Sam Altman Goes to Microsoft while Former Twitch CEO Takes over OpenAI?! - Updates

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will be joining Microsoft to lead up a new advanced AI research team, and Emmett Shear, the former CEO and co-founder of Twitch, the streaming platform, will be joining OpenAI as its new interim CEO.

Of course, by the time this episode airs, all of that may be different. Everything could have changed. The twists and turns of this story are truly Shakespearean. 

And I am so excited to be here with you to catch you up on the latest. My name is Carly Reilly. Let's dive into everything that has happened in this OpenAI, Sam Altman, Microsoft, etc. saga since we last covered it, which was, like, you know, a little over 24 hours ago, and yet everything has changed. We've missed so much. 

My last update was Saturday, day. By Saturday night rumors were swirling that that Sam was in talks with the board to return to OpenAI as the CEO.

At that time it was understood that there was this like 5pm pacific time deadline by which they were going to try and make a deal. Of course Sam and Greg were only going to come back to OpenAI if there was a major shakeup of this board. And if Sam felt like he was gonna be able to execute in the way that he wanted to and needed to,

5:00 PM comes and goes. There's no hard update. The rumors are that the board is starting to balk at this.  They're maybe not willing to bring Sam back. They're not willing to step down.

We don't know exactly what's going on.  But we do know that every open AI employee seemingly, is now on social media showing their support for Sam. It really was.  A somewhat unprecedented display of love and loyalty. 

Sam had tweeted, as all of this was going on, "I love the OpenAI team so much." And then, again, seemingly every member of the OpenAI team gets on Twitter to retweet that with a heart.

And I have to say, that is pretty impressive; to have bred that much goodwill with a team while also driving that much value, shipping products, the speed that they're shipping them, executing at the level that they were all executing.

In any case, Sunday morning comes around and we have no decision. We don't know exactly what's going on. It seems like the conversations are still in place. It feels, at least to me, it felt like, okay, sanity is going to be restored, Sam's going to come back, the board made this terrible decision, they'll be gone, whatever.

It felt like that's where things were settling. But that would not be the last time that I thought I had a grasp on what was happening or what was going to happen, only to be entirely wrong.  Sunday comes, a new 5pm deadline Pacific Time is set. Sam tweets a picture of himself with an OpenAI guest badge around his neck saying, "This is the first and last time I'll ever wear one of these,".

So again, we know that he's at the OpenAI building, that he's talking presumably with the board, that these conversations are ongoing. And it's just a matter of wait and see.

And then bombshell number one comes. At 9pm pacific time, Sunday night, the announcement is made, Sam is not returning to OpenAI. OpenAI has hired now a different interim CEO, Emmett Shear, formerly co-founder and CEO of Twitch.

Now, everyone is shocked by this news, including, based on reports, Sam himself. 

You may remember that Mira Murati, who has been the CTO of OpenAI, was initially the one who was announced to be the interim CEO for OpenAI.  

But she, it seems, has been fully swung to Sam's side, and it was being reported that she was going to hire Sam and Greg back in her role as interim CEO. So clearly the board was like, well, we can't have her anymore.

So they've hired somebody who... is really not that well known as far as big corporate CEO's go. Now to talk a little bit about Emmett for a moment: 

Emmett has been with Twitch since its very earliest days since it was Justin TV. If folks don't know, Justin TV was Justin Khan, another one of the co-founders of Twitch, had this thing where he would  live stream his life 24/7 and it was called Justin TV. I've actually interviewed Justin Khan before in some other context  and we talked a little bit about that. That then became Twitch and Twitch was then ultimately sold to Amazon for a billion dollars and Emmett had stayed on to run that company even after Justin left and others left after the sale.

He is somebody who is seemingly very interested in AI, I think, clearly. He's been tweeting about it for months. And he's quite skeptical of it and seems to be definitely on the doomsday'er, doomsayer, fearful side of things.

Which puts him in line with this board.

So perhaps not surprising from that standpoint, but it was, it just felt so out of left field. 

But that is not the end of the surprises. Oh no. Far from it.

After that bombshell, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, gets on, I keep calling it Twitter, X, whatever, I don't care, it'll always be Twitter to me,  Satya Nadella gets on X to tweet, we remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI, we look forward to getting to know Emmet Scheer. 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.

So then you get the news that Sam and Greg are joining Microsoft, which, of course, a brilliant move by Satya Nadella, an important move by Satya Nadella, whose stock has taken a real beating on the backs of all of this up and down, and back and forth, and the ouster, and the seemingly incredibly unprofessional way that it all went down.

Microsoft stock, for what it's worth, is up a little bit today now, on all of this news.

But also noteworthy in this tweet, was the line: "Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft,".  As we've noted, OpenAI employees showed a ton of support for Sam on social media throughout this ordeal. 

Well, just how many employees love Sam? Have a number now, and it's 505. 

Specifically, 505 members of the OpenAI team, out of 700 total employees at OpenAI, signed a letter to the board, basically excoriating them and the way they've handled the last three days, and saying that they will be leaving to join Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. At Microsoft. Here's the line :

"Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing open AI. 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 there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join,".

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

Now, I know, I know, this has been a lot to take in, there's a lot going on, a lot of moving pieces, but this next piece is, to me, the craziest of all of it.

One of the signatories, off this letter, is Ilya Sutskever,  who is the chief scientist at OpenAI and the person who was believed to have instigated this entire thing, to have led this whole coup.

And he is now signing a letter saying that if this isn't essentially reversed, if the decision that he was supposedly a big... factor in, isn't reversed, he may in fact leave to go join Sam and Greg, the guys that he booted out.

Ilya then follows up his signing of this letter with this tweet.

"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite this company,".

What the what? What?

So here's the thing. Obviously the whole tech world loves Sam Altman. I like Sam Altman. I've met him before. I actually ran a fundraiser at his house in San Francisco. I worked closely with his team to put on this fundraiser for Andrew Yang. I was the finance director for Andrew Yang's presidential campaign.

So I spent a little bit of time with Sam. I hardly know him, but  I always had a good impression from him, I got good vibes from him, clearly, again, much of the world feels the same way. But I was also open to the idea that this board were not simply a bunch of bumbling idiots, but that there was something they were genuinely concerned about, and I think too many people have made the mistake of assessing this board by normal board standards and going like, "oh my god, but Sam has created so much value for open AI, how could they get rid of them?", and it's like, this is not a normal board who's playing by normal rules.

They don't have equity in this company. They're not worried about shareholder value. They're worried about the future of humanity  safely ushering in artificial intelligence. And so on that basis, I was willing to entertain the idea that they had made the right decision, even if they had gone about it in a terrible way.

And frankly, Elon Musk is somebody who's been beating this drum a little bit. He had tweeted out this:

"I am very worried. Ilya has a good moral compass and does not seek power. He would not take such drastic action unless he felt it was absolutely necessary,".  

But, Elon tweeted this before Ilya came back around and then said,  I regret my participation in all of this.

So again, those of us who were like, all right, I'll stay open minded, I like Sam, but maybe there was something serious here that these folks were seeing, or maybe the board is wrong on all accounts, but again, they were voting their conscience.  I tweeted this out,  maybe it was a matter of, I need to be able to look my kid in the eye in five years when AI is ruining the world and say, I did what I could. I tried, I tried to stop it. And, and I can respect that even if it ends up not being true, or even if they ended up being wrong, whatever, right?

But then to get this tweet from Ilya, so, what, this really was just like a completely poorly thought out, what was this about?

What this makes it seem like is the board was kind of concerned, things were moving a little too quickly. They felt like Sam was really just barreling ahead. There wasn't anything specific. They just like, you know, it was like a vibes thing.

They just felt like, they were like, oh, I don't know. It feels like it's going a little fast guys, and overnight, they decided, you know what, probably best just to bring somebody else in here, because I think it's all just getting a little out of hand. And without talking to Sam, sharing that they were considering this, sharing that their concerns had apparently gotten severe enough that they were considering this. And they just wildly miscalculated how beloved he was, how talented he was, how difficult their work was going to be without him. And then when all of this went down, what, did Ilya now has talked to Sam and realized like, this could have been resolved in other ways?

It is a story of just staggering bored ineptitude. And, and again, this is coming from somebody who was, who, and still is to a degree, willing to... hear out the rationale here, but with every passing hour, it seems like the likelihood that there was a reasonable rationale to all of this gets smaller and smaller.

I'll close with this: There were concerns that maybe AGI had been developed or that they had gotten very close to some sort of AGI, artificial general intelligence, and that that was the thing that had been, that was really scaring the board and leading to all of this. Perhaps, I suppose that's still on the table, but this line from the the open letter from the employees of OpenAI to me is just really telling. It says,

"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,".  

It's a searing indictment of this board that has still not publicly addressed why the decision they made was made.

Now, in terms of the future, it's still incredibly unclear. I think it is actually still possible that Sam and Greg do get reinstated at OpenAI, because at this point, this is a company that is gutted. You have 500 of their employees likely leaving. What's more, there's a possibility that Microsoft could pull out of its deal.

Somebody mentioned this. The 13 billion that Microsoft has committed to OpenAI has not all been paid out yet. And if they're able to find that OpenAI has, or does, in some ways violate the terms of their contract, they could pull out of this thing.

It's also expected that there are going to be a wave of lawsuits to follow, suing this board for the way they went about this. So plenty more questions to be answered, and I will continue to track this story and provide updates as seems helpful and necessary. 

I will be off this Thursday, as it is Thanksgiving. And we got some extra episodes last week and this past weekend, because the story was crazy and happening,

But for now, that is the show. Thank y'all so much for being here. If you do enjoy these, please do, like, subscribe, comment. If you listen on the, on a podcast feed, you can follow it on the podcast feed there. Have an awesome rest of your day.