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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
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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”.
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.
He hallucinated to the board.
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.
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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.
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.
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!!
CEO? Fuck him. He’ll be just fine.
of course he will, he wasnt even getting paid
Huh??
What’d he do?
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.
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.”
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.
Chief technology officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO, effective immediately.
When contacted by The Verge, OpenAI’s communications department declined to comment beyond the blog post.
This is an extremely sudden turn of events as Altman has largely been the face of OpenAI, which arguably kickstarted the current AI arms race with last year’s hugely popular ChatGPT.
Altman is a co-founder of OpenAI and initially served as a co-chair of the company alongside Elon Musk.
Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla — he has since founded his own AI company, xAI.
The original article contains 239 words, the summary contains 112 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This post is unnerving
How so?
The bot is using AI and arguably the technology of OpenAI to report on the news that a human has lost their job but has no context on what it is reporting.
Yeah, I see your point. Not sure I can do anything about it, but yeah. It’s kind of like an almost unnoticeable line in the sand has been crossed.
Thank you for taking the time to explain what you meant, I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.
Probably because he went on his hype campaign trying to ask for regulations, except not ones that actually harm his company, and then the fear mongering.
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this can’t be good. even under the actual founding dude, GPT seemed to get knocked on the head every few months in quality. letting The Board exercise their precious estimable authority means pig-headed austerity and cost cutting 100% of the time. it was a hell of a technology.
It’s not an equity board. It’s the original non-profit board.
There’s zero reason they would be choosing to focus on profits over progress.
In fact, one of the theories I think is more credible is their loss of faith was in Altman being too closed and profit oriented as opposed to open and research oriented.
