OpenAI Was Dead. Then Ilya Sutskever Posted This | Greg Brockman

It was maybe the only moment in OpenAI's history where I felt like I didn't want to do it anymore.

I was at home.

I got a text saying, "Can we hop on a video call?" So, I hopped on the video call. I noticed that it was the board minus Sam who were on there. I was told that the board has decided that Sam would be removed, also that I had been removed from the board but would be staying with the company.

It just wasn't right. Right after I hung up the call, I talked to my wife and I said, "Got to quit." And she said, "I agree."

Yes. That day when I quit, I started to get all these messages, people saying, "I don't know what you and Sam are doing next, but I'm with you. I want to go start something with you." That was a real honest surprise. There were a few of my close collaborators who quit that day as well. That's Jakub, Szymon, Aleksander, and the five of us. So, those people plus Sam. We all got together and we started to chart out what a new company could look like. I remember feeling that first day like, okay, there's a 10% chance that we actually get the company back. 10%. The next day, we set up a meeting at Sam's house. A bunch of people from the company came by and we showed the vision that we'd been sketching out. So, it was really one day in, you know, this fresh picture of how we'd run the project. And we spent a bunch of time over that weekend also negotiating with the board and the company and trying to figure out is there a path back together that makes sense. That Sunday night, the board replaced me as interim CEO with a new person and the company just rebelled. Like we'd actually been at the office. We thought we were close to a deal and to come back. Yeah. We thought that we had a path and then the board made that change and then suddenly it was everyone streaming out of the building and it was just like real chaos. I was on video calls with many of the people who had been interested in coming to this new company saying it's going to be okay. We have a plan and we expanded, you know, we've been building this little life raft right for the small set of people we expected to want to come and suddenly it was like no one wanted to be associated with this entity. Right, people wanted to, you know, stand up for what they viewed as right. Then this petition starts to circulate. So many people were trying to sign the petition at once it actually crashed Google Docs. And so you had to have certain people who are designated as the person you go to to actually put your name on the document so you don't have too many editors at once. You know, I probably got home around like 5:00 a.m. or something, went to sleep, and I woke up like 45 minutes later, and I checked Twitter, and I saw that Ilya had posted and had signed a petition, and it said that he wanted the company to come back together. And that was this real moment of relief. I felt so much gratitude that it just felt like, okay, like we can put this back together. We can get back to a good track.