore after their break up.

And to be clear, that's because the role of Romero in the success of ID is often underrated like here. He invented those games (Doom and Quake and Wolf) as much as Carmack did. For example, Romero was the guy who invented percent-based life. He removed the score. This guy invented the modern video game in many ways. Games that werent based on Atari or Nintendo. He invented Wolf, Doom and Quake setups which were considerably more mature than Mario and Bomberman and it was new at the time. Romero invented the deathmatch and its "frag". And on and on.

Who's talking about replacing Ilya? What are you talking about?

Isn’t that a bit like stealing from the for-profit investors? I’m not the first one to shed a tear for the super wealthy, but is that even legal? Can a company you invested in just say they don’t like profit any more?

Won't a truly open model conflict with the AI executive order?

Means free Gpt4?

Ps: It's a serious question

Things can improve along a dimension you choose to measure but there is also the very real risk of openai imploding. Time will tell.

From what I've seen, Ilya seems to be even more concerned than Altman about safety risks and, like Altman, seems to see restricting access and information as a key part of managing that, so I'd expect less openness, not more.

Though he may be less inclined to see closed-but-commercial access as okay as much as Altman, so while it might involve less total access, it might involve more actual open/public information about what is also made commercially available.

Why would the good talent leave? Are they all a "family" and best buddies with Sam?

And then?

Training data is more restricted now, hardware is hard to get, fine tuning needs time.

I definitely believe he can raise a lot of money quickly, but I'm not sure where he'll get the talent, at least the core modeling talent. That's Ilya's lane, and I get the sense that group are the true believers in the original non-profit mission.

But I suspect a lot of the hires from the last year or so, even in the eng side, are all about the money and would follow sama anywhere given what this signals for OpenAIs economic future. I'm just not sure such a company can work without the core research talent.

I'm guessing he has verbal commitments already.

Ilya Sutskever, the head scientist at OpenAI, is allegedly who organized the 'shuffle.' So you're going to run into some issues expecting the top talent to follow Sam. And would many people want to get in on a new AI development company for big $$$ right now? From my perspective the market is teetering towards oversaturation, there are no moats, zero-interest rates are a thing of the past, and the path to profit is nebulous at best.

99% with the 1% being it is actually $20-30B

Honestly? If even a tenth of Sam’s reported connectedness / reality distortion field are true to life… very good odds.

Other than having a big mouth what has HE done? As far as I can find, the actual engineering and development was done NOT by him, while he was parading around telling people they shouldn't WFH, and schmoozing with government officials

Such a bad take. Developers (me included) loved Dev Day.

He is not exactly an insider, but seems broadly aligned/sympathetic/well-connected with the Ilya/researchers faction, his tweet/perspective was a useful proxy into what that split may have felt like internally.

Great analysis, thank you.

https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899

I wonder if the "benefiting humanity" bit is code for anti mil-tech. What if Sam wasn't being honest about a relationship with a consumer that weaponized OpenAI products against humans?

What if the board gave Altman clear direction, Altman told them he accepted it, and then went off and did something else? This hypothesis doesn’t require the board’s direction to be objectively good.

Yeah, the surprise firing part really doesn't make much sense. My best guess is that if you look at the composition of this board (minus Altman and Brockman), it seems to be mostly academics and the wife of a Hollywood actor. They may not be very experienced in the area of tech company boards, and might not have been aware that there are smoother ways to force a CEO out that are less damaging to your organization. Not sure, but that's the best I can figure out based on what we know so far.

This is not commercial vs non commercial imho. This is the old classic humans being humans.

In a clash of big egos, both are often true. Practical differences escalate until personal resentment forms and the parties stop engaging with due respect for each other.

Once that happens, real and intentional slights start accumulating and de-escalation becomes extremely difficult.

Maybe, but I have a different opinion. I have worked at startups before where we were building something both technically interesting and what could clearly be a super value add for the business domain. I’ve then witnessed PMs be brought on who cared little about any of that and instead tried to converge in the exact same enshittified product as everywhere else with little care or understand for the real solutions we were building towards. When this happened I knew within a month that the vision of the company, and it’s goals outside of generating investor returns, was dead if this person had their way.

I’ve specifically seen the controlling members of a company realize this after 7-8 months and when that happens it’s a quick change of course. I could see why you’d think it’s ego but I think it’s closer to my previous situation than what you’re stating here. This is a pivotal course correction and they’re not pretty, this just happens to be the most public one ever due to the nature of the business and company.

responsible board

The board was irresponsible and incompetent by design. There is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree and is part of some kind of cultish "singularity" spiritual/neo-religious thing. That individual has also never had a real job and is on the board of several other non-profits.

Altman's not going to sue. Right now he has the high ground and the board is the one that looks petty and immature. It would be dumb for him to do anything that reverses this dynamic.

Altman is going to move on and announce a new venture in the coming weeks. Whether that venture is in AI or not in AI will be very revealing about what he truly believes are the prospects for the space.

Brockman and the others will likely do something new in AI.

Gygax had fucked off to Hollywood and was too busy fueling his alcohol, cocaine and adultery addictions to spend any time actually running the company. All while TSR was losing money like crazy.

The company was barely making 30 million a year while 1.5 billion in debt...in the early 80s.

Even then, Gygax's downfall is the result of his own coup, where he ousted Kevin Blume and brought in Lorraine Williams. She bought all of Blume's shares and within about a year removed any control that Gygax had over the company and canceled most of his projects. He resigned a year later.

Gygax? The history books don't think much of his business skills, starting with the creation of AD&D as a fiction to avoid paying royalties to Arneson.

Jobs was a liability when he was fired and arguably without being fired would have never matured. Formative experience if there ever was one.

I'll just say it: Jobs being pushed out was the right decision at the time. He was an abusive and difficult personality, the Macintosh was at the time a sales failure, and he played internal team and corporate politics that pit team against team (e.g. Lisa vs Mac) and undermined unity and success.

Notable that when he came back, while he was still a difficult personality, the other things didn't happen anymore. Apple after the return of jobs became very good at executing on a single cooperative vision.

Yeah that's right. There's a blogger in another post on HN that makes the same point at the very end: https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

The solution is to replace the board members with AGI entities, isn't it? Just have to figure out how to do the real-time incorporation of current data into the model. I bet that's an active thing at OpenAI. Seems to have been a hot discussion topic lately:

https://www.workbyjacob.com/thoughts/from-llm-to-rqm-real-ti...

The real risk is that some government will put the result in charge of their national defense system, aka Skynet, not that kids will ask it how to make illegal drugs. The curious silence on military-industrial applications of LLMs makes me suspect this is part of the OpenAI story... Good plot for a novel, at least.

I appreciate this argument, but I also think naked profit seeking is the cause of a lot of problems in our economy and there are qualities that are hard to quantify when you structure the organization around it. Blindly following the economic argument can also cause problems, and it's a big reason why American corporate culture moved away from building a good product first towards maximizing shareholder value. The OpenAI board certainly seems capricious and impulsive given this decision though.

Yeah, there's no governance problems in for-profit companies that have led to, for example, the smoking epidemic, the opioids epidemic, the impending collapse of the planet's biosphere, all for the sake of a dime.

Their ambiguous goals induce politics. [...] This is the problem with religious organizations and ideological governments: they can't be trusted, because they will be captured by their internal politics.

Yes, of course. But that's because "doing good" is by definition much more ambiguous than "making money". It's way higher dimension, and it has uncountable definitions.

So nonprofits will by definition involve more politics at the human level. I'd say we must accept that if we want to live amongst the actions of nonprofits rather than just for-profits.

To claim that "politics" are a reason something "can't be trusted" is akin to saying involvement of human affairs means something can't be trusted (over computers). We must imagine effective politics, or else we cannot imagine effective human affairs -- only mechanistic affairs of simple optimization systems (like capitalist markets)

No, you're confusing business with politics. You're right that a literal coup d'état is the forced takeover of a state with the backing of its own military.

But in the business and wider world, a coup (without the d'état part) is, by analogy, any takeover of power that is secretly planned and executed as a surprise. (We can similarly talk about a company "declaring war" which means to compete by mobilizing all resources towards a single purposes, not to fire missiles and kill people.)

This is absolutely a coup. It was an action planned by a subset of board members in secret, taken by a secret board meeting missing two of its members (including the chair), where not even Microsoft had any knowledge or say, despite their 49% investment in the for-profit corporation.

I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. But this is one of the great boardroom coups of all time -- one for the history books. There's a reason it's front-page news, not just on HN but in the NYT and WSJ as well.

It's not uncommon to describe the fall of a government as a "parliamentary" coup, if the relevant proceedings of a legislative assembly are characterized by haste and intrigue, rather than debate and deliberation.

For example, the French revolution saw 3 such events commonly descried as coups - the the fall of Robespierre on 9-th of Thermidor and the Directory's (technically legal) annulment of elections on the 18-th of Fructidor and 22-nd Floréal. The last one was even somewhat bloodless.

voting out a politician as a coup.

That6 is literally a political coup

Yup. The only correct governance metaphor here is the opposite. It's a defense of openAI's constitution. The company, effectively like Mozilla, was deliberately structured as a non-profit in which the for-profit arm exists to raise capital to pursue the mission of the former. Worth paying attention to what they have to say on their structure:

https://openai.com/our-structure

especially this part:

https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...

If the rumors are correct and ideological disagreement was at the core of this, OpenAI is not going to be open anyway, as Sutskever wants more safety, which implies being as closed as possible. Whether it's "public good" is in the eye of the beholder, as there are multiple mutually incompatible concerns about AI safety, all of which have merit. The future balance between those will be determined by unpredictable events, as always.

OpenAI had abandoned its public good mission and had morphed into a psuedo-private for-profit.

They should be fine with the overwhelming volume of investment available to them.

Another way to look at it: How could this be wrong, given that their objective was not profit, and they can raise money easily with or without Altman?

This wasn't just some cultural shift. The board of OpenAI created a seperate for profit legal entity in 2019. The for-profit legal entity received overwhelming investment from Microsoft to make money. Microsoft, Early investors, and Employees all have a stake and want returns from this for profit company.

The separate non-profit OpenAI has a major problem on its hands if it thinks its goals are no longer aligned with the co-owners of the for-profit company.

I think it was a good thing that, in hindsight, the leading AI research company had a strong enough safety focus that it could do something like this. But that’s only the case as long as OpenAI remains the leading AI research company going forward, and after yesterday’s events I think that’s unlikely. Pushing for more incremental changes at OpenAI, possibly by getting the board to enact stronger safety governance, would have been a better outcome for everyone.

Much of the criticism was that they are not open enough. I see no indication that this will be changing, given the AI safety concerns of the remaining board.

Nevertheless, I agree that the firing was probably in line with their stated mission.

It's a lesson to any investor that doesn't have a seat on the board, what goes around comes around, ha ha :}

You seem super optimistic that backstabbing power-plays will result improvement.

I see it far more likely that openAI will lock down its tech even more, in the name of "safety", but also predict it will always be possible to pay for their services never-the-less.

Nothing in this situation makes me think OpenAI will be any more "open."

But that's actually what Jobs turned out to be? Woz and others were the engineering genius at Apple, and Jobs turned out to be really good at finding and identifying really good sales and branding hooks. See-through colourful boxes, "lickable" UIs, neat-o minimalistic portable music players, flick-flick-flick touch screens, and "One More Thing" presentations.

Jobs didn't invent the Lisa and Macintosh. Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Tesler etc did. They were the tech visionaries. Some of them benefited from him promoting their efforts while others... (Tesler mainly) did not.

Nothing "wrong" with any of that, if your vision of success is market success... but people need to be honest about what Jobs was... not a technology visionary, but a marketing visionary. (Though in fact the original Macintosh was a market failure for a long time)

In any case comparing Altman with Jobs is dubious and a bit wanky. Why are people so eager to shower this guy with accolades?

Yes, this was my thought when seeing those comparisons as well.

If the board was really serious about doing good over making profit (if this is indeed what the whole thing is about) they'd open source gpt-4/5 with a gpl-style license

I think "don't extinguish humanity or leave most of them unemployed" is a principle everyone can get and stay behind.

Be the change you want to see.

This is a really good point. If a non profit whose board you sit on releases a product that competes with a product from the corporation you manage, how do you manage that conflict of interest? Seems he should have stepped down.

The current interim CEO also spearheaded ChatGPT's development. Its the biggest product, consumer market based move the company's ever made. I can't imagine it's simply a pure "Sam wanted profits and Ilya/board wanted pure research" hard line in the sand situation.

It's a bad idea to make yourself dependent on a new service from the outset.

They could have gone bankrupt, been sued into the ground, taken over by Microsoft...

Just look at the just because they fired their CEO.

Was the success based on GPT or the CEO?

The former is still their and didn't get inferior.

Slower growth doesn't mean shrinking

I am curious what happens to ChatGPT now.

If it's true that this is in part over Dev day and such, and they may have a point, however if useful stuff with AI that helps people is gauche is OpenAI just going to turn into increasingly insular cult? ClosedAI but this time you can't even pay for it?

I wonder if this represents a shift away from the LLM being the headline product. Their competitors are rapidly catching up in that space.

It's clear you haven't read any Asimov stories. His robots are impeccably ethical due to the three laws, and the stories explore robopsychologicalb conundrums that arise when people keep putting them in situations that tax the three laws of robotics.

If you were a AI going rogue, how would you evade public scrutiny?

I am addicted to got now:/

Asimov AI is just humanlike behavior mostly, if you want a more realistic concern think Bostrom and instrumental goals.

In most of Asimov's stories it's implied that machines have quietly and invisibly replaced all human government and the world is better for it because humans tend to be petty and cruel while it's impossible for robots to harm humans.

An optimistic perspective of how despite today's regrettable events, Sama and gdb will start something new and more competition is a good thing : https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1725916938281627666?s=20

I have a contrarian prediction : Due to pressure from investors and a lawsuit against the openai board, the board will be made to resign and Sama & Greg will return to openai.

Anybody else agree ?

Let's not forget the role of Ilya to make gpt what it is today

How important is Altman? How important were three senior scientists? Can they start their own company, raise funding, and overtake OpenAI in a few years?

The general opinion seems to be estimating this at far above 50% YES. I, personally would bet at 70% that this exactly what will happen. Unless some really damaging information becomes public about Altman, he will definitely have the strong reputation and credibility, definitely will be able to raise very significant funding, and the only expert in industry / research he definitely won’t be able to recruit would be Ilya Sutskever.

Company with an unusual corporate structure designed specifically to be able to enforce an unpopular worldview, enforced that unpopular worldview.

I get that people feel disappointed, but I can't help but feel like those people were maybe being a bit wilfully blind to the parts of the company that they didn't understand/believe-in/believe-were-meant-seriously.

I work in consulting the genai hype machine is reaching absurdity in my firm. I can’t wait until Monday :)

It's almost like by wrapping someone else's service, you are at their mercy.

So you better be planning an exit strategy in case something changes slowly or quickly.

Nothing new here.

Is Bill Gates really loved by all ? I feel like it was the case before COVID, but then his reputation seemed to go from loved to hated

I can't imagine he would be interested in a C-office role at this point. Board member? Sure.

The for-profit would not exist if the non-profit was not able to maintain control. The only reason it does exist is because they were able to structure it in such a way that the for-profit is completely beholden to the non-profit. There is no requirement in the charter for the non-profit or the operating agreement of the for-profit to maintain a balance - it explicitly is the opposite of that. The operating agreement that all investors in and employees of the for-profit must sign explicitly states that investments should be considered donations, no profits are obligated to be made or returned to anyone, all money might be dumped into AGI R&D, etc. and that the for-profit is specifically beholden to the charter and mission of the non-profit.

https://openai.com/our-structure

Balance is irrelevant. It’s an accounting mechanism for irs rules.

The next day, Brockman, who was Chairman of the OpenAI board, was not invited to this board meeting, where Altman was fired.

Around 30 minutes later, Brockman was informed by Sutskever that he was being removed from his board role but could remain at the company, and that Altman had been fired (Brockman declined, and resigned his role later on Friday).

The board firing the CEO is not a coup. The board firing the CEO behind the chair's back and then removing the chair is a coup.

The board ousting the board chair (without notice) and the CEO is a coup. It's not even clear to me it was legal to meet and act without notice to the board chairman.

It seems you are saying that anything that doesn’t put profit first can’t be successful.

The commercial interests were not well-represented in the number of votes.

This is entirely by design. Anyone investing in or working for the for-profit had to sign an operating agreement that literally states the for-profit is entirely beholden to the non-profit's charter and mission and that it is under no obligation to be profitable. The board is specifically balanced so that the majority is independent of of for-profit subsidiary.

A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the intent was for there to be significant representation of commercial interests here, and that is the exact opposite of how all of this is structured.

Seems pretty straightforward, the dev day was a breaking point for the non-profit interests.

What was so bad about that day? Wasn't it just gpt4-turbo, gpt vision and gpt store and few small things?

As someone else commented on this page, it wasn't a coup.

Bite who?

Why has no one on HN considered it has to do with ...

Maybe because this was not proven in a court still, and "innocent until proven guilty" is still a basic concept that must be preserved.

So a big "allegedly" must be placed here.

The problem is that it might unfortunately be necessary to have this kind of funding to be able to develop AGI. And funding will not come if there are no incentives for the investors to fund.

What would you propose instead ?

This is why working for any company that isn’t public is an equity gamble.

That's a cynical take on work. I assume most people have other motivations since work is basically a prison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR1jzExZ9T0