It got more upvotes than Steve Jobs death announcement. In my point of view, considering fame and impact on the world, which I think is what translates to HN upvotes, Steve Jobs is of much higher stature than Sam Altman. Also, a death is a much more significant event than a firing.
So, why this is such a big deal?
UPDATE: I understand there is upvote inflation, I just don’t think it alone accounts for the number of upvotes. After all, the 12yo Steve Jobs post is still #4.
UPDATE 2: The Jobs’ post comparison was intended just as a reference. The more significant fact is that it’s #3 of all time. I am more curious about why is such a big deal compared to everything else, not just Jobs post.
1. It came completely out of left field, at a time when OpenAI has had an astonishingly successful year.
2. It was much more harshly worded than most corporate press releases letting their CEO go, basically accusing Sam Altman of serious wrongdoing.
3. It occurred during market hours and blindsided their investors and partners.
4. It revealed a schism inside the company that the public had little awareness of.
5. It has deep implications for the trajectory of a technology that many see as heralding a revolution at least as significant as — if not more than — agriculture or industry, with truly existential implications for humanity.
6. The revealed schism appears to go right to the heart of heated debates over those existential risks and the right course to navigate through them.
If Apple had very suddenly fired Jobs at the hight of the Apple Renaissance during market hours and very publicly accused him of lying it would have been a bigger deal than his eventual death.
There are many open questions right now about what exactly Altman did that was bad enough to get him fired on the spot (and for openAI to burn all their bridges with him in a harshly worded press release) and what it means for the future of OpenAI and the AI field in general and the rest of Altman’s companies. It’s a highly salient topic for discussion and speculation, so no wonder that it does well on HN.
It's a small world, the one where money pours round.
HN is open to a wider community (I'm not in SF or a startup founder) but HN is focused on startup and Silicon Valley news. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the users on HN with 10k+ karma are affiliated with Y Combinator, either as alum or more directly, in some way.
So, in my opinion, this is the office gossip talk of people who's everyday lives revolve around startup culture and Silicon Valley news. I think the news about OpenAI and Sam Altman's departure is relevant and interesting but the outsized weight on HN is most likely because of the communities attention to the niche domain of interest (SV/SF area tech news, startup culture, cult of personalities within that culture, etc.).
(*) With most having overwhelmingly positive things to say about their interaction.
Doing the math: Steve Jobs' death has 4,338 upvotes on Oct 5, 2011 [2], while the average HN front-page story had 62.68 votes that week. The average HN front-page story this week has 145.54 votes, giving a 2.32 inflation factor.
So Steve Jobs' death would have had 10,073 in today's upvotes.
Far more than the current 5,341 votes on Sam Altman's story.
(Would be really nice if hn.algolia.com had sorting by inflation-adjusted popularity.)
That said, this is pretty big. OpenAI is a wildly successful company and as CEO Sam Altman is one of the big players in that.
Not only was he fired, but he was fired unexpectedly and very publicly, this rarely happens. Usually companies try to prevent the media storm that is happening right now by quietly moving people to less important roles and or they “want to spent more time with family” or “are looking for another challenge”.
So it’s not just the firing of the ceo of one of, if not the most, successful startups of this time, it’s completely unexpected, and the wording suggests something really big has happened or will be happening, or the board is making reckless decisions, which would be newsworthy on its own.
Not having all the information makes people wonder what’s going on adding to the attention as we all speculate on what’s going on and how it is going to change things.
Another factor in this is that a lot of startups and companies rely on OpenAI making it directly relevant to a lot of people, especially those on this website.
So far, from my viewpoint, OpenAI was perfectly as a product - both in terms of features and their deployments. Now anything can be possible.
What is still very unclear is what removing Altman protects or preserves about the integrity of OpenAI and its work. The unexpected outcome is that by fragmenting OpenAI with firings and resignations, it will spread the core research know how more broadly, so if the firing were over an AI governance/safety concern, it might delay it a couple months, but could have the opposite effect.
It's not Altman himself, it's the instability in developing the tech that is the big deal. Personally, I suspect it's a bit of a valley palace intrigue gone wrong, where someone supported some of the upstream orchestration that resulted in this outcome, but as far as why this is important, it really is the tech.
https://content.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/sc...
It's at 129 points so it seems a lot of people are curious.
I wish HN had a "vouch" button for flagged submissions, the way there is for flagged comments.
I don't think this is the most interesting post I've ever seen, but nothing about it seems flag-worthy as far as I can see.
It occurred while we were already paying heightened attention to OpenAI (seriously, have you seen the front page of HN?)
There is inherent drama — a guy got kicked out of his own company
There is no explanation, so people want to speculate about it, which means lots of comments
Usually, an ouster will come with preceding signs of trouble, but not this. Imagine if Tim Cook was suddenly fired today with a press release bluntly stating they lost confidence in his abilities (despite Apple's stellar performance). I bet you'll get a similar number of votes.
On one side, there are proponents of an argument that Sam hid evidence of the achievement of AGI from the board, or that he pushed for acceleration of development in a way that scared the board.
On the other side, there are proponents of an argument that the board wasn't happy with OpenAI Dev Day pushing commercialization directly within OpenAI (e.g. the marketplace) against the wishes of the board and OpenAI's charter.
Until Sam, OpenAI, or others comment further, this is the perfect playground for speculation and court intrigue about what is arguably the most prominent technology company of the 2020's (thus far).
This looks like that
But it was not as magic and promising as my first experiences with AI that I had over the last 24 months or so.
AI is a much bigger step for mankind than home computers and smartphones. So Altman is involved in making much bigger dents in the universe than Jobs was.
ps, The overthinking is most of this conversation is amazing and almost all wrong. The closest to a 'non-community gasp' idea that is correct is that it appears that this powerful and respected person has been lying to his board of directors and he will probably still be around to do, uh, more lying. Still, that's not a big deal at all. He's just a guy.
The GPTs shop is not yet active and many directory sites like gipeties.com have sprung up to fill the gap.
Which way the cookie crumbles will affect how the directory sites and the people creating gipeties will do.
do some thinking, and you can get the real one. maybe hn's audience of top-minds are actually just as human as the people who watched shakespearean tragedies 100s of years ago or people buying people magazine and other tabloids today. sam altman is a celebrity, [was] one of the most powerful and important figures in the direction of AI (even if he didn't develop it), and this was his (imo hopefully temporary) tragic fall.
YC has grown a a lot in that time too.
Lots of changes. No comparison.
The median commenter seems to think that OpenAI has committed commercial suicide and Sam and those who leave with him will start the competitor that will dethrone OpenAI….
Myself, I’m guessing that whatever he has done is going to be reason enough for investors to steer clear and he’ll be mostly forgotten by the next hype cycle.
The way the statement was phrased is practically unheard of at the board/executive level. The board essentially accused Sam Altman of lying to them, which would normally be a permanent black mark against someone. On top of that OpenAI’s corporate structure makes the outcome of this exercise particularly unpredictable with a bunch of board members that - frankly - probably have no idea what they’re doing.
Altman also ran YC at one point but at the end of the day ChatGPT is all the hype nowadays and we just abso-fucking-lutely love drama.
A firing with the odd reasoning of being dishonest is just a perfect storm.
Also many things are shared because they confirm what someone wants to believe, sometimes even being just a headline with no content.
