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.
It seems odd for them to say that given that there were relatively credible rumours that the board was negotiating with Sam about a potential return (which we can assume broke down as they looked for an alternative CEO).
[I’ve retracted the above, as it seems inaccurate with the new hiring of Shear and reports that the board just went silent in response to pressure from investors and Microsoft]
Can they not share some of the reasoning though? Like, sure, some of it may involved corporate propreitary knowledge and NDAs, but part of the reason there was such a blowback to the decision was that it seemed to come out of nowhere. People assumed another shoe was going to drop because of the manner of the board’s decision, and then it just hasn’t?
- Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report.
- Continue to speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors, and customers as possible, take good notes, and share the key takeaways.
- Reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers.
So he’s accepted the position without even knowing why they did what they did at a high level. [seems false, see Joshua’s reply below]
While the board probably have the right to do what they did via the OpenAI Charter, the fact they are not sharing the reasons for doing so, at either a high or low level, internally or externally, means that they have lost and are continuing to lose a lot of credibility and legitimacy, regardless of the legal facts of the case.
Why do you think that the rumors that the board was negotiating with Sam was “relatively credible?” At this point, seems more likely than not to be false, eg either random fake news or a PR spin by pro-Altman VCs.
Altman’s photo wearing the guest pass—seems like an obvious “i’m coming back to return as a CEO or not at all implication”. Like he was obviously in the OpenAI offices for some reason, seems weird for it not to be negotiations with the board over something as opposed to collecting his belongings
Roon had a now-deleted tweet along the lines of “crossed the rubicon troops marching on rome” which again, implies there was an internal open-ai move to get sam back
It still find the board silence is pretty weird, and the big missing piece here.
I stand by my current belief that the radio-silence is currently damaging for the perception and support of the AI Safety cause
It seems that the board wasn’t present when he visited. I guess what seemed to be going on were two different factions: 1) Mira Murati as interim CEO was trying to find some way to get Altman and Brockman back 2) The board was trying to find its own new CEO choice asap to foreclose any chance of Sam returning to the position
I think you are over-responding when we basically have no good information, as illustrated by the fact that you keep having to walk back claims you have made only a short time before
I take your point here John. There’s a lot that’s still to come out about the events of the weekend, and I’ve probably been a bit trigger-happy with responses. I’m going to step back from this thread and possibly the Forum as a whole for a little bit.
I do want to note that I picked up a somewhat hostile/adversarial tone to your comment (I’m not saying this was intentional). To ‘keep having to walk back claims’ seems a bit of an implied overclaim to me, especially as from my PoV it only happened twice—once seeing Ashlee Vance’s updated reporting, and the other with Joshua’s comment.
‘Walking back’ seems to also be more adversarial than just ‘corrected mistakes’ too (compare ‘you keep having to walk back claims’ vs ‘you made corrections twice’. In any case, while the reporting has changed, a lot of my intuitions and feelings haven’t shifted much. I still find the board’s complete silence strange, and think this could be a precarious moment for AI Safety.
he’s accepted the position without even knowing why they did what they did at a high level
I don’t think this is correct, from the same statement:
Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.
Feels like some version of the reasoning should be made available to investors/microsoft/the public is some short-term timeframe though? I feel like that would do a fair amount to quell some of the reactions
How on earth does one reconcile this with the fact that Ilya has now publicly tweeted that he deeply regrets his involvement in the board’s actions, and that he has signed the open letter threatening to quit unless the board resigns?
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.
Oh wow, that last paragraph seems like a good sign that they have good grounds for these statements they’re not walking back
It seems odd for them to say that given that there were relatively credible rumours that the board was negotiating with Sam about a potential return (which we can assume broke down as they looked for an alternative CEO).[I’ve retracted the above, as it seems inaccurate with the new hiring of Shear and reports that the board just went silent in response to pressure from investors and Microsoft]
Can they not share some of the reasoning though? Like, sure, some of it may involved corporate propreitary knowledge and NDAs, but part of the reason there was such a blowback to the decision was that it seemed to come out of nowhere. People assumed another shoe was going to drop because of the manner of the board’s decision, and then it just hasn’t?
The new CEO has literally just promised to:
So he’s accepted the position without even knowing why they did what they did at a high level.[seems false, see Joshua’s reply below]While the board probably have the right to do what they did via the OpenAI Charter, the fact they are not sharing the reasons for doing so, at either a high or low level, internally or externally, means that they have lost and are continuing to lose a lot of credibility and legitimacy, regardless of the legal facts of the case.
Why do you think that the rumors that the board was negotiating with Sam was “relatively credible?” At this point, seems more likely than not to be false, eg either random fake news or a PR spin by pro-Altman VCs.
I mean I definitely agree that there’s a fog-of-war situation going on. Given some new updates here, I’ve retracted that paragraph.
Some original points were:
Things like this https://nitter.net/emilychangtv/status/1726337590901796927#m. - yes distrust the media etc etc but it seemed the main state of play
Altman’s photo wearing the guest pass—seems like an obvious “i’m coming back to return as a CEO or not at all implication”. Like he was obviously in the OpenAI offices for some reason, seems weird for it not to be negotiations with the board over something as opposed to collecting his belongings
Roon had a now-deleted tweet along the lines of “crossed the rubicon troops marching on rome” which again, implies there was an internal open-ai move to get sam back
It still find the board silence is pretty weird, and the big missing piece here.
I stand by my current belief that the radio-silence is currently damaging for the perception and support of the AI Safety cause
Update on point 2: https://nitter.net/ashleevance/status/1726457222169829838#m
It seems that the board wasn’t present when he visited. I guess what seemed to be going on were two different factions: 1) Mira Murati as interim CEO was trying to find some way to get Altman and Brockman back 2) The board was trying to find its own new CEO choice asap to foreclose any chance of Sam returning to the position
I think you are over-responding when we basically have no good information, as illustrated by the fact that you keep having to walk back claims you have made only a short time before
I take your point here John. There’s a lot that’s still to come out about the events of the weekend, and I’ve probably been a bit trigger-happy with responses. I’m going to step back from this thread and possibly the Forum as a whole for a little bit.
I do want to note that I picked up a somewhat hostile/adversarial tone to your comment (I’m not saying this was intentional). To ‘keep having to walk back claims’ seems a bit of an implied overclaim to me, especially as from my PoV it only happened twice—once seeing Ashlee Vance’s updated reporting, and the other with Joshua’s comment.
‘Walking back’ seems to also be more adversarial than just ‘corrected mistakes’ too (compare ‘you keep having to walk back claims’ vs ‘you made corrections twice’. In any case, while the reporting has changed, a lot of my intuitions and feelings haven’t shifted much. I still find the board’s complete silence strange, and think this could be a precarious moment for AI Safety.
I don’t think this is correct, from the same statement:
Thanks for this, have retracted that sentence.
Feels like some version of the reasoning should be made available to investors/microsoft/the public is some short-term timeframe though? I feel like that would do a fair amount to quell some of the reactions
I would like that, however, how much they care about external reactions is unclear to me
How on earth does one reconcile this with the fact that Ilya has now publicly tweeted that he deeply regrets his involvement in the board’s actions, and that he has signed the open letter threatening to quit unless the board resigns?