OpenAI's Sam Altman to depart as company's CEO - Sam Gone

OpenAI's Sam Altman to depart as company's CEO​

Reuters
November 17, 20233:58 PM EST
Link
(Archive)
Nov 17 (Reuters) - ChatGPT maker OpenAI said on Friday Sam Altman will depart as the company's chief executive officer after the board found he was "not consistently candid in his communications".

OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati will serve as interim CEO, the company said, adding that it will conduct a formal search for a permanent CEO.

"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," according to OpenAI.


Backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft (MSFT.O), OpenAI kicked off the generative AI craze last November by releasing its ChatGPT chatbot, which became one of the world's fastest-growing applications.

Altman was not immediately available for comment, while Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shares of Microsoft (MSFT.O), which has a stake in OpenAI, were down 1.91% at $368.93.

 

[Laffs n Gaffs]

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI has quit in response to the events. (In the OpenAI blog it says that Greg was removed as chairman of the board, but still retained his role.)

[nitter] [.ph]

He also gave his side on what happened:

[nitter] [.ph]
------
I believe the theory that Sam's views of profit conflicted greatly with OpenAI's originally-intended-to-be-nonprofit side is the most likely cause for him to get the boot. Regardless, how sudden this all happened is still intriguing to me; it will be interesting to see who says what in the upcoming days.

 

[namelesstacotruck]

Sam Altman was the most replaceable person at that company. Generic venture cap puppet. Ilya was the person who if let go could have plausibly created a competitor if what people say is true.

Whoever replaces him will be worse of course.

 

[cybertoaster]

Guess he did diddle his sister...

There's nothing open about openAI anymore, its gone closed-source and for profit a while ago.

That's a really flattering way to say that boomer autist went and said stupid shit like that startup founders with funny accents were worse, and because he was VC jesus at the time many other VCs did the same and if you "talked funny" you didn't get any investments for at least a couple years until he got ousted.

 

[Safir]

There was an article some months ago where his sister was claiming that he sexually abused her as a child.

Let me guess, she could consent in a consent accident?

Guess he did diddle his sister...

Read the goddamn article.

“I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman,” she posted two years ago. “I feel strongly that others have also been abused by these perpetrators. I’m seeking people to join me in pursuing legal justice, safety for others in the future, and group healing.”

Annie also claims that Sam withheld trust money from her after their father passed away, asserting this happened after her brother knew that she “started sex work for survival because of being sick and broke with a millionaire ‘brother’.”

This is a mad whore who's probably coked out of her mind, angry that he didn't promote her podcast.

Spoiler: LONG

Annie does not exist in Sam’s public life. She was never going to be in the club. She was never going to be an Übermensch. She’s always been someone who felt the pain of the world. At age 5, she began waking up in the middle of the night, needing to take a bath to calm her anxiety. By 6, she thought about suicide, though she didn’t know the word.

She often introduced herself to people in elevators and grocery stores: “I’m Annie Francis Altman. What’s your name?” (Of Sam, she told me, “He’s probably autistic also, but more of the computer-math way. I’m more of the humanity, humanitarian, justice-y way.”) Like her eldest brother, she is extremely intelligent, and like her eldest brother, she left college early — though not because her start-up was funded by Sequoia. She had completed all of her Tufts credits, and she was severely depressed. She wanted to live in a place that felt better to her. She wanted to make art. She felt her survival depended on it. She graduated after seven semesters.

When I visited Annie on Maui this summer, she told me stories that will resonate with anyone who has been the emo-artsy person in a businessy family, or who has felt profoundly hurt by experiences family members seem not to understand. Annie — her long dark hair braided, her voice low, measured, and intense — told me about visiting Sam in San Francisco in 2018. He had some friends over. One of them asked Annie to sing a song she’d written. She found her ukulele. She began. “Midway through, Sam gets up wordlessly and walks upstairs to his room,” she told me over a smoothie in Paia, a hippie town on Maui’s North Shore. “I’m like, Do I keep playing? Is he okay? What just happened?” The next day, she told him she was upset and asked him why he left. “And he was kind of like, ‘My stomach hurt,’ or ‘I was too drunk,’ or ‘too stoned, I needed to take a moment.’ And I was like, ‘Really? That moment? You couldn’t wait another 90 seconds?’”

That same year, Jerry Altman died. He’d had his heart issues, along with a lot of stress, partly, Annie told me, from driving to Kansas City to nurse along his real-estate business. The Altmans’ parents had separated. Jerry kept working because he needed the money. After his death, Annie cracked. Her body fell apart. Her mental health fell apart. She’d always been the family’s pain sponge. She absorbed more than she could take now.

Sam offered to help her with money for a while, then he stopped. In their email and text exchanges, his love — and leverage — is clear. He wants to encourage Annie to get on her feet. He wants to encourage her to get back on Zoloft, which she’d quit under the care of a psychiatrist because she hated how it made her feel.

Among her various art projects, Annie makes a podcast called All Humans Are Human. The first Thanksgiving after their father’s death, all the brothers agreed to record an episode with her. Annie wanted to talk on air about the psychological phenomenon of projection: what we put on other people. The brothers steered the conversation into the idea of feedback — specifically, how to give feedback at work. After she posted the show online, Annie hoped her siblings, particularly Sam, would share it. He’d contributed to their brothers’ careers. Jack’s company, Lattice, had been through YC. “I was like, ‘You could just tweet the link. That would help. You don’t want to share your sister’s podcast that you came on?’” He did not. “Jack and Sam said it didn’t align with their businesses.”

On the first anniversary of Jerry Altman’s death, Annie had the word sch’ma — “listen” in Hebrew — tattooed on her neck. She quit her job at a dispensary because she had an injured Achilles tendon that wouldn’t heal and she was in a walking boot for the third time in seven years. She asked Sam and their mother for financial help. They refused. “That was right when I got on the sugar-dating website for the first time,” Annie told me. “I was just at such a loss, in such a state of desperation, such a state of confusion and grief.” Sam had been her favorite brother. He’d read her books at bedtime. He’d taken portraits of her on the monkey bars for a high-school project. She’d felt so understood, loved, and proud. “I was like, Why? Why are these people not helping me when they could at no real cost to themselves?”

In May 2020, she relocated to the Big Island of Hawaii. One day, shortly after she’d moved to a farm to do a live-work trade, she got an email from Sam asking for her address. He wanted to send her a memorial diamond he’d made out of some of their father’s ashes. “Picturing him sending a diamond of my dad’s ashes to the mailbox where it’s one of those rural places where there are all these open boxes for all these farms … It was so heavy and sad and angering, but it was also so hilarious and so ridiculous. So disconnected-feeling. Just the lack of fucks given.” Their father never asked to be a diamond. Annie’s mental health was fragile. She worried about money for groceries. It was hard to interact with somebody for whom money meant everything but also so little. “Like, either you aren’t realizing or you are not caring about this whole situation here,” she said. By “whole situation,” she meant her life. “You’re willing to spend $5,000 — for each one — to make this thing that was your idea, not Dad’s, and you’re wanting to send that to me instead of sending me $300 so I can have food security. What?”

The two are now estranged. Sam offered to buy Annie a house. She doesn’t want to be controlled. For the past three years, she has supported herself doing sex work, “both in person and virtual,” she told me. She posts porn on OnlyFans. She posts on Instagram Stories about mutual aid, trying to connect people who have money to share with those who need financial help.

She and Altman are black-mirror opposites. Altman jokes about becoming the world’s first trillionaire, someone he knows socially told me. (Altman disputes this and asked me include this statement: “I do not want to be the world’s first trillionaire.”) He has dedicated himself to building software to replicate — and surpass — human intelligence through stolen data and daisy chains of GPUs.

Annie has moved more than 20 times in the past year. When she called me in mid-September, her housing was unstable yet again. She had $1,000 in her bank account.

Since 2020, she has been having flashbacks. She knows everybody takes the bits of their life and arranges them into narratives to make sense of their world.

As Annie tells her life story, Sam, their brothers, and her mother kept money her father left her from her.

As Annie tells her life story, she felt special and loved when, as a child, Sam read her bedtime stories. Now those memories feel like abuse.

The Altman family would like the world to know: “We love Annie and will continue our best efforts to support and protect her, as any family would.”

Annie is working on a one-woman show called the HumAnnie about how nobody really knows how to be a human. We’re all winging it.

We've talked about this in the Liz Fong-Jones (the rapist) thread, people (or creatures) sometimes lie in a very autistic way. Notice how she says "climbing into my bed nonconsensually" and then "sexual, etc bullshit fake nonsense aboose" but nothing specific.

Sam had been her favorite brother. He’d read her books at bedtime. Now those memories feel like abuse.

Was he simply reading her bedtime stories?
(If you're a poor reading this, remember that rich people sleep on helipad-size beds. You'd probably want the child to be at the center of the bed so she doesn't fall off when she falls asleep, and next to you so you can show her pictures.)

What was the "technological" aboose, you'd think like spyware, whitelists, internet lumberjack, etc? Shadowbanning. He stopped reading her bullshit.

(Also, Sam Altman is a faggot. I'd believe it if he were raping girls now with his boyfriends but not at 14.)

Don't make me defend a yid faggot kthx.

 

[Jarolleon]

Did the Effective Autists actually claim a scalp?

 

[tehpope]

The CEO they hired is the former Twitch CEO. The one that let competition get the upper hand because he wouldn't thot patrol.

And he's a huge simp for some ethot / porn actress who is pro pedo.

After high-profile AI company OpenAI fired their CEO Sam Altman and replaced him with the former CEO of Twitch, Emmett Shear, it has been revealed that Emmett is a simp for lolcow Aella / Rachael Slick (who wants AI-generated CP and is a literal whore).




Discuss here

 

[Maurice Maine]

From what I gather Sam went to Microsoft and he's gonna take at least half of OpenAI with him. More developments as they come.

 

[RepeatedMeme]

OpenAI's lead scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever, has renounced his position

For context, he was the deciding vote, the only member of the board that was acting as an employee and voted for the ouster (since the others were the ones outsted)

I'm not sure if this shows incredible cowardice or trickery or... what to think of this, other than that OpenAI is now almost as much of a lolcow as the Other "AI Safety" community.

 

[NOT Satoshi Nakamoto]

OpenAI's lead scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever, has renounced his position
View attachment 5509458

For context, he was the deciding vote, the only member of the board that was acting as an employee and voted for the ouster (since the others were the ones outsted)

I'm not sure if this shows incredible cowardice or trickery or... what to think of this, other than that OpenAI is now almost as much of a lolcow as the Other "AI Safety" community.

It's surreal to use ChatGPT at work while its parent company self-immolates. I'm sure many have experienced this but it's a first for me.

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

From what I gather Sam went to Microsoft and he's gonna take at least half of OpenAI with him. More developments as they come.

Substantially more. Though the BBC is currently gobbling his nethers and talking how amazing he is so the bias here is clear.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67470876

Staff at OpenAI have called on the board of the artificial intelligence company to resign after the shock dismissal of former boss Sam Altman.
In a letter, they question the board's competence, and accuse it of undermining the firm's work.
They also demand Mr Altman's reinstatement.
The sacking on Friday of a man who is one of the leading figures in artificial intelligence (AI) shocked the tech world.
The letter's hundreds of signatories, who include senior staff, say they may themselves resign if their demands are not met.
They also state that Microsoft has assured them that there are jobs for all OpenAI staff if they want to join the company.
Lilian Weng, head of safety systems at OpenAI, posted on X - formerly Twitter - that more than 650 of the company's 770 workers had put their names to the letter - a number that staff members said was rapidly climbing.
"All the efforts started after 1:30 AM, 500+ within two hours and all of this after 2 crazy days with very little sleep", she wrote.
One of the notable people to sign the letter is OpenAI's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever - despite being a member of the board which now finds itself under fire.
Writing on X, he said that he had made a mistake.
"Now 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", he posted.
In a fast moving and chaotic series of events over the weekend it seemed briefly that Mr Altman might get his job back, only for it to be announced he was joining Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI in exchange for a 49% stake.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella wrote on X, that Mr Altman would be leading "a new advanced AI research team".
Responding to the post confirming his new job, but before the letter was published, Mr Altman wrote "the mission continues".
He later added: "We are all going to work together some way or other, and i'm so excited. one team, one mission."
Meanwhile, ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear will become OpenAI's new interim boss.
Writing on X, he called the job a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity".
But he added the way Mr Altman had been sacked was "handled very badly" and "seriously damaged our trust".
Mr Altman, 38, helped launch the firm - best known for creating the popular ChatGPT bot - and has become one of the most influential figures in the fast-growing generative artificial intelligence (AI) space.
The sacking of such a high profile figure surprised industry watchers, and angered many in the company he'd led - culminating in them demanding the board members resign.

'Embarrassing circus'​

Dan Ives of investment firm Wedbush Securities says Microsoft has ended up being strengthened - but the episode reflected badly on OpenAI.
They were "at the kid's poker table and thought they won until Nadella and Microsoft took this all over in a World Series of Poker move for the ages", he wrote.
"The embarrassing circus show over the weekend at OpenAI was finally taken over by the adults in the room."

OpenAI's new boss Emmett Shear is the former head and co-founder of video streaming service Twitch. A memo to OpenAI's staff said he had a "unique mix of skills, expertise and relationships that will drive OpenAI forward".
In spite of now being at the helm of one of the world's most powerful AI companies - and being a self-described "techno-optimist" - Mr Shear has expressed concerns about what he sees as the potential existential threat posed by the technology.
"It's like someone invented a way to make 10x [ten times] more powerful fusion bombs out of sand and bleach, that anyone could do at home", he told the Logan Bartlett Show podcast in June.
The exact reasons for Mr Altman's sacking by the board remain unclear.
On Friday, when OpenAI announced it was firing Mr Altman, it accused him of not being "consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities" - but did not specify what he is alleged to have not been candid about.
Mr Shear has addressed some of the speculation on the subject.
"The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models", he wrote on X.
The mention of safety could suggest that this was not a disagreement about the management of the risks AI may pose, though the words are open to interpretation.
But Mr Shear committed to hiring an independent investigator "to dig into the entire process".
Additional reporting by Tom Singleton

I'm frankly wondering if Mircosoft got the board to sack him so they could claim the entire business without needing to do an actual hostile takeover.

 

[NoReturn]

Hundreds of OpenAI employees threaten to resign and join Microsoft​

The situation at OpenAI is getting even more dicey.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20...oyees-resignation-letter-microsoft-sam-altman
Archive: https://archive.is/BLq4o

Most of the staff at OpenAI have threatened to resign from the company and join Microsoft, which has hired ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new “advanced AI research team.” In a letter to OpenAI’s board that was reported on this morning by Wired and journalist Kara Swisher, more than 500 current OpenAI staffers say that “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”

The letter says the OpenAI employees will leave if the board does not reinstate Altman and Brockman and then resign. But seeing as the board has already made its choice, deciding to remain in place and naming a new CEO, while Altman and Brockman head to Microsoft, it seems that Microsoft may have just found Altman’s first several hundred employees, assuming they’re correct about the company’s promise to hire them all.

OpenAI employees signing the letter accuse the company’s board of jeopardizing their work and having “undermined our mission and company.” They also reject the idea that OpenAI was pushing ahead too quickly without concern for safety. “Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms,” they write.

Swisher reports that there are currently 700 employees at OpenAI and that more signatures are still being added to the letter. The letter appears to have been written before the events of last night, suggesting it has been circulating since closer to Altman’s firing. It also means that it may be too late for OpenAI’s board to act on the memo’s demands, if they even wished to do so.

OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly led the push to remove Altman, noted on X (formerly Twitter) that he had some regrets about the weekend of chaos inside OpenAI. “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI,” said Sutskever. “I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.” Bizarrely, Sutskever’s name is on the list of resignations, too.

Microsoft has now created a special “advanced AI research team” to house a number of former OpenAI employees, with Altman offered a CEO title to lead the division. It’s an unusual move for Microsoft outside of acquisitions, as the company typically only uses the CEO title for the leaders of big divisions like Microsoft Gaming or acquired companies like LinkedIn and GitHub. OpenAI employees have made it clear that Microsoft is treating this like a big acquisition, assuring existing employees that there are open roles to join Altman and his team at Microsoft.

Altman’s hiring came just hours after negotiations with OpenAI’s board failed to bring him back as OpenAI CEO over the weekend. Instead, former Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has been named interim CEO. He will take over from Mira Murati, who was named interim OpenAI CEO following Altman’s shock firing on Friday. Murati is at the top of the list of OpenAI employees threatening to now join Microsoft.

Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team, led by Altman and Brockman, comes just a week after Microsoft announced it has built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Altman had been reportedly pitching a separate startup to build custom, Nvidia-rivaling AI tensor processing unit (TPU) chips to investors recently, according to The New York Times.

Update November 20th, 12:15PM ET: The number of signatories had risen to 650 by shortly after 11AM ET, according to a post from OpenAI safety leader Lilian Weng. Weng indicated there were a total of 770 employees and said that “more will come” in terms of signatures.

Interestingly I can't find the actual letter or names of the people who signed it. I think they know everyone is watching.

 

[namelesstacotruck]

I cant see those people joining microsoft because they dont have a bite at becoming millionaires overnight with microsoft.

The people who would follow Sam Altman are chasing getting that payout and MS cant give it to that many people based on their corporate structure.

 

[Absolutego]

I cant see those people joining microsoft because they dont have a bite at becoming millionaires overnight with microsoft.

The people who would follow Sam Altman are chasing getting that payout and MS cant give it to that many people based on their corporate structure.

The people joining Microsoft are going to get a reliable six figure paycheck for the foreseeable future working on Bing AI. That product's going nowhere, nor are useful people working on it.
Chasing the seed funding -> IPO payout is considerably more foolish, considering the tech VC scene has had a decade now of watching big IPOs fail to deliver on early revenue promises, and the general fact that we're in an anemic investment economy while everyone's waiting for the bottom to properly fall out of it.

 

[Peaches the Wonder Cat]

The people joining Microsoft are going to get a reliable six figure paycheck for the foreseeable future working on Bing AI.

This is the company that didn't give employees a cost of living adjustment in 2023, and laid off thousands. That paycheck is far from reliable.

There's no reason for someone who was looking at generational wealth at OpenAI to want to work at a company that famously pays less than competitors.

 

[clipartfan92]

Sam Altman to return as OpenAI CEO with new board members
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Gerrit De Vynck, Nitasha Tiku, and Pranshu Verma
2023-11-22 06:33:09GMT

SAN FRANCISCO — Sam Altman, who was fired from his role at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI last Friday, will return to his post as chief executive officer, ending a boardroom drama that has transfixed Silicon Valley and exposed the power struggles over who has control over the future of artificial intelligence.

Bret Taylor, the former chair of Twitter’s board, will serve as OpenAI’s new board chair, OpenAI said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter late Tuesday. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora and one of the board members who voted to oust Altman will be board members. “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO,” the statement said. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment further.

Altman will not have a seat on the board and the board agreed to an independent investigation, which will examine all aspects of recent events, including Altman’s role, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

“I love OpenAI, and everything I’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Altman said on X.

Altman’s return puts a cap on nearly a week of chaos at the AI company. His firing shocked much of the tech industry, including OpenAI’s own investors and employees, who mounted a campaign to get him back. On Sunday night, Altman agreed to join Microsoft instead, but the next day, both he and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella signaled that they would be open to him going back to OpenAI instead. On Monday, nearly all of the company’s roughly 770 employees signed a letter saying they’d quit if he wasn’t reinstated.

“When I decided to join [Microsoft] on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. With the new board and [with] Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with [Microsoft],” Altman said on the platform X.

The drama around Altman’s sudden ouster at OpenAI has exposed the deep rift inside the company over who should control its future. OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, but in recent years under Altman’s leadership, it took on billions of dollars in investment from the likes of tech giant Microsoft and venture capitalists, and began developing consumer products. Outside critics and some employees worried the company had abandoned its mission and was behaving more like a Big Tech company. It originally was meant to provide a more transparent, democratic alternative to Big Tech.

Altman’s return will be greeted with relief by investors, customers and employees who feared the boardroom drama could lead to the company’s implosion. If that had happened, it would have left a vacuum at the center of the AI industry, opening the window for competitors like Google and AI start-up Anthropic AI to gain momentum.

Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest investor and uses its technology in its own AI products, also stands to benefit from a stabilized OpenAI and the return of Altman.

“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on X. “We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.”

 

[Markass the Worst]

People caught onto the gayops too quickly. They'll try something sneakier next time.

 

[Ivan Daniloff]

People caught onto the gayops too quickly. They'll try something sneakier next time.

You mean the theory that they were trying to flush out dissenters on the board with the fake firing?

 

[Troonos]

Is Sam responsible for the ideological sterilization of the language algorithm? If so, fuck him.

 

['Ole Dente]

View attachment 5502776

If you look at the center of every interpersonal problem in a company, you can usually blame a woman for being the cause and you’d be right more times than otherwise.

 

[Thomas Talus]

If you look at the center of every interpersonal problem in a company, you can usually blame a woman for being the cause and you’d be right more times than otherwise.

If you mean Ilya Sutskever, that's a man.