OpenAI employees revealed: They don’t want to go to Microsoft at all, and joint resignation to force the palace is only a last resort

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OpenAI’s infighting is about to start its second season.

On this side, Helen Toner, the former board member who was “kicked out”, released the latest inside story:

First, the original firing of Altman was to strengthen OpenAI;
second, his resignation was coerced by company lawyers.

On the other hand, Ultraman has not stopped moving. He stated at a public event that OpenAI is rethinking the company structure to " fix bugs . "

At the same time, OpenAI employees also contributed to the fight, breaking the news that the collective resignation to force the palace was a bluff.

We have no interest in working at Microsoft.

In their eyes, Microsoft is a traditional company, and as an OpenAI employee, they are the innovators who truly change the world.

It has to be said that the internal fighting at OpenAI has completely brought to light all the internal undercurrents.

Then let’s continue to sit in the delicious seats~

Firing Ultraman is for the good of OpenAI

Let’s first look at the inside story released by Helen Toner in her latest interview with the Wall Street Journal.

She was one of four directors fired as a result of the infighting.

She first responded to the board’s purpose in firing Altman at the time.

In order to strengthen OpenAI and make it more capable of completing its mission.

As a non-profit organization, OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all mankind.

She thinks this is the most important part. Even relatively speaking, it is not that important whether the OpenAI organization will always exist.

Amid intense negotiations, an OpenAI lawyer has said the board's decision to fire Altman could bankrupt the company.

Helen replied: This is actually consistent with our mission. This answer surprised many executives present at the time.

But Helen revealed in the interview that her resignation was also related to whether OpenAI collapsed.

She said that when OpenAI employees began to protest, an OpenAI lawyer said that if the board's firing of Altman caused the company to fall apart, then the board members would have violated their duties.

Affected by these factors, several members of the board of directors finally chose to resign.

Helen also added that the board fired Altman not because of safety concerns, but because of a lack of trust.

This seems to echo the revelations made by The New Yorker a few days ago.

In October this year, Helen participated in a paper on AI security. The paper stated that the launch of ChatGPT triggered a sense of urgency among technology giants, leading them to accelerate the launch of AI products.

After the paper was released, Altman questioned Helen, saying that her public criticism of OpenAI harmed OpenAI's interests.

Altman then contacted several other board members behind Helen's back and tried to persuade them to fire Helen, people familiar with the matter said.

However, as several board members exchanged opinions on the content of the conversation, it was discovered that Altman seemed to (intentionally or accidentally) misrepresented their thoughts , saying that they all supported the removal of Helen.

According to people familiar with the matter, Altman apologized for his handling of Helen's paper before his reinstatement.

It is worth mentioning that this latest revelation also mentioned that the former board of directors was very shocked that OpenAI employees and management supported Altman one-sidedly at that time.

The latest news shows that this is also a careful planning.

Looking back at the past, Ultraman Niu Hulu failed in his first attempt to return to OpenAI, but this caused employees to quit. Hundreds of people signed an open letter demanding Ultraman's reinstatement and the resignation of the board of directors.

They proposed that if the board of directors did not agree, they would resign collectively, join Microsoft together, and open a new department internally.

According to some insiders at Microsoft, this operation was actually their last resort, "a bluff that finally worked."

An OpenAI employee also broke the news that although everyone signed to follow Ultraman and leave, no one really wanted to go to Microsoft .

He said that "Microsoft is currently the largest and slowest company among all technology giants," which is contrary to the entrepreneurial philosophy of OpenAI employees.

It is understood that the joint letter was drafted by some senior employees and that Sunday night they began calling other employees to urge them to sign.

The employee also said that even if they do eventually join Microsoft with Altman, many people may leave as soon as possible to join other AI startups such as Hugging Face, Cohere, including OpenAI’s main competitor Anthropic.

In fact, some former employees of OpenAI said that they really look down on those traditional large companies internally, and see themselves as innovators who can fundamentally change the world.

However, given that Microsoft has promised to provide equal salaries to OpenAI employees and pay equity, many employees are still willing to sign the open letter under the influence of money.

Looking at it this way, it seems that OpenAI employees are not losing money at all?

But on the other side, some Microsoft employees were angry.

You know, Microsoft just laid off 10,000 employees some time ago and also cut bonuses and stock awards this year.

Ultraman wants to adjust the company structure

After such a big drama, what Ultraman will do next has attracted even more attention.

No, Ultraman has recently made it known that he wants to adjust the company's structure.

There are clearly some flaws with this structure, and our new Board of Directors is carefully considering how we should best structure our company based on our mission.

He said OpenAI has been through a "crazy" period, including its transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization and the surge brought about by ChatGPT.

In 2019, Altman designed a groundbreaking organizational structure for OpenAI: transforming from a non-profit organization to a "profit cap" model.

OpenAI became composed of the OpenAI non-profit organization and the for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global LLC. The latter is responsible for business ambitions and can accept investments and set rates of return, but there is a limit or cap on the amount of profit that can be earned.

The latter must operate under the governance of the former.

This year's chaos within OpenAI was partly caused by this architecture.

So it's normal for Ultraman to want to adjust.

But how to adjust it specifically? What impact will the adjustment have on OpenAI? It depends on the follow-up...

Reference links:
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/OpenAI-rethinking-its-corporate-structure-to-fix-bugs-Sam-Altman-says
[2] https://www. wsj.com/tech/ai/helen-toner-openai-board-2e4031ef?mod=followamazon
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-employees-did-not-want-to-work-for- microsoft-2023-12

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