<p>If you somehow missed the main drama of modernity, here’s a brief recap from Vladimir Guriev:</p>
<p>“In the States, an amazing corporate drama is unfolding right now, for which, I’m sure, script applications are already being written, because nothing like this has happened in recent history.</p>
<p>At least, it hasn’t happened that such events occur in such a compressed timeframe, where key events happen not months or years apart, but hours apart.</p>
<p>The company OpenAI, which created ChatGPT and generally wants to make real artificial intelligence, consists, if very roughly, of two structures: a commercially conditional and a non-commercial one. Moreover, the commercially conditional part is subordinate to the non-commercial one and is needed, basically, to raise money for research. Until recently, the commercial part of OpenAI was led by Sam Altman, while the non-commercial part was controlled by an independent board of directors (and since the commercial part is subordinate to the non-commercial one, it was controlled by them as well).</p>
<p>Before all the subsequent events, OpenAI’s valuation was around $80-90 billion.</p>
<p>Research at OpenAI is led by our Nizhny Novgorod guy Ilya Sutskever, so for the purposes of this discussion, we can consider that he leads the non-commercial part (reporting to the board of directors).</p>
<p>And then this board of directors suddenly fires Sam in one day. Moreover, with such a harsh formulation that translates from corporate to ordinary language as “because he’s a scoundrel and a liar.”</p>
<p>No one actually knows why this happened, but there are two relatively convincing theories. According to the first, OpenAI is close to creating real artificial intelligence, and Sam and Ilya disagreed on a couple of points from Augustine’s blessed writings (Ilya is an advocate of a maximally cautious approach, while Sam, compared to Ilya, tends to push everything into production). According to the second, there is no real artificial intelligence on the horizon, and Ilya was just offended that he’s so smart in a secondary role and tried to get rid of the unpleasant guy when the opportunity arose.</p>
<p>In general, almost all theories converge on the fact that this is a confrontation between business (Sam) and the director of research (Ilya).</p>
<p>The current CTO is appointed as the interim CEO of commercial OpenAI. By the way, she is a woman, and she is from Albania. Her name is Mira Murati (and she has an incredible career, of course, even without considering her last position).</p>
<p>But the problem is that Sam, unlike Ilya, is a star, and many people love him. Even the employees.</p>
<p>Therefore, immediately after Sam, Greg Brockman, a significant person in the company, leaves as well, and unlike Altman, he is not the CEO but rather a researcher and developer.</p>
<p>It’s touching that Sam and Greg are also members of this board of directors, but they were not invited to this meeting because there was already a quorum, and they would just argue. They were informed about the separation via Zoom. More precisely, not via Zoom, but via Google Meet.</p>
<p>Another problem is that Ilya spends money, while Sam brings it in. For example, he brought in $10 billion from Microsoft. And Microsoft learned about his dismissal from the news, which surprised them a bit.</p>
<p>From the same news, Microsoft learned about Google Meet, although they have Skype, and if you’re not that inclined towards BDSM, then Microsoft Teams.</p>
<p>So, in principle, formally, no one is particularly obliged to report to them, not to mention coordinating such decisions, but ten billion is ten billion; they could have at least called.</p>
<p>Since many people love Sam, while it seems that no one loves Ilya, some (unknown) number of OpenAI employees are saying, like, bring Sam back right now, or we’ll quit right now and you can develop however you want.</p>
<p>Microsoft might be saying something similar because there’s an agreement about ten billion, but Microsoft hasn’t transferred all the money yet. In general, they also have a lever.</p>
<p>The board of directors, according to rumors, thought it over and said: well, okay, we made a mistake, sorry.</p>
<p>Microsoft and the employees say: and, by the way, guys, after you bring Sam back, you’re free. You can go out into the cold.</p>
<p>At the same time, the employees and Microsoft, of course, cannot force the board of directors to leave.”</p>