Yesterday OpenAI fired its CEO:
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.
His response on Twitter:
Here is a more detailed description how the firing happened.
Last night, Sam got a text from Ilya asking to talk at noon Friday. Sam joined a Google Meet and the whole board, except Greg, was there. Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon.
The cast of characters:
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Ilya Sutskever is co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.
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Greg Brockman is co-founder and president of OpenAI. He also quit immediately.
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Further board members are the non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.
For corporate language, the OpenAI statement uses strong words.
Manifold has a great niche in quickly reacting to news and dissecting it in a multitude of markets. Some redundant but someone will arbitrate. Here is the one with the most traders and if you want to have just one URL to follow this story, this one probably is the best.
It is a chaotic one because anybody can suggest additional options. As an alternative, this one is curated by a single person. Another good one is What was Sam Altman "not consistently candid about" according to the OpenAI board, specifically? Both of these were created by users whom I interviewed here earlier.
Naturally, there are plenty of theories now. Above, I presented the best consensus answers prediction markets came up with within less than 24 hours. We will see how this fares against mainstream media.
What will happen now?
OpenAI, ChatGPT and its CEO Sam Altman got a lot of attention over the last year. They were favorites for Time’s Person of the Year.
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Who will be the next permanent CEO of OpenAI? Current lead is Mira Murati. She is CTO and now interim CEO.
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Will Sam return to OpenAI within a year? Probably not.
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What will Sam do in half a year? Best current guess is to found another company.
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We don’t know, if this is good or bad for AI risk. It seems to be best guess for the reason, but we don’t know who was on which side.
Probably until next week, my surprised readers! 😊