There was a mystery at the heart of the chaos
OpenAI: The beginnings of a company: openAI as a nonprofit for profit (or not) for science (Autskever and Microsoft)
The conversation I had with Sutskever at the OpenAI headquarters was reported in WIRED. Among the topics we discussed was the unusual structure of the company. OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence on par or beyond human level—termed artificial general intelligence or AGI—in a safe way. The company discovered a promising path in large language models that generate strikingly fluid text, but developing and implementing those models required huge amounts of computing infrastructure and mountains of cash. This led OpenAI to create a commercial entity to draw outside investors, and it netted a major partner: Microsoft. Everyone in the company worked at this for-profit arm. Limits were put on the company’s commercial life. After OpenAI turned into a pure nonprofit, the profit that investors got was capped at 100 times what they put in. The whole shebang was governed by the original nonprofit’s board, which answered only to the goals of the original mission and maybe God.
I can’t say whether Altman’s conduct truly endangered OpenAI’s mission, but I do know this: The board seems to have missed the possibility that a poorly explained execution of a beloved and charismatic leader might harm that mission. The directors appear to have thought that they would give Altman his walking papers and unfussily slot in a replacement. The consequences were immediate and volcanic. Altman, already something of a cult hero, became even revered in this new narrative. The outcry that followed was not deterred by anything he did. To the board, Altman’s effort to reclaim his post, and the employee revolt of the past few days, is kind of a vindication that it was right to dismiss him. Sam is still working on something. Openai’s status was tarnishing because all of Silicon Valley blew up.
The Openai board of chairman and CEO Greg Brockman dismissed by the Microsoft CEO and the board of his former employer, David Sutskever
When I made a joke about the bizarre org chart that mapped out this relationship, Sutskever did not appreciate it. “We are the only company in the world which has a capped profit structure,” he admonished me. “Here is the reason it makes sense: If you believe, like we do, that if we succeed really well, then these GPUs are going to take my job and your job and everyone’s jobs, it seems nice if that company would not make truly unlimited amounts of returns.” In the meantime, to make sure that the profit-seeking part of the company doesn’t shirk its commitment to making sure that the AI doesn’t get out of control, there’s that board, keeping an eye on things.
This would-be guardian of humanity is the same board that fired Sam Altman last Friday, saying that it no longer had confidence in the CEO because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Only one person at the company was aware of the firing until it was announced in the media. There was no advance notice for the Microsoft CEO and other investors. Openai president and chairman Greg Brockman was kicked off of the board by the four directors representing majority of the board. Brockman quickly resigned.
