Citing a relevant part of the Lex Fridman interview (transcript) which people will probably find helpful to watch, so you can at least eyeball Altman’s facial expressions:
LEX FRIDMAN: How do you hire? How do you hire great teams? The folks I’ve interacted with, some of the most amazing folks I’ve ever met.
SAM ALTMAN: It takes a lot of time. I mean, I think a lot of people claim to spend a third of their time hiring. I for real truly do. I still approve every single hire at OpenAI. And I think we’re working on a problem that is like very cool and that great people want to work on. We have great people and people want to be around them. But even with that, I think there’s just no shortcut for putting a ton of effort into this.
For example, Altman was misled to believe that the board was probably compromised and he had to throw everything at them, and the board was mislead to believe that Altman was hopelessly compromised and they had to throw everything at him (or maybe one of them was actually compromised). I actually wrote about that 5 days before the OpenAI conflict started (I’d call that a fun fact but not a suspicious coincidence, because things are going faster now, 5 days in 2023 is like 30 days in 2019 time).
Citing a relevant part of the Lex Fridman interview (transcript) which people will probably find helpful to watch, so you can at least eyeball Altman’s facial expressions:
I think it’s also important to do three-body-problem thinking with this situation; it’s also possible that Microsoft or some other third party might have gradually but successfully orchestrated distrust/conflict between two good-guy factions or acquired access to the minds/culture of OpenAI employees, in which case it’s critical for the surviving good guys to mitigate the damage and maximize robustness against third parties in the future.
For example, Altman was misled to believe that the board was probably compromised and he had to throw everything at them, and the board was mislead to believe that Altman was hopelessly compromised and they had to throw everything at him (or maybe one of them was actually compromised). I actually wrote about that 5 days before the OpenAI conflict started (I’d call that a fun fact but not a suspicious coincidence, because things are going faster now, 5 days in 2023 is like 30 days in 2019 time).