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 OAI’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.
News article covering the situation: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires-sam-altman-greg-brockman-employees-openai
Altman’s Microsoft hiring comes just hours after negotiations with OpenAI’s board failed to bring him back as OpenAI CEO. Instead, former Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has been named as interim CEO.
Altman had been negotiating to return as OpenAI CEO, but OpenAI’s four-person board refused to step down and let him return.
I mean it’s obviously a power play. But the characters involved are this:
Altman: entrepreneur extraordinaire, head of YC, CEO, investor, etc.
Brockman: entrepreneur extraordinaire, former CTO of Stripe (e-commerce infra company), investor, etc.
Nadella: CEO of Microsoft, nuff said.
Sutskevar: researcher extraordinaire, academic
McCauley: RAND Corp scientist (no idea what that means but it has scientist in the name)
Toner: Georgetown academic.
All of the tech entrepreneur people and investors – the people who are obsessed with just making money – are on one side. And all of the academic, science people are on the other side. Recall that OpenAI was founded by a bunch of researchers and academics who explicitly made it a nonprofit, which Altman changed once he became CEO in 2019.
Idk if the academics really care about the betterment of mankind, but I know for a fact that the other guys’ are driven by pure greed.
The people obsessed with making money? Do you know what a CTO is? Greg Brockman is an engineer and was leading all technical operations at stripe. He himself has been involved in multiple big papers, also the lead researcher of GPT-4 just quit OpenAI to join Greg and Sam… Ilya is not even listed as a main contributor for GPT-4 and Greg was…
No man, ilya is bigger. Greg’s name might be on the paper but doesn’t mean he was involved in doing research. ILya is famous for many bug things.