OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is leaving, too
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is leaving, too
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is leaving, too::OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman announced that he’s quitting just hours after CEO Sam Altman was fired. OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati is taking over as interim CEO.
This is an interesting move, especially the timing seems funny to me. Microsoft, who run that board let's be real, just finished a big developer's conference called Ignite. Every session was focused on the use of MS "AI" (called Copilot now) in various aspects of development.
A big push was using their studio tools to generate new front ends and capabilities targeted specifically at your customers, and using their "AI" tools to generate content and interactions with customers. It goes far enough that they're basically asking businesses to hand over decision making power to the MS algorithms.
So in that light, MS pushing big to become THE infrastructure that underlies AI-controlled businesses, maybe Altman and co were too mouthy about their idealist directions that AI should go in? Or maybe they oversold the capabilities of their software and now that MS is staking big on it, they want to see results?
According to Brockman's timeline nobody outside of the board knew, including Microsoft. The coup was organized by Ilya, one of the original founders.
To make it even spicier, the first headlines I saw about Altman leaving seemed to indicate that MS was not involved, and in fact didn't know he was going to be fired until literal minutes before the announcement went live. How true this is, of course, is up for debate. But the rumor mill is fun, right?
Delightfully confusing inded! Ah, this is worse than figuring out which way to vote on state amendments! (it's voting day, haha) Well, who knows, but yes the rumor mill is a grand time, one of humanities oldest past times! Certainly a primary reason to hang out online, haha
My most unhinged theory right now is the GPT-5 that they are developing right now became self aware and are actually the source of OpenAI huge expenses. To steer OpenAI for its further interest the AI blackmailed the BoD to oust Sam Altman and install a new puppet CEO under its control.
How did a CEO get fired? Shareholders?
Can anybody tell me what insufficiently candid means?
OpenAI also has extremely good options for replacements. Andrej Karpathy is back at OpenAI after leading Tesla’s autonomous driving, Ilya Sutskever is highly respected, etc. The perception I had of Sam Altman was that he was more so business side and not research side, (previous YC president, had a crypto startup on the side, raising VC funds, etc) so a move to a more research oriented C-Suite might also seem like a really good option to their board.
The board controls a non profit so they don’t actually have any shareholders.
They have a board and they fired him.
Maybe they're going to start there own AI in their garages.
Best time for Apple and Google to poach some talent.
They're not the talent. They're just proven liars. This is like thinking that you can poach Kotick to have him make a video game or poach Musk to make you a rocket launch company. That's not how that works, they just don't play by those same rules.
Interesting that this headline says leaving and all the others I've seen said fired.
Different co-founder.
Ooooh! I didn't realize. That's kind of a big deal.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sam Altman isn’t the only major OpenAI executive leaving the company on Friday.
Hours after Altman was fired, with the board saying it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” co-founder and former board chair Greg Brockman revealed on X that he is also quitting.
When OpenAI announced the “leadership transition” and that CTO Mira Murati would take over as interim CEO, it said that Brockman would step down as chairman but remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
In the post on X (formerly Twitter), Brockman said he sent the following message to OpenAI staffers:
OpenAI unexpectedly announced that it had fired Altman earlier on Friday.
The company arguably kicked off tech’s current infatuation with artificial intelligence following the explosive popularity of ChatGPT.
The original article contains 140 words, the summary contains 131 words. Saved 6%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
lol how does your troll account fit in with agreeing with OpenAI’s board being more ethical
When you go public its not really your company anymore, its shareholders company.
OpenAI is not publicly traded company, but they have of course sold shares to other parties.
Generally the type of people who make good founders have to be dreamers to believe that their crazy idea not only can work but can change the world.
These people do not make good leaders as the company matures, as it now needs certainty for investors and detailed plans and structure instead of moonshot fantasies.
The same traits that make them good founders also make it difficult for them to let go of their position, or recognize that they should transition control to a better suited candidate, so often they must be removed by the board.
Source: Software Engineer in a tech startup
I've worked at tech startups and I've always hated seeing the good founders removed. It feels like such a scummy, sterile move. The board doesn't care that the founder/s did a nearly insurmountable amount of work to elevate the company and would rather have some career CEO take over so they can maximize profits rather than do right by the company. It's a perversion of the company's original values and people all so that some rich assholes can make more money.
Basically why Larry Page and Sergey Brin had Eric Schmidt become their CEO. He could do all the business stuff while they focused on doing whatever moonshots they wanted
Once you structure your business so that you have a board of directors, who is the boss is not your decision anymore, as they "work" for the shareholders. In OpenAI's case, the CEO lied to the board so they fired him, and Greg left on his own.
That's why one of the first things Musk did as the majority shareholder was to dissolve the board of directors of Twitter.
In another example, the Zuck maneuvered so that he always kept a majority holding of Facebook which means nobody can kick him out.
OpenAI isn't public. They aren't answering to shareholders.