The 4 Theories Behind Sam Altman’s OpenAI Exit

On today's show, we keep breaking down the OpenAI saga because it keeps getting crazier. We're sharing the best insider info from all around Twitter. We're breaking down our perspective and we're going to close out with how it impacts you. On today's show, we are talking Polish part two of the OpenAI saga because frankly, there's just too much to talk about. This is marketing against the grain. Let's get into today's show. Kieran, I do not know how to process what's happening in the world right now. I'm still wearing black. I'm still in more.

You're still. I'm asking. I'm feeling very vibrant and colorful again.

You're wearing, you're wearing white and black. You're in the middle. You're halfway there, which is basically feels like where we are with this saga. We still don't actually have have resolution. We recorded yesterday, Monday the 20th at 1pm it is now Tuesday, the 21st of November, and there's been so much that has transpired in less than 12 hours.

Isn't it wild that we're, we're like three, three plus days into the biggest technology event of our lifetime and we still haven't got an official, like, here is why we did this. Like, it is unbelievable. Yeah.

So it's like there are so many things here amongst the cast of characters of this story that I don't even know where to start.

Oh, the script writing is amazing. We're going to find out that Martin Scorsese is on the board of OpenAI. He joined in secret and he has been writing this whole thing behind the scenes.

I want to start with the hero of this story. There are two heroes of this story right now. Sam Altman and Satya Nadella. Satya Nadella is who I want to start with first. Who is the CEO of Microsoft. He did, did a little bit of a media tour yesterday afternoon, Kieran, after he talked to Kira Swisher, he talked to Emily Chang on Bloomberg. And you know what the big takeaway is? He still does not have any answer from the board of directors as to why this happened.

I saw there was one.

He still has no explanation and just flat out said, I have got no explanation for what has happened.

I don't know the why.

Now.

He, he played an incredible PR game because he, he covered all of his bases. He said, if Sam and Greg come here, going to be awesome. If Sam, Greg.

Hold on, hold on. That's the second part of this. The Sam and Greg Going to Microsoft thing that we talked about yesterday isn't official.

It's not done. And I think it could be used as a force and function to, like, force the board to resign. Like, we're really serious about this. We'll blow the company up. The other thing that was in.

We're get to that in a minute.

He also covered his base where he said, I have not been told the why. I have not been communicated. So in my mind, Sam is an incredible leader because no one has given me any other reason to doubt that. Now, there was, like, a tweet going around this morning where an employee within OpenAI who was remaining anonymous said there was two. I don't know. You got that tweet that there was two reasons for why the board did this, and both of them were incredibly odd. One of them was he give the same project to two people. The other reason that was given was he give different opinions about someone within the company to two members of the board. Right. He told someone on the board his opinion of that person in one way and told another member of the board that opinion was very different in another way. Both of those things happen every day.

I was gonna say, are we firing every CEO in the world now?

Every manager, not just every single person who manages anyone.

Yeah, I was gonna say any major in the world.

That's the bar. I'm giving people the same work all the time by mistake. I'm, like, given different opinions by people all the time. That's the bar. Let's just call it a day. We'll all become individual contributors. Let's just, like, reset it back to zero.

In fact, I'd make the argument that if. If those things like that aren't happening, you're not being aggressive enough and moving fast enough.

They're just a part of every. Like, how many times have you.

Yeah.

How many times when you're moving fast have you done that? Like, it's just, like, part of natural with you personally?

Maybe a thousand.

Always. Always the different opinions. Ah, no. Kieran. Kieran. Kieran's doing great. He's a great guy. Kieran's a total jerk. He's an asshole. And both of them are right. And I actually don't mind.

Depends if you catch him playing.

What? Depends what day. So. So. So, yeah, that was the closest I had seen. I don't know if you've seen any. That was the closest I had seen on Twitter to the why. But I just cannot, for the life of me believe that that was given as a serious reason. Why?

No, so, so you have the CEO of Microsoft being forced to do a media tour and being like, hey, still, still, this happened on Friday. It's Monday afternoon. I still do not know what's happening. Which is wild.

This is a $90 billion company. This is not.

This is a company that was valued at $90 billion.

Right, 90 billion.

Well, let's talk about the other hero of our story, Sam Altman. At the time that Saatch is going on and doing this, 710 of 770 employees at OpenAI had signed the letter that they would leave and go to Microsoft with Sam and Greg. So that to me is mind blowing. A key side character in this whole story is Paul Graham, who is Sam Altman's mentor, founder of Y Combinator, and he had a great tweet on this. The idea of a standoff between three board members and 95% of an organization's employee is so unprecedented that it seems almost grammatically ill informed. I wouldn't have thought such a thing was even possible. If 95% doesn't count as a vote of no confidence, what number would?

I'm telling you, like, it has to be like you. You're three people destroying an entire organization of people who all want to work together. On Thursday during the day, as far as we know, normal day. Friday, they decide to destroy the company and never give a why. There just seems. There has to. There has to. It would. I think there has to be an incredible why or these three people don't have a career. Like, how. How could you ever have a career?

You were saying, you're basically saying that the three board members of OpenAI are either the worst board members in the history of humanity or they are like trying to save humanity.

Yeah, there has to be. There has to be like a. Yeah, it has to be opposite end of the spectrum. Because if it's just, hey, this person managed this person ineffectively, then I don't think it warrants, like, let's blow the company up. Not just blow the company up, but do you want to like, touch on the. I think the craziest.

Oh, before we get to the craziest, stick. Stick around for the craziest. I want to do one other Paul Graham thing because I think it's important and I think it tells you why this story is still happening. So this is a post from, from Brian, who shared a write up from Paul Graham from 2009. This is 2009. And this is what Paul Graham said about Sam Altman. Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be. He says, honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask, what would Steve do? But on questions of strategy or ambition, I ask, what would Sama do? What I learned from meeting Salma is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think. Startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a racehorse. But there are a few people with such force of will that they are going to get whatever they want, right? And so basically what he's saying is that, like, he has never seen, this is one of the most prolific startup investors in the world. He's never seen a more determined, more relentless founder than Sam Altman. Which tells me this is why this is happening. Exactly like, exactly he, he is not going to let go of his company. Which Kieran, validates the prediction you made on our, our first part one of this show, which is you're like, he's going to get OpenAI back.

Right?

I think, I think this amazing characterization of a human who, who is legitimately by somebody credible been compared to Steve Jobs. Very, very few humans. And this is one of them. And it's not on his designs as well. This is on his relentless execution of being a founder.

But I think it speaks to both reasons it's happened. I think it speaks to the reason it likely happened that the board maybe let him go because he is, from all of the descriptions of Sam, he is one of the most ambitious founders and CEOs in the world. But he is the most ambitious and founder of a nonprofit whose entire mission is to bring AGI slowly and safely to humanity. Whether you agree or disagree, like, that is the core mission of the company. So you can see there is going to be some friction at some point in time where the CEO of that company is the most ambitious founder since Steve Jobs. And so you could see those two things rubbing up against each other. You still need a pretty great why to like blow up the company. Let, let the founder go. But then to your point, I've always thought, even yesterday I said, this is from everything I've heard about him. I just don't see him letting this. I don't see him allowing this to happen. Like, Paul Graham had a great quote about Sam is, and he said like, if you drop, you dropped him into a island of cannibals he would come out five days later and he would be king. Like, he's just an incredible strategist, an incredible deal maker. So I still am pretty like, I'm like 90%, maybe more, that this all just goes away. And OpenAI exists in the same form within your board.

I think I've moved to that camp with you. Winner of the funniest tweet might go to Mark Andreessen. Kieran. He just posted this screenshot from a media article and says, I've got nothing. And it says Altman and OpenAI's chief.

Scientist.

The move to focus on large language models is the best way for the company to reach AGI or adjusted.

There's. That's made up. Like, it's. They would have given them. They would have given the media organization. There's.

Come on, that's. Even if it's not. Even if it's made up, it's hilarious.

There's a lot of technology and media have to be the two greatest enemies at the moment. So. But that is still. It's funny. Like all these technology founders, like engineers are incredibly amazing at like shit posting on Twitter. Like they've learned, they've just learned this incredible skill over the years of how to like blend into Twitter and just shit post with everyone else.

Okay, I know you want to get to your favorite storyline of the biggest plot twist of the last 20 hours. And I think we should show this tweet from Patacus. Patrick Campbell, friend of the pod. Shout out Patrick. But what Happened is apparently OpenAI approached its competitor and rival Anthropic about a merger. So the board goes to Anthropic about a merger to get the anthropic CEO to be the new CEO of OpenAI.

That is just incredible that a board can say, yeah, let's. Like there is one thing.

Oh, and by the way, this, his commentary is amazing. Apparently FTX owns. Yeah, I know, 20, 20% of anthropic. And so then FTX would own like seven and a half to nine and a half billion dollars to be debt free of OpenAI.

Man. Sam. Sam Bankman Fried was an absolute entrepreneurial genius. He's going to spend the rest of his life in jail. But he made this and like everyone should have just laid off. He had it all figured out after all this incredible investment. 5 to 10 billion. So I think that's great, right? Because as far as. I don't know, I don't know any stuff. But as far as I would assume that all of the customers that got Absolutely washed in the FDX scandal. Will get.

Yeah, they would. They would get some money back through bankruptcy, which is just a really funny, funny side plot of all this and sad side plot of this. But the crazy thing is that the board tried to merge with their top competitor.

Okay, this is wild. There's one thing that your board is saying the CEO is not aligned to your mission to saying the CEO has done something egregious that is like against our values. Saying the CEO is not performing the duty that we expect him to perform. But you can't just decide to merge the company. No, that is mine. That's all the things that happen. This is the most mind blowing to me that you can just say, hey, we three people who, other than the Quora guy who set up an, you know, really just set up a large SEO AdSense site. Right? That's. You know, I know he was in Facebook before that, but that's all Cora.

Oh, we're gonna get. We're gonna get to. We're gonna get to him in a second.

The others didn't even have. They've never created a company, never started the company. How. How can they have the gall to say, we believe we should actually take your company and merge it with your closest competitor? That to me is like when I was. I'm out, right? Like, unless again they come up with, okay, well, what happened was the plot to Terminator actually happened to me last week. It was all playing out and so we had to pull. Pull the plug. That's the only thing that would bring me back around to saying this board had a why that I could maybe, like, see some merit in, but I don't think it's going to happen.

Well, so, so, so, so here's. Here's the. Here's my take on the anthropic merger plot line, Karen, which is it feels like they were trying to do two things. Solidify a leadership position and not lose employees. But also, which I could maybe understand strategically, but they were trying to make sure that Sam didn't have an open door back.

Right.

Like, it makes it feel very personal.

Exactly.

It makes it feel like they were doing something so there was no backsies, that Sam could never overthrow what they did and get back and run OpenAI. It's like, oh, no, we're just going to OpenAI. As you know, it is not even going to exist anymore. And so there's nothing to come back to. Right.

So cut to Adam d', Angelo, who founder of Quora Quora. Is this like, cool Platform Q and A site. It really is a SEO arbitrage business. They've never really been able to monetize. I know he was X meta. I actually don't know exactly.

He was like, he was the CTO of Facebook.

Okay.

So he's Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz and everybody are. And Ama and Assad from Replit. All these people work deeply together at Facebook in the early days.

So they went on to launch Quora. I'm not shitting on Quora, because they've done a good job, but they launched this in October, and this is basically the GPT Store, Carbon Copy. Right. That you can go in, you can create your own bot, and then there's a creator platform where you can basically buy and sell these bots. This is three weeks before the GPT Store launched. Now, the odd thing is that this is one of your board members and now actually one of your closest competitors because you've just launched their product. So there is some rumors that, like, that could be one of the reasons that this happened. Again, that wouldn't be a great why, but maybe he managed to figure out a why to get the other board members on board. But that's. That's character number one is Adam d', Angelo, who's ex CDO meta.

Nick Carter here had a good tweet around. Like Elon Musk, Holden Karnofsky and Reid Hoffman all left the OpenAI board at various points due to all the conflicts.

Yeah.

Yet Adam d', Angelo, who's clearly impressively conflicted, stayed on. Right. Which is, you know, I think an interesting thing to point out is that you've had a lot of. Part of the reason. Look, if, like, if those three people were on the board, we wouldn't be talking about this, right?

No.

So amaj, who is the founder of Replit, very well thought of entrepreneur, says, I have known Adam d' Angelo for many years, and although I've not spoken to him in a while, the idea that he went crazy or is being vindictive over some feature overlap or any other rumor seems just wrong. It's best withhold judgment until more information comes out.

I agree with that. Because the feature that they launched.

I totally agree with that. Give us some more information. Yeah. What is holding. What is holding you back from giving some basic information to everyone?

Right. It is incredible. But I do. The reason I agree with that is because that GPT Store feature is a very competitive feature. OpenAI are not the only ones to do that. PO, which is Quora's version of that is not the only one to do that. There's going to be a whole slew of competitors juking it out for. For that category. So him thinking like, I don't think he cares that OpenAI did that. I think he probably had prior notice that they were doing that. And I'm sure he expected to have a ton of competition for the very same use case.

I'm willing to be a fair person and reserve all judgment on Adam d', Angelo, who's one of the three board members who's holding this up. But at some point you have to provide information. It's not like it's been 10 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. It's been we're on like day four of this going on. Right. Like you can provide. I'm not talking much. A few sentences, right. Like if you have the CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world coming out being like, I don't know why this happened, like that is a problem.

It's wild.

And I quite frankly am very skeptical and not very trustworthy of anybody who's involved in that situation and isn't willing to provide some type of clarity. Right. So there's one other layer to this that came out. This is a post from friend of the pod, Ginny Ginnya and I love her framing. It's season four. We have a new character. It's like each day is a season of this story. And Dustin Moskowitz, who was co founder of Facebook, who's founder of Asana, really strong technologist and entrepreneur, really, really well respected. This is a screenshot of Reddit. Right. So take this with a grain of salt but it's an interesting. It's outlining that there that Moskowitz and d' Angelo are friends. So he and Helen toner and Tasha McCauley all he's got connection to all three of these board members. And is there a chance that he's involved in influencing in the background is basically the gist of this. And I don't know or not, but what I know for sure is there's a bunch of ex Facebook people involved in the background.

Yeah, there's a lot of X meta actually.

Right. And I don't know what's going to happen, but there's a lot happening here.

And the odd we'll have a hot exclusive.

No all look all Sam is going to go on the all in pod Sam or Salcher is going to go on the all in pod on Friday and blow this up, lay it all out.

I Can't. That will be like a incredible. Well, I will say there's been some great Twitter spaces. Like, again, it does show some of the value of X as a platform. Jason Calakas and David. David Sachs and a bunch of people jumped on over 5,000 people. So again, this really is like bringing. This really is a moment in time for nerds. I think we are. We are getting a full series of succession in a very small, small amount of time. The other one thing I will just call out is one of the funny things that some of the OpenAI employees are doing are like, okay, like you, I think maybe you did show this yesterday, but I've seen it a bunch now. I, okay, I'll go to. I'll go to Microsoft, but I'm not using teams. And then Danny off is like, hey, join. Join Salesforce. And they're like, oh, I'll. I like slack, but I'm not going to a company that owns Tableau. They're never going to figure out AGI. So the employees know they're in demand. They don't have to like, worry about upsetting anyone.

But to be clear for Everybody, there are two outcomes here. Either this, the OpenAI team, basically all of them and some of which who are in d very dire visa situations and risking some amount of personal uncertainty to move to Microsoft. Either they're going to move to Microsoft and keep the work going, or Sam's going to figure out a way to get back in and run OpenAI. Those are the. I think those are the only two outcomes here.

Right?

I'm an optimist, Karen, as we've said many times on the show, and I had a tweet yesterday and Brian, co founder of HubSpot, responded. So I wanted to share those. I actually think the silver lining of all of this is that you've taken our most brilliant AI minds and you've catalyzed them together through a traumatic event. Right. And now they are going to be tighter than ever and work even better and harder together. Do you agree with that?

I agree with that. I, Again, I.

No matter where this happens, I actually think this is Excel. Like the board has failed because if they are worried about this accelerating too quickly, this is. This is accelerating faster than it was.

Right.

Their intervention increased acceleration of AGI instead of decreasing it.

I still, I'm still very, very confident that the most likely scenario is they all get back together at OpenAI and this is the footnote in their success that they have in the future.

I think Brian had a good kind of categorization. He's like, it seems clear that there are two tribes, the altruist, Ilya, Anthropic, et cetera, and the capitalist. Sam Satya. And so there's a little bit of a divide between the capitalist and the altruist, which is part of how we've gotten here. Right.

So the other, the other winner I want to bring up is the person who has covered this best on Twitter.

This is Chris Blake. Yeah, Chris Blake is a winner of this.

He might be the main, one of the main winners, like just hit after hit.

This is one of the totally is.

This is one of the funniest ones. He's done so many good ones. Like, hey, OpenAI. What? This is ridiculous. Cancel my subscription. So he's asking for the best recipe for a cooking a delicious Thanksgiving turkey. And then in chat PT is like, hey bud, can you ask us again later? It's me, Jeff, the last engineer here and there's just a lot going on today. We'll get back to you shortly as soon as I figure out how these GPUs work. And then he goes down here and he does a follow up and he's like, he asks grok, I want to know how to cook a delicious Thanksgiving turkey. And Jeff at OpenAI has been unhelpful. Can you help me? What's the best recipe? And then it just goes in and gives the rest recipe. But like he's just been cranking out the hits. So for as long as this lasts, he is a good person to follow on Twitter if you want to have some.

He's got some great entertainment value if you are the average viewer listener who does too. Look, we're doing two entertaining shows this week because this story is everything because it's Thanksgiving and you don't want us to go deep dive on marketing and tech nerdery right before you're about to eat a bunch of turkey. You want, you want some good sugar Holiday sugar podcast for the car ride to the in laws. Right? And so what would you tell the average person going into the holiday here in the States or the rest of the week around the world of like what should they be taking away thinking about this etc.

I think diversification in AI is good. There's a lot of models. I think OpenAI will be back together will still be the premium model, but it is not bad to start to make sure that you have two, three models that you can plug into play with. So I think there is diversification in models that would be the core lesson for a business, right, that you don't need to build on a single API. You can actually build in a way where you can plug and play into different models. And this is a good example of why you should do that. The second lesson for all of us marketers, I think are like, own the story, right? We talked about this yesterday. I think the more you can own the story regardless if you win or lose, at least you're in the battle. But you're never in the battle if someone else writes your story for you. And the third one is like, this is a nascent, this is a very early stage space. This space is like maybe 24 months at the most, at the most old in terms of like the shift from the companies that were wrapping around the APIs to now, the kind of companies that are being built today and the type of products that are being built on top of the large language models that exist today. So it is a fast moving space and you have to be prepared for a lot of turbulence, a lot of change. And that's just part and parcel of these kind of platform shifts, these paradigm shifts. And so they're, they're my kind of three takeaways that I would have for people who are trying to follow along. And the fourth is like, have some fun with it. Stories like this only happen once in a lifetime in tech. So like, go have some fun, create some fun memes and just join in.

Well, I think like you're, if you're listening to this pod, you're going to a family gathering and you're going to be the most knowledgeable person about this at the family gathering, right? And I think what you should tell everybody is like, there's our country in. I'm talking to the listeners us. Like, our country is divided. And this is like a great example of it. You've got some people who are very altruistic and want nothing but the best of this technology regardless of any economic implications. And there you have a group of people who are like, hey, I think you could have great economic implications that benefit our society as long as alongside the technology and advances. And I'm in the latter camp. I think you can have both. I think you have a CEO in Sam Altman, who I have seen no information that he has done anything other than try to be a remarkable person and a remarkable founder. And the reason you know that is because over 700 people would follow him, not just to a new startup, but to Microsoft, right? Like to a big established company with it. Probably not excited to be A part of. But they're going to do that because they believe in Sam and they believe in Greg. And all the jokes aside, my biggest takeaway from this story is that, like, character matters. Doing the right thing for people over and over again means that when you need them, they show up for you. Right? Like, they show up for you in a way that you would never expect. Like, early on, I think Sam had a tweet or something that said, like this. This process has been like being alive at his own eulogy, right? Because it's been people talking about how. How he impacted their life. And I think that's a. Like, when you're going into kind of the end of the year, starting a new year, like, I think taking a minute and reflecting on that and being like, oh, what would people say about me? Am I showing up as a leader, as a partner, as a wife, husband, what have you? The way that I should be to have the people by my side when something that I can't even control. But it's terrible. It happens, right? And I think that might not be a tech marketing answer, but, man, I look at all this, and that is the thing that blows me away, that it would be very easy if Sam and Greg and the team were not good people for everybody to turn on them. The exact opposite happened.

I am. You've inspired me. I'm gonna go and ask everyone that I know, inclusive of my parents. If I go and join Microsoft, will you come join me?

Your parents will for sure say yes.

Yeah, they want.

Dogs will say yes.

There's. Some people might. Might not say yes, but, yeah, there's.

There's. There's your brothers. Some other folks probably will say no, but. But I think. I think that is. That is going to be one of the enduring lessons from all this. I'm hoping by the end of this week that we have some good clarity and that Sam is back at the helm of OpenAI. I think you and I are like, hey, let's diversify and work with lots of models, but let's not slow down the work we're doing on OpenAI, because we still believe in the future of OpenAI. And even though it's been a sad few days, we're still optimistic about the long term, right?

100%.

All right. This has been marking against the grain. Hope that everybody has an amazing Thanksgiving. We'll be back with you after the break, and we'll talk to you real soon. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

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I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails.

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