Sam Altman fired from OpenAI

Found this on Reddit: Anxious_Bandicoot126 comments on Sam Altman is leaving OpenAI (reddit.com)

I feel compelled as someone close to the situation to share additional context about Sam and company.

Engineers raised concerns about rushing tech to market without adequate safety reviews in the race to capitalize on ChatGPT hype. But Sam charged ahead. That's just who he is. Wouldn't listen to us.

His focus increasingly seemed to be fame and fortune, not upholding our principles as a responsible nonprofit. He made unilateral business decisions aimed at profits that diverged from our mission.

When he proposed the GPT store and revenue sharing, it crossed a line. This signaled our core values were at risk, so the board made the tough decision to remove him as CEO.

Greg also faced some accountability and stepped down from his role. He enabled much of Sam's troubling direction.

Now our former CTO, Mira Murati, is stepping in as CEO. There is hope we can return to our engineering-driven mission of developing AI safely to benefit the world, and not shareholders.

Obviously just speculation for now, but seems plausible. The moment the GPT store was released I thought:

"wow that's really good for business ... wow that's really bad for alignment"

Worth noting that of the 4 remaining board members, 2 are associated with EA: Helen Toner (CSET) and Tasha McCauley (EV UK board member)

Twitter is full of people laying into EA for being behind Sam Altman's firing. However, if it's true that this happened because the board thought Altman was trying to take the company in an 'unsafe' direction then I'm glad they did this. And I'm glad that for the time being considerations other than 'shareholder value' are not the defining motivation behind AI development.

Latest (48 hours in): OpenAI Board Stands by Decision to Force Sam Altman Out of C.E.O. Role
After 48 hours of furious negotiations, the A.I. company said Mr. Altman would not return to his job and that former Twitch C.E.O. Emmett Shear would be its interim boss. 

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 said Mr. Shear has a “unique mix of skills, expertise and relationships that will drive OpenAI forward,” according to the memo viewed by The New York Times.

“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.

An open letter from 500 of ~700 OpenAI employees to the board, calling on them to resign (also on The Verge).

Suggests there's an enormous amount of bad feeling about the decision internally. It also seems like a bad sign that the board was unwilling to provide any 'written evidence' of wrongdoing, though maybe something will appear in the coming days.

But all told it looks pretty bad for EA. Seems like there's an enormous backlash online - initially against OpenAI for firing everyone’s favourite AI CEO, and now against “EA” “woke” “decelerationist” types.^[1][2]

It’s also seemed to trigger a flurry of tweets from Nick Cammarata, saying that EAs are overwhelmingly self-flagellating and self-destructive and that EA caused him and his friends enormous harm. I think his claims are flatly wrong (though they may be true for him and his friends), and some of the replies seem to agree, but it has 500K views as I publish.

Seems like the whole episode (combined with at least one prominent EA seemingly saying it’s emblematic dreadful and toxic) has the potential to cause a lot of reputational damage, especially if the board chooses not to clarify its actions (although it's possibly too late for that).

1. ^{^}

   https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1725924114190536825?s=46

2. ^{^}

   https://x.com/atroyn/status/1725937945444757720?s=46

I make this speculative comment with no inside information

There may be a world in which this is net positive. If EAs have been wrong the whole time about the best approach being the "narrow" or "inside" game, this might force EAs into being mostly adversarial vs. Tech accelerationists and many in silicon valley in general. This could be more effective at stopping or slowing doom in the medium to long term than trying to force safety from the inside against strong market forces.

It could even help the EA AI risk crowd come more alongside the sentiment of the general public, after the initial reputational loss simmers down.

I'm not saying this is even likely, it's just a different take.

FYI — lots of relevant links collected here: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board  and OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend 

Very interested to find out some of the details here:

• Why now?  Was there some specific act of wrongdoing that the board discovered (if so, what was it?), or was now an opportune time to make a move that the board members had secretly been considering for a while, or etc?
• Was this a pro-AI-safety move that EAs should ultimately be happy about (ie, initiated by the most EA-sympathetic board members, with the intent of bringing in more x-risk-conscious leadership)?  Or is this a disaster that will end up installing someone much more focused on making money than on talking to governments and figuring out how to align superintelligence?  Or is it relatively neutral from an EA / x-risk perspective?  (Update: first speculation I've seen is this cautiously optimistic tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky)
• Greg Brockman, president of the board, is also stepping down.  How might this be related, and what might this tell us about the politics of the board members and who supported/opposed this decision?

From this article:

Brad Lightcap, an OpenAI executive, told employees on Saturday morning that the company had been talking with the board to “better understand the reason and process behind their decision,” according to an internal message I obtained.

“We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety or security/privacy practices,” he wrote. “This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.”

If this is true, then I think the board has made a huge mess of things. They've taken a shot without any ammunition, and not realised that the other parties can shoot back. Now there are mass resignations, Microsoft is furious, seemingly all of silicon valley has turned against EA, and it's even looking likely that Altman comes back.

It seems like they didn't think they had to act like the boards of other billion dollar companies (notifying your partners of big decisions, being literal instead of euphemistic when discussing reasons for firing, selling your decisions with PR, etc). But often norms and customs happen for a reason, and corporate governance seems to be no exception. 

"OpenAI’s ouster of CEO Sam Altman on Friday followed internal arguments among employees about whether the company was developing AI safely enough, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Such disagreements were high on the minds of some employees during an impromptu all-hands meeting following the firing. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and board member at OpenAI who was responsible for limiting societal harms from its AI, took a spate of questions.

At least two employees asked Sutskever—who has been responsible for OpenAI’s biggest research breakthroughs—whether the firing amounted to a “coup” or “hostile takeover,” according to a transcript of the meeting. To some employees, the question implied that Sutskever may have felt Altman was moving too quickly to commercialize the software—which had become a billion-dollar business—at the expense of potential safety concerns."

Kara Swisher also tweeted:

"More scoopage: sources tell me chief scientist Ilya Sutskever was at the center of this. Increasing tensions with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman over role and influence and he got the board on his side."

"The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: [Sam will] have a new company up by Monday."

Apparently Microsoft was also blindsided by this and didn't find out until moments before the announcement.

"You can call it this way," Sutskever said about the coup allegation. "And I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAl builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a term that refers to software that can reason the way humans do. 
When Sutskever was asked whether "these backroom removals are a good way to govern the most important company in the world?" he answered: "I mean, fair, I agree that there is a not ideal element to it. 100%." 

https://twitter.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1725712642117898654

Thought this was a good article on Microsoft's power: https://archive.li/soZMQ

It is unclear if OpenAI could continue as a going concern without continual cash inflows from Microsoft. While OpenAI is, according to reports, making about $80 million per month currently and may be on track to make $1 billion in revenue in 2023—ten times more than it anticipated when it secured an additional $10 billion funding commitment from Microsoft in January—it is not known if the company is profitable or what its burn rate it is. But it is likely to be fast. The company lost $540 million dollars in 2022 on revenue of less than $30 million for the entire year, according to documents seen by Fortune. If its costs have also ramped up in line with revenues, the company would need continual support from Microsoft just to keep operating.

Furthermore, OpenAI is entirely dependent on Microsoft’s cloud computing datacenters to both train and run its models. The global shortage of graphic processing units (GPUs), the specialized computer chips needed to train and run large AI models, and the size of OpenAI’s business, with tens of millions of paying customers dependent on those models, mean that the San Francisco AI company cannot easily port its business to another cloud service provider.

It seems like the board did not fire Sam Altman for safety reasons, but instead for other reasons instead. Utterly confusing, and IMO demolishes my previous theory, though a lot of other theories also lost out.

Sources below, with their archive versions included:

https://twitter.com/norabelrose/status/1726635769958478244

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275

https://archive.is/dXRgA

https://archive.is/FhHUv

This is mere speculation, but another group I'm on posited this might be part of it:
Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, claims Sam has severely abused her

We are at a critical time as we stand; either we have the Board yielding to the plea/threat of the worker or we have inexperienced actors being at the helm of the driving force in AI. What do you think organizations like EA can do in this regard, should we just sit and watch or should we regard the threat as non-existent because to me, having this sort of people managing the AI space is a ticking time bomb

Interesting. The press release defines the board's governance mission as "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity," and then asserts that Sam hindered that mission.

I suppose one could interpret that as a shift towards greater caution and governance in the name of AI safety, or a shift towards greater speed/open-sourcing if the board views their mission through a lens of accelerationism and accessibility. 

Or something entirely different... we're digging into talmudic nuance here, and all of these are near-wild guesses.

It could be noteworthy that they chose to highlight Mira's governance experience. 

The latter part of the press release (not quoted above, but visible in the original here) also points out that the majority of board members hold no OpenAI equity, which could be a nod towards this being a move that sacrifices profitability for the sake of the mission. Again though, only a guess, and even if true it would still leave open the question of how the board is interpreting the mission.

Not too long an unemployment period of 5 days, but on the other hand, not a bad endorsement.

The reinstatement of Altman as head of OpenAI took place under truly revolutionary circumstances. Reportedly, 650 employees threatened to leave immediately and investors threatened legal action against the ChatGPT creator. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft, the largest investor, owning 49% of the shares and pumping huge amounts of money into the company, had the most at stake. It was the tech giant that first expressed great dissatisfaction with Altman's dismissal and even offered him the creation of an AI division within Microsoft, should OpenAI's board of directors nonetheless relent.

Just saw this on hacker news as a response to Sam Altman Exposes the Charade of AI Accountability. The damage for EA's reputation is hard to estimate but perhaps real.

I think people have yet to realize that this whole AI Safety thing is complete BS. It's just another veil, like Effective Altruism, to get good PR and build a career around. The only people who truly believe this AI safety stuff are those with no technical knowledge or expertise.

Here’s a Bloomberg article with a few more details.

https://archive.ph/sv8SH

Apropos of nothing, I'm reminded of this old update from CEA.

If Holden or other folks in EA blew up OpenAI, that ain't gonna be good for the movement... fr fr