podcasts
Collection
Collection for podcasts • 511 items • Updated • 2
text stringlengths 16 2.76k |
|---|
Speaker A: Sam Altman was just fired by the board of directors of OpenAI. Why? What did he do? And why are over 500 employees of OpenAI signing a letter of protest? Where is Sam Altman going to go next? This is a pretty big deal for tech, for Silicon Valley, for the future of the AI industry. Ryan, have you been follow... |
Speaker B: I have, but I think high level, and I know you've been assembling the details here, and that's what we're going to talk about today. So, David, give us the details. What happened to Sam Altmande? OpenAI? What in the world are they doing over there? |
Speaker A: Yeah. End of day, Friday, November 17, the OpenAI Twitter account tweets out, OpenAI announces leadership transition. And everyone knows a leadership transition means somebody got fired. And there's not that many leaders. There's kind of just Sam Altman. So everyone reading this is like, what automatically i... |
Speaker B: That was my immediate reaction. I was like, okay, he hasn't been candid. This is code for he's lied to us. And in order to get fired from a company for lying, it can't be like, it seems to me it can't be a, especially somebody with the, the I think, press of Sam Altman. It can't be a small lie. Has to be lik... |
Speaker A: Yeah. Over the weekend, it was just three, two and a half days of chaos. We do have a lot more clarity as to where this whole mess is going. It was a tumultuous weekend. There was speculation going on left and right. Sam was going to get rehired by the board. But then Sam is now elsewhere at Microsoft now. S... |
Speaker B: To the why still. |
Speaker A: Yeah, so still kind of confused. But this is when we start to get a glimpse of like, okay, there is trouble brewing. There's not as alright, in OpenAI. And that's when Greg Brockmande, who is the president of OpenAI and one of its co founders, was also removed from the board by the board. And so Sam Altman a... |
Speaker B: Well, that's a huge slap in the face, right? Like you're a co founder, you're, we're going to let you have your job, but you're no longer on the board. Right. I mean, that would be pretty frustrating, I would imagine. |
Speaker A: And we should probably talk about what is a board and what does it do. So Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are executives. They're making the decisions, they are leading the company, and the board is generally not doing anything at all. They're generally just overseeing governance and high level direction. And t... |
Speaker B: Do you know what this reminds me of? Do you remember Og, Spider man? No man? Norman Osborn getting fired from Oscar? Do you remember that scene? |
Speaker A: Right? |
Speaker B: You can't do this to me. Do you know how much I've sacrificed? That's what this reminds me of. Like, two of the co founders basically getting fired. I guess Greg was not fired technically, but, like, getting pushed out of their own company. |
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And so everyone is realizing, okay, number one, at number two of OpenAI, perhaps the most important defining company of the modern age, are out one. One fired, one quitting in solidarity. And so everyone is really trying to ask, like, what the hell is going on? And with Greg... |
Speaker B: So this is the why being revealed at first. At first, the initial inclination is, oh, Sam must have done something really bad. There's some skeleton in the closet. But then when you have other employees, other co founders also resigning in protest, then you start to think, well, maybe the board was doing som... |
Speaker A: So then this brings up the question, who the hell is the board of OpenAI? Who are these people that made this governance decision to remove the one and two of OpenAI and cause just a massive amount of chaos in Silicon Valley? Because this isn't, Ryan, just about OpenAI. This is about OpenAI and the cambrian ... |
Speaker B: All of society, right? If AI is going to be the most transformative technology that we'll see in the decades to come. This has ripple effects for, for that. And it affects how maybe nation state geopolitics like it could affect so much downstream, certainly. |
Speaker A: So this has brought up the question of who is the board of OpenAI? There are now four members. There used to be six. Two of them are recently gone. So four. Four left. Ilya Suitsgever, a co founder and chief scientist at OpenAI, is one of them. Adam D'Angelo, who is the CEO of Quora and an independent direct... |
Speaker B: Ah, they're rock from the sun. |
Speaker A: Right? |
Speaker B: Another thing. |
Speaker A: And then last one, Helen Toner, a member of Georgetown center for Security and Emerging Technology, also an independent director. So this is your board. These are the people that voted out Sam and then also caused the departure of Greg. |
Speaker B: Okay, so one other co founder and then three independents, it looks like. |
Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. Three independents, one being Joseph Corden Levitt's wife. So these are the people that we're trying to ask, like, yo, like, can you explain yourselves? Like, why, why remove Sam? Because to this day, to this moment, at the time of recording, Monday morning, noon eastern time, we have not gott... |
Speaker B: Just kind of funny behind the influencer. This is the best part. Wow. |
Speaker A: Yeah. |
Speaker B: I thought it was great someone saw him do this. |
Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. Where I found this photo was actually, he just retweeted it, so he thought it was funny, too. And so the rumors, Ryan, start going around on Sunday that the board wants to do an oopsie, a reverse uno card, and. Okay, okay, no, we made a mistake. Let's get Sam back. |
Speaker B: A nice little takes backsy. They're sorry. |
Speaker A: So the board instated the CTO, Mira Murati, as CEO. And so as an interim CEO. And Mira was like, okay, well, as CEO, I plan to rehire Sam Altman and also president Greg in a capacity that's yet to be finalized. |
Speaker B: Yeah, but he was CEO. Right. So you're going to rehire him under, like, working for someone else? |
Speaker A: Well, I think the deal is, like, Mira, who's now interim CEO, is like, well, the board just effed up. I'm bringing him back. I'm in charge of this company. I'm going to do what's best for this company. What's best for this company is getting Sam back into the company. These are the rumors that are going arou... |
Speaker B: Now we are starting to see it. It's actually sort of a schism around a belief system. Right? Which is like one of, let's accelerate, let's move faster into the AI frontier. And the other is like, let's slow down. Let's be careful. Let's stall our progress and make sure it's safe before we, before we push upd... |
Speaker A: So the speculation becomes, okay. Sam and Greg, the board members of OpenAI, were the gas pedal part of the board, and the rest of the board were the brakes, were the AI safety people? Interestingly, the next decision by the board was to hire as the new CEO, replacing the interim CEO, Kira Emmett Scheer, as ... |
Speaker B: Wait, wait. So just really quick, though. The previous CEO, Mira, was only CEO. |
Speaker A: Like, very temporarily for the weekend. Yeah, just like a weekend. |
Speaker B: You could do that. And now they're replacing her with yet another CEO. |
Speaker A: I guess you always have to have somebody calling shots at all moments of time. You can't have a void that's just chaos. Okay. |
Speaker B: She was very much interim. Like, 48 hours interim CEO. |
Speaker A: Yeah. I don't even know if she made it 48 hours because the board brings in Emmett Shear. And who is Emmett Shear? He is a part time partner at Y Combinator, former Twitch CEO. So another tech executive, and importantly, Emmett Scheer, is an AI decelerationist. So here's a tweet from Emmett that says, I spec... |
Speaker B: Because the context is this. AI technology is dangerous. At least many people believe it's dangerous. And this has been a debate that's been raging quite publicly for the last year or so between decelerationists, AI decelerationists, and regulators. And even the White House has weighed in on this, and accele... |
Speaker A: I think that's been some of the takes that have been going around the Twitter sphere lately is like, well, the board of directors vision for AI is OpenAI is for OpenAI to like self destruct to not exist. So this is kind of like the, like the dividing by zero approach of the board of governance is very much a... |
Speaker B: But this is why it's kind of a microcosm of the debate and sort of proves, I think, one side more right than the other because we actually get to test what happens when you start to shut the doors of accelerationism. What happens? And I think the next thing that you're going to explain tells us exactly what ... |
Speaker A: Oh no, this is about halfway over. Interestingly, when it was announced that Sam was removed as CEO, Microsoft is one of the bigger owners of OpenAI shares. They're one of the biggest investors. And if Jason has this paper napkin math valuation of OpenAI. Right? Well actually if you look at the Microsoft sto... |
Speaker B: Why? Because Microsoft is providing cloud services to. |
Speaker A: OpenAI is that it owns the equity, it owns shares of the company. Right. |
Speaker B: Okay. |
Speaker A: Yeah. So like OpenAI independent organization, but has investors. And one of the largest investors is Microsoft. |
Speaker B: Yeah. |
Speaker A: So Microsoft, the price goes down. Not it doesn't tank, but it goes down. |
Speaker B: So that's our public market view. Right. Because we can't see. Exactly. Because OpenAI is still private valuation. It doesn't have any shares in the public exchange. So that's a proxy for that then. |
Speaker A: Right. But Ryan this morning tweeted out at 03:00 a.m. eastern time, Sadia Nadella tweets out, we remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI. Not only is Microsoft one of the largest shareholders of OpenAI, they also have a partnership with them, a business deal. We'll talk about that. So we remain comm... |
Speaker B: Oh, my God. |
Speaker A: I'm guessing over the weekend, Sadia, the managing director of Microsoft, was like, this is my moment. There's a free agent. His name is Sam Altman. I want him on Team Microsoft. I'm going to burn the midnight oil and get whatever is going to be let go by OpenAI. And they're going to come to Microsoft. |
Speaker B: This is like the greatest maybe aqua hire of all time here. |
Speaker A: It's an aqua hire, but without. So one of the big conversations going around is like, Microsoft would have never been able to buy OpenAI because of antitrust regulations. It would have been too big. But when OpenAI just fires Sam Altman and then Greg leaves and then you could only presume that some amount of... |
Speaker B: So, David, is this all confirmed? Is, is Sam on board with this? |
Speaker A: Well, he retweets, Sam Altman retweets this tweet saying the mission continues. So you could only imagine that Sam is on board with this. Yeah. |
Speaker B: Balaji had to take care. |
Speaker A: Yeah. He says Sadia wins reflexes of a startup CEO again, just talking about moving fast, moving quickly. The resources of a trillion dollar company. I'm pretty sure. Microsoft is the number one highest valued company that exists. And pulling this all together in 48 hours from a cold start gets it signed and... |
Speaker B: No, I did. Okay. This is somebody's photoshopped a Microsoft badge on, you know, Sam Altman's previous guest pass version. |
Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly right. And so now, now the meetings are like, well, now Sam Altman works at Microsoft. Okay, so that's the story of Sam Altman. And that is as much information as we have about where Sam Altman is going next. Along with Greg, they're going to Microsoft. That is, there's no much more info... |
Speaker B: OpenAI is nothing without its people. They're all, it's like a chorus. It's almost like a collective social media chant at this point. OpenAI is nothing without its people. |
Speaker A: Yeah. It's like a call to solidarity of OpenAI employees. And so this is OpenAI employees in my mind, like, banding together, in protesting. Like, yo, like, if you do not align with the employees, the people of OpenAI, then you're not going. You're going to lose. You're going to lose out. |
Speaker B: Well, that's why this is an interesting schism, because it's a schism based on what you believe. To take a lesson from crypto, it seems like this all settles down to the social layer, what we call a crypto, the layer zero, basically. And so if Sam is saying, hey, no, we want to be an eight or a nine on the a... |
Speaker A: And I think it got even more explicit than that when at 08:48 a.m. this morning, eastern time, 550 of these 700 employees of OpenAI wrote a letter to the board telling them to resign. |
Speaker B: Wow. 550 of 700 employees. That's basically all of them. |
Speaker A: That's basically all of them. And you can imagine that the remaining 150 might just like, we're just too lazy or some reason post is pretty, pretty damning. We don't have time to read it all here, but there's a link in the show notes. I'll just read the last paragraph. Your actions have made it obvious that ... |
Speaker B: Well, that's the thing. I mean, the OpenAI board was trying to fork in a different direction. And the runners of the OpenAI node, the employees namely, said, no, we're going to maintain this. We're not going to allow you to do that. It's a massive pushback here. |
Speaker A: Interestingly, the last signer on this letter, it says, it signed by 550, but we can see the first twelve. Number twelve, Ilya Suitskyvere, suit skipper is one of the guys on the board back. He signed that own letter about, look. |
Speaker B: At this, David, this just happened. He tweeted out, I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. This is Ilya, fellow board member, one of those additional four that we were talking about in that earlier in the episode. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together, and ... |
Speaker A: Basically saying, oops, we effed up. So those are the details. As it stands, Ryan, as of Monday morning, this is all of all that we have. Half, over half of OpenAI employees are threatening to leave to go to Microsoft, where Sam and Greg already are. But really, we need to talk about what does this all mean?... |
Speaker B: All right, David, so now the question is, what does all of this mean, and how will it define the decades to come? So it seems like this is planting the seeds for maybe a schism in tech and a schismeheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheh u... |
Speaker A: This atlantic article came out just now that I thought put it very, very well, or at least defined the playing board very, very well. So I'll read two quick passages here. To truly understand the events of this past weekend, one must understand that OpenAI is not a technology company. OpenAI was deliberately... |
Speaker B: Yeah, about just over a year ago, David Chat GPT four came out and was available to the public. |
Speaker A: And so I'm guessing at that moment there was a divide that was created which was like, one part, let's research AI for humanity, and the other part was like, let's make an extremely valuable tech company. And it looks like that forking of the company finally has come to a head, and now we're going to see whi... |
Speaker B: I guess I have a few takeaways from this, but maybe the main takeaway is there's no stopping this train, is there? This tech is going to be developed, isn't it? Unless some greater force actually puts a stop to it. I think it would take at this point in time a government threatening to throw people in jail f... |
Speaker A: Those are my takeaways as well. I think there's one thing that we can be sure. It goes back to the Balaji tweet that we saw earlier where I mean, OpenAI at $90 billion of value. If all those employees go to Microsoft. And who are the employees that are going to go to Microsoft? They're going to be the accele... |
Speaker B: That is the takeaway and this is the schism. And what an epic schism it will be, because I think through the events that just played out, both sides will come away from this feeling like they're right and they're vindicated and all of their concerns and, you know, the energy and the momentum of their argumen... |
Speaker A: Yeah, it really would. It would be more than great. It'd be kind of critical. But at least that is, that ends this current saga of this drama of what is now the fight of Silicon Valley, which is accelerationism versus decelerationism. |
Speaker B: Bankless nation will have some more episodes for you on this divide, I'm sure, in the near future. Hope you enjoyed the show. If you're not familiar with bankless, make sure you like and subscribe. We'll get more of this content coming your way. |
README.md exists but content is empty.
- Downloads last month
- 5