Late Friday afternoon, when OpenAI released a statement announcing that its CEO Sam Altman was stepping down due to a “lack of transparency in his communications with the board,” people assumed the worst.
For hours everyone asked: Did he embezzle? Were you self-employed? Did he cover up some terrible wrongdoing in society? Was there a personal scandal? Did he secretly write all ChatGPT replies himself?
Surely it had to be something SO horrible and terrible that it warranted this extreme and unusual measure of firing Altman over Google Meet.
Well, no. It turns out that the main problem was apparently a disagreement about the level of commercial use that a company operating within a non-profit organization should have. This apparently pitted Altman against chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who was also on the board.
(Note: We don’t know much about the history of Open AI yet, and it’s still evolving.)
It is clear that Sam Altman came out of the situation as a hero. And that’s a big difference from Friday, when it looked like the potential scandal was about to be revealed.
Over the weekend, tech industry figures such as Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, released messages of support for Altman. Schmidt called him a “hero”. And Marissa Mayer, who isn’t usually particularly biting on Twitter — now X — tweeted her disapproval of Altman’s firing.
Even OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, who has a complicated personal relationship with Altman and was openly hostile to him on X earlier this month, said the board made a big mistake.
Other OpenAI colleagues, including former interim CEO Mira Murati, began tweeting cryptic heart emojis in support of Altman. After some failed negotiations to return to OpenAI, Altman left to work at Microsoft.
It also seems very likely that a large number of OpenAI employees will leave to join their former boss. Nearly 500 employees, including Mira Murati, signed an open letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement and threatening to resign if he did not.
Even Sutskever, who apparently orchestrated the OpenAI coup, signed the letter and posted on X that he regretted it. (Altman responded to this tweet with a heart emoji; your guess is as good as mine as to what that means.)
As the dust settled (well, maybe), the story emerged: Sam Altman came out very well. He is loved by his employees, who are willing to leave their jobs as a sign of loyalty to him, and is admired by his colleagues throughout the industry.
Meanwhile, the OpenAI board and the faction of people who worried that AI was killing the human race seem ridiculous, histrionic, and incapable of making good decisions. (And in Sutskever’s case, I deeply regret it 48 hours later.)
Faction doomer It seems increasingly ridiculous: Atlantic reported that at an internal company meeting, Sutskever ordered a wooden effigy of an “unclassified” AGI—or artificial general intelligence—and lit it on fire, leading employees in chants of “feel the AGI” at a Christmas party.
This faction apparently made a hasty decision to fire Altman and wrote an ad that made it seem like Altman was guilty of something terrible, and now the company might even be on the verge of collapse.
If they were truly afraid that the commercialization of AI research was bad for the future of humanity, they set off a chain of events that could very well move the entire AI operation within Microsoft. And that’s probably not the result they wanted.
It’s only Tuesday, so things could take another 180 degree turn at any moment. But the public perception of OpenAI’s collapse is already set: those who believe AI will trigger Doomsday don’t mean it, and Sam Altman is Silicon Valley’s new hero.
