Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.
“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the company said in its blog post.
EDITED TO ADD direct link to OpenAI board announcement:
https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition
“AI is going to take away jobs.”
“Wait… not like that.”
Oops… didnt see that coming
He got billions in his account. I dont think he cares. For them job is something to do to not get bored, I guess?
Pretty much literally not about the money for him.
He didn’t have any equity and didn’t get a salary.
So he can go and do something fun like hike the Andes for two years.
He got billions in his account
Was unaware the man has had his bank account records leaked to the public. Do you have a source for this claim?
Net worth estimates seem to be $500M - $700M
https://www.thestreet.com/investors/sam-altman-net-worth-how-does-he-make-money
Seems to be somewhere between 0.5 and 0.7 billion, which due to a quirk of the English language are technicallybillions, making OP technically not wrong ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/sam-altman-net-worth/ https://www.thestreet.com/investors/sam-altman-net-worth-how-does-he-make-money
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So if we’re all billionaires, do we need to eat ourselves?
If everyone’s super(rich), no-one is.
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Anxious people: We’ve been eating dead skin for ages!
Hey, nobody’s judging anyone for their kinks. Do as you please.
Lol
Nope but assuming he’s broke af is pretty idiotic. He rolls wirh Musk, Branson and all.
I’ve seen a number of misinformed comments here complaining about a profit oriented board.
It’s worth keeping in mind that this board was the original non-profit board, that none of the members have equity, and literally part of the announcement is the board saying that they want to be more aligned as a company with the original charter of helping bring about AI for everyone.
There may be an argument around Altman’s oust being related to his being too closed source and profit oriented, but the idea that the reasoning was the other way around is pretty ludicrous.
Again - this isn’t an investor board of people who put money into the company and have equity they are trying to protect.
So what is their board here if they aren’t investors?
It’s a non-profit.
OpenAI is a non-profit with a board which owns the LLC which is what was invested into and makes money.
This was not the LLC board, but the non-profit board in charge of the whole thing.
Thanks for explaining! I knew about this arrangement but didn’t know the two boards work this way.
So, non-profit board members are being simply hired as employees and they don’t have to have any connection with the company as long as they meet the bylaw criteria.
Altman himself praised this non profit overseer structure before. I wonder what does he think of it now 🫣
A point of clarification, board members aren’t usually considered employees by virtue of their presence on the board. They are apart from the organization. They often have a dual role as some kind of executive in the company, though.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, this is a good question that not everyone knows the answer to. (It’s been answered above me, but just so we’re clear, any large organization can have a board of directors, whether they invest money or not. A board of directors isn’t necessarily “the people who have money”, it’s the people who set the direction.)
I thought it also had to do with him allegedly abusing his sister for decades?
Not according to any of the information currently coming out.
And it would be weird for the President to resign as well if the CEO was ousted for sexual abuse.
I’m more surprised that the folks at OpenAI saw fit to fire him than I am that he committed fireable offenses.
Because he lied to them instead of for them.
But what he lied about is probably bigger news.
This has corporate PR speak all over it, but it is clear that it was circumventing the desires of the Board, and the chairman of the Board steps down as well.
The absolute hell happened?
If I had to guess, about how interested he was in keeping it non-profit in spirit. Which direction he believed in, I have no idea. I don’t know him or the board. The statement sounds like the board is leaning toward non-profit behavior, but I don’t believe a company who merely says “do no evil”.
The company is now actually being run by ChatGPT, Mira is just the face it’s hiding behind.
I asked Bard to give me a generic reason for firing a CEO.
Certainly, here are some vague reasons for firing the CEO of an AI company:
Leadership concerns: The CEO’s leadership style or personal conduct was not in line with the company’s values or culture. This could include issues such as lack of transparency, poor communication, or ethical breaches.Yup.
Bard is on copium with that last one.
No, Bard is just making a prediction based on the way CEO firings are presented in press releases. Those press releases are never the “real” reason, what we’re seeing here is the way a board would frame the firing of its CEO. “Ethical breach” is the term used when “The CEO was killing hookers for fun and WHOO-WEE we did NOT want to get any of that on us,” is not considered appropriate to tell the press.
I am actually very surprised. Did not see this coming.
That’s what my blind girlfriend said.
OpenAI also announced that co-founder Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board, though he will remain at the company.
Interesting. No way this isn’t connected
Yeah. Given the language (Altman lied to them) and the chairman stepping down (but remaining in the C-suite) I’m starting to think that maybe Altman was trying to take something in an unapproved direction and present it as a fait accompli but got found out before he was ready to reveal it.
I added the direct link to the board’s announcement to the post text so people can see it for themselves – interesting how the board separated Altman’s removal from Brockman’s demotion by five paragraphs, adding Brockman’s changed position just before the end almost as an afterthought. Which of course it isn’t, lol.
He just resigned like 30m ago.
Uhh… Keep reading?
Hours after it was published, Brockman posted to X that he had quit “based on today’s news.”
Apologies, looks like that statement may have been added after the fact.
Not exactly surprised here. Every time I’ve seen him on the news, it’s always him fearmongering about the dangers of generative AI, when ChatGPT is burning through money and seemed to become more and more restrictive with every iteration. You can’t run an organization if it is built on top of lies.
Actually open models (not open source, sadly) like specialized LLaMa 2 derivatives that could be ran and fine-tuned locally seems to be the future, because there seems to be a diminishing return in training/inference power to usefulness, and specialized smaller model tuned for specific applications are much more flexible than a giant general one that can only be used on somebody else’s machine.
because there seems to be a diminishing return in training/inference power to usefulness
Be careful not to be caught up in the application of Goodhart’s Law going on in the field right now.
There’s plenty of things GPT-4 trounces everything else on, they just tend to be things outside the now standardized body of tests, which suggests the tests have become the target and are no longer effective measurements.
This is perhaps most apparent in things like Orca, where we directly use the tests as the target, have GPT-4 generate synthetic data that improves Llama performance on the target, and then see large gains in smaller models on the tests.
But those new models don’t necessarily have the same capabilities on more abstract capabilities, such as the recent approach of using analogy to solve problems.
We are arguably becoming too myopic in how we are measuring the success of new models.
He hallucinated to the board.
Oh no, anyways
This is unprecedented. They let that schmuck at Unity “retire” on a holiday but they fired Sam. Oof.
It sounds like there was a power struggle over the direction of OpenAI.
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I mean yeah but also no. I think anyone would be the former guy (i.e., the Sam on the left) over the latter if given the choice.
This is really big news, going to be interesting if anything leaks or if we stay in the dark. For Altman to be fired and for them to release a statement like this it has to be something drastic.
My guess — and this is pure conjecture — MS canned him because Bing didn’t eat Google’s lunch.
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Allegedly MS didn’t know until a few minutes before the announcement.
Microsoft doesn’t have that power, and it has hurt their stock value. Their CEO’s response suggests that Microsoft and other partners didn’t know until everyone else did.
But they said it was because he wasn’t being totally honest with the board for OpenAI tho
Corps would never lie to save face or hide truths!!
On one hand, this was posted 15 minutes before you posted this… on the other hand, this is a much clearer headline
Really? I searched by new before I posted, saw nothing about Sam Altman.
EDITED TO ADD you can color me blind, because yeah, there’s one titled “OpenAI announces leadership transition” right before mine. Shit. Not sure how to handle this, but if the mods want to delete mine they can.
Not sure how to handle this,
In times of great dishonor, the Samurai would commit seppuku with their sword.
I have half a plastic knife I use on the cat food . . . will that do?
Only if you post the video
I think I’m gonna need to upgrade my current drug regimen . . . be right back . . .
Alternatively, you can do sudoku.
But he still has to do it with the plastic knife.
Best I can do is charcuterie with dried salami.
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CEO? Fuck him. He’ll be just fine.
of course he will, he wasnt even getting paid
Huh??
What’d he do?
No idea, but given how sudden and out-of-the-blue this is, and the fact that he was co-founder of OpenAI (meaning that to some degree the board is pushing him out of his own company) you can make an educated guess that’s it’s huge.
My guess, personally, is financial malfeasance,if only because personal misbehavior usually involves some hemming and hawing before a company concludes that the ejectee “is no longer a good fit and does not represent the values held by our organization.” This was very sudden, no one saw it coming, and that’s not too usual.I guess we’ll see, lol.
EDITED TO ADD I’ve changed my mind after a closer look at the wording of the board announcement. Given the language (Altman lied to them) and the chairman stepping down (but remaining in the C-suite) I’m starting to think that maybe Altman was trying to take something in an unapproved direction and present it as a fait accompli but got found out before he was ready to reveal it:
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. (paragraph 3)
As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. (paragraph 6)
It’s worth keeping in mind the explicit mention of their key responsibility at the end, which was the original non-profit charter of “ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
Whatever it was it’s spicy enough that they’re trying to bury the press release in the late Friday afternoon news graveyard
Edit: even better, whatever they’re trying to distance themselves from is so important they didn’t even wait for the closing bell on the market.
I interpret their wording that he lied to the board repeadetly and made some unethical backdoor deals of evil.
More likely he didn’t want to be evil and all the board cares about is money
Almost certainly the opposite - it’s the board that is non-profit and Sam has been the one bringing billions of dollars of commercially-tied investment
Makes me wonder if he wanted to put ethical guardrails on the product that would’ve been less profitable for the board.
It’s the non-profit board, not an investor board. None of the members have equity in the company.
Yeah I’m going with the board doesn’t like the commercially tied investment deals from other companies.
I’ve worked with some non-profits… that are greedier than for-profits. The board just kinda… y’know…. Money.
…tax-free tho
Quick edit: donations make hella money and old people love to leave mills hahahaha
Unverified, but I saw some rumor about sexual abuse in his past. Look it up.
Those allegations have been floating since ~2021, I have a hard time believing they’d take emergency action on them 2-3y later.
