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Notes -
OpenAI announces leadership transition
I posted this in Twitter and someone speculated that it's because Altman paused subscriptions on Tuesday, but that would alone seem like a pretty inconsequential reason for this sort of a major move.
Brian Armstrong tweeted now that $80 billion of company value has been 'evaporated'. I'm like 'what?' You realize that there is still an immensely popular product with millions of users? A few departures even of key people does not change that. i don't get it...it's like social media compels otherwise rational, smart people to make incendiary statements for attention. It's not like creating 'the next Open Ai' will be easy...look how hard Google has struggled despite unlimited resources and PR. I dunno how much valuation has been lost, but if it were public, probably a 10-20% decline in share price on Monday on this news. Bad but not critical at all. I agree he's right about wokeness, but as we've seen with the huge success of Silicon Valley tech companies, wokeness is evidently not a hindrance to success as much as he may dislike it.
I also observed how it seems like important news and events are always on Friday-Saturday, for example:
Gaza conflict
Starship launch
Open Ai board upheaval
Twitter advertisers defecting over alleged antisemitic post by Elon
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
For years I've heard repeated bitter complaints that the government drops bad news on Friday afternoons in order to avoid the weekday news commenting on it. Bonus points for late Friday before a holiday so the next week has low news engagement.
I guess this is the corporate version.
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Now that the dust seems to be settling, it looks like a coup by the more nonprofit-focused boardmembers and executives against the guys like Sam and Microsoft who wanted to build a company with real shareholder value. The talent might be there, but there's no guarantee that the will to put out products to the marketplace is still there. Microsoft's equity might be worth pennies on the dollar if OpenAI leadership refuses to ship state-of-the-art technology from now on.
EDIT: If you want proof that Microsoft is scared shitless, take a gander at this breaking report: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO.
I think that’s good news, anyone who thought it was appropriate to launch an 80 billion dollar startup under the auspice of a “non profit” belongs in jail for abusing non profit status.
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I had the 'power struggle for leadership of top AI company' arc coming just before the finale. Makes you wonder how far they've gotten with GPT-5. All that's been officially admitted is 'it's in training and we'd like more money from Microsoft'.
They want money to build out their own sales/corporate offering (even the most expensive models wouldn’t cost $20bn to train, more like a few hundred million in raw compute), which would presumably compete directly with Microsoft, given the latter has full rights to build and sell whatever it wants on top of every Open AI model with zero royalties.
The limiting factor is availability of GPUs or said compute, not the nominal cost, Nvidia is laughing all the way to the bank.
Yeah but the bulk of the huge raise they’re going for now is to (a) allow existing shareholders to cash out and (b) to build out an enterprise offering, not just to buy GPUs.
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If true, then this sounds like the board doing it's job. Even if the result of this is to entirely kill OpenAI, that would still be closer to the mission than what had been going on. That said, I'm still waiting to see what the real result will be.
Sounds like a value alignment problem. Could value alignment be a fundamentally intractable problem with intelligent actors?
Yeah. The issue with all alignment talk is that the sect of people who'd align the ASI almost certainly have a set of values that are every bit as opposed to mine as whatever random set of values that an ASI would have, if not more. Sure, at least some of the unaligned AI values would involve paperclipping me and the universe, but even that's better than "keep everyone around, but use my unlimited power to align everyone with my values for eternity."
"Make a shit ton of money by building tools that people find highly useful and economically valuable" is at least a comprehensible value and something I can work with, since it allows space to other value systems.
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This doesn't work for all of your examples, but I think part of it is that companies will often wait until late Friday to make moves that could get a lot of pushback. The extremely-online types will always pick it up anyway, but the normal people will often be less interested because it's the weekend and they've got things to do, so it reduces how much it gets picked up. By the time Monday rolls around the momentum of the pushback is often lost.
Actually, hadn't thought about it like this before, but that's also probably to reduce big stock shifts, give the news time to settle a bit before people get to trade on it.
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MSFT was at 372.90 immediately before the announcement, and dropped 1.9% on the news. Also apparently Microsoft has a market cap of $2.75T so yeah that's $52B of paper value evaporating. Not $80B (though we'll see what happens Monday morning), but still quite substantial.
Plus at least a few other higher ups have resigned in solidarity. If people start leaving then competitors could snatch them up and pass OpenAI very quickly.
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I think it’s a zero now. Best talent won’t go there and this is a business that depends entirely on that. They will fall behind the others.
Perhaps they had good reasons for stopping this but now others will take the people building this and win.
As for your one comment on how things break for the issues of the day I feel like we live in completely different worlds. Have the world is running in Bronze Age values and .1% of the world is running post human.
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