The recent events at OpenAI have been nothing short of a Silicon Valley drama. With the sudden removal of CEO Sam Altman and the subsequent appointment of new leadership, the company has been in a state of turmoil. The board’s decision to remove Altman led to a series of resignations and the potential departure of a large number of employees, creating a crisis for the company.
The timeline of events is filled with unexpected twists and turns, including the sudden resignation of the new interim CEO, Miriam Moradi, and the subsequent appointment of former Twitch co-founder, Emmett Shear, as the new CEO. The involvement of Microsoft and its CEO, Satya Nadella, added another layer of complexity to the situation, as they expressed interest in hiring Altman and other OpenAI employees.
The involvement of various board members and the behind-the-scenes discussions about potential mergers and new CEO candidates have added fuel to the fire, leading to further confusion and uncertainty within the company.
As the dust begins to settle, it remains to be seen how OpenAI will navigate this turbulent period and regain stability. The impact of these events on the company’s future direction and its employees’ morale is yet to be determined. However, one thing is clear – the clash for the world’s most important AI company has left a lasting impression on the tech industry.
Watch the video by Matt Wolfe
Video Transcript
Well it seems like the Epic Silicon Valley drama is finally coming to an end we finally have a resolution you haven’t been paying attention over the last 5 days let me walk you through really quickly everything that got us to where we are right now Friday November 17th open AI announces leadership transition
Sam Alman is out as CEO and is also removed from the board the reason given Sam Alman was not consistently candid in his Communications with the board hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading open AI vague but that’s what we
Were working with we also learn in this statement that Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company but Greg had other ideas he immediately quit and gave us a breakdown of the timeline of events essentially
Telling us that neither him or Sam were given any prior notice that any of this was about to happen we also learned that miror moradi would now be the interim CEO and she found out basically the night before this all happened late Friday night we then learn that three
Senior researchers over at open AI would then quit in solidarity with Greg Brockman and Sam Alman we also learned that night that Microsoft and Satia nadela were also blindsided by this announcement and had no idea this was coming which is crazy seeing that Microsoft is a 49% investor in open aai
Now the board over at open aai consisted of six members you had Greg Brockman and Sam Altman and then you had co-founder Ilia suus who was the chief scientist for open AI then we had three people that weren’t part of open AI on the board we have Adam D’Angelo who also is
A Founder at Kora and creating a chatbot tool called po which has some competing elements to chat GPT which for a moment we thought sort of factored into everything that was going on the board also included Tasha mcau a tech entrepreneur and Helen toner somebody
That we will come to find out has a little bit of beef with Sam Alman but we’ll get to that in a minute minute based on this board’s makeup they needed four votes to get Sam out we know Greg didn’t vote Sam out we know Sam didn’t
Vote for himself meaning that Ilia ceser Adam D’Angelo Tasha mcau and Helen toner all voted to get Sam out and remember Ilia was one of his co-founders at open aai Saturday November 18th we learned that Sam is potentially going to get his job back at open AI after an outpouring
Of love and support from the employees over at open Ai and pressure from all of open ai’s investors it seemed that Sam was on the fast track to getting his role back and undoing the board’s decision and it appeared that we would have Sam back by the end of the day on
Saturday throughout the day on Saturday all of the news looked very optimistic that Sam would be back in his role before the weekend was over but nope Sunday we learn that Sam mman will not be coming back and instead they brought in the former twitch co-founder imit
Shear to be the new CEO of open AI so if you’re keeping track that’s three CEOs over a 3-day period we had Sam Alman who was fired on Friday Miram moradi replaced him and then by Sunday Mir Mora was already replaced by EMT shear and then in a huge bombshell Sai and Adella
Of Microsoft came and said fine if open AI isn’t bringing Sam Alman and Greg Brockman back they could come and work for Microsoft and on top of that any open AI employees that want to come over and work under Sam in this new AI division that we’re creating for they’re
All welcome over at Microsoft as well Sam mman confirms he’s going to Microsoft Greg Brockman confirms he’s going to Microsoft along with those three researchers that quit in solidarity earlier with them and then the next twist comes Ilia suus one of the four board members who voted to get
Sam Alman out went to Twitter to say I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions I never intended to harm open AI I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company so one of the four people who helped to kick Sam out
Regretted his decision and now want Sam and the team back together Sam Alman sees this retweets it with three hearts and we get the impression that maybe there is hope for Sam and Ilia still working together Monday morning a letter among open aai employees starts to circulate basically saying if the board
Isn’t fired we’re all quitting and one interesting statement from this document was that the board informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed would be consistent with the mission the board was ready to let open AI die over this Feud or whatever was going on here and
Notable signers Mira moradi the first person they put as interim CEO to replace Sam Alman and ilas suus himself one of the people that voted to get Sam out signed this document saying that he’s going to quit in solidarity if we don’t bring Sam back by the end of the
Day over 700 of the 770 open AI employees signed this letter one by one open AI employees took to X to write the same tweet open AI is nothing without its people once again showing solidarity for Sam Alman and bringing the team back together EMT Shear at the time the
Current CEO of open AI went to Twitter to basically say I’m going to do an investigation into everything that’s going on I want to know what happened with the board I want to know the reason Sam was fired I’m going to get to the bottom of this finishing his post with
The board did not remove Sam over any specific specific disagreement on safety the reasoning was completely different from that I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models so essentially reaffirming that he’s going to push forward with the apis and chat
GPT and the commercialization of the products and not back off on this stuff and that’s essentially where I left off the story last time I made a video now I did go into a lot of detail around why I think all of this was happening where
The riffs sort of were and my best guesses to why they decided to get get rid of Sam Alman and again I think that everybody in the moment thought they were doing the best thing for the future of open AI but nobody totally agreed on
What that best thing was but as we all know that wasn’t the end of the story we finally got a sort of conclusion by the end of the day Tuesday night November 21st so from my last video to now here’s everything that we learned we learned
That the open AI board at one point approached anthropic about potentially merging and essentially replacing Sam Alman with the CEO of anthropic Dario amodi we also learned that before they approached EMT sheerar to be the CEO they also approached the former GitHub CEO Nat Freeman as well as the CEO of
Scale AI Alexander Wang modai fredman and Wang all declined these job offers and eventually they landed on EMT Shear now while this was all going down we learned that it was not a done deal yet for Sam Alman over at Microsoft and are they actually Microsoft employees right now
Like who do they work for yeah so they’re all in the process of joining and in this Bloomberg interview sachia also confirms that he has no idea why the board removed Sam no new information was given to him and when asked the question if he wants changes to the open
AI board he essentially said yes we need some governance changes over there well as it turns out Sam was still talking to open AI trying to figure out how to come back we’re into Tuesday now and Sam Alman and members of the open AI board have opened negotiations aimed at a
Possible Return of the oued co-founder and chief executive officer the artificial intelligence company discussions are happening between Altman and at least one board member Adam D’Angelo the talks also involve some of open ai’s investors who are also pushing for reinstatement and one thing that came along that was really interesting
Remember I said that bringing in EMT was probably not the best decision by the board if they really wanted to keep Sam out well the new CEO of open AI EMT Shear will quit if open aai board can’t provide evidence of why they fired Sam this came out in a report from Bloomberg
With EMT basically saying I’m not getting any answers about this and I need to get to the bottom of what’s going on at this point law enforcement was starting to get involved some Executives said they were getting questions from regulators and law enforcement entities such as the US
Attorney’s office in Manhattan over the charge of Altman’s alleged lack of cander the truth was going to come out one way or another they told the board and this is just mind-blowing here the board agreed to discuss the matter with their Council after a few hours they returned still unwilling to provide
Specifics they said that Alman wasn’t candid and often got his way the board said that Alman had been so deaf that they couldn’t even give a specific example according to the people familiar with the executives what they’re saying here is that the board’s claiming that Sam Alman was so deceptive that they
Can’t even give one instance of when he was deceptive because he was that good now of course the board wasn’t saying anything meaning that the media and people on X and people like me are essentially guessing on the narrative without the board speaking we’re all just sort of left speculating and the
Early sort of speculation was that Adam D’Angelo was the board member that was essentially keeping Sam out Adam D’Angelo is the co-founder and CEO of quora.com but quora.com also owns the chatbot called po and if you’re not familiar with po po essentially allows you to create your own custom bots and
Sell them on a internal bot Marketplace well with the release of gpts and the GPT store this seemed to be direct competition with Po’s bot store leading to a lot of speculation that Adam D’Angelo was upset that Sam announced the GPT store which was going to directly compete with his bot store and
That was part of the reason why Adam might have wanted Sam out of the company more information information started to surface about another board member Helen toner who is the director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for security and emerging technology toner had written a paper called decoding intentions artificial intelligence and
Costly signals the paper came out in October of 23 and it seemed to criticize open ai’s efforts to keep its AI technology safe while praising the approach taken by anthropic Mr Alman said that he had reprimanded M toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to
The company particular L at a time he added when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating open AI over the data used to build its technology toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and
Companies developing AI but Mr Altman disagreed he said I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight now taking a look at this paper in question here page 30 is where some of the
Criticism comes into play you can see here she says while the system card itself has been well received among researchers interested in understanding GPT 4’s risk profile it appears to have been less successful as a broader signal of open ai’s commitment to safety intended as a relatively inconspicuous
Research preview the original chat GPT was built using a less Advanced large language model called GPT 3.5 which was already in widespread use by other AI customers GPT 3.5s prior circulation is presumably why openi did not feel the need to perform or publish such detailed safety testing in this instance openi
Has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of chat GPT and gp4 including regarding copyright issues labor conditions for data annotators and the susceptibility of their products to jailbreak that allow users to bypass safety controls this muddled overall picture provides an example of how the
Messages sent by deliberate signals can be overshadowed by actions that were not designed to reveal intent she then goes on to praise anthropic which happens to be open ai’s biggest competitor a different approach to signaling in the private sector comes from anthropic one of Open ai’s primary competitors
Anthropic desired to be perceived as a company that values safety shines through across its Communications beginning from its tagline an AI safety and research company a March 2023 strategy document published on anthropic website revealed that the release of anthropics chatbot Claude a competitor to chat GPT had been deliberately
Delayed in order to avoid advancing the rate of AI capabilities progress and thropic had deliberately decided not to productize its technology in order to avoid stoking the Flames of AI hype where the GPT for System card acted as a costly signal of open ai’s emphasis on building Safe Systems and thropic
Decision to keep their product off the market was instead a costly signal of restraint by delaying the release of CLA until other companies put out similar capable products anthropic was showing its willingness to avoid exactly the kind of frantic Corner cutting that the release of chat GPT appeared to Spur so
Basically she’s saying that chat GPT and open AI cut Corners to get chat GPT and GPT 4 out quickly and anthropic was doing the right thing by restraining and holding back releasing this to the public before they felt it was safe and ready which if you watched my last video
About why all of this happened is very consistent with the narrative that I broke down it was really the story of the people trying to commercialize the product and get it to Market as fast as possible for a faster commercialization and profitability versus the researchers and the people that were worried about
The security and the safety and all of this technology moving too quickly now whether or not Adam D’Angelo was the driving factor that pushed whether it was initially ilas eses which was the original Theory or whether it was Helen toner we don’t totally know those details yet but it seems like each of
Them had their own sort of separate motives for why it would be a good idea to get Sam out fast forward to 10:03 Pacific time on Tuesday November 21st open aai tweets this we have reached an agreement in principle for Sam mman to return to openai as CEO with a new
Initial Board of Brett Taylor as the chair Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo remaining on the board so from Friday to Tuesday we finally get a conclusion to this story Sam Alman was fired Mir moradi was in a SE CEO Mira turned out to be team Sam she’s out as CEO we get
EMT Shear in as CEO he turns out to be team let’s call it truth helps get to the bottom of things and essentially helps broker the deal to bring Sam mman back on as CEO of open aai so in a 5-day period open AI has had three different
CEOs Sam Alman goes to Twitter to sort of confirm everything’s getting back to normal I love open Ai and everything I’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its Mission together when I decided to join Microsoft on Sunday evening it was
Clear that was the best path for me and the team with the new board and with saa’s support I’m looking forward to returning to open aai and building our strong partnership with Microsoft SAA then echoed Sam’s sentiment here saying we are encouraged by the changes to the
Open AI board we believe this is a First Essential step on a path to a more stable well-informed and effective governance Sam Greg and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the open AI leadership team and ensuring open AI continues to thrive
And build on its Mission we look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of the next generation of AI to our customers and partners following morning which is the day I’m recording this Wednesday November 22nd at the end of the day the greatest privilege of my job is working
With people who are driven by Mission these last 5 days I saw people across open AI remaining calm and Resolute and driving their mission despite all that was happening around them and I saw people across Microsoft remain focused on our Miss and serving our customers and partners stepping up to help in
Every way this is what I’m especially thankful for going into the Thanksgiving holiday thank you for your resolve and for the work you do each day to advance AI safely and responsibly and distribute its benefits to all Humanity so these last two messages pretty much confirm
SAA is given the blessing of Sam over at open AI they’re probably going to even deepen their partnership most likely SAA or somebody at Microsoft will end up on the open AI board and to confirm what SAA said said there that they all kept their heads down and kept working and
Kept on pushing their mission forward Greg Brockman actually went to X to talk about a new feature that open Ai and chat GPT had rolled out while he was still in the middle of the turmoil of wondering whether or not he was actually back at the company they actually
Released chat GPT with voice to all the free users and they did it in a pretty funny way it’s been a long night for the team and we’re hungry how many 16-in pizzas should I order for $77 people for a large group of 778 people assuming an
Average of three slices of pizza per person and each 16-in Pizza provides around 12 slices you’d need to order around 195 pizzas this ensures everyone gets at least three slices would you like to know where to order from or anything else about organizing food for a large group at 11:41 p.m. on Tuesday
Night Greg Brockman posted this image with what appears to be a very happy and excited open AI te seemed to be back together now Emily Chang from Bloomberg here did some amazing reporting around this and got so many good details about what was actually going on over inside
These closed door meetings at open Ai and some of this is just fascinating when you hear how it played out according to Emily one of the biggest sticking points was Sam still being on the board as of right now Sam is not on the board another sticking point was
Adam staying on the board as of right now Adam is still on the board so it looks like Sam gave some concessions agreed to not be on the board anymore and also agreed to let Adam D’Angelo stay on the board we also learned that Microsoft will likely have some sort of
Board representation at some point at least as an observer here’s what I found really interesting is that the CEO that the board put in place EMT Shear was actually instrumental in bringing Sam back as CEO EMT Shear joining the talks was a turning point in the negotiations
He asked the board to provide concrete evidence of Sam’s wrongdoing when they did not do so he said he could not remain in the CEO role and helped both sides find common ground to get Sam reinstated so as things stand right now Sam is back Greg is back the three
Researchers that quit are back it looks like the team is staying together we have a new board the board consists of Adam D’Angelo the CEO of quora and po as well as Brett Taylor and if you’re not familiar with Brett Taylor I found this post here from Sam par Brett Taylor
Created Google Maps he started friend feed and sold it to Facebook he was then the CTO of Facebook he founded quip which sold the Salesforce for $750 million he then became the co-ceo of Salesforce the chairman of the board of Twitter and then the board of Shopify
And he’s only 43 years old Larry Summers on the other hand is a professor at Charles W Elliot University and president ameritus at Harvard he was the Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton and the director of the NEC for President Obama things seem like they’re
Getting back to normal a little bit and it sounds like the $86 billion valuation for open AI is still on the table with Thrive still planning to participate as well as ashon Kutcher sound Ventures also planning on participating one of the bigger winners out of this whole
Thing Microsoft we take a look at their stock chart here you can literally see this story play out in Microsoft stock chart so check this out November 16th everything is normal stock is on the rise November 17th we hear Sam Alman is out as open AI CEO boom stock drops from
376 all the way down to 369 over the weekend we learn okay Sam Altman’s not at open AI anymore he’s coming to work at Microsoft what happens stock rebounds in a big way jumps all the way up to 37744 November 2st more uncertainty about what’s going on with Sam Alman and
Where he’s actually going to land huge Revolt over at open AI with tons of people threatening to quit if Sam isn’t back we see a dip in Microsoft stock announcement that Sam is back in at open AI boom stock rebounds all the way up to
378 which zooming out a full 5 years is its all-time high over a 5-year period they did have a time all the way back in 1999 where they were doing a little bit better than they are now but in The Last 5 Years this is the best the Microsoft
Stock has ever looked I got to say satian Adella seems to know what he’s doing over there now I know it seems like this story ends here Sam was fired ousted by the board seems to have been a bit of a coup Sam told he can come to
Microsoft no information comes out about why Sam was fired all the investors all of the employees over at openai rally around Sam Alman Sam Alman gets reinstated as CEO of openai everything’s back to normal but there’s still a lot of questions some of the questions we
Have now are summed up well from the information here what happens to ilas tuser now he was one of the board members who voted to OU Sam ultman but he’s also the company’s Visionary Chief scientist and if this whole thing went down over AI safety concerns and the
Board thought that things were advancing too fast and going to get out of hand quickly how is Sam going to address that as of right now the board only has three members and none of them actually work at open AI or are investors in open AI
Are Sam and Greg going to try to work their way back onto the board is Microsoft going to figure out how to get some board seats so that they can prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future this sort of crack that we saw in open AI this this
Week has opened the doors for companies like anthropic who just released a new larger model to try to bring people over like companies like inflection who just released a new version of Pi which they claim is the second most powerful AI right now behind GPT 4 and most of all
What actually happened what was the board’s reasons the board still to this day has not spoken up Nobody Knows the board’s reasons we’re still left speculating was it Helen toner who pushed for it was it originally Ilia who push for it was it Adam D’Angelo who was frustrated that they’re competing we
Don’t know the true narrative the ex board has not spoken up and we have no idea the actual reasons they said Sam needs to get out of here so still more questions coming out still more that we need to learn but as of right now I’m
Closing the book on this Saga and we’ll likely make some updates as we learn about him in my end of week News videos but I feel like we have closed this story arc but every time I’ve said that in the past I’ve had to reopen the the
Book and talk about it some more because things never seem to go as expected but right now we seem to be kind of hitting a calm place where everything is sort of getting back to normal but it’s been a fun 5-day ride and I’ve absolutely had a
Blast following this story it’s been my favorite soap opera I’ve been watching a real live episode of succession play out in front of me and Reporting on this has been probably one of the most fun things I’ve done on this YouTube channel and over on my ex account since I’ve started
Talking about AI a little over a year ago on this channel so hopefully you’re up to date hopefully I close that loop on the full story and we have the full picture now there are still some questions but the story line seems to be coming to a logical conclusion there’s
Still a lot more in the open AI story there’s still a lot more in the what the hell is going on with the board story but as of right now on Friday Sam was fired Greg quit here we are Wednesday November 22 Sam’s back Greg’s back we
Have a new board and I imagine open AI is trying to to get back to normal in some ways and that’s what I got for you today that’s all the news that come out everything that I know so far you haven’t watched my last video where I
Dive deeper into the reasons why I highly recommend that video as well and if you enjoy videos like this you want to stay up to date with the latest AI News latest AI Tech latest AI research get some tutorials and just go deeper down the rabbit hole with me maybe like
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You’ll stick with me on this YouTube channel as I explore even more cool AI Tech and news and stuff all right thank you so much I’ll see you in the next one bye-bye
Video “OpenAI: Inside the Clash for the World’s Most Important Company” was uploaded on 11/22/2023 to Youtube Channel Matt Wolfe