So you want dump trucks of money to throw around and look big eh? We got some garages right here that we haven't figured out how to use..,. MS is having its cake and eating it,so why are people caring about openai and its politics? Everyone will get fed or ****ed the same.
Matt Levine's breakdown... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-controls-openai I mean here’s a diagram: The question is: Is control of OpenAI indicated by the word “controls,” or by the word “MONEY”? On Friday, OpenAI’s nonprofit board, its ultimate decision maker, fired Sam Altman, its co-founder and chief executive officer, saying that “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Apparently the board felt that Altman was moving too aggressively to commercialize OpenAI’s products like ChatGPT, and worried that this speed of commercialization raised the risk of creating a rogue artificial intelligence that would, you know, murder or enslave humanity.[2] So it just fired him. “Microsoft was shocked Friday when it received just a few minutes notice” of the firing, despite having invested some $13 billion in OpenAI. Other investors and employees were similarly blindsided. But that’s the deal! The board decides, and it does not answer to the investors or employees or take their interests into account. Its only concern is with “humanity.” Except that then OpenAI spent the weekend backtracking and trying to hire Altman back, under pressure from Microsoft Corp., other investors and employees. Altman’s conditions for coming back, as far as I can tell, were that the board had to resign and the governance had to change; I take that to mean roughly that OpenAI had to become a normal tech company with him as a typically powerful founder-CEO. They almost got there, but then did not. This morning, OpenAI announced that Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, would be its new interim CEO, while Microsoft announced that it had hired Altman to lead its in-house artificial intelligence efforts. Also this morning, “more than 500 of OpenAI's 700-plus employees signed an open letter urging OpenAI's board to resign” and threatening to quit to join Altman’s Microsoft team. Incredibly, one of the signers of that letter is Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, who is on the board and apparently led the effort to fire Altman. “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” he tweeted this morning, okay. I wonder if Altman will hire him at Microsoft. So: Is control of OpenAI indicated by the word “controls,” or by the word “MONEY”? In some technical sense, the first diagram is correct; that board really did fire that CEO. In some practical sense, if Microsoft has a perpetual license to OpenAI’s technology and now also most of its employees — “You can make the case that Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0 and zero risk of an antitrust lawsuit,” writes Ben Thompson — the money kind of won. What should the answer be? Well, it could go either way. You could wr
SF just burns money like they are printing it. Their last conference had more celebrities than most opening nights of a movie and the Foo Fighters played. But it seems like a terrible, predatory place to work with lots of internal cutthroat competition and politics and tons of turnover.
If a worse case scenario were to happen there is now zero confidence that this company will handle it appropriately. It is clear who needs to be fired after this colossal f*ck up.
It. May. Not. Be. Over. Excerpts below ... OpenAI Investors, Led By Thrive, Angle to Bring Back Altman OpenAI’s investors are still trying to return co-founder Sam Altman to a leadership role at the ChatGPT maker, and Microsoft Corp. has signaled that it wouldn’t oppose such an outcome. Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Tiger Global Management are looking to protect their investment after the OpenAI board forced out Altman on Friday, according to people familiar with the matter. Altman is eager to return, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential negotiations. .... Now, it turns out, Microsoft would be amenable to Altman and Brockman returning to OpenAI — albeit with a couple of key conditions. The startup’s current board would have to resign, and OpenAI’s governance would have to change to ensure that such upheaval could never happen again, according to people familiar with the software giant’s thinking. “Irrespective of where Sam is, he’s working with Microsoft,” Nadella said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday. Also :
Nearly All of OpenAI Staff Threaten to Go to Microsoft If Board Doesn’t Quit More than 700 of the AI firm’s roughly 770 employees signed a letter on Monday addressed to OpenAI’s board stating that the signatories are “unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment and care for our mission and employees.” The letter called for every member of the board to resign and for Altman to be reinstated, or else employees might jump to Microsoft. The software giant “has assured us there are positions for all OpenAI employees,” the letter said.
