What. The. Fuck?
Sam Altman won’t return as CEO of OpenAI, despite efforts by the company’s executives to bring him back, according to co-founder and board director Ilya Sutskever....Emmett Shear, co-founder of Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch, will take over as interim CEO, Sutskever said.
This is from The Information, but it's all over the place. I guess on Monday we'll find out if the entire staff of OpenAI is going to quit, as gossip had it yesterday. Either way, this is a helluva soap opera. The CEO of Twitch? On an interim basis? This makes even less sense than firing Altman in the first place.
The OpenAI board is truly mind boggling. There's no way any group of ordinary humans would ever have done this.
UPDATE: And the other shoe drops:
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and many of their former OpenAI colleagues will join Microsoft, the software conglomerate’s chief Satya Nadella said Monday, capping an intense three days of discussion following the sudden exit of the AI startup’s executives.
However, Microsoft says it "remains committed" to its $10 billion partnership with OpenAI.
Kevin is assuming facts not in evidence. Are the decisions even being made by humans? If AI has taken over the company, it's natural that the reasons for its decisions will not be comprehensible by pitiful human "intelligence".
I'm also rather baffled by all the breathless coverage of this (both here on Drum's blog and on the front pages of the NYtimes, etc.). There are thousands of tech companies, and hundreds of biggish-and-or-notable ones; even goofy shennanigans with the hiring/firing of the c-levels of one of them is not particularly newsworthy.
Maybe the coverage has *also* been taken over by AI?
Yes, "There are thousands of tech companies, and hundreds of biggish-and-or-notable ones." But how many of the size and impact of Microsoft?
Very few. Microsoft has a market cap of $2.8 trillion. But we aren't talking about the leadership of Microsoft, but instead one part of the leadership of a comparatively tiny entity. True, Microsoft does have $10 billion invested in OpenAI, but that's less than 5% of Microsoft's 2023 revenue.
So, again, tiny. Why all the breathless coverage of Sam Altman's employment status?
I'm not sure what is going on with OpenAI, but it is worth noting that OpenAI is a 501(c)(3) public charity. You shouldn't expect its board to act like the board of a for profit corporation.
I think that’s the essential point.
OpenAI is a nonprofit that recently created a for-profit entity. That was likely to form tension at some point. That point is now.
Altman seems to have a gift for getting attention and getting funding. I can’t say I know, but I don’t see that he’s the essential tech guru that must lead the company’s AI engineering efforts. His essential role is strategy. His strategy, and Microsoft’s, is pedal-to-the-medal AI and AGI development. He and they want to “win the race,” consequences be damned.
The board (and the new guy) want to take a slower, safer road to developing the technology.
Which makes sense. As a nonprofit in a field that many claim will lead to the destruction of humanity, a little prudence seems reasonable.
For the AI-may-be-the-end-of-the-world crowd, the Altman ouster should be welcome news. For the AI-may-be-the-end-of-the-world-and-I-can’t-wait crowd, maybe not.
The Egg Goose just got slaughtered. All that Effective Altruism wasted, how sad.
There is no joy in Mountainview,
The Mighty Casey is on the other team now
Sure sounds like they had cause to fire him, now.
Joined Microsoft? This is the same Microsoft that just had huge layoffs.
Replacing all those layoffs with AI?
On the contrary, this sounds exactly chaotic enough to be ordinary humans.
The above +10
I welcome our robot overlords.
The reporting on this is all over the place in terms of why this guy was fired. He obviously did something to piss off a couple of board members (described as "a lack of communication and transparency" whatever that might mean), but key investors were caught off guard by the vote and scrambled to unshit the bed and in the meantime the guy takes a bunch of top talent with him and goes to Microsoft. What a clusterfuck.
On the other hand, perhaps the board was right to start getting suspicious of a guy who seemed to be developing one of those tech-bro god complexes that usually leads to a big implosion, fraud charges, lawsuits, sexual assault allegations, etc. if you don't nip it in the bud.
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I hope the board members who apparently had some kind of snit are happy now. Their rainmaker has joined The Evil Empire. Colossus plus Guardian reprise.