Sam Altman leaving: OpenAI announces leadership transition

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And if any of those answers are “yes”, what, exactly, does OpenAI think is the point of doing so? It kind of makes everyone’s lives harder, OpenAI’s included.

As others are mentioning here, all startups are great at adapting. Adapting won’t be the issue, but I can tell you right now the answer to any kind of adaptation is “stay away from OpenAI”.

I think OAI is taking us for granted at this point. We want to build atop this wave and be a part of a community AND company that we can trust and work with. This uncertainty and lack of communication gives us neither, and it only makes us question the reliability of everything.

At the end of the day, we’ll find a way through. We always do. But that might mean leaving OAI in the dust like they’ve been leaving us in the dark.

What’s driving me nuts is that I, and many others as seen on this mega thread, do have a love/hate relationship with OpenAI, because some of their choices are amazing, and some haven’t been all that great.

I think our apprehension from all this stems from which side of that relationship just got booted? Is the side that allowed all of us to truly love and believe in OAI’s products/mission the side that got removed? Or is it the side that gets people frustrated with OAI in the first place the side that got kicked to the curb?

We literally don’t know, and they can tell us whatever they want, but actions speak louder than words. OpenAI actually put their money where their mouth was. Now, is it just going to be like every other one of their competitors, where they claim they’re benefitting humanity, but instead are gonna gatekeep and decide that for themselves, consumers and developers be damned? How are we supposed to know if they don’t communicate with any of us?

Are they going to be more secretive out of “safety”, or less?

The longer they wait, the more people are going to pivot away from them, and they’ll watch all their money just dissipate into thin air.

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It’s hard to imagine an easy recovery from this. At most, four board members are responsible and have created considerable hostility that may very well set a lot of very smart people on a different path.

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I think the sama drama and the topic thereof is proving to us that we’re all a little bit concerned and we have questions about what this means for us and their projected future for developers.

I think an AMA is a perfectly fair way to help us understand what their plans are, get some transparency from them, and how we as developers can expect to move forward with OpenAI and their mission. It’ll help us regain some trust and understanding.

If there’s one thing that’s becoming clear, regardless of everyone’s opinions (which I respect all sides), it’s that we’re confused and we want more details about what this means for us, and what exactly is going on.

it doesn’t have to be tomorrow, but it should definitely be seriously considered.

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Hypothetical internal thoughts: “We have no idea what’s going on. It’s not like we were in the meeting where one or two conspired to tell another they could be a new CEO if they agreed to not call the whole board nor stakeholders they represent and simply tell the top two board members one at a time they were unemployed while having the “post blog” button available. Not all of us can just walk.”

What you’ll see: “We will continue to provide ever-improving services with our newest models that are smarter than ever.”

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““untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors.””

The true power in all this is the staff. If they just group up and complain about the 86B sale going south, ie - quit unless sama comes back, then it’s done.

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Fair point, but hey, maybe it could be the exact opportunity for the people who can’t walk to just tell us “we’re as in the dark as you are”. At least that alone will help reassure some trust.

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I think you’re right. These are two very different economic models. Which do you think they’ll choose?

That depends on their strategy. If they value a creator economy around their core technology, this would be unwise. But, we don’t actually know their strategy. In fact, the recent events suggest even management was not in agreement what that was.

I believe this is not the case so far. Investors have paid many times what consumers have paid.

Indeed, some are a little more than that. But most aren’t even that. Many selling and reselling inferences are AI repackagers.

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Well I think the partnership with Microsoft tends to mean going in the direction of a commercial facing product rather than research focused. I think the GPT’s proves that. How my “Lawyer GPT” is truly any different than ChatGPT with a hat on is beyond me…

Yeah exactly.

Are computers aftermarket innovators of electricity?

Its the same thing here. You can make something with GPT that can do incredible things, way beyond a chatbot.

I don’t stand with Ilyas as I know nothing about him but it seems his idea is he just wants to make the best AI possible and leave it up to us the developers to create things. Where Sam and Microsoft would more go in the direction of “We’re not just going to give you the brick and mortar, we’re also going to build you the house”. At that point I see that as a monopolization of the market of sorts and I don’t think it most healthily supports a free market, if a free market is something they care about.

To me what would most healthily support the market is if they focus just on creating general purpose AI tools (vision, whisper, ChatGPT) and let us do the work on creating things with it, so in that sense, I stand with Ilyas’ viewpoint. (if what I’m hearing is true on the viewpoints of Sam versus Ilyas but that could all be wrong)

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Under Sama-sama we were let in, with minimal hoops or nannying, and given API access to an incredible technology. If it was a safetyist coup, I wonder if they were mad about access to powerful tech being given out willy-nilly, or, if some level of AGI has been achieved (say, like a 2nd grader), that there is not a framework of rights in place for it yet. The second scenario I’d kind of agree with, but the Overton window on AI rights is still at the chuckle/eyeroll level :roll_eyes:

Hopefully its something more mundane

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Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

Of course they’re waffling! This is their super power

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Hey everyone,

I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to you all. It’s really cool to see how everyone is keeping the conversation civil and thoughtful.

It’s not every day you find a thread where people actually listen to each other and respect different points of view, especially on a topic like this that could easily get heated. It’s kind of refreshing, you know?

So, yeah, just a big shout out to everyone for being awesome and making this space a great place for a healthy debate. It’s stuff like this that keeps my faith in online communities alive.

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Hmmm… Poe is starting to look good. All the LLMs under one roof, GPTs (static, RAG, and server-based) for $17 bucks a month? And a creator marketplace for revenue sharing – all ready to go.

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I agree. It is different. But it is not impervious to being subjected to bad business models.

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lol

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what does resign mean here?

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it means that they’ll be back next week? not sure how this company works.

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honestly, the entire issue here revolved around not talking this over with MSFT first.

Nothing else was really an issue, IMHO.

MSFT has poured 10s of billions of dollars and committed a massive reputation towards OpenAI. Even if you disagree with the profit motive, you really need to have a chat with the trillions dollar market cap company that has been underwriting everything you’ve been doing for over a year.

The fact that they didn’t (and it’s super obvious at this point they didn’t), is the real tragedy in all of this and is the reason they must go.

Taking them for granted is just a slap in the face of a lot of people at MSFT who worked hard to make all this possible, not to mention the 100s of millions of investors in MSFT. Just … so deeply irresponsible.

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Sorry I’m late to the conversation. You all know I have no shortage of opinions:)

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Please share!

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So Sam needs to be back and the board gone. Just my 2 cents

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