The interesting part about this story isn't Altman himself. It's more about the weird decisions and inner politics of a $90bn company. A board firing their ceo without official reasoning, MS sweeping in while owning 49% of said company, 95% of the staff threatening to quit and the ceo coming back and firing the board while everybody else still tries to understand what the fuck just happened.

Like another commenter said, this could straight up be an episode of Silicon Valley.

Would you like to hear about my week? I'm a thousandaire.

Sadly, I think you're absolutely right. This feels orchestrated in a way that allows a select few parties to look like visionaries, while eliminating others from getting in the way.

Sadly all that crazy seems totally possible with Microsoft involved.

Well yeah, Microsoft is very much in bed with OpenAI. It's not a huge mystery to see how this is going to play out.

Like an episode of Silicon Valley

For fucking real. It's like he's God himself, because everyone want him, nevermind the consequences.

I think its mostly popcorn at this point. The general opinion as I've noticed is that OpenAI is severely failing at living up to what it promised. Nobody particularly gives a shit about the board or Altman except some folks that seem fixated about the honestly unhinged postings of his sister.

There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.

Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.

I read something about him not being honest with the board, or keeping things from them? Didn't see any elaboration, though.

They have been asked to provide that by the media, the first temporary CEO they named, and their investors, some of which even threatened to sue of they didn't disclose it. So either it is something so discriminating to the board they're willing to rather sink with it, or they actually don't have anything solid at all and fired him without cause bue to something personal/unprofessional.

Was is ever not completely under capitalism? As far as I've seen they were always fully going with hype over substance posturing

They're all money grubbers. The board are part of a rationalist cult called Effective Altruism that claims to want to save humanity, but they believe they need lots of money to do this (Sam Bankman-fried is an EA guy.)

Sam Altman is also nominally part of this group, but also hangs out with people like musk and Rishi Sunak. He's more like your typical alt-right tech bro.

The entire company (literally almost all the employees) threatened to quit and take jobs at Microsoft if he wasn't reinstated and the board removed. And that's exactly what has happened.

I don't really have an opinion on this Sam guy or why his employees want to drink his bathwater, but it's an interesting example of the employees of a company unifying behind somebody.

I'm not convinced this wasn't a planned strategy to get OpenAI back in the headlines for a week.

I didn't think so at first but now that it looks like everything will go back to "normal" before the US Thanksgiving Weekend, I feel like maybe this was a "Chinese Firedrill" to get attention for something other than their training data and legal problems.

From the first sentence of the article:

Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI with a new board

Proof n°1093866 that being rich has nothing to do with being smart.

Copilot, yes. You can find some reasonable alternatives out there but I don't know if I would use the word "great".

GPT-4... not really. Unless you've got serious technical knowledge, serious hardware, and lots of time to experiment you're not going to find anything even remotely close to GPT-4. Probably the best the "average" person can do is run quantized Llama-2 on an M1 (or better) Macbook making use of the unified memory. Lack of GPU VRAM makes running even the "basic" models a challenge. And, for the record, this will still perform substantially worse than GPT-4.

If you're willing to pony up, you can get some hardware on the usual cloud providers but it will not be cheap and it will still require some serious effort since you're basically going to have to fine-tune your own LLM to get anywhere in the same ballpark as GPT-4.