> The Fact still nobody knows why they did it is part of the problem now though.
The fact that Altman and Brockman were hired so quickly by Microsoft gives a clue: it takes time to hire someone. For one thing, they need time to decide. These guys were hired by Microsoft between close-of-business on Friday and start-of-business on Monday.
My supposition is that this hiring was in the pipeline a few weeks ago. The board of OpenAI found out on Thursday, and went ballistic, understandably (lack of candidness). My guess is there's more shenanigans to uncover - I suspect that Altman gave Microsoft an offer they couldn't refuse, and that OpenAI was already screwed by Thursday. So realizing that OpenAI was done for, they figured "we might as well blow it all up".
The problem with this analysis is the premise: that it "takes time to hire someone."
This is not an interview process for hiring a junior dev at FAANG.
If you're Sam & Greg, and Satya gives you an offer to run your own operation with essentially unlimited funding and the ability to bring over your team, then you can decide immediately. There is no real lower bound of how fast it could happen.
Why would they have been able to decide so quickly? Probably because they prioritize the ability to bring over the entire team as fast as possible, and even though they could raise a lot of money in a new company, that still takes time, and they view it as critically important to hire over the new team as fast as possible (within days) that they accept whatever downsides there may be to being a subsidiary of Microsoft.
This is what happens when principles see opportunity and are unencumbered by bureaucratic checks. They can move very fast.
> There is no real lower bound of how fast it could happen.
I don't know anything about how executives get hired. But supposedly this all happened between Friday night and Monday morning. This isn't a simple situation; surely one man working through the weekend can't decide to set up a new division, and appoint two poached executives to head it up, without consulting lawyers and other colleagues. I mean, surely they'd need to go into Altman and Brockman's contracts with OpenAI, to check that the hiring is even legal?
That's why I think this has been brewing for at least a week.
I don't think the hiring was in the pipeline, because until the board action it wasn't necessary. But I think this is still in the area of the right answer, nonetheless.
That is, I think Greg and Sam were likely fired because, in the board's view, they were already running OpenAI Global LLC more as if it were a for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft driven by Microsoft's commercial interest, than as the organization able to earn and return profit but focussed on the mission of the nonprofit it was publicly declared to be and that the board very much intended it to be. And, apparently, in Microsoft's view, they were very good at that, so putting them in a role overtly exactly like that is a no-brainer.
And while it usually takes a while to vet and hire someone for a position like that, it doesn't if you've been working for them closely in something that is functionally (from your perspective, if not on paper for the entity they nominally reported to) a near-identical role to the one you are hiring them for, and the only reason they are no longer in that role is because they were doing exactly what you want them to do for you.
> My supposition is that this hiring was in the pipeline a few weeks ago. The board of OpenAI found out on Thursday, and went ballistic, understandably (lack of candidness). My guess is there's more shenanigans to uncover - I suspect that Altman gave Microsoft an offer they couldn't refuse, and that OpenAI was already screwed by Thursday. So realizing that OpenAI was done for, they figured "we might as well blow it all up".
It takes time if you're a normal employee under standard operating procedure. If you really want to you can merge two of the largest financial institutions in the world in less than a week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Credit_Suisse_b...
The hiring could have been done over coffee in 15 minutes to agree on basic terms and then it would be announced half an hour later. Handshake deal. Paperwork can catch up later. This isn't the 'we're looking for a junior dev' pipeline.
I suspect it takes somewhat less time and process to hire somebody, when NOT hiring them by start-of-business on Monday will result in billions in lost stock value.
Yeah, like OpenAI hired their first interim CEO on Thursday night, hired their second on Monday, and are now talking about rehiring Sam (who probably doesn't care to be rehired).
There may be drawbacks to the "instant hiring" model.
This narrative doesn’t make any sense. Microsoft was blindsided and (like everyone else) had no idea Sam was getting fired until a couple days ago. The reason they hired him quickly is because Microsoft was desperate to show the world they had retained open AI’s talent prior to the market opening on Monday.
To entertain your theory, Let’s say they were planning on hiring him prior to that firing. If that was the case, why is everybody so upset that Sam got fired, and why is he working so hard to try to get reinstated to a role that he was about to leave anyway?
The fact that Altman and Brockman were hired so quickly by Microsoft gives a clue: it takes time to hire someone. For one thing, they need time to decide. These guys were hired by Microsoft between close-of-business on Friday and start-of-business on Monday.
My supposition is that this hiring was in the pipeline a few weeks ago. The board of OpenAI found out on Thursday, and went ballistic, understandably (lack of candidness). My guess is there's more shenanigans to uncover - I suspect that Altman gave Microsoft an offer they couldn't refuse, and that OpenAI was already screwed by Thursday. So realizing that OpenAI was done for, they figured "we might as well blow it all up".