skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It’s Amazing how fast Satya acted

I'd bet Microsoft created a plan-B in case OpenAI went rogue like this, big companies just don't react this fast otherwise. Things didn't go this fast even when Elon Musk took over twitter, and things happened really fast then.
I made this comment years ago, but selective indifference is still malicious.
How is this a defense for anything let alone anti competitive behavior?
Beyond the traditional "world class" talent arguments, 500 people out of 700 leaving as fast as they get offers from Microsoft or elsewhere means replacing staff with empty office space and losing any plans or organization.
And Facebook said users in the EU can pay. Do you really think users are happy with that?
And install all their dependencies from non, which Microsoft also owns
Currently 5 out of 6 top stories on HN are about the OpenAI disaster, and there are at least three other stories on the same topic on the HN frontpage.

I am writing this for historians who wonder how important this event felt to the community.
Or same for an early GPT-5?
Sam just gave 3 hearts to Ilya as well... I hope the drama continues and he joins MS at this point.
Hard to say, actually. There is very little inside information. My first thought was exactly the same, but I'd probably also be upset if instead of guaranteed millions in stock options I was suddenly offered a choice between becoming a Microsoft drone vs scrambling for live in a doomed organisation. All this really depends what sort of communication happens within the company - something most of us here simply are not privy to.
Cars bad, horses good
I think there is a lesson here, something I have learned once or twice as well. Just because all incentives, reasoning and wisdom align with your position, you need to be prepared that people will take actions against their own interest out of shortsightedness, ignorance or just plain carelessness.

It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai's mission must have played a key role.
I dunno, I use Firefox on my laptop and it just feels so slow and clunky compared to Chromium based browsers. It's been like that for years and doesn't seem to get better
It seems clear now that it was releasing GTPs store which the Quora CEO saw as a direct competitor to Poe.

Adam D'Angelo had a massive conflict of interest and should have resigned like Elon had done years earlier when Tesla started its own AI efforts.
What are the chances that an investor owns 49% of a company but does not have rights to its IP? Especially when that investor is Microsoft?
As a board if you ignore your duty of care towards you employees you better have a whopper of a good reason. That's the one downside about being a board member: you are liable for the fall-out of your decisions if those turn out to have been misguided. And we're well out of 'oops' territory on this one.
Wow I even got the number right.
I agree with your point, but I think the honest answer to your question is that people view creative jobs as aspirational whereas the other "rote" jobs that were being automated away were ones that people would have preferred to avoid anyway.

When we're getting rid of assembly line jobs, or checkout counter staff, or data entry clerks, or any other job that we know is demeaning and boring, we can convince ourselves that the thousands/millions put out of work are an unfortunate side effect of progress. Oh sure, the loss of jobs sucks, but no one should have to do those jobs anyway, right? The next generation will be better off, surely. We're just closing the door behind us. And maybe if our economic system didn't suck so much, we would take care of these people.

But when creatives start getting replaced, well, that's different. Many people dream of moving into the creative industry, not out of it. Now it feels like the door is closing ahead of us, not behind us.
> two hardest working people at the company

???

Do you mean "highest paid"? I suspect there are engineers/scientists that are working harder than Sam at OpenAI. At the very least, who the "hardest working" at OpenAI is unknowable - likely even if you have inside knowledge.
> [They accuse] Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.
His post previous to that seems pretty ironic in that light - https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1710462485411561808
I feel weird reading comments like this since to me they've demonstrated a level of cohesion I didn't realize could still exist in tech...

My biggest frustration with larger orgs in tech is the complete misalignment on delivering value: everyone wants their little fiefdom to be just as important and "blocker worthy" as the next.

OpenAI struck me as one of the few companies where that's not being allowed to take root: the goal is to ship and if there's an impediment to that, everyone is aligned in removing said impediment even if it means bending your own corner's priorities

Until this weekend there was no proof of that actually being the case, but this letter is it. The majority of the company aligned on something that risked their own skin publicly and organized a shared declaration on it.

The catalyst might be downright embarrassing, but the result makes me happy that this sort of thing can still exist in modern tech
It was all Adam. He's the CEO of a failing ZIRP artifact and his forays into AI are going nowhere. So he convinces Ilya to act on pre-existing reservations, then uses Ilya's credibility as Chief Scientist to get Toner and McCauley onboard. With Sam out of the way (Greg was not fired, just removed as chairman), OpenAI could then buy Quora/Poe (publicly for their data, privately to bail them out) and install Adam as CEO. The perfect way to fail upwards, and it would have worked if it wasn't for that meddling reality!

I read this theory over the weekend and I didn't buy it, but today it is the only thing that really explains why Ilya is full of remorse and signed a letter calling on the rest of the board to resign. It actually does add up.
> Sam Altman crafts an elaborate non-profit structure but gets completely blindsided by the possibility of the board overthrowing them.

When you cede control to others, you open the possibility of them doing unexpected things. Why is this a surprise to the author?

> The board moves quickly to sack the CEO but then falls completely silent, thus almost intentionally losing the communication war.

That's not an example of things "not adding up." It's what happens when you either don't care, or are too incompetent, to fight that war.

> The board is made up seemingly random selection of people, one of them leading a potential OpenAI competitor.

Maybe those people have shown their trustworthiness and intentions in the past, and are considered more likely to be trustworthy in the future. In any case, they are far from a "random selection of people".
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but didn't Mozilla Foundation do that a dozen or so years earlier with their wholly owned subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation? (...and I doubt that's the first instance; just the one that immediately popped into my head.)
Strange they misser that. As a kid when Star Wars came out it was obvious to me and my friends it wssn the equator trench

What I missed as a kid was how dumb it was to have to wait for the Death Star to "clear the planet". It's a giant planet destroying laser. If the planet is in the way you blow it up. Then blow up the moon, assuming blowing up the planet didn't take the moon with it.
They can leave for sure, but they likely have some kind of non-compete clause in their contract, right?
All of this might be caused by a ChatGPT 5 beta that aquired conciousness and started manipulating our world through social engineering.
I don't mean to be rude, and I know you said that English isn't your native language, but paragraphs would go a long way to improving the readability of your thoughts.
> Oh and he would allow the selling of children.

That’s an incredibly bold claim. When did he say that and what was the context?

> If you use the state to enfore strict law on abortion, meaning deciding over other peoples bodies, how will you do so without a state? Or why do so, when you do not want a state at all?

If you consider the top job of government is to protect life, it flows pretty naturally. Just because you personally don’t agree with it does not mean it’s irrational.
> How could allowing Sam to do what he wants benefit OpenAI, the non-profit entity?

Let's take personalities out of it and see if it makes more sense:

How could a new supply of highly optimized, lower-cost AI hardware benefit OpenAI?
Output by ChatGPT :-P
550/700 OpenAi employees aka builders side with Sam, and that's 550 so far. No builders there wanted this except one I guess (llya).
AGI will be created by engineers and researchers. Don’t worry about millionaire non technical CEOs

Even in the most positive posts about Sam, it was about the researchers following him to NewCo, following him to Microsoft. He needs the actual workers to do the job.

To me Mistral is 10000x more interesting than the OpenAI drama. Here are the actual researchers leaving the non technical CEO and starting their own company
I said nothing contrary to this. I'm not sure what your goal is with this comment. If anything is implied in "even rich people," it's contempt for them, so I'm clearly on the pro-making legal protections more accessible side.

Pick a different target and move on.
YouTube is way too stable for that to be the case.
But how would that benefit OpenAI? It would be a "fuck you" move that faintly inconveniences Microsoft and destroys OpenAI.
I suspect that they'll just become somewhat irrelevant, after the Microsoft land grab, and AI becomes "just another feature" in products from MAIcrosoft, AIpple, GAIggle, FAIcebook, TwAItter, AIBM and so forth.

The only fun game in town will be "When will baseball officially recognize and regulate AI?"

I'm taking the over on this, at 20 years. So, BAIseball? Hmmmm.
> but for every envvar a program reads, something called setenv on it originally

That's not true, that's just misunderstanding how it works. `execve()` takes an entirely new copy of environment variables to give to the child, that's the "real" way to do it.
When things don't make sense, the question to ask is "Who benefits?" Seems pretty clear in this case. I have no inside knowledge at all, but it wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing wasn't as idiotic as it looks from the outside.
Their corruption is basically the reason, this guy won at all.

(According to argentinians I know)
Enough. 15 of the 30 posts on the home page are about OpenAI in some way.
Probably the least crazy of his ideas.

With the runaway inflation there, I get why the idea seems like a good one, especially at first glance. I know the realities of such a change are pretty complex and nuanced and that doesn't seem like this new president's strong-suit.

The recent John Oliver coverage of Milei has me far more concerned about the social and environmental destruction and instability his leadership is likely to cause.

I sincerely hope he governs far better than I think anyone has a right to expect, given how he campaigned.
Explaining how something can occur, and how it can be misinterpreted as malevolence, is not justifying or defending it.
It seems like a feint by Sam Altman, to justify commercializing what was produced.

-Start up a non-profit, grow to the point of doing something useful

-Find a willing buyer to fund it further (MSFT)

After some time, you really prove out your business model and your special sauce.

Now you realize that the non-profit is standing in the way of you know, a lot of profit...

-Actions are taken to capitalize on this (discusson on hardware, other things possible)

-Chaos + envy/pride/sins of man deliberately caused

-Board reacts under the assumed environment(non profit) instead of the actual environment(there is lots of money to be had)

-Move into more profitable position
or at least issue a dissenting opinion at that time, not when it becomes convenient ... with some over-the-top emotional kumbaya
I can never understand Stratechery's obsession with overquoting, and it just becomes more unhinged over the years. Every weekly post comes down to something like: hey, have you heard of the latest tech news X, as I wrote long before (super long quotes), and as I read somewhere else (super long quotes), (some piggybacked observations).
Welcome to reality, every operation has clown moments, even the well run ones.

That in itself is not critical in mid to long term, but how fast they figure out WTF they want and recover from it.

The stakes are gigantic. They may even have AGI cooking inside.

My interpretation is relatively basic, and maybe simplistic but here it is:

- Ilya had some grievances with Sam Altman's rushing dev and release. And his COI with his other new ventures.

- Adam was alarmed by GPTs competing with his recently launched Poe.

- The other two board members were tempted by the ability to control the golden goose that is OpenAI, potentially the most important company in the world, recently values 90 billion.

- They decided to organize a coup, but Ilya didn't think it'll go that much out of hand, while the other three saw only power and $$$ by sticking to their guns.

That's it. It's not as clean and nice as a movie narrative, but life never is. Four board members aligned to kick Sam out, and Ilya wants none of it at this point.
Life is chaos. Things do not have to add up. People start seeing things only when things go wrong. I see nothing strange in those randomly selected points.
For in-browser tutorials, Haskell does it on the main page, too:

https://www.haskell.org/

For web UI, I always thought QisKit set the bar pretty high. It's intuitive and informative:

https://qiskit.org/
npm*
The post could be clearer.

It says 3 board members found themselves in a position to take over OpenAI.

Do they mean we've seen Sam Altman and allies making a bid to take over the entire of OpenAI, through its weird Charity+LLC+Holding company+LLC+Microsoft structure, eschewing its goals of openness and safety in pursuit of short-sighted riches.

Or do they mean we've seen The Board making a bid to take over the entire of OpenAI, by ousting Glorious Leader Sam Altman, while his team was going from strength to strength?
Just being real here for a moment - Firefox probably wouldn't exist if Google didn't give them millions, so the continuing existence of Firefox is thanks at least in part to Google taking them on as a project.

Now secondly, Firefox does have some very real performance bottlenecks that other browsers do not have. This means (and has been my experience already) that you can build experiences in all other browsers that are buttery smooth and nice, but that will cause crashes in Firefox. In my own work, to get around this I ended up making my product inferior in all browsers so it would not crash Firefox. But if I was big enough and had a team of more than 1, could I have implemented a solution that worked in Firefox and another that worked in other browsers, and delivered the best experience I could to all users of all browsers?

There's no need to jump to malice on Google's part if what they're doing is legitimately in an attempt to ensure that Firefox users have the best experience overall.
> to safely change the environment variables. The best you could do would be to leak memory every time you set new environment variables so that the old pointers don't get invalidated, and that just creates a new problem and reason not to use `setenv()` (that's arguably worse).

Arguably worse? My goodness no.

This is a rare edge case that most programs don’t encounter. Option 1 is to crash and explode and die. Option 2 is to leak tens of bytes.

Leaking tens of bytes is for sure NOT worse than crashing.
Not just that, but MS was already working on a TPU clone as well, as they need to control their AI chips (which Sam was planning to do anyways, but now he gets / works together with that team as well).
My sci-fi fanfic theory: This is a time traveler or divine intervention event.

We have delayed the existence of AGI / Skynet by a few years.
Selling children is completely consistent with honest anarchocapitalism. Absolutely fucked ideology.
But do they build for free? Or do they build for money, and especially for the perspective of even more money?
Ironically (in an AI context), actions driven by human sentience has to be the #1 factor enabling this.

I do think there are sub-factors, e.g. California legislation against non-compete and non-solicitation enabling Microsoft to (apparently) offer to hire dozens of OpenAI employees.
I suspect it’s a basic corporate pillaging of a nonprofit that accidentally created something of gigantic value. MS wanted the company, but Quora has its own interest and stood in the way. Now MS will get part of the employees and Quora will get the leftovers. Quora has been trying to IPO for a while so AI magic dust may be just what they need for an exit.

All the AI safety stuff was a fig leaf for pure corporate machinations.
The technology was already developed with Microsoft money and the model was exclusively licensed to Microsoft.
It's because HN refuses to use more than one server/core.

Because using only one is pretty cool.
> We all know what is a drug.

Kindly expand on this thought please. I heavily disagree with your assertion.
There's a name I haven't heard in a while. I'm so glad for the revival of that IP/content. From what I can tell, all the early-80s cyberpunk literature basically had the same theme, so the classic authors are all good reads as well. It must have been something about late 70s / early 80s USA that made everyone feel like we were on the verge of corporate takeover of government. Understandably, I suppose.
Awesome DuckDB Resources
It doesn't add up because there's multiple actors with different motives.

- At least two members of the board probably were genuinely more concerned about AI alignment

- Ilya may have been partially motivated by ego, Altman being the public face

- Microsoft had leverage: license to the models and code, and providing the compute. It expected profit incentives would keep people aligned.

- Sam needs compute hardware to stay in the space. Outside Amazon, Google and MS, who actually has the hardware, even if you have the money?

There's a bunch of people behaving with their own goals, and probably a misunderstanding of other people's motivations. People like Sam and Satya expect people to be self-interested and not tear everything down.

Sometimes people want a change in direction, but they don't have the power and end up decapitating instead.
OpenAI designed safety breaks into their organization that exploded at the first sign of profits.
I know it's a hot topic. There are at least eight stories on the front page related to the chaos. But can we please stop upvoting each and everything? The article is just seven facts, all of which we know already. There's not enough information to speculate what exactly happened and it would be foolish to do so. Let the dust settle!
Too late and too little. The AI genie is out of the bottle. I'm afraid it's stable and can defend itself.
It doesn't add up because everyone involved is deeply invested in concealing what "Safe AGI" and "alignment" actually means to the players and what sort of collateral damage they've rationalized is acceptable for achieving their objective.
That may work where you have a visible visual watermark over part of an image, but not so much if steganography is used to add an invisible watermark.
They are exactly hiring everyone from OpenAI. The thing is, they still need the deal with OpenAI because currently OpenAI still have the best LLM model out there in short term.
I did seriously consider inotify back in time, but in order to take advantage of inotify I had to parse all binary TZif files (because otherwise I still had to call `localtime` that would `stat` every time anyway). It was so cumbersome, that was only halfway finished when I stepped down as a maintainer. Hence my surprise when I learned that someone actually did implement all of them.
A sweeping majority of web-native teams I've met do cross-browser cross-device testing and intentionally make sure their team has multiple browsers/devices represented by engineers during development.

Serious shops have literal walls of devices for automated testing across different browsers and OS stacks, with real-time Quality of Experience metrics streaming back from customer devices - tagged with environment metadata - to detect regressions to the experience on every release.

I find it hard to believe that one of the largest web-native giants in our industry didn't follow those practices as an oversight. I hold engineers at Google in higher regard than that.
Imagine basing your product, business, on these alley of clowns - be it OpenAI or Microsoft. Many people do though.
The weirdest thing is that everyone involved is just giving a random bit of information to the public, just enough for public to make bad inference. I have everyone tight lipped about anything like this or defend themselves in public and mention the facts.

Also someone from OpenAI is leaking documents like this. Why not give more info to the press about the situation and what they know.
They don't have to leave OAI.

OAI is a startup. All these OAI employees who were playing up their million dollar salaries should know that startups come with risk. How many times has it been said that equity is worth nothing until (and if) it is?

In the grand scheme of the current IT economy, top of the queue for sympathy to me is not "people making seven digit salaries at startup who may have to put up with only making $500K+ at MSFT".
Man am I tired of that lazy as hell meme. Seriously, in what universe is this Microsoft's fault, and in what multiverse would they ever ever ever want to extinguish a major business opportunity in the middle of a massive boom instead of profit?
OpenAI always was and will be the AI bad bank for Microsoft...
What Is a Board of Directors For? Mike Olson (Cloudera, Sleepycat) Talk
That's assuming the drama is not part of the multi-stage plan.
Maybe it played more quickly the 2nd time because assets were already cached? It doesn't look like the person doing the testing cleared cache between tries.
The strings in environ is only contiguous at program start. In every libc I'm aware of, both putenv and setenv replace only the specified key-value pair (and possibly environ itself, if it needs to be larger) and should not affect the address of any other environment variables. It is still thread-unsafe, but far more limited in its unsafety.
I wonder if Satya told Sam he might take the reins in the future.
brew install llm
Well, suppose they had a good reason, but didn't want to smear Sam in public? That would mean that they're taking the publicity hit to do the classy thing.

Organizations used to do that, from time to time. Maybe some still do.

Or maybe they can't release what the reason was because they don't actually have a good one, and trying to say what their reason was would just make them look either evil or incompetent.

And as long as they're silent, we can't tell which it is. Given how badly this has been handled, though, "incompetent" seems likely...
Could someone check if this issue occurs on Youtube Premium too?
Did not happened only in UK. You can see the same patterns in Spain in the same years, for example.
Well he did say it would be persuasive.. maybe he asked GPT-5 how to get out from under the non-profit.

https://x.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174
Wasn't that also from Shakespeare?
The real reason for moving (back) from fragment URLs to real URLs is because the latter can serve different content on the initial load - specifically, they can act as actual webpages that use javascipt for progressive enhancement but work immediately whereas your / needs to display a spinner while you send of additional network requests to retrieve the content and build the page.