The Vergecast - Emergency podcast: chaos at OpenAI

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel and Alex Heath join David Pierce after a long, winding weekend reporting on the dramatic shakeup at OpenAI, still in progress. Further reading: Turmoil at OpenAI: after firing Sam Altman, what's next for the creators of ChatGPT? Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI OpenAI’s new CEO is Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO Emmett Shear named new CEO of OpenAI by board Hundreds of OpenAI employees threaten to resign and join Microsoft Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman  How ChatGPT Fractured OpenAI - The Atlantic Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. We’re doing a survey on how people use The Verge (and what they’d want from a Verge subscription). If you’re interested in helping us out, you can fill out the survey right here: http://theverge.com/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to an emergency crossover episode of the Vergecast and Decoder. I'm Eli Patel. I host both shows. I've got David Pierce with me. Hello. Alex Heath is here.

Hello. We are supposed to be off on both shows this week, but given what happened with OpenAI over the weekend, which is a story about org charts in many ways, we had no choice but to do an emergency episode of our podcast, especially because Alex and I spent our weekends on the phone. breaking a bunch of news about the discussions that led to what at this moment is Sam Altman Microsoft employee, which I can confidently say as an outcome no one thought would happen in this entire saga. This is so bananas.

It is, the whole thing is insane. I'm very much in the weeds on this whole thing. So, David, can you help us get through what happened this weekend? Because it is crazy. Yes. Okay. So we're going to do the following. in three parts, because I think this is the only way to do it in a way that makes any sense.

The first thing we're going to do is just basically tell the story of the last 96 hours, starting from sort of midday Friday until where we are right now. Things are still changing. There's a non-zero chance that real news will break while we're recording this. But we're going to get as close to the moment as we can as we do this. And so I just want to tell the story all the way through. Then I want to talk about the org charts piece that you're talking about. We're going to talk about Open AI as a company and how this happened.

And I know that's a thing you two have spent a lot of time trying to sort through. And others have done really good reporting on over the course this weekend. So we're going to talk about that. And then at the very end, I wrote this down as just winners and losers. But I think it's useful to talk about kind of what this landscape looks like going forward. So all of that said, let's just start at the beginning. And the beginning is Friday afternoon, at least as far as I can tell, out of absolutely nowhere, OpenAI publishes the blog post saying in basically as many words, we have fired Sam

Altman as our CEO. That's where all of this begins. So the board fires him. They kick Greg Brockman off of the board. He then a few hours later immediately quits. And as far as we understand, and you two should correct me if I'm wrong, because I think the minutes leading up to this are very important. No one, including most people at OpenAI, had any idea this was coming, correct?

It's not only that they didn't know it was coming, they were actually on a company holiday. So they were taking a day of rest because of all the craziest of the previous week where they were announcing all these products that Sam was the face of. So not only were they weren't prepared, but it was actually when they were all actively not looking at what was going on at the company. And then externally, the company was totally business as usual, right? Sam had just been on the Hard Fork podcast. he had taped an interview with Casey Newton and Kevin Roos, an interview which they had to can because he got fired two days later. He had been doing other appearances. Like, from all external appearances, this was totally business as usual for this company.

And Sam was completely shocked when the board called him into a Google Meet, which is also very funny and fired him. And for everything we understand about that Google Meet is they basically read him the statement, which is you have not been consistently candid with your communications to the board. and we don't think that we can trust you around the company. And that's all he got. That's all anyone has gotten. So, Alex, one of the things we all immediately started talking about was the, like, ruthlessness of this statement. Yeah.

Normally when you're getting rid of your CEO, even if you're essentially firing your CEO, you find a way to do this sort of slowly and nicely so that they get to, like, step away to spend more time with their family or, you know, take some time off or whatever. And everybody pretends this is nice even when it's not. This was the opposite of that. Like I don't know that I can remember a thing that felt as much just like a knife of a blog post as this one. Oh, yeah, this is ice cold. I mean, this is saying that you are firing someone in a fairly direct way for a situation like this.

Usually when it is a co-founder and it is someone as high profile as Sam Altman, like Neely I was saying, this will be very managed. It will phase out, you know, he'll phase out of the company. it looks like, you know, he's wanting to pursue his passions, those kinds of words. And this was like, no, we have knifed Sam Altman in the back in the night. And I mean, just like what Neely I was saying about this being business as usual, he was literally at a conference the day before and the night before even. And I'm told was like, I've got to go. I've got a meeting. And I think it was right when all this was starting. So he was literally on stage representing Open AI with a. bunch of artists in Oakland right before all this happened.

Okay, so all this happens. Miramiradi, the CTO of OpenAI is promoted to interim CEO, and this is where we are. So then immediately everybody starts scrambling to figure out what the hell is going on here, basically was the vibe at the time. You guys started talking to people, and this one answer about what was going on starts to trickle out. Again, this all feels like thousands of years ago. Yeah. But my memory of this is like the leading reason became a split between sort of two factions at OpenAI, one that said, basically, we are a research project designed to make sure that we can make AI good for the world. And another side that said, this is a gigantic business that we're going to continue to run like a gigantic business. And that starts to percolate up as like first sort of a leading, like educated guests. And then we got some reporting that said that was part of the split. But how would you?

you frame kind of what we learned in the early hours of like what the actual fight was that led to Sam being fired? Nelai, what was your sense? You know, I still think we don't know, especially because today, Ilya Sitskiver is saying that he regrets his actions, but the theory on Friday night, on Friday night, the theory that started bubbling out and the thing everyone started talking about was that the nonprofit of OpenAI, which owns OpenAI, the commercial entity, of which Sam is the CEO and Microsoft. The theory on Friday night that started bubbling out is that OpenAI is a nonprofit. That's the board of directors.

That nonprofit controls a commercial entity of which Sam was the CEO and of which Microsoft is an investor. That board thought the commercial entity was moving too fast to commercialize LOMs, right? But they thought that the danger of the products was too high for how fast Sam was. moving and there was some religious split, ideological split. Like, that was all very hazy between the people who believed we were on a course to destroy humanity and Sam Altman saying, we're going to do a store for GPs and you can make laundry buddy. That was out there. Like, that was the conversation that was happening. Is Sam moving too fast with a dangerous technology to the board canon for that? Is Ilya a religious believer in the idea that we need to be safer,

which is what Open AI was founded to do this safely and make AGI. And the existence of that tension is not new, by the way. Like that, whether or not that led to what has happened in the last four days, I think you're right. We still don't know. But the existence of that tension between those two sides is pretty real and well established at this point. That tension is why we have Anthropic and why Elon is doing another AI company right now. So Open AI has been consistently chaotic and consistently splitting itself apart really since the beginning. I just don't think anyone expected it to split from the top in such a dramatic way.

And, Nilai, I think maybe now is where it's probably good to explain who actually made this decision, because really this comes down to six people, right? And so we should go through exactly who the people were that made this decision, because increasingly it's becoming clear that now it's three people against the rest of OpenAI, which is just an insane position. Which is insane. Also, this is not a public company. So we don't have a record of these votes. The board has not said anything.

We don't know if this was a unanimous vote. We don't know if a majority. Like the reporting is that it's a majority vote, but because of what Ilya is saying today, it is actually really unclear what happened here. Well, here's what we know. So Sam and Greg posted on X that Ilya, who is a co-founder, the chief scientist, really described to me by many as like the brains of the operation, one of the most influential AI researchers in the world, worked at DeepMind. before kind of the AGI doom person, I would say, the most prominent one inside the company. He was the one who told Sam and Greg that they were being fired by the board. At that time, the board was six people, including Sam and Greg.

So Greg is the board chair. So the board chair found out he got fired from his own board, which is, I don't know how that works. Yeah, no clue. What's clear, because we know Ilya was the one who communicated the message, is that the board needed a majority. So they needed four people. The other three members of the board, besides Ilya, are not open-eye employees, right? So they got Ilya to side with them, kick Sam and Greg out without any notice. And now Ilya is saying after all of this and after pretty much all of the company is set to resign and go to Microsoft with Sam, I actually regret this.

And I also will go to Microsoft with Sam if we don't bring them back. Okay, we're going to get to that. Like, A, Heath, unbelievable, spoiler alert on this. story. Like, come on. Sorry. Anybody listening to this is well and spoiled. If you're listening to an emergency episode of this, it's like, you're in it.

That's fair. Yeah. No, I think where all this goes is very interesting. And I think the I'll be a piece of this is actually super interesting. But just to get back to Friday night, because I think like the timeline here actually matters a lot. So Friday night, we start learning the reasons it happened. I believe three high level open AI employees all resign right after this all goes down with

Sam and Greg. Sam and Greg, as far as we can tell, and I'm curious if you guys have heard it, anything about this, immediately go to work spinning up a new AI company. I think it was very obvious to everybody immediately that they could just like have a company with an LLC and a name and people would throw billions of dollars of investment at it. Yeah. And so they started the, the things that have been reported are that they were building, or they were thinking about building an AI chip company to rival Nvidia. There's been the thing with Sam and Johnny Ive and Masa son working on AI hardware. Sam's learned.

which is investor in Humane, which is forever hilarious. Did you guys learn anything about what the like counter idea might have been if we landed in the world of Friday night where they just went off and started their own company? No, and I think it's actually important to fill that in a little bit. I don't know if you've ever been fired. You know, the first thing you do is you plot your revenge, like very emotionally plot your revenge, right? And that is what was happening. That is what that communication was.

we'll just start a new cup. Like, it just, it, these are still people. They are very human people. As we discovered throughout their actions of the weekend, they might think they're the masters of the universe. They might be playing with $80 billion worth of shareholder value.

But they are people, like just deeply emotional, flawed people, just like everybody else. And so that first wave was very much a revenge wave. Like they had no notice, so they had necessarily no plan. So we'll start a new company.

I can get the money. Everyone will come over. That was a burst of communication that I think was rooted in just the emotion of the moment. Then I think everyone got some sleep. And then we entered into Saturday where Alex and I broke the news that the investors were pressuring the Open AI board to bring these folks back. Which bled into today, and again, the absolutely unpredictable. of today. But I think the Friday night we're just going to go start a new company was just the first heated emotion of that moment. And all the people around them were very much saying,

hold up. Like, can we just control Z this thing and fix it? Like, I heard like my interest is just fixing it. You know, like very directly from some people. Like, I'm just trying to fix it. This is ridiculous. It should have never happened. So I believe that. But also, Alex, tell me if you agree with me on this or not, I would assume that every venture capitalist on earth with Sam Altman's phone number called him on Friday night and said, tell me how to give you money for your next thing. For sure. So, I mean, is your point that like they should have just left and not tried to No, I just, I think, Neelai, I think you're right, but I also think the sort of parallel universe in which they went to start that company is not that far off. Right. I'm not saying it was

impossible, right? It was a very easily accomplished thing. I think you're correct. The money was flowing. The support was public, right? You saw Vinod Kosovo, who runs Kostla Ventures, just publicly tweeting how much he supported saying. Like, the money was available from all of his existing investors, probably from Microsoft, right? But the thing that I'm just trying to underline here is that first wave on Friday night of we'll start our own thing was reflexive. It was not considered. And I, there's a big gap between we'll support you and whatever your next thing is and writing a check against a business plan. And that gap was as far as we can tell, but no one ever thought about crossing that chasm. Okay, that's fair. All right. And so let's get to Saturday,

because that's when stuff gets even we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade, no code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great. SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible.

Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across more than 125 categories,

so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow.

That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. So we've had the breakup. We've had the feelings. Everybody's putting up angsty away messages. And then Saturday morning in the Bay Area somewhere, reconciliation begins. Neil, take me through like the beginning of the story on Saturday.

So what we had heard is the investors in Open AI, which is mostly the commercial entity, they were putting a lot of pressure on, hey, we need to at least know what happened. We need to know your reasoning. And we need to see if we can resolve this situation. That led to what I'm guessing is yet more Google Meet calls. And I just want to keep highlighting this because I think we are all imagining some like very tense in-person meetings. And really everyone was kind of just on the phone. I mean, we're all imagining the board room from succession, right?

Like that's what's in everybody's mind as we go through this. Like a bunch of people sitting around a table raising their hands like with great intention. I'm saying I don't even know if their cameras were on. Like this is a lot of people who are like alone or like, small groups of people in various places. Also, just very important note, $10 billion from Microsofts can still not make you use teams. It is the most important.

So we start hearing there's all this pressure. And Alex actually hears, hey, they might bring him back. So Alex and I just start calling everyone. And we broke this, we beat, I don't remember who we beat, but we beat someone by six minutes to this story, that Open AAS board is in. negotiations to bring Altman back. And the most important piece of that story is he was ambivalent about it that was reporting that we had. And his condition was, I'm not going to go work for these people again. They just fired me for no reason. They all have to go. Which is understandable.

Just an incredible condition to impose, right? So even from that moment, like, we get this reporting, we break the story. We're like high-fiving. I'm thinking, and Alex is thinking, okay, to make this happen four people have to publicly admit they made a mistake and resign in disgrace yeah this is a high mountain who knows what will happen next and then we spent the rest of the weekend on the phone yeah Alex what was your sense of whether that those were kind of real requests whether that was again sam saying i'd like to come back here's my rational list of what it will take or sam being like fuck me fuck you i think it was pretty clear that sam had the upper hand as of like Saturday midday. And then, you know, we had reported that they had a

5 p.m. deadline to reach a deal with the board. And the thing that was going to happen at that point was if it wasn't reached, Sam's camp was telling the board, there's going to be mass resignations. You know, the entire company is behind us. Is that why you think he had the upper hand? Like, just because it was so clear so quickly that Open AI as a company was behind him? I think what everyone underestimated is the resolve of what old. ultimately was three people to not have him come back. And the thing is, like, the board has been radio silent, you know, aside from that initial statement and an internal email that reiterated the statement to employees Sunday night, no one from the board has said anything publicly.

They haven't elaborated on anything. So that's important. But it seemed like Sam was getting the upper hand. The 5 p.m. deadline passes on Saturday. I'm at a party and Nilai is like, I'm like stepping aside and Eli's calling me and we're like, what is happening? Does this mean mass resignations? And then we look on X. And I want to note it is deeply ironic that all of this has been playing out on X because it's all training data for GROC. It's all training data for Elon's Open AI competitor. This is all just a plan to poison GROC. You're like, GROC, how do I replace the CEO? And it's like, here's some ideas. Right. And it's also, there's a lot of deeper irony there with Elon we can get into at some point.

But we saw this very public display of support for Sam Saturday night with pretty much everyone at OpenAI, you know, quote tweeting him with the heart emoji, right? Yeah. So Sam tweets something like, I love the OpenAI team. And as if they had, you know, coordinated this in like a high school cafeteria. They all quote tweeted it with hearts. They all quote, exactly, major high school calf vibes. And then we're all thinking like, okay, this. This maybe means he won? Like, we're all forward to, like, Neil and I are scratching our heads. And then, you know, you wake up the next day and you realize that was a pressure campaign

to show that Sam actually did have the backing of the whole company. Yeah. And so we had heard, we had reported this 5 p.m. deadline, 5 p.m. Pacific. So that deadline just comes and goes. And we are scrambling, texting everyone in the universe, like, what is happening? This was a deadline, right? Everyone's supposed to quit.

So they start tweeting the hearts. And it was actually very unclear whether this was, we're all quitting right now or Sam has won. And the online reaction was like instantly polarized, right? Binary reaction. Like people are like, Sam's one, it's done. And our instinct was we would know, right? Like this is cryptic. We're doing high school away messages on X.

It's absolutely not done. But we still don't know. And there was no further conversation after that. Like, I was basically told go to bed by a source. Like, you're done for the day. Like, we did this thing. It's the show of force. Like, everyone has to go to sleep now.

We'll try again tomorrow. So that was the end of that day. I will say that my favorite conspiracy theory about this is that a misaligned AI was instructed to get people to watch the Las Vegas F1 Grand Prix, which started at 1 a.m. Eastern. And I was like, this almost worked. Like, I almost watched this. But I went to bed at.

anyway. Then we woke up the next morning and it was basically the status quo. Like this pressure campaign had not moved anything. We were told, Carrey Swisher has reported this, we were told that there was a noon Pacific deadline, which they blew right by. And then we reported again, there was another 5 p.m. deadline. So my response to that was, is this real? Like, you can only issue so many 5 p.m. ultimatums in your life, especially in sequential days. And I was told, yes, this is a hard deadline. It's real today. Like either this happens at 5 p.m. today. Or, or we go in another path. And I thought, oh, man, how do I report this?

And that is when Sam tweeted a picture of himself in the OpenAI offices holding a guest badge with the caption, first and last time I ever wear this patch. Which is, right, that's the ultimatum. Like, either this is getting fixed or I'm never coming back here again. And so that was when I felt comfortable saying, okay, it's like, we're doing the 5 p.m. thing again, but I've got the guy, like, issuing the ultimatum. Like, this makes sense to me. Yeah. So then they then spent the whole day at Open AI headquarters, hashing this out, basically having what I would assume is just the same fight over and over and over again.

Sam trying to get the board to resign in disgrace and the board not wanting to resign in disgrace. There was some internal discussion there about picking the successors for the board. And the feeling, and we don't have this on the site, so this is a little shakier, but the feeling was people were suggesting candidates. We heard a lot of what I would call. all like web 1.0 names, Cheryl Sandberg was in the mix. Like, Marissa Myers in the mix. Like, all these like old heads who are from that era, you know, the adults, like, we're

going to hire adult supervision for Google. Like, I was like, when is Eric Schmidt going to show up? Right. Like, these are the kinds of people we're talking about. Yeah. I mean, if you saw a very public web 1.0 tech executive, like, tweeting support of Sam over the weekend, they were most likely trying to get on the board. Dick Costello just appears out of nowhere.

At one point, Alex is like, these people are just like in the firmament. They're available to show up and like run your company for a couple of years. Like Brett Taylor, we should know. I mean, Brett Taylor with like the guy who literally just negotiated the sale of Twitter to Elon and the second most dramatic boardroom tech situation of the last decade. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's just like I keep calling him capital A adults, although no one here was acting like an adult. But like they, you know, they have that rep.

Like here's the cast of character. And we had heard that Sachin Adela was mediating this conversation, right? And his point of view was he's pretty neutral. He just wants this over with. He needs, he needs a story to tell Microsoft shareholders on Monday morning. And that is Microsoft's interest, is stability for its shareholders because they have this massive dependency on opening eye. And that was one of the other things we should have said on Friday is that this all happened while the markets were still open on Friday and Microsoft's stock, like, tanked as a result of this happening. Like, this was the biggest public blowback on this was going to come back to Microsoft in a pretty real way.

So it makes sense that Nadella was going to be directly involved in doing this. And this ticking clock for Microsoft, I think it is underappreciated, but it was very real that Microsoft needed a crisp thing to say on Monday morning one way or another. So I always had it in the back of my head. Like, at some point, this has to hit some kind of resolution because Microsoft will, not demand it, but we'll just create a resolution to say to its shareholders. So there's all this vetting of these old heads. The OGs come to town, right? So the vibe I'm getting, and again, we don't actually know if everyone was all together. We know there's a lot of opening high people at that headquarters. We don't know if the board was there, actually. But the vibe we're getting

is people are firing names at this board, and the board is not taking it seriously. And in the meantime, they are running their own search for a new CEO, because their interim CEO, Miramir Maradi, has sided with Sam in the meantime. Like, publicly during the Hart's campaign on Twitter, she's posting the Heart, right? So she's... What a sentence. She's gone over. I mean, it is just absolutely childish.

When I say these are very flawed human people, like, we're going to win this fight by posting hearts on Twitter is, I don't know what to say about it. One day I will, like, have had enough time to process that situation. But Mira has gone over to Team Sam, look very publicly. So the board needs a new CEO. So that they're getting tossed these names. And everyone is hoping that they will accept some names and resign. And the new names will take over.

And in the meantime, they are looking for a new CEO. And that is more or less what is happening all day Sunday as the 5 p.m. deadline draws ever near. So we hit that deadline. And again, nothing. Alex, what would you have, where was your head at sort of the end of Sunday? Like, obviously, things get crazy several hours after that deadline, but like, where were we at the end of that day on Sunday, do you think? I was feeling like if we didn't have an announcement by five, it wasn't going to work out. And we were kind of getting back channel that by midday Sunday, things were taking a turn.

And I didn't, obviously, no one could have expected what actually happened. This is the most, like I was saying at the top, bananas thing. but yeah, I think people were, generally people who were close to the story were thinking like, okay, he made it very clear publicly. This is the last time he's setting foot in the building. The deadline is passed and it's not looking good. And there's a version of that that would have been a very dramatic weekend that ended in a relatively okay thing, right? Sam and Greg go off to do something.

They bring some Open AI people with them. Open AI hires a new CEO. Everybody moves on with their lives. Like that, there's a version of this where like a lot of people, People had a lot of feelings, but it turns into a relatively normal corporate change, right? But that is obviously not what happened. Right. The negotiation to bring Sam Altman back has failed.

Miram Murati continues is interim CEO. Microsoft wishes Sam the best and says they'll support him in the new venture. Right. Again, the thing that needed to happen by Monday morning was a Microsoft statement to the market. And you really just cannot underestimate how much pressure that was applying to the situation. So I'm expecting that statement, right? Like here's the forcing function. We just have to be ready for this deal is going to fall apart.

Microsoft is going to issue some holding statement and say, you know, we have a deal with Open AI. Everything's fine. Our contracts are rock solid. Brad Smith or chief legal officers, a great lawyer. Like whatever Microsoft is going to say to calm everybody down. But instead, in all credit to Bloomberg, Bloomberg has a report, I don't know, 10,000. minutes before the thing actually happens, that Mira Murati has hatched a plan as interim CEO to just rehire Sam and Greg as employees while the board is out calling people

to interview them to be the CEO to replace Mira. And so what comes out in the end, I'll just like fast forward a little bit, is Mira's plan was to quickly hire Sam and Greg as employees again, forcing the board to fire all three of them which would have led to presumably lawsuit. Like, who knows what was going to happen in that moment. But that was the last swing of chaos when it was, I think, obvious, oh, this just fell apart. Like, we're not in a place where we're negotiating four people resigning. We're in a place where we're actively trying to create legal leverage for a lawsuit to come.

And the board is actively trying to replace the person that they just hired to replace the CEO they fight. Sorry, it's just, it's, I know, it's just like, this whole thing has been such a blur for Nile and I, like, when you say all this out loud, it's just truly, it's insane. And it does seem like, I think your instinct there is right, Neyla, that it's, at that point, what you're saying is, I'm not going to quit, you have to fire me. Yep. Like, I'm going to cause so much trouble for you that you're going to have to get rid of me, and then I'm going to have ammo, kind of in whatever direction I want to use it.

Yeah, exactly, right? And the rehiring of Sam and Greg is, like, a deeply funny idea. Like, you have to fire them again. Just like hire them as interns and watch them get fired. Yeah. And all three of them will then sue the board. And this is when Alex and I just started sending out hundreds of text messages. This is about to fall apart.

Like, this is absolutely about to fall apart. And it fell apart. And it fell apart in the weirdest way possible, which is the board just, I didn't even announce. No. The information broke. Yeah. This is just like coming from sources. The board has been in a bunker somewhere.

They don't have a crisis comms team. They don't have people speaking to the media. They've just been radio silent, but it starts to trickle out that they've actually named a new CEO. And it's Emmett Shear. Not on my bingo card for who was going to be the next CEO of OpenAI. Not on anyone's bingo card. I think it's very safe to call this one out of left field. Emmett was the co-founder of Twitch, which is a live streaming video site, not an

AI company. He's not seen as a AI leader. He posted shortly after it leaked that he was being named CEO that he got the call for the job that day and took a few hours to decide. And, you know, he's a free agent. He left Twitch earlier this year before mass layoffs. They've had two rounds of layoffs since. I can confidently say that the vibe within Amazon is that Twitch has been a, how should I put this, shit show since Amazon bought it. And so no one really thought of Emmett, except the board apparently. He is now the CEO. And he sent this note internally to employees saying that he was going to conduct an independent review of the board's actions, which is hilarious because he was hired by the board. I don't think that's possible to have an independent review

when you are the person you're represented by the people that you're reviewing. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. And also, those people can callously fire you whenever they want, which they've proven twice in 48 hours that they can do. Okay. And we've been dancing around this this whole time. I really think at this point we should just say who these people are. Because at the end of the day, three people set all this in motion. Three people have caused Open AI to explode from within. So should we just get into that?

Yeah, do it. Yeah. Okay. So opening eye is very strange in how it's strange. structured. And this is something that people haven't really been paying attention to because we've been so focused on just the success of their products with chat GPT. But OpenAI started as a nonprofit. And so it has this weird structure where there's a nonprofit. There's a flow chart, which is like perfect for Decoder. There's a flow chart on OpenAI's website. And I challenge you to look at this flow chart

and try to make sense of it. It is one of the most confusing. I just want to be very clear. You can definitely make sense of it and they've drawn it to be more confusing than it actually is. Okay. Well, we're going to redraw the flow chart now because it's all different. So there's this nonprofit with this board that controls it. And importantly, the board of open AI does not have equity in open AI, which is a really wild thing. And so that's the context of the board. There's three of them, really, that aren't open AI people. So one of them is Adam DeAngelo, who's the CEO of Cora. He operates, I should note a competing AI chatbot platform called Po. He was the original CTO of Facebook. He's a known quantity in Silicon Valley. He's a really well-connected guy. There's a woman named Helen Toner

who has ties to the effective altruism movement. She used to work at Open Philanthropy. She's now at Georgetown. She funds AI safety stuff. She was actually on our stage at Code in September with Casey Newton talking about AI safety. And then the other one is a woman named Tasha McCauley, who is the former CEO of Geo Sim Systems. And as far as I can tell basically no one in tech that I know knows who she is. Okay. So that's the three people. And they are the ones who basically decide to bring Emmett in. Because as we find out in the next turn of the story, the guy that we thought was the architect, the mastermind of all of this flipped, which we can get into. Yeah. So Emmett's a weird choice. And it's a weird choice and also openly a decelerationist, which is a phrase that the AI community loves to use.

Like there's videos of him being like, this is terrifying, we should slow it down. This will extinguish all value in the cone of light, which is a real thing he says. Wow. It's amazing. And his point of view is we should slow AI innovation way down so we can get a handle on how dangerous it is. So you can see where the board is, right? This is a split that we've been hearing about the entire time. Open AI is playing with dangerous toys and Sam is running too fast.

So we brought an Emmett Shear to slow this whole thing way down. Yeah, I think that's right. And then on the flip side, very early this morning, Neely, I think to your point correctly, to get something out before the stock markets opened, Microsoft announces it has hired Sam Altman and Craig Brockman to run, I believe the phrase is an AI research lab. An advanced AI research team is their statement. Can I just read this statement from Sachi Nadella? Please do.

Which just contains magnitudes. We remain committed to our partnership with Open AI and our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we've 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 are extremely excited to share the news at Sam Altman and Greg Rockman, together with colleagues, We'll 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.

In the journalism business, we call that bearing the lead. And importantly, Sam Altman is being given the title of CEO at Microsoft, which is inside Microsoft's corporate politics, like a big deal. There are not a lot of CEOs at Microsoft. Usually when they acquire a big company, they give those people the CEO title. So the person who leads LinkedIn as a CEO title, the person who leads GitHub has a CEO title. Phil Spencer is now the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. That's a big deal.

You can go listen to that Decoder episode where I ask him what that title shift means. And it basically means he has his own resources. Right? He's split off from Microsoft. Your own P&L. Well, I don't know. Even going to listen to that episode.

It basically means you have your own resources and you are more of a free agent to run your little division, like it's an own little company. So this is the arrangement Sam is getting. What I will tell you is I read this statement, especially that we look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear. They don't know.

They don't know these people. They don't know what's going to happen with Open AI. They don't know if Emmett's going to turn the pace of innovation way down. But they are able to tell the market, hey, the face of the AI winning that we've been doing is Microsoft, now works at Microsoft. Does Sam Altman have a contract to work at Microsoft yet? Like, I don't know the answer to my question. Does Sam Altman, the guy used to run Y Combinator who has his hands in every startup in the universe, has multiple investment funds, thinks of himself as the guy who was running the hottest AI startup in the world on its way to making AGI.

Does he want to be a Microsoft employee? I truly do not know the answer to that question. I do know that this statement utterly worked to not only calm the market, but to send Microsoft stocks skyrocketing. and we are now sitting here saying, do we need to pre-write Microsoft is now a $3 trillion company because the stock, as we are speaking, is like to the moon.

So this statement worked. I'm just cautioning everyone. This, in my view, is a holding statement. It's still a holding statement. Well, I think knowing what we know about Sunday, knowing that Microsoft really wanted to have this buttoned up by markets open, this was decided like, it was almost like 1 a.m. Pacific.

Yeah, I was asleep. Like straight up, I was like, I'm done now. I'm thinking that like, okay, surely nothing more is to come. And then like around one, Nadella Tweezus, and luckily Tom Warren is waking up in London and gets it on the site. It's nuts. But I think there's an important thing here, which is we know that Microsoft wanted to get this done. I have to imagine that whatever got Sam and Greg to agree to go to Microsoft was a lot. I imagine they had all the leverage in that situation because they'll just go do their own thing, right?

Like we've all been saying. Microsoft cannot make it look like the company that they have literally bet their AI Azure Future on is imploding before their very eyes. And so I have to imagine this is going to go down as one of the best packages ever from a big tech company to a team to come there because they had all the leverage that night. I agree. So this just real quick, this brings us to winners and losers. Wait, we're not done with the story yet. We're not. There's one more turn, but we're going to get to that.

But first we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy.

And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot dot com slash sell. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. A-ha moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move.

Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.aI slash vergecast. That's cloud. com. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode.

Claude. aI. slash vergecast. All right, we're back. And we are back with these. last and current turn of the story, which is a letter. So much of this all is just happening people writing texts to each other. It makes me very happy. Neely, since you're our quote reader for the day, do you want to read part of this letter? Yeah. It's truly spectacular. From a bunch of open AI

employees, they wrote an open letter to the board. Keep in mind, this all starts with, you know, a 5 p.m. deadline, which is there's going to be mass resignations unless Sam comes back. They've blown the deadline twice and Sam has now announced to go to Microsoft. The markets think Microsoft has conducted the greatest act will hire in tech history with no regulatory oversight. Like I have a version of that idea from like 5,000 people in my text message in box. Like Satchanil is a genius. Okay. What no one is counting on is like, oh, people still want to do the plan. Right. Like if you say you either hire Sam or we all resign, a lot of people are going to try to resign when you don't hire Sam back.

So 500 plus employees out of, what is it, 700 employees? Yeah. I mean, by the time this episode comes out, it will have been the whole company. The letter says, we, the undersigned mate, choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all open eye employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this step imminently unless all current board members resign and the board appoint

two new lead independent directors, such as Brett Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Importantly, Ilya has signed this letter, and he has tweeted, I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm opening eye. I love everything we've built together, and I will do everything I can to reunite the company. Mira has signed this letter, and Sam has now, quote, tweeted, Ilya with three heart emojis, which I'm just saying this, I want to point out, we are talking about 10 to 80, billion dollars in shareholder value is happening with heart emojis on Twitter. It's the most emo thing. I've listened to Letter to Elise like 10 times this weekend because when I was in college, I would just use the lyrics to Letter to Elise by the Cures my aim away message. That's where we

are emotionally with this situation. This means the board might succumb to this pressure campaign because they're going to lose their entire company. All these employees are tweeting, Open AI is nothing without its people. The board might succumb. They might reinstate Sam. This whole Sam is now the CEO of a Microsoft research team might not come to pass. I truly do not know what happens next. And that's what I mean by Microsoft needed some clarity and they got it today in a move, which maybe seems like Nadell is a genius, but also may have just created enough stability for the next chapter to play out. So, Alex, there are two things in here that jump out to me that I'm really curious about. One, this means Microsoft has made very clear, very loudly that

anyone who wants to leave OpenAI can go work for Microsoft, which is a pretty ruthless thing to do to a company that you've been saying we, you know, are committed to our partnership and look forward to getting a new leadership team. And the other thing is this is the final form of the kind of the board against the world thing. This is not quote tweets and heart emojis. This is literally the vast majority of the company saying in no uncertain terms, we will leave unless you do this. I'm always of the mind that it's one thing to make big noises about quitting your job. It's another thing entirely to quit your job. This does feel like the board is going to have to call a lot of bluffs in a way that it's probably going to lose at this moment in time, right? Yeah. I mean, what I was hearing over the

weekend is that Ilya is really the wild card here. He has a lot of respect internally. He's a co-founder. He runs the research teams. The fact that he flipped and is now saying, I'm also going to go to Microsoft, means there really is no open AI anymore. because that was always the key man. If Ilya is still there, there's still a chance that, you know, they're not going to be this like breakneck commercial entity that they have been under Altman, but they at least will do leading research because the research community respects him. If he is going, it is literally Adam DeAngelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner,

those people are going to be all that's left of Open AI. Yeah, he was kind of the truest believer, right? Like, if you wanted to pick somebody who was like the most held on to the original vision of open AI, you'd probably pick Ilya, right? So the Atlantic has this incredible in-depth story about Open AI that everyone who's listening to this should go read. And there is a scene where they had a leadership off-site. I think it was last year. And Ilya has a wooden effigy that he literally sets on fire at the meeting to represent non-aligned AGI, which is, you know, this is like the idea that, you know, they're creating AGI in an unsafe way. I mean, it's kind of a

religious thing in more ways than I think people get in the AI community. But yeah, that's, that's, I think for you, if you want to understand kind of the cultural divide, which is maybe where we go next here, but like the culture divide within Open AI has become somewhat religious in the last year or so as the companies become commercialized. I told Alex that a real headline we should write after this is the rich people are crazy. Because this is religious fervor. Now, these are people who believe that they are going to create the power to do. destroy the universe. And that is how they talk about it. It's not like an imposition of class warfare on billionaires. It's, no, you should listen to the billionaires talk. And you should listen

to what they call effective acceleration and deceleration. And there's a schism there that is beyond cultural, right? It has reached a level of religious fervor that is making them act irrationally, and that might be appropriate. Like, if you thought that the thing you were building could destroy the world, you should probably reach into some, like, principles that are not just made up, which is, like, how you find religion. But that's, like, there's no moderating force on that, right? There's no, like, centuries of church dogma or liturgy, like, whatever. There's some forum posts about effective accelerationism that they're all reading, that they've just made up. And like, that's weird. And it's worth some scrutiny outside of the sort of boardroom or chart battles that, you know, that's where I like to focus my attention.

But there's something here that is making these people act irrationally and with not just like religious fervor, but with like martyrdom fervor. Like they will kill the company because they believe this is so right. Right. And what's great about this. this story is that this tension is actually personified in the org chart. So going back to how ridiculous it is the way that Open Eye is structured, they have this nonprofit board that controls the company effectively. They can fire people, et cetera. They get to decide when the company has reached AGI, which is a very important power to place in a company that's whole mission is around creating AGI. And so you have that one side of the equation. And on the other side, you have the for-profit

entity that OpenI created under Sam Altman to raise all of the money from Microsoft, hire all of the top talent from all of the big tech companies that they have in the last year, to build wildly successful commercial products. And Sam Altman is on stage at Dev Day. I was there a couple weeks ago saying, we are going to be the app store for AI. We are going to start sharing our revenue with you. We are going to give more of our technology to our developers. We are going to be a platform. So inherent in the structure, is this tension where the commercial entity is charging ahead with something that the board is tasked with protecting and ultimately deciding. And incentives drive behavior here. And so it's

just really interesting to look at like, maybe this was always going to happen. You know, the favorite theory I've heard over the weekend was like, this is actually Elon Musk's poison chalice because he named OpenAI. He really set it up, gave it its first donation, set up the nonprofit structure. And maybe this was always going to happen. Well, and then importantly stopped giving that money when he stopped being part of the company. It was a big part of like semaphores reporting from a while ago. Right.

That was part of when OpenAI realized we need a lot more money to do the kinds of things we're doing. They went to Microsoft to get both the capital and the compute to do it. And all of a sudden, you're just kind of off to the races. And as soon as you decide you want the money, it becomes very hard to not want the money anymore. That's one of the things we've seen over and over. And like, this idea that you can have a nonprofit overseeing a for-profit company is not unheard of in tech. It's fairly unusual. But like Mozilla is a version of this kind of org chart.

Signal is a version of this kind of org chart. Like it's possible to do. But it comes with a really complicated set of tradeoffs in every case. Like Mozilla's thing. And Nelai, I know you and I both talk to Mitchell Baker, the CEO. of Mozilla about this, Mozilla's for-profit company gets most of its money from Google, which to Mozilla, the nonprofit that wants to make the internet better, feels really bad. But without that money, you can't do the work anymore.

And so this tension is never going to stop going away, or this tension is never going to go away. And so you eventually need somebody in charge who is either so mission-driven that they stay that way no matter what, or you get into the Sam Altman thing where you eventually start chasing the money and then the money gets big and then that's what you become. So I said this earlier, and I'm not going to try to describe an org chart on a radio show, but it is very true that the flow chart that Open AI has published about its ownership structure is like consciously more complicated than it needs to be. There's only three boxes on the structure.

Most of the extra boxes are just labeling who owns what. So there's OpenAI, the public charity at 501C3, that owns the. a holding company, which co-owns OpenAI, the commercial entity with Microsoft. That's it. That's a whole structure of this thing. There's a charity that owns a holding company so that employees can have some equity on the holding company. And then there's the commercial thing that goes off and does all the work.

That structure exists all over the place. It does not exist in Silicon Valley. So outside of Mozilla and these other things that are run is, you know, they're sort of like not capitalistic in their way. Right. In Silicon Valley, everything is like a deline valley. where organized C-Corp with VCs on the board and now all over the place, super voting shares for founders. Like there's a way to do it.

And they do that because this stuff happens when you don't. Like that's why they do it, right? Like founder drama with their VCs, like the story of Uber exists, right? The story of Apple exists. Like do you know every single year meta shareholders vote to remove Mark Zuckerberg? Yeah. And he just outvotes them because he has super voting shares. It just doesn't matter that the shareholders of meta are like, get this guy out of here, year after year, because he has super voting shares.

Right. So you get a structure like this and these shenanigans become possible, but then you look around the world and you see functional structures like this at very big companies, at very important companies. Someone pointed out to me that Bosch, which is a huge German engineering firm, very successful in the car world, in the engineering world, is organized basically like this. there are companies that are owned by the towns they're in in Europe. Like all these other structures exist. And this org chart, people look at it and you look at it and like, this is crazy. If you just spend a few seconds looking at what these boxes mean, and I don't know why some of them are ovals and some of them are squares. Like, it's just three boxes.

Yeah. Right? At the end of the day, there's Open AI, the charity that owns a holding company that owns Open AI Global, which is the commercial entity. And Microsoft is a big investor in that entity. And that means Microsoft does not have a lot of control over this board, which I think has become a real problem from Microsoft at this point in time. It means that Sam Altman did not have super voting shares to stop it. But it also, very importantly means that the board was too small and too inexperienced, made a hasty decision, and there was no governance check on their behavior. And I think that is like the fundamental mistake of the structure, not the structure itself.

Or we find out that, and I don't think this is the case, but I just want to play devil's advocate. Or we find out that, like, Open AI invented God in the last two weeks. There's this clip of Sam Altman at a conference in San Francisco the day before he was fired saying that, like, there's been a few moments in his career where they've gotten to push back the veil of ignorance. And, like, he was talking as if, like, you know, they had made fire. And he said, one of these moments happened in the last couple of weeks. So everyone is reposting that clip saying, What if they realized they had AGI or what if they realized the model was about to just accelerate in a way that no one could have predicted?

I will say that Ilya has been doing a press tour and being pretty open that the model capability is going to progress a lot faster than everyone thinks. So there has been, you know, a lot of theory to that. But what it looks like right now is inexperience and the board not realizing what was going to happen when they made such a rash decision. And I just want to point this out there. The other thing I've heard is it's not that Microsoft and the commercial entity of OpenAI and Sam didn't think safety was a problem. Right. Like Kevin Scott, the head of AI at Microsoft, was on stage with me at code. And we talked about AI safety and the limits and like how careful they should be.

This is a thing that Microsoft is publicly talking about. So if Open AI's board is saying, okay, we're going too far ahead. their entire job is communicating that there's a misalignment. Their entire job is saying to Sam, hey, you're over the line. Like, pull it back or we're going to fire you. Instead, they just fired him. Instead, they just went ahead. They gave Microsoft one minute notice that they're going to fire Sam.

And so, like, the fundamental job of this board is to communicate and set limits, and they just didn't do it. Yeah. Well, so, and this is another good moment to put a button on what you said earlier on Eli, which is that we actually don't know the whole story behind why he was fired in the first place. And Emmett Shear, in his weird, long tweet announcing that he is CEO, at the very end, says, 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. So before that, I'm like, okay, Open AI wants to go back to being essentially a research organization. fine. Like whatever you want to say about that decision, that is at least a decision. Now it's like, okay, well, then what are we doing here? What fight are we having here? It's, I'm sure there are people who know, but that part does not seem to have come out in any way that I find at all sort of satisfying. What I think we will find out is that this is a classic business dispute. I mean, yes, there are obvious concerns on different sides of the debate here about AI safety. And I do

think that played a role. But what we just saw was a couple of weeks ago, Open AI hastily, and I can say this confidently because I was part of the press scrum and getting pre-briefed and all this about the App Store stuff. Very hastily, Open AI announced a major business expansion that Sam Altman led, right? They had this huge conference and we're like, we are pushing ahead. We're going to be a new platform. And if I had to guess, that probably led to a lot of this, because Sam was clearly caught by surprise. There was nothing, you know, normally if this had been like a long gesticulating thing over months,

it would have leaked in dribs and drabs, and it really just came like a thief in the night. And so there was a breaking point here very recently. And the thing I can point to is Sam getting on stage and saying, guess what, we've been going 100 miles an hour, we're going to go 200 miles an hour, and we're going to become an even bigger business. And what seems clear now is that a bunch of people at Microsoft,

including Satya and Adela, saw that and said, hell yeah. And at least one person inside of OpenAI said, hell no. Yeah, I mean, this is like, essentially this is capitalism versus hippies. I mean, that's what this story is. It's the story of Silicon Valley, man. I think that's too reductive. Again, the religious aspect of this is just not to be underestimated.

Microsoft sees this and says, yeah, go even faster because every one of these queries runs on an Azure server. Yeah, right. Right. That's great for them. They're ready to go. The Open AI board sees this and says, okay, you're going to give people the ability to make computers go take actions in the real world without any oversight and let them build whatever AI tools on our model that they want and resell them and create a commercial incentive to do that without any safety checks whatsoever. And that is opposed to our mission.

That is like real. That is a moral dilemma. Do you remember, I mean, we were just talking about this on the Vergecast. We were talking about how this store and these, this agent API thing is going to open them up to a world of hurt. I mean, they literally had to say on stage, we will indemnify you for any copyright violation that may occur from creating bots on our platform. It was very, and like I went to a Q&A with Sam after they announced this at Dev Day, and it was clear that they had not thought through the details, right? Like they hadn't decided on how much revenue they were going to share with creators, how the store incentives were going to be. aligned. It was all just being done kind of on the fly. And we were all going like,

this sounds like a disaster. Like it's a smart business play. If you are Sam Altman, the venture capitalist, right? It's like, yes, this is what you want to go do. You want to build a moat around, you know, the fastest growing consumer product of all time. You want to be a platform. But it was clear that they were moving a million miles a minute. Yeah. And also, the problems are not hard to imagine. Okay, you, a creator sets up a GPT bot that just spams people in their email with marketing messages. Does OpenAI want to be sharing revenue with that creator? Is that a thing you want to incentivize?

You can make it even worse. It's connected to Dolly, right? Okay, you want to make deep fake nudes of people. And that's an app you want to sell in the GPT store. Does Open AI have the content moderation ability to stop it at scale when millions of people realize this is a thing they should try to sell? The most wild thing I heard at Dev Day was that OpenAI uses GPT to, moderate GPT. It uses the AI to moderate the AI and that's how they were good. And that's how they

were going to approach the store. Yeah, I mean, it's it's truly bananas. Yeah. So I think there's a lot still to sort out here, right? I think including the question of like, does Sam Altman actually ever work for Microsoft? And I think we're going to talk about this a lot for a long time, I suspect. But just to let's just put a button on this moment for now because if we stay on here too long, more news will break and this will be out of date. So we need to like put this. on the internet. Just five minutes, I want to do real quick, who won and who lost over the last four days, and then we're going to get out of here. I'm just going to throw some names at you, and you guys are going to tell me winners and losers. Sound good? I mean, this sounds like an

impossible exercise. It's going to be great. I'm excited about it. Here we go. Person number one, Satya and Adela. I feel like a big winner of the weekend, right? He might be the only winner. Okay. Everyone thinks he looks very clever today. I do not know long term if having your stock price swing this much on the actions of one or two people. is a good thing for Sasha Nadella. Fair. Okay, person number two, Sam Altman. I genuinely can't decide.

Loser. Huge loser. Really? Yeah, without question. Huge loser. He was the guy. And now he might still be. He might start a new company.

He might go work for Microsoft. He might take everyone with him. But losing the thing you founded is the worst. And it might be that he returns to Open AI in 12 years like Steve Jobs. But in the meantime, right, the most likely outcome is he owns. next. Is this his Elon Musk style Joker origin story? Like is that? Yeah, I don't, I, there's no, I come back to the very beginning. It's great to think that all these people are cogs in a machine and it's a narrative that's playing out and it's a, like, you know, people write about it that way. Sometimes we write

about it that way. These are people, you know, and like, whatever he does next is going to be deeply colored by just the emotional damage of this weekend in the sense that he can't trust the people he thought he could trust. And maybe that's just the reality of being the guy who ran White Combinator for a long time. Maybe he was already like that, you know, he's been in the scene for a long time. He knows a lot of people. But to go from the top of the world to Microsoft employee in 48 hours, no matter what happens next, he is not the winner today. I think he is more a winner than Eli, but I don't think he's a full winner. I mean, I think, like Sam, like I was saying, looks like he had all the leverage with Microsoft. Microsoft needed a way to message.

that this was under control. I imagine he extracted some insane deal terms out of Nadella late last Sunday night. And if he does get the entire Open-AI team to come to Microsoft and he gets to run it like his own fiefdom, like LinkedIn has its own email, right? Like it's its own building, its own... Do you think he gets to use Google Meet? That's well, maybe that, you know, that may have been the biggest concession of all was that Nadella agreed that they don't have to use teams internally.

We'll find that out. I'm sure Tom is on that. But, I mean, I'm thinking to why they created the commercial entity. It was because they needed funding for compute to train their models. And Microsoft showed up with a bag, mostly of cloud credits, interestingly, saying, we will give you all the compute you need. Microsoft has gone on what I've seen some analysts saying is the most expensive infra, private company infra buildout of all time with its AI data centers, something like $50 plus billion in the last few years. So if Sam gets the insulation of being an independent company within a mega cap company and all of the resources that he was desperately trying to raise money for for the last few years anyway and all the people from the company, I mean, it seems like he wins. I mean, you know, like he seems like a winner to me. Certainly this is like for his like, yeah, trusting people, not great. But I think he's more a winner than Eli.

All right. I have a bunch more, but I actually think I think you're right. Most of them are pretty easy. Open AI, obvious loser. Google, winner or loser? Google is the most vindicated of any company right now. They got so much heat for being slow and not rushing the stuff to market. And now they're vindicated because Open AI itself just tore itself apart over the idea of going a little bit slower. And Microsoft, which has recalled Nadella undecoder, I want to make Google dance. I want them to know. that it was me who made them dance. Incredible quote is now having to start a new division, set it up, give it research funding, while navigating meeting Emmett Shear, which is literally in the statement, they have to meet this guy. Like, if you're Google, you're like, wow, we were right to go slowly and carefully, and our moment will come to us. Also, we have better distribution for our AI search product than anybody in history. Like, maybe we'll just continue to steamroll the industry. I don't know if that's going to happen.

I don't know if Google can actually execute. Oh, there are many, many questions. But if you are Sundar Pichai today, you're like, phew, miss that one. You know, like, you're just fine. I think that's right. I think that this is the most, like, aggressive wrench of instability into its biggest competitor that Google could have possibly hoped for. Bard still sucks, though.

So there's that. Anthropic. Alex, you brought this up earlier. Is the team at Anthropic just, like, giggling and high-fiving right now? I mean, yeah, Anthropic was created for a, similar reason. I don't know if there was a coup that was failed, and that's why Anthropic got formed, but they all worked at Open AI. They had, they were the kind of more decelerationist, effective altruism, you know, movement. They broke off as a separate faction, created another AI lab.

And, you know, they haven't had the commercial success of Open AI. I think it's worth noting that the only AI startup that has been, you know, successful commercially is Open AI. Like, there's Claude, there's all these chatbots, like their usage pales in comparison. So, Yeah, I think they are winning because of the instability. Like maybe they'll be able to hire some of these people. But I really think everyone lost here except in the short term, Nadella and Sam Altman. I really do. In the short term, every Microsoft employee is thinking about selling their stock to buy a house.

Yeah. I've seen multiple tweets of just the screenshot of the stock price saying, thank you, Satya, Nadella. Yeah, all those people won. Did anybody else win? Remains to be seen. Fair enough. Okay. Last one.

And then we should get out of here. Chat GPD. Is this the end of the chat GPT era? Is it even the end of the story? I don't know. Okay, fair. If we play this out in what seems like the most likely scenario right now, which is that OpenAI becomes significantly kneecapped in some meaningful way, it seems unlikely to me that all of the stuff that we saw two weeks ago at Dev Day comes out the way that we thought it was going to. It seems possible that this organization goes back to being more of a research organization. And ChatGPT,

the fastest growing consumer internet product in history, becomes a side-jointed show for this company again. I mean, if there's no one there to operate it. Yeah, there's certainly that. I mean, that's where we are right now is like there may not be an open AI by the end of the week, right? Yeah. Like chat GPT probably over, which is wild, but like they'll just recreate it inside

Microsoft. And it won't be as cool and it won't be as like, you know, breakneck and, you know, move fast break things. You know, Microsoft is like a, you know, regulated monopoly. They're going to move very slow and thoughtful. on like how this is rolled out because they have to, right? So yeah, I do think this marks, this decidedly marks the move fast break things era of generative AI. I think that's pretty safe to say.

I think so too. Without question. The like craziest rise and fall of a app I can think of. Unless Microsoft just takes it. Like I do not know what happens next. Like we're going to end this podcast and I'm going to go think about the org chart a little bit more. And by the time I'm done looking at the boxes, everything might be different. I think that is, again, the weirdest outcome of all of this is we still don't know.

It's been, we might be on to six CEOs of Open AI by the end of this week at the rate we're going. Each one of the board members is going to become the CEO until there's only one of them left. It is nuts. And it is, I think, one of the most riveting corporate dramas of our time. It is also just frankly one of the saddest. Yeah, agreed. All right. I think we're done here.

Nelai, you want to take us out? That's it. That's a Vurchast. That was also Decoder. We love hearing what you think of our shows. You can send us emails at Vergecast at Theverge.com or Decoder at the verge.com. We read them all. You can follow us all in threads where we broke a lot of news this weekend.

Sign of the time for threads, I will say. Although most of the action was still happening on X, a lot of it happened on threads. And very importantly, you can subscribe to Alex's newsletter command line, which I am 100% confident without having asked Alex first, is going to be full of scoops about what's happening at OpenAI for the next 500 weeks to come. I hope so. I sure do. That's it. Rock and roll.

And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.