The OpenAI Saga - Everything Changed AGAIN!

So I actually didn't think I'd be making another video about the whole OpenAI saga. But this story just gets wilder and wilder. I mean, we are witnessing history right now. Silicon Valley history, AI history. They're going to make movies or TV series about what is happening right now. My channel is not going to turn into an OpenAI Saga breakdown channel. I feel like this is going to slow down eventually, but right now stuff is happening so fast and and has been so wild that I feel I've got to keep on talking about it. I feel like this is probably the information people who watch my channel want the most right now. So I've got to keep going with this. And speaking of the fact that one day they're probably going to make a movie or TV show out of this, here's what Roberto Nixon posted when he asked Chatgpt to cast the OpenAI movie. You can see here's the actors here and Joseph Gordon Levitt playing Sam Altman. I just want to share a fun fact with you. Did you know that Joseph Gordon Levitt's wife was actually one of the board members that voted to to get Sam Altman fired? So although I like these casting decisions, I think it's pretty unlikely that JGL here is going to play Sam Altman in this movie. Anyway, I've made two other videos prior to this about the whole OpenAI saga, what happened with Sam Altman and subsequently other major team members over at OpenAI. But if you missed those videos, let me speedrun it for you real quick. On November 17, OpenAI announces a leadership transition and in this announcement they fire Sam Altman and elevate CTO Mira Murati to interim CEO. Sam Altman confirms this on Twitter. Greg Brockman, Chairman of the board and President at OpenAI, subsequently quits and then gives a breakdown of the events that happened, stating that both him and Sam were given just moments of notice before the announcement went out that Sam was being fired and Greg was being demoted. He also mentioned that Mira Moratti found out the night before that she would be upgraded to interim CEO. Later that same night, three senior OpenAI researchers resign in solidarity with Sam and Greg. We learn that Microsoft had no details about this happening and they were blindsided by these actions as well, which is crazy considering that Microsoft is a 49% investor in the company. Taking a peek at the board the board is made up of six members, two of them being Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, who are now no longer with the company, the other four being Ilya Suskever Adam D', Angelo, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner. They needed four votes to get Sam out, meaning that Ilya, one of the co founders with Sam, was one of the people that voted to remove Sam. And then in the biggest twist that we've seen, the news comes out that OpenAI is trying to rehire back Sam Altman as CEO of the company and reinstate him on the board. And that's essentially where I left off in my last video. I obviously went into a lot more details and explained what I believe was happening in all of these scenarios and the implications, but that's essentially where we left off. After the news broke that Sam Altman may end up back at OpenAI, he went on Twitter and tweeted, I love the OpenAI team so much. And one by one, almost every single staff member at OpenAI retweeted Sam's post with a heart in solidarity that Most of the OpenAI team members were on Team Sam. This feels like that scene in the Hunger Games where one by one everybody puts up their sign and shows solidarity with the movement. Up until now we had thought that miramoratti, now interim CEO, was on board with this whole decision. Her being put in as the interim CEO made us all believe that, well, maybe she was part of this ousting because it could boost her career and she gets the opportunity at CEO. Well, as it turns out, Mira Morati was on Team Sam as well, giving a heart emoji when he made the post. I love the OpenAI team so much, indicating that she was with Sam. It turns out that this mass showing of love for Sam Altman from all of the team members over at OpenAI somewhat implied that if Sam was out, probably a lot of other team members were out. So there was a lot of pressure to bring Sam back because it looked as though Sam was going to take all of the team members with him. Also, a lot of OpenAI's backers, Microsoft, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, they all wanted Sam reinstated. OpenAI as well. According to the information, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global were among the firms negotiating Altman's return behind the scenes. Microsoft, which is heavily relying on OpenAI's technology for its own enterprise software products and dispersed growth in the company's cloud business is also likely to favor Altman's return. So to recap Friday, Sam fired, Greg Brockman quits. Three more senior researchers quit wake up Saturday morning to learn that pretty much the entire OpenAI team is behind Sam Altman, including Mirror Moratti, who seemingly didn't want any of this. Throughout the day we hear more and more stories that it looks like Sam Altman's going to be back at OpenAI. The governance team. The board behind OpenAI would probably be reconfigured to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again and employees are going to bail if this doesn't happen. Investors in OpenAI are pushing for this to happen. That's where we kind of leave off. Saturday night, it's looking like by Monday morning Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are going to be back at OpenAI and it's going to be like nothing ever happened. Sunday starts off as a fairly quiet day. No new info. It's still seeming like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are coming back to OpenAI and that the board and all the OpenAI team members are winning this battle. Sunday night, everything goes nuts again. Articles start to come out saying that Sam Altman isn't coming back to OpenAI. The board was sticking strong and instead they brought in Twitch co founder Emmett Shear as the new CEO. So Miramorati got to be interim CEO for about 48ish hours before she got the boot for apparently supporting Sam Altman. And now Emmett Shear is in as CEO. Sunday night at 11:53pm the saga continues. In another twist that I think some of us saw coming, I didn't see it coming, but I've seen on Twitter a lot of people saying they predicted this move. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says, we remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OpenAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we're extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success. So Sam Altman removed from OpenAI from the board. Greg Brockman then quits the investors and all of the employees pushed to bring Sam Altman back, including Mira Morati, the interim CEO. She was also one of the people pushing to bring Sam Altman back. Ilya Suskever and the other board member members say, nope, not happening. We're bringing in the ex Twitch co founder to be CEO and Satya says fine, if you're not going to keep Sam and Greg on OpenAI, we're bringing them into Microsoft. We're building an advanced AI team, and we're going to let Sam and Greg run this team. Sam Altman retweets Satya's tweet about him coming over to OpenAI to confirm that this is actually happening. Greg Brockman does the same. We are going to build something new, and it will be incredible. He mentions the initial leadership being him and Sam Altman, as well as those three senior researchers that we reported earlier quit in solidarity with them. So does this mean that Microsoft is now building a division to compete with OpenAI, to release the reliance on OpenAI? To me, this sort of screams that Microsoft is going fine. If you're not going to put the people that got OpenAI to where they are today back in place, we're going to go and do the same thing internally, and we're going to give them unlimited resources to make this happen as quickly as possible, theoretically. Bing Chat, Bing Image Creator. All of these tools are going to be powered by new models in the future that were probably built by this new team that Sam and Greg are putting together directly inside of Microsoft. Now, whether Satya Nadella's statements about being committed to OpenAI are genuine or not, that's yet to be seen. If I had to guess, he's probably gonna play both sides a little bit. Let's keep with OpenAI, see what they produce. Let's work with Sam, see what they produce. Let's continue to work with meta, see what they produce. And whoever gets us to our goals the fastest are the team we're going to lean into. That's probably what's happening. But I would imagine they're going to put a ton of resources into Sam and Greg and the internal team and figure out how to build all of this stuff back up as quickly as possible internally at Microsoft without the governing board being this nonprofit that should be focused on research. So cool. You'd think the saga ends here. Sam's fired, Greg quit, OpenAI, hires Emmett Shear as new CEO. Sam and Greg go to Microsoft to build a new AI team over directly inside of Microsoft. But no, that's not where the story ends. Things get even crazier now. Here we are Monday morning, the day I'm recording this video, and Ilya Suskever tweets, I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together, and we'll do everything I can to reunite the company. This is the day after Microsoft announced they're bringing Sam and Greg to work on an internal team at Microsoft. Ilya seems to be having second thoughts and saying I want the gang back together again. Also this morning, Sam Altman sees that tweet, retweets it and gives it three hearts, acknowledging that he sees that Ilya regrets that decision. Also today, Monday morning, after all of this news breaks down that Sam's not coming back, they're going to Microsoft instead. Emmett Shear from Twitch is now the CEO. According to Kara Swisher here, 505 of 700 employees at OpenAI tell the board to Resign to the Board of directors at OpenAI, OpenAI is the world's leading AI company. We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best methods and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position. The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI. When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAI acted swiftly to stabilize the company. They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties and were negotiating in bad faith. The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward, the one that would best serve our mission, company stakeholders, employees and the public, would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that can lead the company forward in stability. Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mir Murati against the best interest of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed would be consistent with the mission. Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that our positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary, should we choose to join, we will take this step immediately unless all current board members resign and the board appoints two new lead independent directors such as Brett Taylor and Will Hurd and reinstate Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Now here's where this is really interesting. Look at who signed Mir Morati, number one signer, the person they put in as interim CEO after ousting Sam Brockman. But most interestingly, look at number 12 on the list, Ilya Suskever, the one who deeply regretted his decision to side with the board and oust Sam Altman, is now signing off saying that he will leave OpenAI potentially if they don't fire the rest of the board. What is going on? Is this the end of OpenAI? It quite possibly could be, especially if Ilya ends up following Sam out the door over to Microsoft. OpenAI is done after that and the story is continuing to play out right now over on Twitter, X team members from OpenAI, one by one are tweeting this exact tweet. OpenAI is nothing without its people. And my Twitter feed is filled with it. OpenAI is nothing without its people. OpenAI is nothing without its People. OpenAI is nothing without its people. This is the Twitter feed right now. Everybody once again standing up in solidarity, making it look like one by one they're going to step away from OpenAI and likely join Sam and Greg over at Microsoft. Sam Altman, obviously seeing all this is retweeting and hurting these people, all saying OpenAI is nothing without its people, including miramoradi. The story gets wilder and wilder. I feel like there's more to this story. I feel like I'm investing way too much time and energy into being an armchair detective trying to figure out what the heck is going on over at OpenAI right now and now over at Microsoft. I did write up a fairly long mini essay over on Twitter about exactly what I think went down over at OpenAI and why this decision was made and how I think that both Sam Altman and Ilya Suskever were acting in what they thought were the best interest of the company, but they weren't necessarily aligned on what the best interest of the company was. Ilya being more that research academic side, wanting to push the technology forward, Sam Altman pushing more on the commercialization we've got to make more money side with the subscriptions, the APIs, the GPT store wanting to raise more money. He was more on that capitalistic commercialization of the product to get more money in to in turn fund research. But I don't think Ilya necessarily liked all this commercialization. Again I do a fairly succinct job of breaking down what happened at OpenAI, and I feel like this is the narrative you're going to hear more and more as more information comes out from the people at OpenAI. I think it kind of nails it. So I'm going to link up to this tweet below because I highly recommend you reading it if you want more info about it. And one last little bit that I want to share here before I kind of give a few more opinions on what's going on is that Emmett Shear, the new CEO of Open, also put out a tweet this morning with a little bit more details about what he plans to do with OpenAI. Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once in a lifetime opportunity to become the interim CEO of OpenAI. After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just a few hours, I accepted. He talks about how he's taken time off to spend time with his family and kids. He spent the day drinking from a fire hose as much as possible, speaking with the board and a small number of major partners and listening to employees. The partnership with Microsoft remains strong. He even says it's clear that the process and communication around Sam's removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust. So his first day on the job he's already sort of bashing the board. I have a 3 point plan for the next 30 days. Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report. Continue to speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors and customers as possible. Take good notes and share the key takeaways. Reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers. He even says, I will drive changes in the organization up to and including pushing strongly for significant governance changes if necessary. The board that just hired him on he's already saying I'm going to do an investigation and if I have to boot some board members, I'm going to try to boot some board members. He's saying that he believes it will take longer than a month to achieve true progress. He has nothing but respect for Sam and the entire OpenAI team. He ends it with saying, before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any 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 it sounds like he is not planning on taking away what we have at ChatGPT and the APIs and the ways that OpenAI is making money. So that's good to hear. But how strong is the OpenAI going to be if all of the team bails? Now there is an interview clip of Emmett talking about his thoughts on AI that Rowan Chung shared here and here's the interesting bits from it.

It will get very fast, very quickly. And that kind of intelligence is just an intrinsically very dangerous thing because intelligence is power. Human beings are the dominant form of life on this planet pretty much entirely because we're smarter than the other creatures. Like my P doom. My probability of doom is like my bid ask spread and that's pretty high because I have a lot of uncertainty. But I would say it's like between like 5 and 50. That should cause you to your pants. But it's human level extinction. I yeah, yeah. No, it's not just human level extinction. It's such a Extincting humans is bad enough. It's like potential destruction of all value in the light cone. Like, like not just for us but for any alien species caught in the wake of the explosion. It's like a universe destroying bomb. This is not a figure it out later thing. This is like a big problem. It's like someone invented a way to make like 10x more powerful fusion bombs out of like sand and bleach that like anyone could do at home. It's terrifying and I've had enough time with it now that I can laugh about it. When I first realized it was heart stopping the Techno Optimist and I am like no, no no. The AI thing. This thing though actually may be a problem if you are rejecting it because we sound like a bunch of crazies that like some number of people who are worried about this are on your. I'm on your team. I'm on the Techno Optimist team.

So it sounds like Emmett is kind of on that doomer sort of concerned of where this is all going side of things. And literally in the process of recording this video, Sam Altman tweets the OpenAI leadership team, particularly Mira, Brad and Jason, but really all of them have been doing an incredible job through this that will be in the history books. Incredibly proud of them. Greg Brockman retweets It cannot overstate the level of pride and respect I feel for Mira, Brad, J, Jason and the rest of the leadership team for the response to this crisis. One team, one mission. So this story is still unfolding. I'm borderline afraid to stop recording because as soon as I do, new news is going to come out about what's going on. The story is ongoing. I'm loving this. I will make more videos about this if I have to. I'm hoping the news slows down a little bit because this has been my soap opera. I've not been sleeping. I've been going down this rabbit hole. Oh, that's a lie. I've been sleeping, but I've been borderline not sleeping over this. So where does this leave us right now as I end this video? As of the recording of this video, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are not coming back to OpenAI. Instead, they are starting up a new team over at Microsoft, along with the three senior researchers that quit from OpenAI. It sounds like Microsoft and Satya Nadella said that anybody that wants a job over in the Microsoft division is welcome to leave OpenAI and come over to Microsoft. There's a petition out remove the board from OpenAI employees. And if they don't remove the board, the employees are threatening to quit and likely move over to Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg. Again, to sort of restate what I said in my little essay here, this really came down to Sam Altman on the commercialization side. He knew the company needed a lot of money to handle the compute power necessary to train these models as well as to let people actually use these models. So he was out there raising capital. He was figuring out how to commercialize the product through things like APIs, subscriptions to ChatGPT plus OpenAI Enterprise Editions, upcoming GPT store. He was figuring out how to make money for this company to fund all of the compute as well as to fund the research. Seemingly the board was on the side of focusing on research and the academic side and just advancing the technology, but not so excited about the commercialization of the whole thing over here. I believe that the board was most likely a little worried that Sam was going to be rolling out features too quickly, Both internally at OpenAI and externally at Microsoft. Then the board wanted these things to roll out. They wanted more internal testing. They wanted to be able to improve them, make them safer, and really dial them in. While I believe Sam and Microsoft were probably more pushing to get this stuff out so they can make more money, not because they need more money for themselves and just want to become bigger, bigger billionaires, but because they needed this money to fund the research over here. And that was the two opposing forces was the research academic side and the commercialization side, and the board being governed by the nonprofit and not having a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, but having a responsibility to ethical and safe advancement of the research. They felt that the commercialization efforts were at odds with their mission. That is my armchair detectiving. That's sort of what I stated in the last video. That's sort of what I stated in my long essay on Twitter here. That's where I believe things broke down. But again, without any formal announcement from the board on why they made this decision, it's still somewhat speculation. I feel like we have enough good info flowing now and enough details to really put all the pieces together. And this is what the puzzle looks like to me, with a few little pieces missing and I don't know where it goes from here. I think there's a couple potential scenarios that can out. I think scenario one, the board resigns from OpenAI, Sam and Greg and the senior researchers and everybody threatening to quit goes back to OpenAI. Ilya and Sam bury the hatchet. They push forward on what they were doing. I think that's scenario one. Scenario two, the board holds strong. OpenAI has a mass exodus. Tons of team members leave OpenAI to move over to Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg over at Microsoft. If Ilya is one of those people, I also think that spells the end for OpenAI. I think OpenAI really struggles without someone like Ilya there. And now Microsoft accelerates the advancement of AI and AGI internally without OpenAI's help and without this sort of nonprofit governance board whose goals aren't really aligned with the goals of the commercialization of the tech. Or there's a potential third scenario which, which I don't feel is super likely, but there's a third scenario where Sam and Greg being at Microsoft and Ilya and maybe Mira staying over at OpenAI and they deepen the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI and the teams work really closely together to both grow OpenAI's interests and Microsoft's interests. And the team is sort of united, but just in two separate companies. I think that's sort of a third scenario that could potentially play out. I would say almost more than likely with one of the first two scenarios is going to play out. OpenAI gets overhauled, Sam and Greg come back, or Microsoft becomes the powerhouse AI developer and brings all of the OpenAI team over and they just see rapid advancements in the technology that they're building over inside of Microsoft. Those are the few scenarios I see playing out. Again, these are real people. I don't want to speak negatively about any person involved in this, I don't know any of them personally. I truly believe that most people in this whole scenario believed they were acting in the best interest of their mission. Sam Altman was trying to get money, money to help with the research side. The research side was trying to figure out how to get this out of the public eye, out of the policymaker's eyes a little bit and focus on just advancing the tech. And everybody's decision was based on what they truly believed was the best decision for their individual missions. I just think it could have been handled better through communication internally instead of people at OpenAI finding out that they're getting fired essentially from a blog post. So from a leadership standpoint, from the board, there was definitely some very poor decisions made. And it even, even seems like Ilya is coming out and agreeing with that statement now. But again, this story is all ongoing. I'm just an armchair detective. I'm pulling together all the information that's coming to me. It's a fire hose of info right now and I'm trying to put all the pieces together. And again, this is the best picture that I can paint for people of what's actually going on at OpenAI. But I also know this saga isn't over yet. Throughout this week, we're going to see more and more info drop about what's actually happening. We're going to see a mass exodus or maybe things even going back to normal at OpenAI. Probably not, but maybe. And before I stop recording, just to prove the nature of how fast this is moving, it's now been updated that now 700 of the 770 OpenAI employees, including SUS, has signed the letter demanding Sam and Greg back and reconstituted board with Sam allies on it. So literally at the beginning of this video, it was 500 and something. And as I've been recording this video, we're up to 700 out of 770. Almost the entire OpenAI staff is threatening to leave if they don't bring Sam and Greg back. And I think at this point it all comes down to whatever deal Sam and Greg made at Microsoft. Do they even have the ability to come back? We don't know yet. This is all unfolding. I can't wait for the Netflix series. It's going to be wild. I'm excited to see how this plays out. I need to hit stop record again. I'm afraid to, because I know as soon as I do there's going to be more news dropping about this whole scenario. But I'm keeping people updated over on X. As news drops, I am real time tweeting it, so everybody should be able to stay in the loop over on X. Follow me there Mr. Eflow and make sure to check out FutureTools IO. I also keep all the news up to date on this website. Thank you so much for tuning into this video. What a watch. Wild freaking weekend. I don't know about you, but I'm having a blast. I like the story that's playing out. I'm having fun watching it. But I also am very empathetic for all of the people involved that their livelihoods are up in the air right now. That definitely affects me.