Curious of what folks take aways were from the drama that unfolded at OpenAI?
I think one thing for sure for me was how fast this all has evolved. It hasn’t even been 48 hours, and there are thousands of stories and every minute the story is changing.
Thoughts?
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It was delivered on a Friday so journalist have to scramble for a source over the weekend to get clarity. By mid week or the following we will know. Him and brockman will launch a new AI startup to compete.
If you are valued at 30B, why are you trying to raise yet more money? Seems totally nuts …
Just because that’s their valuation doesn’t mean they have that much cash on hand. And with higher interests rates, it’s more expensive to borrow right now.
Exactly – it looks like they just burned through 10B within 6 months …
Because training a language model like GPT 4 is incredibly expensive
You have an IP for a product that is woth 100B, but its not ready. people will value your unfinished 100B product at 30B now. Does not mean you have liquid 30B or even 30m in the bank
There’s nothing to learn it doesn’t concern 99.9% of this sub
People in here would be delighted to hire a CEO and have him run the company and fire themselves.
A CEO without shares is just an employee, if you are an employee then this sub is not aimed at you. High profile employees are still employees.
If i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares
What does his recent tweet mean if he has no shares
It’s a joke, a bitter one.
It sums up why they were able to fire him without him being able to do anything.
Perhaps the takeaway is in your message? Realign corporate structure, perhaps? Current governance seems to not be working if they fire him on Friday and want him back on Saturday…
When founders or CEO have their vision for the future that is not only in contradiction but also conflicts the vision the board have, one of these two is going to win.
Usually founders have priority shares so they are always able to win as “they are the board”.
In here the founders were probably in heavy conflicts in what they planed to do going forward, this level of disagreement was more likely on a ideological level which means 100% unsolvable, someone had to go.
Be wary of takeover by personality.
My personal fav take on the matter was by Varun Mathur from Hyperspace AI:
Deleted
it’s just got a backslash in the url
Dude is bitter and over dramatic. Sheesh. He could have been fired for any number of reasons.
yeah this espouses a very childish worldview. sam will be on the right side of history and you’ll be watching later as a nobody after your company obviously collapses. in reality we really know nothing about either side and why things turned out the way they did.
It’s a really good write-up, but isn’t all that a bit much when we don’t even know why the board fired Sam? They had some sort of reasoning and it could’ve been completely justified, no?
It can also be exactly what he is saying, but do we have any actual source of information that confirms that?
I think regardless of the reason for firing, the execution of the firing was the problematic portion. A company that valuable benefits to go without such a sh*t show.
We don’t know what happened, so we can’t derive any lessons from this.
Was Sam Altman fired with or without cause? If he committed fraud or something and was removed because of that then there’s not much to learn besides don’t commit fraud. If he was fired for disagreeing with the board on a fundamental issue, the lesson is to understand your powers and ability in the company. He’s an employee and nothing more, so it’s not like he’s Zuckerberg where he can just do whatever he wants with majority control.
My guess is he saw things one way and the board saw things another way and he wasn’t willing to budge on an issue he believed was important.
We don’t know what happened
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin scam is enough to have him ousted. That was nothing but a horrible scheme to monetize peoples’ intimate personal information.
There is zero good that would come from Worldcoin, which is why they started off in various third-world countries, stealing peoples identity data that were not well educated enough to realize the implications of what they were doing.
He’s an employee and nothing more, so it’s not like he’s Zuckerberg where he can just do whatever he wants with majority control.
He’s realisticly between these two. I suspect we will see a fairly stout exedous from the company with his firing if it isn’t for fraud and does hold pretty decent discretion. Top that off with Microsoft not knowing it was going to happen and I suspect there will.be some real major changes as a result of it
My takeaway is, “I’m glad I bought MSFT shares after hours on Friday that were $10 less than the highs”.
This will blow over.
I put some thoughts on the link below.
There are two major takeaways for me:
- never let your board with such a low number of people (3 people left the OpenAI board in 2023 and were not replaced)
- always have board members with (1) a vested interest in the company success and (2) no conflict of interest. It seems that some remaining board members were in one of these categories.
Full post on: https://juli1.substack.com/p/founders-what-can-you-learn-from
Unless you are trying to build a powerful world altering technology for the good of humanity with a non profit, I don’t think there is much for the average startup founder to learn here. This is WAY outside the norm.
If you plan a coup, make sure you, yourself, fully integrate yourself into the system so that you become the one who is too big to fail.
The problem is, that’s what Altman did for himself, which means the money and power follow him, not the other person.
Working in the c-suite beyond your co-founders is 80% managing personalities.
EVERY startup has drama. You’re seeing OpenAI’s because it’s high profile and their board shit the bed with this decision.
I dunno about thousands of stories. Really just a handful tbh.
I prefer not to speculate.
Everyone sucks
You can speculate and make stuff up all you want.
Will we really know what happened? Probably not.
What we do know is that in less than 24 hours, the board played their move, it completely backfired in their faces in the worst way possible (the employees got pissed) and now they’re fucked
The OpenAI board may consist of some great researchers, but they’re inexperienced business people, board members and humans
This will set a precedent.