Sam Altman: Back in charge

Sam Altman is back to leading OpenAI, and the people who fired him are now gone. This is war. Kill or be killed. In this post, I briefly look at who left and who took over.

Old Board:

All are beautiful, young and smart.

• Adam D’Angelo.
  A Caltech Computer Science Graduate and best known for founding Quora. He also worked on Instagram and has his own competing AI company, Poe. Despite his Caltech pedigree, D'Angelo does not appear to have any significant research publications.
• Helen Toner.
  An Australian who did significant work on AI safety, but nothing significant on the development side. Her most cited paper (790 citations) is on the malicious use of AI :
  
  The malicious use of artificial intelligence: Forecasting, prevention, and mitigation M Brundage, S Avin, J Clark, H Toner… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2018 - arxiv.org
• Tasha McCauley.
  Is surprisingly light weight, with a global net worth estimated at only 10 million. Worked as a firefighter in NY. No heavy duty science to be seen.
• Ilya Sutskever.
  Ilya was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia and grew up in Jerusalem. He was stolen by Elon Musk from Google. The loss on Ilya upset the Google founders so much, that Sergey Brin broke his friendship with Musk for making Ilya an offer he did not refuse.
  
  Ilya's most cited papers have over 40 000 citations, with plenty of papers cited over 10 000 times. Ilya is most likely the man who gave birth to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) at Open AI, and had the largest contribution of all to ChatGPT and other products.
  
  His citations are in the range of a Nobel Prize winner. That is, many people who win the Nobel prize are not as cited as Ilya. He is likely to win a Nobel Prize himself.
• Sam Altman.
  Sam himself is a great deal maker, and the political father of AGI. His research and expertise comes nowhere near Ilya. I do not believe he wrote the code. It is unclear he could create and progress the tools on his own. He did however get the money. He is the one who convinced Elon Musk, Microsoft and Sequoia Capital to invest in OpenAI.
  
  At under 1 billion, Sam's global net worth is relatively small, compared to his prominent position in the media and his expected impact on the world.
  
  Altman joined Y Combinator in 2011 and became president in 2014. The total valuation of Y Combinator companies had surpassed $65 billion, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits, and Stripe.
• Greg Brockman.
  Well cited scientist, with several papers over 1000 citations. At 50 million global net worth, he's not a light weight for where he comes from. Greg was the first to quit Open AI in solidarity with Altman. He's the kind of guy who can get another job anytime -- perhaps even better paid. Major contributor to the development of Open AI products, from the concept to the code.
• Mira Murati.
  The beautiful Albanian who briefly replaced Sam has gotten her hands dirty on AI research, but she's not Ilya. She's a surprisingly light weight, with a global net worth of about 5 million. Perhaps, less.
• Emmett Shear.
  He replaced Mira Murati after one day. At 0.5 Billion, his global net worth approaches Sam Altman's. He's not a light weight financially, but has no relevant experience or publications in the field of AI. He's not someone who discovers new algorithms. Emmett Shear is a founder of Justin.tv. He served as CEO of Twitch and is a part-time partner in Sam Altman's Y Combinator.

Now, the new board is formed from heavy duty politicians -- king makers and the kind of law breakers that we call law makers. These people have considerable experience in leading the world, or taking over the world.

• Bret Taylor.
  Former CEO of Salesforce
  Board member at Shopify
  Chair of board of Twitter, before Elon Musk took over. Played a major role in forcing Musk to pay for Twitter and complete the deal, which resulted in him leaving Twitter, alongside most employees.
  Taylor has his own AI startup.
  His global net worth is estimated at a quarter of a billion dollars.
  Bret Taylor does not appear to have any significant research.
  
• Larry Summers.
  Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration
  Former President of Harvard University
  He was punished for free speech, and forced to resign from this position when he commented that there may be differences between men and women in Academia.
  Summers went to MIT at 16, where he started as a Physicist and graduated as an Economist. After receiving his PhD from Harvard, Summers became Harvard's youngest professor at the age of 28. (Same as me, but it wasn't at Harvard) Larry Summers is a heavy weight in Academia and Politics, but, at a global net with of 40 million, not so successful with his finances -- probably a way to avoid becoming a target.
  An old man, 68, who had a PhD before the members of the previous board were born, and a cancer survivor, Larry does not have the intellectual power to advance and understand AI, but is a seasoned, experienced leader with fantastic political connections. The sort of man who gets fired from Harvard and lands a job in the White House.
• Adam D’Angelo.
  Is the only surviving member of the old board.