The Significance of Sam Altman as TIME CEO of the Year

0:00Today, we are talking about Sam Altman as Time's CEO of the year, and the rest of the year. from his firing then rehiring a couple weeks ago. When Time announced this year's Person of the Year, a lot of people had some questions. For the skeptics, it wasn't that Taylor Swift was not significant. The era's tour single-handedly propped up the U.S. economy for much of this summer, and she has achieved a level of superstardom that we really haven't seen for a very, very long time. It wasn't so much a knock on Taylor, but a question of where Sam Altman was. Because remember, Time's person of the year historically has not been our favorite person of the year, but just the person who had the most significant impact on the world.

0:41For many in the AI space, the answer to that was very clear. 2023 was and will be remembered as the year of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT will be remembered as the inflection point moment between the world before AI and the world after generative AI. Now, for some, it was an indication of how much people are not paying attention to the significance and the world-changing significance of artificial intelligence. The AI Safety Memes account wrote, Time just announced their person of the year. It's not AI. It's not ChatGPT. It's not Sam Altman. It's Taylor Swift, an entertainer who has been famous for two decades.

1:16We are in the Don't Look Up timeline. Now, as it happens, it appears that Time had a plan for this. And so, using their prerogative as an independent private publication, they invented a new category called CEO of the Year, to which they gave that title and a very extensive multi-thousand word piece to, yes, Sam Altman. Now there are a number of interesting things about this piece. If someone were to read just one article about artificial intelligence, they'd probably get a better sense of the recent history of the field and some of the key players, along with some of the big fault lines and the key events of this year, from reading this than just about anything else I've read, which is to Time's credit.

1:55But for those of us who have been paying attention for quite some time, was there anything in here that was really novel or new or different information than we didn't have before? Yes and no. Let's check out a few of the details so we at least have the complete sense and this can serve as your summary of the piece. Now, in terms of sourcing, they write, Interviews with more than 20 people in Altman's circle, including current and former OpenAI employees, multiple senior executives, and others who have worked closely with him over the years, reveal a complicated portrait. Those who know him describe Altman as an affable, brilliant, uncommonly driven, and gifted at rallying investors and researchers alike around his vision of creating artificial general intelligence for the benefit of society as a whole.

2:32But four people who have worked with Altman over the years also say he could be slippery and at times misleading and deceptive. Still, even among those people, it was more complicated than our normal heuristics and archetypes would suggest. Said one of them, in a lot of ways, Sam is a really nice guy. He's not an evil genius. It would be easier to tell this story if he was a terrible person. He cares about the mission. He cares about other people. He cares about humanity. But there's also a clear pattern, if you look at his behavior, of really seeking power in an extreme way. So that's the setup.

3:00That's the context. Make of that what you will. One thing that the article does not have is any sort of pry out around what actually went into his firing. A spokesperson from OpenAI continued to deny giving people that information which they so want. A couple little tidbits that were interesting from Sam's past. One, apparently he actually considered a run for governor of California. And while he himself characterized that as a, quote, very lightweight consideration, a senior aide to him says they spent six months doing things like setting up focus groups, refining a political platform, and even publishing a 10-point policy platform before Altman ultimately decided to stay focused on entrepreneurship and investing.

3:35There is a lot of the early history of OpenAI, although nothing that hasn't been printed elsewhere. Although one thing that I did think was interesting comes from this paragraph. In 2018, OpenAI announced its charter, a set of values that codified its approach to building AGI in the interest of humanity. There was a tension at the heart of the document between the belief in safety and the imperative for speed. Says a former employee, The fundamental belief motivating OpenAI is, Inevitably this technology is going to exist, so we have to win the race to create it, to control the terms of its entry into society in a way that is positive.

4:06The safety mission requires that you win. If you don't win, it doesn't matter that you were good. Now, this, I think, is incredibly important to understand and contextualize all of these decisions that all of these different actors are making. One of the common supports for the nonprofit board in the wake of Altman's firing was that they were not beholden to the shareholder objective of maximizing value. They weren't a business board tasked with doing what was best for the company. Instead, they were a nonprofit board focused on the mission of Safe AGI. However, you can see here that there is an inherent tension because of the belief that to have any influence on the shape of AGI, you have to win the race to AGI.

4:45Taken in that light, firing Sam was obviously a major setback to the mission, and so this is a really interesting and much more nuanced dividing line that I imagine still exists. If the belief is that you have to win the business and competitive race to actually achieve the safety mission, then that means you just have to move blisteringly fast. And indeed, the non-profit's objectives and the business's objectives look a lot closer than they might initially. The story then proceeds to their weird non-profit-for-profit hybrid structure, to when in 2019 Sam moved from being about 30 % of the time at OpenAI to full-time, and again, all this stuff that we know.

5:18One part of the story that comes up for me again that I haven't really had resolved is why the board had shrunk from 9 to 6 over the course of 2023, specifically why those three directors had left. Was it just for personal reasons or was there something more going on? And the reason that this matters is that it seems like a lot of the tension on the board was around who to replace those three directors with. Thus understanding what made them leave, or at least crossing having to care about that off the list because it was just for personal reasons, seems like it would be really valuable to understand.

5:46Now the article also of course gets deep into the episode of Sam's firing and then rehiring, and in particular discusses the letter where basically all of the employees threatened to leave and go to Microsoft should Sam and Greg not be reinstated. Even in this piece, they speculate that part of the motivation was not just wanting Sam back, but their extreme financial incentive. That's something that we're going to get into in just a moment because there's been more reporting on that as well. Ultimately, the story ends on a question of how Sam is going to restore confidence, what OpenAI's role is going to be going forward, how Society Wheeler won't scrutinize him and the company more closely, but all with the understanding of just how significant the institution is.

6:23Now, like I said, let's move over to some of the other reporting because this one has been getting a lot of traction on Twitter. It's a Business Insider piece called OpenAI Employees Really, Really Did Not Want to Go Work for Microsoft. The argument of this piece was basically that the whole letter saying that people would go to Microsoft that was signed by almost everyone at OpenAI was just one big gambit, and that on top of that, a lot of people actually felt pressured to sign it. This was an audacious bluff, and most staffers had no real interest in working for Microsoft. Now, this is according to, quote, several current and former employees talking to Business Insider.

6:55Writes Insider, One current OpenAI employee admitted that, despite nearly everyone on staff signing up to follow Altman out the door, quote, no one wanted to go to Microsoft. This person called the company, quote, the biggest and slowest of all the major tech companies, the exact opposite of how OpenAI employees see their startup. Given the absence of interest in joining Microsoft, many OpenAI employees, quote, felt pressured to sign the open letter the employee admitted. The letter itself was drafted by a group of longtime staffers who had the most clout and money at stake with the years of industry standing and equity built up, as well as higher pay.

7:23They began calling other staffers late on Sunday night, urging them to sign, the employee explained. Another big thrust of the piece is that no matter what Microsoft said about matching compensation in terms of cash, the equity packages were worth so much that it would have been very difficult for Microsoft to actually match that and most people didn't think they would. Writes Insider, Microsoft agreed to hire all OpenAI employees at their same level of compensation, but this was only a verbal agreement in the heat of the moment. Another OpenAI employee openly laughed at the idea that Microsoft would have paid departing staffers for the equity they would have lost by following Altman.

7:55Insider also claims that at the same time, employees at Microsoft were really angry. Now, on the one hand, all of this sort of tracks as a pretty reasonable backstory, or at least background that wasn't necessarily shared at the time. But it also does read to me like the type of article where they quote the same one employee over and over and over again, and extrapolate it to be like that was everyone. Indeed, it provoked enough of a response that some OpenAI employees decided to deny it on Twitter. Rune, for example, wrote, Not to long post, and I can only speak for myself, but this is a very inaccurate representation of the mood from an employee perspective, on the idea that employees felt pressured.

8:32At some point, hundreds of us were in a backyard learning about the petition. People were so upset at the insanity of the board's decision that they were immediately fired up to sign this thing. The Google Doc literally broke from the level of concurrency of people trying to all sign at once. I recall many having intelligent, nuanced conversation about the petition, the wording thereof, and in the end coming to the conclusion that it was the only path forward. Half of the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3 a.m. That's not something that can be accomplished by peer pressure. On the claim, it was all about the money.

8:59At the time, it sounded like signing the petition meant leaving all OpenAI equity and starting fresh. We're not idiots. Everybody knows that the terms at Nuco would be up in the air at best, with a lot of bargaining chips on Microsoft's side. People signed the petition because it was the right thing to do. You simply cannot work at the gutted husk of a company whose ultimate leadership you don't respect. Claim no one wanted to go to Microsoft. You'd have to be out of your mind to prefer starting new on models and code and products being controlled by someone else, rather than building in the company specifically designed to be the vehicle for safe AGI.

9:27It has nothing to do with the Microsoft talent bar or bureaucracy or brand. Not sure why some idiot leaker provocateur would frame it this way. Microsoft has been quite successful at acquiring companies under bespoke governance structures and letting them do their own thing. GitHub and LinkedIn, for example. Even Microsoft's own preferred outcome was continuity of OpenAI, per the New Yorker article. I still bet if the board hadn't changed their mind, the company would have mostly reconstituted itself at Microsoft. Ultimately, there is still a lot of this story yet to be told. The Wall Street Journal did an interview with Helen Toner, who was of course one of the academic members of the board that was against Sam Altman, and it gave us basically zero new information.

10:03One thing she tried to explain was her comment around the destruction of the company being consistent with the mission of the board. The WSJ wrote, At one point during the heated negotiations, a lawyer for OpenAI said the board's decision to fire Altman could lead to the company's collapse. Toner replied at the time, that would actually be consistent with the mission, startling some executives in the room. In the interview, Toner said that the comment was in response to what she took as an intimidation tactic by the lawyer. She was trying to convey that the continued existence of OpenAI isn't, by definition, necessary for the nonprofit's broader mission of creating artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity at large.

10:37Now, of course, this gets back to what I was just saying. If you have to win AGI to have the safest AGI, then there is a contrast. But ultimately, there really wasn't very much in here that we didn't know. Now look, I think on the one hand that it's insane to cover so closely the developments and machinations and ego battles of such a small group of individuals and just one company. But what it reflects is the extent to which this technology, and by extension its potential to impact the world, is concentrated in an incredibly small number of hands. Indeed, if there is any lesson to take away from this whole affair, it is a reminder of exactly that fact.

11:13To the extent that we don't want that to be the case, we're going to have to actively participate in the conversation around what governance of this technology should look like, because the default is that it's ruled by whoever gets there the fastest. And so friends, that is the Time CEO of the Year, Sam Altman, the latest in the saga of OpenAI. And of course, the next thing that I'm waiting for is to see what their response to Google's claims that Gemini outperforms GPT will be, because that could get mighty interesting. Till next time, peace.