Total Twink Death: Sam is out at OpenAI, Twitch's old CEO is in [E: Sam at Microsoft :marseyclippy:]

https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101

EDIT: TOTAL JEET VICTORY, SATYA HIRES SAM AND SAVES HIS STOCK PRICE:

We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we're extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.

:marseypajeettalking:

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Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was an almost wholly unremarkable startup guy who somehow attracted the attention of Paul Graham (significant cult leader, his fund is called YC and was responsible for Reddit among other crimes) and got given a sinecure for a few years. He was appointed CEO of OpenAI before they had anything to show and hung on. Once they made a fancy chatbot this made him very important so everyone loves him.

This is how Sam is spoken of by Paul in 2009:

I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be.

Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"

What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.

At which point Sam's most significant accomplishment was dressing weird at an Apple event:

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1700465192350065.webp

What happens to OpenAI matters because they have the leading chatbot so Microsoft and Accenture will probably use them to steal trillions of dollars of corporate money. It's extra dramatic because OpenAI was founded by Rationalists (/r/atheism if it was a s*x cult) and has a neurodivergent charter taken directly from science fiction, so the board was unironically thinking about Sam's suitability to control Skynet when they decided to fire him with thirty minutes warning for an undisclosed reason.

Emmett is kinda a loser and even more boring than Sam, they were in the same round of YC funding, but he actually successfully ran Twitch (not making it better, but extracting cash for Bezos) so there's a slim chance he does well as CEO.

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Who is Sam Altman? Why all the drama about him?

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Moving this into the main post lol.

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