Is OpenAI Over? Breaking Down The Craziest 48 Hours In Silicon Valley

Now, Kieran, I have an update for you that you haven't seen yet. Sleep breaking Emily Chang from Bloomberg. Been doing some really good reporting on this. Reports that 700 of the 770 OpenAI employees saying they will now go. Isn't this wild? You're talking about Microsoft acquiring a $19 billion company for free. We're coming at you today with the details and our reaction to the craziest business story of our lives. Sam Altman being fired from Open AI. It is an emergency show. The craziest story of the last decade plus happened over the weekend. And today we are breaking down what the hell happened, what you and your business should do about it, the implications for you, and we're going to have some fun along the way. I'm your co host, Kip Bodnar, Chief marketing officer at HubSpot. I'm joined by my co host, Kieran Flanagan, who's the chief marketing officer at Zapier. This is marketing against the Grain. Let's get into today's show. Kieran, what the hell is going on in the world? Like, how are you feeling? Capitalism failed over the weekend, Kieran, you had a, a person who had run the most successful startup, maybe in history get fired for being too successful. What the hell happened here? Like, I am so sad. I've worn black all day. It's going to keep. I'm going to keep it on. It might, I may wear black all week. I feel like the world just. We lost a great company this weekend. Let's break down what happened for everybody.

I'm gonna break down what happened. But one quick, one quick ask. There's two quick things. So first of all, I feel like one thing we were missing here is something that you would appreciate, right? I feel like this is a moment where we need a good whiskey. I don't know if you saw this. A bottle of Macallan from 1926 sold for 2.1 million. I checked the name to say that this is Kip B. Nerd Cash, please.

Not me, my friend.

The second thing is like, have you ever been any kind of show you've ever watched for a 48 hour period? Have you ever been this enthralled by an episode of anything? I can't remember anything that I've been like, no, just refreshing Twitter like this.

I sat on Twitter all weekend and I was like, is this what happens to people who like, really like reality television? Like a big scandal, like breaks out or like a big celebrity relationship or divorce happens? Like, I was, I think I was A zombie. At one point I was like, I was like, I have to stop looking at what's happening here.

This is the dorks version of the Kardashians, right. Where it's like, oh my God, what did they just say now? Like the nerds. All the nerds. Like, this is what it feels like to like really love something like the Kardashians, except we actually have money at.

Stake in all of this.

Yeah, exactly. There's actually tons of businesses.

So yeah, lots of people have jobs tied to this.

Here's a couple of things. I think I got a little bit lost. I want to kind of play them out for you and see what you think. So Friday we hear that the board had sent this pretty vague statement. I want to get onto that a little later. About Sam not really being aligned with the board's values. Right. And then Greg Brockman, who's the other co founder, was asked to step down from the board, keep his job because he's. They said he's an integral part of the company. No, he is a co founder but no longer on the board. Right. And the board is the founder of Quora. Then they have a couple of people that are in the AI safety. Like it's three members and then three members of the three co founders of OpenAI. One of the things I just want to make sure that the listeners understand before we get into it is the statement was vague, but it had some, it had some information in it that I think is really important and that OpenAI started as a no profit and the mission of OpenAI is to bring AGI to humanity safely. Right. That is really important. That is actually how it started. Now it has a commercial entity as well and they never really had plans to get into consumer. Like ChatGPT was a demo product that you launched as a fun product as a way to gather information for their core, which has always been ili's number one mission. Like if you. There's an incredible. I, I urge everyone to go watch this. There's an incredible 10 minute documentary that the Guardian made about him two weeks ago, following him around.

The chief, this is the Chief Scientist of OpenAI who was kind of on the initial concern side with the board that, that Sam and Greg were moving too fast and commercializing too aggressively, which is by, by all accounts the source of conflict, which is the core job of the board.

Right. This is like, this is the thing that got a little bit lost and I think we can get into how terrible the board did here. But I actually think if you think of the job of the board, it's like, is the CEO aligned with the mission of the company? And you could argue that, hey, if you, you know, maybe there's some reason to do this because Sam is no longer aligned to the core mission of the company. But the reason I just wanted to start with this is I'm a huge fan of OpenAI and all of the founders and I'm a huge fan of evi. Like, I've watched his stuff. I've, I've written all of them. He's a real, like, he's a real scientist. He really cares about that mission of AGI for humanity. And I saw so many terrible takes about him over the weekend. Oh, like there was an awful Twitter thread about, hey, now you have to go figure out how to wake up in the morning and raise capital. First of all, this guy created DeepMind. He's the reason AI is where it is today. He will not struggle ever to raise capital if he wants to raise capital. And so I think there is like some nuance in what happened here.

So first of all, one of the bad things that happened is this is what, what's called a Friday dump. You dump it at the end of the day on a Friday when people are out of the office and hopefully and you're hoping nobody pays attention or.

There was no Twitter. That was a PR thing that maybe worked in the 80s.

Yeah. So look, it's.

That doesn't work anymore.

But this is an example of, I think the people involved in this decision not understanding like the second, third, fourth quarter ramifications of decision. That's something we're going to talk about on the show today. So what happens is they basically make this announcement that Sam's no longer the CEO. And then like the next thing we see, I think in the time of events, Kieran, is this, which is Greg, who is Sam's co founder in OpenAI, basically saying, post this. Hey, everyone, I'm super proud of what we've all built together since starting in my apartment eight years ago. We've been through tough and great times together, accomplishing so much. Based on today's news, I quit genuinely wishing you all nothing but the best. I continue to believe in the mission of creating safe AGI that benefits humanity. So he's saying, hey, I'm on board with the mission, but I could not disagree more with what you did. And so I want to say that's a great co founder. Yeah, right?

Yeah.

He's like, my, my co founder's out. I'm out. I mean, if you ever quit the pod, I'm quitting the pod. Karen. We're. We're in this together. Right? Like that is that. I thought that was pretty awesome, Greg.

Yeah. When I originally saw the news, I was like, wow, like, what has Sam Altman done? One of the most successful.

You thought you were like, oh, did he crossed some type of line.

Yeah, he's done something. So it's going to come out that it's going to be so egregious. You're like, oh, wow, like, I get it. And then when I saw that statement and he ended with like, I still believe in this mission, I was like, wow. That's when I started to really think through this must be just a difference of strategy or difference of thinking or difference of, like, how we move forward. And there were some really good Twitter threads that popped up initially, and they may be a little bit out of date right now, which is again, this tension between the nonprofit and the profit. And the Dev Day was a catalyst to that because the Dev Day had a lot of consumer launches that we were all excited about, but maybe started to, like, add to that friction.

So I want to go back to kind of the events of what happened. So this, this all breaks down on Friday night. We're all freaking out. You and I are whatsapping. And then we get into Saturday. And then a rumor, rumor happens that the board is considering bringing Sam back on as CEO. Greg back on in his capacity. And so there's conversations. Apparently Sam and Greg have some demands. And this was apparently precipitated by a lot of OpenAI employees saying, like, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna leave the company.

Microsoft, don't forget Microsoft got a $10 billion investor, got one minute notice.

They've a five minute notice before the public announcement.

And then they're savage. Yeah. Horrible, brutal, Terrible way to organize it.

Worst comms with your key partner who has access to all of your GPU scaling that you need to actually run your model.

Yeah.

All your credits, do the research, do all of this work. Right. And so then Microsoft, the employees pressure. And I think up until when I went to bed on Sunday night that we're recording this. Just everybody's aware we're recording this at 1pm Eastern Standard Time on Monday, November 20th. This might be obsolete even by the time you listen to it, but this is what we're. We're breaking down as of this day and time. And I think when we, when I went to bed last night, it was still possible that Sam was going to come back as CEO. And I wake up to reports that Sam and Greg are now leading AI at Microsoft.

When I went to bed, I was like, this is, they're back. Like they're, they're going to be reinstated, job done, new board.

I went to sleep thinking that, oh, this was just a wild 48 hours. OpenAI is back to normal on Monday. If we kind of. And like you and I, maybe we'll do a pod on it. Maybe won't. Maybe we'll just kind of like make. Kick it around. And then I woke up and I was like, wait, hold on. Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0 0.

What? They. I. That was. I did not see that playing out that way. Actually. I never had considered them sudo acquire an OpenAI.

If you had, you would have bought a bunch of Microsoft call options on Saturday.

Did you see the stock? It has the craziest like drop on Friday and then straight back up further on on Monday. And so like, what they, they get a load of the employees will likely join. They get the co founders, they get a bunch of the founders.

I got a couple of tweets on this show. First of all, Ben Thompson, who used to work at Microsoft years and years ago, now one of our best tech industry analysts. His tweet was it's the most extraordinary weekend of my career, which he's seen a lot. He's, he's seen everything. Then you have what I think is a masterful tweet from Satya. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. He sends this out at 2:53 in the morning on Monday, November 20th. We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap and our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft tonight and continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear, who's new CEO. We haven't even got to that yet. Get to that in a second. And OpenAI's new leadership team. We are 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. That is how you CEO, my friends.

You do it before. You basically replicate OpenAI within your org. You take both sides of the place. You don't lose either. Like, maybe, maybe OpenAI get themselves going again and make some progress and your partnership there yields a ton of upside. But now you have this other research division inside of Microsoft and you're a trillion dollar company.

Balaji had the best tweet. Satya wins. He's got the reflexes of a startup CEO. Resources of a trillion dollar company. Puts this together in 48 hours from a cold start. Gets it signed and over the line before the markets opened.

I suspect the deal is that looks like a company within Microsoft and that Sam Greg co have actually more equity than Microsoft. Like it's like a 51, 49 split. So it's like a start. It's the same way. Like it's basically just open AI.

Like we'll Microsoft incubated startup.

Yeah, yeah. And I'll give you the same deal we give OpenAI. The other thing that just so people understand where Microsoft are going with this. Right. It's always kind of being a head scratcher because even last week after their conference, they reframed Bing Chat to Copilot. Now why did they do that? They don't want to play. I think they've realized that they don't want to play in the search game. The Bing search thing did not really work out. It's going to be hard to steal share away from Google if you play the same game. If you play the search game. Oh, I know. We'll play the Copilot game. What we'll do is compete with OpenAI instead and try to be the de facto copilot for all consumers. And then eventually Microsoft want to do that for all business. And so they just reframe the product into a category that they can win. But the takeaway I had from that was okay. The category they're reframing themselves into their competitor is not really Google. It's OpenAI, which is their other partner. So then again, this seems like pretty aligned with where they want to go, which is like, you're a cool partner, but hey, we'll just take it all for ourselves else, right? We'll play both sides. We'll get some benefit here. But really we'll just take the entire thing if we want. The last thing on that tweet from Balaji is when did Microsoft become so cool? Like, if I told you five, 10 years ago that the hottest company with some of the most incredible people got disrupted and went and joined Microsoft, like, that's not something you would have said five, 10 years ago. It's just a testament to the CEO and what an incredible job he's done with that company. One quick thing I wanted to show you, Kip, is because this is, you know, late Break in.

I got some new news too that I could show you that I just saw.

Did you see the letter? Right, so this came out today because the OpenAI employees, this is what. Yeah, they're chilling on a Friday. They're like, you know, oh, that was a hard week of work. Did a ton of stuff, made some progress and they come back online and they're like, what?

Right?

And so they may have not all been involved. So they released this letter. There are some wild statements in this letter. One of the ones that I really want to bring your attention to is where do they, where do they say this? Okay, here we go. You also informed leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed would be consistent with the mission. With the mission. Okay, here is, here, here is an interesting thing to think about there. What is the mission? To bring AGI to humanity safely. So what can you infer here? That the current path is bringing AGI to humanity unsafely. And in that documentary, that 10 minute documentary, I really got the feeling that like Eli, Eli is wrestling with like, I don't know if you saw the Openheimer movie, like wrestling with the weight of the work that he is doing where he's like in the entire documentary. The line that really stood out to me was we get one shot, like we can only create AGI once and if we do it wrong, we're in a lot of trouble. So I don't know like that. That's inferring a ton of speculation. But anyway, the last thing I want to do here is look at the last name on this letter which is to the board directors asking them to resign. It's Ilya.

But it's, but it's not the last letter. So. So to state the timeline for everybody, right, this letter got circulated this morning, Monday, November 20th in the morning, it was signed by 520 of the 770 OpenAI employees saying that they will le.

Resign.

Go work at Microsoft with Sam and Greg if Sam and Greg are not reinstated. Now, Kieran, I have, I have an update for you that you haven't seen yet.

Sleep breaking.

Emily Chang from Bloomberg. Been doing some really good reporting on this. Reports retweeted Ashley Vance, who's another great Tech reporter, that 700 of the 770 OpenAI employees saying they will now go. What is the board going to be a board of? He really isn't this wild. You're talking about Microsoft acquiring a $19 billion company for free.

The board are really going to be like Quora is going to become OpenAI. Open Quora. Quora. Yeah.

In all seriousness, there is no way that you and I, in our most creative moments of our life, could have ever made up with this.

You couldn't come up with this script?

No.

It is unwritable. Like, I was trying to think would the. My favorite. Obviously, all of us are very similar. Our favorite. One of my favorite shows of all time is obviously Succession. I was like, succession never touched this, never got close to this kind of incredible script. Write in.

There's one thing I could tell for sure, that the person this week who got less sleep this weekend than Sam or satya or the OpenAI board, this guy named Ben Mezrich. He's the guy who wrote the book that the Social Network was based off of. He wrote the book on the GameStop fiasco. Like, this is his thing. He writes these books. You know, he is in Washington or San Francisco, California, and he is writing a script as fast as a human being can possibly write a script right now.

I don't.

Right. Like, he is like, I know what to do. I was born for this moment, you know, and. And so he's a Boston area author. Shout out to Ben. Like, I'm excited to see what you. You write coming out of this saga. Like, it's going to be incredible.

I was trying to think. There was a great tweet that someone said, like, if opening. If AI or AGI is truly going to be. I think someone quoted some time back that it would be a billion times smarter than humans, then it has likely discovered time travel. And so this is all just. Someone has come back in timed and warned Ilya that something bad happened. And it's been. And they're just forking the timeline. And I'm trying to figure out, like, in this iteration, like, who is Sarah Connor and like, are we going to see Arnold Schwarzenegger come back in some form? But you could not get script written like this. If you, you know, if you sat down to write how this played out, you could not have written it.

If you're old like me, you remember the Saturday Night Live sketch of Sarah Palin where they just read her literal verbatim speech because it was so crazy and made it funny? It's exactly like. You don't even need a screenwriter. You could literally just like recount what actually happened. It's better than anybody could make up. And one of those things, Kieran, is, I got something else we got to walk through with everybody. And again, if you're listening to this, I know the audio is going to be live before the video. But we're walking through a bunch of screenshots and stuff that will also be on YouTube. So check us out on the YouTube. So OpenAI hired a guy named Emmett Shear, who was the co founder of Twitch, to be its new CEO. And this is Emmett's tweet. I specifically say I'm in favor of slowing down, which is sort of like pausing, except it's slowing down. If we're at a speed of 10 right now, a pause is reducing to zero. I think we should aim for a 1 to 2 instead. And then this guy, Britt Adcock, he is seems like he is a smart, knowledgeable guy. Lots of followers. The slow people at OpenAI fired the fast people. The other fast people quit immediately and more fast people will follow. The slow people are now hiring more slow people.

I, I'm okay with the slow if there's a reason behind it. That's the thing that has really been mind blowing to me is that the comms on this has been next level, bud. This is one of the biggest decisions you could make, right, that you have that you are letting the, the founder go of an incredible company, probably potentially one of the biggest companies of our lifetime. And you can't even give the why. And they still have not given the why. So it leaves everyone to fill in the story themselves. Like everyone is filling in the story and they've come down on the side of Sam and probably rightfully so. But the board should have been like, okay, like let's give clear reasoning of why so we can control the narrative. Doesn't mean they would have won or it would have went in their favor. But you have the new CEO coming in and saying, I want to slow down to two. You have Sam Altman saying the last two weeks that he's seen something for the fourth time in his lifetime that is like game changer, right? Which suggests there's something in the G. If they're training GPT5, maybe there's something like something in that that is causing friction. But again, you're left to fill in all the blanks because how do you not come out and give some clear and coherent reasons why?

I want to give our listeners a lesson. If you are going to make a big change, you're going to make a big bold move. That normally means that there's somebody who's a loser in that situation and there are people who are a winner in that situation. If you make a big bold move and everybody's a loser, then you're the loser. Right. And that's what happened in Open. It's because, Kieran, we are forgetting another part of this timeline that they could have just waited because one of the things that was happening is OpenAI was raising another $10 billion at a $90 billion valuation.

90 billion, like, oh, that's cool and helpful.

They probably needed some cash. A lot of that transaction was employees selling shares on the secondary market and making money for themselves. You know what's no longer going to go through those sales of secondary shares. So what do the employees have to lose? Yeah, like Microsoft can be like, cool, I'll just pay you what you were going to get in that secondary sale to come over and do this with us. Like, they made a decision without considering any of the game theory or the second, third order of events.

After that decision, they didn't even think about the step they were taken. I'm not even like a step ahead. I'm not even thinking about the step that I'm taking. Like, I'm not thinking about. We've just screwed our investors, we've just screwed Microsoft, we've just screwed our co founders. The tech community was always like, Sam is an incredibly popular figure for many great reasons. So, like, we're the, we're the bad people here. So at least give like 3, 4 coherent bullet points here, here, here, here, and you can make up your own opinion.

More of them say that there's a breakthrough that you feel like has major impact on our society that we're not saying anything else about. Like, give, give, give, give some reason. Okay, Kieran, we, we're. But we gotta break down some winners and losers. I think you and I just go back and forth. Let's start with the winners and then we'll. You wanna start winners or losers? Your. Your call. Where do you want to start?

Let's start. Winners.

All right, who's your first winner?

Oh, come on.

Sacha, Sacha, Sacha, Sacha. Number one. Microsoft number two. We kind of touched on why Sacha is the winner. I have an unexpected winner for you in this. Google is an unexpected winner in this because. Because ChatGPT is going to get slowed down. All the consumer OpenAI features are going to get slowed down. Microsoft's focus will get consumer. But it's going to take them a little while to get that re going and rebuild that. Google just got some more time. Google is a winner of what?

Google. The Google PMs are in a room huddle around the room now. Looking at this news going rapidly, creating OKRs for Q1 to review, get into a meeting, look at the Q1 QRs and then at the end of Q2 start doing some actual work.

Right.

Like their, their speed to execution is still really slow. And so I do agree that they could potentially be a winner. I think the other winner.

I think they're a winner. I'm not saying they might, they're not going to do. I'm not saying they might do something. They got extra time.

Yeah, they got extra time. The other winner I would put into this same category is actually open source. Right.

Ooh, talk to me.

There's an incredible reason now to be more self reliant or not rely on maybe other companies and actually fine tune your own model, use these open source models and be much more reliant on open source versus like a single partner. And I think that open source could potentially be a big winner of this where people may look at that as a safer option or at least an option that they hadn't considered before. So I think all of these other models are potentially a winner out of this.

I think a winner is a lot of the other core top tier OpenAI competitors like Anthropic, for example, like they had this behemoth de facto developer platform brand in that space that's taken a huge hit. So that, that makes life maybe slightly easier for them to. If I'm at one of those competitors, like I am heads down trying to execute as well and as fast as possible because I got given a little bit of a gift, right.

And I think ultimately like the founders who go. Who end up in that AI division, Sam, Greg, they are winners. They have probably a. Sam and Greg won. They have a blank chain.

They may have lost their original company, but by the way, the structure of the original company sucked. It was a weird nonprofit. Nobody had any like equity. Elon invested 40 million and got nothing for it is one of the weirdest business structures of all time. Yeah.

And so they, they can re. They can do a reset, create it under the umbrella of a company that only cares about profit or primarily cares about profit. And so they can kind of do it the way that they want to do it. Now, whether that is good for humanity or not, that is the way it is going to play out. You want to quickly do losers.

Yeah, I have a lot of losers. I have a lot of losers.

There is a lot of losers.

Have a lot of them. I mean, the first One is the OpenAI board. Like that's the obvious one. So first of all, Paul Graham, who's the founder of Y Combinator, one of the most influential minds in technology startups had a sick, sick burn. Kieran.

I still, I saw this.

He posted an unexpected advantage of appointed board members who already have significant achievements. Being on your board is not their main source of their importance. So they won't tend to cling to their seats even when it's obviously time to leave. I don't know what else you need to say about the Open AI board.

They should really, you know, for their own sake. I think they need to do some comms because I, you know, it's hard to, I don't know how.

That board cannot resign. Yeah, I'm being serious.

I think it will resign. I think it resigns before this show is live.

We might be doing another show tomorrow talking about this.

OpenAI is back. Open AI is back.

But this is, this is as of right now. All right, so the board's a loser. I got a different type of loser that maybe an unexpected loser. I think AWS is a loser.

Oh.

Because Microsoft and their Azure Cloud computing now has arguably the biggest, best team of AI researchers and scientists at the world and they'll be able to build AI into their cloud computing layer by default. And that's not going to be an overnight thing, but that is a major strategic advantage long term in the cloud computing cloud server business. And that's like AWS is going to have to. I'm sure they're working on. It's an amazing business. I'm sure they work on awesome stuff, but makes AWS's life harder. And AWS for folks not familiar, Amazon Web Services, who is the, the leader in that cloud computing stack right now?

I think any company that is vying for the copilot for enterprises are potentially losers because yeah, this team are going to crush it.

Right.

They are incredible. And so they're so tightly intertwined. They are Microsoft. And so Microsoft just has such an incredible head start over other companies that are going to try to do that. So it's going to be hard to anyone to create a wedge that that company or that team will not have usurped or do a better job of.

I think another group of losers is if this all happens, if 700 OpenAI employees leave to go to Microsoft, then all of these companies who have only built, tried to build standalone businesses on top of that OpenAI API that is rough. Are in real tough shape.

Yeah, it's tough. That is a tough place to leave all those companies. There's a lot of companies that have built on top of that API and they. That's the other. Yeah, really good.

Really.

That's the other thing. The board. The board don't think through the third, second, third, fourth order of impact here. There's some great businesses serving real needs built on top of OpenAI. Unless, again, part of the deal is Microsoft will. You know, there's a couple of things that might play out tonight. Either it gets reassembled, but. Gets reassembled in Microsoft. It gets wound down and Microsoft take the assets. I don't know. There's a ton of ways that maybe it won't be that impactful for consumers, but I can't imagine. It just gets torched.

And the problem is, Kieran, if Microsoft takes the assets, then it has to get regulatory approval.

Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. They're under a different.

You see what I'm saying? So that, to me is a lower likelihood of an outcome.

Yeah. God, I don't know. I need to go. I will be busily refreshing Twitter this evening to see, like, just how. What other incredible scripts get wrote tonight.

Oh. Oh, Kieran. Like, it is happening by the minute. 10 minutes ago. You ready?

It's just, I see posted, we have.

More unity and commitment and focus than ever before. We're all going to work together some way or other. I'm so excited.

What is literally going on here? Like, the entire company and I want to work together again. Right. Like, I actually don't understand what's going on because how did they get a 4 to 2 vote in the first place? Like, what has happened? Like, there's no way that. So ILI definitely voted. Had to have been on the. On the vote to vote Sam out. Or, or it would have been a three of three. I guess I'm. I'm speculating, but, like, that's the only way you get to a four.

Yeah, maybe.

Three co founders, three board members. How do you get to a four? Two. So I don't know. I. I really don't.

Like, this is the point.

Everything about this is so. I don't know, like, what's happened? What happened? First of all, to take the drastic action, to say, wow, this is something we really need to do again, because there's something within the mission that has not been adhered to. And then what happened in the last 24 hours where you're like, no, no, actually, I totally disagree with what I just did. And now I think that we should, you know, fire the board.

It's just like, here's an OpenAI employee who just tweeted an hour ago, I'm happy to join Microsoft.

I know.

I saw that I'm not using teams, which I thought was funny. But like clearly this is happening. Like we're watching the weirdest company death of all time and we're watching it in real time.

If I had to hedge my bet right now, I would still say that OpenAI gets back together in its current form.

Wow, that's a bold prediction.

I still think it gets back now. It would take an incredible, like someone like.

I think that's the best. I think that's the best outcome for society for what it is.

Microsoft would have to then renege on like all of its messaging has gone out. Everyone is congratulating them. So it would be, I don't know, like that's the thing that I, I.

Thought it only happens if my. If Microsoft gets a huge stake in open it.

If that's why I think that they deal.

It's a part of it.

Yeah, that the back end deal the 90 billion. Microsoft do the whole thing and just buy the company. Maybe that's. But again, I don't know.

They don't buy the company but they buy like 49 of it.

Well, they already own 49%, don't they? I'm pretty sure they got that with. They got that with a 10 billion. Yeah. Let's see.

Oh, you're probably right. You are probably right. I don't know what happens there. Yeah, you know, you know what's crazy in all of this is that not only does he get the company for free, he's going to get a write down on the OpenAI valuation and save a bunch of money in his P.

And L. I don't know what's going on.

This is wild.

I actually had a. I had a clean narrative in my head today that it was the nonprofit versus the prophet, that ILI was like, really cares about the mission and that that's what happened. Whether you agree or not, that's what happened. And then I saw the letter board resign and I saw ili's name on there and then that blew my. Then I was like, okay, I have no.

I don't know what to think anymore.

I don't know. I don't know what's going on. I couldn't write the script and someone needs to come out and tell us like the plot line here because I'm losing the plot. It's like that movie. Did you ever see that movie where everything is backwards?

Oh, memento.

No, there's a one that they did recently.

Oh, that's the other Christopher Nolan movie that I just watched.

Yeah, that was the Christopher Nolan down. I'm his biggest tenants. I'm the biggest fan. But that movie, like I didn't know what was going on. I watched it twice.

I still didn't watch it. I heard it was.

That's my feeling.

I was like, Memento is also Christopher Nolan movies.

Yeah, Christopher is a far better version of that.

So I have, I have one group of people who are winners and losers of this. Karen. Us. We named some winners. We named some losers. Content creators, I think marketers, I think marketers and us are winners and losers. And the reason for that, I think we're losers because we've got some cool stuff cooking and building on these LLMs that are. It's probably going to get slowed down and a lot of what we want to do and thought was possible is going to take a little bit longer and that's a loss and that sucks. And I, I personally am in my heart very sad and upset about that today. Yeah. The winning side of this is the search disruption of Google and the discoverability of information is going to happen slower. And so if you're a marketer who does a lot of ads, Google, SEO, all of that, like the time before that gets massively disrupted, got extended a little bit. We got a little bit more Runway.

I don't know. I think there's a lot of competitors to Chat GPT that are starting to get really good anthropic perplex the AI. I think Chat GPT has all the oxygen.

Yeah, but they have, but they, but they had the brain.

I agree with that.

They had the critical mass of users. It's going to take a major breakthrough from somebody else for them to break out and get a critical mass of tens of billions.

But if you're Microsoft, you must be, you're. If you're the marketing team at Microsoft, you are just dreaming up incredible campaigns with Sam to steal.

All of the users hasn't slept, slept since Thursday night.

I'm just like thinking of all of the campaigns. The other, well, the branding.

What do you call this research group? How do you brand it? What's the web experience look like?

Well, the copilot's already how long until.

We have pricing and packaging? Like what, what like what's happening.

The last loser I'll give you because it's applicable to something I worked on over the weekend I was trying to work on is so I was building a GPT with actions because the action stuff is really like the powerful thing where you can Integrate it to an app and do. You can deploy natural language into any app and do all this kind of cool stuff. And I think a bunch of us were excited to like, see the evolution of GPTs and see that store get built out and see the actions get built out. And it's incredibly buggy. Like, it's bad. It's really bad. The actual functionality. I managed to build a GPT that pulled data through an API and it was horrible to build that. And so I don't see that going anywhere. Like, that's part, that's part of the, that that fits into the friction. Right. That's a consumer side of the business. If anything gets reassembled and refocused, that is probably the last thing that they want to, that they're going to do unless the entire company. So I think for some of us who are like super interested to build these kind of GPTs, I see all of that slowing down.

Yeah, it seems like the GPTs were a big course of the conflict. I think moving to consumer consumerization on those, which is a bummer because I do think agents are a big part of the future of how we're going to leverage artificial intelligence, especially in marketing, especially in different business use cases. And so that is, I think, a real, real bummer, honestly. Yeah.

Darn.

I'm just sad. I know this is funny, I know we made a bunch of jokes, but like, I genuinely am bummed out about what's happened.

I try to not jump into the right and wrongs over the weekend because again, I'm like, maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong. I just wish the comms was better so you could actually make an informed decision. That's the thing that just bums me out is like, for a company this.

Valuable, well, regardless of the comms, we have a great, we have a great founder who was leading a company and he's not anymore.

No, I, I agree that part. I agree with that part. I'm just saying that you have an incredible company, an incredible founder, an incredible founding team doing incredible stuff that is changing the course of humanity, that is impacting all of our businesses. And you make an, you make a decision to disrupt that and you couldn't even bother to write a press release that articulated that, like, whether, again, I'm not. The wrongs and the rights I don't want to get into because I don't know all the details. But you couldn't, you couldn't even like, have a couple of bullet points to.

Let share a clear point of view.

As to why point of view. And we probably still would have disagreed with that, but at least we would have, you know, saw your.

Yeah.

Or had had something to go on. In the OpenAI letter, just so you know, that was signed by employees and Evia, it said. Oh yeah, it, it said that you all that it said that the board give no reasoning for their decision. Which blows my mind. Right.

Yeah, you, that's a good point because if there was any, in even any internal reasoning, it would have been external by now and we would have all would have seen it.

But how, but how. That's the thing I don't understand is again the 4 to 2 vote. So he, he must have been part of the vote to vote them out and he signed a letter to say you give no reasons why you voted them out. That's. I just think it's just.

Yeah. Well, I think it shows a lack of transparency for. I'm sure there are good and bad reasons for that. But to your point, you, you have to give the world a little bit of explanation when you do something that is this big of a change.

Right. This perfectly describes what, what I'm going through right now, actually. I just saw this. So like OpenAI at the behest of EDI fires Sam OpenAI at the behest of Sathya discusses bringing Sam back OpenAI at the behest of AI, opts not to Microsoft at the behest of Satya hire Sam OpenAI at the BS that Eli discusses bringing Sam back who join in Microsoft. You know this timeline is wild, right?

It's a pretty accurate timeline though of what's actually happened based on the information we know.

Just incredible.

For everybody watching today's show, listening to today's show, we tried to get it out to you as soon as possible. We didn't do a show over the weekend because we knew so much was happening. We thought it would be resolved by Monday. Maybe it's resolved, maybe it's resolved, maybe it's not. Kieran, it's. I somehow think we're going to talk more about this. You know, it just seems like there's probably a follow up show to this. What we wanted to do is leave you with a last piece of advice of like what do you actually do? And Kieran, my advice to everybody, and I'm curious of your advice, is a lot of the companies I know, a lot of even people I knew were really focused on the OpenAI API because it was so good and now they're going to have to diversify and that's going to diversify to other large language models. That's two different open source models. And maybe building some of their own models internally. Right. That might take a little bit longer, but might be better strategically long term. And so I think if you're watching this show and you're an early adopter into, into the AI game, that's what you need to do. I think if you're not in the AI game yet now, you need to know that your approach has to be more diversified than I think you probably could have gotten away with a couple weeks ago.

I think there's two QCAR lessons you covered wanders. Diversification is always good, right. And especially in large language models. There's such great diversification in models that if you can create something where you can plug and play into these different models, your business is going to be much more sustainable. The other thing I want to say is every writer should learn to write or have someone for them who can write. Right. Because whatever the truth in this story, I said this in a post earlier, in today's world, the story matters and the story will either. You'll either tell your story or the story will be told for you.

Right.

And I think this is a great example of it, which is no story was told, so their story was told for the board and anyone who made that decision and then they lost instantly lost because stories traveled so fast in today's Internet. And it's just a great reminder that write in is to me a core competency of being able to operate in today's world. If you are a founder, if you are an operator, you have to be able to write because that, that kind of being able to like tell your story before someone else tells it, before someone else tells it is so important to this, you know, what happened over the weekend. Yeah.

And then don't lose the lesson, right. Is the, is the third thing is like learn all the things from this so that it doesn't happen to you.

Right.

Think through the second, third order impacts of big decisions that you're going to make. Think through how you want to communicate and own that story. Just like Kieran's talking about, right. Think through who is on your side, who can help you both get good advice to make an important decision, but also help you drive that story in the world once it's out there. There was nobody on the board side and the rest of the world just kind of ate them up and told their version of the story. Right.

Let me, let me leave everyone with my wild, great my wild conspiracy theory because we need to end on, like.

I love conspiracy theories. All right, so.

So one of the board members is married to who I think is a really great actor, Joseph Gordon Levitt. You know. You know Joseph Gordon Levit. He's an inception. Incredible films. What if this was all a by Joseph Gordon Levitt? That he really wants to play Sam Altman in a film because he played Travis in the one they did against Uber.

He did play Travis.

He got his wife to help blow up the company to get the story written so he could play Sam Altman. There you go. So if he ends up playing silent. Amen. We knew. We now have our answer.

You have. Your conspiracy theory will be validated then.

Tasha McAuley is his wife. Who's on the. On the board.

Yes, I. Kieran, I somehow feel like you and I are going to be talking to each other about this again in the next 24 hours. Some.

Oh, probably in the next hour.

All right, that is today's show. We will be back real, real soon with another episode. Marketing Instagram. This data is wrong. Every freaking time.

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