What is OpenAI, Really?（OpenAI 到底是什么？)
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What is OpenAI, Really?（OpenAI 到底是什么？)
What is OpenAI, Really?（OpenAI 到底是什么？)
AI Summary:
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OpenAI 是人工智能领域的领先公司，也可能是目前科技界最热门的公司。然而，最近 OpenAI 发生了一系列动荡，包括 CEO 被解雇和员工起义等事件。
- OpenAI 员工在推特上发起请愿，威胁要辞职。
- Altman 和 Brockman 宣布加入微软，领导一个新创建的人工智能部门
- 微软的 CEO 萨蒂亚·纳德拉出现在媒体上，表示希望继续与 OpenAI 保持战略合作关系。
最终，经过几天的混乱，OpenAI 的董事会同意让原 CEO 回归，并组建了新的董事会。整个事件揭示了 OpenAI 非营利性和营利性结构之间的冲突，以及公司内部对于利润和安全之间平衡的分歧。
OpenAI is the clear leader in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector, and probably the hottest company in tech, right now. Just last week, we published the first-ever deepdive into the engineering culture at OpenAI , looking at how ChatGPT ships so ridiculously fast. The short of it is that ChatGPT is a one-year-old-startup within the 3-year-old Applied group. OpenAI has high talent density and tight integration between engineering and research. ChatGPT operates like an independent startup, releasing frequently and incrementally.
However, just days after last week’s article, the tech world was shocked as OpenAI suddenly fell into crisis – with the risk it might even cease to exist. Last Friday, the company’s board fired CEO Sam Altman, and cofounder Greg Brockman also quit. By Sunday, employees were revolting and demanding Sam and Greg be brought back. By Monday, OpenAI had hired a new interim CEO, and Altman and Brockman had announced joining Microsoft to head up a newly created AI division. By Monday night, 743 of the 778 OpenAI employees had signed a petition threatening to follow Sam and Greg by joining Microsoft unless OpenAI’s board resigned and Sam returned as CEO. That same day, Microsoft confirmed it was ready to hire all OpenAI staff.
For a few hours, there was a very real possibility that OpenAI would shrivel to 30 employees, with 95% of OpenAI’s staff becoming Microsoft employees overnight.
Finally, on Tuesday night OpenAI’s board announced that an agreement had been reached, where Sam Altman returns as CEO, the board is updated, and things get mostly back to normal.
Last week, Evan Morikawa, who leads around half of OpenAI’s engineers, shared insights about its engineering culture in this newsletter. On Wednesday, he summarized events as “the most insane 100 hours of my career.”
Today, we analyze what happened, what caused this sudden near-death experience for OpenAI, and the potential implications of these dramatic events:
1.
Five days of chaos – the timeline
2.
From nonprofit to for-profit
3.
ChatGPT too successful, too fast?
4.
Microsoft’s interest in a standalone OpenAI
5.
OpenAI’s CEO: does something feel off?
6.
OpenAI’s board: plenty of questions
7.
What is OpenAI, anyway?
We’ll use PST (pacific standard time/California time) for all timestamps. OpenAI is headquartered in San Francisco, where events unfolded
Noon (12pm): Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and board member, joins a board meeting to which he was invited. At this meeting, he’s sacked, effective immediately. The board has 6 members, including Sam. The board’s chair, Greg Brockman, is not present.
12:19pm: Greg Brockman, cofounder of OpenAI, its president, and chair of the board, gets a message from Ilya Sutskever, cofounder, chief scientist, and fellow board member. Ilya asks Greg for a quick call.
12:23pm: Greg joins a Google meet with the other 4 board members. He’s told he is to be immediately removed from the board, and that Sam has been fired.
“The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately. (...)
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
1:46pm: Sam Altman announces on Twitter that his time at OpenAI is over, saying he’ll have more to say about what’s next, later.
“Hi everyone,
I’m super proud of what we’ve all built together since starting in my apartment 8 years ago. We’ve been through tough & great times together, accomplishing so much despite all the reasons it should have been impossible.
But based on today’s news, I quit.”
With each development, the reaction is disbelief inside and outside OpenAI: Sam fired; what? Greg quit; how? After all, Sam Altman was the public face for OpenAI for four years; the leader who championed the wildly successful ChatGPT. Greg had been there since the start of OpenAI and was a popular leader, like Sam.
The story of OpenAI’s board firing Sam Altman became the most upvoted story on Hacker News in the past five years, indicating just how unexpected and impactful it was for the tech community. The story is the third most upvoted of all-time, behind Stephen Hawking’s passing , and the news of Apple rejecting to install a backdoor on iOS that the US government requested.
So how did this firing take place, and what about the board which executed it? To understand this, here’s an overview of OpenAI’s admittedly exotic corporate structure, from its website :
OpenAI’s corporate structure. The board controls the nonprofit, which controls the for-profit entity
OpenAI started as a nonprofit in 2015, and the board controls this nonprofit. In 2019, a “capped profit” company was created, which we’ll go into later. The nonprofit owns and controls this for-profit part of OpenAI, as well. Sam Altman was CEO of the OpenAI nonprofit, and the board controls the nonprofit.