Rumours have been moving fast today: Altman and Brockman started immediately pitching a new AI start-up (something that requires planning); a group of OpenAI investors were trying to stir up a staff revolt (on the basis of share price potentially falling without him) and a lawsuit against the board to get Altman re-instated; the OpenAI board is talking to him about coming back, with Altman ambivalent and demanding governance changes (translation: Zuckerberg levels of voting power) if he does; a pissed-off Nadella contacted Altman to support whichever direction he goes in (with an implied threat to OpenAI if Altman doesn’t stay).
While it’s obvious you’re a big fan of Altman, there’s nothing to be positive about from a business POV concerning the chaos surrounding him over the past 24 hours. No-one here is saying he’s a swindler like Bankman-Fried, but the tech press’s newest whiz-kid clearly made decisions questionable enough (perhaps deliberately) that several board members voted to terminate him. That’s not cynicism, that’s an observation of facts on the ground.
However this shakes out, it’s a vignette about the dangers for tech companies (and their employees) that invest themselves entirely in a single person whose main value becomes popularity tied to fickle media coverage and fanboi popularity. We’ve seen this with outright crooks like Bankman-Fried, with unstable egomaniacs like Musk, with techno-utopian greedy guts like Andreesen, and now with Altman (who just seems like a more thoughtful and less publicly obnoxious variation on the successful SV VC who finds it useful to also be seen as a tech visionary tycoon).
