OpenAI, the Complete Story

Knife fight in a clown car. By yesterday, at least 700 of 770 OpenAI employees vowed to leave the company following the board’s incomprehensible decision to fire CEO Sam Altman, thus marking one of the great disasters in corporate governance history. The chaos catalyzed by this unimaginably stupid decision lasted several days, with no clear sense of who would win the AI game of thrones — the board, Sam, or a third, more mysterious thing (Satya Nadella) — and the only people who knew for sure why the board had flipped its suicide switch were the few responsible. But, from all available pieces of this clown car puzzle, the nut of the drama looks something like this: a handful of decel cult members hacked the non-profit entity clunkily responsible for OpenAI, then attempted to ritually castrate the company in order to save the world from the malevolent, all-powerful demonic entity promised in the sacred blog posts of “Rationalism,” their atheist faith. This provoked the most tech friendly, startup-loving optimists in the industry to root for Microsoft (!), which nobody found weird, while Microsoft publicly negotiated a pseudo acquisition of possibly the world’s most important company for approximately $0. In the end, with the help of several high-profile tech middlemen, Sam knifed the board, resumed control of OpenAI, and we all went home for Thanksgiving. But holy shit.