> We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.
> We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.
1- So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults?
2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this?
3- Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.
> So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults?
Altman was trying to remove one of the board members before he was forced out. Looks like he got his way in the end, but I'm going to call Altman the primary instigator because of that.
His side was also the "we'll nuke the company unless you resign" side.
His side was also "700 regular employees support this", which is pretty unusual as most people don't care about their CEO at all. I am not related to OpenAI at all, but given the choice of "favorite of all employees" vs "fire people with no warning then refuse to give explanation why even under pressure" I know which side I root for.
Looking back, Altman's ace in hand was the tender offer from Thrive. Idk anyone at OpenAI, but all the early senior personnel backed him with vehemence. If the leaders hand't championed him strongly, I doubt you get 90% of the company to commit to leaving.
I'm sure some of those employees were easily going to make $10m+ in the sale. That's a pretty great motivation tool.
Overall, I do agree with you. The board could not justify their capricious decision making and refused to elaborate. They should've brought him back on Sunday instead of mucking around. OpenAI existing is a good thing.
No idea what these 700 employees were thinking. They probably had little knowledge of what truly went down other than “my CEO was fired unfairly” and rushed to the rescue.
I think the board should have been more transparent on why they made the decision to fire Sam.
Or perhaps these employees only cared about their AI work and money? The foundation would be perceived as the culprit against them.
Really sad there’s no clarity from the old board disclosed. Hope one day we will know.
I wonder how much more transparent they can really be. I know that when firing a "regular" employee, you basically never tell everyone all the details for legal CYA reasons. When your firing someone worth half a billion dollars, I expect the legal fears are magnified.
But that's the difference, the CEO is not a regular employee. If a board of directors wants to be trusted and taken seriously it can't just fire the CEO and say "I'm sorry we can't say why, that's private information".
That is one HUGE grain of salt considering 1/ it's Blind 2/ Even in the same thread there is another poster saying the exact opposite thing (i.e. no peer pressure)
Also, all the stuff they started doing with the hearts and cryptic messages on Twitter (now X) was a bit ... cult-y?. I wouldn't doubt there was a lot of manipulation behind all that, even from @sama itself.
So, there is goes, it seems that there's a big chance now that the first AGI will land on the hands of a group with the antics of teenagers. Interesting timeline.
The 700 employees also have significant financial incentive to want Altman to stay. If he moved to a competitor all the shine would follow. They want the pay-day (I don't blame them), but take with a grain of salt what the employees want in this case.
Microsoft's role remains same as it was on Thursday. Minor (49%?) shareholder and keeps access to models and IP
IMO Kevin tweeting that MS will hire and match comp of all OpenAI employees was amazing negotiation tactic because that meant employees could sign the petition without worrying about their jobs/visas
I was thinking about this a lot as well, but what did that mean for employee stock in the commercial entity? I heard they were up for a liquid cash-out in the next funding round.
OpenAI is an airgapped test lab for Microsoft. They dont want critical exposure to the downside risk of AI research, just the benefits in terms of IP. Sam and Greg probably offer enough stability for them to continue this way.
It makes sense to airgap Generative AI while courts ponder wether copyright fair use applies or not. Research is clearly allowed fair use, and let OpenAI experiment with commercialization until it is all clear waters.
What is the benefit of learning about this kind of drama minute-by-minute, compared to reading it a few hours later on hacker news or next day on wall street journal?
Personally I found twitter very bad for my productivity, a lot of focus destroyed just to know "what is happening" when there was neglible drawbacks of finding about news events a few hours later.
Satya just played the hand he had. The hand he had was excellent, he had already won. MS already had perceptual license, people working on GPT and Sam Altman on his corner.
The one thing in Microsoft has stayed constant from Gates to Ballmer to Satya: you should never, ever form a close alliance with MS. They know how to screw alliance partners. i4i, Windows RT partners, Windows Phone Partners, Nokia, HW partners in Surface. Even Steve Jobs was burned few times.
Satya comes out as evil imho, and I wonder how much orchestration there was going on behind the scenes.
Microsoft is showing that it is still able to capture important scale ups and 'embrace' them, whilst also acting as if they have the moral high ground, but in reality are doing research with a high governance errors and potential legal problems away from their premises. and THAT is why stakeholders like him.
The explanation for point 1 is point 3. If the people involved were not terminally online and felt the need to share every single one of their immediate thoughts with the public they could have likely settled this behind closed doors, where this kind of stuff belongs.
It's not actually news, it's entertainment and self-aggrandizement by everyone involved including the audience.
Considering CEO2 rebelled next day and CEO3 allegedly said he'll quit unless board comes out with truth, doesn't provide much confidence in their adulthood.
The board not saying what the hell they were on about was the source of the whole drama in the first place. If they had just said exactly what their problem was up front there wouldn't have been as much to tweet about.
> Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates
This has been my single strongest takeaway from this saga: Twitter remains the centre of controversy. When shit hit the fan, Sam and Satya and Swisher took to Twitter. Not Threads. Not Bluesy. Twitter. (X.)
Bluesky still has gated signups at this point so I don't think it will ever be a viable alternative.
Threads had a rushed rollout which resulted in major feature gaps that disincentivized users from doing anything beyond creating their profiles.
Notable figures and organizations have little reason to fully migrate off Twitter unless Musk irreversibly breaks the site and even he is not stupid enough to do that (yet?). So with most of its content creators still in place, Twitter has no risk of following the path of Digg.
> Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.
It's only natural to confuse what is happening with what we wish to happen. After all, when we imagine something, aren't we undergoing a kind of experience?
A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof. It's only human to do this. We all do.
It was funny reading Kara Swisher keeping saying twitter is dying and is toxic and what not, while STILL doing all her first announcements on twitter, and using twitter as a source.
same with Ashlee Vance (the other journo reporting on this) and all the main players (Sam/Greg/Ilya/Mira/Satya/whoever) also make their first announcement on twitter.
I don't know about the funding part of it, but there is no denying it, the news is still freshest on twitter. Twitter feels just as toxic for me as before, in fact I feel community notes has made it much better, imho.
____
In some related news, I finally got bluesky invite (I don't have invite codes yet or I would share here)
and people there are complaining about... mastadon and how elitist it is...
that was an eye opener.
nice if you want some science-y updates but it's still lags behind twitter for news.
> A lot of people wish Twitter were dying, even though it's it, so they interpret evidence through a lens of belief confirmation rather than belief disproof.
If there’s been one constant here, it’s been people who actually know Tonrer expressing deep support for her experience, intelligence, and ethics, so it’s interesting to me that she seems to be getting the boot.
If there is one clear thing, it's that no one on that board should be allowed anywhere near another board for any non-clown company. The level of incompetence in how they handled this whole thing was extraordinary.
The fact that Adam D'Angelo is still on the new board apparently is much more baffling than the fact that Tonrer or Ilya are not.
Add delusions of grandeur to that list thinking she can pursue her ideological will by winning over 3 board members while losing 90% of the company staff.
She was fighting an idelogical battle that needs full industry buy in, legitimate or not that's not how you win people over.
If she's truely a rationalist as she claims then a rationalist would be realistic understanding that if your engineers can just leave and do it somewhere else tomorrow you aren't making progress. Taking on the full might of US capitalism via winning over the fringe half of a non profit board is not the best strategy. At best it was desperate and naive.
This is pretty good evidence she's a rationalist; rationalism means a religious devotion to a specific kind of logical thinking that never works in real life because you can't calculate the probability a result if you didn't know it could happen in the first place.
Traditional response to this happening is to say something about your "priors" being wrong instead of taking responsibility.
2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of this?
3- Twitter is still the best place to follow this and get updates, everyone is still make "official" statements on twitter, not sure how long this website will last but until then, this is the only portal for me to get news.