What happened at OpenAI? > Nov 2 -> Sam was in the room, when the team demonstrated the next big improvement. 3 times before in OpenAIs history, most recently with GPT-4, they’d pushed back the veil of ignorance and pushed forward the frontier of discovery. As he watched the latest advance, he was already planning for the next moves: the funds that would have to be raised, the resources that would have to planned for > Nov 4 - Ilya was unsettled. They’d reached a threshold of autonomy that was concerning, while the alignment team was still just adding capability instead of emotion, actual love for humanity. They needed more time to figure out the research pathway instead of hurrying to deploy product. > Nov 6 - OpenAI dev day goes well. Lots of kudos. They release the announced products over the next several days After dev day, Greg and Sam are in full on fund raising mode. They’re targeting 90 billion valuation, a 3x lift from 30 billion. OpenAI recruiters are already calling Google employees with 10-20 mil 4 year packages telling them if they join now they’ll make it in before the valuation increase. Nov 9 > Greg meets Emanuel Macron for a photo op, afterwards take investor meetings in Paris. OpenAI is now at the sovereign wealth fund, European family money sized investment Nov 13 > in an interview with the Financial Times in London, Sam confirms for the first time that work has begun on GPT5 and that he’s fundraising. Nov 14 > OpenAI pauses ChatGPT subscriptions, as they’re totally out of capacity for inference. Usage has spiked post dev day. Nov 16 > APEC CEO summit, Sam confirms the Nov 4 next step up discovery By this point Ilya is pissed and scared. The fundraising tour has caught him by surprise. The usage numbers have spiked and now they don’t have enough servers for the research team, meaning they have to fundraise again to support research. Events are starting to move beyond him. Nov 17 10 am > board meeting starts. Ilya produces 2 23 year old staff engineers (rumor) to describe progress and dangers to the board. Turns into a battle when he says they shouldn’t be fundraising and shouldn’t be expanding and that Sam was out on tour without board agreement. Sam points out that as the CEO he has to stay ahead of the team and manage news flow in advance of the team’s needs. “We’re going to need more money for more data centers” Ilya has a fit. Things come to a head. A vote is taken. Sam is out. The board demotes Greg, who is not at the meeting as Sam is authorized to cast his vote.