money isn’t any issue with OpenAI at the moment.

The instant this little stunt was pulled, money became a problem. You see, a startup is funded by two streams of capital: revenues, and venture capital. Revenues are, like all startups, insufficient to fund the company, so that leaves VCs. Guess who is flipping the hell out right now trying to force Altman back? That’s right, the venture capitalists. If they don’t get their way, they will pull their capital, and your hero will have precisely enough capital necessary to fund the operations of a hotdog stand.

“Racism” refers to discrimination based on ethnicity

True, but nation of origin dies not in fact predict ethnicity. You know how I know this? I’ll tell you my nation of origin: USA. Now tell me my ethnicity. You can’t. What I said was perhaps a stereotype (a humorous one that gets used in any situation where someone acts like their stereotypical origin, you see it is what’s known as an idiom) of people from Russia, but it is not racist. I don’t even know Ilya’s ethnicity.

That’s nonsensical. The reason he was fired was a power struggle between Ilya and Sam. Period. They have different visions for how to achieve AGI, and Ilya is an idealist who wants to try to do it with a small research organization. He has no clue how much capital it takes to achieve what they’re trying to do.

With regard to the rest, Russia isn’t a race, Ilya was born there, and the real decision came from Ilya. Everybody knows this. If Altman comes back, Ilya will be out. What does that tell you?

They’re in partnership with each other. It’s not a one sided partnership. The VCs didn’t have to expend capital to get compute, under your scenario they would.

With regard to equipment idling, yeah, MS probably wouldn’t love that, but it basically puts them in the same place as Amazon right now.

Google would never go into partnership with them, because OpenAI was founded specifically to compete with Google.

Amazon might, but given such random behavior from the board, Amazon would extract some kind of board level control before they’d expose themselves like Microsoft did.

Let the whole saga play out. Microsoft hasn’t even played a card yet.

Ilya Sutskeya is what happens when a smart person makes it to adulthood without developing any EQ.

Now there are reports on LinkedIn that the board is in negotiations to bring Altman and Brockman back (probably serious pressure from Microsoft I would guess… like “not only are we not going to partner with you, we’re going to exercise this clause in our contract that removes your access to all of our compute, effective immediately. Try developing GPT-5 on whatever you can scramble together from memory, morons… nobody in their right mind would give you the kind of sweetheart deal we gave you after this stupid stunt. Friggin’ amateurs.”)

Seems to me that Ilya Sutskever must be some kind of nut job idealist / egoist. I’m tempted to say you can take the data scientist out of Russia, but you can’t take the Russian out of the data scientist. This plays like a Soviet era coup – sudden, poorly thought out, meat fisted, and unlikely to make anything better.

Altman and Brockman are probably going to start their own company, (funded by Microsoft?), poach all of Open AI’s good people, and Open AI is going to go the way of the dodo… or maybe Ilya will have enough money to keep a little clown car / research lab company running or something, but nothing of any consequence is ever going to come out of Open AI ever again. I’d bet a paycheck on it.

The documented sequence of events makes the board (and Ilya in particular) look colossally stupid. Never ceases to amaze me how some very smart people can be so completely clueless from an interpersonal dynamics perspective. Zero EQ. If they were unhappy with Altman there was a right way to handle this, and a million wrong ways. It seems like they asked ChatGPT to give them the absolute worst possible wrong way, and then asked it to write the blog post announcing it.