[John7149]

He can poach away half the staff IMMEDIATELY. You cannot run a company with majority of your key personnels gone in a week. Then the remaining staff will be moving over within 3mths to a year. What OpenAI will be left in a year time will be back to square one, startup mode. Whatever tech they have now it will stay stagnant. Whatever tech Altman started in his new venture will be just slightly behind what OpenAI has. Within a year Altman will supercede it. He is that important. Think Steve Jobs to Apple but AI.

[CPLX]

Those people have kids and mortgages and car payments. And are very well compensated. They aren’t gone by this time next week. Is there any precedent for that? Nobody does that.

Yeah sure eventually he could poach people and it’s always possible that this is the beginning of a transition but there’s some seriously magical thinking going on here.

[MrLeap]

I have no reason to believe Sam Altman's a similar case, but have you heard of Nick Calandra? He was editor and chief of the escapist. Last week he got fired, the entire video department (~20 people) resigned and they immediately started a company together called Second Wind.

[CPLX]

Sure I’ll buy 20 employees walking. That’s plausible.

OpenAI has 700 and they’re highly compensated. How would you even onboard and meet payroll in a week for a non existent entity if you suddenly had even half that number?

Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?

[TapWaterBandit]

> How would you even onboard and meet payroll in a week for a non existent entity if you suddenly had even half that number?

> Answer is that won’t happen. The point being most sane people will wait around to see if anything really changes. Why wouldn’t they, what do they even have to lose by waiting?

Not saying it will happen but I'd honestly say this would be the least of the issues. VC's and established companies would be fighting tooth and nail to invest money in whatever venture Sam Altman/Greg Brockman + whatever % of staffers were launching. Money would not be the problem here. Think of how much money so many were willing to throw at the con-job that the vast majority of crypto was and then think of how much money they would throw at AI tools (which are clearly a big deal already).

[CPLX]

I mean we’ll see.

As far as I can tell Altman’s real serious talent is getting billionaire types to like him. First Paul Graham then Elon and the initial OpenAI funders. In both cases he seems to have been dropped rather abruptly after running things for a few years.

He has never personally built meaningful tech and has definitely never actually demonstrated anything approaching popularity with any rank and file employees.

Might happen. But it sure hasn’t yet. I don’t doubt that the Davos / Bohemian Grove set will install him in another position though, he does seem to have a genuine knack for that.

[TapWaterBandit]

Not just the billionaire type though, right? We are discussing staff leaving with him for that very reason.

And he did VC fund-raising before that for early projects too. Give his Wikipedia a read.

He is clearly a very savvy businessman and smooth operator on a personal level. And has been involved in enough high profile successes that I don't think it is a fluke.

[piuantiderp]

Did Paul Graham drop him?

[vikramkr]

It's not like he's going to have any trouble at all raising enough money to match their compensation, and if he's going to build the ruthlessly for profit version who wouldnt switch over? These folks make too much money to care about kids and mortgages and car payments.