Microsoft hires Sam Altman & Greg Brockman to lead new advanced AI research team
A post by Satya Nadella also suggests that former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear will be among OpenAI's new leadership team.
Microsoft’s involvement in the future of artificial intelligence has become more solidified following some changes to leadership at OpenAI. After a series of events, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will be joining Microsoft’s new AI research team while former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear will be the interim CEO of OpenAI.
Early Monday morning on November 20, 2023, Satya Nadella took to X, formerly Twitter, to announce that Microsoft will remain committed to OpenAI. The post confirms that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will be joining Microsoft to “lead a new advanced AI research team” and Nadella states he looks forward to working with Emmett Shear and OpenAI's new leadership team.
We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett…
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 20, 2023
To get you up to speed, last Friday, the OpenAI board of directors ousted Sam Altman as CEO. Following this, Greg Brockman announced he would be leaving while Andrej Karpathy posted that the “board had a chance to explain their drastic actions” and yet the board of directors offered no insight. According to Bloomberg, the board had a 5:00 p.m. deadline to "give in to Altman's demands."
Jake Piazza and Hayden Field of CNBC have been tracking the events of OpenAI. On November 6, 2023, OpenAI announced its GPT-4 Turbo AI and Altman also said the company would pay the cost of legal actions of users who face copyright infringement. A little over a week later, OpenAI made a post announcing the leadership transition.
Be sure to check out the Shacknews OpenAI page for our ongoing coverage of the company and its products.
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replySam Chandler posted a new article, Microsoft hires Sam Altman & Greg Brockman to lead new advanced AI research team
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This OpenAI thing keeps going. Apparently Satya Nadella is there mediating.
https://www.threads.net/@reckless1280/post/Cz17hlQPjYj/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==-
The board misread the room so, so badly. They must have been very shielded from the business aspects and just figured the money flowed like wine all on its own. When you take a $10 billion investment from a tech giant, you are bought and paid for. You don't get to do a coup without their consent.
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lol they fired him without letting MS know beforehand? That’s amazing
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*1 minute. Not even kidding.
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They are spending money like crazy. The company won’t function at even close to the level it is now without the Microsoft money. They will become irrelevant as every large tech company dumps billions into LLM tech and hires away all their best people.
AI/LLM potential is out of the bag now, it’s an arms race.-
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The concepts itself for AI isn't too difficult to understand. The hard part is just building it all out with infrastructure that is performant. On that point, OpenAI has a significant lead. They probably won't be able to afford to do much after this week.
If OpenAI fails, some other corporation will try to take it's place. Wither it will follow any kind of guidance related to keeping AI "safe" and used in non-commercial applications will remain to be seen.
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Yeah, my concern with all this is that I didn’t want their internal rate of progress to slow down. I like OpenAI’s consumer facing products, but I’m more looking forward to their AGI work and what it will eventually do for humanity. Unfortunately it seems it’s going to take gobs of money to continue their work.
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The consumer products could be a net drag on the company's mission, though. Do you want your lead researchers and engineers working on AGI or do you want them spending all of their time building and supporting Laundry Buddy to tell morons how to wash their shirts?
Products aren't free, they require significant engineering and support resources. There's a reason researchers at Universities generally aren't in the business of developing products. It's because it steals the focus away from what they actually want to be doing, which is research.
That's also why companies that engage in serious research, like Microsoft, tend to separate their research divisions from their product/engineering divisions. They don't want their researchers being taken off task. Of course, these industrial research giants only operate because there is enough excess profit to do so!
I would bet that the research minded folks at OpenAI were probably pissed that they were being dragged into a bunch of product engineering efforts spearheaded by Sam, and felt like they were being taken off task. If I were Satya and I cared about maintaining the product focus, and also cared about holding onto the research brainiacs, I'd try to craft an offer to the board that dedicated a sizable tranche of their partnership funding towards research efforts and to split the company into independent divisions; a research area fully controlled by Ilya and a product area fully controlled by Sam.
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It's the OP of the thread - reports of Altman planning mass headhunting. MS is directly siding with Altman over the board, which suggests that their funding goes with him too. If Sutskever and his board remains, OpenAI is done. A humble R&D non-profit with no funding is irrelevant in the AI arms race.
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Wouldn't Google or Apple love to step in & bankroll OpenAPI in Microsoft's stead?
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* OpenAPI OpenAI
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Ahhh, got it.
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I doubt he is. But he holds a huge amount of their funding hostage. Kinda seems like Microsoft’s money goes where Sam goes.
If OpenAI locks down and goes more research based where does that leave Microsoft? I doubt they would be happy just allowing Microsoft to continue to productize their research like they have been doing. If they do, then what is the point of getting rid of the product arm of OpenAI?-
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Honest question, because I don’t know. How hard would it be for them to move funding to another LLM and move their stuff over to that gradually.
They might be in a tight spot depending on how the OAI board wants to proceed as a business going forward. If they are not ok with what their consumer facing arm was doing, what makes them ok with what Microsoft is using their tech for? -
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This. 1000%. Both places I work at/for are all in with MS on this and this shit will not be allowed to happen. *Everything* is riding on it.
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Right, they're the ones that are riding the hype train to pump up their stock. They're trying their best to make every product of theirs an AI infused product (that you can soon pay a subscription fee for in order to access, yay!).
It's not clear that OAI is actually the loser in this scenario. If they don't care about money and are happy to downsize, then Microsoft is kind of fucked.
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lol, they just wrapped up a four-day Microsoft Ignite event (Nov 14-17) that was dominated by AI sessions. If Microsoft lets Sam Altman walk away from OpenAPI, they sacrifice their leading position in AI. IMO they're gonna do everything they can to get Sam back into the driver's seat at OpenAPI. And if it means purging the board members who staged this coup, well, I doubt they're gonna shed any tears.
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Pretty good article that takes the last year into context
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-chaos/676050/?gift=65TaprE9muhN3Ac-gka2n8Rljqp2r2IjsVIcPKeJJIc&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share -
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update , looking to bring back sam and greg but hiring a new ceo
https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726457543629914389?s=19-
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Elon Musk?
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update2 : new CEO is EMMETT SHEAR (formerly ceo of twitch lol)
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hes interim i suppose. sam altman ceo path is dead
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23967515/sam-altman-openai-board-fired-new-ceo-
So what is sam altman's role going forward?
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prob start a new company. hopefully microsoft funds
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Uh huh. So it probably also means that the board at OpenAI will no longer have any clout over Microsoft.
Which is probably a shame because they may acting well within their own sense of ethics about AI at OpenAI.
But I don't know all the details. So I will shut up and just wait for what else that will be revealed.
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CEO of Microsoft's new advanced AI subsidiary, which will be staffed with most of the folks from OpenAI that are allowed to follow him.
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"The board of directors at OpenAI, the high-flying artificial intelligence start-up, stood by its decision to push out its former chief executive Sam Altman, according to an internal memo sent to the company’s staff on Sunday night.
OpenAI named Emmett Shear, a former executive at Twitch, as the new interim chief executive, pushing aside Mira Murati, a longtime OpenAI executive who was named interim chief executive after Mr. Altman’s ouster.
“The board firmly stands by its decision as the only path to advance and defend the mission of OpenAI,” said the memo, referring to Mr. Altman’s ouster on Friday. It was signed by each of the four directors on the company’s board; Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, Ilya Sutskever, and Tasha McCauley.
“Put simply, Sam’s behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board undermined the board’s ability to effectively supervise the company in the manner it was mandated to do,” the memo said." -
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sam and greg join microsoft!
https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122
and microsoft remains committed to open ai-
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i feel like this is gonna be getting some edits shortly:
Microsoft
On November 20th 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team, trying to kill OpenAI. [36]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman#Microsoft -
But bye open ai, this is going to go down as one of the biggest corporate blunders in history, up there with Groupon turning down a multi billion dollar acquisition offer
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Very very dumb. Now they will have very limited (possibly zero) influence over the future course of AI, where if they had been more flexible they the would still be part of the conversation.
This is assuming, of course, that what I assume will happen actually happens. Altman and the core brain trust (people who have worked with Altman since the beginning) will launch a new team at MS and use infinite money/resources to relegate OpenAI to the dustbin of history over the next couple of years.
Ideological rigidity rarely works out well for anyone, but maybe this will be an exception!
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Well, guess this is the next best thing for Microsoft https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires-sam-altman-greg-brockman-employees-openai
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If they make a subsidiary for him, what happens to the folks who remain loyal to him at OpenAI?
This shit is wild.-
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Is asking an employee to sign an anti poach agreements enforceable?
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Anti-poaching agreements are between companies.
If you mean no-competes, those are not legal in California and generally won't stand up in any court.-
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He's going to bring a bunch of people over with him, I'm sure.
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nm, the letter I posted below makes it crystal clear:
"Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join."
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More details on MS hiring Altman: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires-sam-altman-greg-brockman-employees-openai
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I told you guys that Microsoft would hire Altman. My only question is what role will he have at Microsoft? I thought he was mostly the guy that would raise money for OpenAI from investors like Microsoft.
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Ilya Sutskever: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."
https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028
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He's gonna show up at Sam Altman's house and play demoscene tunes from a boombox.
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He's gonna dress as woman and get hired as Sam Altman's new in house nanny.
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OpenAI Staff Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns
"Nearly 500 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman at Microsoft unless the startup's board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO."
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/-
LOL WTF: "Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s CTO, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place."
What the fuck is going on over there?
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Have they confirmed it is Llya's signature?
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Word is that 550 of 700 OpenAI employees have signed this letter:
"To the Board of Directors at OpenAI,
OpenAI is the world’s leading AI company. We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position.
The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.
When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAI acted swiftly to stabilize the company. They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties, and were negotiating in bad faith.
The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward - the one that would best serve our mission, company, stakeholders, employees and the public - would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that could lead the company forward in stability.
Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgement and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman."-
Could you imagine what going to work at OpenAI is gonna be like today? How the hell would anybody be able to focus on getting anything done right now?
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Number is up to 650 of 700 now: https://nitter.net/lilianweng/status/1726634736943280270
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But don't worry, they already hired the ex-CEO of Twitch to get things under control!
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Number is now over 700 of the ~770 employees: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/microsoft-openai-sam-saltman-fired/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4
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They better get to quitting because I don't think the board is going anywhere. They appear to take the 503c non-profit seriously, as they should. qIt's pretty clear now Altman has bigger goals around designing and building custom AI chips that will rival what nVidia is doing with tensor.
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How is designing chips not compatible with 503c status?
I'm sure the board is very proud of themselves taking such a principled stand, now they get to stand by and not be part of the conversation around AI moving forward. Some legit 5 dimensional chess moves, there.
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I am very confused by this whole story, but mostly by....why did they fire Altman? Do we know that for sure?
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Looks like he wanted to create a separate startup focused on creating AI chips to accelerate OpenAI's technology and the board had enough?
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I'm guessing the startup would not comply with 503c status of any kind.
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The company is a nonprofit. But Altman, Brockman and Sutskever in 2019 formed OpenAI LP, a for-profit entity that exists within the larger company’s structure. That for-profit company took OpenAI from worthless to a valuation of $90 billion in just a few years – and Altman is largely credited as the mastermind of that plan and the key to the company’s success.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/19/tech/sam-altman-openai-board/index.html
Yep.
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It stems from their "two tribes" that have been acknowledged since at least 2018. You have the board that are there to oversee a non profit that calls out their primary mission is to research AI safely, especially when it comes to AGI. Also profit is not an objective.
You have Sam Altman who wants to monetize the shit out of it.
Adding to that, he has some questionable stuff in his background.. how he left y combinator, stuff like anthropic folks disagreeing with him so much that they left to do the same thing but stick to the original mission, he's a pretty slimy VC type or at least has that reputation that's largely been forgotten /overshadowed with chatgpt blowing up.
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For a smart person, llya may have made some moves that seem dumb. It might be because of principles about the 503c status.
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And yet, he signed his name to the letter saying he'd leave OpenAI for Microsoft, if Sam Altman wasn't reinstated. So where are those vaunted principles now?
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Maybe llya feels strong enough about AI that doing work on it for profit could create more problems? I don't know.
Llya's biggest mistake may just simply not keeping the mouth shut. Don't say anything unless you're certain.
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"I am Spartacus!"
"Oh yeah, he's Spartcus all right, we'll be moving along."-
"Is it OK if I join your group, guys?" - Sparticus
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But they'll have to start from scratch, right? I assume that 1) OpenAI would retain exclusive access to its code & IP, and 2) OpenAI wouldn't be willing to provide Microsoft with access to their code & IP if the latter withdraws access to funding & resources. Or am I missing something?
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nm, I think I found the answer to both my questions. I posted about it below.
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statement from new CEO of open ai https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275?s=46&t=a8Pjw_2Gzth_zpOPBTHQaw
says sam's removal wasnt about safety *xfiles theme*-
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Yea who cares about this guy now, I posted this last night when news was coming out but everyone’s reply went to the above sub thread so now I look like a dummy
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Nobody cares what this guy says. It's all about what Microsoft & Sam Altman are doing, and what happens to the OpenAI employees who have threatened to resign.
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This article does a pretty good job of summarizing the situation. And if it's all true, OpenAI is dead & Microsoft will assume the mantle of AI leader:
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/microsoft-swallows-openais-core-team
Some notable tidbits:
"Part of Satya’s incredible deal with Sam and Greg is likely that these key OpenAI employees that join Microsoft will have their now worthless PPUs pseudo-refreshed for equity in Microsoft which vest over multiple years. There will be compensation packages that are $10 million plus ($1e7+) for those who were with OpenAI for multiple years.
There is likely also a huge incentive-based pay for all the huge bets and risks this new team will be making, which will align and incentivize the OpenAI team to do what they do best, accelerate.
The narrative that risk takers chasing generational wealth won’t want to join Microsoft and instead chase the start-up life is quite moot. There is a possibility that this subsidiary may also be allowed to grant its own equity to employees in a form that is not directly Microsoft stock.
<...>
Microsoft can likely claw back or not deliver quite a bit of what it had planned for OpenAI. These compute resources can be routed to the new internal team. Furthermore, given how killer Microsoft’s legal team is, it’s possible that an even large portion of what is already delivered or soon to be delivered can be clawed back.
If the new team were to spin out and make their own startup, they would have had tremendous difficulty acquiring enough compute to build a GPT-5 scale model before Anthropic or Google. Given there is a sort of runaway escape velocity here, this would put them at a huge disadvantage in the race to AGI. By joining Microsoft, the former OpenAI team will still have access to the necessary compute resources next year.
It is very likely that this development accelerates spending further and Microsoft’s orders for GPUs will have to go up yet again in order to fulfill the OpenAI contract and give the new company everything they need to build GPT-5 next year."
Here's the key stuff, though:
"Within a few hours of Sam being fired, Satya minced no words in his tweet “supporting” OpenAI’s new leadership. It was effectively a thinly veiled threat that said “I don’t need you.” (which he doesn’t for copilot deployment)
> 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
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> Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
Microsoft has full legal rights and access to the weights of the base GPT-4 model as well as the various fine-tuned versions and DALL-E 3.
If the team went down the startup path, they would have had to spend significant time rebuilding GPT-4. Instead, at Microsoft they will have access to much of the IP they require for future products.
What’s more important to understand is if Microsoft has legal direct access to all the data and code used for pre-training and RL. It is obviously all stored on Azure, but if the new Sam-led internal team can freely access that, they can basically start exactly where they left off without much of a hiccup. If they cannot get it, then we estimate that it could possibly lead to only a 4-6 month delay vs prior. While this small of a delay sounds insane to say... Talent is everything." -
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I'm sure it was a bland, passive letter that used 100 words to say 10.
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"Y'all can gargle my balls. I am out. peace."
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Hey, at least I put in my resignation with ten words. Unless you count something like "y'all" as one word?
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Sure seems like it.
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This whole thing is absolutely crazy and from the sidelines I'm just sitting here laughing at the absurdity of it all.
A board that has zero clue that actions have consequences - This makes me laugh and want it to all burn down.
Microsoft is essentially going to do a hostile takeover of the most well known AI infrastructure and Microsoft is a for profit company who is going to exploit this shit as much as they possibly can versus a non-profit who may have at least had a chance at remaining somewhat independent and responsible. - This is scary AF. -
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“Lack of intelligence,” starting Shia LeBeouf, this winter on Hulu.
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I am still not caught up on this. Nobody seems to be able to say exactly what this was over or who on the board got this rolling.
I hear that Microsoft could simply just walk away with most of their top talent if they wanted. They retain rights to OenAI's IP which they could then easily fork and that would be the end of OpenAI. Either way, it looks like the board has been brought to heel and are in big trouble; likely to lose their seats.
There is a good book or TV season here.-
It's pretty ridiculous. The board wanted to prevent ChatGPT from being recklessly commercialized, but they had already granted Microsoft full access to everything. If the board stick to their guns, the overwhelming majority of OpenAI employees may quit to go work for Sam Altman again at Microsoft & the board will be left defending.... nothing. If the board capitulates, Sam Altman will return & the board be forced out, effectively ruining any chances at preventing Microsoft from rampantly commercializing ChatGPT.
Great job, OpenAI -- you played yourselves masterfully.
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yea this was the point of that letter to the board right, they want everyone be put back and for the outsiders who voted this to be FIRED
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"Employees at the company’s San Francisco headquarters refused to attend an emergency all-hands scheduled on Sunday with new CEO Emmett Shear, according to a person familiar with the matter, who added that they responded to the announcement in OpenAI’s Slack with a “fuck you” emoji."
AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA-
"More than 700 of the company’s roughly 770 employees have signed a letter threatening to quit unless the current board resigns and reappoints Altman as CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/microsoft-openai-sam-saltman-fired/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4-
Imagine being told to go fuck yourself by 91% of your company's employees.
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That other 9% probably were on vacation or had issues logging in.
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Is that typical for slack? lol
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95 Percent of OpenAI Employees Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door
"Almost the entire staff of OpenAI has now signed a letter threatening to leave and join a new venture led by ousted CEO, Sam Altman. Some 738 out of its around 770 employees, about 95 percent of the company, are now listed on the letter released early this morning."
https://www.wired.com/story/95-percent-of-openai-employees-threaten-to-follow-sam-altman-out-the-door/-
It's now easier to count the number of people that would stay at OpenAI (32), if Sam Altman isn't reinstated & the mutineer board don't resign.
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* the mutineer board members don't resign
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Decisions about whether someone should be fired typically depend on a variety of factors, including their performance, behavior, adherence to company values, and the overall goals and values of the organization.
If there are specific concerns or controversies surrounding Sam Altman that have arisen since my last update, I would recommend checking the latest news sources, company statements, or other relevant information to get the most up-to-date and accurate assessment of the situation. Ultimately, decisions about employment are typically made by the relevant stakeholders, such as a company's board of directors or shareholders.
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…and ClosedAI
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Are these board members anyone significant that they're wielding all this power to reshape the company whether intended or not?
I just found out they had an interim CEO who was their CTO and then dumped her in less than a day for the Twitter guy. -
After all this is over, give the movie rights to the team that did "The Death of Stalin", it would be perfect.
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Yes, that is an experienced CEO of all the time. https://chatgdp.org
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