- The OpenAI saga continues to unfold with rapid developments.
- Sam Altman was fired as CEO and Greg Brockman resigned from OpenAI.
- Three senior researchers also resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman.
- Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, was blindsided by these actions.
- The board voted to remove Altman, including co-founder Ilya Suscover.
- However, there was pressure to bring Altman back from both employees and investors.
- It was rumored that Altman and Brockman would be reinstated at OpenAI.
- However, Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear was announced as the new CEO.
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, announced that Altman and Brockman would join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.
- Altman and Brockman confirmed the move to Microsoft on Twitter.
- Ilya Suscover expressed regret for his participation in the board's actions and expressed a desire to reunite the company.
- The situation remains uncertain, with conflicting reports and developments.

- 505 out of 700 employees at OpenAI have called for the board of directors to resign.
- The employees believe that the board's actions have jeopardized the company's work and mission.
- The leadership team at OpenAI has tried to cooperate with the board but found them to be incompetent and negotiating in bad faith.
- The employees are considering leaving OpenAI to join a new Microsoft subsidiary led by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
- Emmett Shear has been appointed as the new CEO of OpenAI and plans to investigate the situation and make necessary changes.
- The situation is still unfolding and there is ongoing discussion and speculation about the future of OpenAI.

- The board of OpenAI was hesitant about commercializing the product and focused more on research and academic advancement.
- There were opposing forces between the research side and the commercialization side, with the board prioritizing ethical and safe advancement.
- The breakdown in communication led to poor decisions and people finding out about their firing through a blog post.
- Possible scenarios include the board resigning, mass exodus from OpenAI to Microsoft, or a deepened partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.
- The majority of OpenAI staff is demanding the return of Sam and Greg.
- The situation is ongoing and more information is expected to be revealed.
- The narrator finds the drama entertaining but empathizes with the people involved.

- OpenAI is experiencing significant turmoil, with the firing of CEO Sam Altman and the resignation of Greg Brockman.
- Three senior researchers also resigned in support of Altman and Brockman.
- Microsoft, a major investor, was caught off guard by these actions.
- Altman and Brockman will join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.
- The majority of OpenAI employees are calling for the board of directors to resign.
- The situation remains uncertain, with conflicting reports and discussions about the future of OpenAI.

Here's the entire recap of everything that's gone down in this crazy OpenAI saga!

Discover More From Me:
🛠️ Explore hundreds of AI Tools: https://futuretools.io/
📰 Weekly Newsletter: https://www.futuretools.io/newsletter
😊 Discord Community: https://futuretools.io/discord
🐤 Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mreflow
🧵 Follow me on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mr.eflow
🐺 My personal blog: https://mattwolfe.com/

Resources From Today's Video:
My thoughts: https://twitter.com/mreflow/status/1726513283677729074

Sponsorship/Media Inquiries: https://tally.so/r/nrBVlp

#AINews #AITools #GenerativeArt

So I actually didn't think I'd be making another video about the whole open AI saga, but this story just gets wilder and wilder.

I mean, we are witnessing history right now, Silicon Valley history, AI history.

They're going to make movies or TV series about what is happening right now.

My channel is not going to turn into an open AI saga breakdown channel.

I feel like this is going to slow down eventually, but right now stuff is happening so fast and has been so wild that I feel I've got to keep on talking about it.

I feel like this is probably the information people who watch my channel want the most right now.

And speaking of the fact that 1 day they're probably going to make a movie or TV show out of this.

Here's what, Roberto Nixon posted when he asked chat GPT to cast the open AI movie.

You can see here's the actors here and Joseph Gordon Levitt playing Sam Altman.

I just want to share a fun fact with you.

Did you know that Joseph Gordon Levitt's wife was actually 1 of the board members that voted to get Sam Altman fired.

So although I like these casting decisions, I think it's pretty unlikely that JGL here is going to play Sam Altman in this movie.

Anyway, I've made 2 other videos prior to this about the whole open AI saga, what happened with Sam Altman and subsequently other major team members over at OpenAI.

But if you missed those videos, let me speed run it for you real quick.

On November 17th, OpenAI announces a leadership transition.

And in this announcement, they fire Sam Altman and elevate CTO Mira Murati to interim CEO.

Greg Brockman, chairman of the board and president at open AI subsequently quits and then gives a breakdown of the events that happened, stating that both Him and Sam were given just moments of notice before the announcement went out that Sam was being fired and Greg was being demoted.

He also mentioned that Mira Mirati found out the night before that she would be upgraded to interim CEO.

Later that same night, 3 senior open AI researchers resign in solidarity with Sam and Greg.

We learned that Microsoft had no details about this happening and they were blindsided by these actions as well, which is crazy considering that Microsoft is a 49% investor in the company.

Taking a peek at the board, the board is made up of 6 members, 2 of them being Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, who are now no longer with the company.

The other 4 being Ilya Suscover, Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner.

Meaning that Ilya, 1 of the co-founders with Sam was 1 of the people that voted to remove Sam.

And then in the biggest twist that we've seen, the news comes out that open AI is trying to rehire back Sam Holtman as CEO of the company and reinstate him on the board.

And that's essentially where I left off in my last video.

I obviously went into a lot more details and explained what I believe was happening in all of these scenarios and the implications, But that's essentially where we left off.

After the news broke that Sam Altman may end up back at OpenAI, he went on Twitter and tweeted, I love the OpenAI team so much.

And 1 by 1, almost every single staff member at OpenAI retweeted Sam's post with a heart in solidarity that most of the open AI team members were on team Sam.

This feels like that scene in the hunger games where 1 by 1, everybody puts up their sign and shows solidarity with the movement up until now.

We had thought that Mira Mirati now interim CEO was on board with this whole decision.

Her being put in as the interim CEO made us all believe that, well, maybe she was part of this ousting because It could boost her career and she gets the opportunity at CEO.

Well, as it turns out, Mira Mirati was on team Sam as well, giving a heart emoji.

When he made the post, I love the open AI team so much indicating that she was with Sam, It turns out that this mass showing of love for Sam Altman from all of the team members over at OpenAI somewhat implied that if Sam was out, probably a lot of other team members were out.

So there was a lot of pressure to bring Sam back because it looked as though Sam was going to take all of the team members with him.

Also a lot of open AI's backers, Microsoft, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, they all wanted Sam reinstated at open AI as well.

According to the information, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global were among the firms negotiating Altman's return behind the scenes.

Microsoft, which is heavily relying on OpenAI's technology for its own enterprise software products and to spur growth in the company's cloud business, is also likely to favor Altman's return.

So to recap, Friday Sam fired, Greg Brockman quits, 3 more senior researchers quit, wake up Saturday morning to learn that pretty much the entire open AI team is behind Sam Altman including Miramarotti who seemingly didn't want any of this throughout the day we hear more and more Stories that it looks like Sam Altman is going to be back at OpenAI.

The governance team, the board behind OpenAI would probably be reconfigured to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again.

Employees are going to bail if this doesn't happen.

Investors in OpenAI are pushing for this to happen.

That's where we kind of leave off Saturday night.

It's looking like by Monday morning, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are going to be back at OpenAI and it's going to be like nothing ever happened.

Sunday starts off as a fairly quiet day, no new info.

It's still seeming like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are coming back to OpenAI and that the board and all the OpenAI team members are winning this battle.

Sunday night, everything goes nuts again.

Articles start to come out saying that Sam Altman isn't coming back to OpenAI, the board was sticking strong, and instead they brought in Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear as the new CEO.

So Mira Mirati got to be interim CEO for about 48-ish hours before she got the boot for apparently supporting Sam Altman and now Emmet Shearer is in as CEO.

The saga continues in another twist that I think some of us saw coming.

I didn't see it coming but I've seen on Twitter a lot of people saying they predicted this move.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft says, we remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite and in continuing to support our customers and partners.

We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OpenAI's new leadership team and working with them.

And we're extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will 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." So Sam Altman removed from OpenAI from the board.

The investors and all of the employees push to bring Sam Altman back including Mira Murati, the interim CEO.

She was also 1 of the people pushing to bring Sam Altman back.

Ilya Susco and the other board members say, Nope, not happening.

We're bringing in the ex Twitch co-founder to be CEO.

And Satya says, fine, if You're not going to keep Sam and Greg on open AI.

We're building an advanced AI team and we're going to let Sam and Greg run this team.

Sam Altman retweets Satya's tweet about him coming over to open AI to confirm that this is actually happening.

We are going to build something new and it will be incredible.

He mentions the initial leadership being him and Sam Altman, as well as those 3 senior researchers that we reported earlier quit in solidarity with them.

So does this mean that Microsoft is now building a division to compete with OpenAI to release the reliance on OpenAI?

To me this sort of screams that Microsoft is going fine if you're not gonna put the people that got OpenAI to where they are today back in place we're gonna go and do the same thing internally, and we're going to give them unlimited resources to make this happen as quickly as possible.

Theoretically, Bing Chat, Bing Image Creator, all of these tools are going to be powered by new models in the future that were probably built by this new team that Sam and Greg are putting together directly inside of Microsoft.

Now, whether Satya Nadella's statements about being committed to open AI are genuine or not, that's yet to be seen.

If I had to guess, he's probably going to play both sides a little bit.

Let's keep with open AI, see what they produce.

Let's work with Sam, see what they produce.

Let's continue to work with meta, see what they produce.

And whoever gets us to our goals, the fastest are the team we're going to lean into, that's probably what's happening, but I would Imagine they're going to put a ton of resources into Sam and Greg and the internal team and figure out how to build all of this stuff back up as quickly as possible internally at Microsoft without the governing board being this nonprofit that should be focused on research.

Sam's fired, Greg's quit, OpenAI hires Emmett Shear as new CEO.

Sam and Greg go to Microsoft to build a new AI team over directly inside of Microsoft.

Now here we are Monday morning the day I'm recording this video and Ilya Suskovor tweets.

I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions.

I love everything we built together and we'll do everything I can to reunite the company.

This is the day after Microsoft announced they're bringing in Sam and Greg to work on an internal team at Microsoft.

Ilya seems to be having second thoughts and saying, I want the gang back together again.

Also this morning, Sam Altman sees that tweet, retweets it and gives it 3 hearts, acknowledging that he sees that Ilya regrets that decision.

Also today, Monday morning, after all of this news breaks down, that Sam's not coming back, they're going to Microsoft instead.

According to Kara Swisher here, 505 of 700 employees at OpenAI tell the board to resign.

To the board of directors at OpenAI, OpenAI is the world's leading AI company.

We, the employees of OpenAI have developed the best methods and pushed the field to new frontiers.

Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms.

The products we built are used by millions of people around the world.

Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position.

The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company.

Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.

When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAI acted swiftly to stabilize the company.

They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds.

Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence.

They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties and were negotiating in bad faith.

The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward, the 1 that would best serve our mission company, stakeholders, employees, and the public would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that can lead the company forward in stability.

Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome.

Yet within 2 days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO, Mira Murati against the best interest of the company.

You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed would be consistent with the mission.

Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI.

We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment, and care for our mission and employees.

We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

Microsoft has assured us that our positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.

We will take this step immediately unless all current board members resign and the board appoints 2 new lead independent directors such as Brett Taylor and Will Hurd and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

Now here's where this is really interesting.

Number 1 signer, the person they put in as interim CEO after ousting Sam Brockman, but most interestingly, look at Number 12 on the list, Ilya Suskovor, the 1 who deeply regretted his decision to side with the board and oust Sam Altman is now signing off saying that he will leave OpenAI potentially if they don't fire the rest of the board.

It quite possibly could be, especially if Ilya ends up following Sam out the door over to Microsoft.

And the story is continuing to play out right now over on Twitter.

X team members from open AI 1 by 1 are tweeting this exact tweet.

OpenAI is nothing without its people and my Twitter feed is filled with it.

Everybody once again, standing up in solidarity, making it look like 1 by 1, they're going to step away from open AI and likely join Sam and Greg over at Microsoft.

Sam Altman, obviously seeing all this is retweeting and hurting these people all saying open AI is nothing without its people, including Mira Mirati.

I feel like I'm investing way too much time and energy into being an armchair detective, trying to figure out what the heck is going on over at open AI right now.

And now over at Microsoft, I did write up a fairly long mini essay over on Twitter about exactly what I think went down over at open AI and why this decision was made and how I think that both Sam Altman and Ilya Suskovor were acting in what they thought were the best interest of the company, but they weren't necessarily aligned on what the best interest of the company was.

Ilya being more that research academic side, wanting to push the technology forward.

Sam Altman pushing more on the commercialization.

We've got to make more money side with the subscriptions, the APIs, the GPT store wanting to raise more money.

He was more on that capitalistic commercialization of the product to get more money in to in turn fund research.

But I don't think Ilian necessarily liked all this commercialization.

Again, I do a fairly succinct job of breaking down what happened at open AI.

And I feel like this is the narrative you're going to hear more and more as more information comes out from the people at open AI.

So I'm going to link up to this tweet below, because I highly recommend you reading it if you want more info about it.

And 1 last little bit that I want to share here before I kind of give a few more opinions on what's going on is that Emmet Shear, the new CEO of OpenAI, also put out a tweet this morning with a little bit more details about what he plans to do with OpenAI.

Today, I got a call inviting me to consider a once in a lifetime opportunity to become the interim CEO of OpenAI.

After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just a few hours, I accepted." He talks about how he's taken time off to spend time with his family and kids.

He spent the day drinking from a fire hose as much as possible, speaking with the board and a small number of major partners and listening to employees.

The partnership with Microsoft remains strong.

He even says it's clear that the process and communication around Sam's removal has been handled very badly which has seriously damaged our trust.

So his first day on the job he's already sort of bashing the board.

I have a three-point plan for the next 30 days.

Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report.

Continue to speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors, and customers as possible.

Take good notes and share the key takeaways.

Reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers.

He even says I will drive changes in the organization up to and including pushing strongly for significant governance changes if necessary.

The board that just hired him on he's already saying I'm gonna do an investigation And if I have to boot some board members, I'm gonna try to boot some board members He's saying that he believes it will take longer than a month to achieve true progress He has nothing but respect for Sam and the entire open AI team He ends it was saying 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.

The reasoning was completely different from that.

I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.

So it sounds like he is not planning on taking away what we have at chat GPT and the APIs and the ways that open AI is making money.

So that's good to hear, but how strong is the open AI going to be?

Now there is an interview clip of Emmett talking about his thoughts on AI that Rowan Chung shared here.

And that kind of intelligence is just an intrinsically, very dangerous thing because intelligence is power.

Human beings are the dominant form of life on this planet, pretty much entirely because we're smarter than the other creatures.

Like my P-Doom, my probability of doom, is like my bid-ask spread, and that's pretty high because I have a lot of uncertainty, but I would say it's like between like 5 and 50.

That should cause you to shit your pants.

But it's human level extinction, I think.

No, no, it's not just human level extinction.

It's such, extincting humans is bad enough.

It's like potential destruction of all value in the light code.

Like, not just for us, but for any species caught in the wake of the explosion.

It's like someone invented a way to make like 10X more powerful fusion bombs out of like sand and bleach that like anyone could do at home.

And I've had enough time with it now that I can laugh about it.

When I first realized, it was heart stopping.

And I am like, no, no, no, the AI thing, this thing, though, actually, may be a problem.

If you are rejecting it, because we sound like a bunch of crazies, just notice that like some number of people who are worried about this are on your, I'm on your team.

So it sounds like Emmett is kind of on that Doomer sort of concerned of where this is all going side of things.

And literally in the process of recording this video, Sam Altman tweets, the OpenAI leadership team, particularly Mira, Brad and Jason, but really all of them have been doing an incredible job through this that will be in the history books.

It cannot overstate the level of pride and respect.

I feel for Mira, Brad, Jason, and the rest of the leadership team for the response to this crisis.

I'm borderline Afraid to stop recording because as soon as I do new news is going to come out about what's going on.

If I have to, I'm hoping the news slows down a little bit because this has been my soap opera.

I've been sleeping, but I've been borderline not sleeping over this.

As I end this video, as of the recording of this video, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are not coming back to open AI.

Instead, they are starting up a new team over at Microsoft, along with the 3 senior researchers that quit from open AI.

It sounds like Microsoft and Satya Nadella said that anybody that wants a job over in the Microsoft division is welcome to leave open AI and come over to Microsoft.

There's a petition out to remove the board from open AI employees.

And if they don't remove the board, the employees are threatening to quit and likely move over to Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg again to sort of restate what I said in my little essay here.

This really came down to Sam Altman on the commercialization side.

He knew the company needed a lot of money to handle the compute power necessary to train these models as well as to let people actually use these models.

He was figuring out how to commercialize the product through things like APIs, subscriptions to chat GPT plus, open AI enterprise additions, upcoming GPT store.

He was figuring out how to make money for this company to fund all of the compute as well as to fund the research.

Seemingly the board was on the side of focusing on research and the academic side and just advancing the technology, but not so excited about the commercialization of the whole thing over here.

I believe that the board was most likely a little worried that Sam was going to be rolling out features too quickly, both internally at OpenAI and externally at Microsoft.

Then the board wanted these things to roll out.

They wanted to be able to improve them, make them safer and really dial them in.

While I believe Sam and Microsoft were probably more pushing to get this stuff out so they can make more money, not because they need more money for themselves And just want to become bigger billionaires, but because they needed this money to fund the research over here.

And that was the 2 opposing forces was the research academic side and the commercialization side and the board being governed by the nonprofit and not having a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, but having a responsibility to ethical and safe advancement of the research.

They felt that the commercialization efforts were at odds with their mission.

That's sort of what I stated in the last video.

That's sort of what I stated in my long essay on Twitter here.

That's where I believe things broke down.

But again, without any formal announcement from the board on why they made this decision, it's still somewhat speculation.

I feel like we have enough good info flowing now and enough details to really put all the pieces together.

And this is what the puzzle looks like to me with a few little pieces missing.

And I don't know where it goes from here.

I think there's a couple potential scenarios that can play out.

I think scenario 1, the board resigns from open AI, Sam and Greg and the senior researchers and everybody threatening to quit goes back to open AI, Ilya and Sam bury the hatchet.

They push forward on what they were doing.

I think that's scenario 1 scenario to the board holds strong.

Tons of team members leave OpenAI to move over to Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg over at Microsoft.

If Ilya is 1 of those people, I also think that spells the end for open AI.

I think open AI really struggles without someone like Ilya there.

And now Microsoft accelerates the advancement of AI and AGI internally without open AI's help and without this sort of nonprofit governance board whose goals aren't really aligned with the goals of the commercialization of the tech.

Or there's a potential third scenario, which I don't feel is super likely, but there's a third scenario where Sam and Greg being at Microsoft and Ilya and maybe Mira staying over at OpenAI and they deepen the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI and the teams work really closely together to both grow OpenAI's interests and Microsoft's interests and the team is sort of united but just in 2 separate companies.

I think that's sort of a third scenario that could potentially play out.

I would say almost more than likely with 1 of the first 2 scenarios is going to play out.

Sam and Greg come back or Microsoft becomes the powerhouse AI Developer and brings all of the open AI team over and they just see rapid advancements in the technology that they're building over inside of Microsoft Those are the few scenarios I see playing out again.

See all Matt Wolfe transcripts on Youtube

The OpenAI Saga - Everything Changed AGAIN!