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"AI is going to take away jobs."

"Wait... not like that."

Oops... didnt see that coming
He got billions in his account. I dont think he cares. For them job is something to do to not get bored, I guess?
- Pretty much literally not about the money for him.
  He didn't have any equity and didn't get a salary.
- He got billions in his account
  Was unaware the man has had his bank account records leaked to the public. Do you have a source for this claim?

I've seen a number of misinformed comments here complaining about a profit oriented board.

It's worth keeping in mind that this board was the original non-profit board, that none of the members have equity, and literally part of the announcement is the board saying that they want to be more aligned as a company with the original charter of helping bring about AI for everyone.

There may be an argument around Altman's oust being related to his being too closed source and profit oriented, but the idea that the reasoning was the other way around is pretty ludicrous.

Again - this isn't an investor board of people who put money into the company and have equity they are trying to protect.

So what is their board here if they aren't investors?
- It's a non-profit.
  OpenAI is a non-profit with a board which owns the LLC which is what was invested into and makes money.
  This was not the LLC board, but the non-profit board in charge of the whole thing.
- I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is a good question that not everyone knows the answer to. (It's been answered above me, but just so we're clear, any large organization can have a board of directors, whether they invest money or not. A board of directors isn't necessarily "the people who have money", it's the people who set the direction.)
I thought it also had to do with him allegedly abusing his sister for decades?
- Not according to any of the information currently coming out.
  And it would be weird for the President to resign as well if the CEO was ousted for sexual abuse.

I'm more surprised that the folks at OpenAI saw fit to fire him than I am that he committed fireable offenses.

Because he lied to them instead of for them.
- But what he lied about is probably bigger news.
  This has corporate PR speak all over it, but it is clear that it was circumventing the desires of the Board, and the chairman of the Board steps down as well.
  The absolute hell happened?

The company is now actually being run by ChatGPT, Mira is just the face it's hiding behind.

I asked Bard to give me a generic reason for firing a CEO.
Certainly, here are some vague reasons for firing the CEO of an AI company:
Leadership concerns: The CEO's leadership style or personal conduct was not in line with the company's values or culture. This could include issues such as lack of transparency, poor communication, or ethical breaches.
Yup.
- Bard is on copium with that last one.

I am actually very surprised. Did not see this coming.

That’s what my blind girlfriend said.

OpenAI also announced that co-founder Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board, though he will remain at the company.

Interesting. No way this isn't connected

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He just resigned like 30m ago.
Uhh.. Keep reading?
Hours after it was published, Brockman posted to X that he had quit “based on today’s news.”
Apologies, looks like that statement may have been added after the fact.

He hallucinated to the board.

Not exactly surprised here. Every time I've seen him on the news, it's always him fearmongering about the dangers of generative AI, when ChatGPT is burning through money and seemed to become more and more restrictive with every iteration. You can't run an organization if it is built on top of lies.

Actually open models (not open source, sadly) like specialized LLaMa 2 derivatives that could be ran and fine-tuned locally seems to be the future, because there seems to be a diminishing return in training/inference power to usefulness, and specialized smaller model tuned for specific applications are much more flexible than a giant general one that can only be used on somebody else's machine.

because there seems to be a diminishing return in training/inference power to usefulness
Be careful not to be caught up in the application of Goodhart's Law going on in the field right now.
There's plenty of things GPT-4 trounces everything else on, they just tend to be things outside the now standardized body of tests, which suggests the tests have become the target and are no longer effective measurements.
This is perhaps most apparent in things like Orca, where we directly use the tests as the target, have GPT-4 generate synthetic data that improves Llama performance on the target, and then see large gains in smaller models on the tests.
But those new models don't necessarily have the same capabilities on more abstract capabilities, such as the recent approach of using analogy to solve problems.
We are arguably becoming too myopic in how we are measuring the success of new models.

I mean yeah but also no. I think anyone would be the former guy (i.e., the Sam on the left) over the latter if given the choice.

Oh no, anyways

This is unprecedented. They let that schmuck at Unity "retire" on a holiday but they fired Sam. Oof.

It sounds like there was a power struggle over the direction of OpenAI.

This is really big news, going to be interesting if anything leaks or if we stay in the dark. For Altman to be fired and for them to release a statement like this it has to be something drastic.

Allegedly MS didn't know until a few minutes before the announcement.
Microsoft doesn't have that power, and it has hurt their stock value. Their CEO's response suggests that Microsoft and other partners didn't know until everyone else did.
But they said it was because he wasn’t being totally honest with the board for OpenAI tho
Corps would never lie to save face or hide truths!!

On one hand, this was posted 15 minutes before you posted this... on the other hand, this is a much clearer headline

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- Not sure how to handle this,
  In times of great dishonor, the Samurai would commit seppuku with their sword.

CEO? Fuck him. He'll be just fine.

of course he will, he wasnt even getting paid
- Huh??

What'd he do?

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- It's worth keeping in mind the explicit mention of their key responsibility at the end, which was the original non-profit charter of "ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."
Whatever it was it's spicy enough that they're trying to bury the press release in the late Friday afternoon news graveyard
Edit: even better, whatever they're trying to distance themselves from is so important they didn't even wait for the closing bell on the market.
I interpret their wording that he lied to the board repeadetly and made some unethical backdoor deals of evil.
- More likely he didn't want to be evil and all the board cares about is money
Makes me wonder if he wanted to put ethical guardrails on the product that would’ve been less profitable for the board.
- It's the non-profit board, not an investor board. None of the members have equity in the company.
Unverified, but I saw some rumor about sexual abuse in his past. Look it up.
- Those allegations have been floating since ~2021, I have a hard time believing they'd take emergency action on them 2-3y later.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.

Chief technology officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO, effective immediately.

When contacted by The Verge, OpenAI’s communications department declined to comment beyond the blog post.

This is an extremely sudden turn of events as Altman has largely been the face of OpenAI, which arguably kickstarted the current AI arms race with last year’s hugely popular ChatGPT.

Altman is a co-founder of OpenAI and initially served as a co-chair of the company alongside Elon Musk.

Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla — he has since founded his own AI company, xAI.

The original article contains 239 words, the summary contains 112 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This post is unnerving
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Probably because he went on his hype campaign trying to ask for regulations, except not ones that actually harm his company, and then the fear mongering.

this can't be good. even under the actual founding dude, GPT seemed to get knocked on the head every few months in quality. letting The Board exercise their precious estimable authority means pig-headed austerity and cost cutting 100% of the time. it was a hell of a technology.

It's not an equity board. It's the original non-profit board.
There's zero reason they would be choosing to focus on profits over progress.
In fact, one of the theories I think is more credible is their loss of faith was in Altman being too closed and profit oriented as opposed to open and research oriented.

That sucks, and weirdly sudden too. I don't like OpenAI but I do like Altman. I saw a lot of the videos he makes and he strikes me as someone that knows what he's doing and, despite running it as a business, genuinely cares.

It's so alarming that he would get suddenly fired when the company is doing so well. Nobody knows what's going on but I don't doubt a "company board demands more profit" situation

You mean the guy who spun this all up as a Non-Profit company, then spun up an LLC for that Non-Profit to manage, then made deals with Microsoft?
Somehow his long term actions tell me, like most rich twatwaffles, you can't actually trust what he is saying.
When the board that he answers to says he hasn't been consistently candid, you can bet your sweet ass any soundbites you as a regular schlub have read are "not consistently candid" and you're hearing what he wants you to hear.
But you do you on believing these chucklefucks when their actions speak loudly to the contrary.
- "Not consistently candid" means lying his arse off to the point of endangering the continued existence of the organisation.
- twatwaffles and chucklefucks
  You are a visionary sir. I will add these words to my vocabulary.
- twatwaffles
  Thank you!! This made me laugh. TIL
I saw a lot of the videos he makes and he strikes me as someone that knows what he’s doing and, despite running it as a business, genuinely cares.
This makes his firing make more sense to me. Boards don't want a CEO who knows what he's doing and genuinely cares. They want a CEO who will do their bidding without question, and draw all the flak for their decisions.
- Nah, competent boards want a CEO that will inspire investor confidence and pull in good numbers. Something Altman was doing in an above-and-beyond fashion.
  I'm sure there was something going on behind the scenes and he pissed off some important bumblefuck.
- Your comment was the equivalent of "I have no idea what I'm talking about"