Remember when Jack Dorsey was ousted from Twitter and replaced by Evan Williams, who was himself ousted and replaced by Dick Costolo, who was replaced when Dorsey came back? Or the drama around Yishan Wong's sudden resignation as Reddit CEO, to be replaced by Ellen Pao, to be replaced as the founder Steve Huffman came back? The Flexport drama last month where the hired CEO was replaced by the founder? The movie "The Social Network"? Going back a bit, Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack's ouster from Cisco, or Diane Green and Mendel Rosenblum's ouster from VMWare?
Build something successful and there will be a lot of infighting about who gets to control it.
But I guess the amount of contingency in how all this might play out may well be the reason for the ouster.
you're missing one noteworthy name who was CEO between those two people :)
That said, I feel like more is to come out still. The board made serious accusations.
Notably, Sam/Greg do not guess or insinuate why he did a coup.
Maybe it was a coup as per some reporting; maybe it wasn’t. I’m reluctant to make a decision here based on who got to the reporters first. There is some asymmetry in media savvy between Sam and the board.
This just happened. We don’t have all the facts.
"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."
This really reads like Sam did something wrong and had it coming. But Greg and Sam's statement make it sound like Ilya just wanted to go another direction and got the votes. Why make Sam out to be the bad guy if there was no wrongdoing?
I seen people compare him to Oppenheimer lol.
Did he actually build anything at OpenAI or did he just manage it?
a) Make sure it's sufficiently neutered as to not say something offensive or incongruent with certain ideologies, make certain topics off-limits
or
b) Scare lawmakers into making it impossible for anyone to catch up to OpenAI et al, so they can reap the benefits of cutting-edge AI while keeping the public placated with incremental improvements to outdated and sufficiently hobbled models
Zuckerberg started Fb in his dorm and Steve Jobs left his mark on every inch of their flagship products. Altman was positioned to be the next "Jobs / Zuckerberg" but I can't say I know he really deserved it as much as people seem to think. Obviously open to completely changing my mind.
It's a lot more popcorn than we usually get from corporate announcements.
And OpenAI have been the most exciting tech company of the last 12 months.
Even more so now than ever, I don't think this corporate structure will survive.
But other than that, the details are still pretty lacking. The drama is only getting started and whatever comes next from both sides will be even more interesting.
"greater things are coming"
huh, do they already have a plan or is this just generic optimism?
Now that they're so well established and intertwined with Microsoft Sam's personal network is not as important.
People who start out petty usually remain that way. There’s a lot of people in this world whose happiness depends on others doing just a little bit worse-off than them.
If I was a developer building on OpenAI’s platform today, I would begin putting my contingency plans into place.
Jealously and greed strikes once again, someone was more greedier than the rest.
Also why are all the links and sources from Twitter / X? We were told repeatedly it was dead? It seems that this drama suggests that it isn't.
The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion by Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”
Bokonon’s paraphrase was this:
“Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.”
