An anonymous letter from Altman and Brockman boosting OpenAI explains the firefight around the company and its employees, but not on Hacker News
Greg Brockman, who resigned as board chair of Openai last week due to Altman’s treatment, was one of two people mentioned in an anonymous letter boosted by Musk. The letter states that they witnessed a disturbing pattern of manipulation by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, driven by their obsessive pursuit of achieving artificial general intelligence.
There have been many twists and turns since Friday, with Altman making a failed attempt to return as CEO, the board replacing Murati as interim CEO with Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear, Microsoft announcing it would hire Altman and Brockman, and almost every OpenAI employee threatening to quit unless Altman returned.
The crisis around Openai was made even worse by Musk’s sudden firing of the CEO with just 100 characters left in his name.
A person who responded to an email sent to an address listed on the Github profile told WIRED they saw the letter via a discussion on Hacker News and posted a copy of the original, found on Board.net, which allows anonymous posts. The person said they later removed their copy of the letter to preserve their privacy, adding “I have no idea as to the veracity of any of the contents.”
“These seem like concerns worth investigating,” Musk wrote in his post linking to the unsigned letter, which is addressed to OpenAI’s board and purports to have been written by concerned former employees of the company. The authenticity of the claims has not been verified by WIRED.
Musk has himself been accused of similar behavior at several of his own ventures, which include automaker Tesla, rocket maker SpaceX, and brain interface developer Neuralink.