The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Latest OpenAI Drama: Altman/Brockman to Microsoft, Board Hires Former Twitch CEO; Employees Rebel

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

WTAF is going on? First the board announced former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as new CEO. Then Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were running a new division in Redmond. Then employees started rebelling with a letter demanding the board's resignation. Interested in the AI Breakdown Edu/Learning Community Beta? https://bit.ly/aibeta ABOUT THE AI BREAKDOWN The AI Breakdown helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI.  Subscribe to The AI Breakdown newsletter: https://theaibreakdown.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to The AI Breakdown on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAIBreakdown Join the community: bit.ly/aibreakdown Learn more: http://breakdown.network/

Today on the AI breakdown, the latest in the incredible saga of OpenAI. Former Twitch CEO comes in as the new interim CEO. Sam and Greg are going to Microsoft, but now in OpenAI, employer rebellion, seems to make everything up in the air once again. The AI breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to Breakdown.netnetwork for more information about our YouTube, our newsletter, and our Discord. Hey, friends, just a very quick note before we get into today's episode.

something I'm really excited about, and I've been kind of teasing and talking about for the last month or so. I am going to be running an experimental new AI education and learning community coming this December. Between December 4th and 22nd, every weekday there will be new video tutorials or written case studies or challenges, which we will do together to basically help people learn more about how to actually use AI tools. Now, this is going to be a paid beta experiment. It'll be $20 a month to participate, and the reason for that is pretty simple. One, I want people who are serious enough about learning AI to actually pay for this and invest in their future. And two, I want people to judge it on the basis of having actually paid for it and give me feedback accordingly.

I am opening up a very limited number of slots and will only be leaving registration open until Wednesday at 1159 p.m. East Coast time. To learn more and get the link to sign up, go to bit.ly.ly slash AI beta. That's bit.ly.ly slash AI beta. Hope you can participate. Looking forward to it. And now let's get back to this crazy open AI story. When I went to bed last night around midnight on the East Coast, a crazy, crazy thing had happened in the Open AI story. Later, at 4 a.m., when I woke up with my young kids because of some chaos at home, an even

crazier thing had happened. And this morning, after dropping my daughter off at school, yet another insane thing had happened. This is once again the AI breakdown, and we are ripping through the news, trying to do this as continuously as possible. So I have to do as little editing as possible. So apologize if you hear any bubbles or word fumbles. It is just sort of part and parcel of what we're doing.

All right. So where we pick up this story is obviously over the weekend, there had been incredible pressure on the OpenAI board to reverse their decision. Investors who hadn't been informed about this. And most notably Microsoft had, of course, been putting lots and lots of pressure on the company to bring Sam and Greg back into the,

the fold. Employees had also been pushing for that as well. They had been seen coming in and out of Sam Altman's house in San Francisco throughout the weekend. And on Sunday afternoon, Altman was back in the Open AI building, presumably to negotiate some deal that would bring him back and have the board leave. Now, we knew that at that time that the board was open to negotiations, or at least that's what had been reported, although it wasn't exactly clear what those were going to turn into. And it seemed like there were some big hang-ups surrounding the fact that they were going to have to leave and they weren't sure who was going to come in. So that's where we left things yesterday afternoon. Then around 11 p.m., we got information that a really interesting thing had been going on behind

the scenes. Miramiradi, the former CTO, who was now acting as interim CEO after Sam Altman had been fired, actually had intended to use her authority to bring Greg and Sam back in. So apparently she was just agreed to be the CEO simply to reverse the board's decision, or at least that's what it seemed. Boomberg writes, OpenAI's interim chief executive officer, Miram Moradi, plans to rehire her ousted predecessor Sam Altman and former president Greg Brockman in a capacity that is yet to be finalized, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Now, the problem was that Mira ran a foul of Adam DiAngelo. Adam DiAngelo is, of course, the CEO of Cora, who was formerly at Meadow or when it was Facebook, and he has been acting as the representative of the Open

AI board, and he did not want this to happen. So there was this new dimension of the battle between Mira on the one hand and Adam DeAngelo from the board on the other. Well, that materialized or metastasized into a crazy announcement. This is the one that I was referring to first, around midnight, that in fact Sam Altman would not be coming back to Open AI and that the former co-founder and CEO of Twitch, Emmett Shear, would be running OpenAI. Open AI, which frankly was a shocking twist for people. Here's how Ashley Vance from Bloomberg summed it up. She writes,

So here's what happened at OpenAI tonight. Mura planned to hire Sam and Greg back. She turned Team Sam over past couple days. Idea was to force Bord to fire everyone, which they figured the board would not do. Bored went into total silence, found their own CEO, Emmett Shear. Was a game of chicken until the very end.

Only Constant was bored talking to just about no one. Microsoft is not pleased about the outcome. Tomorrow will be an interesting day for stock. I suspect there might not be enough cars in the U.S. for the number of lawyers that shall descend upon San Francisco. Now, in terms of what the key players were feeling, Emily Chang also from Bloomberg writes, the Open AI board has hired Emmett Shira's CEO. He's the former CEO of Twitch. My understanding is that Sam is in shock. Now, one crazy little psychodrama aspect of this is the fact that Sam and Emmett were in the same class, the original class at Y Combinator all the way back in 2005.

Now, there were a few different takes to Emmett's hiring. Eliasur Yudkowski said, let's all take a moment to appreciate the sheer guts and courage that must be possessed by Emmett Shear in order for him to willingly step into the middle of this. However, others were not so appreciative. Here's how Kara Swisher summed it up with a dig at Emmett unnamed in the middle. Swisher writes, OK, I'm back for a couple hours to update you since this idiocy at OpenAI is pretty epic. Thus, let me tell you what's what. The negotiations with Sam Altman were ongoing and there was a noon PT deadline today when Ilya Sutskever and his side asked until 5 p.m. That's when things went wacky. After dithering with Altman and his side for a few more hours, they dropped this out of left field,

introducing a CEO, and I am being generous here, less than impressive in comparison to the interim CEO, Mira Muradi and obviously Altman. But she wanted Altman and Greg Brockman back, which was the right move, so the lady had to go. Kara went on about Emmett. Re interim dude Shear. I made a good Jucero joke over X, but he is well regarded enough, though not as experienced as Maradi. I assume he was the best one they could get who said yes and he was free and presumably bored. He sold Twitch to Amazon for close to $1 billion and stepped down as CEO of it in March.

Now, one of the things that many people noted is that Shear is definitely ex-pilled and seemingly more ex-pilled than Sam. And by that, I mean that he has a higher percentage doom chance, a P-Doom chance, in terms of how likely he thinks it is that runaway AI has catastrophic impact on the wider world and is even a civilization-ending force. Amirafrotti tweeted, the new interim OpenAI CEO, Emmett Shear, as everyone can see, has said wants to slow down the pace of AI development to ensure that products are made safely. Means he is, as one would expect, aligned with Iliath Sutskever, the master of open AI.

Kara Swisher pointed out, most important job qualification is to go along with Ilya's beliefs. It's a direction, like the Zax. Now, Emmett is not a quiet guy on social media, and he was not quiet after accepting this position. I'm going to read his full statement because it's obviously highly consequential to the story. Emmett writes, at around 4 a.m. Eastern Time, 1 a.m. Pacific time, Emmett wrote, Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once-in-aetime opportunity to become the interim CEO of OpenAI. After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just a few hours, I accepted.

I had recently resigned from my role as CEO of Twitch due to the birth of my now nine-month-old son. Spending time with him has been every bit as rewarding as I thought it would be, and I was happily happily avoiding full-time employment. I took this job because I believe that OpenAI is one of the most important companies currently in existence. When the board shared the situation and asked me to take the role, I did not make the decision lightly. Ultimately, I felt that I had a duty to help if I could. spend today drinking from the fire hose as much as possible, speaking with the board, a small number of major partners and listening to employees. Our partnership with Microsoft remains strong,

and my priority in the coming weeks will be to make sure we continue to serve all our customers well. OpenAI employees are extremely impressive, as you might have guessed, and mission-driven in the extreme. And it's clear that the process and communications around Sam's removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust. I have a three-point plan for the next 30 days. One, hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report. Two, continue to speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors, and customers as possible. Take good notes and share the key takeaways. Three, reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective

force to drive results for our customers. Depending on the results, everything we learn from these, I will drive changes in the organization, up to and including pushing strongly for significant governance changes if necessary. I will be rolling these out as they become clear over the 30-day period. Open AI's stability and success are too important to allow turmoil to disrupt them like this. I will endeavor to address the key concerns as well, although in many cases I believe it may take longer than a month to achieve true progress. I have nothing but respect for what Sam and the entire OpenAI team have built. It's not just an incredible research project and software product, but an incredible company.

I'm here because I know that, and I want to do everything in my power to protect it and grow it further. It's now 1 a.m. and I'll pick this up tomorrow. P.S. I am posting this here, both because I think it's in the general public interest to know in this case, but please don't expect all future internal communications to come through a public channel. PPS, before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety. Their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models. Now, that last paragraph is the one that really threw this into another layer of overdrive and disarray. Everyone

had been assuming for days now that the disagreement with Sam was over a specific question of safety, but now the new guy was saying that that wasn't true. For many then, it brought us back to the question of what was the point of them firing Sam? What was the justification? What was the reason? If anything, this created more questions than it answered. And yet that wasn't the only shoe to drop around that time, as Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, tweeted late last night or early this morning depending on your perspective, we remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to integrate 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. When that happened, even though it was literally 3 a.m. on the East Coast, the internet literally exploded. Balaji Shrinivasaan writes, Satya wins, reflexes of a startup CEO, resources of a trillion-dollar company. pulls this together in 48 hours from a cold start, gets it signed and over the line before

markets open. Sel Maltman retweeted Satya and said, the mission continues, to which Satya responded, I'm super excited to have you join as CEO of this new group, Sam, setting a new pace for innovation. We've learned a lot over the years about how to give founders an innovator space to build independent entities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I'm looking forward to having you do the same. Greg Brockman wrote,

We are going to build something new and it will be incredible. initial leadership, and then he pointed to all of the people who had been the first to break from OpenAI, and he, too, said the mission continues. Now, a lot of folks at this point were asking, why do this? Why not just go start your own thing? Obviously, there would be an endless supply of venture capital to spin up any new OpenAI competitor for Greg and Sam. And to me, I think it reflects just what a premium there is on raw computing power right now. Microsoft is building out $50 billion worth of data infrastructure next year, and other companies and even startups that are in, extremely well capitalized, just can't hope to beat that. In a world where at this point still

bigger remains better, and access to massive computing resources is incredibly significant. Remember, after all, that part of what Sam Altman seemed to have been fired for was going out and trying to build a competitor to Nvidia. It apparently made more sense to Sam and Greg to just build this thing from within side Microsoft right from the get-go to get access to all of those resources, rather than being in this weird, liminal inside outside position. Outside of just massive respect for Satya Nadella for pulling this off, There were plenty of folks who also pointed out that this represented just further centralization in the AI space, which was already being centralized by this computing conundrum.

Adobe's Chris Kastanova wrote, Elon Musk was worried that Microsoft would take control of OpenAI and shared a CNBC clip of an interview with Elon, to which he responded, inevitable. Meanwhile, others like Tab's Avi Schiffman started to wonder what the relationship between the new Microsoft Division led by Sam and the remaining team at OpenAI would actually look like. Avi wrote, Sam's new advanced research team is probably in control. of what's left of OpenAI. He's basically Ilius' new boss, Lull. And yet very early, there

were some indications that perhaps employees at OpenAI were not happy with how the whole thing had gone down. At around 1 a.m. East Coast time, Andre Carpathy tweeted a toxic waste symbol and nothing else, leading to tons of speculation, which would be resolved just a few hours later when this morning, as I was driving my daughter to school, yet another shoe dropped in which more than 500 of the 700 employees of OpenAI demanded a shift once again. In a letter they write, to the board of directors at OpenAI. And again, remember, this is this morning. OpenAI is the world's leading AI company.

We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position. The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.

When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAI acted swiftly to stabilize the company. They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties and were negotiating in bad faith. The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward, the one that would best serve our mission, company, stakeholders, employees in the public, would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that could lead the company forward instability. Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually

agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Muradi against the best interests of the company. You also inform the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed, quote, would be consistent with the mission. Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We are unable to work for or with people that lack competent, judgment, and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greb Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees that this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this step imminently unless all current

board members resign and the board appoints two new lead independent directors such as Brett Taylor and Will Hurd and reinstate Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Now, Miramir Amirati was the first signatory of that, but like I said, there were 500. However, the one that got people's real attention was little old number 12, Ilya Zedkever, i.e., the guy who had apparently been at the center of the whole thing and was in fact on the board. Now, right around the same time this letter was published, I tweeted, I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company, to which Sam Altman quote tweeted with three hearts.

Journalist turned VC, M.G. Sigler wrote, jotting this down. One, Open AI. at the behest of Ilya, fire Sam. 2. OpenAI at the behest of Satya discusses bringing Sam back. 3. Open AI at the behest of Ilya opts not to. 4. Microsoft at the behest of Satya hire Sam. 5. OpenAI at the behest of

Iliah discusses bringing Sam back or joining Microsoft. We're now back at the situation where Sam is either going back to OpenAI as CEO or all of OpenAI is joining Sam at Microsoft. And this is the absolutely insane moment at which we find ourselves. Silicon Valley, of course, is rallying behind

these employees. Investor Ron Conway writes, the great team of OpenAI who know better than anyone else what they have been responsibly building with Sam and Greg are voting with their feet. This board must go. Stop the coup. Meanwhile, employees of OpenAI are all spontaneously tweeting the same message. Open AI is nothing without its people. Hundreds of those messages populate the pages of X right now and are sending a fairly clear message. And so that's where we will end the story for now. Obviously, this is incredibly fast moving and there's likely to need to be an update even later today. But at the moment, that's the story. Theoretically, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are going to Microsoft, but now it seems like

500 people may be coming with them, or perhaps they'll be going back to Open AI as we thought was going to happen over the weekend. And so anyways, we have not seen the end of this story, and I'm sure that somehow it will find a way to just get crazier from here. That is going to do it, however, for this part of the coverage. So until later today, probably. Peace.