SHOTS FIRED!! OPEN AI Explodes

911, what's the day of your emergency? Hey, the tech industry got flipped upside down over the weekend. I was staring at my phone the whole time. I haven't been so invigorated by any story in like five years.

My wife, my divorce because I haven't looked up on my phone, I've just been on Twitter all weekend. Sam, how are you doing right now with this open AI story? It's been awesome. The real winner through all this is Twitter.

Twitter's been great for this, right? Twitter just thrives through all kinds of controversy. Twitter, AKA the Silicon Valley Group chat has been awesome. Awesome, all weekend.

It's been awesome. I feel like I can root a world, I know I can be what I want to. I feel my own in it like days off. I thought there was a chance that you were just like out-duck hunting, and I would come on today and you'd be like, what happened?

So I thought there was a small chance. I'm a Sam Altman fan. I've loved this guy. We've talked about him for years.

I'm a big fan of his. I love drama. I love gossip. I read TMZ every day.

And so now I've got TMZ on Twitter. It's awesome. Of course, we're talking about open AI. And Sam Altman getting fired on.

We're recording this Monday. He was fired Friday, but there's news happening in real time, like constantly, right? Exactly. Just as an hour ago, there's news.

So we don't know exactly what this is going to all land. We're going to try to get this out as soon as we can. We had a whole other episode of Plants. We canceled it.

We just said, let's do this right now. What's our reaction? What is our reaction to the open AI stuff that's going on? All right, Sam, where do you want to start?

I think we should take this character by character, go through all the players that were involved. And I think we should give them kind of a grain. And they can get it, if they get an A or an A plus, that means they came out a big winner here. You can get a C, you can get an F.

I think we should grade all the players of how this is turned out for them in the 48 hours so far that this happened. Oh, do you want to first give a little timeline summary recap? Yeah. So I think you should do it because you've been paying attention to it more closely, but it all started Friday at like what?

Three o'clock? Exactly. Friday afternoon, I get a text message from Ben Levy. He just says, wow, Sam Altman.

What the fuck? Holy shit. What? And he doesn't say the news yet.

And then he's like, Sam Altman. Out. But he's like, this spells out. Then he like, does the stars not out?

Out of what? Where's the album? It was unfathomable that Sam Altman would get fired, right? Like, in the same way that, you know, I don't expect to wake up and see that Elon Musk has been fired from Tesla.

You don't think you don't wake up and think that Sam Altman is fired from OpenAI, which is the hottest private company. Probably the most important startup in the world that has gone from 0 to 90 billion evaluation in just a couple of years here. Yeah, it was shocking. It started because OpenAI, I don't even know.

Our guy put it this in military time. So it's just 248. At 248, OpenAI announced a leadership transition. They said that Sam Altman is departing as CEO because he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board and their CTO, Olivia Meira.

She was going to become the intermittent CEO. A little over an hour later, Sam Altman said, I love my time at OpenAI. He was transformative for me personally, and that he's excited for what's next. Well, let's pause there.

Because the first phase here is wild speculation. So speculation is, oh my God, shock and speculation. So I can't believe this happened. Like a neighbor fool's joke.

It mustn't have been something bad, dude. He must be, you know, this was a fraud. Did they unleash AGI? Was there a huge privacy leak that is causing him to have to step down because there's a security issue that he overlooked?

Is this, there's like this accusation from his sister about sexual assault when they were kids? Is it because of that? And everybody, assume it's got to be the worst. Until one hour later, when is it?

One hour later? Yeah, I think a couple hours later, Greg, who was the chairman and was essentially his co-founder of OpenAI, the lead technical guy at the time at the early days, sends this message to the team. Hi, everyone. Super proud of what we built up, starting my apartment eight years ago.

We've been through tough times, a great time together accomplishing so much, doing what should have been possible. Based on today's news, comma, I quit. Wishing you all the- The eye lowercase. The eye lowercase, I.

And so then now we're, we enter phase two. Phase two is, wait, Greg's on the board. Wait, Greg is a stand up guy. If it was something really bad, Greg would not have just quit with him.

There must, this must not be as bad. Is there some kind of power play, jealousy, a coup that's happening here? Is Sam being wrong? And instantly, I see the court of public opinion shift.

And the court of public opinion says, look, if Sam just really f-ed up, Greg would not have just followed him out the door and quit unless Greg was in on it. So, still a possibility. More likely it seems like Greg doesn't stand for this reasoning. So maybe we all stand for this reasoning.

And all of a sudden, you see the Sam army come forward. People who are started from YC when he was the president of YC saying, look, I don't know what happened here, but Sam is like, he went to bat for me. So many stories came out. They were all the same variety.

They were all the same variety. It was a startup saying, we had a time and we were screwed. I emailed Sam to be like, hey, here's what's going on. Blah, blah, blah.

Sam quickly replied with just something like, hey, make sure you're communicating or just be your best. There's only what you can control. But behind the scenes, he went to war for us. We found out later that he called all of investors, threatened to dangle them over the balcony if they screwed us.

And he saved our ass and didn't even mention it that he was doing that. Just in the background, he went through and saved us. And we found out later that this was true. So I don't know what happened here, but I ride with Sam.

Well, an equally big deal is one time I had a customer service question and I DM'd him and he replied and he solved it for me. So a lot of people replied fast. He replied, we didn't have to. He vouched for us when he didn't have to.

He did. By the way, that was not a joke. He did reply to me. Like I had like a hair.

I couldn't figure something out. I was like, I'm going to DM Sam and he replied. Like he solved my problem. But yeah, the guy seemed a great guy.

And his brother comes out and says to all the people that are gleefully hating today, please don't. You're betting against the wrong guy. OK, so that kind of foreshadows act two. Act two is the weekend.

So Friday, you get the crazy news dump. Now, the weekend, you have news that people start even inside the company start to stand with Sam because they say if there was something bad, tell us what it is. You don't have to say publicly. Say it internally.

What does it mean? He wasn't candidly consistent or consistently candid with the board about what did he lie? What did he lie about? How bad was it?

You're taking our leader out, our two leaders out now. And wait, who is the board? Oh, the board is like this combination of people who have no, they didn't build this. They don't even own equity in this.

But they're deciding our future because the board is basically one legit technologist, Adam D'Angelo, who was the co-founder of CTO of Facebook back in the day. And then he co-founded Quora after that. Do you have Adam, legitimate character in Silicon Valley? And then you have a bunch of other people that nobody's ever heard of.

One of them is like that actor's wife. She's like an academic somewhere and never had a job. Just in order to love it. Yeah, exactly.

The guy from Inception. You know, like great. The guy from Inception, not Leonardo DiCaprio. That's the first thing.

He's not the one with the board. Yeah, not even him. Exactly. So you got her, you got a couple of the characters here.

But nobody that is, again, no equity, no skin in the game. And no track record building or operating complex companies. So that seems a bit weird. They're getting no data.

And rumors come out. Sam's going to have a new company by Monday. Sam and Greg are going to create an open AI competitor by Monday, which is just like a pretty bad ass threat to throw down. And so once the team starts to say, they start to tweet out these emoji hearts saying, I basically, I stand with Sam out of all the details.

But if you don't come out with any details explaining why you did this, I'm going to probably leave with Sam. And so the board starts scrambling. And they start trying to renegotiate with Sam to maybe bring him back. And his conditions are like, cool.

I'll come back. Y'all all got to resign and clear my name. You got to bring back Greg. And we're going to put a new board together.

That's like the board of my choosing. The board doesn't want to do all that. And so they're kind of stalling. They're going back and forth.

He goes back to the office with a guest pass on his badge. And he says, this is the last time I'll ever enter this office with a guest pass. And then at the last minute, we hear the news come back. It looks like Sam's coming back.

And then Sunday night, it hits. There's a new CEO in town, Emmett Sheer. My former boss, the former CEO of Twitch, is now suddenly the guy from opening AI Sam is out. He's at shock.

That was like, what I thought was the end. And before I went to sleep, thinking, OK, we're going to record this spot, I thought that was the end. Emmett releases an announcement on Twitter saying basically, like, hey, here's my 30-day plan. I wake up this morning.

And there's more news. 600 of the 700 employees of open AI have signed a petition saying, if you don't bring Sam and Greg back and all resign, we're all leaving. 600 of 700. It was actually 500 as of 3 AM.

And then it got to 650 as of right before recording this. That's basically 100 people woke up and also signed a pledge. Hey, by the way, the guy who was supposedly behind the entire coup, Ilya, the main technologist, the scientist who was on the board, who was the guy who sent Sam a Google Meet link and was like, hey, can you join us right quick? It's like, sure, let me just pop up.

I'll just put my microphone. And he pops on and then gets fired. The whole board is sitting there and they executed his ass. Ilya comes out and signs the pledge.

It says, I'm sorry for what I did. What? And he even tweets out. He goes, I want to get the band back together and make it right.

I'm sorry. I regret what I did. And I will try to right the wrong. And then on top of that, before that they happen, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, comes out and says, hey, we still support OpenAI.

Sure. Look forward to beating the new guy, I am it, which is just a really funny way of putting it. Because apparently they were not consulted and only told one minute before the firing happened. That one minute before the press release went out, that Sam was fired.

So they were blindsided, even though they agreed to come fund $10 billion in this company and own 49% of it. And then he says, oh, and good news. Sam and Greg now work for Microsoft. And this is just like the ultimate checkmate move.

Because Sam, I don't know if you know this, but Microsoft not only do they own 49%, not only do they provide all of the funding, which OpenAI requires to exist. They can pull that at any minute now, because a lot of that funding is in compute credits, so basically server credits. But not only that, they also have the license to all the technology. They have the model, the weights, the inference.

They have everything they need to basically hand Sam and Greg, the new, like all of the code, and be like, you have to start from scratch, here you go. And so in the end, they got everything. They got everything they wanted. They got the team, the technology, the money, they got everything.

The most interesting part of all this, though, is the characters, because everyone keeps saying this is succession, real life. And it is. It's one of the greatest things to happen in Silicon Valley in the last 15 years. It's a beautiful storyline.

We thought Sam Bankman was a gift from the gods in terms of podcasting. This is actually, I think, more interesting. It's not played out yet. So the story is still going to keep going.

But let's talk about the characters. Let's talk about Sam Altman first. We talked about him a ton. But this guy, basically, his background is he's from St.

Louis, my hometown, give a shout out to St. Louis. Then he moved to Silicon Valley to join Y Combinator at the age of 19 or 20. He started a company that had mild success.

I think it raised a fair amount of money and sold for $50 million, which he walked away with $5 million and hardly that into hundreds of millions by investing in things like Airbnb, Dropbox, things like that. Because he worked at Y Combinator eventually becomes president of Y Combinator at the age of 27. Two quotes from Paul Graham about Sam Altman. And remember, Paul Graham is somebody who invested in Dropbox, invested in Airbnb, invested in, you know, he's seen the founders.

He knows everybody in Silicon Valley's met Mark Zuckerberg. He's met all these guys. And so for him to be most impressed by Sam Altman means something. And he says, Sam Altman has it.

You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back five years later and he'd be the king. That's the first one. And then he goes, the second one he goes, I met Sam Altman many years ago when he was 19 years old. He was a Stanford dropout, which by the way, Harvard Stanford dropout is the number one resume.

That is the number one, like, if you go to Harvard Stanford and you don't dropout, you have intentionally chosen to not have the number one credential you could have, which is Harvard dropout or Stanford dropout. So he says, within three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking, ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19, in three minutes. I don't know what Sam Altman did in three minutes, but I would love to know. I am fascinated by people who are special.

I love it in sports, but you could see it. You could see LeBron James at age 17, was like a freak of nature. Yeah, he had like the equivalent of a 42 inch verb. You know, whatever he did, it was like, yeah, it was like a day creator dunking.

There's another story that's kind of remarkable. I thought this was kind of the case character. So Sam Altman's gay, he came out when he was like 15 or 16, I think you said something about, he's from your hometown saying, there's some story which is that he came out and not only did he just come out as a teenager, which alone takes him for every, he then like hosted like a pep rally or something like that. He went to John Burrows, so in St.

Louis, where I'm from every, most all high schools are either Catholic or some type of Christian, whatever. And he came out as being gay, but he like went to a, I think he created a club, some type of like gay club and out of Catholic school, they're like, no, we're not, we're not about this. And so I think he led like a walkout, like a school walkout. That takes a lot of like a little leader.

Yeah, he's very courageous guy. And then, but for like the last 15 years pre-open AI, he was even though he was president of Y Combinator, he was still a little bit behind the scenes. And even though that he was running this huge incubator and he's a powerful guy, it still felt like, well, why would Paul Graham say this about this kid who still has yet, still has unfilled potential? Couple years ago, he starts working on an open AI and then all of a sudden we're like, oh, all right, the guy was plotting and it's, it's, he's played the long game.

Now we understand why everyone like looks up to this guy. And open AI has basically taken over the tech industry and he went from zero to, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world in what five years or something like that? Yeah, exactly. So he leaves the most prestigious job in Silicon Valley, which is president of YC, is Dean of Harvard.

Dean of Harvard, he quits suddenly because the nonprofit research organization he co-founded, you know, he felt like that was the right opportunity. He did that. Suddenly it was surprising. I remember the time I had the thought I think I said this before here, which is that I had the thought like, if Sam had all been just quit putting the president of YC to go join open AI, how can I justify coming into work tomorrow?

Like, why would I not also go to open AI? Whatever open AI is, I knew nothing at the time. But all I knew is if that one of the smartest guys in the world didn't did that, maybe I should go do that too. And honestly, that would have been the greatest career move I ever made if I had done that.

Because, you know, opening I quickly, you know, changed the structure from nonprofit to becoming, you know, like a capped for-profit thing and became worth, you know, nearly $100 billion in a short period of time, creating chat GPT, the fastest growing product of all time to get to 100 million users faster than any. And let's go to his two partners, because when he started it, there's a bunch of weird stories that aren't entirely open, but it seems like there was something where Elon Musk funded the business or helped fund the business effort, seen invested $40 million, and he also helped to recruit and convince a few of Sam's co-founders to join him. Is that right? That's right.

So basically, when people say, okay, great, Sam's just, you drop him on an island of cannibals, he comes up, okay, cool, what's his skill? What does he do? And basically it was like, on anything about strategy or ambition, there's what program said he said. If there was ever a question on strategy or ambition, I default to what would Sam do?

And, you know, the program was like 20 years older than Sam saying that. So that's kind of impressive. So what did he do? He basically has a conversation with Elon Musk, and the two of them shared the same belief, which was that artificial intelligence was going to be a big deal, that we would be able to, one day, realize AGI, which is artificial general intelligence.

Think about it as super intelligence, when AI is generally smarter than humans and kind of everything that most of the things that we try to do. So they both said that's also kind of scary because we don't know what's going to happen on the other side of AGI. So we should fund research in a nonprofit that will study, fund the research around this so that we can safely create AGI instead of having AGI that kills us all like the movies. So what Sam did was he hosts his dinner in Palo Alto, and you know, he gets Elon Musk there, and he gets a few other smart key people.

One of them was this guy, Greg, who was at the time the CTO of Stripe, which was before OpenAI, was the most impactful big startup in the world. So he gets a CTO of Stripe, he gets this guy, Ilya, who's like the lead research scientist at AI at Google, essentially, he's kind of like one of the founding fathers of AI and deep learning. And so they get a bunch of these people around the table, and they basically read Hoffman is there, and they basically like, we need to do this. Elon basically just agrees to fund 40 million dollars into the nonprofit.

So Elon puts his money where his mouth is, Sam helps recruit, put the whole deal together, puts the people together. On the way home, Sam's like, hey, Greg, let me give you a ride back to San Francisco. So they drive back to San Francisco, and what Greg says, and what Sam says is, the first 30 minutes it's an hour long drive from Palo Alto to San Francisco. So the first 30 minutes, Greg just asked me rapid fire, like 150 questions.

Then at the 30 minute point he goes, okay, I've decided I'm gonna do this. I'll quit Stripe, and I'll join OpenAI. Whatever this thing is that you're creating, I will join it. So the next 30 minutes they started making their plan.

Like, okay, what are the first things we need to do? Which tells you something about Greg, to do, again, a crazy career move like that, to just have independent mindedness and conviction and something that quickly, and tell you some of Sam's persuasiveness and ability to put this thing together. Then what Elon says is that he recruited Ilya out of Google, which was very, very hard to do. And he says it's the reason that him and Larry Page, founder of Google, don't talk anymore.

He used to be friends with Larry, he used to famously Elon didn't own a house for a period of time, and he would just crash at friends' houses. So he would crash at Larry Page's house all the time. He says that they got into arguments about AI, and that he was really worried about AI, and Larry was like, tech forward and was like, no, it's gonna be amazing. And then he says that he got pissed when Larry called him a speciesist, but basically you're just all about humans.

And Elon was like, what the fuck else am I supposed to be about? Are you not? That scares me even more. I'm gonna create OpenAI now to defend against Google, which owned DeepMind, the number one player at the time.

And so Elon basically poaches Elon and Sam poach Ilya out of Google, which took a lot of money and a lot of persuasion, I believe, to get him out. And that he becomes, when he joins OpenAI, the research community who worships this guy, basically followed, and they got all the top researchers to join, and that is the founding story of OpenAI. That's amazing, right? I mean, this is like movie drama shit, of just that dinner, that drive home.

I mean, this is perfect, and we're gonna have to have Justin Timberlake stars, one of these guys. And so this brings us to, I think, the second character that we should talk about, this guy, Greg, who I believe is the unsung hero in this whole thing, because Sam Altman is kind of like the hero, right? He's the CEO, he gets backstabbed, he gets wronged, he's the martyr, he had to suffer. People come out and they're all supporting Sam and sharing, like it's like a funeral for Sam on Twitter the other day.

He's like, oh, I remember that once Sam responded to my customer service request, like, oh, I was on a bike once, and Sam, you know, he moved over in the lane, so I could go by, right? Like everybody was just sharing their favorite Sam memory. And then nobody's really talking about Greg. Now, Greg, in my opinion, shifted this whole fucking thing, because at first it was like, damn, I don't know what Sam did, must have been horrible, blah, blah, blah.

As soon as Greg came out and was like, yo, on this, I quit. And they're like, Greg's the number two, he's on the board, he was the chairman of the board, I think. They're like, if Greg doesn't think this was right, I don't think it's right. And so Greg single handed me, like, shifted the perception of the narrative around this whole thing, and the board didn't counteract that.

And so I think Greg was the real hero of this. And then what I did was, there's some amazing blog posts that anybody who's a real nerd about this stuff, and I really love kind of like the lore, the canon of Silicon Valley. You gotta go read this. Greg has blog post up on his blog about, about the early days of OpenAI.

And I think he blogged the early days of OpenAI last week. No, it's eight years ago. This thing started a long time ago. And he talks about like, they didn't have an office.

He's like, all right, just come to my apartment. And he's like, here's the four of us in our apartment. He's like, I didn't know anything about machine learning. So I did two things.

Number one, I asked Iliya, what is the number one textbook about machine learning? I bought it and I studied it religiously. He's like, I'd read everything there was to know about deep learning and machine learning. And this is the former CTO of Strike.

He's not like a non-technical dude. He's known as like this incredible, one of these 10x or 100x engineers. And he says, I didn't know anything about deep learning. So I just dedicated myself to go read page one, chapter one of the book.

And I'm gonna take notes and I'm gonna ask it to the questions. He goes to, while these guys were setting up their research stuff, I did everything else. Like, oh, your back looks a little bit like hello, oh, you guys thirsty? I'll go get smoothies.

And he's doing literally all the like intern grunt work, those first few months to get him set up. He's like, basically it was alternating between research would do something, then research would get blocked. And I would say, oh, what's blocking? It's taking forever to run this training center.

I have to like organize this data. And Greg would stay up all night and basically like, do the engineering, because people don't realize engineering and coding is very different than AI research. And so he would do the coding that would make the researchers go faster. He built basically all of the infrastructure so that researchers could do great work.

And even when GPT, like there was a story, like they ran the model and the output was kind of like, ah, like it was so, so, so, and then Greg like locked himself in a room for two weeks and he came out and suddenly GPT worked. And we were like, what the hell just happened? He's like, yeah, I black out and I did that. And so he has these great blog posts and photos of those early days that I thought was kind of amazing.

So Greg was born in 89, which puts him around 34 years old now. He joined Stripe in 2010, became CTO 2013. So he was CTO of Stripe when he was about 24, 25 years old. And then he go, he left Stripe to co-found OpenAI.

So he was only 26, 27 when he started working on OpenAI. It's pretty amazing. These guys are freaks. Unreal.

It's unreal. And by the way, what did you give? You forgot to give him a grade. So Sam Altman, he's gonna win no matter what in all of this.

So I think he was gonna get like, let's say B plus, right? He was gonna get a B plus. Why? Because he got fired.

He got backstabbed by your own people. That's not great. Not a great thing to happen. Two, they haven't said what you did.

But you did something, right? They want you to fire you for nothing. So you did something. We don't know what it is.

Oh, no. OK. I can't give you an A for that. It looked like he was gonna get the job back, which would have been great.

But then he didn't. So it didn't happen in the end. So even though you got some support from your team didn't happen. Until the Microsoft thing happened, which was literally like, imagine playing a game of chess.

And you're like, oh, I think I got this guy. You know, I have a five piece to three advantage here. His queen is out. And then you look up from the board.

And he's holding a Glock to your head. But basically, it's like, now he's at Microsoft. They have the license to all of the technology. They have all the training data in the world.

Because guess what? 90% of computers are PCs that run Microsoft. They run Windows. He has all the funding in the world.

He got paid, I'm sure. Like Satya had to bring Sam and Greg in before the stock market open on Monday just to not have this be an issue for Microsoft that they got screwed here. They put a bunch of money into a lame duck. And so he got everything.

He got the tech. 600 or 700 people saying they're going to follow him there. But he got the team. He got the money.

He got the funding. And he got it all in 48 hours. And they were basically like, yeah, they're going to lead a new subsidiary of Microsoft. That's going to do a research on AI.

Like, oh, you mean, open AI part two? So now he has to walk away with an A plus, right? Like, you can't knock that. And he's got the good guy label.

Unless they come out with some new information that shows that he did something after. Which something has to come out. There's only three options in my opinion of how the story for Sam ends. Option A is it's an unforgivable sin.

I think that that is not likely. But it is possible. That what he did is just, well, you're done. Option B is he goes back to open AI, becomes CEO.

I think that was more likely than not going to happen. I think. But option C is he stays at Microsoft. And I think in a decade or five years, he becomes a CEO of Microsoft.

Yeah. Which is now worth $5 trillion or something at that point. Yeah, right now. It's really today.

Yeah. So he's going to turn out OK. So now this other guy, Ilya, he looks like a schmuck here. So he's a loser here.

He looks like he gets an F. He gets an F. There is a little bit of likeability with him where it's like, oh, you're just a brilliant scientist artist turned who was who was you were manipulated in here because you're just a scientist and you don't understand human interaction. So he plays.

So we should find one thing, which is what are the possibilities of what Sam did that might put Sam in the wrong or Ilya the right. So there is what you're calling the unforgivable sandwich. I would say, by the way, not a great tracker of anything being unforgivable. But let's say the really bad personal stuff could be one reason why, in which case, I would say that's a completely fair reason to remove him.

If they did an investigation about that, that was true, that they're in the right for removing him. That's defensible, but they just haven't said anything. Reason number two is safety concern. So Ilya is famous.

Like the reason he's doing this is literally he's worried about AGI. It doesn't want the world to end. And what initially people thought was Sam says all the right things about safety, but also Sam is like a, you know, capitalist. He's an entrepreneur.

He's he's a he's a hard charging guy and he's running forward here. And maybe they're saying slow down. He's saying, no, we don't need to slow down. And they're saying, Sam, this is too risky.

And he's saying, no, no, no, this is not risky. We got to move forward. That's what it looked like the situation was. And it was made crazier by the fact that I don't know if you saw this.

He did an interview the day before. And he said something like this. He said, I've been lucky to be in the room four times now. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago, where I saw something that pushed the veil of ignorance forward and the frontier of technology to us.

So basically he's saying like, there's been like three or four mind blowing moments, you know, about AI. I've been lucky enough to be in the room. The last one happened a couple of weeks ago. It's way too easy.

It's going to stun people. And so some people are like, yo, did they like create the monster super intelligent? Like, did they create AGI? Has AGI been achieved internally?

And he like randomly posted on Reddit not long ago. AGI has been achieved internally. I was like a joke, I guess. So some people said maybe they've stumbled into something and this guy's going too fast.

And it's, you know, like the scientists around the nuclear bomb saying, no, no, no, we got to like destroy this thing or we got to like slow down. This is getting too crazy. That would have been the other reason, which would have been again defensible, especially given that open AI's charter is specifically says we're not about increasing shareholder value. We are about, you know, safely building AGI to benefit all of humanity.

So that is their charter. And if they thought this guy's moving too fast, putting that at risk, I would say they are completely in the right to do so if they believe that to be true. The bad part is again, they've come out with no evidence that that is the case. They've been explained themselves.

So nobody believes them. But that's true. The third reason. So, you know, you have the really bad thing you have the safety argument.

And the third thing is essentially it's just a power play. They're annoyed by him. They don't feel like he listens. They feel like he's getting all the credit or he wants fame and fortune and power play.

Let's get this guy out of here and we will we get to run another thing. And that's like a jealousy driven thing. And I don't know which of those is the most true. I don't know what you think.

But you know, it seems like none of those are perfect explanations. I think I'll say what I think maybe later about it. It's number three. I think it's number three.

Let's talk about let's come back to the board. But let's talk about Emmett's here because you are one of the handful of people or you know, however many people who have had a relationship with him and understand. And so last night at 1 a.m. Emmett basically said, I've been the guy that's been picked.

He put out this really good tweet where he explained what he was doing. The funniest part I thought was he's had the job down for 12 minutes. And he did a wonderful job of saying the word R. He goes, our products are going to be this.

Our team is going to do this. We are going and it reminded me of that meme where there's a guy who goes, hey, I made this. And he hands it to a stick figure. And the stick figure goes, you made this.

And then the first guy leaves and the stick figure looks at the thing and goes, I made this. And it's the whole point about the internet where people steal stuff. I actually think Emmett's a great guy. So I'm just messing around.

But I thought it was amazing how he's like 12 minutes later, this R company is going to do this. What do you think about Emmett in this role? He's been getting a lot of criticism because he previously shared online that he's like, I actually think we need to slow things down. And a lot of people are like, this is ridiculous.

Don't slow down, whatever. But he seems like a really thoughtful great CEO. Am I wrong? So Emmett, you're right.

I worked with Emmett for about two years. Got to sit with him in hundreds of meetings and see how he thinks and hang out with him. I have beers and just kind of talk to him. He came on the podcast.

I talked to him for an hour there about AI stuff. You always said he was really thoughtful. He's extremely intelligent in a broad way. So most people are not that intelligent.

That should be. Some people that are like, oh, they're above average. Then he meets some people, as you say, of and burn toner. And it's just very clear.

He's just got more horsepower in his head than most people. I think that's great. As much as we like to say that hard work is what matters. Like, yeah, what else matters?

Like, intelligence is also really, really strong attributes. Like, you know, like, you know, step creates great skills, but like LeBron is 6'8", 250. Right? Like, you know, size and speed matter.

I hate when people downplay intelligence. And I'm like, guys, let's just admit, some people are born smarter. Some people are 7'4'4'. There's a reason why 20% of Americans who are 7'4'4'4'4'4'4'.

And below the age of 30 are in the NBA. You're better at that particular thing. Same with intelligence. I hate that height helps you with basketball.

Intelligence helps you with running companies, right? Like, that's the thing. So, Emmett is extremely intelligent. He's amongst most intelligent people I've ever met.

So that's the first thing. Second thing is he's got depth and breadth. So a lot of people are really, really intelligent in one specific domain. It seems like this guy, I might be one of those.

He's extremely, extremely, technically intelligent. But it seems like in the game of, you know, soft power and politics and, you know, people and all that. He, you know, had a pretty boneheaded way of doing this that didn't work out to his own tweet. I deeply regret what I did.

It was handled very poorly. So, you know, I think, you know, some people could really, really smart in one technical domain, but they're not, they don't have a breadth of intelligence. I would say that Emmett is wide and deep. So he's technically very strong.

He was a great engineer. They built Twitch, one of the best live streaming products. It was him and this guy Kyle. Kyle went on to build self-driving cars and Emmett ran Twitch for like, whatever, 18 years or something like that.

So, you know, between Justin TV and Twitch. And so, he's very good technically, which is important because it's a deeply technical product. He, you know, he said to me the other thing, one thing when I was talking about AI, he's like, yeah, like, once you understand how transformers work. And I was like, well, let's stop there because I have no idea how transformers work.

So, like, the rest of your sentence, because he said it like, yeah, it's easy. I mean, just once you get out transformers work, it's like, you know, blah, blah, blah. Just anybody could go watch a video. We've had a smart, a couple of smart people in this pod and they try to use analogies because I'd be like, I don't understand what you're saying.

And they're using an analogy. I'm like, can you please use an analogy for your analogy? Like, I think we had biology on here. And he was like referring to the Battle of the River of Tames in World War II in order to like, describe crypto.

And I'm like, guy, I don't know what the Battle of Tames was. Like, this doesn't make sense to me. Right. Exactly.

You know, I'm asking for a lunch bowl over here and you're making gourmet. Yeah. Let's do this right. What's his soft skills like?

Well, his soft skills, I would say, when I experienced him, which was like, you know, whatever, he's been running the company for over a decade as CEO. I thought he was good. Not great. So for example, I think he always knew what to do.

Like, if you caught him when he was calm, he would give great advice on the people side of how to handle something. However, in the heat of the moment, he was prone to falling into like debates about semantics, about words, about data that would make people feel like shit. And he would like win the battle and lose the war type of thing with people. And so I don't think he was great with that.

But I also think Twitch was like a bunch of very like, it was a community product with a bunch of very like sort of woke people in the company that were like very touchy feel about stuff. You know, I think open AI is going to be his type of people. You know, like, and it was better in meetings where all the people were engineers and pro pro people. He was worse the more that the people were, you know, we got legal PR, cops, you know, marketing.

You know, those meetings went worse for him, I thought. And so I think he'll have less about here. But he also is like, he'll reference the battle of the bulge. Like he'll reference, you know, well, the judicial system in Ireland back in the 1500s, what they did was really interesting.

It's like, dude, why do you know this? He's like, well, I've read about all the judicial systems. I'm sorry. How governing has changed over time.

It's like, that's your casual reading? He's like, yeah, I don't know. Is that weird? And it's like, you know, somebody's really good when they don't even realize it's weird when the thing they do is really fucking weird.

And so he has a very, very wide set of knowledge. Now, he's getting kind of labeled as a, a D cell. I don't know if you've seen this, like a D cell or a C, I'm just thinking, like somebody wants to slow think down. As soon as he has a suit.

Yeah. So they kind of like a suit or like a doomer, you know, like this guy's anti technology, which is pretty silly. And it's like, you know, if he could be technology would, you know, like a technologist or a true. They're called the guy who invented Twitch of boomer, basically.

Yeah, it's stupid. And so, you know, a friend who a mutual friend described it well, because people dug up all his old tweets and he said, if it open, if open as at a 10 right now in terms of speed, you know, it should probably be like a one or two, because you know, you just don't want this cat to get on the bag. And so I want to read you what he, I have the transcript of what he said on our podcast, which, what he came on about AI. So I asked him very simply, I said, is AI going to kill us all?

And he goes, maybe I go, it's interesting you say maybe it's going to kill us all because like you're pretty like pro technology, everything you're an optimist. And he goes, well, it's because I'm an optimist that I'm scared. If I was a pessimist, if I was like, oh, this AI thing's overhyped, this technology is not that impressive. It's just a nice little magic trick.

It's nothing real underneath it. If I was pessimistic, I would be less worried. I'm optimistic. I'm extremely impressed with how these work.

And I see a pathway where this is going to get better, very fast. And at some point, it's going to be able to self-improve. That's very scary because we don't know what happens on the other side of that. It's because I'm optimistic.

The second thing he said was, he goes, here's the analogy. You know, in biology, there's like, there's now like ways that you can synthetically do things. You know, we can edit genes, for example, and we can like add an extra leg to a sheep or we can like modify a virus. This was like, you know, COVID, right?

Like, you can modify a virus and make it more spreadable. We all saw with COVID how dangerous that capability is that like, this thing, you know, this leaf from a lab, that's really, really bad. Like, you know, that was a big mistake that technology made that like, you know, fucked up the world for a few years. And so he's like, you know, we have regulation.

I think everybody kind of agrees. We should maybe not go super fast and make it easy for somebody like print small box in their home. Right? Like, we should maybe not give that capability to everybody.

And maybe we should like slow down to make sure there's some oversight so that we don't do something really bad that like creates a super virus. He's like, people get that when it comes to biology. They don't really get that when it comes to AI. He's like with AI, here's the thing.

AI is really good at like the one thing you need in order to be really good at AI developing AI. He's like, AI can code. It can write code. It can read everything there is to know about a subject in an afternoon, become absolute world expert at it.

And then it can translate that into action. It can translate into writing code. It can also design chips. Yeah, it doesn't do either of those two things perfectly right now.

It's not amazing writing code. And it's not amazing. I'm designing chips, but it can do them. It's within the zone of things that AI can be good at, the type of things that AI can be good at, which means that over time it's going to be able to write code that designs AI and design chips that make AI better.

And once that thing can improve itself, it's going to get fast. It's going to get really amazing, really fast, especially anyone can expect. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it all works out, but also maybe it doesn't.

And that's like, even if I think the probability of a really bad thing happening is low, it's the consequences are so bad. We're not just talking about like a virus that's kind of like screws up your computer or like gets like, you know, even like a pandemic that gets people sick. We're talking about this could destroy like, he says, like, we could destroy all of the value of the light code, which I don't know what the light code is, but I don't want that. Right.

So he's describing like, even if it's low probability, we should just be really, really careful about that and like make sure we don't screw the whole thing up. And a friend resounds on one thing, they go, they go everything. Like, I'm going to like slow this down and stop it. He's like, no, I'm smart.

And it knows the game theory of this. The prisoners dilemma. If you go too slow, somebody else will create a GI before you because you slow down to zero. So somebody else will get there before you who may not share your moral beliefs around safety.

So you can't go too slow where other people get their first, you don't share your safety views, but you can't go so fast that you don't actually build safely. There's a middle ground to seek. And so I think that's the best description of this where people are trying to label him as one thing and knowing what I know about him, that's just not true. Well, let's go like through rapid fire of like some other story points when we'll make that quick.

And then also we've been there of what we think will is going to happen. One quick story point for you. We got to fight all grades before the story. So the board, what do you want to grade the board?

Oh, they're fucking losers. So the worst. They look horrible. They're going to get like it stands for fucking loser.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there an FL? They're the worst.

I mean, it doesn't matter what the truth is it's all about perception and they look like the worst, including Adam D'Angelo, the founder of Cora right now. He looks horrible. So F they get an F you agree? Yeah, agreed.

What do you give him? What do you give him? He's a good job here. TBD.

See he's actually actually it's actually like a D or C at the moment. He's getting dragged, I think, which isn't fair, but no, he looks like he's a loser here because of perception. Right. And what about the heroes job?

Like it's hard to look good regardless of how amazing he is, right? Right. And what about Satya Microsoft? He gets a B.

He looks pretty good. I mean, he's the man. I mean, he's kind of made a resurgence for Satya or Microsoft. I think that I think there's a real world where being actually catches up at Google in terms of search and Microsoft is going to become just an even bigger company than they already are.

So yeah, I mean, he's a man. He's a, him and Sam are the masterminds. I give a plus the dude, you know, mobilized over the weekend and before the markets opened and hit Microsoft stock, he had basically acquired open AI for negative $100 billion. He acquired open AI.

It's incredible. He got open AI out of the nonprofit, capped profit structure. It's just super for profit inside Microsoft. He got the key talent, you know, Sam, Greg, all of the key people, 600 of the key people.

And now they just own the whole thing instead of 49%. That's, that's how he plus he questioned on this one. He's the man. So let's do the storylines.

Yeah, here's one quick storyline. Have you heard of fair child conductors? You know what that is? I've heard of it, but I'm not a history guy.

So what's the story? Isn't there something like the traitorous eight or something? What is that? Yeah.

So basically there was the, there was a big company called, I think it was called Shockley conductors and the made conductors, computer chips in the 60s in Silicon Valley. People were pissed off at the guy who owned it. William Shockley, I think his name is brilliant, but just paying ass. And so these eight guys said, Hey, you got a bail or where bail on?

And the guy, the seat goes, see ya. And so these eight people went and started Fairchild, which was basically the equivalent is like Nvidia, but back then in 1960. Basically first Silicon Valley, right? That was like the, that was the seed round of Silicon Valley.

Yeah. And they were famous, the culture was famous because they were casual. So it was like where nerds would come and be casual and where like the best actually, best idea is actually one. And that was where the whole like culture of Silicon Valley arguably started there.

And then the off, offshoot of Fairchild conductors was basically IBM. So IBM was founded by one of the founders of Fairchild. Andy Grove, the guy, the famous manager of, I think he was the CEO of IBM. He came from there.

The founders of Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, I think might have spun out. I mean, like basically it was, there's all these people, but the story of the treacherous eight is what they're called is very similar to this story. And so if you're interested in this type of stuff and you can actually go and read that book and you can see a lot of similarities between what is going on now. So this is like our version of that.

And so it's going to end well, I think for Greg and Sam because I ended really nicely for the treacherous eight. So that's an interesting thing. My question is that they, they unwind this whole thing and they revert back to opening iPad. That's why like, as it hasn't happened yet, but I think the final step now, now that Ilias on the pledge being like, I quit, I'm also going to go work there.

And it's like, what is the point of even having the opening entity if 600 of the people, including all of the leaders are gone? I don't think they want to be inside Microsoft necessarily. So I think what's not like an average. No, no, no.