[altdataseller]

OpenAI has hundreds more employees, all of whom are incredibly smart. While they will definitely lose the leadership and talent of those two, it’s not as if a nuclear bomb dropped on their HQ and wiped out all their engineers!

So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me

[alsodumb]

Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message.

I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of them) who joined OpenAI recently with pure financial incentives. They'll jump to Sam's new company cause of course that's where they'd make real money.

This coupled with investors like Microsoft backing off definitely makes it fair to question the survival of OpenAI in the form we see today.

And this is exactly what makes me question Adam D'Angelo's motives as a board member. Maybe he wanted OpenAI to slow down or stop existing, to keep his Poe by Quora (and their custom assistants) relevant. GPT Agents pretty much did what Poe was doing overnight, and you can have as many as them with your existing 20$ ChatGPT Plus subscription. But who knows I'm just speculating here like everyone else.

[alex_young]

The heart tweet rebellion is about as meaningful as adding a hashtag supporting one side of your favorite conflict.

Come on. “By 5 pm everyone will quit if you don’t do x”. Response: tens of heart emojis.

[alsodumb]

It wasn't a question of "will these people quit there jobs at OpenAI and get into the job market because they support Sam".

It was a question of whether they'd leave OpenAI and join a new company that Sam starts with billions in funding at comparable or higher comp. In that case, of course who the employees are siding with matters.

[londons_explore]

Sam hasn't yet lined up the funding, so therefore they can't yet offer decent jobs, so therefore the openai employees haven't left

But they will.

[teaearlgraycold]

Talk is easy. But also the good employees will be paid well to get poached.

[hipadev23]

Anyone worth a shit will leave and go work with Sam. OpenAI will be left with a bunch of below average grifters.

[hef19898]

What is it with all this personality cult about founders, CEOs and CTOs nowadays? I thpught the cult around Steve Jobs was, bad it pales in comparison to today.

As soon as one person becomes more important than the team, as in the team starts to be structured around said person instead of with the person, that person should be replaced. Because otherwise, the team will not be functioning properly without the "star player" nor is the team more the sum of its members anymore...

[HlessClaudesman]

People love to pick sides then retroactively rationalise that decision. None of us reading about it have the facts required to make a rational judgement. So it's Johnny vs Amber time.

[Closi]

While your post sounds like something that would be true, there are loads of examples of where companies have thrived under a clear vision from a specific person.

The example of Steve Jobs used in the above post is probably a prime example - Apple just wouldn’t be the company it is today without that period of his singular vision and drive.

Of course they struggled after losing him, but the current version of Apple that has lived with Jobs and lost him is probably better than the hypothetical version of Apple where he never returned.

Great teams are important, but great teams plus great leadership is better.

[_factor]

Newsflash. Altman is no Steve Jobs.

[hef19898]

Steve Jobs is actually a great example: He was, sucessfully at each time, replaced twice, once aftwr he almost ran Apple into the ground and then after his death. In fact, he shoes how to build an org that explicitly does not depend on war star player.

[austhrow743]

In a dispute between people willing to sacrifice profit for values and those chasing the profit, why on earth would you put grifters on team values over profit?

[bertil]

I'm assuming the original comment meant that the grifters would not be extended a new offer after their colleagues learned that they were not as good as their CV said at open AI.

[throwawayhno]

Welcome to hn. Here it's all about money

[Gigablah]

Only on HN: your worth is tied to your choice of CEO.

[happytiger]

I take it you have never made a pledge to someone.

It’s a signal. The only meaning is the circumstances under which the signal is given: Sam made an ask. These were answers.

[alex_young]

This is how one answers if they actually intend to quit: https://x.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559?s=46&t=Q5EXJgwO...

There’s nothing wrong with not following, it’s a brave and radical thing to do. A heart emoji tweet doesn’t mean much by itself.

[happytiger]

Did I say there was something wrong with either case? No. I said it was a signal. And it certainly can mean a lot by itself.

You can disagree. You can say only explicit non-emoji messages matter. That’s ok. We can agree to disagree.

[15457345234]

So is this a company or something else that starts with a c? (Thinking of a 4 letter word.)

[behringer]

Why a researcher would concern him or herself with management politics is beyond me? Particularly with a glorified sales man. Sounds like they aren't spending enough time actually working.

[bertil]

My experience of academic research is that there's a lot of energy spent on laboratory politics.

[vvrm]

Because a salesman’s skills complements those of a researcher. Salesman sells what the researcher built and brings in money to keep the lights on. Researcher gets to do what they love without having to worry about the real world. That’s a much sweeter deal than a micromanaging PI.

[wyager]

Given that the board coup was orchestrated by AI safetyists, it likely has a pretty direct bearing on life as a researcher. What are you allowed to work on? What procedures and red tape are in place? Etc.

[alsodumb]

It's not just management politics - it's about money and what they want to work on.

A lot of researchers like to work on cutting edge stuff, that actually ends up in a product. Part of the reason why so many researchers moved from Google to OpenAI was to be able to work on products that get into production.

> Particularly with a glorified sales man > Sounds like they aren't spending enough time actually working. Lmao I love how people come down to personal attacks on people.

[zq]

The two most important to OpenAI's mission - Alec Radford and Ilya Sutskever - did not respond with a heart.

[babyshake]

Presumably there is some IP assignment agreement that would make it tricky for Sam to start an OpenAI competitor without a lot of legal exposure?

[threeseed]

Team Sam = Team Money.

If you're an employee at OpenAI there is a huge opportunity to leave and get in early with decent equity at potentially the next giant tech company.

Pretty sure everyone at OpenAI's HQ in San Francisco remembers how many overnight millionaires Facebook's IPO created.

[bnralt]

There's a financial incentive. And there will be more opportunity for funding if you jump ship as well (it seems like OpenAI will have difficulty with investors after this).

But also, if you're a cutting edge researcher, do you want to stay at a company that just ousted the CEO because they thought the speed of technology was going too fast (it's sounded like this might be the reason)? You don't want to be shackled when by the organization becoming a new MIRI.

[hef19898]

It seems that MS spent 10 billion to become a minority shareholder in company controlled by a non-profit. They were warned, or maybe even Sam oversold the potential profitability of the investment.

Just as another perspective.

[zo1]

All this talk of a new venture and more money makes this smell highly fishy to me. Take this with a grain of salt, it's a random thought.

It's created huge noise and hype and controversy, and shaken things up to make people "think" they can be in on the next AI hype train "if only" they join whatever Sam Altman does now. Riding the next wave kind of thing because you have FOMO and didn't get in on the first wave.

[behringer]

If you're looking for money you probably chose wrong going with a non-profit.

[majikaja]

Money = building boring enterprise products, not building AI gods I would suspect

[threeseed]

OpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products.

Which likely most of the company was working on.

[sangnoir]

OpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products under Sam Altman's leadership

[mirzap]

And that could be a core problem. He wasn't really free to decide the speed of development. He wanted to change that and deliver faster. Obviously, they achieved something in the past weeks, so doomers pulled the plug to stop him.

[j7ake]

Salaries at openai already make them millionaires.

[tempsy]

being a lowly millionaire doesn’t get you much these days. almost certainly anyone who was hired into a mid level or senior role was probably already at least a millionaire

[haldujai]

> Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter

Selection bias?

[alsodumb]

Not if it's a big sample set. There's a guy on twitter who make a list with every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter and almost all of them did react to Sams tweet in a supportive way.

[ignoramous]

A majority of the early team that joined the non-profit OpenAI over BigTech did not do so for money but for its mission. Post-2019 hires may be more aligned with Sam but the early hires embody OpenAI's charter, Sustkever might argue.

Of course, OpenAI as a cloud-platform is DoA if Sam leaves, and that's a catastrophic business hit to take. It is a very bold decision. Whether it was a stupid one, time will tell.

[15457345234]

> every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter

Literally the literal definition of 'selection bias' dude, like, the pure unadulterated definition of it.

[alsodumb]

Like I said, if the subset of OpenAI researchers who are on twitter is very small, sure.

But people in AI/learning community are very active on twitter. I don't know every AI researcher on OpenAIs payroll. But the fact that most active researchers (looking at the list of OpenAI paper authors, and tbh the people I know, as a researcher in this space) are on twitter.

[haldujai]

It seems like you're misunderstanding selection bias.

It doesn't matter if it's large, unless the "very active on twitter" group is large enough to be the majority.

The point is that there may be (arguably very likely) a trait AI researchers active on Twitter have in common which differentiates them from the population therefore introducing bias.

It could be that the 30% (made up) of OpenAI researchers who are active on Twitter are startup/business/financially oriented and therefore align with Sam Altman. This doesn't say as much about the other 70% as you think.

[15457345234]

> But the fact that most active researchers ... are on twitter

On twitter != 'active on twitter'

There's a biiiiiig difference between being 'on twitter' and what I shall refer to kindly as terminally online behaviour aka 'very active on twitter.'

[haldujai]

Large sample =/= (inherently) representative. What percentage of OpenAI researchers are on Twitter?

Follow-up: Why is only some fraction on Twitter?

This is almost certainly a confounder, as is often the case when discussing reactions on Twitter vs reactions in the population.

[djvdq]

They can support Sam, but still stay in the company.

[ethbr1]

How childish are employees to publicly get involved with this on Twitter?

If the CEO of my company got shitcanned and then he/she and the board were feuding?

... I'd talk to my colleagues and friends privately, and not go anywhere near the dumpster fire publicly. If I felt strongly, hell, turn in my resignation. But 100% "no comment" in public.

[djvdq]

> You should find a better place to work.

Work is work. If you start being emotional about it, it's a bad, not good, thing.

[15457345234]

Nah, it's fine to be passionate about your work and relationships with your colleagues.

You just need to temper that before you start swearing oaths of fealty on twitter; because that's giving real Jim Jones vibes which isn't a good thing.

[dylan604]

These are people very active on Twitter and work for a company that unashamedly harvested all of the data it could for free with out asking to make money. It's not like shame and self-respect are allowed anywhere near this company.

[15457345234]

tl;dr: Any OAI employee tweeting about this is unhinged.

[qwertox]

Which would mean that he specifically selected who to follow due to their closeness to / alignment with Sam, pre-ousting? How would he do that?

[15457345234]

Big question!

[15457345234]

It's always been my observation that the actual heavyweights of any hardcore engineering project are the ones that avoid snarky lightweight platforms like twitter like the plague.

I would imagine that if you based hiring and firing decisions on the metric of 'how often this employee tweets' you could quite effectively cut deadwood.

With that in mind...

[alsodumb]

That's not the case with AI community. Twitter is heavily used by almost every professor/researcher/PhD student who is doing learning. Ilya has one. Heck even Jitendra Malik who's probably as old as my grand father joined twitter.

[haldujai]

Mostly for professional purposes such as networking and promoting academic activities. Sometimes for their side startups.

I rarely see a professor or PhD student voicing a political viewpoint (which is what the Sam Altman vs Ilya Sutskever debate is) on their Twitter.

[kvathupo]

Completely disagree: Yann LeCun, John Carmack, Rui Ueyama, Andrei Alexandrescu, Matt Goldbolt, Horace He, Tarun Chitra, George Hotz, etc.

[OfficialTurkey]

I have never used twitter but this strikes me as a strange take at best. Many of the most brilliant and passionate engineers I've had the pleasure to work with have been massive shitposters.

[15457345234]

> massive shitposters

Yes, agreed, but on _twitter_?

The massive_disgruntled_engineer_rant does have a lot of precedent but I've never considered twitter to be their domain. Mailing lists, maybe.

[xcv123]

Yes, on Twitter. Mailing lists are old boomer shit.

[15457345234]

That's funny

[dorkwood]

> It's always been my observation that the actual heavyweights of any hardcore engineering project are the ones that avoid snarky lightweight platforms like twitter like the plague.

What other places are there to engage with the developer community?

[15457345234]

Engagement is not necessarily constructive engagement

[dorkwood]

That's a strange thing to say. I find a lot of value in the developer community on Twitter. I wouldn't have my career without it.

I also wasn't being facetious. If there are other places to share work and ideas with developers online, I'd love to hear about them!

[karmasimida]

Discredit people using twitter is a weird take, and didn't resemble critical thinking to me.

[gardenhedge]

Since Twitter has been so controversial I don't think it's strange to discredit people using it. The people still using it are just addicted to attention.

[15457345234]

Yup. 'Tweeter' is a personality type.

[moralestapia]

Also, serious investors won't touch OpenAI with a ten foot pole after these events.

There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya).

Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single largest investor and it didn't even warrant a courtesy phone call to let them know of all this fiasco (even thought some savants were saying they shouldn't have to, because they "only" owned 49% of the LLC. LMAO).

Next bit of news will be Microsoft pulling out of the deal but, unlike this board, Satya is not a manchild going through a crisis, so it will happen without it being a scandal. MS should probably just grow their own AI in-house at this point, they have all the resources in the world to do so. People who think that MS (a ~50 old company, with 200k employees, valued at almost 3 trillion) is now lost without OpenAI and the Ilya gang must have room temperature IQs.

[visarga]

200k MS employees can't do what 500 from OAI can, the more you pile on the problem, the worse the outcome. The problem with Microsoft is that, like Google, Amazon and IBM, they are not a good medium for radical innovation, are old, ossified companies. Apple used to be nimble when Steve was alive, but went to coasting mode since then. Having large revenue from old business is an obstacle in the new world, maybe Apple was nimble because it had small market share.

[codebolt]

MS isn't starting from scratch, it already has the weights of the worlds most powerful LM, and it's all running on their datacenters. Even without Sam, they just need to keep the current momentum going. Maybe axe ChatGPT and focus solely on Bing/Copilot going forward. It would give me great satisfaction to see the laughing stock search engine of the past decade being the undisputed face of AI over the next.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Apple used to be nimble when Steve was alive, but went to coasting mode since then

Give me a break. Apple Watch and Air pods are far and away leaders in their category, Apple's silicon is a huge leap forward, there is innovation in displays, CarPlay is the standard auto interface for millions of people, while I may question the utility the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, iPhone is still a juggernaut (and the only one of these examples that predate Jobs' passing), etc. etc.

Other companies dream about "coasting" as successfully.

[Freedom2]

> Apple Watch and Air pods are far and away leaders in their category,

By what metric? I prefer open hardware and modifiable software - these products are in no way leaders for me. Not to mention all the bluetooth issues my family and friends have had when trying to use them.

[cloverich]

My first question to this scenario would be: Could MS provide the seed funding for Sam's next gig? As in, they bet on OpenAI, and either OpenAI keeps on keeping on or Sam's gig steals the thunder, and they presumably have the cash to play a role in both.

[moralestapia]

Surprise surprise!

https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122?s=46

[didibus]

But OpenAI is a non for profit that was exploring a goal that it saw financial incentives as misaligned.

It's what kind of got it achieved. Because every other company didn't really see the benefit of going straight to AGI, instead working on incremental addition and small iteration.

I don't know why the board decided to do what it did, but maybe it sees that OpenAI was moving away from R&D and too much into operations and selling a product.

So my point is that, OpenAI started as a charity and literally was setup in a way to protect that model, by having the for-profit arm be governed by the non-for-profit wing.

The funny thing is, Sam Altman himself was part of the people who wanted it that way, along with Elon Musk, Illya and others.

And I kind of agree, what kind of future is there here? OoenAI becomes another billion dollar startup that what? Eventually sells out with a big exit?

It's possible to see the whole venture as taking away from the goal set out by the non for profit.

[karmasimida]

Survive as existing? They will.

But this is a disaster that can't be sugarcoated. Working in an AI company with a doomer as head is ridiculous. It will be like working in a tobacco company advocating for lung cancer awareness.

I don't think the new CEO can do anything to get back trust in record short amount of time. The sam loyalists will leave. The question remain, how is the new CEO going to hire new people, and will he be able to do so fast enough, and the ones who remain will accept the company that is a drastically different.

[peanuty1]

Surely the employees knew before joining that OpenAI is a non-profit aiming to develop safe AGI?

[alexgartrell]

OpenAI's recruiting pitch was 5-10+ million/year in the form of equity. The structure of the grants is super weird by traditional big-company standards, but it was plausible enough that you could squint and call it the same. I'd posit that many of the people jumping to OpenAI are doing it for the cash and not the mission.

https://the-decoder.com/openai-lures-googles-top-ai-research....

[sgift]

They thought so. Now, they know that instead they work for one aiming to satisfy the ego of a specific group of people - same as everywhere else.

[bottlepalm]

Ah yes you're either a doomer or e/acc. Pick an extreme. Everything must be polarized.

[astrange]

There's a character in HPMOR named after the new CEO.

(That's the religious text of the anti-AI cult that founded OpenAI. It's in the form of a very long Harry Potter fanfic.)

[tempusalaria]

Imagine how bad a reputation EA would have if the general public knew about HPMOR

[xvector]

Even HP fanfiction lovers HATED HPMOR. It had a clowny reputation

It is wild to see how closely connected the web is though. Yudkowsky, Shear, and Sutskever. The EA movement today controls a staggering amount of power.

[astrange]

Here's the new CEO expressing the common EA belief that (theoretical world ending) AI is worse than the Nazis, because once you show them a thought experiment that might possibly true they're completely incapable of not believing in it.

https://x.com/eshear/status/1664375903223427072?s=46

[FeepingCreature]

Sorry, which character are you talking about? (Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions.)

[astrange]

The one with the same name as the new CEO. Pretty straightforward.

> Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions.

That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive.

[FeepingCreature]

Oh hey there he is, cool. I had a typo in my search, I think.

> That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post.

Yes, almost as if "Lesswrong is a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality."

> It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive.

I don't think anybody either asked somebody to, or actually did, donate all their money. As to "joining a cult group house polycule", to my knowledge that's just SF. There's certainly nothing in the Sequences about how you have to join a cult group house polycule. To be honest, I consider all the people who joined cult group house polycules, whose existence I don't deny, to have a preexisting cult group house polycule situational condition. (Living in San Francisco, that is.)

[whatshisface]

Is Chat GPT writing this whole dialogue?

[questime]

The perception right now is that the board doesn't care about investors, this will kill this company that is burning money at an insane rate. Employees will run for the exits unless they are convinced that there is a future exit.

[thekevan]

Funny you should reference a nuclear bomb. This was 14 minutes after your post.

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1726478716166123851

[jxf]

But a number of those other employees have said they'll leave if Altman isn't rehired.

[zombiwoof]

Bullshit. They are not quitting

[TechnicolorByte]

Even if you don’t believe many employees would consider leaving for Altman, I find it probable that many would consider leaving for financial reasons. What will their PPUs be worth if OpenAI is seen as a funding risk?

[bartimus]

Maybe not instantly. But there's a version where they don't agree with certain decisions and will now be more open to other opportunities.

[15457345234]

They're either not quitting or they've outed themselves as being part of a personality cult and they'll just hinder things if they're not ejected promptly.

[icy_deadposts]

You're right. They're fired.

[spaceman_2020]

If the funding dries up for OpenAI, those engineers have no incentive to keep working there. No point wasting your career on an organization that's destined to die.

[laurels-marts]

> and talent of those two

You are aware that more than just 2 people departed?

[pedrosorio]

The GPT-4 pre-training research lead quit on Friday.

[patapong]

I am guessing they are super reliant on Microsoft to keep running ChatGPT... If Microsoft decides to get out and finds a way they would be in deep trouble.

[sangnoir]

I'm sure Google will throw a couple of billions their way, given the chance

[exitb]

Why though? Companies invest to see profit or get products they can sell. This is not only about the CEO. The CEO change signals a radical strategic shift.

[blast]

> it’s not as if a nuclear bomb dropped on their HQ

Oh yes it is.

[DantesKite]

Andrej Karpathy literally just tweeted the nuclear radiation emoji lol.

[simultsop]

With a PR damage such this one, if they survive it will be a miracle.