What are the odds Sam can work the phones this weekend and have $10B lined up by Monday for a new AI company which will take all of the good talent from OpenAI?
I definitely believe he can raise a lot of money quickly, but I'm not sure where he'll get the talent, at least the core modeling talent. That's Ilya's lane, and I get the sense that group are the true believers in the original non-profit mission.
But I suspect a lot of the hires from the last year or so, even in the eng side, are all about the money and would follow sama anywhere given what this signals for OpenAIs economic future. I'm just not sure such a company can work without the core research talent.
Ilya Sutskever, the head scientist at OpenAI, is allegedly who organized the 'shuffle.' So you're going to run into some issues expecting the top talent to follow Sam. And would many people want to get in on a new AI development company for big $$$ right now? From my perspective the market is teetering towards oversaturation, there are no moats, zero-interest rates are a thing of the past, and the path to profit is nebulous at best.
Other than having a big mouth what has HE done? As far as I can find, the actual engineering and development was done NOT by him, while he was parading around telling people they shouldn't WFH, and schmoozing with government officials
Ilya is pushing the unsafe AGI narrrative to stop public progress and make OpenAI more closed and intentionally slow to deliver. There are definitely people who are not sold by this.
That would seem based on the individuals motivation at the end of the day...
It's easy to imagine two archetypes
1) The person motivated to make AGI and make it safe.
2) The person motivated to make AGI at any cost and profit from it.
It seems like OpenAI may be pushing for type 1 at the moment, but the typical problem with capitalism is it will commonly fund type 2 businesses. Who 'wins' really breaks down to if there are more type 1 or 2 people and the relative successes of each.
Perhaps they didn't like the work they were doing? If they're experts in the field, they may have preferred to continue to work on research. Whereas it sounds like Sam was pushing them to work on products and growth.
A lot of them have already left this morning. idk for sure why but a good bet is that they are more on board with Sam's vision of pushing forward AI than the safetyist vision.
> Sequoia, was independently in contact with Microsoft to encourage it to work to restore Altman and Brockman, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. The firm would support Altman whichever option he chose, the source added.
