Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - OpenAI and Microsoft, Human Nature and the Not-So-Effective Altruists, Imperfect Information and the Cult of Sam Altman

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Reactions to one of the most extraordinary weekends in the history of the tech industry, the blindspots that were exposed among both the OpenAI board and Microsoft, the non-profit model for development and OpenAI's recruiting prowess, and a groundswell of support for Sam Altman as a variety of questions remain.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? Feeling defeated, Andrew. I had this great plan. I had some business to take care of these few days. I was going to write a nice, relaxed daily update over the weekend of the Microsoft Night Conference last week.

We were going to record together in Vegas as we talked about last time. Have a lighthearted sort of holiday mailbag. And, you know, the real reason to be mad at Open AI in this entire affair is it just completely screwed up my schedule. I'm just a total mess over here. I know so much for the relaxing holiday week that we had in front of us. And I do appreciate all the great emails we got for the rollicking, freewheeling mailbag that is not going to be happening this week. Maybe we'll double back next week. But yes, Open AI for the second time in 12 months became one of the biggest.

in the world. We could have recorded on Saturday. The podcast we would have recorded on Saturday would have been instantly useless. And so now here we are Tuesday morning. And we'll see how long this podcast retains its relevance. But I'm excited to be here. We recorded dithering yesterday. And we're like, man, we have 12 hours. Can we make it 12 hours? I think we did. So hopefully things are in a bit of a holding pattern now. But we'll see what happens. I got to tell you something, Ben, I am beginning to wonder whether all this altruism is actually as effective as they say it is. That's my number one takeaway on the way out of the last 96 hours. I mean, you're actually, you just kind of jumped ahead to a point I want to get to in this podcast.

I do think there is some sort of ideological component that undergirds a lot of this. It actually touches on a lot of the conversations we've had about AI over the last few weeks and months. And I think it is pertinent to this case. But yeah, we shall get to it in due time. Yes, we will get into all of it here. I'll anchor us at the outset with a timeline of events for anybody who's been living under a rock or really anybody who just wants to appreciate the sheer chaos of the last week. Bear with me because there's a lot to get through here. But what are the challenges about writing, especially like the free articles is how do you balance between people that have read everything you've written and sort of new readers? It's a real challenge.

This is like the ultimate manifestation of that where some portion of our audience has been following every single twist and turn for the last, you know, 96 hours or over long this is going on. And there's a whole other segment of the population that has no idea. So, so yes, bear with us. I think anchoring us is a good idea. Yeah, and you know what? I feel no guilt about forcing people to sit through the updates because I think there is also value in just stepping back to appreciate how crazy it's been and how many twists there have been. So last Thursday, November 16th, Sam Altman was on a panel at APEC and said that in 2024, quote, the model capability will have taken such a leap forward that no one expected.

He also said four times in the history of Open AI, the most recent time was in the last couple of weeks, I've gotten to be in the room when we pushed the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. Getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime. So that is important because Sam was still serving as the public face of the company, less than 24 hours before he was fired by the board. So just underscoring how sudden all of this was. And then number two, whatever breakthroughs he was alluding to there may or may not have been part of what spurred his exit on Friday. So just keep that in mind as we move forward here.

And just to be clear, I mean, as you're listening to these updates, we still don't know what spurred his exit. Exactly. Which cuts in multiple directions. It's not, I mean, some communication from the board to be nice. But also, we can't leave aside the fact he might have done something wrong, but at some point, someone should say something. But either either here or there, continue. No, but that's a crucial part of the spectacle here, okay? Because the entire media has been, at least the entire tech media apparatus, has been pouring over the details here for about five days straight.

And no one has gotten to the bottom of what exactly happened that spurred this board action, including a bunch of investors who have billions of dollars. invested in Open AI. Including Saki Nadella. Yeah, he's still guessing right there along with the rest of us. So hi, Sachi. I hope you're listening here. According to Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of Open AI, on the night of Thursday, November 16th, Sam got a text from Ilius Sutskiver asking to talk at noon on Friday.

So Friday, Sam joined a Google meet and the whole board was there, except for Greg Brockman, who is chairman of the board. Ilya told Sam that he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon. Later Friday afternoon, OpenAI released a statement saying, quote, 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 Open AI.

So from there, Brockman announced he was quitting and the entire world was speculating about what exactly prompted any of this. Saturday afternoon, a day later, news breaks that Sam Altman is in talks with the Open AI board to return as CEO, just an unbelievably funny twist after 24 hours of everybody being like, oh my God. Do you use? Yeah. Open AI just fired Steve Jobs part two. And then Saturday night, Altman tweets, I love the Open AI team so much, which sets off a procession of heart emojis, quote tweeting Sam Altman's tweet. This for me was probably the cringiest moment of the entire affair.

There was another tweet storm last night, like highly coordinated. Did you catch that one as well? I did. And I hated that one as well. but you know glad that the people of open AI are sticking together through this open AI is nothing without its people um sam sunday afternoon tweeted that this is the first and last time i ever wear one of these and was pictured with a guest badge which to me what i saw that initially implied that he was coming back as CEO he knew he was coming back as CEO he was entering in negotiations with the board and um knew he

get all the leverage. Alas, Sunday night news breaks that Sam is not coming back as OpenAI CEO. And then about an hour later, it's reported that Twitch CEO, former Twitch CEO, Emmett Shearer, is taking over. Sam is reported to be in shock over the news. And then at 253 a.m. East Coast time, Satya and Adela tweets, 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 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. We look forward to moving quickly, to provide them with the resources needed for their success. Love that Satya Nadella led with a note on everything they announced at Microsoft Ignite. And then says he looks forward to getting to know, Ebert Shear. Yeah, it was terrific. And then the final update here. Well, the funny thing was just what we've been on the note because he was using like

the extended sort of tweet format. So in the timeline, you didn't see the Sam Altman and Greg Brockman part of the tweet. saw the top part. You had actually click into it to sort of expand to see the whole thing. A great flex from Satya. A little PS. Well, he knew that everybody was going to be clicking through to see the full version of whatever he was saying in that moment. And so I really respect the move from him. On Monday, Ilya tweets, I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm Open AI. I love everything we've built together. And I will do everything I can to reunite the company. So just to make all of it even weirder. And then per the

Wall Street Journal, Sutskever flipped his position following intense deliberations with OpenAI employees, as well as an emotionally charged conversation with Brockman's wife, Anna Brockman, at the company's offices, during which she cried and pleaded with him to change his mind, according to people familiar with the matter. Apparently, Ilya was the efficient at the Brockman's wedding. So I have a mailbag question for us, but have I left out any details that you deem crucial to the rest of the story here? Well, I can't remember the exact timing.

I remember a lot of timing. I remember the fact that that Sionidale tweet came out at 153, my time, when I was in the middle of writing my fourth version of an article about this and then had to pivot once again. But I believe it was just minutes after I posted that subscriber's tweet came out, but I'm not sure if that.

came before or after this letter from opening high employees about saying how they're going to like follow outman if the board is not removed that included Ilya who's on the board it was on it's been it's been uh yeah it's been quite an adventure to say it's less that's all speechless yes on Monday morning I saw Ilya's name on there and I thought for a second that he was among the group of people that the employees were demanding

resign and lo and behold turns out he'd flipped entirely from where he was on Friday. He's demanding that he himself resign apparently. Ashley Vance from Bloomberg tweeted 700 of 770 OpenAI employees are saying they will go now. What is the board going to be bored of? A valid question on the way out of all this. One of the weird things about this by the way, this isn't like the main thing to sort of talk about on this podcast. But like the tone of that letter and like the overwhelming support and the overwhelming support and then all the tweets with the heart emojis and, you know, open eyes,

nothing without its people or whatever might be. It kind of felt like a mini current thing sort of bit, right? Not many. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I mean, it felt large for those of us in tech, but particularly amongst the company itself, right? You have these massive sort of movements of everyone swept up in whatever sort of,

you know, the current thing is. And like how many. me, you know, how much thought and deliberation was going into, like, these various employees or is ever just sort of like swept up in the tide? Like, there is this dynamic of the way the internet works that just manifests itself in these sort of collective actions that spin up super quickly and, you know, sometimes dissipates and sometimes don't, you know, the question is to what extent do they actually impact the real world? But there was just a, there was a sense of that that's like, oh, this feels familiar. We've seen this before. Even though it was like, sort of

of a very micro version of that. Yeah. And the reason I say not many is because it has all the hallmarks of every other current thing that we've experienced over the last like 10 years or so. It seemed to me to be sort of a reality distorting situation for a couple days there where there's this groundswell of support and momentum. And then it's almost like the facts don't even matter, which to your point, we still just have no idea what was driving all of this. So we're all working with imperfect information.

Yeah. There are facts that were still unknown. And I think that's actually really important to sort of put out there up front. We don't know why the board did what they did. Like like we, I mean, Eric Newcomer to his immense credit wrote a piece saying like, look, can we put the brakes on a little bit? Like I mean, Altman's had some messy exits. Like from, you know, no one's quite clear what happened when he left Wycombinator when he was sort of the hand. pick successor from from paul graham who founded it we know he's like talking about this hardware thing is that open eye affiliated he's going to make chips with the saudi wealth fund like there's there's all these pieces that are going on and it is notable that the media spin that came out sort of immediately

was basically as favorable as possible to altman and it was framed in the look all these safety folks are mad that we're pushing forward and they want to they were mad about the developer day or whatever it might be and we're just trying to sort of you know progress humanity and it's like tailor made for all these sort of biases that I in particular am a part of right like like I do think that we should be biased more towards progress I think and so it's like it's just sort of like catnip out there and what makes this notable and jumped out to me is when we were talking about the AI regulation a couple of weeks ago, one of the organizations we were critiquing was OpenAI, led by Sam Altman.

He was when I talked to Gregory Allen about what was prompting this, he's like, well, when Sam Altman says it's a big danger that we need to act. And there was a bit of like Open AIs in the weed. They have Microsoft as an ally that knows how to work Washington better than anyone in tech. It seems awfully suspicious. They're all signing up for this deal. and it's not like they're actually stopping work, right? And this is sort of like gives you pause.

Like one of the scary things about a sort of current thing moment is you sort of lose perspective on everything that came around it. And this is something that jumped like suddenly the exact same person that a lot of people in tech were critiquing or we sort of in passing sort of insinuating seems to be in the favor of a sort of cynical interpretation of we're going to get sort of regatory lock in for this massively potentially profitable new technology that we're not sure if there's a moat or not, if it can be protected or if anyone can sort of make a bottle. This person is out there campaigning for regulation.

And suddenly two weeks later, everyone is completely unified. Like, look, this person is for progress. What are these other people doing to stop him? Yeah, exactly. And again, I'm not casting aspersions in any direction. I'm just pointing out that we, there's a lot here we do not know. There's a lot we don't know. And so to the extent I wrote my piece and what we talk about today, there are things

that can be talked about that are evergreen, that are like just systemic sort of problems. And so if someone comes back and listens to this podcast, I was going to say in a month, but realistically listens to it tomorrow when it's published. There's like facts that have changed. Like that is an important acknowledgement. And that acknowledgement doesn't just apply to this podcast. It applies to every piece of quote-unquote. quote, news we've gotten over the lax 96 hours.

Like, for example, Saturday, was the board considering bringing him back? Or was that a rumor that was planted to put pressure on the board to bring him back? We don't know. We don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there was just a lot of righteous indignation and sort of definitive commentary almost from the outset.

And it just built and built and built throughout the weekend. And I agree with you that just an appropriate pause. humility here as we wait for more of the facts to become clear. Feels like the right place to be. But in any event, Craig says one thing that is bothering me a lot is that in general, folks on the board seem to be the folks most concerned about existential risks of AI and focused on how we build an AI that aligns with human values. But based on this weekend's events, these same people also seem so naive about human

behavior as to be unable to anticipate the consequences of their actions and how Sam Altman or the employees of their company were likely to respond. So how are these people going to build an aligned AI if they can't do that? What do you think, Ben? And what do you think? What do you think? Seems like a reasonable question to me. Yeah. I mean, look, that was my takeaway. Okay. And to be honest with you, I come away from all of this with less trust in Sam Altman. and his lieutenants and less trust in the people who forced him out of the company, albeit we don't have all the facts. But most importantly, I have less faith in the notion that a group of super intelligent

private actors who are all way too online are going to be able to properly balance the upside and risks that come with what's allegedly the most powerful technology the world has ever seen. Like, if anything, I would prefer to have someone. of the control be more widely dispersed. I'm not saying vest all the power with the government, but vesting all the power with a group of like 12 people at Open AI also seems unwise to me, particularly after the last couple of days. I 100% agree. And number two, this is a failure case we have seen repeatedly in sort of human history. There is a tendency amongst very smart people

to sort of have this thought that if only I had control, I could actually make the world function properly. And Newsflash, historically, that has never turned out very well, right? Actually, it has turned out like a disaster. The largest disasters in history, even look at the 20th century, right? It's remarkable, you know, like obviously everyone points to the fascism in Germany and Italy, in Japan, wherever you might as say. The movement that actually killed the most people is communism.

And by like an astronomically larger number, like 60, 80 million in China alone. And that's before you get into the Russian purges and famines and what happened in Ukraine and all these sorts. You know, not this Ukraine, the previous Ukraine when they like starved a whole bunch of them. This I think the communism analogy is one that does jump out to me. This sense that if only we set up society in the right way, that it is going to be this sort of utopia that emerges. And this idea that we need more top-down control and allocation of resources to achieve the ends that we want to achieve. And the problem is that you run into fundamental issues of human nature.

You run into a question of incentives. What motivates people? What can people do? You run into the issue that there's so much in the world that's not knowable, right? Like the beauty of markets and the beauty of money is that money is that money is, an abstraction. You can't eat money. You can't live inside money. Like, like, the whole point of it is that it is an abstraction that allows all the resources in the world to be mediated by sort of a common sort of item that we all agree is worth something, even though it's not intrinsically

worth anything. It's a medium. It's a medium for negotiated. And that, that medium of money is also can stand in for human incentives, for human motivations. Oh, I want to earn money. I don't need to articulate that I want to earn money because I want to provide for my family, or I want to earn money because I want status, or I want to earn money because I want to do, you know, do good things, or I want to travel, or whatever your motivation might be, you just say, I want to make money. And this idea of a market sort of mechanism mediated by money that actually collates and aligns incentives because all your personal incentives and all your personal foibles and all the foibles of different groups going together is all smoothed out into sort of a common

mechanism that broadly speaking does push everyone in sort of the right direction. And the reason I talk about this is this is the communism obviously is antithetical to that. It doesn't trust the market. It thinks that there should be no money. Everyone should just like provide and get what they need. That's obviously a simplistic articulation, but not far off from the truth. And you have a situation here where you have a bunch of folks that are super smart and say, we ought not, this can't be trusted to profit, a profit motivation. This can't be trusted to a normal market mechanism. We need to have the smart people in charge figuring it out and directing it.

And I'm not saying, you know, it's the same failure case. It's people who are very, very, very smart. There's a question later on this rundown. Like one of my principles of analysis to assume that people are smart. And in this case, there's no assumption needed. They are absolutely incredibly brilliant. But there's a sense that because you're smart, the ambition and belief that you can know everything and solve everything is problematic. And AI kind of makes it worse.

It's like an accelerant because AI knows so much. It's like, well, communism did work, but maybe if we applied AI to it, they would actually understand all the parts of the market and understand all the pieces and all the levers. And you go back to like this whole lot. lobbying thing and the reason why I'm opposed to sort of too early government intervention, there's this sense that, oh, we need to do something because of this existential risk. And yet, without an appreciation, that the way government actually interferes in a market is an incredibly blunt instrument. And it's absolute best.

It is going to warp the market, is going to move things in ways you don't understand, is going to be subject to corruption. It's going to be subject to people trying to regulatory capture all the things we sort of talk about. But this whole mentality that, oh, no, the government will fix it. Like, it's naive. It's like, it's like this not understanding human nature. And this is a real commonality. I think Craig's point, well, it comes across as snarky, I think is actually incredibly relevant and ought to be one of the biggest takeaways here.

This idea that we are going to be smart enough to control AI or whatever. might be is fundamentally flawed. Now, that doesn't mean there's not potential issues. I actually think this is a long monologue to basically say exactly what you said. I think you nailed it. The solution that we're going to have to stumble to and get to is we're going to having it dispersed, having opposing actors, people with different incentives that are competing in the same market.

That market could be a monetary market. It could be the market for military power. Like that is obviously an application here. But a balance of forces is. sort of, again, something we know from history is the way these risks are ultimately managed. And when you don't take that approach, when you pursue a top down, we're super smart and we'll solve for everybody else. Disaster follows again and again. I think that's well said. And the only other question that I have on this front is it's further

down in our outline, but we can just get to it now. Like to the extent that there is consensus that this has been a disaster and that whatever the board was trying to achieve, it's quite possible that they're going to end up driving most of their company into the hands of the most powerful for-profit entity on earth or one of them, one of like three or four. But to the extent that that's true, are we objecting to the board's means or the board's ends here? And to the extent that we're holding them responsible. objecting to the board's entire existence and reason for being. That's my objection.

The whole fundamental issue here was this idea. And this whole thing is a beautiful example of how the smart person ideology falls apart. You know, let's go back to COVID because why not? That's what we do all the time, right? There's this bit where when you're communicating with the broader public, you have to be simple and you have to be transparent. Like, you can't be super complicated. Like in this thing, do this, do that. And then, oh, we're changing it completely because people who are immersed in it,

who are following it closely, they can understand the twists and turns. They can understand why a recommendation today is totally different than a recommendation in three months because, oh, the facts change. That is true. Those are things that happen. But when you get so stuck into the details and you assume that if you just write down the right guidelines, is you provide the right words, people will follow. That's not how it actually works.

People are busy. They're living their lives. They have other stuff going on. They're watching seven hours of TV a day, whatever it might be. They're not going to follow, like the fine details of what's being communicated. That's sort of number one. Number two is you go back to the censorship or questions about online content. Part of the motivation here is this sort of just assumption that if only people don't see bad things,

they won't have bad beliefs, whatever the bad is defined. Or if they see good things, they will have good beliefs. And it's such a ridiculous understanding of human nature. But you see that manifested here. You had a board with a charge to develop general AI safely for humanity or whatever it might be. They decide that the current executive, and that is their role, is to choose the chief executive,

was not fulfilling that mission, although they didn't really say it was like bad communication with the board. They didn't really cite their core sort of thing, but whatever. And so they remove him. The problem is that that was all fine and proper, and they now had power according to words,

according to the words in the charter. But the actual power was held by Microsoft because they have GPUs. They actually provide the means by which this work is done. They provide the means, means by which if Altman and Brockman want to continue doing this work, they need to go somewhere to get that. They have the agreement from the IP that is downstream from providing those GPUs because OpenAI didn't have a way to get capital on their own because of this convoluted

structure that they had. And, you know, it was going to be funded by Musk. He pulls out, where are they going to do? And the reality is that power in this situation had nothing to do with words on a page. They had nothing to do with the actual sort of issues at play here. At the end of the day, however this sort of ends up turning out is what is very clear is that Microsoft has power. The board has no power. And the best they can do is screw up what was going on. It's not like they can magically because they say the right words, get rid of Altman, and then everyone's still there, and they keep getting development, they keep getting money

from Microsoft, they keep getting access to GPUs. They have no means to do any of that. And that's the reality of political power. That's the reality of economic power, is actually having the resources that you can bring to bear, having credible deterrence, having credible ability to sort of act in your interest. And if you don't have that,

if all you have is words on a piece of paper, you're powerless. And that's just reality. And this is a shining example of how the smart person mentality can go wrong. get so wrapped up in words, get so wrapped up in the text, get so wrapped up in the details, and so wrapped up in well actuallying everything, well actually this, Satchinadella. Yeah, well, and, you know, I think to Craig's point, the failure to anticipate human behavior is just a giant blind spot in all of this.

And I think if we're ascribing the board's failure to that blind spot, obviously, if the goal was to drive Sam out, which may have been a reasonable goal, you want to be able to put him out to pasture without inciterating the entire company or most of the company's value. And I think strategically speaking, there may have been better ways to approach this, at least wait until the deposit hits. I mean, no, the actual, again, like, we don't know what happened, which by the way is part of the bad strategy. But you have to, if you're going to do this, you have to get Microsoft on board. You have to have a communication strategy. You have to get out in front of this. Exactly.

And you have to think like a for-profit entity. And to your point on just the model itself being what's worth looking at with heightened skepticism in the wake of all this, to say the least, I understand why the model had appeal, you know, in theory, just like a communist will touch. you, communism has never failed. It's just never been executed properly. And that's the problem. This is like, I mean, here, I have to drop this because I actually watch the piece of media. And so when I do that, I have to This is so exciting. We go back to Oppenheimer, right? I know. It was very exciting. Have I brought up Oppenheimer on this podcast? Yeah, I can't remember. I don't think so. Okay, great. This is perfect. So one of the, the threads in Oppenheimer is like, how is it, why is it that this sort of absolutely brilliant, sort of person who did such great service for the United States. Like, why was he a communist?

And like, was he, like, sharing, like, secrets or whatever might have happened there? And why is he suddenly, you know, like all these, all these sort of factors. And leaving aside the sort of historical veracity of the movie or whatever it might be, I think it isn't sort of an interesting point here where Oppenheimer is in many respects a critique of smart person syndrome. This, like, where there's just, there's no. actual understanding of human nature and of humanity. And to the extent the movie's sort of depiction of their treatment of their children is like accurate, for example, right?

It's like it's kind of weird that the person who is claiming fealty to a particular ideology because it treats people better can't manage to treat people close to him well. Right? Right. And I think that's something that you do see sort of, again, as a failure case for this sort of approach, when you're motivated by caring for the entire world, it's very easy to no longer care about those around you to sort of no longer sort of pay attention to it. Maybe it's an excuse. Maybe it's a rationalization, whatever it might be. But the reality is reality happens in the real world. And if you don't understand the real world, if you don't act appropriately in the real world.

Yeah. the different levers that you're going to be encountering. You end up whatever, you know, you end up in a bad place. And to me, this is just, again, I say this as someone that is wary of, you know, I don't want to make the same mistakes. Like this is why touching grass is important. Actually, you know, remembering why number one, treating those around you and those close to you first, putting that as a priority matters.

It doesn't just matter because it's the right thing to do that we are. in my estimation, the measure of morality is how you treat those closest to you first and foremost, because that's where you actually have an effect. But number two, it's such a easy way to make critical errors to get lost. Because as you grow larger, as your concerns extend from your family or your friends to your city or your state or your country or the world or the future of humanity to take a sort of pertinent example, by definition, you're sort of moving up and up in layers of abstraction. You're not actually going to talk to or interact with every person in the world. And this is the whole effect of altruism sort of foundational critique that I have.

This idea that every decision you make should be a sort of utilitarian calculation. Oh, if I earn more money here, I can contribute money to XYZ and I can save, you know, 10 children from malaria and that's justified, like the epitome of sort of ends justify the mean sort of activity. you're operating on a level of abstraction when what you're actually doing in day-to-day life is very, very real. And that mismatch between the abstraction of your justification and the reality of your actions is where so much of this goes wrong. Yeah, well, as far as the utilitarian calculations of the board, we may want to double-check the math on what they came up with over the last week or so. But what I was going to say earlier is that in the abstract, I do understand why this nonprofit approach to developing AI and AGI had appeal. Because when you look across tech over the last 10 to 20 years, there are instances where the motivation for profit has made the product worse in various cases, whether it's Twitter, whether it's, you know, Google ads or whatever it may be.

But I think the crucial point, as I understand it, in terms of why this won't work or why tension was inevitable, this dysfunction was inevitable, is that open AI in order to pursue AGI needed massive amounts of compute and needed to be a for-profit entity in some respects. And ultimately, that just meant that they were going to come into tension with this board somewhere along the way. And so now here we are. And it certainly seemed like Sam Altman wanted to expand on the commercial side and the board for whatever reason was uneasy with his vision for the immediate future on the Open AI side. No, let me jump in here. A few points. Number one, again, I'm hesitant to say what or what did or did not motivate the board. It remains the case we don't know.

And it's worth pointing out that this board composition is fairly. nuts. Like, first off, there's three empty seats because, like, and traditional board investors, like Reed Hoffman was on the board, you know, three of them left this year. So number one, that's a screw up by Altman or whoever is motivated the board. Like, you, you, you, it was shrunk down to this, this core piece. Number two, you have a couple of folks that, that don't seem to have any sort of operating or real world experience, but are, like, very heavy in sort of the EA world, right? And why is the deciding factor about this? Like, well, you know why, but it's very ideologically driven. And so that's sort of number two. Number three, there is this other board

member, you know, the CEO of Cora that is a customer of AI. They have like a bot sort of platform. They're doing this, this sort of creator, people who make bots can make money that kind of looks like the GPTs that that open AI just launched. a massive conflict of interest, right? Like so just even if you want to have a nonprofit board, leaving aside all the other things, just the composition and the selections here were terrible. Like this is nothing to do with their points of view or whatever might be.

Just like basic board composition given the power that's in place here. Yes, Friday night in Las Vegas as I was waiting for qualifying to start, felt like I was waiting hours on end. And literally I was waiting hours on end, shivering in the grandstand. But finally started Midnight Pacific time. And as I was waiting, I was reading the resumes of everyone on the board. And I just could not believe that this group of a handful of people had as much power as they did over one of the most important companies on Earth. And this gets to some of the structure issues you were talking about.

And why I do think that even though Satya is like being held as like, like, you know, King, King Satya coming in and like sort of saving the day and, and are potentially putting Microsoft in a stronger position. All that we can get into that, whether it is or not. The reality is this was a massive screw up by Microsoft. And, you know, it's funny. I regret not sort of honing in on this earlier. Because I, you know, there was a lot of debate, I think, within Microsoft about this opening ideal in general, where the benefits are super. clear. We've been talking about them for the last couple of years. They have access to sort of the leading tech that's in the markets. They're monetizing on both sides, right? When open AI sells

access their API or they make money on chat GPT, that flows to Microsoft because it runs on Azure. Azure gets to have the exact same APIs. And Microsoft is infusing them in all their products. It's been a massive win. At the same time, this is their entire sort of future roadmap, and they didn't have control. They didn't even have a seat on the board. they didn't have a seat on the board. This gets to the composition issues where it's this nonprofit on top of this cap profit company, which is the part of the company that Microsoft actually bought into. And so, like, there was, there was, like, quote unquote, good reasons from a, like,

regulatory perspective or whatever that they didn't have a seat on the board. But this is the bit where getting caught up, it's like, we're talking about this deal and, like, let's look at, well, legally speaking this, legally speaking that, you step back and you forget that wait. We're committing the future of our company to an entity that we have no control of number one. And number two, they do not have the incentives in place that will naturally align them to our interests. In a normal situation, even if it was some sort of startup, the board would have a fiduciary duty to make money. Right. And that is like a deterrent. That's like a mutually assured destruction sort of limitation that even if you have unqualified board members or even

if you have ideologically driven board members, at the end of the day, they have to be concerned that if they blow up the company, they're going to get sued back and forth for billions of dollars, right, from their investors, from customers, from whatever it might be. Deterance matter. And like, we've given up on deterrence all over society and we do it in our companies as well. You had a board that was very clear, by the way, to their credit, if you go to like the structure page, we are not here to make money. Like we, that is not our motivation, sort of XYZ. And Microsoft is going in and is not only does not have power in this sort of legal

perspective, they also don't have the deterrence sort of on their side of a fiduciary duty, which does actually matter. Now, again, they seem to have rescued themselves from the worst case scenario. which would be we've committed our whole company to a strategy and the impetus of the strategy is gone. Yeah, the value is gone too. Because they do have real world control. Like they have the GPUs, right? That is actually their saving grace.

But you do have to, I think real questions ought to be asked about how they let themselves get in the situation in the first place. Yeah. I think those are important questions. And, you know, people have been talking about the investors and all the, lawsuits that are going to be flying in the wake of all this and the tender offer from Thrive Capital that is currently pending. I have no idea how exactly all of that will play out. I was not an M&A lawyer. I'm not an expert in corporate transactions. See, this is the problem with lawyers. You sit here and I'm waiting for you and I'm like,

I was thinking, I don't want to talk about the Wigle stuff because I don't know about it. I'm like, oh, we have another lawyer on the call. Every time you talk to a lawyer, no, every time you talk to a lawyer about a legal issue, always say, oh, that's not my area of specialty. They dodge legal questions more than everybody else. I was talking to an M&A lawyer about this on Monday night at a basketball game. And he said, yeah, we're going to be punting the litigation aspects to a different firm here. So, yes, everybody's just passing the fuck in the midst of all this. Terrible.

I will say, though, all these deals appear to have been agreed upon when the structure of OpenAI was very clear and the board's fiduciary duties were not a secret. So to the extent that all these people have jumped out on Twitter and said, well, there goes the tender offer and the investors are going to be coming for their pound of flesh at the end of all this. And the board better watch their ass. I'm not at all convinced that's true. And my guess is the reason everyone on the investor side is so pissed off is that they realize they have no real recourse and no real outs. So good luck to them. Microsoft, as you mentioned. Well, the other thing, too, is we're dealing with a private entity. So there's going to be like

the sophisticated investor sort of classification, which goes into being able to make private investments in the first place. The whole point is that you are qualified and capable of evaluating the risks inherent in something that is not a public security. So it's going to be hard to come on and say, me, a sophisticated investor, read this webpage, which clearly said they're not going to be motivated by profit. They're going to be motivated by other factors. Give me money. There's a big hole in that argument.

But it seems unfair. So let's go to trial. Yes. And so on the Microsoft side, I'm curious for where you are 48 hours later, Bill Gurley over the weekend tweeted, if you told me 10 years ago. that a group of the smartest engineers in the land would evoke the threat, do what I say, or I will go to work at Microsoft. I would not have believed you.

Amazing shift in corporate reputation, parentheses, and much credit to Satya. I think that's a good take on all of this. Well, it is, though, this is where it is also fair to sort of question how much credit Satya deserves at the end of all this. No, no, no. Saya deserves, he's, Sanya is playing the hand that he dealt himself, to be fair.

I was going to say that's the thing. He dealt himself those cards. But like, you know, so, you know, Altman and Brockman are not yet at Microsoft, right? Because that was the, that was the mind-blowing part. These like startup people are going to go work for Microsoft. That's wild. How did, how did Sanya pull that off? Well, he hasn't pulled it off yet, right?

And it sure seems like, you know, when you go into. a negotiation, right? There's this, there's this term, term of art, you know, best alternative to negotiated agreement. Batna, right? Yep. Yeah. Do you, you know, batna in law school? I'm familiar, of course. And the point is your leverage in negotiation comes from your willingness to walk away, from your willing to sort of do something else. And at what, to what extent is this agreement to go work for Microsoft sort of in an attempt to front as far as, you know, Altman's Batna is concerned. It seems pretty clear he would prefer to be in charge of opening eye, ideally with a new charter, at least a new board that is, you know, sort of aligned

in sort of his direction. And at first it was like, well, I'm not going to come, you know, I'm not going to come back. Or if I come back at the whole board he's resigned, they have to issue a statement saying that the exonerating me about whatever it might be. And, you know, the clear implication being that I don't need to be here. And the board called his bluff. They appointed a different CEO. So I don't think it's an accident. A few hours later, suddenly Satianadella is out with his tweet, which, by the way,

the real deadline in all of this was the stock market opening at 9.30 a.m. You know, Eastern on Monday, right? And Microsoft's entire strategy is looking like a total disaster. And so that tweet comes out, the stock market, you know, the stock rallies. and then a couple of years later, it's like, well, it's not actually agreement yet. And now Sondi is out there doing TV saying, oh, yeah, it's totally fine.

Like, we're going to work with Open AI and Altman regardless. If they're together, fine. If they're separate, that's fine too. And, you know, this is the one piece that, you know, let's get there. Let's actually see it before we buy into it because it feels like a Battena play. You know, like Microsoft is Altman's Battena here.

and will he actually go do it? And so, you know, TBD. Yeah. So if he were to go do it, Janick says, can you please talk about Sam Altman's incentives? The point of confusion I see most is, why is Sam joining Microsoft as opposed to starting something new?

He'll be smothered at Microsoft. Do you think that's a valid concern in terms of what's possible for Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and any amount of OpenAI talent that, ends up at Microsoft if things don't work out with the reverse coup they're trying to engineer on Thanksgiving week here. So if you go to a new company, you're starting from scratch. You have to, and you're starting from scratch in two perspectives.

Number one, you have to get all the money. You have to just in general to pay staff and to get GPUs. Number two, you have to get GPU allotment. There aren't enough GPUs in the world. So you have to go somewhere to sort of get them. And then number three, you have to actually build the models all over again. You have to start from scratch. Microsoft solves all three of those problems.

They have unlimited money to sort of like effectively speaking. They have GPU capacity. And number three, they have a perpetual license agreement with OpenAI for access to their IP. As I understand this, having not seen the agreement, but I've heard it from a few different places, this includes full access to the source code and full access to the model weights. They have everything. So you go to Microsoft, you start from exactly where you were. You continue working, you know, or whatever the last drop was.

And Microsoft gives you all the GPUs that you need and, you know, because it's sort of in their interest. So I think it's actually pretty obvious why they would go to Microsoft. It's a, it's a, you're measuring in years when it comes to technology that is the, you just a massive arms race. they actually want to win and control this, then there's kind of no other option, right? And so that

that is why probably the bat not is valid and they will go to Microsoft. Now you can get into broader, you know, psychoanalyzing questions about he just wants to be in charge. That Altman does not have stock in Open AI, that he brags about that

fact. Like, I think that you were criticizing ads, for example, I think Google being constrained by the need to make money is good, right? Like, I think in general, that is a, it's an understandable incentive to the extent it leads to bad outcomes. It leads to outcomes that risks sort of status in the market. The reason we have debates around monopoly and antitrust is concerned that those incentives get sort of out of whack and they aren't sort of in place and you don't, you, you, ideally we all want a well-functioning market.

Right. But just in general, again, historically speaking, this has been the best way to capture value from driven people and to harness it and constrain it in a way that is good for society. And just for the record, I agree with that. And the only thing that I was doing was basically giving the board the benefit of the doubt and saying it makes sense to me in the abstract if you look at AI as a uniquely powerful technology alongside everything else we've seen. It makes sense in theory, but it doesn't make sense in practice. No, totally. Totally. I just, if you're looking at it as this technology that's definitely going to reshape the way the entire world lives and thinking to yourself, well, the motive for profit may harm it and distort it in certain ways. And let's try to keep it pristine and, you know, but there's always going to be.

Yeah. No, exactly. It's so, it's so friction was inevitable. I'm not bad. I'm just in general. It's so clueless about humanity. There's always going to be an incentive. There's always going to be a motivation.

you take away money as a money factor you're going to have something else it's just sort of it's just sort of the reality here and you know i there's there's some statement from from altman i can't remember where it was i thought it was an interview with i don't know i couldn't find it anywhere but it's something on the lines of asking him this question of like okay if this is so powerful what is actually going to be the the the mechanism to control it's like oh yeah we're going to basically we're going to have a board right we're going to have like like people that are making decisions it's like number one that that that seems questionable. Number two, that seems to vest an extraordinary amount of power and a small amount of people. Should we call it a board? We call it a pulp mural? Like what is the actual name that we want to use here? You go to government, for example.

Why do we favor democracy? Not because it's an efficient way to run things. Because it's a check on tyranny. It's like the least bad sort of thing. We need a government to help organize society, but we want to have some matter of accountability. You can make the same case about market mechanisms, right? Yes, we could sit around. We could point out every issue with it.

We could sit here for days and days and days and do it. But the question is, what's the alternative? And I will take an option that has the incentives front and center. You're like money. That's the incentive. Good. And I understand that. I get that.

We can operate around that. We can incentivize. We can have mechanisms that other people want to come for your money. They're going to compete with you. They're going to do sort of X, Y, Z. And, you know, just to check with you. The thinking there is that the motive for profit then is going to act as a check on the possibility that your for-profit enterprise could, you know, poison the entire world

with technology that ends up wrecking society. all over the world. Well, I mean, if we want to get sort of philosophical about the future of AI, I think the reality is, and you sort of mentioned this before, is having multiple AIs, right? Like, the good guys have an AI, the bad guys of an AI. Whoever defines good guys, bad guys is sort of immaterial to the point of there being sort of this balance of course. The board of open AI can define who's good and who's bad.

I trust that group of four people. I mean, this idea of there's going to be a singular unitary power. and a small group of people making decisions on behalf of mankind is insane. Like, sorry, not to jump on board of the let's get tech people to study history bit, but this is actually a pretty example where it might be useful to study some history. It doesn't work out very well. Yeah, no, I think that's very fair. But so downstream from this particular conversation,

one aspect of this story that I found really interesting as an outsider is the notion that OpenAI's tech talent is, uniquely valuable and that losing some of that talent is its own existential threat to Open AI poaching some of that talent is a massive opportunity for competitors. So is it possible then that Open AI's bizarre structure helped recruit all that talent and build this unbelievable roster? Like are there ways the structure may have helped Open AI to this point? Absolutely. I think that that's arguably, if you want to be completely, cynical about this entire thing.

This is sort of your reasoning. This was, and you go back and you read the opening blog posts of opening I's announcement. It talks about being attractive to these kind of people to come work for. And so, like, there is a very sort of nefarious spin on this, which is, you know, AI is going to take over the world. You know, we'll, you know, figure out to make money in the future. How do I actually get the best people on my side?

Oh, we're going to do it. We're not here for money. We're here for the good of humanity. They will really appeal to your better angels. Let me go to Robert Oppenheimer and say, look, no, if we can figure this out, we can have communism everywhere, right? Or whatever it might be. I mean, it's just a, I'm purposely screwing up the story. But that, you know, there is, I think, a real aspect here.

That was a motivation. You have folks that are very, very smart. They're frustrated at the state of the world. There's so many stupid people out there doing dumb things. What if we invented AI? And we invented AI and we could actually bring this world. of abundance. No one had to work anymore. We could provide for everyone. AI with you, this sort of utopia. And, you know, what's counter to that? Oh, a big company controlling it and just trying to

make money from doing it. That's bad. I don't want to support that. I want to support this other sort of vision. And all along, you're just skating over the reality of human nature, the reality of the reality of reality, the way the sort of world actually works. So I think this is actually a very insightful question that is critical. And by the way, you already had, I've talked about Altman's sort of history, you had Anthropic. Anthropic was the other set of people from Open AI that were upset with the direction open AI was going and decided we're going to go in another, like we're going to spit off

and start our own company. You basically start a direct competitor. And you're insufficiently worried about safety and all these sorts of things. Like this is this whole view of the world of, you know, we're super smart. and it's sort of like it's endemic to it's like physicists in the 30s. It's really, that really is an analogy here. And, you know, absent this sort of like, you have really, really smart people that are fabulously wealthy.

They've been working in tech and you're fabulously wealthy and you can create. You're sad. Yeah. You actually don't need money. A lot of the point of the money is the force that comes from investors having you being legally liable. for like other people's money and things along those lines. And so it was it was kind of like a real arbitrage to realize that we can actually get the best folks by giving them the play playing into their sort of ideology about the way the world works and actually build this.

And yeah, and we'll give it all the way to Microsoft. We'll let them, you know, we have all our models, all our things. That perpetual license is capped at AGI. If we achieve AGI, Microsoft doesn't get that. And if we achieve AGI, we've made it. Like, we control the world. Well, it's also incredible to me that AGI and what AGI actually represents is completely subjective. So the breadth of the terms in both the board charter.

From what I understand it is defined in the Microsoft Open AI agreement. Again, I haven't seen the agreement, but it is, yeah, but whatever it is, apparently we're not there yet, even though it is a classic sort of thing where the goalposts are moved every time the previous one is reached. Yep. Well, as far as the people involved here, we could just bounce around towards the end. I did want to read this section from the Atlantic over the last couple of days. Anticipating the arrival of this all-powerful technology, Sutskiver began to behave like a spiritual leader, three employees who worked with him told us.

The more confident Sutskiver grew about the power of Open AIs technology, the more he also allied himself with the existential risk faction within the company. For a leadership offsite this year, according to two people familiar with the event, Sutskiver commissioned a wooden effigy from a local artist that was intended to represent an unaligned AI, that is one that does not meet a human's objectives. He set it on fire to symbolize open AI's commitment to its founding principles. And then, I got to tell you, that made me smile because one big disappointment with hosting Sharp Tech is that I feel like I got here like 10 years after all the most ridiculous and embarrassing Silicon Valley behavior was reined

in. And I'm happy to know that at Open AI, the most absurd era of Silicon Valley is still alive and well led by Ilya and his effigy for unaligned AI. I don't know whether you have any I thought the FG story was number one. I thought that was the second funniest story. The funnier one was the chanting, feel the AGI, feel the AGI. It was a difficult choice. I couldn't decide which anecdote to go with, but either way, I enjoyed the color there on the internal dynamics at OpenAI. The other thing broadly is it's one of the weird things about tech, for sure.

I mean, tech is just a fundamentally weird entity because of this whole thing we've talked about zero marginal cost. Just the idea of free content and free the world. And then it was in San Francisco where you have traditionally this sort of countercultural and sort of hippie sort of mentality. And a lot of these stories, you go back to the foundation of tech the first 15, 20 years. It's insane. Like, it's wild. There's a reason why Burning Man is basically like a tech festival. And there's a degree to your point.

It's all been sort of rubbed away or sanded down to a large extent. But that fundamental sort of character in nature does exist. And you tie it to this question about the value of employees. That's true. Like, the number of people that can effectively build this sort of stuff is very, very small. And you go to tech companies. general, the number of employees that meaningfully move the needle that actually could rebuild that company from scratch is shockingly small.

And the reason it works, this stuff is very, very hard. It's very, very hard. And it's hard. That's what was eye-opening for me, just to jump in, is I know a lot of people in tech, and they're all super, super smart. And so I think mentally just sort of put everybody on the same level. and say, look, Google, Deep Mind, they've got a bunch of incredibly talented people.

And it's all sort of like a commodity at a certain point where there's not that much differentiation between one brilliant person here and one brilliant person there. And so it was enlightening to see that, in fact, there does appear to be some differentiation, at least in this little space here. Oh, there's differentiation everywhere.

Like, there's the sort of talk about the 10x engineer. That's not true. there are like 100,000 X engineers that like that just because it's a it's not just the ability to do the math and to do decoding and that sort of thing. It's the conceptualization of how the entire system works and do and to be ultra productive in that way and to, you know, to sort of like channel an entire organization along a particular path to it to achieve an outcome. And the reason it works is because the nature of tech and its economics is that you can get so much. much leverage off of a very small number of people because the product scales infinitely. It's just software. Right.

You can duplicate it sort of endlessly. And there's no transaction costs. You can actually serve the whole world. You can have two guys in their dorm room create one of the most powerful entities on earth. At a very, there's brilliant people at Google for sure. But at a very functional level, Google is a two-person project that rules the world. Like, like, and that is the leverage. That makes this industry interesting.

and it makes it weird. And it's why you have this catering to employees by and large. We were talking about this, you know, with a friend of ours who's like, don't these people have contracts? It's like, no, no, they don't. They're all at will. And you hear all at will, you're like, wow, that's terrible for employees. No, it's terrible for employers because there's such a, the real scarce resource is talent.

And so you have the people are, are incentivized by they get these big equity grants and their company that vests over four years, and then that equity is replenished every year. So when and if you leave, you're giving up, like, on paper, like a few million dollars. And so if you want to recruit a superstar from another company, you have to match their unrealized sort of equity grant. Like that's sort of, that's exactly. And so the problem here is if the board just cratered Open AI's value and this tender offer, which is going to be for employees so they could cash out is not going to materialize,

there's no handcuffs holding them from going somewhere else. And you could be sure Microsoft will match their equity, right? That's the least of their sort of concerns. Now, this has been great for people in tech that are smart, but not essential because everyone gets in on the deal, right? That's how it all works, even if there's not that many people that really do truly move the needle. But all these dynamics go into this.

It's why you tolerate weird behavior. It's why you come up with convoluted structures to incentivize the few people that matter to sort of join you because it is true. It actually, it really is true. It's not, not everyone in tech could sit down and go to open the eye and build this. It's a very small number. And that, I would encourage you to think about that. That applies broadly. It's not just open AI. It's probably there to a more extreme case because it's, it is so advanced. But, but yeah, this is the foundation of so much tech weirdness. Yeah. Well, it's certainly on Monday night, I was trying to use Ticketmaster and was marveling at how awful the tech behind Ticketmaster is.

So we need to get one of those 100,000 Xers over there. Yeah, we can shake hands on a monopoly antitrust. Oh, my God. Just figure it out. If you're going to make every ticket on earth electronic, then please figure out the electronic side of that model. But I want to close with this because, look, on one hand, this whole weekend was a, watershed moment in my crusade against people who tweet in all lowercase letters. On the other hand, I'm worried that the lowercase faction, they have never been more powerful after the last

couple of days. Each new update from Sam Altman feels like he's taunting me. But I want to read a couple tweets from over the weekend and just say my piece on the Altman front. So Ron Conway, What happened at OpenAI today is a board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking. It is irresponsible. And it does not do right by Sam and Greg or all the builders of Open AI. Eric Schmidt, Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 billion in value and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I and billions of people will benefit from his future work. It's going to be simply incredible. Thank you, Sam Altman, for all you have done for all of us. And then Elon Musk's, I am very worried. Ilya has a good moral compass and does not seek power.

He would not take such drastic action unless he felt it was absolutely necessary. Now, to be clear, Elon was very much in the minority this weekend. And the first two tweets I read from Ron Conway and Eric Schmidt are much more representative of the breathless praise that was being thrown around with regards to Sam Altman. And there were three things I read in Bloomberg that made me a little skeptical. So number one, in the weeks leading up to his shocking ouster from Open AI, Sam Altman was actively working to raise billions from some of the world's largest investors for a new chip venture, according to people familiar with the matter. Altman had been traveling to the Middle East to fundraise for the project, which was code named Tigris, the people said.

Altman has also been looking to raise money for an AI-focused hardware device that he's been developing in tandem with former Apple design chief Johnny Ive. Altman has had talks about these ventures with SoftBank, Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, Mubidala Investment Company, and others, as he sought tens of billion dollars for these new companies. And there was also WorldCoin, which Bloomberg describes as, quote, his eyeball scanning crypto project, which launched in July and was promoted as a potential universal basic income system to make up for AI related job losses. I lost it at WorldCoin and the idea of making up for AI related job losses with the universal basic income. I don't know what exactly happened here, but in addition to longstanding skepticism of people who tweet, in all lowercase letters, which, by the way, is 100% serious.

Another useful heuristic for decoding the news is that anytime Twitter is in near universal agreement about something, the truth is generally a lot more complicated. And oftentimes it's the exact opposite of whatever narrative Twitter has decided on. And when I think about Altman, you know, I think it's reasonable to wait and see exactly what was happening before turning him into like a Steve Jobs figure and turning this into a Steve Jobs and John Scully situation. And my guess is that we're talking about somebody whose greatest skill is generating hype and managing public opinion. And I think the takes that are framing him as Steve Jobs are not going to age, are not going to age well. And that's just sort of my instinct

in all of this while noting that we have no idea exactly what happened here. But I just wanted to put that on the record as we go through all of this. That's sort of been in the back of my mind as I processed the news the last four or five days. I completely agree. And that's why up front we're not making definitive statements. What we can talk about is should Microsoft have made a deal with a nonprofit? Why is it a nonprofit? What's going on there?

Are the people on the board sort of qualified? Like all these sort of issues. But the decision itself, we don't know. And I think your worry and your sort of suspicion of the, you know, I talked about the open AI staff current thinginess, but there was like a Sam Altman current thing that was sort of happening online, right? And the reality is every time that happens, there is a lot of pressure and like sense that I got to jump in and say my piece too.

And of course it's going to be in support. And anyone that has the courage of their convictions, is mostly just going to not say anything. And by the way, credit to Elon Musk. Now, to be fair, Elon Musk has had direct involvement and public disputes with Alton. They started opening eye together. They opened it and Musk bailed.

And that was the, you know, and of course everyone wants to demonize Musk, I guess that's a point in Altman's favor. But then again, you had the weird white combinator thing. You had the, you had the anthropic thing. Like, they're like, something happened that however much you want to talk about the ideology of the board and this idea that these few people are going to control the world, which I think is generalizable.

That's the critique that we can all learn from. Yeah. We could all learn from. The fact remains that they made a decision that did indeed incinerate billions of dollars in value and they held to that decision. And by all accounts, they are still holding to that decision. So, now, Ilya has bailed, to be fair. So like maybe, maybe there is something else going on.

I don't know. And maybe, again, like I said, there's a weird conflict of interest on the board. There's, there's all these other sort of things going on. Maybe at the end of the day, it will turn out that is what it was. And then we can really go in on how screwed up this all was. And by the way, bring an Altman for criticism for allowing the board to get in such a state that this could even happen. Wiser board. members. But until then, yeah, I agree with you. Let's be careful. Like, like, and this isn't a comment,

you know, this is a broadly generalizable one. I think there's a lot of people out there that regret a lot of stances they took and a lot of sternness they, with which they deliver those stances and a lot of vigor, which with they sought to cancel those that disagreed, that did it all in service of something that they realized them. Maybe it wasn't quite right. Yeah, exactly. You know, and let's be careful. And I just needed a place to vent after rolling my, eyes for 96 hours straight at the discussion surrounding Sam Altman. Like to the extent we're talking about him as some Christ-like figure who's the greatest visionary of his generation, I look at the ideas that are thrown out in that Bloomberg piece.

It's like, let's start a chip company. That's like picking up a basketball and saying, let's be LeBron James. Let's compete with Nvidia. Let's talk to Johnny. Yeah. Let's invent the new iPhone. Like, like actually, this is weird in a couple ways. Number one, the big sort of like, this is where I'm frustrated myself.

The big sort of, there was a question of breaking my mind when I talked about this hardware bit. How are they going to fund this, right? Right. I asked that. Like we talked about this like three weeks ago. Sorry. Sorry, I reduced you to a question of the back of my head and you're actually sitting right in front of you. But then also like these entities are separate from open AI. So Sam Altman is the founder of them and he controls them.

Like talk about conflict of interest, right? Like this is a walking conflict of interest. How is that going to work at Microsoft, by the way? It's, I think a reasonable question, a reasonable question to ask. So there's a lot of dodgy weird stuff going on. That has nothing to do with the board and would raise fair board questions. Now, again, if these are the issues, the board should say something, right? At some point, like, you need to sort of, you can't just abide by, hey, that's the rules.

Where are the managers? We've decided what it is. That's not how this works. You have to actually operate at a full level, on a PR level, on a communications level, on a securing allies level, all these real world things that Altman appears to be very good at, that Satya is good at, and the board seems to be completely clueless about, which, you know, to be talking about affirming your priors, affirms by priors about this whole sort of ideological movement that is way up in the clouds. It doesn't actually deal with the real world. But that doesn't change the fact that we still have the courage of their convictions. That is that is something. There you go.

Well, I'll close with this tweet from Mateo Franchetti, the CEO of 8th Sleep. We checked our data. And last night, San Francisco saw a spike in low quality sleep. There was a 27% increase in people getting under five hours of sleep. We need to fix this. I still can't tell whether that was serious or whether that was a joke. It appears to have been serious. a little creepy that 8 Sleep has that.

Yeah, just a shiny example of how stupid tech people can be. Like, what are you doing? I don't know. I don't know. But it tracks with my personal experience because Sunday night, I could not sleep. I was compulsively refreshing Twitter for about 12 hours. It was an amazing weekend for memes. I didn't include those in the timeline that we went through at the start of the show.

They don't translate as well in the podcast medium. but great work by tech Twitter across the board here. And yeah, I got like four hours of sleep on Sunday night because there was just too much going on. So I'm glad that both of us got a good night's sleep Monday and have been able to reconvene here and go through it all. And I'm sure that it will continue for weeks to come here and be a dominant topic on Sharp Tech. But you look great. You don't let me, you don't be moan and growing that I got one hour of sleep. I had appointments at any of them.

What a mistake. I'm like, no, I actually had it all planned out. I'm like, Microsoft Ignite is going to be on that Wednesday. I will be able to write my update over the weekend and I can get a good night's sleep on Sunday and make these appointments at 8 o'clock. Oh boy. What a mistake. You know, let's talk about mistakes. Let's talk about my mistakes.

Ben makes plans and God and or the AGI God in the sky laughs. And or Jesus Christ himself, Sam. That's right. Well, we are coming back after Thanksgiving. We will get to some of the fun mailbag questions that came in to email at sharptech. If you have takes on Altman and or OpenAI, send those as well. I look forward to running through all of it over the next couple of weeks. But for now, a hearty, happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there in the audience and a happy

thanksgiving to you as well, Ben. Go Bucks. And let's circle back next week. Well, this is an opportunity to be cringe in a genuine way, which is we are thankful for all our listeners, everyone listening to this. And this is our chance to sound really corny and say it and meet it and it be appropriate. So thank you, everyone. This is our heart emoji to the listeners who email and keep us consistently entertained all year round. So hard emoji to all of you. Apparcase or lower keys. Absolutely proper punctuation and uppercase letters in that message there. But Ben, have a great rest of the week and we'll come back Monday.

Talk to you later.