Unless you’ve been cut off from all worldly communications, you’ve heard that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was very unceremoniously booted from OpenAI – and was informed in a Google Meet, despite Microsoft being a major OpenAI investor and partner.

No one seems to know the precise reason why he was terminated. Malfeasance? Was it his reported lack of transparency with the board, which now consists of three independent directors holding no equity, and its Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever? A coup?

Or something quite different transpiring behind the curtain…

In any event, OpenAI’s board has hired Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear as its interim CEO, a source familiar with the matter told Axios.

“…This is a shocker and Altman was a key ingredient in the recipe for success of OpenAI,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “That said, we believe Microsoft and (Satya) Nadella will exert more control at OpenAI going forward with Altman gone.”

We wondered from the start if Microsoft have a hand in this, considering that they are a large investor and partner, yet held no board seat and let’s be honest: control is an aphrodisiac to Microsoft – and the tech cabal at large.

We suspect we were right, especially when it was announced that  Microsoft hires ex-OpenAI leaders Altman and Brockman to lead new AI group.

A Bit Of History

Altman’s first company, Loopt, which raised $30M – as we know, Altman is very good at raising funding – never gained traction and was acquired for some $43M. OpenAI/ChatGPT certainly got traction, but at what price? Said Futurism, “OpenAI Is Losing a Flabbergasting Amount of Money on ChatGPT, And costs are on the rise…it costs $700,000 per day to run ChatGPT due to computing costs…

“At the end of last year, Reuters reported that… Sam Altman has set the company’s revenue bar very high in an investor pitch, with estimates that the firm could make $200 million this year and $1 billion next year.

“Compared to the $30 million OpenAI made in revenue last year, according to Fortune, that figure seems almost impossibly high.”

Speaking of traction at what price, in an age where countries mandate ‘the right to be forgotten,’ Stack Overflow reported that “The core challenge posed by generative AI right now is that unlike conventional applications, LLMs have no “delete” button” … There’s no straightforward mechanism to “unlearn” specific information.” This piece is must-read.

What to speak of the fact that LLMs hallucinate and plagiarize ad nauseam – and no Section 230 protections here.

LLMs are potentially a game-changer in both good and not-so-great ways, but was ChatGPT/pandora’s box released into the wild too soon, and without necessary safeguards in place, which means at the end of the day, what precisely hath Alman wrought?

It’s also important to note that Altman had very little stock in the company. Said CNBC, OpenAI’s unique corporate structure left Sam Altman vulnerable. Now he’s out.

But wait! There’s more and pay attention here, founders, especially those whose mantra is to do well while doing good. “OpenAI’s corporate structure is that it’s first and foremost a non-profit, with a for-profit in the mix, but secondary to the mission, and there’s a capped profit structure here… In plain language, if investors put in $1, even if OpenAI was making billions of dollars in profit, that investor would be limited to $100 in total direct profit. It would still be a sizeable return, but not unlimited.” And how many times have we said that investors are in the exits business? Preferably with a sizable ROI.

With little equity/incentive to make a profit, on top of having become more or less the face of GenerativeAIs, here we are again at that Silicon Valley standby favorite: founder as rock star, not unlike Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos founder/Steve Jobs impersonator before him, sans the fraud and lawsuits.

So far.

Even tech rockstars are not above the law or the rules of business.

There was hue and cry when Elvis/Altman left the building, not by choice, with key employees choosing to exit as well. To the point where, the very next day, “OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO,” The Verge reported. Huh??? That was short-lived, considering the MSFT announcement.

Employees are threatening to leave OpenAI en masse, but not all of them are Altman acolytes.

“In 2020, a group of OpenAI employees quit over concerns that the company was becoming too commercial and sidelining safety research in favor of lucrative deals. (They went on to start the rival A.I. lab Anthropic.),” said  The New York TImes. ”And several current and former OpenAI employees have told me that some staff members believed that Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman could be too aggressive when it came to starting new product.”

OpenAI might have been his baby, but at the end of the day, despite being one of Silicon Valley’s anointed (Y Combinator, OpenAI, World Coin), Altman was still accountable to the board, and therein lies the rub – and possibly the manipulation on a certain company’s part. Was the board too hasty in ousting him, or was this just the latest in a series of missteps on Altman’s part? In an age where everything is knowable or quickly discoverable, another heads up, founders: transparency seems to necessarily be the order of the day.

But there’s never a dull moment in tech and were we the only ones not surprised that Altman landed at Microsoft? It had been our theory from the start that the company had somehow orchestrated this, and with an inexperienced board in place, well, there was a time when MSFT was known as the evil empire, and a leopard never changes his stripes (sic).

As we were saying, the money always wins. And speaking of the bro code, always good to have friends in high places, especially in the Valley…

ChatGPT may well have been released too soon, and given the current machinations going on (Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO Altman’s move to Microsoft isn’t a done deal, and Ilya Sutskever’s flip to supporting Altman means two board members need to change their minds), only time and just a bit more transparency will reveal if Altman was as well. Onward and forward