1 HOUR AGO : Sam ALTMAN Announces NEW CHANGES To OpenAI

So OpenAI has had some major changes recently that we do need to discuss, because if you thought that the OpenAI saga was over, you are surely mistaken. They actually released a ton of statements today in which they detail many changes for the future and many changes to the OpenAI board. So without further ado, let's break down exactly what's happened to OpenAI and what are the key points that you need to focus on that essentially should show us where our future is headed for AI development. So, of course we have Sam Altman returns as the CEO and OpenAI has a new initial board. Now, Sam Altman returning as the CEO isn't new information, but the new board is new information. And other things that were said today were actually quite new information, along with some statements made by Sam Altman himself. The new board that is different to the one that they announced is, is going to be Brett Taylor, the former CEO of Salesforce, Larry Summers, the economist and former US Treasury Secretary, and Adam d', Angelo, the co founder and CEO of Quora. Now, this new board is very, very interesting because it makes us question the motives of OpenAI, because there are certain people that are missing from this board that we do also need to talk about. And there are two main people later on in the video that that we will talk about. And those two people are going to be Ilya Sutskova and of course, Helen Tona, because they were previously members of this board. So this new board does give us a very interesting look into how some things are OpenAI. So if you know about Brett Taylor, he's someone who founded Salesforce. He actually had some very interesting things to say. Essentially, he won't be staying on as part of this board. So he tweeted today saying that today, as the board chair, I sent the attached letter on behalf of the board to the OpenAI community. I'm excited to be working with my board colleagues, Adam and Larry, the OpenAI leadership, and all OpenAI stakeholders. The board's focus is stabilizing the company, building out a qualified, diverse board, and enhancing governance procedures consistent with the importance of OpenAI's mission. Before taking on this responsibility, I had a full plate of commitments and. And as I have communicated to board colleagues and management, when these transitional tasks have been completed, I intend to step away and leave the oversight of OpenAI in the good hands of the board colleagues. So as it says above here, Brett Taylor won't be staying on this board. Once he finishes his transitional tasks, he's going to be stepping away. And it seems that either it's just going to be Larry Summers and Adam d', Angelo, or they may, in fact get someone else to replace Brett Taylor as the chair of the board. So he's going to be there initially, but it seems from what we've g added and by what he tweeted, that he's not actually going to be there and he's going to step away and leave the oversight of OpenAI into the hands of the board's colleagues. And of course, we did have some statements from Sam Altman that were rather, rather interesting. So if you remember previously, what we did talk about, one of the things that many people did talk about with this new board was many people talked about how Adam d' Angelo was potentially having conflicts of interest, and that's why OpenAI had made some of the key changes in, in terms of getting Sam Altman out of the company. However, Sam Altman actually addresses this in a new statement on Twitter. Sam Altman did state that. I recognize during this process, some questions were raised about Adam's potential conflict of interest running Quorra and Po while being on the OpenAI board. For the record, I want to state that Adam has always been very clear with me and the board about the potential conflict and doing whatever he needed to do, even recusing himself when appropriate, and. And even offering to leave the board if we ever thought it was necessary to appropriately manage the situation and to avoid conflicted decision making. So essentially what he's saying here is that even though there may have been a very slight conflict of interest, because Adam is launching a product that is quite similar to the GP seesaw, Adam had actually been working with Sam Altman in order to ensure that with any conflict of interest, there wasn't going to be any. He continues to state that Quora is a large customer of OpenAI and. And we found it helpful to have customer representation on our board. We expect that if OpenAI is as successful as we hope, it will touch many parts of the economy and have complex relationships with many other entities in the world, resulting in various potential conflicts of interest. The way we plan to deal with this is with full disclosure and leaving decisions about how to manage these situations like that up to the board. So they know that if OpenAI is going to be a successful company, it's going to be touching literally every part of the economy. So many companies are making their own version of GPTs, and so many companies are going to be using The GPT Vision API, the Whisper, they're going to be using ChatGPT. If we're being honest. And of course the only problem is is that you don't want to have a conflict of interest because once there's financial incentives, that's when things can start to go wrong. So Sam Altman essentially now plans to do this with full disclosure and leave any decisions about how to manage situations like this up to the board. So it's clear that although many people did think that this was an issue, and although it was a theory that was floating around, it's clear that this may have not been as big of an issue as many people were thinking. On Twitter, Sam Altman continues to state that the best interests of the company and the mission always come first. It's clear that there were real misunderstandings between me and members of the Board. For my part, it is incredibly important to learn from this experience and apply those learnings as we move forward as a company. I welcome the Board's independent review of all recent events and I'm thankful to Helen and Tasha for their contributions to strength of OpenAI. Now we're actually going to touch on this statement here. I'm thankful to Helen and Tasha because it does post also something very fascinating because it means that something isn't what we thought it was before. That we're going to talk about Mira Marathi, which is the CTO of OpenAI right now and additionally we also need to talk about this statement as well. Mira Marathi said the OpenAI team is irreplaceable. I couldn't be happier to be back at work alongside Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. The mission continues and later on in the video we need to talk about this. This statement does hold a lot more information than you do think. Now in terms of the new board, we do have Microsoft joining that new board. You can see here it says Satya, Kevin, Amy and Brad have been incredible partners throughout this with exactly the right priorities all the way through. They've had our backs and were ready to welcome all of us if we couldn't achieve our primary goal. Clearly made the right choice to partner with Microsoft and and I'm excited that our new board will include them as a non voting observer. So I'm guessing Microsoft, like they stated before, they want to have some oversight to the board because they don't want their billions of dollars just to go up in smoke again. They really don't want a situation like what happened before just to happen where they've got these companies just, you know, breaking down as they shouldn't. I mean a billion dollar company shouldn't just disintegrate over a weekend, especially if it's going to be one of the biggest companies in the world. So Microsoft's like, look, you know what, whatever happened last time, we get it. But this time, if anything's about to go down, we need a seat at that board and we at least need to look at what's going on. Even if we don't have any votes, we still want to be in the know how so we know where things are going and we can at least, you know, give you guys some guidance on that. So that would be something that I didn't expect. Now, like I said before, this is of course the new board and one of the members that did actually leave the board was of course, Helen Toner. So Helen Toner was actually a member of the board and, and there were many theories about why she left. But I'm going to read her statement to you all first and then of course you're going to understand more about the situation and why. Helen Tonor leaving the board isn't really controversial, but it still is pretty fascinating. So you can see that she said. Today I officially resigned from the OpenAI board. Thank you to the many friends, colleagues and supporters who have said publicly and privately that they know our decisions have always been driven by our commitment to OpenAI's mission. Much has been written about last week or two. Much more will surely be said. For for now, the incoming board has announced it will supervise a fully independent review to determine the next best steps. To be clear, our decision was not about the board's ability to effectively supervise the company, which was our role and responsibility. Though there has been speculation we were not motivated by a desire to slow down OpenAI's work. When I joined OpenAI's board in 2021, it was already made clear to me and to management around me that this was a special organization that would do big things. It has been an enormous honor to be a part of the organization and to the rest of the world has realized the same thing. I have enormous respect for the OpenAI team and wish them, the incoming board, Adam, Brett and Larry, all the best. I'll be continuing my work focused on AI policy and safety and security. So I know our paths will cross many times in the coming years. Now, the reason this was particularly interesting was because of the fact that before this, Helen Toner was on the board. And you can see here on this article from the information it says Altman argued with OpenAI board member Toner before Alster in the weeks leading up to firing as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had a conflict with artificial intelligence researcher Helen Toner. And that was one of the directors that actually said someone familiar with the situation. But of course, now that we've seen that she actually said that she resigned. And of course we have here, it says, I'm grateful to Adam, Tasha and Helen for working with us to come to the solution that best serves the mission. I'm excited to continue to work with Adam and sincerely thankful to Helen and Tasha for investing a huge amount of effort into this process. So this statement that you're looking at on screen right now is actually a statement from Sam Altman. Okay. And the reason I said it's a bit fascinating that he said this was because of the previous conflicts with Helen Toner. So you can see here, this is an article from the Guardian. It says Altman said in the statement at the time that Toner brings an understanding of the global AI landscape with an emphasis on safety, which is critical for our efforts and mission. However, it appears Toner's research work on AI safety at CSET might have been the catalyst that led up to past turmoils at OpenAI. The New York Times reported to this week that in leading up to Altman's firing, he. He and Tona had discussed an October paper she had co authored for CSET. In the paper, OpenAI is criticized for releasing ChatGPT at the end of last year, sparking a sense of urgency inside major tech companies like Google to ensure they did not fall behind and prompting competitors to accelerate or circumvent internal safety ethics review processes. So I do find it kind of strange that in the paper they essentially said that they them releasing chatgpt maybe forced other companies like Google to accelerate. And then she said that our decision was about the board's ability to effectively supervise. There has been no motivation to slow down OpenAI's work. It is kind of, you know, confusing sometimes, but at the same time, right now all we know is that Helen Toner has resigned. There may have been some conflicts before, but it seemed like everything with Helen Toner and Sam Altman has of course been resolved. And of course you can see from this last part, it says. The New York Times reported that Altman complained in an email about the paper's criticism of OpenAI and its praise of Anthropic's approach. The report said that Toner defended the academic paper as an analysis of the challenges in developing AI, but Altman reportedly said it amounted to criticism from a board member and indicated it was damaging to OpenAI. So that's why I said, I think even though there may have been some conflicts before, I'm pretty sure that now with Helen Toner resigning and Sam Altman back, that whatever conflicts they did have, I'm pretty sure that it's all resolved now. Now we move on to some of the juicy stuff because I think this is really, really important that we do focus on and we need to analyze every single statement because I don't want to grasp at straws here. At the same time, I do want to pay attention to exactly what's going on. I've been thinking, is Ilya actually out of the company? And the reason I've posed this question, I think he's largely still working at OpenAI, but we do have to realize exactly what was said. So essentially right. Sam Altman did this statement in the OpenAI statement to the board, so you can see that it says I love and respect Ilya. I think he's a guiding light of the field and a gem of a human being. I harbor zero ill will towards him. While Ilya will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our working relationship and are discussing how he continue his work at OpenAI. So of course he's stating that I love and respect him, I have no ill will. But of course you read it here. While Elliot will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our working relationship and discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI. So it's clear that right now they're essentially figuring out how can we integrate Ilya Sutskeva back into OpenAI. Because whatever happened over the last couple of weeks wasn't smooth sailing whatsoever. Whatever happened between them, whether or not it was a coup attempt, whether or not Elia saw something crazy and wanted to slow down the entire AI process, either way, we know that some something definitely occur. I am leaning more towards the Ilya saw something that was a bit, quote, unquote dangerous. But right now we're never going to know until official statements are made. And although Elliot did reverse his decision in the end, we still don't know why he initially did that thing in the first place. The reason I stated that is it possible that Ilya is of course no longer at his role at OpenAI and is he going to continue working there? Although I do think he is going to continue working there is because some of the tweets that we did clearly didn't include Ilya Sutsk. For example, previously when we saw pictures of the OpenAI team, we always saw the four members of the core OpenAI team, Elia Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, and of course, Mira Marathi. But with new pictures and new statements, we're not really seeing Elia Sutskever in those pictures. You can see right here, Greg Brockman tweeted, building this together. And of course, this picture of him with the OpenAI team. But someone is missing from the picture, notably Ilya Sutska. It could just be that Ilya Sutskov has taken maybe a few weeks off to figure out his role back at OpenAI. But at the same time, we do have to realize that there haven't been as many mentions about Ilya Sutskova as we would like to have had. In addition, with Mira Moratti's tweet, she said the OpenAI team is replaceable. I couldn't be back. I couldn't be happier to be back at work alongside Sam Altman and Greg Brock. Notice how she didn't mention Elias? Maybe that's because, like we said before, his role is uncertain at the moment. We actually don't know until Elias tweets something, until he makes a statement, until they directly address it. We currently don't know where he is. One of the things that we do know about Elias is that he does have OpenAI in his bio, so it seems like he's still working there. But according to Sam Altman's statement, they're still discussing this relationship and they're trying to figure out exactly where things could go. And I do think that it will be interesting to see exactly where things do go with, with Sam Altman and OpenAI and Ilya Sutskova, because I do think that it is pretty hard to figure out how to move forward when things like that do occur. And of course, the thing is, is that we don't really know the full story. We've had some information, there's been some leaked information from Reuters, from the Verge, but we're trying to piece together a piece of an image where we've only got like, 40% of it. So we're not going to know what really occurred until more independent reviews are done and more information does come out, which it likely will over the coming weeks. And, of course, what we have is what's next? The OpenAI board. It says, as a board, we're focused on strengthening OpenAI's corporate governance. Here's how we plan to do it. We will build a qualified, diverse board of exceptional individuals whose collective experience represents the breadth of OpenAI's mission, from technology to safety policy. We are pleased that this board will include a non voting observer for Microsoft. So of course we know that. Satya Nadella a seat on the board, which is something that he did want. And of course he. They talk about how they will stabilize OpenAI's organization so that they can continue to serve the mission. This will include convening an independent committee of the board to oversee the review of the recent events. This is going to be something that I'm glad they're finally doing. Whatever happened, it definitely was a. And I don't want to use any vulgar words, but it was just a very awful show. Like it just wasn't good. Things didn't go smoothly at all and it did feel like there was a sense of unperformance, professionality with whatever happened at OpenAI and everything really did feel quite slapdash. And of course they say we will enhance the governance structure of OpenAI so that all stakeholders, users, customers, employees and partners and community members can trust that OpenAI will continue to thrive. And then what's next for OpenAI? Well, they say, so what's next for us? We have three immediate priorities. Advancing our research plan and further investing in our fullest stack. Safety efforts have always been critical to our research. Roadmap is clear. This was a wonderfully focusing time. I share the excitement with you all. We will turn this crisis into an opportunity and I'll work with mirror on this. Continuing to improve and deploy our products and serve our customers. It's important that people get to experience the benefits and promise of AI and have the opportunity to shape it. We continue to believe that great products are the way to do this. I'll work with Brad, Jason and Anna to ensure our unwavering commitment to our users, customers, partners and governments around the world is clear. Brett, Larry and Adam will be working very hard on this extremely important task of building out a board of diverse perspectives, improving our governance structure and overseeing an independent review of recent events. And I look forward to working closely with them on these crucial steps so everyone can be confident in the stability of OpenAI. I'm looking so forward to finishing the job of building beneficial AGI with the best team in the world. The best mission in the world. Love, Sam. So that was Sam Altman's final statement to pretty much everyone and to just, you know, conclude the summary of what he's essentially saying here. He's basically saying that, look, we know that the company kind of went through a shaky period. We're going to make sure that we stabilize that. We're also going to focus on AI safety. And of course we're going to make sure that we finish the job of building AGI. I don't think we should look too much into this last statement here where he says, I look forward to finishing the job of building AGI. And meaning that they're pretty close. I personally do think they're pretty close, but within the next year I guess we will see how close we were or how close we weren't to AGI based on what they do release. As for Ilya Satskova being out of the picture to Sam Altman's statement, I do think that Ilya Sutskova is definitely one of the pioneers in the AI space. So I don't think they're going to let him go and I don't think he's going to leave OpenAI anytime soon because I just believe that he's far too valuable in terms of what he brings to OpenAI for him to be going to another company. But the only thing is, is that we don't know what he saw. We don't know what he's going to be doing. I do think that he just wants to get back to work, but at the end of the day, right now it is pure speculation. I just hope that everyone can go back to working normally. Hopefully the company can function as normal and if there was something that they did see, hopefully they do manage to contain it. There was also a recent tweet where Elon Musk said that he reached out to Ilya Satskova, but apparently he doesn't want to talk. I don't know if that's for legal reasons. I don't know if that's because he doesn't want to say what he saw. It could be for any a million reasons under the sun. We're never gonna know until he tells us himself. That being said, if you enjoyed this video, we'll see you on the next one.