Well this probably disproves the theory that it was a power grab by Microsoft. It didn’t make too much sense anyway since they already have access to tech behind GPT and Microsoft doesn’t necessarily need the clout behind the OpenAI brand.
* Exclusive access to resell OpenAI's technology and keep nearly all of that revenue for themselves, both cloud and services
* Receive 75% of OpenAI's profits up to $1 trillion
My guess at this point is financial malfeasance, either failing to present a deal to the board or OpenAI has been in financial straits and he was covering it up.
Through the public actions of Sam Altman in various places like the US congress it has become rather clear that his goals are to device and fear monger to create an environment of regulatory capture where due to misguided laws OpenAI will have an unfair competitive advantage.
This might be quite in line with what Microsoft tends to like. But it also can be a risk for MS if regulation goes even a step further.
This is also in direct opposition with the goals OpenAI set themself and which some of the other investors might have.
So MS being informed last minute to not give them any chance to change that decision is quite understandable.
At the same time it might have been pushed under the table by people in MS which where worried it poses to much risk, but which maybe e.g. might need an excuse why they didn't stop it.
Lastly is the question why Sam Altman acted the way he did. The simplest case is greed for money and power, in which case it would be worrying for business partners at how bad he was when it comes to public statements not making him look like a manipulative untranslatable **. The more complex case would be some twisted believe that a artificial pseudo monopoly is needed "because only they [OpenAI] can do it in the right way and other would be a risk". In that case he would be an ideologically driven person with a seriously twisted perception of reality, i.e. the kind of people you don't want to do large scale business with because they are too unpredictable and can generally not be trusted. Naturally there are also a lot of other options.
But one thing I'm sure about is that many AI researchers and companies doing AI products did not trust the person Sam Altman at all after his recent actions, so ousting him and installing a different CEO should help increasing trust into OpenAI.
Buying them (or getting de facto control) is clearly an easier way to achieve that, vs. replicating the technology in-house.
IMO this is the most important part of Nadella's blog post:
> Most importantly, we’re committed to delivering all of this to our customers while building for the future.
It's curious to me that they see the departure of Sam Altman as a reason to remind us that they are "building for the future" (which I take to mean: working toward independence from OpenAI). I think it actually lends credence to the theory that this was a failed power grab of some sort.
Maybe almost had to since it was during market hours.
I'm not saying I think it WAS that, but come on.
In my opinion, I'd say the shortness and lack of details backs up the story that they had no idea. You'd see way more words if a marketing department had it's hands on something like this. This was 100% a get something out asap job.
(Assuming they have some plan that gives them the flexibility to trade shares directly on the market like that. I think $GME had something like this?)
Edit: And, of course, actually mean it, unlike Caroline Ellison and the $22 FTT: https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/15892874579753041...
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A statement from Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella Nov 17, 2023 | Microsoft Corporate Blogs
As you saw at Microsoft Ignite this week, we’re continuing to rapidly innovate for this era of AI, with over 100 announcements across the full tech stack from AI systems, models, and tools in Azure, to Copilot. Most importantly, we’re committed to delivering all of this to our customers while building for the future. We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda and an exciting product roadmap; and remain committed to our partnership, and to Mira and the team. Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world.
They needed the Microsoft investment before GPT scaling was proven out. I imagine many entities would be willing to put money into a truly open research lab given OpenAI’s track record.
And then Greg being all "committed to safety" in his resignation statement makes me think this was a conflict between being an open OpenAI with global research or being closed and proprietary in the name of safety.
OpenAI (the board that made this decision) is still ultimately a non-profit, so it's possible that interests might not be aligned.
OpenAI’s biggest customer and investor starts buying AMD chips and simultaneously building their own chips
there are a lot of ignorable cracks in the armor that support any number of theories
let alone Altman himself, who knows
Why? It’s hard to imagine anyone putting any significant amounts of money (in comparison to the MS deal anyway) without any exclusivity rights at least
They 100% have leverage to exert influence on both, it’s just bad PR if word gets out.
This is funny to me, as Twitter is the platform for "deliberately low-effort" posts, but you see it as a platform for official statements. How times change...
But seriously, this muddies the water even more. I assumed the Microsoft deal being based on some false pretense was the reason this was all happening. I guess that could still be true and the board is trying to protect themselves from whatever else is about to come out.
OpenAI has pretty much the "best" model and first mover advantage. They can lose the latter, and might struggle to keep the former.
They just ended Ignite, their huge IT conference - and have revealed baking GPT into EVERYTHING they do. Everything.
The closing keynote was the massive engineering effort put in to running LLMs at scale - for MS themselves and customers.
MS is all in on GPT, including releasing a no code and low code custom GPT builder for orgs this week.
“we’re committed to delivering all of this to our customers ... We have ... full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda...”
I'd argue this is signaling they have the IP / source code / models / etc.
(Which, for what it's worth, is common in substantial partnership agreements.)
I think that just signals that they have a firm business agreement with OAI regardless of what Altman might be doing.
with a product like chatGPT, especially given the nature of how it has been presented thus far (our servers, our API, your account on those servers) , it seems extraordinarily dangerous to treat it like a common partnership agreement.
Satya Nadella's Statement on OpenAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312355
and for completeness I suppose (though at the moment they're #1 and #2):
OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611
Greg Brockman quits OpenAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704
Come on. No way Microsoft’s team does a deal like that with 0 power or knowledge in a situation like this. That’s ludicrous.
Edit: the only case I can see for MSFT being truly blindsided is as follows. Elon is behind it. Sam and Elon have their breakup. Sam seems to win. They close the deal with MSFT, all is good. But Elon is intimately familiar with the corporate structure and all moves made historically, maybe even has some evidence of wrong-doing. There is probably only 1 person in the valley that could pressure the non profit to oust Sam (and by extension Greg) AND provide the financial/legal/power backing to see it through. It takes a lot money and influence to do this from the outside. That is really the only scenario I could see MSFT truly being blindsided for getting out-maneuvered by a dinky non-profit board.
sama’s generic “looking forward to what’s next” response also doesn’t give me confidence it won’t be a bigger scandal
I mean, if they don't come out and explain what happened, they can't be surprised when people "hallucinate" all kinds of random, preposterous explanations.
1) A long standing disagreement between AI-safety and AI-profiteering with Ilya on one side and Altman on the other. Ilya (board member) was the one who told Altman to attend video call, then told him he was fired.
2) Some side dealing from Altman - raising new VC funds - maybe in conflict of interest with OpenAI, that was the final straw.
There also appears to be a lot of rumors about Altman's personal conduct, but even if true that doesn't seem to jibe with the official statement over the reason for his firing, or Brockman and others resigning in unison - more reflection of the internal rift.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_engineering_groups#C...
I don’t know why so many here are struggling to accept that this guy fucked up, lied to his boss, got caught, and got fired for it, and that’s all there is to it. boards will tolerate many things, but willfully lying to them about anything material is not one of them.
a ceo who won’t tell the board the truth is a ceo who thinks they are more important than the company. some boards don’t care, because they are already bought off with equity, but this board doesn’t get equity…
What I do know, having worked for many large organizations, is that reading the daily press (or listening to the news) is a terrible way to get accurate real-time facts about current corporate happenings.
Related: check out Gell-Man amnesia effect.
Microsoft, while a large investor (who has already reaped large rewards from that investment) explicitly has no governance role in any of the OpenAI entities, including the one at the very bottom of the stack of four that they are invested in, and this was a decision by the board governs the nonprofit at the top of the stack about personnel matters, so there is no reason to think that Microsoft would be notified in advance.
"Im shocked to see gambling in this establishment! Shocked I tell you!"
If MSFT doesn’t like this move, why wouldn’t they just … not honor those credits? Or grant more to a successor entity? Does OAI have its own warehouse of GPUs separate from Azure?
Seems like a very dangerous game for Ilya to play.
The last this he said was: “I look forward to building AGI with you” or the like…
I’m betting that he insulted Satya at that event or upshowed him, etc. and that’s why he’s kicking rocks…
This comment on the OpenAI DevDay video aged really well:
> @JustinHalford: Some odd tension coming from Sam. I’m sensing some tension in the Open AI/Microsoft partnership.
There it is!!
“I look forward to building AGI with you.”
vs.
“Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world.”
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/17/a-statement-from...
Microsoft has an influence over fking governments. It doesn't need to have an official board seat. It doesn't even need to ask what they want directly. It's enough for people in power to be aligned with their interests.
I'm not saying that's the case here, just pointing that having no ownership or board member in an entity doesn't rule out having power or influence.
Without the top 5 tech companies, S&P500 has lackluster growth.
Microsoft has added trillions to its cap. The statement “we have all the access we need” is a powerful statement. To both OpenAI board and investors.
OpenAI is built on Azure compute. MS has invested billions of their own, they’re building their own chips now.
Essentially Microsoft is saying you can burn OpenAI to the ground, “we have everything we need” to win! - the data, the compute, the algorithms, the engineers, the capital and the market.
This is a way bigger blow to OpenAI than Microsoft.
The Open AI board letter, representing just 4 people, screams butt hurt and personal disagreements. Microsoft, who just finished building OpenAI’s models into every core product, was blindsided. The chairman of the OpenAI board, Greg Brockman, another startup exec was pushed out at the same time. Eric Schmidt, with his own AI startup lab start singing Sam’s praises and saying “what’s next?”
My guess is that Microsoft is about to get fucked and Eric Schmidt is going to pop open a bottle of expensive champagne tonight.
"screams butt hurt"? the board put out a blog post saying the CEO had lied so badly they'd insta-sacked him.
I would not be surprised if it turns out Microsoft has a multibillion dollar, complex financial instrument axe on the necks of these people by Monday forcing a sale or a new management structure that gives them more control.
I assure you that sentience is a physical process, akin to HUMAN METABOLISM
You have nothing to be surprised about, Mr. Turing-jokester.
Edit: I just read he was fired, but the point remains.
"Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI, learned that OpenAI was ousting CEO Sam Altman just a minute before the news was shared with the world, according to a person familiar with the situation."
The site is mercifully clean (just turn off your adblocker and see what I mean).
Their scoops are good.
The format is succinct and efficient but not "dumb" like a short twitter thread.
What's more, none of this has changed over the years, somehow avoiding enshittification.
Both masterminds of ChatGPT have left the company.
Feels like Nokia 2.0
Just a rumor. Zero chance someone at MS wasn't already aware.
"Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI, was blindsided by Altman’s firing, Axios reported and Semafor confirmed."
It's probably literally an exec on the OpenAI/Microsoft partnership.
The alternative to "a person familiar" is us as readers never get this information at all.
those are some bold beliefs given the overall honesty in journalism and benefits to being first to publish.