On OpenAI and Employee Empowerment
Updates
November 22, 2023
It's official. Altman is resuming control. Called it. I can't recall a more significant display of employee empowerment in my lifetime.
November 20, 2023
It turns out that Altman isn't returning—at least for now. Still, the mere fact that the board considered the notion undercores the main point of this post. If staffers depart en masse as promised, I could still see it happening.
Late Friday, OpenAI announced that it had shitcanned CEO Sam Altman. The word shocking is entirely apropos, but not unheard of. Uber and WeWork are just two recent examples of valuable decacorns whose boards and investors forced their CEOs to walk—although after much more protracted battles.
Evidently, news of the unexpected departure isn't sitting well with OpenAI's workforce. Many employees threatened to resign if Altman isn't reinstated. As Alex Heath and Nilay Patel write on The Verge, "If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him."
Can OpenAI stand to lose a significant portion of its employees? Hell, no. I suspected that recruiters at Google, Amazon, Anthropic, and Meta are probably trolling these folks on LinkedIn as we speak. I would.
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