Author: Baichuan.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was just fired by OpenAI last Friday local time.
This news shocked the entire AI technology circle. Why on earth was he fired? Although the reason is not clear at this time, it seems that SAM and the board have serious problems in reaching agreement and communication.
What happened? Here's OpenAI's official announcement:
mr. altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he 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 openai.The translation is as follows:
"The departure of Mr. Sam Altman follows a prudent assessment process by the Board, which concluded that he was not always forthcoming in his communications with the Board, which prevented the Board from exercising its responsibilities. The board has lost confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI. ”What's going on these days, let's sort out the timeline:
On the 6th, SAM, CEO of OpenAI, announced the new generation of ChatGPT products on OpenAI's developer day, including AI assistant GPTS, high-performance GPT-4 Turbo, cheaper usage fees, and more.
On the 13th, Sam revealed in an interview with the Financial Times that OpenAI is seeking further financial support from Microsoft because ChatGPT is advancing "how to build superintelligence". The reason for the need for funding is that it takes a lot of computing resources to achieve this goal.
On the 14th, ChatGPT suspended the registration of new users because there were too many users to register and it could not provide support on its own.
On the 16th, SAM received a text message from a board member requesting a conversation at noon on the 17th.
At noon on the 17th, Sam joined an online meeting and was informed of the dismissal.
On the afternoon of the 17th, another board member, Greg, also received a text message requesting a meeting, at which he was informed that he had been expelled from the board, and then the news was released.
Then, Sam and Greg both left.
The whole incident process was so fast that even Sam himself didn't react, and after the news was posted on X, netizens posted a lot of comments. Someone even asked Sam:
Is it that OpenAI has been controlled by superintelligence?So what exactly caused Sam to be fired? Why did OpenAI, which only finished the DevDay conference a week ago and is preparing to obtain further funds for expansion, "change the coach"?* On the other side of the meeting, did AI pretend to be the board of directors and fired you?
Unexpectedly, the first human unemployment caused by OpenAI turned out to be SAM unemployment.
There are two important pieces of information that can be seen from the announcement released by OpenAI:
He was not consistently candid in his communications with the boardThis suggests that Sam is hiding something in his communication with the board. Another point is:
OpenAI is intentionally built to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial universal intelligence benefits all of humanity. （openai was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity）Now that the Board reiterates this, it may be that this is the point of divergence between SAM and the Board. Combined with SAM's interaction with Microsoft CEO Satya at the launch event, as well as the emphasis on seeking further investment from Microsoft at the follow-up meeting, we can probably guess why.
The root cause of this personnel turmoil is the divergence of development paths, and the specific flashpoint may be the conflict between SAM and the board of directors over how to deal with the future relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft.
Microsoft announced earlier this year that it would invest up to $10 billion in OpenAI to expand the collaboration between the two companies to include AI supercomputing and research, while enabling both parties to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technology.
Everyone knows that if a non-profit product is controlled by a business giant, it may deviate from the original intention of "benefiting all mankind", but now the demand for computing power is huge, and the money in hand cannot support this computing power.
For financial reasons, the board may be tempted to press a pause button and take small steps technically, but not to bring in too much external capital to pursue the commercial success of the product.
However, Sam, who used to be the chairman of Y Combinator, a top investment institution, is certainly a pragmatic person, and it seems that ChatGPT can only be promoted through business at the moment.
The progress of technology naturally requires a lot of money, and it takes a lot of server resources just to process the massive requests of users, which can be seen from the fact that ChatGPT was forced to maintain it for nearly a day after the press conference. Not to mention the huge amount of computing power support required to train the model, for these problems, Microsoft Dad happens to have the ability and funds to solve them.
Sam hopes to build a high-capitalization company with Microsoft's capital and the computing power of Azure, a cloud resource, just like the companies he successfully invested in during his time at Y Combinator.
While other board members may want to maintain OpenAI's independence for the "benefit of all mankind", then the truth may be that SAM and the board are divided over the depth of the future relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft.
What follows is pure speculation that SAM may have privately made some kind of assurance or agreement to Microsoft that would have secured more funding and computing power, and that these conditions may not have been agreed to by the board.
Microsoft CEO introduces Copilot at Ignite in Seattle
The board of directors may realize that if they are kidnapped by Microsoft, ChatGPT may lose the confidence to conduct independent research, and at the same time, they also do not like to let Microsoft use their technology to develop products tied to Microsoft, such as Copilot, which will make ChatGPT's attention and influence decline.
Judging from OpenAI's attitude towards GPTstore and user scaling in the future, we may be able to verify the real cause of this conflict. This is a big event that could change OpenAI's course for some time to come.
What is embarrassing is that when Sam kicked Musk out of the board of directors, he also used this reason to "benefit all mankind", but he didn't expect the boomerang of fate to return to his hands after a few years.
Finally, add some materials, who is the OpenAI board of directors:
Greg Brockman (Chairman of the Board).: Joined OpenAI in 2015 as Chairman of the Board of Directors of OpenAI's non-profit organization. After graduating in 2010, Greg worked with Stripe, a startup, and served as CTO until 2015. Stripe is a payments company that processed more than $1 trillion in transaction volume in 2023, second only to PayPal's 1$25 trillion.
sam altman (ceo): Joined OpenAI in 2020 as CEO. Prior to joining OpenAI, Sam's main accomplishments were as chairman of Y Combinator, where he invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and many other companies worth tens of billions of dollars.
Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist): He joined OpenAI in 2015 as Chief Scientist. Ilya was involved in the AI project DNNresearch as a student, and was acquired by Google in 2013 and worked at Google, where she led the completion of the AlphaGo Go AI project.
adam d’angelo: He joined OpenAI's board of directors in 2018. In addition, he founded Quora in 2009 and has served as CEO ever since. In addition, before 2009, he was the CTO of Facebook.
tasha mccauleyShe is a part-time senior management scientist and roboticist at the RAND Corporation, and she is a signatory to the 23 AI Governance Principles released in 2017.
helen toner: Joined the Board of Directors of OpenAI in September 2012. Her role is to think about security in a world where OpenAI's creations have global reach.
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