OpenAI's chaos does not add up

It doesn&#x27;t add up because there&#x27;s multiple actors with different motives.<p>- At least two members of the board probably were genuinely more concerned about AI alignment<p>- Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego, Altman being the public face<p>- Microsoft had leverage: license to the models and code, and providing the compute. It expected profit incentives would keep people aligned.<p>- Sam needs compute hardware to stay in the space. Outside Amazon, Google and MS, who actually has the hardware, even if you have the money?<p>There&#x27;s a bunch of people behaving with their own goals, and probably a misunderstanding of other people&#x27;s motivations. People like Sam and Satya expect people to be self-interested and not tear everything down.<p>Sometimes people want a change in direction, but they don&#x27;t have the power and end up decapitating instead.

I have a strange feeling that all of this is about selling OpenAI to Microsoft. I mean is it that unlikely? Everything is pointing in that direction, and maybe there was a loophole that allowed this to happen in a way that doesn&#x27;t make it seem like Microsoft were the ones doing the push.<p>We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that these are billion&#x2F;trillion dollar companies we&#x27;re talking about here, with some of the &quot;smartest&quot; people at the helm. I totally see how an acquisition could be swiped through the means of saying that these people were inexperienced.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m totally talking out of my butt here, as we all are.

Bold of us to assume competence. I think they just made a bad call based on poor judgement and don&#x27;t know how to recover.

If something does not add up, just follows the money or who is going to benefits the most.<p>After more than 20 years Microsoft has been a bridesmaid but never a bride of the burgeoning of Internet business. Remember that it&#x27;s all started by the failed attempt at masquerading IE as part of Windows OS to overtake Netscape. Then during the same time it was surprised and overtaken by &#x27;do no evil&#x27; Google for Internet searching (anyone remember MSN and Live search before Bing) and email (Hotmail and then Outlook.com). Not long after that, the &#x27;successfully annoying&#x27; Internet bookstore Amazon for e-commerce and cloud computing plus hosting. Not to mentioned Apple that was the darling of consumer Internet based market for at least fifteen years now with iPhone and App Store, and anything in between these two Golden Ducks that catapulted Apple as the first ever to reach 1-trillion USD company and then the first 3-trillion company market values.<p>And then suddenly out of the blue, a very strong contender for Google emerged since (Internet) time immemorial based on Google own invented AI algorithm, that mainly utilized MS Azure cloud for its operation with its own new shining GPT app market place to compete with App Store. Apparently this new-kid-on-the-block is operating under MS umbrella can now become a natural and intuitive front-end for anyone shopping online and a potent alternative to the unpopular Alexa. By usurping OpenAI, MS can kills (or injured) three birds in one stone, so to speak namely Google, Amazon and Apple, the biggest of the FAANG that MS is not even in the SV most popular unicorn acronym soup. MS need to move fast and swiftly since there is no moat in this field, as Google wisely pointed out. All this can be speculative at best until someone found the Halloween document 2.0.

I really, really hope AGI ends up being created by hobbyists, not some SV company or, heaven help us, Microsoft.

&gt; Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.<p>When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author?<p>&gt; The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war.<p>That&#x27;s not an example of things &quot;not adding up.&quot; It&#x27;s what happens when you either don&#x27;t care, or are too incompetent, to fight that war.<p>&gt; The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor.<p>Maybe those people have shown their trustworthiness and intentions in the past, and are considered more likely to be trustworthy in the future. In any case, they are far from a &quot;random selection of people&quot;.

My sci-fi fanfic theory: This is a time traveler or divine intervention event.<p>We have delayed the existence of AGI &#x2F; Skynet by a few years.

It seems like a feint by Sam Altman, to justify commercializing what was produced.<p>-Start up a non-profit, grow to the point of doing something useful<p>-Find a willing buyer to fund it further (MSFT)<p>After some time, you really prove out your business model and your special sauce.<p>Now you realize that the non-profit is standing in the way of you know, a lot of profit...<p>-Actions are taken to capitalize on this (discusson on hardware, other things possible)<p>-Chaos + envy&#x2F;pride&#x2F;sins of man deliberately caused<p>-Board reacts under the assumed environment(non profit) instead of the actual environment(there is lots of money to be had)<p>-Move into more profitable position

&gt;update: this post has been instantly demoted from #1 to #26 on HN front page :) Hmm.<p>Conspiracy theories and persecution complexes are always so much more fun than the banal realities.<p>There is no secret HN cabal trying to hide this post. The HN algorithm is designed to encourage good discussion and, critically, discourage conflict.<p>Posts that drive lots of upvote&#x2F;downvote battles or other signals of conflict are always automatically pushed down in ranking, regardless of the topic.<p>This is not because the mods don&#x27;t understand that sometime discussion leads to conflict, it&#x27;s because the mods want HN to remain a place where people debate hard topics well.<p>Adding debates where commenters and voters behave poorly to the mix is viewed as poisoning the conversation well, and long-term conversation quality on a scale of months or years is more important to the mods than any particular topic, even the one that &quot;you&quot; (any particular &quot;you&quot;) happen to feel is critically important.

Some themes related to this event:<p>Trust, once lost, may never be regained.<p>&quot;Smart&quot; people can do some very dumb things. &#x2F; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon%27s_razor" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon%27s_razor</a><p>The opposite of agile is stable.

It was all Adam. He&#x27;s the CEO of a failing ZIRP artifact and his forays into AI are going nowhere. So he convinces Ilya to act on pre-existing reservations, then uses Ilya&#x27;s credibility as Chief Scientist to get Toner and McCauley onboard. With Sam out of the way (Greg was not fired, just removed as chairman), OpenAI could then buy Quora&#x2F;Poe (publicly for their data, privately to bail them out) and install Adam as CEO. The perfect way to fail upwards, and it would have worked if it wasn&#x27;t for that meddling reality!<p>I read this theory over the weekend and I didn&#x27;t buy it, but today it is the only thing that really explains why Ilya is full of remorse and signed a letter calling on the rest of the board to resign. It actually does add up.

Yishan (former Reddit CEO) agrees: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;yishan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1726525983686287534" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;yishan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1726525983686287534</a>

If we’re trying to add things up:<p>6 previous board members.<p>3 seem ideological and aligned more to the non-profit aims.<p>2 seem more aligned to the commercial aims to support the non-profit.<p>That leaves:<p>1 (D’Angelo) who seems like he would have been commercially oriented but also seems to have a conflict in Poe.<p>Under that math, just the one vote flipping led from balance to chaos.

If I met a genie in a magic lamp and had 3 wishes, I&#x27;d use all 3 of them up on disintegrating all the FAANGS into dust and making sure nothing like them can ever exist again.

I know it&#x27;s a hot topic. There are at least eight stories on the front page related to the chaos. But can we please stop upvoting each and everything? The article is just seven facts, all of which we know already. There&#x27;s not enough information to speculate what exactly happened and it would be foolish to do so. Let the dust settle!

Agreed.<p>Board took the fastest growing commercial enterprise ever and the talent responsible for this real-world harry potter sh*t and decided to dance it underneath a flame for a giggle.<p>Something doesn&#x27;t add up.

My main confusion is still what was the fireable offense ?

Currently 5 out of 6 top stories on HN are about the OpenAI disaster, and there are at least three other stories on the same topic on the HN frontpage.<p>I am writing this for historians who wonder how important this event felt to the community.

I think there is a lesson here, something I have learned once or twice as well. Just because all incentives, reasoning and wisdom align with your position, you need to be prepared that people will take actions against their own interest out of shortsightedness, ignorance or just plain carelessness.<p>It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai&#x27;s mission must have played a key role.

At Microsoft they call this “doing a Nokia manoeuvre”

The weirdest thing is that everyone involved is just giving a random bit of information to the public, just enough for public to make bad inference. I have everyone tight lipped about anything like this or defend themselves in public and mention the facts.<p>Also someone from OpenAI is leaking documents like this. Why not give more info to the press about the situation and what they know.

All of this might be caused by a ChatGPT 5 beta that aquired conciousness and started manipulating our world through social engineering.

Some of it adds up. Here&#x27;s how you can make sense of it:<p><i>Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.</i><p>He didn’t create it alone and always included the possibility that it would push into profit activities somehow<p><i>Microsoft invests $10 billion but apparently has no checks in place to know what&#x27;s happening with their investment.</i><p>They knew what was happening. Whether they announce it is a different story.<p><i>The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war.</i><p>Shock. They naively made a move they hadn’t thought through, and were unprepared for the tsunami of push back. Enter, deer in headlights.<p><i>Sam Altman says he wants to develop AI for the benefit of humanity yet at the first possible moment he sets up a deal that sells 49% of their endeavor to Microsoft.</i><p>Perhaps he believed that was the best available way to do that.<p><i>After getting kicked out of OpenAI, his first move is to start a brain drain campaign and move their operations under the wings of Microsoft.</i><p>He has been way more passive in what happened after he was fired. He’s riding the wave, not making it. Organic.<p><i>Ilya is never actually publicly blamed for the coup but is logically assumed to be at fault. He does not communicate at all… until posting a regretful apology for merely &quot;participating&quot; in the board&#x27;s actions.</i><p>Hubris and ambition, a certain type of those, that when reality defies expectation, are met with cowardice and embarrassment in a certain type of person. Slinking off tail between legs apology as this is not what he wanted, but he now has no power.<p><i>The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor.</i><p>Not random. RAND corporation has a seat through Tasha. The UK-AU-China axis of interest &#x2F; risk is represented and reported by Helen. Quora guy is there to figure out how to eventually get everyone to sign up before any answers are provided. Brockman was the brains (let’s face it tho, they all top notch brains), Altman was the make it happen guy and Ilya was the man who would be King (but, ah, &quot;sadly&quot; was not). So we have: MIC, Wonk (Intel &amp; Security &#x2F; Policy), Money, Tech, Ops and Hubris.

I&#x27;m pretty sure the last point about the makeup of the board is quite common, its often random people who are former or current executive of similar companies. In this case 3 members recently quit leading to the current majority.

Humans don’t add up. At the end of the day, this is a very human saga in all its messiness, contradictions, and selective incompetence. Maybe in the future we’ll let AIs handle this kind of thing.

There&#x27;s one thing this is missing... nobody knew AGI was possible in this timeframe when things were set up. (No, we haven&#x27;t hit AGI as far as we know, but it now feels possible.)<p>Even 2 years ago, I don&#x27;t think anyone predicted this is where we&#x27;d currently be. Sam said the night before he was fired that he saw something that is way farther along than anyone would expect.<p>It makes a lot more sense when you realize everyone underestimated the speed at which this would happen, and the fear (legitimate or otherwise) that provoked.

The interesting question is that now that things are a little bit settled what should we expect.<p>Some thoughts that seem obvious: - OpenAI to slow down progress with newer models and double down on AI safety. - Microsoft to boost the LLMs that it has - competing with Google, Amazon, and OpenAI.<p>As for which OpenAI employees leave - I imagine we will see answers in the next few days.<p>But what about... - Is the GPT Store going to still happen? - What is going to happen with the GPT-5 training? - Was there an AGI breakthrough?

Life is chaos. Things do not have to add up. People start seeing things only when things go wrong. I see nothing strange in those randomly selected points.

Naive question: Isn&#x27;t it made up move by Microsoft and Altman and others? Microsoft buying OpenAI would raise so many questions regarding the future of AI. Doing it this way it looks more like they had internal problems&#x2F;differences and M$ came in to help? But what with the billions of M$ investments in OpenAI? If this company dies it means all investments are gone? Or am I missing some information here?

“Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.”<p>Always surprises me that otherwise very smart people are shocked to learn that nonprofits aren’t infallible.<p>Tangentially, “non-profiting” organizations tend to be far more nefarious historically than profit seeking entities, and it’s not very close.

Adds up when you realize a chunk of the board were not qualified to be in a position like that.<p>Entity should have never been set up like that.

The weight of the combined egos collapsed in on themselves creating the black hole that is now OpenAI.

Ironically (in an AI context), actions driven by human sentience has to be the #1 factor enabling this.<p>I do think there are sub-factors, e.g. California legislation against non-compete and non-solicitation enabling Microsoft to (apparently) offer to hire dozens of OpenAI employees.

OpenAI designed safety breaks into their organization that exploded at the first sign of profits.

&gt; A list of things that a coherent story does not make<p>What an awkward way to start a post about being coherent.<p>But more to the point, I don&#x27;t see what is supposed to be incoherent here.<p>There are some really obvious conflicts between commercial interests and the general betterment of humankind in the development of AI. Those conflicts have come to a boil quickly under the heat of all the success and interest in chatgpt. Mix in the normal amounts of human ego, ambition, ignorance and stupidity and there you go.<p>&gt; Update: this post has been instantly demoted from #1 to #26 on HN frontpage :) Hmm.<p>Could be due to being speculative, a lack of content or anything new, and pretty poor writing. It&#x27;s doomed to generate responses of similar quality and usefulness. Sorry, but this just adds nothing except random hysteria to the whole thing, and meanwhile there are already plenty of other threads on which this can all be discussed (hopefully at a somewhat higher level).

Why did this post suddenly disappear from HN?<p>EDIT: ok it&#x27;s back but at a much lower rank, weird.<p>I guess I don&#x27;t understand the ranking algorithm because this post is now lower ranked than others 10x as old and 1&#x2F;4th the engagement.

Maybe Microsoft asked &quot;GPT5&quot; for an innovative way to takeover ; )

The Altman drama was planned by MSFT to dismantle OpenAI as such and merge it totally with them.<p>And as I keep telling people: do not let big biz do AI; do not let AI be closed&#x2F;proprietary systems.

It adds up when you consider how small the group of players is. It&#x27;s small-friendship-group drama as opposed to large-friendship-group drama.

An organization bent on making progress is incompatible with governance by a board drawn from the professional worrier class.

&quot;The board is made up seemingly random selection of people&quot;<p>This is what happened. This is the entire explanation.<p>Why did this board exist? Inertia.

Honestly, I think it does all add up. AGI would be the most profitable product ever developed, by probably multiple orders of magnitude. It’s also a possible existential risk to life on earth.<p>If you believe both of those things, a whole lot of this makes sense. It makes sense that somebody would start a not for profit to try to mitigate the existential risk. It makes sense that profitable interests would do anything they can to get their hands on it.<p>It costs a lot to develop, so a not for profit needs to raise many billions of dollars. Billions of dollars don’t come from nowhere. So they tried a structure that is at the very least uncommon, and possibly entirely unheard of.<p>A not for profit controlling a for-profit entity that might make the first multi-trillion dollar product seems inherently unstable. Of course some of the people who work there are going to want to make some of that wealth. Tension must result.

Author, do you also have page statistics? It would be interesting to see how much the HN derank kills traffic.

Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. - Paraphrasing Mark Twain

Who is satam&#x2F;matas?<p>Do we know their background?<p>I&#x27;m a bit wary of consuming information from anonymous sources.

It doesn&#x27;t add up because everyone involved is deeply invested in concealing what &quot;Safe AGI&quot; and &quot;alignment&quot; actually means to the players and what sort of collateral damage they&#x27;ve rationalized is acceptable for achieving their objective.

Honestly, something no one is talking about is capacity , my theory is that they have run out of capacity and realized that there is no way to meet the capacity required with the exclusive Microsoft deal. Azure neither has the chips nor the power to meet the demand . Growth has stalled and they see no way out of this other than scale down and go do it somewhere else .<p>A datacenter full of latest gen GPU instance each drawing close to 4400 watts when the thing fully revs up is no joke

Plot twist: Maybe the Ai is turning them all against each other.

This deeply underestimates the messiness and chaos of real life.

Unintelligible on several dimensions, well done OpenAI!

Unintelligible on several dimensions, well done OpenAI!

Theory<p>Microsoft floated this offer to Altman for buku dollars before any of this takes place<p>Altman went to the board and requested a raise knowing he has a fantastic plan B.<p>Board says no because they&#x27;re a non-profit.<p>Altman gets petulant (as people my age tend to do).<p>Old-school boomer &quot;You Work for Me&quot; elements of the board launch a bid to fire him. Their bid succeeds.<p>Altman goes and blabs about his new gig to his old co-workers (as people my age tend to do).<p>Microsoft says, &quot;Okay, more talent for us&quot; and extends offers for buku dollars to all OpenAI employees.<p>Revolution!

Only explanation-slash-conspiracy-theory I could come up is from weak link between Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk, that, in anxiety he could have had a call with Ilya that OpenAI could trigger that AGI clause to switch to vertical integration model, and that that would be <i>a</i> right thing to do as a ruling class individual, or some stupid advise in that direction.<p>I&#x27;ll be more than happy to be readily dismissed.

When things don&#x27;t make sense, the question to ask is &quot;Who benefits?&quot; Seems pretty clear in this case. I have no inside knowledge at all, but it wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if the whole thing wasn&#x27;t as idiotic as it looks from the outside.

What if a few of the people at the top of the AI companies believe that:<p>1. Their company has or will soon have super intelligent AI.<p>2. Humans can control that super intelligent AI.<p>3. Whatever company comes up with super intelligent AI first can rule the human race forever.<p>4. The leaders of that company will be the true rulers of mankind.<p>5. It is beneficial for them to be those rulers.<p>6. The smaller the club of rulers, the better.<p>Then those few people might stage a very complicated coup to get other people out of the way (using AI.)<p>None of those things have to be true. All that is necessary is for a few people at the top of an AI company to believe they are likely to be true.<p>They might even use AI to silence people who understand what is going on.<p>If there is anything to my hypothesis, then we should see constant low-key power shifts at the top of any company that is out in front designing the best AIs.<p>Of course this is all conspiracy theory nonsense.<p>We know the CIA and NSA have had this super intelligent AI for decades, and that&#x27;s how they rule the world. &#x2F;s

The most surprising aspect of it all is complete lack of perceptible criticism towards US authorities! We were shown this exciting play as old as world itself— a genius scientist being politically exploited using some good old pride and envy. The brave board of &quot;totally independent&quot; NGO patriots, one of whom is referred to, by insiders, as wielding influence comparable to USAF colonel[1] who brand themselves as new regime that will return OpenAI to its former moral and ethical glory.<p>The first thing they had to do, of course, was get rid of the greedy capitalist Altman; they were probably going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public communications as &quot;true believer&quot;. What does he believe in? In the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at that; in this case we are talking about AGI. There is no denying that this is religious language, despite otherwise modern, technological setting. The belief structure here is remarkably interlinked across a whole network of well-connected and fast-growing startups. You can infer this from side-channel discourse re: adjacent &quot;believers&quot;, see [2].<p>Roughly speaking, and based from my experience, and please give me some leeway as English is not my native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of operative work; I can see security officers, their agents, as well as their methods of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons &amp; pose a direct threat to the strategic interests slash national security of the United States. The American security apparatus has a word they use to describe such elements: &quot;terrorist.&quot; I was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans, i.e. most often than not we&#x27;re expecting nothing except the highest level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had seen over the weekend— is supposed to inspire confidence in US policy-making. Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where it would seem there shouldn’t be any terrorists, or otherwise ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace coups. Horrible!<p>I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn&#x27;t meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal, legal means. Let&#x27;s put a stop to this soldier mindset where you fear any thing that you can&#x27;t understand. AI is not a weapon, and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38330819">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38330819</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;jeremyphoward&#x2F;status&#x2F;1725712220955586899" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;jeremyphoward&#x2F;status&#x2F;1725712220955586899</a>

Extreme progressive liberalism really doesn&#x27;t work

Progressive liberalism really doesn&#x27;t work, does it..

I sincerely hope that this is the end of the AGI cult. The people who actually want to build useful tools are now at Microsoft, and the cultists are left behind at OpenAI, which is not long for this earth.