DALL-E “an illustration inspired by the book “Where’s Waldo” hiding a image of Sam Altman (OpenAI’s CEO) in a field of computer and AI inspired object and characters. There could be images of famous Silicon Valley moguls such as Satya Nadella, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, etc. aspect ratio 16:9″
You’re the detective in a high-tech game of hide-and-seek, sifting through the digital landscape to find Sam Altman.
Welcome to “Where’s Sam?” The rules? Who knows? They’re making them up as they go along.
First up: Sam Altman becomes our erstwhile hero when the OpenAI board, in a move that came as a shock to everyone uninvolved with the Sturm und Drang going on behind the scenes, cited some vague communication issues and showed Altman the door. In the PR world, “communication issues” is code for “we’re not telling you the real story.”
Pundits and armchair experts turned the rumor mill up to 11 (“Sam’s going to be rehired at OpenAI.” “He’s going to start his own thing?”) and then spiced things up with some truly awful tweets about his siblings. The weekend was heavy on opinions and light on facts.
Here’s what we know as of this morning. (Clearly, it’s all subject to change.)
Sam and Greg have landed at Microsoft, and they will do whatever Satya needs them to do. Meanwhile, at OpenAI, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has been named interim CEO, and he (the company’s third CEO in 48 hours) has a plan. According to his tweet, he’ll hire investigators, chat up everyone who’s anyone, and reshuffle the leadership deck… because nothing says “stable company” like investigations and a management shake-up.
Where does this leave us? Altman’s playing with his new toys at Microsoft, Shear’s trying to put out fires with a water pistol at OpenAI, and the rest of us are trying to keep score. It’s like watching a bad soap opera, but with less believable plot twists.
In all seriousness, there was one part of Shear’s announcement that caught my attention: “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, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”
All of this may not matter, though, because this morning nearly 500 (of approximately 700) OpenAI employees signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman at Microsoft unless the startup’s board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO.
There’s no point in speculating; we’ll just have to keep watching. But with content like this… who could avert their eyes?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.