An OA update: it’s been quiet, but the investigation is over. And Sam Altman won. (EDIT: yep.)
To recap, because I believe I haven’t been commenting on this since December (this is my last big comment, skimming my LW profile): WilmerHale was brought in to do the investigation. The tender offer, to everyone’s relief, went off. A number of embarrassing new details about Sam Altman have surfaced: in particular, about his enormous chip fab plan with substantial interest from giants like Temasek, and how the OA VC Fund turns out to be owned by Sam Altman (his explanation was it saved some paperwork and he just forgot to ever transfer it to OA). Ilya Sutskever remains in hiding and lawyered up (his silence became particularly striking with the release of Sora). There have been increasing reports the past week or two that the WilmerHale investigation was coming to a close—and I am told that the investigators were not offering confidentiality and the investigation was narrowly scoped to the firing. (There was also some OA drama with the Musk lawfare & the OA response, but aside from offering an abject lesson in how not to redact sensitive information, it’s both irrelevant & unimportant.)
The main theme of the article is clarifying Murati’s role: as I speculated, she was in fact telling the Board about Altman’s behavior patterns, and it fills in that she had gone further and written it up in a memo to him, and even threatened to leave with Sutskever.
But it reveals a number of other important claims: the investigation is basically done and wrapping up. The new board apparently has been chosen. Sutskever’s lawyer has gone on the record stating that Sutskever did not approach the board about Altman (?!). And it reveals the board confronted Altman over his ownership of the OA VC Fund (in addition to all his many other compromises of interest**) imply.
So, what does that mean?
First, as always, in a war of leaks, cui bono? Who is leaking this to the NYT? Well, it’s not the pro-Altman faction: they are at war with the NYT, and these leaks do them no good whatsoever. It’s not the lawyers: these are high-powered elite lawyers, hired for confidentiality and discretion. It’s not Murati or Sutskever, given their lack of motive, and the former’s panicked internal note & Sutskever’s lawyer’s denial. Of the current interim board (which is about to finish its job and leave, handing it over to the expanded replacement board), probably not Larry Summers/Brett Taylor—they were brought on to oversee the report as neutral third party arbitrators, and if they (a simple majority of the temporary board) want something in their report, no one can stop them from putting it there. It could be Adam D’Angelo or the ex-board: they are the ones who don’t control the report, and they also already have access to all of the newly-leaked-but-old information about Murati & Sutskever & the VC Fund.
So, it’s the anti-Altman faction, associated with the old board. What does that mean?
I think that what this leak indirectly reveals is simple: Sam Altman has won. The investigation will exonerate him, and it is probably true that it was so narrowly scoped from the beginning that it was never going to plausibly provide grounds for his ouster. What these leaks are, are a loser’s spoiler move: the last gasps of the anti-Altman faction, reduced to leaking bits from the final report to friendly media (Metz/NYT) to annoy Altman, and strike first. They got some snippets out before the Altman faction shops around highly selective excerpts to their own friendly media outlets (the usual suspects—The Information, Semafor, Kara Swisher) from the final officialized report to set the official record (at which point the rest of the confidential report is sent down the memory hole). Welp, it’s been an interesting few months, but l’affaire Altman is over. RIP.
Evidence, aside from simply asking who benefits from these particular leaks at the last minute, is that Sutskever remains in hiding & his lawyer is implausibly denying he had anything to do with it, while if you read Altman on social media, you’ll notice that he’s become ever more talkative since December, particularly in the last few weeks—glorying in the instant memeification of ‘$7 trillion’ - as has OA PR* and we have heard no more rhetoric about what an amazing team of execs OA has and how he’s so proud to have tutored them to replace him. Because there will be no need to replace him now. The only major reasons he will have to leave is if it’s necessary as a stepping stone to something even higher (eg. running the $7t chip fab consortium, running for US President) or something like a health issue.
So, upshot: I speculate that the report will exonerate Altman (although it can’t restore his halo, as it cannot & will not address things like his firing from YC which have been forced out into public light by this whole affair) and he will be staying as CEO and may be returning to the expanded board; the board will probably include some weak uncommitted token outsiders for their diversity and independence, but have an Altman plurality and we will see gradual selective attrition/replacement in favor of Altman loyalists until he has a secure majority robust to at least 1 flip and preferably 2. Having retaken irrevocable control of OA, further EA purges should be unnecessary, and Altman will probably refocus on the other major weakness exposed by the coup: the fact that his frenemy MS controls OA’s lifeblood. (The fact that MS was such a potent weapon for Altman in the fight is a feature while he’s outside the building, but a severe bug once he’s back inside.) People are laughing at the ‘$7 trillion’. But Altman isn’t laughing. Those GPUs are life and death for OA now. And why should he believe he can’t do it? Things have always worked out for him before...
Predictions, if being a bit more quantitative will help clarify my speculations here: Altman will still be CEO of OA on June 1st (85%); the new OA board will include Altman (60%); Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati will leave OA or otherwise take on some sort of clearly diminished role by year-end (90%, 75%; cf. Murati’s desperate-sounding internal note); the full unexpurgated non-summary report will not be released (85%, may be hard to judge because it’d be easy to lie about); serious chip fab/Tigris efforts will continue (75%); Microsoft’s observer seat will be upgraded to a voting seat (25%).
* Eric Newcomer (usually a bit more acute than this) asks “One thing that I find weird: OpenAI comms is giving very pro Altman statements when the board/WilmerHale are still conducting the investigation. Isn’t communications supposed to work for the company, not just the CEO? The board is in charge here still, no?” NARRATOR: “The board is not in charge still.”
** Compare the current OA PR statement on the VC Fund to Altman’s past position on, say, Helen Toner or Reid Hoffman or Shivon Zilis, or Altman’s investment in chip startups touting letters of commitment from OA or his ongoing Hydrazine investment in OA which sadly, he has never quite had the time to dispose of in any of the OA tender offers. As usual, CoIs only apply to people Altman doesn’t trust—“for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.
At least from the intro, it sounds like my predictions were on-point: re-appointed Altman (I waffled about this at 60% because while his narcissism/desire to be vindicated requires him to regain his board seat, because anything less is a blot on his escutcheon, and also the pragmatic desire to lock down the board, both strongly militated for his reinstatement, it also seems so blatant a powergrab in this context that surely he wouldn’t dare...? guess he did), released to an Altman outlet (The Information), with 3 weak apparently ‘independent’ and ‘diverse’ directors to pad out the board and eventually be replaced by full Altman loyalists—although I bet if one looks closer into these three women (Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Nicole Seligman, & Fidji Simo), one will find at least one has buried Altman ties. (Fidji Simo, Instacart CEO, seems like the most obvious one there: Instacart was YC S12.)
As predicted, the full report will not be released, only the ‘summary’ focused on exonerating Altman. Also as predicted, ‘the mountain has given birth to a mouse’ and the report was narrowly scoped to just the firing: they bluster about “reviewing 30,000 documents” (easy enough when you can just grep Slack + text messages + emails...), but then admit that they looked only at “the events concerning the November 17, 2023 removal” and interviewed hardly anyone (“dozens of interviews” barely even covers the immediate dramatis personae, much less any kind of investigation into Altman’s chip stuff, Altman’s many broken promises, Brockman’s complainers etc). Doesn’t sound like they have much to show for over 3 months of work by the smartest & highest-paid lawyers, does it… It also seems like they indeed did not promise confidentiality or set up any kind of anonymous reporting mechanism, given that they mention no such thing and include setting up a hotline for whistleblowers as a ‘recommendation’ for the future (ie. there was no such thing before or during the investigation). So, it was a whitewash from the beginning. Tellingly, there is nothing about Microsoft, and no hint their observer will be upgraded (or that there still even is one). And while flattering to Brockman, there is nothing about Murati—free tip to all my VC & DL startup acquaintances, there’s a highly competent AI manager who’s looking for exciting new opportunities, even if she doesn’t realize it yet.
Also entertaining is that you can see the media spin happening in real time. What WilmerHales signs off on:
WilmerHale found that the prior Board acted within its broad discretion to terminate Mr. Altman, but also found that his conduct did not mandate removal.
Which is… less than complimentary? One would hope a CEO does a little bit better than merely not engage in ‘conduct which mandates removal’? And turns into headlines like
(Nothing from Kara Swisher so far, but judging from her Twitter, she’s too busy promoting her new book and bonding with Altmanover their mutual dislike of Elon Musk to spare any time for relatively-minor-sounding news.)
OK, so what was not as predicted? What is surprising?
This is not a full replacement board, but implies that Adam D’Angelo/Brett Taylor/Larry Summers are all staying on the board, at least for now. (So the new composition is D’Angelo/Taylor/Summers/Altman/Demond-Hellmann/Seligman/Simo plus the unknown Microsoft non-voting observer.) This is surprising, but it may simply be a quotidian logistics problem—they hadn’t settled on 3 more adequately diverse and prima-facie qualified OA board candidates yet, but the report was finished and it was more important to wind things up, and they’ll get to the remainder later. (Perhaps Brockman will get his seat back?)
EDIT: A HNer points out that today, March 8th, is “International Women’s Day”, and this is probably the reason for the exact timing of the announcement. If so, they may well have already picked the remaining candidates (Brockman?), but those weren’t women and so got left out of the announcement. Stay tuned, I guess. EDITEDIT: the video call/press conference seems to confirm that they do plan more board appointments: “OpenAI will continue to expand the board moving forward, according to a Zoom call with reporters.” So that is consistent with the hurried women-only announcement.
(Fixed. This is a surname typo I make an unbelievable number of times because I reflexively overcorrect it to ‘Sumners’, due to reading a lot more of Scott Sumner than Larry Summers. Ugh—just caught myself doing it again in a Reddit comment...)
It was either Hydrazine or YC. In either case, my point remains true: he’s chosen to not dispose of his OA stake, whatever vehicle it is held in, even though it would be easy for someone of his financial acumen to do so by a sale or equivalent arrangement, forcing an embarrassing asterisk to his claims to have no direct financial conflict of interest in OA LLC—and one which comes up regularly in bad OA PR (particularly by people who believe it is less than candid to say you have no financial interest in OA when you totally do), and a stake which might be quite large at this point*, and so is particularly striking given his attitude towards much smaller conflicts supposedly risking bad OA PR. (This is in addition to the earlier conflicts of interest in Hydrazine while running YC or the interest of outsiders in investing in Hydrazine, apparently as a stepping stone towards OA.)
* if he invested a ‘small’ amount via some vehicle before he even went full-time at OA, when OA was valued at some very small amount like $50m or $100m, say, and OA’s now valued at anywhere up to $90,000m or >900x more, and further, he strongly believes it’s going to be worth far more than that in the near-future… Sure, it may be worth ‘just’ $500m or ‘just’ $1000m after dilution or whatever, but to most people that’s pretty serious money!
An OA update: it’s been quiet, but the investigation is over. And Sam Altman won. (EDIT: yep.)
To recap, because I believe I haven’t been commenting on this since December (this is my last big comment, skimming my LW profile): WilmerHale was brought in to do the investigation. The tender offer, to everyone’s relief, went off. A number of embarrassing new details about Sam Altman have surfaced: in particular, about his enormous chip fab plan with substantial interest from giants like Temasek, and how the OA VC Fund turns out to be owned by Sam Altman (his explanation was it saved some paperwork and he just forgot to ever transfer it to OA). Ilya Sutskever remains in hiding and lawyered up (his silence became particularly striking with the release of Sora). There have been increasing reports the past week or two that the WilmerHale investigation was coming to a close—and I am told that the investigators were not offering confidentiality and the investigation was narrowly scoped to the firing. (There was also some OA drama with the Musk lawfare & the OA response, but aside from offering an abject lesson in how not to redact sensitive information, it’s both irrelevant & unimportant.)
The news today comes from the NYT leaking information from the final report: “Key OpenAI Executive [Mira Murati] Played a Pivotal Role in Sam Altman’s Ouster” (mirror; EDIT: largely confirmed by Murati in internal note).
The main theme of the article is clarifying Murati’s role: as I speculated, she was in fact telling the Board about Altman’s behavior patterns, and it fills in that she had gone further and written it up in a memo to him, and even threatened to leave with Sutskever.
But it reveals a number of other important claims: the investigation is basically done and wrapping up. The new board apparently has been chosen. Sutskever’s lawyer has gone on the record stating that Sutskever did not approach the board about Altman (?!). And it reveals the board confronted Altman over his ownership of the OA VC Fund (in addition to all his many other compromises of interest**) imply.
So, what does that mean?
First, as always, in a war of leaks, cui bono? Who is leaking this to the NYT? Well, it’s not the pro-Altman faction: they are at war with the NYT, and these leaks do them no good whatsoever. It’s not the lawyers: these are high-powered elite lawyers, hired for confidentiality and discretion. It’s not Murati or Sutskever, given their lack of motive, and the former’s panicked internal note & Sutskever’s lawyer’s denial. Of the current interim board (which is about to finish its job and leave, handing it over to the expanded replacement board), probably not Larry Summers/Brett Taylor—they were brought on to oversee the report as neutral third party arbitrators, and if they (a simple majority of the temporary board) want something in their report, no one can stop them from putting it there. It could be Adam D’Angelo or the ex-board: they are the ones who don’t control the report, and they also already have access to all of the newly-leaked-but-old information about Murati & Sutskever & the VC Fund.
So, it’s the anti-Altman faction, associated with the old board. What does that mean?
I think that what this leak indirectly reveals is simple: Sam Altman has won. The investigation will exonerate him, and it is probably true that it was so narrowly scoped from the beginning that it was never going to plausibly provide grounds for his ouster. What these leaks are, are a loser’s spoiler move: the last gasps of the anti-Altman faction, reduced to leaking bits from the final report to friendly media (Metz/NYT) to annoy Altman, and strike first. They got some snippets out before the Altman faction shops around highly selective excerpts to their own friendly media outlets (the usual suspects—The Information, Semafor, Kara Swisher) from the final officialized report to set the official record (at which point the rest of the confidential report is sent down the memory hole). Welp, it’s been an interesting few months, but l’affaire Altman is over. RIP.
Evidence, aside from simply asking who benefits from these particular leaks at the last minute, is that Sutskever remains in hiding & his lawyer is implausibly denying he had anything to do with it, while if you read Altman on social media, you’ll notice that he’s become ever more talkative since December, particularly in the last few weeks—glorying in the instant memeification of ‘$7 trillion’ - as has OA PR* and we have heard no more rhetoric about what an amazing team of execs OA has and how he’s so proud to have tutored them to replace him. Because there will be no need to replace him now. The only major reasons he will have to leave is if it’s necessary as a stepping stone to something even higher (eg. running the $7t chip fab consortium, running for US President) or something like a health issue.
So, upshot: I speculate that the report will exonerate Altman (although it can’t restore his halo, as it cannot & will not address things like his firing from YC which have been forced out into public light by this whole affair) and he will be staying as CEO and may be returning to the expanded board; the board will probably include some weak uncommitted token outsiders for their diversity and independence, but have an Altman plurality and we will see gradual selective attrition/replacement in favor of Altman loyalists until he has a secure majority robust to at least 1 flip and preferably 2. Having retaken irrevocable control of OA, further EA purges should be unnecessary, and Altman will probably refocus on the other major weakness exposed by the coup: the fact that his frenemy MS controls OA’s lifeblood. (The fact that MS was such a potent weapon for Altman in the fight is a feature while he’s outside the building, but a severe bug once he’s back inside.) People are laughing at the ‘$7 trillion’. But Altman isn’t laughing. Those GPUs are life and death for OA now. And why should he believe he can’t do it? Things have always worked out for him before...
Predictions, if being a bit more quantitative will help clarify my speculations here: Altman will still be CEO of OA on June 1st (85%); the new OA board will include Altman (60%); Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati will leave OA or otherwise take on some sort of clearly diminished role by year-end (90%, 75%; cf. Murati’s desperate-sounding internal note); the full unexpurgated non-summary report will not be released (85%, may be hard to judge because it’d be easy to lie about); serious chip fab/Tigris efforts will continue (75%); Microsoft’s observer seat will be upgraded to a voting seat (25%).
* Eric Newcomer (usually a bit more acute than this) asks “One thing that I find weird: OpenAI comms is giving very pro Altman statements when the board/WilmerHale are still conducting the investigation. Isn’t communications supposed to work for the company, not just the CEO? The board is in charge here still, no?” NARRATOR: “The board is not in charge still.”
** Compare the current OA PR statement on the VC Fund to Altman’s past position on, say, Helen Toner or Reid Hoffman or Shivon Zilis, or Altman’s investment in chip startups touting letters of commitment from OA or his ongoing Hydrazine investment in OA which sadly, he has never quite had the time to dispose of in any of the OA tender offers. As usual, CoIs only apply to people Altman doesn’t trust—“for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.
EDIT: Zvi commentary: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-the-board-expands
Looks like you were right, at least if the reporting in this article is correct, and I’m interpreting the claim accurately.
At least from the intro, it sounds like my predictions were on-point: re-appointed Altman (I waffled about this at 60% because while his narcissism/desire to be vindicated requires him to regain his board seat, because anything less is a blot on his escutcheon, and also the pragmatic desire to lock down the board, both strongly militated for his reinstatement, it also seems so blatant a powergrab in this context that surely he wouldn’t dare...? guess he did), released to an Altman outlet (The Information), with 3 weak apparently ‘independent’ and ‘diverse’ directors to pad out the board and eventually be replaced by full Altman loyalists—although I bet if one looks closer into these three women (Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Nicole Seligman, & Fidji Simo), one will find at least one has buried Altman ties. (Fidji Simo, Instacart CEO, seems like the most obvious one there: Instacart was YC S12.)
The official OA press releases are out confirming The Information: https://openai.com/blog/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue-to-lead-openai https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-new-members-to-board-of-directors
He’s probably right.
As predicted, the full report will not be released, only the ‘summary’ focused on exonerating Altman. Also as predicted, ‘the mountain has given birth to a mouse’ and the report was narrowly scoped to just the firing: they bluster about “reviewing 30,000 documents” (easy enough when you can just grep Slack + text messages + emails...), but then admit that they looked only at “the events concerning the November 17, 2023 removal” and interviewed hardly anyone (“dozens of interviews” barely even covers the immediate dramatis personae, much less any kind of investigation into Altman’s chip stuff, Altman’s many broken promises, Brockman’s complainers etc). Doesn’t sound like they have much to show for over 3 months of work by the smartest & highest-paid lawyers, does it… It also seems like they indeed did not promise confidentiality or set up any kind of anonymous reporting mechanism, given that they mention no such thing and include setting up a hotline for whistleblowers as a ‘recommendation’ for the future (ie. there was no such thing before or during the investigation). So, it was a whitewash from the beginning. Tellingly, there is nothing about Microsoft, and no hint their observer will be upgraded (or that there still even is one). And while flattering to Brockman, there is nothing about Murati—free tip to all my VC & DL startup acquaintances, there’s a highly competent AI manager who’s looking for exciting new opportunities, even if she doesn’t realize it yet.
Also entertaining is that you can see the media spin happening in real time. What WilmerHales signs off on:
Which is… less than complimentary? One would hope a CEO does a little bit better than merely not engage in ‘conduct which mandates removal’? And turns into headlines like
“OpenAI’s Sam Altman Returns to Board After Probe Clears Him”
(Nothing from Kara Swisher so far, but judging from her Twitter, she’s too busy promoting her new book and bonding with Altman over their mutual dislike of Elon Musk to spare any time for relatively-minor-sounding news.)
OK, so what was not as predicted? What is surprising?
This is not a full replacement board, but implies that Adam D’Angelo/Brett Taylor/Larry Summers are all staying on the board, at least for now. (So the new composition is D’Angelo/Taylor/Summers/Altman/Demond-Hellmann/Seligman/Simo plus the unknown Microsoft non-voting observer.) This is surprising, but it may simply be a quotidian logistics problem—they hadn’t settled on 3 more adequately diverse and prima-facie qualified OA board candidates yet, but the report was finished and it was more important to wind things up, and they’ll get to the remainder later. (Perhaps Brockman will get his seat back?)
EDIT: A HNer points out that today, March 8th, is “International Women’s Day”, and this is probably the reason for the exact timing of the announcement. If so, they may well have already picked the remaining candidates (Brockman?), but those weren’t women and so got left out of the announcement. Stay tuned, I guess. EDITEDIT: the video call/press conference seems to confirm that they do plan more board appointments: “OpenAI will continue to expand the board moving forward, according to a Zoom call with reporters.” So that is consistent with the hurried women-only announcement.
Nitpick: Larry Summers not Larry Sumners
(Fixed. This is a surname typo I make an unbelievable number of times because I reflexively overcorrect it to ‘Sumners’, due to reading a lot more of Scott Sumner than Larry Summers. Ugh—just caught myself doing it again in a Reddit comment...)
Yeah I figured Scott Sumner must have been involved.
Source?
@gwern I’ve failed to find a source saying that Hydrazine invested in OpenAI. If it did, that would be a big deal; it would make this a lie.
It was either Hydrazine or YC. In either case, my point remains true: he’s chosen to not dispose of his OA stake, whatever vehicle it is held in, even though it would be easy for someone of his financial acumen to do so by a sale or equivalent arrangement, forcing an embarrassing asterisk to his claims to have no direct financial conflict of interest in OA LLC—and one which comes up regularly in bad OA PR (particularly by people who believe it is less than candid to say you have no financial interest in OA when you totally do), and a stake which might be quite large at this point*, and so is particularly striking given his attitude towards much smaller conflicts supposedly risking bad OA PR. (This is in addition to the earlier conflicts of interest in Hydrazine while running YC or the interest of outsiders in investing in Hydrazine, apparently as a stepping stone towards OA.)
* if he invested a ‘small’ amount via some vehicle before he even went full-time at OA, when OA was valued at some very small amount like $50m or $100m, say, and OA’s now valued at anywhere up to $90,000m or >900x more, and further, he strongly believes it’s going to be worth far more than that in the near-future… Sure, it may be worth ‘just’ $500m or ‘just’ $1000m after dilution or whatever, but to most people that’s pretty serious money!