Reactions from the Internet to Sam's Firing from OpenAI

Set to the tune of the Wii shop music

I hate to take a page from a lot of modern media by nutpicking reactions, but this is mostly for the memes and frankly it’s hard to imagine something more ridiculous than what’s currently going down in San Francisco, so whatever.

Please don’t take anything in this seriously, if you do I will make fun of you.

He definitely got fired because he was moving too fast

Anonymous sources often have the best information.

Anxious_Bandicoot126 agrees, so I think this is basically confirmed truth at this point.

I think of all the theories out there, these guys are consistently putting the most words behind it. For example, https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1725679858939003349 or https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899, which are both small essays.

Meanwhile my tweets are still limited to 280 characters.

Cards on the table, based on what I know 48 hours later (which is essentially nothing), I think these guys are probably the ones most likely to be right. Still, I don’t know if I would give any particular person in this crowd extra credit — a lot of people are making wild claims, someone was bound to get close.

With Succession no longer on air, I suppose a lot of people have too much time on their hands and miss board room politicking. So the next big question on everyone’s mind: whodunnit?

Satya did it

A solid chunk of people think that the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella was behind the firing, which is weird because it’s not really obvious what he has to gain.

Tom Davenport has it figured out though:

Satya is a mastermind strategist who is also so petty he kicked out his biggest ally on the OAI board because of an awkward question.

I’m doubtful.

Mira did it

Surprisingly this wasn’t a more popular take. There were a few folks who framed this as ‘Mira disagreed with something’ but still have the board making the final call. I guess that makes sense, because at the end of the day Mira wasn’t in the room.

Speculation aside, at least one person on the internet is excited for Mira, though perhaps for the wrong reasons

Ilya did it

Well, there’s only 6 people actually on the board. Two of them were gone at the end of the day. 3 of them are basically unknowns. That leaves one man.

We actually do have confirmation on this one, from Sam Altman himself!

Fine, ok, maybe the phrase “I love you all” is a bit suspect, but come on. Next you’re going to say it’s because of spooks in the military —

It’s because of the military

“most plausible”

well, amyswitoshi.pyth — e/acc definitely agrees:

As a complete tangent, I kinda also love how some people are really interested in Eric Schmidt’s take. Bertil above, obviously, but also others!

Come on Eric, share your secrets! We know you’ve figured out how to see in the future, why else would you name your company Schmidt Futures?

Anyway, back to the military, I kinda like this take, where it actually wasn’t the military but something closeish and kinda mysterious. I’m sorta surprised that they went with Palantir though

Also, some people on this train really just need to touch grass, everything isn’t related to everything else

Luckily, we know it can’t possibly be the US military, because

It’s definitely because of China

I really want to live in a world where somehow this is what happened. Especially if it was for something really silly, like if Sam sold out because Xi was super complementary about World Coin.

By the way, people fucking hate world coin

Still, these responses look downright measured and reasonable compared to

in which running World Coin is akin to sexual assault of minors.

Speaking of…

Definitely a sexual assault scandal

There’s a general category of responses that are essentially along the lines of, “the board was wrong, Sam was right”. This is the opposite of that. There was a lot of speculation about why the board actually made the right call; a lot of that speculation was stuff like:

This is really engaging with the worst impulses of the internet. It’s not like there’s a great track record of correctly pinning these down, like ever, but nonetheless the great online masses persist in making these sorts of claims well before there’s enough evidence.

Lot’s of people bringing this up as well.

Look, to be serious for a moment, it’s nearly impossible for random internet commentators to correctly adjudicate claims like the above. And making a mistake in either direction can be devastating for the people actually involved, as well as a travesty of truth and justice. So I would encourage everyone to step back from this particular brand of idle speculation, it helps approximately no one.

Besides, there are a ton of other reasons why the board may want to fire a CEO, like

They fired him because OAI was running out of money

I’ll be honest, it never even remotely occurred to me that Sam could be in danger because *checks notes* he was going too fast and generating too much interest.

Still, if they were running out of money, maybe they should try and sell the company? Worked for Boston Dynamics a few times.

Sam/the board wanted to sell OAI and the board/Sam disagreed

Ah, yep, seems like Sam already thought of this one. He’s pretty smart, after all.

This is maybe plausible, except obviously it’s the board and the investors that want to sell

No, it’s definitely Altman who wanted to sell.

Wait…fuck…

You know what, never mind, just ignore this whole section.

The board realized they were going to be fucked by Disney

People seem to be rather scared of copyright law.

Reddit user tallr0b in particular is convinced that this is the issue

Honestly, I think if the board somehow didn’t know that OpenAI was training on copyrighted data, that’s grounds to sue the board for the equivalent of malpractice.

He got fired because of a security breach

This is sorta like the copyright stuff, or at least has echoes. OpenAI was using data badly, the board wanted to show that they took action against it.

Lucky for us, user nikcub has put the pieces together, and also the threads:

I love that this timeline is so well thought out! Too bad it’s also not really compelling. In some ways, this is just a slightly more reasonable version of the folks arguing that China was somehow responsible. Two things happened, which means they must be related, of course.

Also maybe it’s worth pointing out that clearly it’s not at all impossible to build a product even with data leaks. Like, ok, it’s not ideal. But the vast majority of users clearly don’t care?

I really actually want to live in the world that these comments came from. If a data leak was enough for someone to get fired, maybe the executive teams over at Experian and Equifax would no longer exist? But last I checked, they were getting awards from Congress for excellence in data safety. Ah well, one can dream.

Sam was actually in fact lying, for real

In History class I learned about the importance of primary sources. So let’s go back to the OpenAI blog post for a second:

Maybe Sam actually was lying somehow. But about what?

Some people posited financial corruption

Others thought that Sam actually had a secret lab going

But my favorite take in this genre was that he was planning to spin off other companies

My cofounder and I talk about spinning off other complementary companies and corporate entities like every day. Our board is generally really excited and hyped about it! Like imagine you were a big investor in OAI and then you found out the CEO was saying stuff like ‘listen, I know we’re already making money hand over fist, and we’ve made the most popular product basically ever. But what if we made more money hand over fist and also secured the future of money making for the first project?’ Why would you fire this person?

Sentience Achieved, and ChatGPT is the CEO now

OpenAI is trying to get to AGI, so of course some number of people guessed that maybe they succeeded.

Relatedly, whenever board structure changes at SpaceX, it’s because they found martians. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that ML folks never internalized that correlation =/= causation, especially because the entire field more or less depends on the opposite.

Of course, because we all love a good Oedipus myth, ChatGPT had to be the one literally responsible for holding the metaphorical knife.

Though this does raise a great question. If Sam is no longer CEO, who is going to take his place?

I am the next CEO of OpenAI

o well, that was easy to figure out. I for one am very excited for Sean’s tenure as the new CEO —

O shit, looks like there’s going to be a board fight over this one. Also, totally independently, B, my guy, why did you #SamAltman in your post? Are you just rubbing it in that you took his job?

It doesn’t matter though, because obviously the new CEO is

look at those eyes. Sam doesn’t have eyes like that.

Ironically, though, I think the actual board must follow Ryan Petersen

because they apparently agreed with his suggestion!

Completely unrelated, did you know everyone in the AI world is hiring?

It does seem like some folks are only hiring very specific people though

To really add insult to injury, even Google got in the game???

Speaking of Google…

Never accept a Google Meet invite

I don’t know who’s having a worse time: Sam, getting fired, or Satya realizing that even Microsoft subsidiaries would rather use Google Meet over MS Teams.

But Google’s still ngmi

Maybe this is where I disclose that I used to work on AI at Google, oops. It’s been a few years, and even back before I left it was hard to get Google to ship products, but idk. I have a soft spot for Google. (Also they seem to have straight up won the self driving car race and no one is paying attention to that???)

Still, I did find this one pretty funny

They’ll get there one day. Maybe.

People really love Steve Jobs comparisons

or, less poetically (and grammatically)

Speaking of poetic, idk who Lokesh is but man I love the energy

Why is Steve on fire? Why is Sam about to be? What’s going on around them to cause this inferno? What does it mean??? I should probably subscribe to designs to find out

ofc the comparisons only got better once Sam was invited back within the day

Maybe time travelers?

I think I saw this movie.

Though I guess the time travelers didn’t do a great job, because it seems like Sam may be back sooner rather than later. Maybe these time travelers were actually working for skynet?

And finally, some miscellaneous reactions that I enjoyed

Presented without further comment.