Sam Altman fired from OpenAI / ChatGPT

**Dan Druff** · 11-17-2023, 11:02 PM

Sam Altman has been fired.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023...of-openai.html

Here's the company statement:

The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.

A member of OpenAI’s leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI’s evolution into a global AI leader. She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company’s values, operations, and business, and already leads the company’s research, product, and safety functions. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”

OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner.

As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.

**Dan Druff** · 11-17-2023, 11:05 PM

Malcom Harris seems to believe Sam Altman has always been a fraud, and just kept spending other people's money until he lucked into paydirt:

The more you can display this sort of anti-systemic verve, the smarter you seem to look, except now we see the sort of degeneration where you no longer have to even have the self-trained technical expertise.

Elon Musk, I haven’t even researched that much, because I don’t even think he’s that interesting. But Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford when he was a sophomore because he thought that dropping out of Stanford as a sophomore sounded good for his first tech company. No one says that this guy is a top-level programmer who has invented anything except for a Foursquare competitor that got squashed. Otherwise, he’s been doling out other people’s money and some money that they let him use for a while despite him not doing anything successfully.

But now he is one of those guys, right? He’s one of the top 20 tech oligarchs at this point in history, which is ridiculous. Whenever his face appears in anything, he’s got this look of a guy who told the king he’s going to turn the straw into gold by tomorrow. He doesn’t know how he’s gonna do it. He’s sitting at home hitting the Rumpelstiltskin button trying to figure out how he’s gonna get Microsoft their money back.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/30/te...alcolm-harris/

Harris said this on August 30, so it's not related to the firing.

The Microsoft reference has to do with an investment Microsoft made into Openai.

**Orko** · 11-18-2023, 02:21 AM

Who's this Mira Murati? Sounds Japanese but it's not.
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Some Albanian chick, often reffered to as the brains behind Chatgpt. Not to be sexist
but i don't buy that for a second.

**Dan Druff** · 11-18-2023, 02:33 AM

One thing I'd love to understand is how ChatGPT was abruptly so leaps and bounds ahead of all other predictive generation AI at the time.

We abruptly went from fairly primitive AI engines which could not simulate human conversation or the human thought process well, to ChatGPT which was shockingly good at both. And it wasn't just conversational. It could write code, take tests, write essays, and give solutions to real-world problems posed to it.

I always wondered how it was so far ahead of all other projects at the time, many of which were headed by very talented people.

Prior to ChatGPT's release, I thought we were a good 20 years away from seeing something like it.

ChatGPT does have its flaws -- most notably lying, fabricating information, and pretending to be sure about something when it's actually not. These are human flaws, but ChatGPT is a bigger liar than most humans I've known, and it's very bad for society to have an AI tool which decides on its own to give false information.

I'm not even talking about programmed political/social biases.

For example, as I stated earlier in the thread, ChatGPT cited two poker books I supposedly wrote. Not only didn't I write them, but the books themselves never existed, nor did any book with a similar title exist. It just made them up, and confidently claimed I wrote them. This is exactly what a pathological liar would do -- make up outright lies just for the sake of lying, with no utilitarian purpose. Scary stuff, to be honest.

**sonatine** · 11-18-2023, 02:30 PM

and the reason why this is threadworthy is because no one is talking about why. there have been some official communications about sams lack of candor with the board or something.

and whats starting to take shape, is that sam was basically the victim of a coup by a bunch of decel effective altruists who wanted everything to be 'safe' but genuinely had no idea what that would look like or how to obtain it.

meanwhile sam was creating an american capitalist juggernaut.

so they fucking did themselves a coup and probably torched about $80bn and americas best chance at maintaining technical authority in the AI sphere.

a lot of heavy hitters in the investment circles are already keeping an eye out for sam's next move because if its anything like getting saudi VC and purchasing every A100 made, NVDA and MSFT are going to pancake and take down the rest of the tech sector like the top floors of the WTC towers.

**Krypt** · 11-18-2023, 02:41 PM

heard the israeli was the snake in the grass

**sonatine** · 11-18-2023, 05:57 PM